LRB on Mahabarata

How to Escape the Curse
By Wendy Doniger

The Mahabharata translated by John Smith

Penguin, 834 pp, £16.99, May 2009, ISBN 978 0 14 044681 4

Many people in India believe that, because the Mahabharata – the ancient epic poem, in Sanskrit, about a disastrous fratricidal war – is such a tragic, violent book, it is dangerous to keep the whole text in your house; most people who have it stow one part of it somewhere else, just to be on the safe side. The Mahabharata, in any case, takes up quite a lot of shelf space: it contains about 75,000 verses – sometimes rounded off to 100,000 – or three million words, some 15 times the combined length of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, or seven times the Iliad and the Odyssey combined; and a hundred times more interesting.
It has remained central to Hindu culture since it was first composed, during the period from before 300 BCE to after 300 ce. A.K. Ramanujan used to say that no Indian ever hears the Mahabharata for the first time. For centuries, Indians heard it in the form of public recitations, or performances of dramatised episodes, or in the explanations of scenes depicted in stone or paint on the sides of temples. More recently, they read it in India’s version of Classic Comics (the Amar Chitra Katha series) or saw it in the hugely successful televised version, 94 episodes, based largely on the comic book; the streets of India were empty (or as empty as anything ever is in India) during the broadcast hours on Sunday mornings, from 1988 to 1990. Or they saw various Bollywood versions, or the six-hour film version (1989) of Peter Brook’s nine-hour theatrical adaptation (1985). And now they can read Chindu Sreedharan’s ‘Epicretold’, posted on Twitter, one 140-character tweet at a time.
The bare bones of the central story are these: the five sons of King Pandu, called the Pandavas, were fathered by gods: Yudhishthira by Dharma (the moral law incarnate), Bhima by the Wind, Arjuna by Indra (king of the gods) and the twins by the Ashvins (the Dioskuroi). All five of them married Draupadi. When Yudhishthira lost the kingdom to his cousins in a game of dice, the Pandavas and Draupadi went into exile for 12 years, at the end of which – with the help of their cousin, the incarnate god Krishna, who befriended the Pandavas and whose counsel to Arjuna on the battlefield is the Bhagavad Gita – they regained their kingdom through a cataclysmic battle in which almost everyone on both sides was killed.

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But the story of the Pyrrhic victory of the Pandava princes constitutes just a fifth of the epic, its skeleton. Much of the flesh is supplied by myths, folk tales, rituals, histories, theology, philosophy, science, legal debates, poetry and just about any other form of cultural knowledge that anyone wanted to preserve in ancient India. Most of these episodes, many of them about women, are fairly securely hooked to the fabric of the plot: a question about the ancestors of the Pandavas inspires the narrator to tell the story of the birth of their ancestor, Bharata, from Shakuntala, the innocent maiden whom King Dushyanta seduced and abandoned (a story that captivated Goethe); Yudhishthira is consoled, after his own gambling disaster, by the tale of Nala, whose compulsive gambling lost him his kingdom and his wife Damayanti, until she managed to reunite them. Other stories are told as moral lessons to the human heroes and heroines, such as the tale of King Sibi, who chopped off his own flesh to feed a dove fleeing from a hawk (both birds turned out to be gods disguised in order to test him); and Savitri, whose steadfastness persuaded the god of death to spare her doomed husband. Philosophical and legal questions also arise out of the aporias of the plot and are answered in discourses that often go on for thousands of verses.
Above all, the Mahabharata is an exposition of dharma, including the proper conduct of a king, of a warrior, of an individual living in times of calamity, and of a person seeking to attain freedom from rebirth. Time and again, when a character finds that every available moral choice is the wrong choice, or when one of the good guys does something obviously very wrong, he will mutter, or be told, ‘Dharma is subtle (sukshma),’ thin and slippery as a fine silk sari, internally inconsistent as well as disguised, hidden, masked. People try again and again to do the right thing, and fail and fail, until they no longer know what the right thing is.
Whenever the Mahabharata is told or retold, the ethical and religious questions that it raises are given new, contemporary meanings. In 1989, the diplomat Shashi Tharoor retold the Mahabharata as The Great Indian Novel, in which the heroes are recast as thinly veiled forms of Gandhi, Nehru, Indira Gandhi and others. (The hero Karna, who, in the Sanskrit version, slices off the armour that grows on his body and fights against his brothers, appears as Jinnah, who, when he goes over from the Hindu to the Muslim side, seizes a knife and circumcises himself.)
In the Sanskrit Mahabharata, Ekalavya, a low-caste tribal, becomes such a superb archer that he threatens Prince Arjuna, famed as the greatest of all archers, who insists that Ekalavya cut off his right thumb; Ekalavya humbly obeys. Contemporary low-caste Dalits make Ekalavya do for them what in the Sanskrit text he didn’t do for himself: rebel. A poem about the movement to gain water rights for Dalits on the Ganges begins, ‘If you had kept your thumb/History would have happened somehow differently,’ and concludes: ‘My thumb/will never be broken.’ Such poems stand as a Dalit (or Dalit Buddhist) critique of Hinduism, rejecting both Ekalavya and Hinduism. There are Ekalavya education foundations in Ahmedabad and Hyderabad. The Ekalavya Ashram in Andhra Pradesh is a non-profit, tribal welfare facility established in 1990; run by people from the local business community, it serves underprivileged tribal people who can’t afford to educate their children. The televised Mahabharata made a big point of the Ekalavya story, playing it out at great length. The Lords Cricket Ground in India has been renamed the Ekalavya Krida Mandal.
Reinterpretations of this sort have been going on from the moment the Mahabharata began to be composed. It grew and changed in numerous parallel lines spread over the entire subcontinent, constantly retold and rewritten, both in Sanskrit and in vernacular dialects. It flickers back and forth between Sanskrit manuscripts and village storytellers, each adding new gemstones to the old mosaic. It was like an ancient Wikipedia, to which anyone who knew Sanskrit, or who knew someone who knew Sanskrit, could add a bit here, a bit there. But the powerful intertextuality of Hinduism ensured that anyone who added anything to the Mahabharata was well aware of the tradition behind it and fitted his or her own insight, or story, thoughtfully into the ongoing conversation. However diverse its sources, for several thousand years the tradition has regarded it as a conversation among people who knew one another’s views and argued with silent partners.
The curse of the Mahabharata has waylaid several scholars who aspired to English all of its 18 books. J.A.B. van Buitenen set out, in 1973, to translate the whole thing and died, in 1978, after completing barely a third of it. (A group of other scholars have continued the project, but it remains unfinished.) The Clay Sanskrit Library proposed to publish a translation of all the books (together with a number of other Sanskrit texts), but this valuable series has now been abruptly discontinued, after publishing (among a number of other volumes) only about half of the Mahabharata. Kisari Mohan Ganguli, the author of the best-known complete English translation, had a different sort of bad luck: he finished the translation (in 1896) but was cheated of the credit for it. Until quite recently, it was always called ‘the P.C. Roy translation’, attributed to the publisher, Pratap Chandra Roy (who was made a CBE), and Ganguli’s name was unknown. The curse is working (as Anna Russell used to say of Wagner’s Ring).
John Smith, earlier the author of a fine translation and study of the medieval Hindi Epic of Pabuji, is the latest to take up the challenge. He may escape the curse because his version is incomplete: though it spans the entire text, he has translated only 11 per cent of the Sanskrit, bridging the translated passages with detailed summaries. Half the book is translation, half summary. He covers the waterfront, however, in that you can find the whole Mahabharata there, in either condensed or fully expanded form, and the careful index helps you to locate whatever you are looking for. This alternation of condensed and expanded passages is true to the spirit of the original Sanskrit text, in which, time and again, a storyteller will casually remark something of the order of, ‘Oh, this was the pond where Shakuntala met Dushyanta,’ and his companion will say, ‘Now that you have told it in brief, please tell it in full,’ and the storyteller gladly obliges. Punning on the name of the mythical author of the text, Vyasa (which means ‘divider’), the text tells us: ‘After he had produced this great knowledge in detail, Vyasa made a summary of it, since the wise in this world want it both in its entirety (samasa) and in parts (vyasa).’
Smith has given it to us in parts, a manageable fragment, by far the best single-volume English translation extant. It is certainly the easiest to read, and the sparing use of notes (less than one to a page, generally cross-references) keeps it moving along, though occasionally necessitating a simplification. Flying in the face of the sexist old Italian adage that a translation, like a woman, cannot be both beautiful and faithful, this one is both meticulously accurate in its rendition of the Sanskrit and fluent in clear, graceful English sentences. The tone is appropriately formal and a bit old-fashioned, elegant rather than conversational, avoiding contractions (‘cannot’ instead of ‘can’t’) and retaining most of the many epithets (though generally using one basic term for each character even when the text uses several, a useful simplification and a way to avoid cumbersome notes). Wisely, Smith left in Sanskrit just a few central, untranslatable words (such as ‘dharma’, ‘brahman’ and ‘mantra’), which he defines in the glossary. In the awkward matter of ‘begats’ (‘awkward’ because English, unlike Sanskrit, lacks precise sexual terms that are neither obscene nor medical), he generally uses ‘lay with’, a bit fusty but better than, say, ‘had sex with’. (‘Lay with’ may, however, strike some younger readers as archaic to the point of incomprehension; some years ago when I wrote in a journal article that Hera suspected that Zeus ‘would lie with’ some woman he was in love with, a young editor corrected it to read ‘would lie to’ the woman.) Every sentence in Smith’s translation is a pleasure to read, and if you check it against the Sanskrit, it’s there.
This, then, is the book to read if you want to know what is in the Mahabharata without devoting several years to it. Smith expresses his admiration and gratitude for the accuracy of Ganguli’s translation, and tactfully omits to mention that, since Ganguli wrote in what passed for English among the 19th-century Bengali bhadralok, his Victorian translation is rather tedious to read nowadays. Van Buitenen, too, is heavy sledding, with his stilted prose and his idiosyncrasies (such as using ‘barons’ to designate members of the class of kings and warriors), though he also got most of it right, and his notes are terrific. But there is a price to pay for three decisions that Smith made: he translated the ‘critical edition’; he left out the poetry; and he left out most of the religion.
The soi-disant critical edition was created in Poona (now Pune) between 1933 and 1972 by a group of scholars labouring under the misguided assumption that you could organise Sanskrit editions as you could Greek editions, by collating a large number of manuscripts. There is a deeply patriarchal metaphor at the root of the whole idea of tracing text stemmata, as if mimicking the way that secondary stories grow out of the trunk of the main plot; the biblical genealogical tree of x begat y (who begat z . . .) ignores the mothers – the storytellers – who just tangle the branches (to continue in dryadic mode). For there is no trunk to this textual tree, no pristine Ur-Mahabharata for scholars to isolate from a mass of corrupted texts; if it is a tree at all, it is a banyan, which must have an original root but sends down so many subsequent roots from its branches (other variants) that one can no longer tell which was the original. There are hundreds of Mahabharatas, hundreds of different manuscripts and innumerable oral versions (one reason it is impossible to make an accurate calculation of the number of its verses), one just as ur as the next. The Pune edition is critical, all right, but in the sense that it left the patient (the Mahabharata) in critical condition.
There are several recensions of the Mahabharata, each preserved and cherished by a particular community. The critical edition, by contrast, is like Frankenstein’s monster, pieced together from various scraps of different bodies; its only community is that of the Pune scholars, the Frankensteins. Moreover, it left out a great deal of material that the Indian literary and religious traditions have continued to draw on, such as the passage in which Vyasa dictates the entire text to the elephant-headed god Ganesha. Ganesha made Vyasa promise not to keep him waiting, and Vyasa made Ganesha promise, in return, not to write down anything he did not understand; when Vyasa began to fall behind, he quickly threw in the ‘knots’ that Ganesha had to stop to untangle and that have troubled readers ever since. This passage also demonstrates the tradition’s subtle understanding of the problematic relationship between oral and written versions of the text.
When, therefore, Smith casually remarks, ‘The text translated here is, of course, that of the critical edition,’ there’s no ‘of course’ about it. Smith’s translation, like van Buitenen’s (he also used the critical edition), leaves out all that the Pune edition left out; he could at least have summarised some of the most important amputations, just as he summarises the bits of the critical edition that he does not translate.
Even within the critical edition, hard choices had to be made to cram the text into a single volume, even an 834-page volume. The literary embellishments went the way of all flesh. For instance: near the end of the story, the hero Arjuna sees that the great city of Dvaraka on the west coast of Gujarat has been deserted. Smith’s summary says, ‘He finds Dvaraka appearing like a widowed woman,’ but he doesn’t mention the longer extended simile that follows the simple image of the widow:

Arjuna saw Dvaraka as a river, with its water consisting of the people, horses for fish, chariots for boats, the sound of musical instruments and chariots for the sound of its waves, and the houses’ bathing ghats for crocodiles; with jewels for its clumps of aquatic moss, adamantine ramparts for its garlands, with the streaming traffic in its main streets for its whirlpools of water, and courtyards for its still pools, like the horrible river of hell whose sharks are the nooses of Time and Death. Bereft of its heroes, devoid of joy, stripped of its glory, it was like a lotus pond in winter.

These images of a city made of water prepare us for the final scene, in which the city is actually flooded by the ocean, to remain submerged for ever, like Atlantis. The poetry is, in a very real sense, part of the plot.
And so is religion. Most scholars of the Mahabharata can be divided into two groups, those who care primarily about the political plot and those who care primarily about the religion. The first group regards the myths and the long sermons on dharma as digressions from the story of the human heroes, an intrusive padding awkwardly stuck around a zippy epic plot. But this is tantamount to saying that the arias in a Verdi opera are unwelcome interruptions of the libretto; Hindus regard the myths and the philosophical arguments, like the arias, as the centrepiece, for which the narration (the recitative) is merely the frame. The extreme version of the cut-to-the-chase (more precisely, cut-to-the-battle or cut-out-the-gods/myths) Mahabharata selection is the 1999 one-volume translation by Chakravarthi Narasimhan (who was under-secretary of the United Nations), which you can read from cover to cover without encountering any event that could not be reported, mutatis mutandis, in the Wall Street Journal. The historians of religion, on the other hand, generally zero in on the Bhagavad Gita (which many Hindus lift out of context and use as a self-contained sacred text); some also concentrate on the theology of Krishna and the other great god of the Mahabharata, Shiva, a darker and more violent god than Krishna.
Smith translates three of the 18 chapters of the Gita (summarising the rest), and many of the episodes in which Krishna appears (as a human more often than as a god), but he chooses not to translate many other passages full of interest for historians of religion, particularly passages dealing with Shiva, who is less central than Krishna to the plot of the Mahabharata but appears at several crucial moments and is absolutely central to its more tragic theology. The merely summarised passages include the story of the sacrifice of Daksha (a recurrent trope for the sacrifice of the human heroes in general), the battle between Arjuna and Shiva disguised as a low-caste hunter, and the hymn of the thousand names of Shiva (an important landmark in the development of sectarian Hinduism). Smith doesn’t translate a single syllable of books 12 and 13, though these raise issues that form the basis of many later discussions of Hindu law and philosophy. Nor does he translate the great stories that have continued to inspire Indian dramatists and poets through the ages, such as the tales of Shakuntala, Nala and Sibi (though he does translate the tale of Savitri). He merely summarises the story of Shikhandin’s magical cross-gendered birth and later gender transformation (at the hands of various gods and demigods), though he translates in full the passages in which Shikhandin is wounded in battle and dies (at the hands of his human opponents). By leaving out the poetry, the stories (often about and/or by women), the philosophy and the religion, Smith has cut away the soft, female parts of the book and left us primarily the hard, male, political and martial parts. The Hindus have a story about this: Bhringin, a devotee of Shiva, refused to honour Shiva’s wife, who therefore cursed him to be a skeleton, stripped of the flesh and blood that (in classical Indian embryology) is given by the mother and left only with the bones that are the father’s contribution.
But some such lacunae are inevitable in a massive undertaking such as this. If it is true that no Indian ever hears the Mahabharata for the first time, it is also true that none of us ever hears all of the Mahabharata, or hears the Mahabharata that anyone else hears; we all make our own selections, for warriors or for gods, for prose or for poetry. Just as the god Vishnu becomes incarnate in Krishna through what the Hindus call a ‘partial’ incarnation (while the full Vishnu remains intact in the world of the gods), so, too, any translation can only aspire to be a partial incarnation. There’s always a danger that a translator will abridge too far; Smith abridges just enough, perfectly capturing the Mahabharata that he most admires. Yet his version is sufficiently incomplete to allow him to live to a happy old age, and all of us to keep the volume safely in our homes.

LRB on Selves

The I in Me
by Thomas Nagel


Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics by Galen Strawson
Oxford, 448 pp, £32.50, ISBN 0 19 825006 1

What are you, really? To the rest of the world you appear as a particular human being, a publicly observable organism with a complex biological and social history and a name. But to yourself, more intimately, you appear as ‘I’, the mental subject of your experiences, thoughts, feelings, memories and emotions. This inner self is only indirectly observable by others, though they ordinarily have no doubt about its existence, as you have no doubt about their inner lives.
One of the enduring questions of philosophy is whether there really is such a thing as the self, and if so, what it is. Descartes famously thought that it was the thing of whose existence he could be most certain, even if he doubted the existence of the physical world and therefore of the human being called René Descartes – because in thinking, he was immediately aware of his own existence as the subject of his thought. Others have argued that this idea of the self is an illusion, due to a misunderstanding of how the word ‘I’ functions: in fact it refers to the human being who utters it, and it is you the publicly observable human being, and not anything else, that is the subject of all your experiences, thoughts and feelings.
Galen Strawson’s book Selves, a work of shameless metaphysics, argues that selves exist and that they are not human beings. However, Strawson is a materialist and does not think that your self could exist apart from your central nervous system. He holds that your experiences are events in your brain, and that if there is a self which is their subject it too must be in the brain. But he is a materialist of an unusual kind: a realist about experience and an anti-reductionist. read more
Strawson believes that although experiences are events in the brain, experience cannot be analysed in terms of the physical properties of the material world, so the material world is much more than the world described by physics – at least in the case of brains, and perhaps quite generally.* This means that the conscious brain has a mental character that is not revealed by the physical sciences, including neurophysiology.
Strawson contends that there are two uses of the word ‘I’, or the grammatical first person, and that they are familiar to us all. One refers to the public human being, as when you say: ‘I’ll meet you in front of Carnegie Hall at a quarter to eight.’ The other refers to the subject of consciousness, as when you think, ‘I hear an oboe,’ or ‘cogito ergo sum.’ The argument of the book proceeds from phenomenology – an introspective examination of the subjective character of experience – to metaphysics, a conclusion about the existence and objective nature of selves. The results are radical and unexpected.
Strawson begins from the essential inner polarity of consciousness: all conscious experience is experience for a subject. It has been objected that Descartes was entitled only to observe that thinking was going on, and nothing more, but Strawson says this is wrong: there cannot be thinking without a subject. The character of an experience or conscious thought is what it is like subjectively for someone or something to have it, and this is as true for sea-snails, if they have experience, as it is for humans.
What is this subject? As presented in experience, it must be a single mental thing. (That does not exclude its also being physical, but phenomenology tells us nothing about that one way or the other.) However complicated the contents of my consciousness at any moment – if I am listening to Schubert, watching the sunset, drinking wine and trying to remember where I put the car keys – all of it is co-present to a single subject. If selves exist in reality, according to Strawson, they must be mental individuals of this kind, for which he coins the unappealing term sesmet – short for ‘subject-as-single-mental-thing’.
Suppose you are persuaded that in one sense you use the term ‘I’ to refer to such an inner thing. What else does phenomenological introspection tell you about it? For most of us, one of its conspicuous features is temporal extension. Even if you in this sense are not a human being, you as subject have existed approximately since the birth of the human being that you also are, and will continue to exist until his or her death. The question can also be posed whether you existed before that organism’s birth and whether you will survive its death. Experience presents us with a sense of the temporal extension of the self, through memory of the past and anticipation of the future. You remember ‘from the inside’ your past life, and apprehend those experiences as your own (think of the present shame or guilt that even a distant memory can produce). You anticipate future experiences as things that will happen to you, this self, not just to a later stage of the organism, and you fear your own future pain in a way that you don’t fear the future pain of others – because it will be yours.
Strawson contends, however, that this natural belief in the persistence of the self is probably an illusion. To begin with, if the self is a single mental thing, how can it persist across temporal gaps in consciousness? If, as most of us assume, we pass part of each night in dreamless sleep, what is it, apart from the human being, that loses consciousness late at night and regains it in the morning? How can there be a mental subject, persisting over such an interval, whose identity over time makes it the case that the subject who hears the alarm clock go off is the same one who saw the late news on television the night before? Strawson holds that the mere physical persistence of the brain is not enough. He agrees with Descartes’s surprising claim that the existence of the mind is inseparable from consciousness – that the self is always conscious. Strawson interprets this, plausibly, not as the claim that the self is a type of persisting substance that, in addition to its other properties, is necessarily also conscious, but rather that the self is nothing but persisting, unified consciousness. In Descartes’s vocabulary, its essence is thinking, and nothing else. This means that the persistence of the self over time must be mental persistence, and that it demands a specifically mental unity, a diachronic unity analogous to the synchronic mental unity of the subject of experience at any one time. This cannot be supplied either by the brain or by the existence of an immaterial soul, conceived as a persisting substratum in which experience inheres.
This leads Strawson to radical conclusions. Not only does the self not persist across gaps in consciousness; it also doesn’t persist across the shifts in the content of consciousness that occur constantly in the course of waking life. One might think that this attack on diachronic identity conflicts with the fact that consciousness always involves time. There can be no experience that lasts no time at all, and the content of any experience is always what is going on in some interval of subjective time – the hearing of a word, the sight of an oncoming bus, the feel of a blast of cold wind. In fact, the nature of the short temporal interval that is experientially present to consciousness at each moment – the specious present, as it is called – is one of the most puzzling things about the experience of time. But while Strawson grants that the self has some persistence over time in virtue of this diachronic unity of moment-to-moment experience, he believes the requisite mental unity does not extend very far.
Strawson holds that our selves are much more short-lived than we normally take them to be, and that the subjective experience of the self does not require that it persist beyond the lived present, which lasts for less than a second. That may be good enough for sea-snails, one might think, but what about us? Here Strawson offers his most startling observation: he himself does not have the sense of subjective persistence that, I assume, most people have. It does not seem to him that the self which is the subject of his present experience existed in the past, or will exist in the future. When he remembers something from the inside, it does not come with the sense that it is he who was the subject of the remembered experience. He claims that this is true even when he feels embarrassed at the memory. ‘The episode of consciousness is certainly apprehended from the inside, and so I take it for granted that it is mine, if I care to reflect: I take it for granted that it is an episode of consciousness of the human being that I am. But there is no sense, affective or otherwise, that it was consciousness on my* part.’ (The asterisk indicates the use of ‘my’ to refer to the subject of present consciousness.) ‘My past is mine* in the sense that it belongs to me*, but I don’t feel that I* was there in the past.’ And more:

When I consider myself in the whole-human-being way I fully endorse the conventional view that there is in my case – that I am – a single subject of experience – a person – with long-term diachronic continuity. But when I experience myself as an inner mental subject and consider the detailed character of conscious experience, my feeling is that I am – that the thing that I most essentially am is – continually completely new.

I do not understand what it would be like to live like this, to feel ‘that there simply isn’t any “I” or self that goes on through (let alone beyond) the waking day, even though there’s obviously and vividly an “I” or self at any given time.’ If Strawson experiences guilt or shame for episodes in the past, it must be very different from mine.
However, this strange phenomenology of impermanence makes palatable to him the equally strange metaphysics to which his arguments drive him. Because the diachronic unity of the self, like its synchronic unity, must be a purely experiential unity, he is led to the conclusion that the self is a ‘thin subject’ – something that exists only if experience exists of which it is the subject. Further, this thing cannot be distinguished from its properties, and those properties are exhausted by the experience, which is in turn identical with the experience’s contents. (Strawson maintains that no object can be distinguished from its properties – another piece of radical metaphysics.) The result is that the self which exists at any time is simply a unified experiential process or episode. In light of materialism, the self can be presumed also to be a neural process: ‘a synergy of neural activity which is either a part of or (somehow) identical with the synergy that constitutes the experience as a whole’. But even though it has physical features, it is single, and therefore a self, only in virtue of its experiential unity. Finally, by the standards of diachronic unity appropriate for the thin subject of an experiential process that is indistinguishable from its content, there is no reason to think any self outlasts the lived present of experience – let alone that it lasts as long as a human life.
If each self is as impermanent as that, it is also, as Strawson says, extremely superficial: it has no ‘ontic depth’. The self that is the subject of your present experience does not know algebra or French, or how to make an omelette, and it does not have political convictions. But such things, says Strawson, can find an adequate home not in the fleeting sequence of selves but in the persisting human being, with its persisting brain, which stores the capacities and dispositions that allow us to attribute these more stable properties. Materialists, he says, ‘take the mind – the mind-brain – to have non-experiential being in addition to experiential being, non-experiential being that provides all the ontic depth anyone could possibly want.’
‘Philosophy, like science,’ says Strawson, ‘aims to say how things are in reality, and conflict with ordinary thought and language is no more an objection to a philosophical theory than a scientific one.’ Yet his conclusions depart so far from the idea most people have of themselves that it seems natural to describe him as offering not a theory of the self, but rather the view that there is no such thing as the self, distinct from the human being. If he is right, there are only human beings, who persist in time, and who undergo a constantly changing sequence of experiences, each having the irreducible character of subjectivity. He asks us to give up the powerful conviction that the I who is the subject of my present experience has existed for a long time, that it was also the subject of the experiences I remember from the past, and that it will be the subject of the experiences that the human being who I am will undergo in the future. At the very least, we are convinced that this could be the case, so that it must make sense.
To sustain this conviction calls for a different metaphysics of the self, though I do not have one to offer. Philosophers have not been very successful in devising credible accounts of the identity of the self over time, and Strawson’s arguments help us to see why this is so. It seems to require that a single mental subject should be capable of existing without any consciousness and through vast changes of experiential content, but it is not clear that the mere physical existence of the brain is sufficient for this, and an immaterial substance may be no better.
Strawson is convincing as to the inadequacy of the deflationary strategy of arguing that the reference of ‘I’ is entirely parasitic on the public, third-person criteria of identity for human beings. I do not think we can resist his basic point that there are two uses of ‘I’, and that one of them refers to the inner subject. He illustrates it with a passage from A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes, in which a ten-year-old girl suddenly realises that she is she, ‘this Emily, born in such-and-such a year out of all the years in Time, and encased in this particular rather pleasing little casket of flesh’ – and again with a poem by Elizabeth Bishop about a similar experience just before her seventh birthday. I suspect that many children have experienced with amazement the realisation that the self with which they are so familiar inhabits a particular public human being.
The book is packed with valuable commentary on philosophers whose writings on this subject Strawson admires, and in whom he finds allies: Descartes, Kant, Hume and William James in particular. It is also peppered with frequent interruptions from an interlocutor – set off in different type – who makes most of the objections that will occur to a careful reader. This is extremely helpful in following what is often an exhaustingly lengthy line of argument, replete with stacks of numbered propositions, terminological abbreviations, and numerical cross-references; sometimes the book is like an obstacle course, though Strawson obligingly suggests from time to time what you might want to skip.
Selves is a work of profound philosophical reflection by a philosopher of intellectual power and exemplary integrity, qualities that are liable to take you far off the beaten track. The result displays the imagination and audacity we have come to expect of Strawson.

[*] He is drawn to panpsychism, and has argued for it elsewhere, though he sets it aside in the present book. See Jerry Fodor’s piece on Strawson in the LRB of 24 May 2007.

LRB on biodefence

Short Cuts
by Thomas Jones


Eight years, billions of dollars and thousands of dead bodies into the ‘global war on terror’ – sorry, Mr President, the ‘overseas contingency operation’ – and we still don’t have an answer to one of the fundamental questions: where is Osama bin Laden? Other, of course, than skulking invulnerably in the darker corners of the Western public imagination, where he is plotting to steal nuclear warheads, cooking up GM anthrax, reading (or misreading) the Quran, and making interminable speeches to his acolytes, possibly punctuated by bursts of insane laughter. It’s unlikely that the forthcoming book by bin Laden’s first wife and fourth son, which emphasises his love of gardening and the World Service, will do much to change that.* Even Blofeld had a cat.
In fact bin Laden hasn’t needed to do anything much lately, because the US government has been doing such a grand job on his behalf, not least by spending billions of dollars breeding killer bugs in laboratories all over the US, ripe for the stealing should bin Laden ever feel moved to launch a biological attack on the Great Satan.
In Breeding Bio Insecurity: How US Biodefence Is Exporting Fear, Globalising Risk and Making Us All Less Secure (Chicago, £19), Lynn Klotz and Edward Sylvester make a compelling case for a radical and immediate change in America’s biosecurity policy. Since 9/11, according to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, the US government has spent $50 billion on its biodefence programme: Klotz and Sylvester estimate that about a quarter of that has gone on research and development into ‘bioweapons countermeasures like antibiotics, antivirals, antidotes and vaccines … Testing them clearly requires ready availability of the bioweapons agents themselves.’ This activity arguably contravenes the Biological Weapons Convention, which Nixon signed in 1972, since signatories to the BWC undertake ‘never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain … microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes.’
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There’s the loophole: it’s biodefence. They need all that anthrax, smallpox, plague, ricin, botulinum and ebola to enable them to work out how to protect themselves from an attack. That’s what both sides said during the Cold War, too – not that either side believed the other. The extreme secrecy surrounding biodefence in the US, Klotz and Sylvester say, only encourages nations that fear they may be potential targets of America’s ‘biodefence programme’ to embark on ‘biodefence programmes’ of their own. And so it escalates.
Klotz and Sylvester argue that the biological threat from terrorists has been grossly exaggerated: growing, storing, weaponising and delivering large quantities of lethal viruses or bacteria isn’t at all easy – not to mention quite likely to kill anyone trying to do it under less than optimum laboratory conditions – and way beyond the capabilities of most nation-states, let alone a terrorist organisation. The extremely well-funded Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan resorted to sarin gas in their attempt to bring about biological or chemical Armageddon only after their experiments with anthrax, botulin, cholera and ebola came to nothing. Less than a month after the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway, which killed 12, Timothy McVeigh murdered 168 people in Oklahoma City ‘with a homemade bomb made from nothing but fertiliser and heating fuel’.
The extreme unlikeliness of a large-scale biological terrorist attack hasn’t stopped the flood of funding to biodefence research projects, however, or the consequent goldrush among researchers. As Klotz and Sylvester report, ‘the number of people working in biodefence has increased perhaps twentyfold in the past decade,’ and there are now ‘219 labs registering with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study anthrax alone’. Klotz and Sylvester call this ‘massive overkill’. Al-Qaida didn’t need to build the planes they flew into the World Trade Center: if they wish ‘to carry out a bioweapons attack in the US’, Richard Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers has said, ‘their simplest means of acquiring access to the materials and the knowledge would be to send individuals to train within programmes involved in biodefence research.’ Background checks are carried out on would-be researchers, obviously, but according to Ebright, ‘Mohammed Atta would have passed those tests without difficulty.’ David Ozonoff of Boston University doesn’t see why they’d bother: ‘Bioterrorism to me is analogous to an autoimmune disease. We did it to the Soviet Union, we bankrupted them in the arms race. Now, al-Qaida is going to bankrupt us on the biodefence stuff.’
Even if the system isn’t infiltrated by al-Qaida, one disease or another could always escape by accident. Klotz and Sylvester document case after case: a lab worker at Texas A&M University getting infected with brucellosis, calling in sick and not being diagnosed for weeks; mice with plague disappearing from a lab in Newark; researchers in Maryland sending researchers in California supposedly dead anthrax bacteria that turned out to be live after all. Then there are the anthrax-in-the-mail attacks of October 2001. It still isn’t known who sent the letters out; the only certain fact is that the anthrax came from a US government lab. The biodefence budget would be better spent, Klotz and Sylvester argue, preparing for more likely and more deadly epidemics: bird flu, for example.
They’re upbeat about the prospects for a more rational biodefence programme under Obama. Their determination to be as positive and patriotic as possible has some weird side effects, though, such as their claim that the US has only recently risked losing the moral high ground so far as the use of unconventional weapons is concerned. Even if you discount the napalm and Agent Orange they dumped on Vietnam, it’s hard to square the claim with the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Klotz and Sylvester also get carried away by some Cold War paranoia of their own, when they talk about ‘the scariest weapons of all: mind-control agents’. It’s not entirely clear what they mean by these: one of their examples is apartheid South Africa’s research into the use of MDMA for crowd control – surely a contender for the most benign thing the regime ever did. Ecstasy or smallpox: I know which I’d rather be attacked with. Bring on the ‘mind control’, please.

[*] Growing Up bin Laden: Osama’s Wife and Son Take Us inside Their Secret World by Najwa bin Laden, Omar bin Laden and Jean Sasson (Oneworld, £16.99).

LRB on Maupassant

On we sail
by Julian Barnes

Afloat by Guy de Maupassant, translated by Douglas Parmée NYRB, 105 pp, £7.99, ISBN 1 59017 259 0
Alien Hearts by Guy de Maupassant, translated by Richard Howard NYRB, 177 pp, £7.99, December 2009, ISBN 978 1 59017 260 5


One of the great examples of literary advice-giving took place in the summer of 1878. Guy de Maupassant was on the verge of becoming famous. As Flaubert’s literary nephew, and a member of the new group calling themselves Naturalists, he was already well known in Paris; three years previously, he had made his first appearance – as ‘le petit Maupassant’ – in the Goncourt Journal, delighting a company of already famous writers with a long story about Swinburne’s decadent behaviour in Etretat. He had written poems, stories and journalism, coauthored a lewd play, and was working on his first novel, Une Vie. He was socially and sexually successful, and physically very fit: the previous summer, having bought a small boat on Zola’s behalf, he had rowed it the 50 kilometres from Bezons to Zola’s house at Médan. Yet on 3 August, two days before his 28th birthday, he made the following complaints to Flaubert about life: ‘Fucking women is as monotonous as listening to male wit. I find that the news in the papers is always the same, that the vices are trivial, and that there aren’t enough different ways to compose a sentence.’
Flaubert – who signed himself in another letter to Maupassant, ‘Gve Flaubert severe but just’ – sent the following reply:

You complain about fucking being ‘monotonous’. There’s a simple remedy: cut it out for a bit. ‘The news in the papers is always the same’? That’s the complaint of a realist – and besides, what do you know about it? You should look at things more carefully … ‘The vices are trivial’? – but everything is trivial. ‘There aren’t enough different ways to compose a sentence’? – seek and ye shall find … You must – do you hear me, my young friend? – you must work harder than you do. I suspect you of being a bit of a loafer. Too many whores! Too much rowing! Too much exercise! A civilised person needs much less locomotion than the doctors claim. You were born to be a poet: be one. Everything else is pointless – starting with your pleasures and your health: get that much into your thick skull. Besides, your health will be all the better if you follow your calling … What you lack are ‘principles’. There’s no getting over it – that’s what you have to have; it’s just a matter of finding out which ones. For an artist there is only one: everything must be sacrificed to Art … To sum up, my dear Guy, you must beware of melancholy: it’s a vice.

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Parts of this advice are inevitably self-advice, or self-justification (Flaubert’s hatred of all forms of exercise, gymnastics and sport was well known). Parts of it miss the mark: it would take more than work to keep Maupassant in good health, since the previous year he had contracted the syphilis that would kill him in 1893. Parts of it are both wise and true. And parts of it would be wise and true had Maupassant been the sort of writer Flaubert was, or had he wanted to be. To take the most obvious point of comparison: speed. Flaubert, the agoniser and perfectionist, liked to quote Buffon’s line ‘Talent is a long patience’ to his disciple. Boule de Suif, the long short story which made Maupassant’s name, and was equally acclaimed by Flaubert, Zola and the general public, took him two months to write – and that represented a Flaubertian agony compared to his subsequent rate of composition. In 1884 he published more than a story a week; in 1886 three every two weeks.
Maupassant is one of the least reliable narrators of his own literary life. The richer and more successful he became, the more he diminished his motives and methods. In 1889 he told his friend Hugues Le Roux that not only was he not ‘born to write’, but ‘with my obstinacy and my method of work I could just as well have become a painter as a literary man – anything, except probably a mathematician.’ He had arrived at writing, he claimed, by a process of ‘reasoning’ rather than through any vocational seizure. Further: ‘Never in my life, neither today nor at any time, have I found the slightest joy in work. For me literature has never been anything but a means of liberation.’ ‘Liberation’ from his day job as a civil servant; from routine and comparative poverty; from having to frequent people whom he didn’t want to be with. Literature was a transaction: Maupassant on another occasion described himself as a marchand de prose, happy to sell his wares to the highest bidder. In other words, he was now provocatively defining himself in direct opposition to Flaubert, who never sullied himself with journalism, never wrote for money, and hated dealing with it, except to complain about its lack.
Though literary uncle and nephew remained devoted to one another, Boule de Suif marks a moment of separation. Maupassant had submitted his early attempts at writing to Flaubert, who had responded with detailed advice. He was especially harsh on Maupassant’s verse, just as he had been on Louise Colet’s (this despite – or because of – Flaubert not being a poet himself). But when it came to Boule de Suif in January 1880, Maupassant, whether from idleness, obstinacy or a sense of literary self-worth, didn’t submit the manuscript. Nor did he leave Flaubert much room for manoeuvre: ‘Tomorrow or the next day I shall send you the proofs of Boule de Suif. I can make only a few word changes because we aren’t allowed to change the line setting as that would throw out the whole book. But epithets are important and can always be improved.’ Thus warned, Flaubert suggested only two small cuts, which Maupassant dutifully carried out. More significantly, in the course of his letter, Flaubert switches for the first time from vous to tu, as if treating Maupassant as an equal in the confraternity of writers.
The year of Maupassant’s first serious success was also the year of Flaubert’s death; and the younger man’s speed and fecundity thereafter were contra-Flaubertian: six novels (plus two more unfinished), nearly 300 short stories and copious journalistic chronicles came out over the next decade, before syphilis closed off his mind. But the presence of Flaubert is not expunged. If Maupassant’s practices were freer and more commercial and his aesthetic less high-minded, the two men had affinities of temperament and outlook. Both were Normans constantly balancing a need for society against a profounder need to be alone; both – in youth at least (and despite Flaubert’s rebuke) – enjoyed taking their pleasures; both valued their privacy, and were profoundly suspicious of marriage and emotional entanglement; both were pessimistic and melancholic, oppressed by human stupidity and easily moved to disgust at the whole business of living.
Flaubert, the more intransigent of the two, thought that for a writer to give the public details of his private life was a bourgeois weakness which should be avoided. Maupassant in this respect was a little more bourgeois, allowing some of his opinions and habits to become known. Afloat, one of two less-known Maupassant works recently reissued with new translations, is one of the most personally revealing of his texts. It purports to be a simple, guileless account of a nine-day cruise along the Riviera coast between Saint-Tropez and Monaco. While the two-man crew of the Bel-Ami dealt with the rigging and the cooking, Maupassant steered and ‘every day … jotted down things I’d seen and thought. In fact what I saw was water, sun, cloud and rocks and that’s all. I had only simple thoughts, the kind you have when you’re being carried drowsily along on the cradle of the waves.’ This is true to some extent; and it’s easy to read the book innocently, trusting the narrator, believing his account of things, and letting yourself be carried along as by an unthreatening breeze. Maupassant is often called ‘a natural storyteller’: that’s to say, a professional, practised, unnatural storyteller. Such is invariably the case, with both the paid and the unpaid variety (think of the best anecdotalists you know in life: their effect of spontaneity is always based on adjustable tropes, prepared impromptus and trusty set-pieces). Here, you are the fourth person aboard the Bel-Ami, merely required to pay attention as the skipper points out the characteristics of wind and wave, the beauties of the shoreline and the secret history of islands and reefs. On the first day, for instance, off Cannes, he tells the extraordinary (and to me unknown) story of Paganini’s burial. The great violinist had died of cholera in 1840, and his corpse was being taken home to Genoa by his son. But the Genoese declined to let the body ashore for fear of infection, a refusal repeated at Marseille, and then at Cannes, until the son, in desperation, sighted the rugged reef-island of Saint-Ferréol, and stashed his father there in secret. Five years later, when the cholera scare was over, he returned, exhumed the coffin, and took it to Genoa for final, honourable burial. Though, as Maupassant notes: ‘Wouldn’t one have preferred this extraordinary violinist to have remained on this jagged reef where the waves themselves moan in the strange gashes in the rock?’ Yes, skipper, we would, the reader is likely to reply.
When we pass the fortress island of Sainte-Marguerite, Maupassant recounts the daring escape of Marshal Bazaine – a story he had from an inside source. On we sail. He takes us fishing in his favourite spot, near the Cap du Dramont, a part of the coastline which hasn’t yet been ‘polluted’ by the ‘Parisians and the English and Americans’. Between Saint-Raphaël and Saint-Tropez, by contrast, the rich forest land is currently being cleared for winter resorts. Here, for instance, is Saint-Aygulf, designed to attract successful artists from Paris; as yet unbuilt, but with streets laid out, and their alluring names already up on metal plates – boulevard Rubens, boulevard Van Dyck, boulevard Claude-Lorrain. On we sail. From time to time we might overhear the crew arguing about the direction of the wind; once, we get caught in a storm; one evening, in the Bay of Agay, a slim crescent moon incites the skipper to philosophical reflection and literary reference about our relationship with this nearest of astral bodies. We forgive him the banality of his observations.
These sections of nautical travelogue are engaging enough; but ‘afloat’ implies its counterpart, ‘ashore’, and it is here that the tone darkens and the book becomes more self-revealing. Afloat you are as free as the weather allows you to be; you are surrounded by nature; and you are (forgetting the crew) as solitary as you need and want to be. Ashore is where the problems start, because ashore is full of other people. The skipper is profoundly suspicious of other people, who not only display their own inadequacies but point up your shared ones: ‘We don’t know anything, can’t see anything, do anything, solve anything, imagine anything, we’re shut up, imprisoned inside ourselves. And there are people who think that the human race is wonderful!’ Man is no more than a ‘two-legged insect’; we are ‘beasts and beasts we shall remain, dominated by our instincts in which nothing can change’; people are stupid and ugly and (a surprising complaint from a Frenchman) smell of garlic. Like Flaubert, Maupassant hates people en masse, quoting Lord Chesterfield’s remark that ‘every numerous assembly is mob’; but, not being a snob, he also hates people as individuals, for their monotony, their ‘paltriness’ and their ‘mediocrity’ (médiocre is a key word in Madame Bovary).
He doesn’t let himself off much more lightly than he does others. And his complaints are often close to those he voiced to Flaubert ten years previously. He feels ‘utter revulsion’ at the repetitious nature of life. He has ‘lusted after everything and enjoyed nothing’. And if men and women are both mediocre and unchanging, then what is the point of art for representational artists? ‘Because man never changes, their art is not only pointless but constantly repetitive.’ Now, however, Flaubert is eight years dead, and there is no literary uncle to help, to offer perspective, to reply that his complaints are those of a Realist, and in effect point up the inadequacies of Realism. Flaubert once claimed that he had written Madame Bovary because he ‘hated Realism’.
Nodding to a different French master, Maupassant notes that most of mankind’s ills come from ‘the dread of being alone’. And he himself shares that dread, which is why, even in nine days, he shuttles between afloat and ashore. He hates receiving letters, which ‘tie me down’; he fears friendship, because affection turns out to imply ownership; and yet this self-described ‘brute’ and ‘faun’, with an animal love of the earth, of landscape, of the sea, cannot resist the tide pulling him back to human beings. At Saint-Raphaël he goes ashore and comes across a wedding – ‘that solemn, carnal and comical act which causes such agitation in mankind’. This is a toxic combination for a man who hates marriage, distrusts happiness, writes as if he has never been in love and, further, loathes the crowd. He stands there, waiting for the bride to come out of the church – a normal human reaction for most of us, but not for Maupassant, who deduces that his individual will has been subsumed into the powerful and dangerous force of mass desire. And so: ‘I stood on tiptoe to look – and I really did have the vile, repugnant, vulgar desire to take a look.’
The disgust here has reached pathological proportions. At every turn the darker or more pessimistic option or interpretation is chosen. France’s sunny, idyllic coastline and its immediate hinterland are at times rendered as tormentedly as van Gogh’s Provence. Death is everywhere, even if the rest of us fail to spot it. For Maupassant, Menton means a hecatomb of juvenile TB cases. Travelling inland from Saint-Tropez, he discovers a cork forest which has been harvested for the wine industry:

the bare trunks turn red, blood-red, like a human limb that’s been skinned, making a bloody forest in a hell where the men have roots and their bodies, weirdly crippled and deformed by torture, look like trees, in which, from their wounds dripping with blood, life was forever ebbing away in endless suffering.

Reductivists might see this as the vision of a diagnosed syphilitic – at one point on the trip he has a violent migraine and resorts to the ether bottle – who would try to kill himself within four years and be dead within five. Anti-reductivists might refer to his previous complaints against the world when still a fit young man, and see a consistency of vision now reinforced by greater knowledge of the world.
If the horror of life at the book’s centre is authentic, much of what surrounds it is a confection. Had Maupassant really just been ‘jotting down things I’d seen and thought’, it would have demonstrated a photographic memory for his own past journalistic work. As Edward Sullivan, who 60 years ago first identified several dozen lengthy recyclings, put it: ‘If Maupassant did compose his book on the Bel-Ami in 1887, the yacht’s gear must have included a file of clippings of his old articles in the Gaulois and the Gil-Blas, as well as scissors and an ample supply of paste.’ There is nothing necessarily wrong with the reuse of material – most prolific writers indulge in it – and travel writers have always told much larger lies than novelists; Douglas Parmée suggests that Afloat is ‘best read as fiction’. Even so, it is still disconcerting to discover that the story of Paganini’s corpse is completely spurious, the escape of Marshal Bazaine not much more reliable, and that anecdotes about those Maupassant met while supposedly going ashore on specific days in a specific year come from another time and another place, and/or were second-hand in the first place.
You will not get much indication of truth versus untruth – and originality versus recycling – from this new translation; if you care about that, you will need to go to a French edition. Presumably an editorial decision was taken not to annotate (though there is an annotation on page 13). And yet, in a sly way, the book does just that. On the very first page the following sentence occurs: ‘Antibes loomed up dimly in front of me, with its two towers dominating the town which is cone-shaped and still walled in by the fortifications of Louis XIV’s Vauban.’ ‘The fortifications of Louis XIV’s Vauban’ is an ugly phrase – untypical of Douglas Parmée’s reliably elegant translation – and a suspicious one. Indeed, Maupassant wrote of ‘la ville bâtie en cône et qu’enferment encore les vieux murs de Vauban’. What’s wrong with inserting ‘Louis XIV’s’? Only that Maupassant didn’t write it, and would never have written it. But isn’t translation about being helpful to the reader, conveying in English what would be conveyed in the French to a French reader? Yes, but many French readers – to judge by the Folio edition, which annotates the name of Vauban – no longer know who the famous fortifier was either.
Then there is the opposite habit, of suppressing information judged tedious. Thus, ‘le poète Haraucourt’ loses even his obscure name to become merely ‘one poet’; while in a list of the failed besiegers of Saint-Tropez, ‘le duc d’Anjou … le connétable de Bourbon … le duc de Savoie et le duc d’Epernon’ are shuffled off as ‘divers other foreign aggressors’. Perhaps this seems a minor offence against a text which is hardly major; harmless, indeed rather helpful. But what about this? Maupassant wrote of the island of Sainte-Marguerite that it contained ‘la forteresse célèbre où furent enfermés le Masque de fer et Bazaine’. This is translated as:

a famous fortress in which were imprisoned the Man in the Iron Mask (said to be the twin brother of the Sun King, Louis XIV, who wanted to keep him out of the way) and Marshal Bazaine, who had the bad luck of having to surrender Metz to the Prussians in 1870 and the good luck to have his death sentence commuted to imprisonment.

Apart from this plodding example, the tucks and trims and interpolations are suavely done. Did the late and distinguished Parmée make them of his own volition? Was he leant on by an editor, or was it a process of collaboration? They are still quite low on the traduttore/traditore scale; but it’s easy to imagine what might happen to translation if this principle of ‘helpfulness’ were logically developed.
Maupassant’s chapter on Cannes begins with a couple of pages about the multiplicity of foreign princelings on the Riviera. These are followed by four recycled pages about salons, the tactics of the women who run them and the talented men who frequent them. There is no indication that any of these salons is located in Cannes; indeed, it seems quite clear they are Parisian, as they would have been in the original newspaper articles. Maupassant discusses the pecking order of guests: musicians at the top, artists next, writers coming a close third, with other riff-raff like generals and parliamentarians occasionally tolerated. He notes how musicians are treated like royalty and inspire a fetishistic following (that tuft of his beard enclosed in your ring); artists can be a little unreliable and rough-mannered, but worth it; while writers are useful because they talk a lot. Among the latter, your poet is more idealistic, and also more trustworthy, than your novelist, who ‘loots and exploits and gnaws away at everything he sees. With him, you can never feel safe, never sure that one day he won’t lay you naked on the pages of a book.’ These matters were on Maupassant’s mind for both social and literary reasons. He increasingly enjoyed high society (one of the attractions of the Riviera was that social barriers were more vaultable than in Paris); and he was preparing to write his novels of worldly life. One of those who were both work and play for him was Madame Marie Kahn, who ran an artistic salon in the rue Murillo; we know that Maupassant visited her at Saint-Raphaël in December 1886. She was one of two beautiful, intelligent and grandly married Russian sisters. Marie, who according to a family member was ‘less aggressively virtuous than her sister’, is generally held to be the prototype for Michèle de Burne in Maupassant’s last completed novel, Notre Coeur.
Alien Hearts is its first new translation for a hundred years. The novel has never been much known or valued among Anglophone readers: Francis Steegmuller, in his 1950 biography, called it ‘lamentable’, a term he also applied to Maupassant’s other high-life novel, Fort comme la mort. By their very subject matter they are set apart from what most readers consider ‘real’ Maupassant – his stories of peasant and bourgeois life – but Steegmuller’s dismissal is far too harsh. Fort comme la mort is the stronger of the two, a complex and finally terrifying story of the emotionally incestuous passion of a society painter for the daughter of his long-term mistress; it explores the inequalities of love between the generations, and the punishments the heart endures for not knowing how to grow old. (Ford Madox Ford called it ‘that really greatest of all renderings of atrocious love – of atrociously painful love’, and said that when he wrote The Good Soldier he had the ambition ‘to do for the English novel what in Fort comme la mort, Maupassant had done for the French’.) Notre Coeur has less heat and less terror: André Mariolle, a young, drifting arty type who has published ‘some notably “stylish” travel sketches’, meets Michèle de Burne at her salon, falls in love with this ‘born coquette’, is frustrated when she doesn’t love him back sufficiently, and runs away to the forest of Fontainebleau. There he meets Elisabeth, a simple but true-hearted waitress who loves him completely and with whom he spends an idyllic month; however, he in turn doesn’t love her enough, and is eventually reclaimed by Mme de Burne. Yes, summary does make it sound rather lamentable.
But if the novel is conventional in its procedures, and some of the pages about salon life lack the swiftness of point which is the essence of Maupassant, there are two central themes worthy of our attention. The first is the idea that Michèle de Burne, despite her long-established social function, is ‘modern’. The word is used repeatedly and pointedly of her; while one opinion of her rival salon-holder the Baroness de Frémines is that ‘modernity can go no further.’ This is not a matter of either woman’s aesthetic taste or social and political opinions, but of emotional development. Comparing the two women, the novelist Lamarthe says: ‘Our friend Burne is more of a woman, more of a modern woman, you know what I mean, irresistible in the artifice of seduction which has replaced the old power of natural charm. I shouldn’t even call it artifice, it’s really an aesthetic, the deep sense of a feminine aesthetic. All her power is there.’ What Mariolle discovers is that the modern woman is not able to love as deeply as her predecessor: she is able to attract, entrap and seduce, but even in intimacy there is a final withholding of heart and body – which, of course, becomes a source of further power. And this change in women, Mariolle decides, is the fault of literature. As he puts it to Lamarthe,

In the days when poets and novelists exalted women and made them dream … they sought and believed they found in their lives the same things that their hearts responded to in books. Today you eliminate all the poetic trappings in order to reveal nothing but disillusioning realities. And when there’s no love left in books, my dear fellow, there’s no love in life.

This complaint against literature from within literature is very French; it also directs us back to an earlier and more famous such complaint, that in Madame Bovary. Emma is the typical reader of those romantic books which make women dream and give their hearts expectation – though look where it got her. Indeed, Flaubert’s novel deals in precisely the sort of ‘disillusioning realities’ Mariolle is now complaining about. And there is a pure Flaubertian moment when Mariolle is doing his final checks on the suburban cottage he has rented for his trysts with Mme de Burne: ‘In the silence of that little pavilion where he awaited the greatest happiness he had ever hoped for, he savoured, alone with his dream, walking back and forth from salon to bedroom, talking to himself, the truest pleasure in love he was ever to know.’
Michèle de Burne is aware of her modern condition, aware that the love she feels for Mariolle is not enough in his terms, or on some hypothetical universal scale. She thinks love is ‘a kind of legend of the soul’ in which some can believe and others not; she says of herself: ‘I love drily.’ But there is nothing she can do about it; when she tries to love Mariolle more than her nature permits, she produces only a ‘factitious ardour’. The upside of this diminished wattage, she points out, is that at least no one dies of love any longer. Furthermore, and despite Mariolle’s example, this sociopathology is not restricted to women: ‘Nowadays men and women don’t love each other to the point of really doing themselves any harm.’ This incapacity, or insufficiency, leads into the second main idea of Notre Coeur: that, as Mariolle puts it to himself, ‘life consists of approximations.’ Completeness lies beyond our capabilities, and the lack of completeness in love – whether we are donor or recipient or both – is how and where we measure life’s ability to fail us (or our ability to fail life) most sharply.
At the conclusion of the novel, Mariolle agrees to come back to Paris and continue his role as courtier in a salon of similarly emasculated males. His own private makeweight in the deal is that he is secretly going to install Elisabeth in his household. He finds himself in male fantasy land (a condition doubtless also the fault of literature), longing for ‘a woman who would be the two of them, who would have this one’s love and that one’s charm! Why do we never find the reality of our dreams and always meet with approximations?’ In a crude, quantitative way you could say that Mariolle gets to have his cake and eat it; but in the bleaker emotional accountancy of the novel, he knows that two halves, however separately enviable, can never make the whole we yearn for.

LRB on Lockerbie

The Framing of al-Megrahi

by Gareth Peirce

It is, of course, now all about oil. Only a simpleton could believe that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing, was not recently returned to his home in Libya because it suited Britain. The political furore is very obviously contrived, since both the British and American governments know perfectly well how and for what reasons he came to be prosecuted. More important than the present passing storm is whether any aspect of the investigation that led to al-Megrahi’s original conviction was also about oil, or dictated by other factors that should have no place in a prosecution process.

The devastation caused by the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, at the cost of 270 lives, deserved an investigation of utter integrity. Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights demands no less. Where there has been a death any inquiry must be independent, effective and subject to public scrutiny, to provide the basis for an attribution of responsibility and to initiate criminal proceedings where appropriate. But, in the absence of this, a number of the bereaved Lockerbie families have of necessity themselves become investigators, asking probing questions for two decades without receiving answers; they have learned sufficient forensic science to make sense of what was being presented at al-Megrahi’s trial and make up their own minds whether the prosecution of two Libyans at Camp Zeist near Utrecht was in fact a three-card trick put together for political ends.

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Perhaps the result could have been different if there had been an entirely Scottish police investigation, with unrestricted access to all available information, without interference or manipulation from outside. Instead, from the beginning, the investigation and what were to become the most important aspects of the prosecution case against al-Megrahi were hijacked. Within hours, the countryside around Lockerbie was occupied: local people helping with the search under the supervision of Dumfries and Galloway police realised to their astonishment that the terrain was dotted with unidentified Americans not under the command of the local police.

Each aspect of every criminal investigation in Britain has to meet certain essential standards; where they are not met, these parts of the investigation should not in principle become the basis of a prosecution. There must be precise notes made of each physical exhibit found and by whom; its movements must be tracked; each time an exhibit is inspected, a record must be kept. The rationale is obvious: without a precise record, interference, contamination or simple mistakes could jeopardise a prosecutor’s reliance on evidence that should be tangible and therefore potentially more convincing. For that reason, a crime scene must be sealed off until searches are complete.

Those engineering the destruction of a transatlantic airliner in mid-flight might have believed that it would be likely to happen over the sea. Instead, Pan Am 103 was destroyed over the Scottish town of Lockerbie and its fall-out was scattered over an area too huge to cordon off. The first and most desperate searches were for the passengers: could any have survived? Volunteers included a police surgeon from Yorkshire who had driven to the site as soon as he heard the news; together with the local police, he and others searched non-stop for 24 hours. They found bodies, none showing any sign of life; the doctor labelled each of the bodies he found, more than 50 of them, noting the place of discovery. Once it was clear there were no survivors, a search for evidence of the cause of the explosion would begin.

Extraordinarily, however, distinct from the Dumfries and Galloway police, scores of men, some wearing no insignia, some the insignia of the FBI and Pan Am (it was noted at the time that many of these men were clearly not Pan Am staff), invaded the area. Lockerbie residents reported seeing unmarked helicopters hovering overhead, carrying men with rifles whose telescopic sights were pointing directly at them. And when, much later, items of baggage came to be married up with the passengers they had accompanied, there were disturbing signs of interference. The suitcase belonging to Major McKee (a CIA operative flying back to the US to report on his concern that the couriering of drugs was being officially condoned as a way to entrap users and dealers in the US) was found to have had a hole cut in its side after the explosion, while the clothes in the suitcase were shown on subsequent analysis to bear no trace of explosives. A second suitcase, opened by a Scottish farmer, contained packets of white powder which a local police officer told him was undoubtedly heroin; no heroin was ever recorded as having been discovered. All but two of the labels that Dr Fieldhouse attached to the bodies he found were removed and have never been found.

Although the crime was the most hideous Scotland had ever known, the integrity of the crime scene was violated; in part because outsiders were conducting a desperate search for wreckage that it was important for them to find and spirit away. As many police investigations over the years have demonstrated, such distracting irregularities can simply be red herrings, and these intrusions may have no bearing on the question of who blew up Pan Am 103. Was it individuals? Was it a country? And if so which one? From the very beginning, in fact, it seemed that the case could and would be easily solved. Considerable (and uncomplicated) evidence immediately to hand suggested who might be responsible; it was as if giant arrows were pointing towards the solution.

In the weeks before the bombing in December 1988 there had been a number of very specific warnings that a bomb would be placed on a Pan Am aircraft. Among them was a photograph of a bomb in a Toshiba cassette radio wired to a barometric timer switch; a number of such bombs had been found earlier in 1988 in the possession of members of a small group with a history of successfully carrying out bombings, primarily of American targets. One group member told police that five bombs had been made; at least one was missing at the time of the Lockerbie disaster and never recovered. The warnings were sufficiently exact that the staff of the American Embassy in Moscow, who usually travelled by Pan Am when they returned to the US for Christmas, used a different airline. Flora Swire, who was travelling to New York to spend Christmas with her boyfriend, found it surprisingly easy to buy a ticket.

All the Toshiba cassette bombs that had been seized were found, when tested, to run for 30 minutes after they were set. The advantage of barometric timers is that they aren’t activated until the plane is airborne – the bomb won’t go off on the ground if the plane is delayed. Some seven or eight minutes would elapse before the air pressure dropped enough as the plane gained height to activate a barometric timer set to go off 30 minutes later, i.e. 37 or 38 minutes after the flight took off. It was precisely 38 minutes after Pan Am Flight 103 took off from Heathrow on 21 December 1988 that it exploded over Lockerbie; when the remnants of the destroyed plane and its contents were put together piece by piece by the Dumfries and Galloway police, fragments of a Toshiba cassette radio were found.

Forensic scientists believed that the radio had been in a suitcase in which there were clothes whose label was traced to a shop in Malta. A search of the house of a man affiliated to the group that manufactured the Toshiba bombs produced clothes bought in Malta; it was established too that he had travelled to Malta before the bombing. And the owner of the Maltese shop from which the clothes were thought to have been purchased identified to his brother, without prompting, a newspaper photograph of that man as the person who had bought the clothes found in the suitcase with the bomb inside.

But the man who bought the clothes was not al-Megrahi, nor was he Libyan. The group making Toshiba radio cassette bombs had no connection at all with Libya. Neither the man nor the group was ever prosecuted for involvement in the Lockerbie bombing. The fact that the explosion took place exactly when one would have expected it to if a Toshiba cassette bomb had been used was ignored: the bomb had not, the prosecution contended at al-Megrahi’s trial, been triggered by a barometric switch in this way. The Lockerbie device, it claimed, was different from the devices made by the group. The difference was that it was a Toshiba cassette radio with one speaker rather than two. From a logically compelling case that seemed to point clearly in one direction the prosecution switched tack, but not at the beginning: not, in fact, until two years after the bombing, when the politics of the Middle East shifted and new allies had to be found quickly if the flow of cheap oil were to continue.

It is not difficult to achieve a conviction of the innocent. Over many decades several common factors have been identified, and the majority of them are present, centre stage, in this case: achieving the co-operation of witnesses by means of a combination of inducements and fear of the alternative (the tried and tested method of obtaining evidence for the prosecution on which many US cases rely); the provision of factual information by scientists where there is no proper basis for it (a recurrent theme in UK convictions as well as in the US); reliance on ‘identification’ evidence which is no such thing. Add to that the political will to achieve a prosecution, and the rest is easy. Fabrication demands outright dishonesty, but it isn’t always necessary, or necessary in every aspect of an investigation: the momentum of suspicion, and a blinkered determination to focus on a particular thesis and ignore evidence pointing to the contrary, is a certain route to achieving the desired end. Al-Megrahi is reported as saying that he has evidence, which will be revealed on his death, that will prove his innocence. But it is clear even from the evidence that can be looked at today that his conviction was extremely disturbing.

For the first two years there was no mention at all of Libya. The investigation originally seemed to have clear evidence of a motive (tit for tat retaliation); evidence of the existence of a bomb intended to destroy airliners in mid-flight contained in the same brand of cassette radio discovered on the plane; and evidence implicating a Palestinian splinter group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, which was prepared at the time to hire itself out to regimes that were known to be state sponsors of terrorism; Syria was one (somewhat earlier, Libya had been another), so was Iran.

Behind every crime there is of course a motive. For the initial prime suspect, Iran, the motive was brutally clear. In July 1988 a US battleship, the Vincennes, shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in the Persian Gulf, with 290 passengers, many of them pilgrims en route to Mecca. There were no survivors. By chance a television crew was on the Vincennes when the attack took place and images of triumph at the carnage were immediately beamed around the world. When it became clear, as it did straight away, that the attack was an appalling error, the US compounded its mistake: President Reagan claimed self-defence and the ship’s commander and crew were awarded high military honours.

Two days after the downing of the Iranian airbus, Tehran Radio condemned the attack as an act of naked aggression and announced it would be avenged ‘in blood-splattered skies’. At the same time, US Air Force Command issued a warning to its civilian contractors: ‘We believe Iran will strike back in a tit for tat fashion – mass casualties.’ Warnings became more specific: ‘We believe Europe is the likely target for a retaliatory attack . . . due to the large concentration of Americans and the established terrorist infrastructures in place throughout Europe.’ Within days, US intelligence was convinced that Iran meant business; and the CIA in due course acknowledged that it had intelligence that Ahmad Jibril, the leader of the PFLP-GC, had met government officials in Iran and offered his services.

Such a partnership would indeed have been ominous, since the activities of the PFLP-GC had since 1970 included planting bombs on planes – bombs built into transistor radios and detonated by a barometric pressure switch. It was in this context that the flood of warnings immediately preceding the disaster had obvious significance for the subsequent investigation. One of them read: ‘team of Palestinians not associated with PLO intends to attack US targets in Europe. Time frame is present. Targets specified are Pan Am Airlines and US military bases.’ Five weeks before this warning, a PFLP-GC cell had been arrested in Germany. The PFLP-GC was precisely a ‘team of Palestinians not associated with the PLO’. Jibril’s right-hand man, Haffez Dalkamoni, was arrested in Frankfurt with a known bomb-maker, Marwen Khreesat, as they visited electrical shops in the city. In the boot of Dalkamoni’s car was a Toshiba cassette recorder with Semtex moulded inside it, a simple time delay switch and a barometric switch. Later US intelligence officials confirmed that members of the group had been monitoring Pan Am’s facilities at Frankfurt airport. Dalkamoni admitted he had supervised Khreesat when he built bombs into a Toshiba radio cassette player, two radio tuners and a TV monitor. He said that a second Toshiba containing similar pressure switches had been built. Although Dalkamoni was prosecuted in Germany, Khreesat was inexplicably released; it only later became clear that he had been acting throughout as an undercover agent for Jordanian intelligence, which is extraordinarily close to the CIA (the CIA played a central role in its creation). On Dalkamoni’s account, other bombs made by Khreesat were at large somewhere, including the one built into a second Toshiba player.

On 9 November 1988 Interpol circulated warnings about the PFLP-GC bombs. Heathrow Airport issued its own warning to security staff, stating that it was ‘imperative that when screening or searching radios, radio cassette players and other electrical equipment, staff are to be extra vigilant’. Over the next three weeks the airport received more information, including photographs of the Toshiba bomb from the German authorities. (A document giving information and advice was drawn up by the UK’s principal aviation security adviser on 19 December, but there were problems obtaining colour photographs and delays in the Christmas post and most airlines did not receive it until the new year, weeks after the disaster.)

In March 1989, less than three months after the downing of Flight 103, the then secretary of state for transport, Paul Channon, had lunch with some journalists. He talked, indiscreetly, of the brilliant detective work undertaken by the smallest police force in the country. Arrests, he told the journalists, were imminent. Although such conversations are customarily regarded as not for attribution, the next morning’s newspapers revealed that a cabinet minister had stated that those responsible for the Lockerbie bombing had been identified and would soon be arrested.

At precisely the same time, however, the US president, George Bush Senior, was reported by the Washington Post as having spoken to Margaret Thatcher about Lockerbie, advising her to keep Lockerbie ‘low-key’, to avoid prejudicing negotiations with Syrian and Iranian-backed groups holding Western hostages in Lebanon. There were no arrests; Channon left the cabinet; and political interest in the case and desire to identify who was responsible for the disaster disappeared. The victims’ families demanded evidence that a proper inquiry was being conducted and in September 1989 Channon’s successor, Cecil Parkinson, met the newly formed UK Families Flight 103. He promised them a full judicial inquiry. Thatcher countermanded this promise, and he returned to the relatives with an admission of total failure. ‘Low-key’ meant no judicial inquiry, no prosecution, and instead a Fatal Accident Inquiry with no powers to subpoena which declined to investigate how the bomb got on the plane for fear of interfering with police inquiries.

As political players grow old, they reminisce and sometimes they forget what they are meant to have said or not said. Five years later Parkinson took part in a television programme about another horrific disaster, the sinking of the Marchioness, in which he confirmed that it was Thatcher who had blocked a judicial inquiry. He remembered discussing with the Lockerbie relatives whether, ‘because the security services were involved’, a High Court judge could look into the security aspects and report privately to him: ‘Because when you get into the Lockerbie business – how did we find out certain information, how did we know this, how did we know that? – you would have had to recall not only our own intelligence sources but information we were receiving from overseas. Therefore that had to be a closed area.’ This suggested the real block.

Nevertheless, investigators had clearly remained confident that despite government diffidence a prosecution would soon be brought. Late in 1989 an imminent arrest once again seemed tantalisingly on the cards. The Sunday Times (known to enjoy detailed briefings from the police and security services) reported that the ‘net was closing’ on the Lockerbie suspects and stated categorically that the bombing had been carried out by the German PFLP-GC cell led by Dalkamoni under orders from Ahmad Jibril and with a bomb made by Khreesat. What was new was the suggestion that the bomb had first been put on a plane not in Frankfurt but in Malta. Clothes made in Malta, the report added, had been found in the suitcase in which police believed the bomb had been planted. A member of Dalkamoni’s cell, Abu Talb, who was then awaiting trial for separate offences in Sweden, had, it revealed, visited Malta. He was the man identified by the shop owner: the man who had clothes bought in Malta in his possession. The Sunday Times articles went on to predict that Abu Talb would be extradited at any moment to stand trial for the bombing.

The suggestion that the bomb was placed on a plane from Malta was made in an attempt to link the discovery of the Maltese clothes with the already existing evidence of the German group. As no passengers transferred from Air Malta to Pan Am 103A in Frankfurt, the feeder flight for Pan Am 103, it would have had to be an unaccompanied bag from Malta that carried the bomb. Two documents were said to have been discovered: a list of the stages followed by Frankfurt airport’s automated baggage system which related to Pan Am 103, and a handwritten worksheet from one of the several stations from which baggage came into the system. As this was official information, it must have been given lock, stock and barrel by investigators to the journalist in question.

A fundamental objection to the last part of the new thesis was blindingly clear: if the intended target was an American aircraft, why risk a premature explosion triggered by the barometric switch by putting the suitcase on an Air Malta flight? The scientific underpinning necessary to support a counter-proposition was established during 1989 and 1990 and rested on two ‘discoveries’: a fragment of an entirely different type of timer in the remnant of a shirt collar and the matching of that fragment with the manufacturer’s prototype. This timer, it was argued, could, once set, keep a barometric switch from detonating for days. It was in the development of this proposition that every safeguard fundamental to a criminal investigation came to be jettisoned.

That Iran and the PFLP-GC were responsible had fitted comfortably with UK and US foreign policy in the Middle East. Both countries had severed relations with Syria on the grounds of its persistent support for international terrorism; both had supported Iraq in the Iran/Iraq war, which ended in the summer of 1988. The obvious truth as it appeared at the time was that the Jibril group, sponsored in this instance by Iran, was a logical as well as politically acceptable fit.

Then, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, thereby putting at risk almost 10 per cent of US oil supplies, and the stability of the Saudi and Gulf sheikhdoms on which the West depended to preserve the status quo in the region. A sudden shift of alliances was necessary: if Iraq had to be confronted, then Iran had to be treated differently and the Syrian regime needed to be brought on board. At the beginning of 1991 Syrians joined Western troops in the attack on Saddam Hussein’s invading army.

The centre of the Lockerbie investigation had by this time ceased to be Scotland: the CIA was in charge. Vincent Cannistraro had made his mark under Ronald Reagan, with a clandestine programme to destabilise the Libyan regime. He boasted that he ‘developed the policy towards Libya’ which culminated in the bombing of Gaddafi’s house in Tripoli in 1986 on the basis of intercept evidence later acknowledged to be false. Now brought out of retirement, Cannistraro shifted the investigation’s approach. The suspect country was no longer Iran but Libya, and in November 1991, the UK and the US made a joint announcement that two Libyan Airlines officials, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and Al Amin Khalifa Fhimah, had planted the bomb in Malta on behalf of Libyan intelligence. Douglas Hurd, the foreign secretary, announced to the House of Commons that Libyans alone were suspected and that other countries were not implicated.

Years of protracted negotiations were to take place before the Libyan government agreed to release the two men to stand trial in a ‘neutral country’. It was not until May 2000 that the two Libyan Airlines officials who had run the airline’s office in Malta finally went on trial – in a purpose-built court outside Utrecht created from a mothballed air-force base – under Scots law, albeit before three judges rather than a jury. What did Gaddafi expect when he agreed to the extradition of the two men? That they would in due course be exonerated because they were innocent but that he would meanwhile reap the diplomatic benefit by having delivered them? The idea of their individual responsibility was anyway peculiar: as agents of a state where not a mouse squeaks without the say-so of Gaddafi, al-Megrahi and Fhimah were either ordered to do what it was said they did, in which case dealing with Gaddafi as a statesman then and now has been beyond hypocrisy – or the thesis was wrong.

The key features needed to prosecute al-Megrahi successfully were the scientific identification of the circuit-board fragment, which would in turn establish its origin, and the identification of the purchaser of the clothes in Malta. The timers, the indictment stated, were made by a firm in Switzerland; their circuit board matched the fragment retrieved from Lockerbie, and they sold the timers exclusively to Libya. Everything, essentially, hinged on those links.

Who found the fragment? And who understood its relevance? Thomas Hayes of the Royal Armament Research and Development Establishment (RARDE) claimed the find (with his colleague Alan Feraday) and Thomas Thurman of the FBI claimed the analytical victory. All were swiftly hailed (or hailed themselves) as heroes. Thurman appeared on television on 15 November 1991, the day after indictments were issued against the two Libyans, boasting that he had identified the piece of circuit board as part of a timing device that might have been sold to Libyan Airlines staff. ‘I made the identification and I knew at that point what it meant. And because, if you will, I am an investigator as well as a forensic examiner, I knew where that would go. At that point we had no conclusive proof of the type of timing mechanism that was used in the bombing of 103. When that identification was made of the timer I knew that we had it.’ This was the claim – the hard evidence – that linked Libyans to the crime. If the claim was false the bereaved Lockerbie families have been deceived for 20 years.

On 13 September 1995 the FBI’s forensic department was the subject of a programme broadcast in the US by ABC. At its centre was a memorandum from the former head of explosive science at the FBI, Dr Frederic Whitehurst. It was a devastating indictment of a former colleague. The colleague was Thomas Thurman and the accusations related to his investigation of a terrorist attack in which a judge was killed by pipe bombs. Two years later, as a result of a review by the US inspector general, Michael Bromwich, into a large number of criminal investigations, Thomas Thurman was barred from FBI labs and from being called as an expert witness. Bromwich had discovered that he had no formal scientific qualifications and that, according to a former colleague, he had been ‘circumventing procedures and protocols, testifying to areas of expertise that he had no qualifications in . . . therefore fabricating evidence’.

Thurman had made the Libyan connection, and its plausibility relied on the accuracy of his statement that the fragment of circuit board proved that it would have been possible for the unaccompanied bag to fly from Malta without the seemingly inevitable mid-air explosion. And thus it was that a witness from Switzerland, Edwin Bollier, the manufacturer of the MEBO circuit board, was called on to provide evidence that such boards had been sold exclusively to Libya. Bollier was described by al-Megrahi’s barrister in his closing speech as an ‘illegitimate arms dealer with morals to match’. The evidence he was clearly intended to provide had begun to unravel even before the trial began. Sales elsewhere in the world were discovered, Thurman did not appear at the trial, and the judges commented that Bollier’s evidence was ‘inconsistent’ and ‘self-contradictory’. Other witnesses, they found, had ‘openly lied to the court’. Despite all this al-Megrahi was convicted.

Bollier had been one of the most potentially dubious of many dubious witnesses for the prosecution. But Dr Köchler, the UN’s observer throughout the trial, recorded that Bollier had been ‘brusquely interrupted’ by the presiding judge when he attempted to raise the issue of the possible manipulation of the timer fragments. Could the MEBO board, or a part of one, have been planted in such a way that it could be conveniently ‘discovered’? After the trial, new evidence that would have been at the centre of al-Megrahi’s now abandoned appeal made this suggestion more credible: a Swiss electronics engineer called Ulrich Lumpert, formerly employed by Bollier’s firm, stated in an affidavit to Köchler that in 1989 he stole a ‘non-operational’ timing board from MEBO and handed it to ‘a person officially investigating in the Lockerbie case’. Bollier himself told Köchler that he was offered $4 million if he would connect the timer to Libya.

There were throughout two aspects of the investigation over which the Scottish authorities exerted little authority: in the US, the activities of the CIA and in particular of Thomas Thurman and the forensic branch of the FBI; in England, the forensic investigations of RARDE, carried out by Hayes and Feraday. Without Hayes’s findings, the Lockerbie prosecution would have been impossible. His evidence was that on 12 May 1989 he discovered and tweezed out from a remnant of cloth an electronic fragment, part of a circuit board. The remnant of cloth, part of a shirt collar, was then traced to a Maltese shop. A number of aspects of the original circuit board find were puzzling. The remnant was originally found in January 1989 by a DC Gilchrist and a DC McColm in the outer reaches of the area over which the bomb-blast debris was spread. It was labelled ‘cloth (charred)’ by him, but then overwritten as ‘debris’ even though the fragment of circuit board had not yet been ‘found’ by Hayes. The fragment found by Hayes, and identified as a MEBO circuit board by Thurman, meant that the thesis of an Air Malta involvement could survive.

Even if one knew nothing of the devastating findings of the public inquiry in the early 1990s into the false science that convicted the Maguire Seven or of the succession of thunderous judgments in the Court of Appeal in case after case in which RARDE scientists had provided the basis for wrongful convictions, Hayes’s key evidence in this case on the key fragment should be viewed as disgraceful. There is a basic necessity for evidential preservation in any criminal case: every inspection must be logged, chronology recorded, detail noted. But at every point in relation to this vital fragment that information was either missing or had been altered, although Hayes had made meticulous notes in respect of every single one of the hundreds of other exhibits he inspected in the Lockerbie investigation.

No forensic scientist knows when he conducts his examinations whether or when there will be a prosecution that will depend on them; this makes it all the more important that his notes are exact. Hayes confirmed that it was his practice to draw pieces of circuit board where he found them – for instance in the vicinity of blast-damaged material – but he made no such drawings of this item, nor had he given it an exhibit reference number as he had every other exhibit being designated at the time, nor did he carry out a standard test for traces of explosive. Almost a month after his inspection of the timer fragment, Hayes was identifying and drawing exhibits which were given reference numbers smaller than the number of the vital exhibit. He recorded his finding on page 51 of his notes, but the pages originally numbered 51-55 had been renumbered 52-56 at some point. Hayes stated that he had ‘no idea’ when the change in pagination was carried out. The inference put to Hayes was that the original page 51 and the following pages had been renumbered, an original page removed and space made to insert what was now page 51 of his notes.

Curiously, a memorandum from Hayes’s colleague Feraday, written on 15 September 1989, to a detective inspector working on the case, referred to a fragment of green circuit board: ‘Willy, enclosed are some Polaroid photographs of the green circuit board. Sorry about the quality, it is the best I can do in such a short time.’ No one was able to explain why there should have been any shortage of time to make available in September 1989 photographs of an item that had been found on 12 May. Feraday’s note continued: ‘I feel that this fragment could be potentially most important so any light your lads or lasses can shed upon the problem of identifying it will be most welcome.’ Again no one was able to explain what light the lads and lasses could shed on something it was most curious they had not seen before now, given that Hayes had recovered it in May. Clearly it could not have been seen by the police before the cloth was passed to Hayes at RARDE and the fragment extracted by him. If Hayes had photographed the exhibit, as was his normal practice, then Feraday would not have needed to rely on Polaroids of dubious quality. The issue of his notes’ pagination was described by Hayes as ‘an unfathomable mystery’. In view of the importance of exhibit PT/35(b), how could the court have been satisfied by this evidence? The new evidence of the former MEBO employee who stole a circuit board would of course have been ripe for analysis by the Court of Appeal, which has now been discharged from considering new evidence in al-Megrahi’s lately abandoned appeal.

A secondary important proposition for the Crown to consider was that the suitcase was on the second layer of a luggage container on the aircraft – which meant that it must have come from Frankfurt. Examining the largest surviving fragment of the outside case of the Toshiba device on 25 January 1989, Hayes had considered its state consistent with its having been at the base of the container. This would have contradicted the Crown’s position that the device was in a suitcase that had arrived last, as unaccompanied baggage from Malta via Frankfurt, and so was nearer the top. By the time he gave evidence at the trial, Hayes had revised his assessment of its position.

(Since the trial, evidence new to the defence but known from the start to the police has surfaced of a break-in at Heathrow in the hours before the disaster. The Fatal Accident Inquiry, which didn’t have this knowledge, had made a finding in 1991 that Pan Am 103 was ‘under constant guard at Heathrow’. Iran Air’s hangar at Heathrow was next to Pan Am’s.)

This isn’t the first time we have heard of Hayes and Feraday. Among the many wrongful convictions in the 1970s for which RARDE scientists were responsible, Hayes played his part in the most notorious of all, endorsing the finding of an explosive trace that was never there, and speculating that a piece of chalk mentioned to the police by Vincent Maguire, aged 16, and a candle by Patrick Maguire, aged 13, ‘fitted the description better’ of a stick of gelignite wrapped in white paper. Both were convicted and imprisoned on this evidence, together with their parents and their uncle Giuseppe Conlon, who was to die in prison. All were later found to be innocent.

Although Feraday was often addressed by the prosecution as ‘Dr’ or ‘Professor’ when he gave evidence, he had no relevant academic qualifications, only a higher national certificate in physics and electronics some 30 years old. Dr Michael Scott, whose evidence has been preferred in appeals to that of Feraday, commented that ‘the British government employed hundreds of people who were extraordinarily well qualified in the areas of radio communication and electronics. Alan Feraday is not qualified yet they use him. I have to ask the question why.’ Feraday, like his US counterpart Thurman, has now been banned from future appearances as an expert witness, but he had already provided the key evidence in a roll-call of convictions of the innocent. A note of a pre-trial conference with counsel prosecuting Danny McNamee (who was wrongly convicted of involvement in a bombing in Hyde Park) provides a typical instance: ‘F [Feraday] prepared to say it [a circuit board] purely for bombing purposes, no innocent purpose.’ The implication here was that anyone who had involvement with this circuit board would have knowingly been involved in bomb construction. That, in common with many other assertions made by Feraday, was entirely false, but it resulted in McNamee’s imprisonment for 11 years.

To discover that al-Megrahi’s conviction was in large part based on the evidence of scientists whose value as professional witnesses had been permanently and publicly demolished ten years before his trial is astounding. The discovery nearly two decades ago of a large number of wrongful convictions enabled by scientific evidence rightly led to demands that the community of forensic scientists change its ways. Similarly, a series of catastrophic misidentifications required the introduction of sound new practices for evidence based on that most fragile of human attributes, visual memory. Witnesses must not be prompted; a witness’s memory, as far as possible, must be as safely protected from contamination as a crime scene. The first description is vital. If a witness makes a positive identification of one individual, no subsequent identification of a second is permissible. Equivocation and uncertainty are not enough. Even if the science that convicted al-Megrahi had not offended against every minimum standard, then the second pillar of the prosecution case, his identification by Tony Gauci, the Maltese shopkeeper, would remain spectacular in its noncompliance with any safeguard. He described al-Megrahi as ‘6’0’’’ (he was 5’8’’), ‘50 years old’ (he was 37), and ‘hefty’; said that he ‘had been to the shop before and after’, ‘had been there only once’; that he ‘saw him in a bar months later’; that he ‘will sign statement even though I don’t speak English’; that al-Megrahi ‘was similar but not identical’, ‘perhaps like him but not fully like him’, and, fatally for any identification of al-Megrahi in the first place, that he was ‘like the man in the Sunday Times’ (in other words, like Abu Talb, whose picture Gauci had initially identified). But Gauci’s evidence was needed and, reports suggest, handsomely rewarded. He apparently now lives in Australia, supported by millions of US dollars.

That a court of three experienced judges convicted on such evidence and that an appeal court upheld the conviction is profoundly shocking. Köchler, the UN observer, reported finding the guilty verdict ‘incomprehensible’ in view of the court’s admission that Gauci’s identification was ‘not absolute’. We had come to believe that such an outcome, resting on invalid identification, was no longer possible. ‘The guilty verdict’, Köchler wrote, was ‘arbitrary, even irrational’ with an ‘air of international power politics’ present ‘in the whole verdict’, which was ‘based on a series of highly problematic inferences’. He remarked on the withholding of ‘substantial information’ (‘more or less openly exercised influence on the part of actors outside the judicial framework’) and on the very visible interference with the work of the Scottish prosecutors by US lawyers present in the well of the court. But most seriously, he set out his ‘suspicion that political considerations may have been overriding a strictly judicial evaluation of the case’. All of this harks back to the bad old days when a blind eye was turned to the way convictions were obtained.

Al-Megrahi’s trial constituted a unique legal construct, engineered to achieve a political rapprochement, but its content was so manipulated that in reality there was only ever an illusion of a trial. Dr Köchler recorded at its conclusion that it was ‘not fair’ and that it was not ‘conducted in an objective manner’, so that there were ‘many more questions and doubts at the end than the beginning’. Since then, these doubts have not disappeared: on the contrary, the questions are graver, the doubts have grown and so has the strength of the evidence on which they are based. Köchler’s observations continue to have compelling relevance; he found the respect of the court, the defence lawyers included, for the ‘shrouds of secrecy’ and ‘national security considerations’ to be ‘totally incomprehensible to any rational observer’. ‘Proper judicial procedure,’ he continued, ‘is simply impossible if political interests and intelligence services – from whichever side – succeed in interfering in the actual conduct of a court.’

The term miscarriage of justice carries with it the inference of accident, but also of death. There is a pressing need to investigate in detail how it has come about that there has been a form of death in this case – the death of justice – and who should be found responsible.