German manuscript collections
Sir, – I was shocked, as most of your readers were, I am sure, to learn, from Nicolas Barker’s account earlier this year, about the demise of the Macclesfield Library (Commentary, June 23). A similar fate is currently being contemplated for one of the most prestigious manuscript collections in Germany, which has been in the care of Karlsruhe’s Badische Landesbibliothek for over a century. This collection comprises a large number of very early manuscripts, many from the monastery of Reichenau (founded circa 720), where they were first catalogued in the ninth century.
It appears that the princes of Baden still have some claims – legally rather dubious, if one cares to take a close look, something they and their advisers are actively discouraging – to large portions of the province’s cultural treasures, even though 1) they were stripped of their politically pre-eminent position in the wake of the First World War and 2) said treasures were secularized in the Napoleonic era and not, strictly speaking, given to the Grand Dukes. The cash raised by auctioning off the manuscripts would pay for repairs at Schloss Salem on Lake Constance, which the impecunious Badens call home.
In the mind of its author, Herr Oettinger, minister-president of Baden-Württemberg, this barbaric scheme would settle once and for all any outstanding claims by the former dynasts, who have already spent their way through the proceeds of the sale of their main schloss at Baden-Baden (including contents). All the federal authorities have done so far is to rule out foreign bids for the Karlsruhe manuscripts, as if that could prevent them, once in private hands, from leaving the country! I can’t help but think that if the EU had a meaningful cultural mandate, with matching human and financial resources, this would be the perfect wrong for it to set right by preserving as a public concern what is indubitably a treasure of supranational significance.
ALAIN J. STOCLET
Université Lyon 2 – Lumière, 86 rue Pasteur, Lyon.
Da Ponte biographies
Sir, – I read with great interest but some surprise Peter Williams’s review (September 15) of Anthony Holden’s biography of Lorenzo Da Ponte. For it seems to imply that it is the first biography of Mozart’s librettist.
It may interest your readers to know that many of the same “extraordinary” points about Da Ponte’s life were made in a much earlier biography (first published by Calder in London and New York in 1955, reprinted 1957, paperback 1982) by my wife, April Fitzlyon. The title of the first edition was The Libertine Librettist. For the paperback, the title was changed to Lorenzo Da Ponte: A biography of Mozart’s librettist.
So the gap in the literature is not quite as large as your reviewer seems to assume. The earlier biography covered the salient features of this remarkable life, including the contradictions which made it so curious. Many relevant and contemporary sources (particularly the Venetian police files) were consulted and cited by April Fitzlyon. In other words the new biography, invaluable as it obviously is, cannot be “the starting point” for future historians.
KYRIL FITZLYON
5 Carver Close, London W4.
Judicial arbitrariness
Sir, – Gary L. McDowell’s praise for Justice Antonin Scalia’s adherence to the “original meaning of the Constitution” because it is a position that protects against “judicial arbitrariness and policy-driven decision making” (September 22) fails to acknowledge what would have been the results had that policy prevailed in the last half-century. Among other cases, schools would still be segregated (the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education would have been unanimous the other way); a small number of rural white voters would still control state legislatures to the disadvantage of a large number of black urban voters (Baker v. Carr would have been decided the other way); defendants in felony cases could be tried and convicted without counsel (Gideon v. Wainwright would have been decided the other way); suspects could be interrogated by the police without first being advised of their right to counsel (Miranda v.Arizona would have been decided the other way); and Vice President Gore would have been elected President of the United States in 2000 (Bush v. Gore would have been decided the other way in deference to the rulings by the Florida Supreme Court).
But wait! Wasn’t it Justice Scalia himself who most vigorously propounded the Supreme Court’s precedent-shattering decision in Bush v. Gore? Talk about “judicial arbitrariness and policy-driven decision making”.
MORDECAI ROSENFELD
37 West 12th Street, New York 10011.
Anti-Americanisms
Sir, – It’s deucedly clever how Tim Mackintosh- Smith injects his anti-Americanisms into his review of Geoffrey Nash’s From Empire to Orient (September 15): once in a parenthesis telling of his and another Arabist’s rejection of proposals to rat on their Arab friends, again in a closing bit of advice to Britishers to “listen to [their] own troublemakers, to people like George Galloway”.
The first apparently represents refusal to supply crucial help in combating Islamic terrorists. The second is an endorsement of a fevered and feverish opponent of all things American in the Middle East.
JIM BOWMAN
Blithe Spirit, 325 S. Oak Park Avenue, Oak Park, Illinois 60302.
‘New Criterion’ critics
Sir, – J. C. (NB, September 22) wonders about the unnamed writers attacking Hilton Kramer’s New Criterion, and when and what they wrote. I was one, in 1984 publishing “The ‘rightward flourishing arm’: Kramer, The New Criterion, and Partisan Review”, in the American Book Review (Jan–Feb 1984).
I accused Kramer and many, though not all, of his writers of ideological rancour reminiscent of the sectarian Left. In 1987 I wrote an essay for Dissent magazine, “Culture and the Neoconservatives”, that discussed a number of figures in what amounted to neoconservatism’s cultural division and questioned their claim to be “for the canon”. It was also critical of The New Criterion. I leave it to your readers to decide if these pieces deserve the scorn that, in its twenty-fifth anniversary issue, is apparently heaped on detractors of the magazine in what sounds like an all too familiar and characteristic tone of smug vituperation.
OLIVER CONANT
285 Riverside Drive, New York 10025.
