Perry Anderson

Are there any appropriate dimensions to literary biography as a form? The stature of a writer, and length of life, might be expected to provide some co-ordinates. Yet even among modern masters there is little consistency.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n14/perry-anderson/different-speeds-same-furies

"Marriage extended rather than altered this, Powell acquiring many an in-law from an Anglo-Irish background to which he was allergic"

To endorse, largely, what has been said: it seems plain that PA likes AP partly because he can identify with the relevant milieu. It is frustrating, in a way, that someone as brilliant as PA lacks perspective on this.

Arrival at the age of 13 at Eton, a year after the Great War had come an end, brought him in Spurling’s view

the underlying stability and continuity that came from a sense he had never known before of belonging to a community that accepted him, the nearest thing to a place where he felt at home. The school became from now on a kind of virtual extended family whose members – however rebarbative, reluctant or remote – stood in all his life for the actual relatives he hadn’t got.

Fortunate in finding himself in a house ‘with a poor reputation and no standards to keep up’, presided over by an easy-going master, he flourished as a member of the school’s Arts Society, did well academically, and emerged more polished and confident socially.

etc.

John Bayley (Letters, 10 January) wonders where I found a Russian tricolour of black, gold and white. The answer is: from the Imperial decree of 1858 which made it the correct flag of the Empire, in concord with the Romanov arms – and from the processions in Moscow today, in which rival banners express attachment to different aspects of the old order. There are those for whom it is more handsome a symbol of the past than the Batavian colours of which Bayley is fond.

Perry Anderson
Los Angeles

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v13/n04/letters#letter5

Mark S's favourite:

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v18/n04/letters#letter1

Like Proust he needs an editor

Seriously need to finish Lineages of the Absolutist State one of these days.
So long.
So dense.
Maybe tomorrow.

I read the second half of PA's Powell epic today.

He spends most of the last pages describing AP as a very conservative or right-wing person. To what end? The only logical end really seems to be what has been a very standard PA manner for 30+ years: to play his own kind of Olympian contrarianism by writing with intimate sympathy about people on the political Right and showing no interest in criticizing their political views.

He also manages, in a predictable way, to insult people who are sceptical about Brexit. He doesn't live in the UK and doesn't face the various problems that Brexit has brought and will bring.

(The one thing he has in common with Morrissey, I suppose. Irish blood, Californian heart.)

Unusually, PA picked up in a Guardian literary comment piece. The one striking thing here is that she quotes something he wrote 34 years ago - if that wasn't 'Modernity & Revolution' then I may not have read it:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/06/proust-truly-long-read-stories

This is the post where I ask for help in parsing one of Perry Anderson's sentences (or in this case fragment of a sentence):
"Odette’s visit as a courtesan to Uncle Adolphe when the narrator is plainly older than when she figures for him as Swann’s wife"

(this is an example of one of proust's "lapses of control": who is older than what here?)

Yes, I puzzled over that also. It didn't help that I haven't read Proust for nearly 15 years.

Odette - when Swann's wife - is a certain age

The narrator is now older than this

Now Odette visits Uncle Adolphe

...

is that what it is saying?

Again, much too far from Proust now to know - don't even remember an Uncle Adolphe.

This could conceivably be a failure of prose or of copy-editing.

LRB editing has worsened in the last couple of years.

yours is one possibilty (though it's not made clear why this causes a problem)
viz "Odette’s visit as a courtesan to Uncle Adolphe when the narrator is plainly older thanshe was when she figures for him as Swann’s wife"

another is this:
"Odette’s visit as a courtesan to Uncle Adolphe when the narrator is plainly older thanhe is when she figures for him as Swann’s wife"
(which is presumably impossible since the events come in the opposite order?)

i guess a reckless copy editor might have deleted some such phrase? (why? hardly to save space) -- it's a copy editor's failing in any case, since a good one (me or you) wd have flagged up and problem and insisted something be done about it. i agree abt the worsening in general

oddly enough an adolphe who's an uncle has already been mentioned: not a character in the book but proust's own maternal grandmother's uncle -- so i didn't blink at this till i went back just now confidently to inform you who the adolphe in the book was, and can't (the only extended proust i have read is the extracts in this essay)

in mine the bolded he is the narrator not the uncle lol, basically a copy editor shd have thrown the whole fragment back at PA and insist he restructure it more clearly and quick now, obnubilate indeed

I used to marvel at the absence of basic errors (spelling, grammar) in the LRB - say, 10 to 15 years ago.

They have come in since then, sometimes say 2 or 3 per issue. I suspect also that there were errors way back, say 35 years ago, and the period I am talking about was a high plateau of quality in between.

I think it's that the narrator is older than he (the narrator) is when Odette figures for him as Swann's wife. The narrator, as a child, visits his uncle Adolphe and meets a lady in pink at his house. This lady in pink turns out to be Odette, who lived as a courtesan before she married Swann. But by the basic timeline of the story, Swann and Odette should already be married well before the narrator has reached the age of this episode. So it's unclear whether: (a) the narrator has met Odette Swann, who is implausibly reverting to her relationship with Adolphe, or (b) he's met the unmarried Odette de Crecy, and Proust has confused his timeline.

aha, thank you jmm :)

i guess that is more obvious to someone readily familiar with the text -- so that it unravels itself via information not actually available on the lrb's page -- but even so it is not terrific writing

Which is not something I would often say about Perry Anderson

rereading this essay i'm enjoying it a *lot* but i do think that writing abt fiction rather than reactionary thinkers or "politics from 30,000 feet" sometimes brings out something a bit discordantly antic in PA's prose -- actually not far from the kind of stuff that made me grind my teeth when christopher hitchens was being a bit too clever in his sentence-making (with similar pretext: i.e. when writing abt fiction rather than politics): "making an English equivalent of the Latin ablative absolute one of the trademarks of his style, with sovereign indifference to schoolroom objections to the pendant participle"

that final phrase is somehow just too cute (esp.after the clumsily repeated "to" before it): give a good example perry and stop showing off

or trying to show off

Yes.

There are, iirc, several instances in Proust with timeline issues. I think he died before all seven vols were published but there were probably issues around any editors dealing w/Proust in the first place. Yeah, lol.

Powell is a reactionary thinker writing fiction - making the last section the strongest. Biggest laugh was Anderson sorta going along with Powell's hatred of Auden/British lefties just because Lyndon Johnson quoted the last line of September 1, 1939 in a speech.

That was poor. That poem is one of the greatest modern poems in English that I can think of. PA, for all his brilliance, wouldn't have it in him to write something like it. He's unwise to mock it for the way it has been appropriated. He doesn't even bother to mention (though it's relevant) the best-known fact about the poem - that Auden kept changing the words because he was anxious and uncertain about the meaning.

Is the second part of the Anderson essay still only available to subscribers?

Yes.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n15/perry-anderson/time-unfolded

I still don't really understand PA's attraction to reactionary thinkers, let alone the way that here he makes no criticism of Powell or doesn't seek to articulate a dialectical relation between ideas that PA supposedly disagrees with and fiction that he thinks perceptive.

I think it comes down to contrarianism, in line with Mark's observation about (C) Hitchens.

admittedly i was reading it in bed late but i found part 2 quite hard going: at the start he is wrestling with the mysteries of differential popularity, which ends up being smug and dull -- popular culture is apparently wildly foreign territory to him and he's using adorno and debord as his baedecker, which lol (has he actually ever been to the cinema? he doesn't write as if he knows what films are actually like) (also is it true that there are no blockbusters than run on understatement?)

then he gets into the weeds of translateability (of idiom, of humour) -- which if course bears on global popularity -- but the survey is too sketchy to do the work he wants it to and too sketchy also for you to get into what interesting about it that isn't pretext-driven. d'you think he's actually read dream of the red chamber?

i didn't really follow the point he was making about bayley (who i anyway have zero interest in): that powell went over bayley's head? who cares?

the section on powell's knowledge of and interest in world lit -- as manifested in his essays and the quotations in the book -- is good, but a bit buried (i'd have liked more honestly, but i think perry is quite out of his wheelhouse here and couldn't risk more)

and then the actual real politics section: which becomes increasingly dispiriting, partly bcz powell's judgments are so cookiecutter tribal and his insights so meagre, and partly bcz it honestly isn't re-integrated back into any of the rest of the piece

xp

contrarianism plus staunch anti-liberalism

Yes, re: anti-liberalism.

I think he quotes Powell saying Labour is part of liberalism?

I suspect that he has, indeed, read the massive Chinese novel. Am sure he wouldn't bluff that. It's all the kind of thing that Moretti would have told him was important.

I think I agree with you, Mark, re: the final section, the banality of AP's views, and how non-integrated it is!

That (from Mark S) is a pretty good critical summary of Part II.

d'you think this is a colossal extract from a longer soon-to-be-pubished book? the "reactionary thinkers" essays in the LRB ended up as a book

(tho they were more easily freestanding: i wonder if some of the sketchier sections will actually exist at some point at deeper length)

This is a good and intriguing thought.

re earlier book, do you mean:
https://www.versobooks.com/books/574-a-zone-of-engagement

?

I don't agree with Anderson at all btw (and from a google of it I saw that Auden was ambivalent about the ending, but it stuck so..), just noting the bizarre contortion at that moment.

Xps

I think I should get a load of the older PA books. I know some of the material but tons I have still not read. Like that book and also:

https://www.versobooks.com/books/228-spectrum
https://www.versobooks.com/books/575-english-questions

PA is pretty good on Global South lit so I reckon he's read Dream of Red Chamber. There is an essay of his in the LRB discussing historical fic that pulls in a wide range of novels (Cities of Salt, Buru Quartet)

spectrum begins with a long chapter on reactionary thinkers -- hayek and oakeshott and etc -- which began life as essays in the LRB (i guess they wd have felt odd in the NLR)

His essays on India (which unusually I am not sure I read!!) became a book.

And so did US FOREIGN POLICY AND ITS THINKERS after ALREADY occupying an ENTIRE issue of NEW LEFT REVIEW a few months previously.

we shd post him a print-out of this thread so he can rewrite where necessary (e.g. concerning uncle adolphe and also omitting any discussion of john bayley's opinions on anything)

I read all his essays on EU states (incl his essay on Cyprus!) back in the day, and I think that became a book too.

Yes that became a big book.

I didn't read the Cyprus material because it was so vast and I couldn't find any personal interest in Cyprus. There are these rare cases where I can't get excited about PA's work.

The Germany essay in the book appeared in the NLR under the heading 'Land of Ideas?'.

I'd second the recommendations for The New Old World (that big book w/ the EU essays and Cyprus) and Spectrum. I didn't have much personal interest in Cyprus before but found it a v gripping and fascinating read. Perhaps because I knew least about Cyprus and Turkey, those two chapters were the best parts of the book, though his essays on France and Italy are among his best (imo).

I interned at Verso five years ago and asked about what his next colossal one would be - I was told it was likely going to be a collection of the essays on Russia, Brazil, China and a longer theoretical intro/conclusion synthesizing views on the BRICs, although who knows, I could easily see him having switched gears and put out an 600 page book on the 20th century novel.

I haven't gotten to the second part of the essay yet (picked up the print copy of the LRB yesterday) so will withhold judgment on it as a whole for now. Had been a pretty big PA stan before (while not always agreeing with particular points) so am always pleased to find others (and to notice this thread!).

Federico, that is most interesting. Are you a long-time ILB poster? We have a FAP tomorrow.

xp Anderson has written at length about those three countries in the LRB, IIRC

"at length" sort of goes without saying with PAnderson of course

i was disappointed by Spectrum, felt i was lacking background on some of the thinkers (esp on the right) that was assumed

Been on a long holiday, read through the last nine of A Dance to the Music of Time for the first time.
I liked it well enough, but Anderson seems to overestimate it/Powell massively in the two articles. Keeps taking midweight literary basics as some kind of mastery - allusion is catnip to him.
Still on holiday, but will try to get round to saying more about Powell and/or this chunk of Anderson when I get back.

Hey pinefox, I'm a (fairly?) long-time lurker and (very) occasional poster. I'm trying to get in the habit of posting more regularly, though my schedule's been a bit crazy the last while. Unfortunately, I'm not in London, otherwise I'd happily join.

I read elsewhere (on another thread?) that the overestimation is part of PA's "bid" to elevate Powell to a more respectable, if not canonical, status, and using (abusing?) Proust in the process. It seems somewhat plausible, whether it's something he deliberately set out to do or not. Still haven't read pt 2 yet, but look forward to getting to it tmw or this weekend.

That seems about right - the Tariq Ali article on Powell makes it clear that PA has been reading and rereading and laughing aloud at Dance for an age, so I suspect the article is the eruption of a forty year internal monologue where he’s arguing with himself that this is better than Proust. Writes it as a late-life treat.

(I think mark s suggests something like canonising AP for a bet in one of the other threads which I also like)

He’s an unpersuasive critic though imo.

I don't remember Ali on Powell - I don't like Ali but I like it when he drops in anecdotes about PA.

Perry Anderson reading a Goosebumps a day.

mofo finishes the quick crossword in matrix bullet time

not me spending 20 minutes hunting the internet for news on the longest word perry has ever used (and whether you could contruct a crossword round it)

Not read it for years, but I *think* I'd stan for *The Logic of Late Capitalism*.

The essay?

long solid thread on PA's "in the tracks of historical marxism" -- useful at least a marker on specific conflicts and how accurately PA summarises them, in particular the debate pro and con althusser (kind of homework list in a moment when further homework may be a distraction and a luxury?) (anyway and however… )

I started Perry Anderson's In the Tracks of Historical Materialism. Early on he provides a hand summary of his Considerations on Western Marxism, which I generally think is good and right, but Tracks has raised a new doubt or two for me that I want to think about. He talks about

— Nate Holdren (@n_hold) January 14, 2023

IN THE TRACKS OF HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

I find it a bit odd to make a statement like this author has done through a series of tweets, not a piece of connected prose (eg: linked from a tweet).

I fully realise that Twitter is attractive and consumable and that Twitter threads have their appeal.

But in this instance the format isn't the best way to follow an argument.

"in the tracks": could mean like sherlock holmes! could also mean PA has been left lying bruised in its foosteps after it passed on its way

The thread is odd in not mentioning a large part of IN THE TRACKS, which is a critique of post-structuralism. A critique that Terry Eagleton opportunistically attacked at the time, before going on to say very similar things himself.

I agree it's a funny title, with those connotations. My sense has always been that it means something like "French theory today is merely following in the tracks of Marxism", but I would have to return to the book to corroborate this.

"I wouldn't trust Anderson on any empirical matters" lol

"did you pick up the milk Perry?"
"as to whether Anderson purchased the aforementioned dairy product, the record must remain forever in a state of occluded obscurity"

The P-Dawg on Mike Davis and Tom Nairn, good stuff, he even manages to admit that not all was plain sailing for Davis at the NLR
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii139/articles/perry-anderson-two-great-losses

"from lower depths of redneck aliteracy"

🧐

yes, that certainly caused a caesura in my reading, if you will

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/podcasts-video/podcasts/perry-anderson-and-john-lanchester-powell-v.-proust

This is now announced, but, not being into the podcast world, I don't know how to listen to it.

i think just click on the sound bar (the triangle-arrow) below the faintly coy photo of perry and make sure yr volume is up

You're right !

Poster Map on another thread mentioned Fredric Jameson and Mike Davis. I wish to reply so I bring it to this slightly more appropriate thread:

...

Davis was a major figure, and certainly commands respect. So my personal irritation with one phrase isn't at all meant to belittle him in general, as if I could.

I was aware that he had written a reply to FJ on PoMo - it's collected, as I recall, in an old volume called JAMESON/POSTMODERNISM/CRITIQUE (1990?) - where I think, possibly, FJ acknowledges him more generously in a reply to critics (though may be fabricating this notion). I am fairly sure that FJ here and there in his work cites CITY OF QUARTZ, if not other works, favourably.

Davis's critique of FJ is surely valid - I have no criticism of it as such.

Davis might well have been justified in some kind of frustration with the English NLR crowd, and specifically the Old Etonians among them (unsure how many that is, maybe just 3, or more). My one substantial, small comment was that this could not logically include FJ, who never had anything to do with English public schools. FJ probably met Anderson et al in the 1970s (just a guess) - say, after MARXISM & FORM and THE PRISON-HOUSE OF LANGUAGE. Terry Eagleton (also no kind of Etonian, though he became an Oxonian) went and taught with FJ for a term in California in the late 1970s. But FJ - to my surprise - seems never to have published a word in the NLR till 1984, when the most famous essay of his whole career appeared there. He was already 50. He has contributed frequently since, but I don't suppose he has been on the editorial board; don't think he has ever resided at length in the UK.

So in sum:
1: yes, Davis in general was good
2: Davis's critique of some affluent leftists could possibly be valid
3: but Davis couldn't literally have been referring to FJ in the specific comment that was cited.

I like Mike Davis and read Victorian Holocausts back in the summer, loved it apart from sections of the book where he goes way too deep into the science of the El Nino phenomenon, which was a bit too much for my brane. And I started City of Quartz last week, it's good stuff - never knew about Llano del Rio the socialist city, which at the time the book was written - the ruins of it still existed.

I meant colony obv.. "city" is a bit of a stretch!

That's a good reminder Calzino - had read about that place and TBH forgotten that Davis discussed it. Apparently a library in CA has a big archive of documentation about it. And I seem to recall that it eventually relocated to another state!?

up to where I'd read he was visiting the ruins and bumped into 2 refugees from El Salvador seemingly living rough there, who he describes as like "hobo heroes from a Jack London novel". When he told them about its socialist history one of them asked did the rich people come and bomb them with planes? No he replies, their credit failed!

thanks for the clarifying information the pinefox, i stand corrected.

Thanks Map - I appreciate your civility here. I have a couple of follow-ups.

1: to support your and Calzino's appreciation of Davis, I remembered that what I admired about Davis was that after every US election - including midterms! - he would write a long, detailed analysis of the results for NLR, in terms of individual states, psephology, demographics. It was extraordinary work; I marvelled at the expertise and data. Marxists are not always thought to be interested in 'bourgeois democracy' - here was a contradiction of that view.

2: I don't have POSTMODERNISM / JAMESON / CRITIQUE here and couldn't find references to Davis in the other FJ I have to end. Finally I looked in POSTMODERNISM itself and found the endnote that the critic you cited had cited. And I'm afraid that here FJ, indeed, doesn't come out so well. What he praises in Davis, he immediately takes away, in a very uncomradely way. His tone is not well judged. He could engage much more with the substance of Davis's critique, and at least in this particular case, he doesn't.

As noted before, this can't have anything to do with a UK background (which frustrated Davis in the UK); it may have something to do with a US academic turf war which is opaque at this distance.

I still have the feeling that in later work, FJ acknowledged Davis more generously, but I may be imagining that. I have 10 of FJ's books to hand but don't think any of them provide such evidence.

Perry Anderson in THE ORIGINS OF POSTMODERNITY (1998) cites Davis (p.78) as 'Jameson's earliest critic [re PoMo] on the Left', and implies that he had made a valid point about FJ's periodisation.

as much as i can appreciate the need to deflate arrogant, vacant intellectualism, i do find that davis's shtick can sometimes lapse into into fetishization, especially when he starts calling people "effete". philosophy and theory were a refuge for me, and helped me to name the false consciousness that had made my own midwestern, blue collar milieu so hostile to creativity and intellect. these qualities are important too, and, to keep things short, i guess i think it's okay that some of our leftists are more about wit or playfulness than they are about centering labor. we need a bit of the former aspect, too.

of course, ideally you'd have somebody like e.p. thompson, who seems to embody the best aspects of both worlds.

Well said.

He only reads the intro to them

At the party last night talked to someone who used to check out books for Perry Anderson as an undergrad. Terrifying. Said he'd bring a trundle and load it up with 40 books every 3-4 days.

— jq di zuppa🥫 (@outsidadgitator) December 30, 2023

Perry has finally gotten round to reading Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, which was published in 2012. A masteful essay of course.
https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii146/articles/perry-anderson-pathbreakers-high-and-low

As someone who doesn't know much about WWI I am really enjoying the piece.

The section on Imperialism is terrific.

The Sleepwalkers is a great book but I'm troubled by the information in the opening paragraph of this piece that Clark claims to be descended from Irish famine refugees and that also he accepted a fucking knighthood!

still, all history profs are melts but tbf on him Iron Kingdom is a good book as well.

yeah that struck me as a bit strange too, I guess Clark has been thoroughly assimilated into the ruling classes now!

Perry does go on to talk about Clark's latest book, Revolutionary Spring, tbf.

plumpes Denken!!!

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n23/christopher-clark/the-murmur-of-engines

lol, good one

would anybody be able to send or post the the text from the PA article about clark in the NLR? i've read the clark piece and now want to work backward

I'll DM you with it, I have institutional access to the NLR

thanks!

before i embark on "regime change in the west" need someone who's read both to tell me if perry (b.11 sept 1938) is just making the same point simon jenkins (b.10 june 1943) was making in the guardian

Just read both and they aren't making the same points though there is an interesting correspondence between Mao and Trump (much more pronounced in the Jenkins comment piece) across both.

Did lol @ this from Jenkins: "You cannot stage much of a revolution in two years."

Feel -- especially after chipping away on ILE just now -- that this piece is actually taking populism seriously as a thing that emerges from the cracks of liberal democracy.

i wd very loosely argue that perry's political response to "what if the so-called smart boys lost control to the surging crowds lol" has always been "time for the even smarter boys (perry anderson) to take charge"

(followed by the [???] line for how this is to happen)

but i still haven't read more than the first page of this (it seems fine so far)

Things will pass.

Smashing it out of the park again! pic.twitter.com/ra4UpINRnv

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) April 4, 2025

finally completed (and reread) perry's lrb piece on "populism" as a response to neoliberal hegemony

as always he manages the "view from 30,000 feet" moves p well -- including a usefully lucid couple paragraphs summarising what *he* means by neoliberalism -- and as always he skimps any exploration of how to fashion the fightback: as in "well, populism is the fightback but it's purely a negative reaction and theoretically inchoate" -- and he sneers that no theory has been developing to underpin such a fight (as if the NLR hasn't been in constant publication since the 1960s: what were your lads up to then, perry?)

also there's lots of little summaries which are just bad pundit-speak shortcuts: viz "the unprecedented success of the Societ Union in avoiding the slump altogether" -- where "the slump" is the Great Depression (1929-39), in the middle of which timeslot the USSR endured terrible famines -- causes and scope highly contested to this day of course but all the more reason not just to handwave through the notion that the soviet union somehow dodged this systemic bullet…

or when he notes that "[t]he Communist International was closed down as early as 1943" -- needs horrible goose chasing him across the page honking "who closed it perry? who closed it?"

a smaller sin that probably irritated me more (lol) is when he precedes the claim that "[m]athematicisation had long anaesthetised much of the discipline of economics" with the following: "judging by neoclassical canons what they essentially amounted to was a mathematical squaring, or cubing, of the underlying dynamic" -- i mean come on dude, i get that maths is not yr wheelhouse but this is garbage

china mieville (for it is he) has since had a go at him on the letters page concerning immigration: when perry says the right have a rhetorical advantage on this issue, which the left have to date failed to find a convincing answer to, mieville says this is merely uncritically to accept and to amplify the right's framing -- which again speaks to anderson's usual hifalutin disinterest in the politics of any fightback. mieville doesn't put it this way, tho -- and nor does he outline what such a politics might be

(i can kind of guess as i know which activist tradition mieville comes from, but it's not there in the letter in any immediate practical sense)

oh noes, the underlying dynamic has been cubed! He gets away with this stuff, I suspect, because no one is willing to edit him properly?

I though the Mieville response was a good one, that letter may well have been "edited for length" though, ironic given the latitude Perry is allowed!

xp great post mark s

Has Perry ever come up with explorations of fightback? This crowd do lol analysis/buy my latest book, which is probably better than anything you read in The Economist. But still they leave you (the reader) to figure it out.

At the end of his review of Clark's book on 1848 he says we'll be getting some kind of chaos iirc. Not exactly helpful.