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Stoddard Martin is a name well known to readers of the JC, Quarterly Review (online) and Jewish Quarterly, which were the first homes of all the essays, many on Jewish themes, collected in his new book.
Martin is a self-declared WASP (although mild in manner, he knows how to sting), who has lived in the UK for many years. He is a liberal radical, a consummate reader of dark times and a philosemite. However, his project is not to please or flatter Jews, but to understand our history and culture in the context of emigration, persecution, freedom and, in particular, via written representations of Jewish experience in the social world, in the arts (mainly music and fiction) and in politics.
There is one specific sense in which he does flatter: he never gives answers to the big questions; rather he raises questions to the big answers of ideologues, pietists, geniuses and fools.
In other words, he is not a pundit, nor is he interested in parading his own personality, or striking attitudes. He has the gift of discussing moral issues without moralising, thus encouraging readers to think hard and draw their own conclusions. A clue to inner workings and concomitant psychic complexity is that he publishes critical works as Stoddard Martin and fiction (short novels) as Chip Martin.
In Monstrous Century, Martin typically clusters three or four books in a group. Wisely, he has added later thoughts in footnotes rather than rewrite the original reviews. He takes issue with polemical writers such as Anthony Julius and Peter Conrad, asking if their certainties about, for example, T S Eliot and Wagner, are justified. Implicitly, he asks us to think in a more nuanced way (the reader is flattered by the assumption that she/he has done some thinking in the first place) about Ezra Pound, Céline, Nietzsche and D’Annunzio. There are, in brief, antisemitisms, not just antisemitism. He thinks hard about the project of Holocaust museums, the subject of the best essay in the book, along with the one on Stefan Zweig, a great if flawed Jewish writer born to end up under Martin’s gaze.
Martin’s prose style is rooted in latter-day feuilleton, the literary pages of newspapers and magazines, whose masters included Edmund Wilson and Cyril Connolly. He writes for the educated general reader and makes no concession to digital simplification. You have to print out his long online Quarterly Review pieces to be able to read them properly, or buy this book.
What next for Stoddard/Chip? I wonder if he, a man of reason with a cutting-edge mind, has ever considered a book where his two brains would interact dialectically to bring together his demarcated double oeuvre: best of both worlds or worst?
Perhaps, too, he would devote a different kind of essay to topics he mentions in passing: “self-hating Jews”, “oestrogen power” and, in particular, suicide, a fraught subject which would benefit from closer attention than he can give it in reviews of biographies.
Anthony Rudolf is a writer, editor and translator