Writing to the TLS

Portrait of a Lady

Sir, – In his review (Paperbacks in Brief, August 26) of Gavin de Beer’s edition of the Autobiographies of Darwin and Huxley, recently reissued in Oxford Paperbacks, R.O’H. regrets that we have ‘unaccountably replaced the full-faced portrait of Mrs Huxley middle-aged, forceful, intelligent, with a sad picture of her in 1910’. Would that the exchange were so arbitrary! An error on the part of a picture agency came to our notice too late for the original edition of the book (1974): the portrait whose loss your reviewer mourns is of Mrs Huxley’s cook.

HENRY HARDY.

Oxford University Press, Walton Street, Oxford.

[9 September 1983]

A curate’s egg

Sir, – It is a pity Patrick Taylor (Letters, October 19) didn’t look up the curate’s egg before attempting to put the record straight. Had the curate really given the dull reply, “It is good in parts”, George du Maurier’s classic cartoon, “True Humility”, would probably not have been published in Punch on November 9 1895.

The Bishop says to the curate: “I’m afraid you’ve got a bad Egg, Mr Jones.” Jones replies: “Oh no, my Lord, I assure you! Parts of it are excellent!”

As for the meaning of the phrase today, usage has taken Jones’s euphemism literally, and usage is not to be gainsaid. It really does mean that something is good in parts, and sometimes that the good parts compensate for the bad. The American dictionary that offers the definition “something discreetly declared to be partly good but in fact thoroughly bad” makes the same mistake as Mr Taylor. As the OED has it, the curate’s egg is “taken as a type of something of mixed character”.

HENRY HARDY
Wolfson College, Oxford.

[26 October 2001]

Academic copyright

Sir, – I turned eagerly to John Sutherland’s review (February 22) of Corynne McSherry’s Who Owns Academic Work? hoping to find a discussion of the widespread insistence by the publishers of most academic journals (not the TLS, happily) that authors of the articles they print should assign copyright to their publisher. No doubt Professor Sutherland is following McSherry in not raising this matter. May I raise it myself?

I deplore such exploitation by publishers of academics’ need to publish in peer-reviewed periodicals for the sake of their careers. This expropriation of copyright, especially without payment, is needless, and I have always resisted it. Recently my resistance barely availed, when a journal sought assignment of copyright in a contribution by Isaiah Berlin that I had offered them on behalf of his Literary Trustees, of whom I am one. They argued when challenged that this was (a) different from transferring ownership, (b) a legal necessity if they were to publish the piece. This is nonsense. Assignment is just the technical term for transfer of ownership; and a lease of the relevant publication rights (including provisions for photocopying and electronic use), on agreed terms, as standardly occurs for books, is all that is needed, and is no more complicated to arrange. (The difference between copyright and publication rights is often not understood, but there is no excuse for publishers to be ignorant of it.) Another invalid argument advanced by journals in favour of assignment is that they depend for their solvency on subsidiary income. This income can just as easily be diverted to the journal, wholly or partly, without the transfer of copyright – a transfer that should surely be resisted by authors, individually and collectively, as a matter of professional principle.

HENRY HARDY
Wolfson College, Oxford.

[29 March 2002]

The great online robbery

Sir, – I write with an addendum to my letter on academic copyright (March 29), in which I argued against the practice, widespread in publishing, of requiring authors of journal articles to forgo their copyright.

Earlier this year I was invited by my University’s online teaching office to write and run an Internet course this autumn. It emerged when a sample contract was supplied that authors are standardly expected to transfer their copyright and moral rights to online publishers. No reason was given for this, and when I asked for one, in a gruelling series of exchanges, none of any plausibility was provided. I insisted on retaining my rights, and at the last minute this was reluctantly agreed to, though at the price of a 50 per cent reduction in royalties, reduced to 20 per cent after further protest. I see no justification for any such reduction, and agreed to the revised terms only to save the course, which seemed to me a good idea.

I tell this tale not because there is any hope of persuading the publishers to relent in my own case, but in order to encourage other authors of online material to take a similar stand, in the hope that the unjustifiable practice of asking authors to part with their rights in this way may fall into desuetude.

HENRY HARDY
Wolfson College, Oxford.

[11 October 2002]

Kripke’s ideas

Sir, – Stephen Neale’s absorbing discussion of Saul Kripke’s originality (February 9) prompts me to place a relevant piece of information in the public domain.
    In Oxford in 1973, without a text, Kripke delivered a brilliant set of John Locke Lectures, in many ways complementary to ‘Naming and Necessity’, under the title ‘Reference and Existence’. At the request of Oxford University Press I edited a draft transcript made from recordings. OUP’s hope was that this would assist Kripke in preparing the lectures for publication, as is customary. However, although he pronounced the transcription reliable, Kripke has not to date published a book based upon it. Since this was not unforeseen, I placed a copy of the transcript in Oxford’s Philosophy Library, where it may be consulted by readers (but not copied or quoted without Kripke’s authorisation).
    I should like this to be generally known to philosophers because I believe not only that these lectures provide clear evidence of Kripke’s originality, but also that they are enormously worth reading. Indeed, if anyone can succeed (where I failed) in persuading Kripke to publish them, the philosophical community will certainly be grateful.
    Neale suggests resolving a dispute about what exactly was said in a crucial exchange between Kripke and Ruth Marcus in 1962 by printing the relevant passage from a verbatim transcript under a ‘fair use’ policy, since Marcus objects (why?) to the publication of the full transcript. But ‘fair use’ applies only to quotations from published material: not even brief excerpts from unpublished sources can be lawfully published without the permission of the copyright owner(s).[1]

    HENRY HARDY
    Wolfson College, Oxford.

[1. This is an error. H.H.]

[16 March 2001]

Fair dealing

Sir, – Tom Rivers’s letter and J.C.’s NB column in your April 6 issue suggest that I may owe your readers an apology for oversimplifying the law (on both sides of the Atlantic) governing unauthorised quotation from unpublished material. But I should like to know exactly which types of unpublished matter are fair game for the fair dealer.
A private letter, I have always believed, is off limits; but J.C.’s comments on Salinger v Hamilton suggest that this is not straightforwardly so, at any rate in the US. What of an unscripted talk not open to the general public, especially one tape-recorded without prior agreement? Is it not legitimate for the speaker to object if a passage from such a talk is printed without permission? Ruth Marcus’s 1962 seminar – the occasion for the remark of mine to which Mr Rivers objects – perhaps falls into this category. (So, maybe, does the Countess of Wessex's conversation with the bogus sheikh.) The 1988 Copyright Act, by contrast, if it indeed implies a license to quote unpublished words unilaterally, seems to have in view primarily words that their author has committed to paper or (as in the case of Andrew Motion) e-mail, rather than viva voce utterances. At any rate, if I drew the limits too tightly, perhaps we might be given a fuller account of just what looser restrictions apply?
In addition, even if the rules of fair dealing (often referred to as ‘fair use’, pace Mr Rivers – by J.C., for instance) are relevant to unpublished material, the attribution of authorship is not always mandatory, as Mr Rivers seems to imply: it may be specifically prohibited, as in the case of a lecture given under Chatham House rules, or a briefing by ‘sources close to’ a political figure. But maybe permission to quote is implicit in these instances.

HENRY HARDY
Wolfson College, Oxford.

[20 April 2001]

Copyright laws

Sir, – Ronan Deazley’s letter about Paul Burrell and copyright (November 7) helpfully answers some of the questions about how ‘fair dealing’ applies to unpublished material that have long perplexed me (see my letter, April 4, 2001). I am particularly pleased to know that a recent addition to UK law excludes Burrell-style unauthorised quotation from unpublished letters.
But one difficulty in particular is still outstanding. Title 17 of the US Code, § 107, having allowed ‘fair use’ for ‘criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching […], scholarship, or research’, and having made clear that such use shall not be ‘of a commercial nature’, crucially adds: ‘The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use.’
This discrepancy between UK and US provisions leaves open the possibility that a work may be legally published in the US and then leak back into the UK in a Spycatcher-like fashion. It is surely desirable that the two laws should be brought into line. In the meantime we have to work with the law as it stands, which in the US case raises the question whether a copyright owner is able to prohibit copying or publication of material deposited in a library by a third party. If not, anyone who writes a letter or email is vulnerable to the ‘fair use’ of such deposited material.
I should declare my interest. The papers of the US commentator Joseph Alsop (1910–89) are in the Library of Congress on open access. In recent years Kai Bird and Christopher Hitchens (and maybe others) have published extracts, without seeking permission, from letters written to Alsop by Isaiah Berlin. Permission would probably have been given by his literary trustees (of whom I am one), but that is not the point. So far as I know, Berlin was never asked whether he wished to restrict quotation from these letters. (Was the onus on him to request such a restriction? Would such a request have been honoured?) In any event, if the quotations in question indeed satisfy the terms of ‘fair use’ in the US, then one cannot control publication there of one’s own private letters, since their owner may always decide to make them publicly available. Is it too late for the US law to take a step back?

HENRY HARDY
Wolfson College, Oxford.

[14 November 2003]

Varieties of religious fudge

Sir, – John Kenrick (letters, January 30) berates John Whale for arguing that, in the arena of religious belief, ‘Commitment frustrates dialogue.’ Kenrick holds that committed believers can engage in open discussion with equally but incompatibly committed members of other faiths. Whale calls this ‘a fudge’, but all Kenrick offers instead is a tray of fudge of his own – five varieties of it. Let me dispatch these in order.

Homogenised fudge: ‘religious beliefs may be compatible’. Some are, but many more are not and never can be, and these include the most central and distinctive beliefs of the major world religions.

Illogical fudge: ‘openness to other faiths may be part of the religious commitment itself’. As in ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me’?

Evolutionary fudge: ‘one can be committed to a tradition that develops’. As when one exceeds a speed limit on the grounds that it may be increased in future?

Evasive fudge: ‘apparent differences between beliefs may rest on a misunderstanding’. This universal characteristic of human opinion cuts no ice in this context.

Euphemistic fudge: dialogue ‘might simply be to establish understanding’. Only as a prelude to the more muscular dialogue of disagreement and proselytism.

What Kenrick sidesteps but Whale may have spotted is that the whole enterprise of seeking, claiming or accepting transcendental certainties, be it never so instinctively attractive, is permanently flawed and divisive, root and branch. No amount of sophistry can cloak the propensity of organised religion to sponsor beliefs held with an overweening certainty that is always liable to slide into intolerance or violence. What is needed is not the recalibration of institutional religion, but its demise. The absurd circle-squaring of religious leaders who maintain that everyone can retain their beliefs full-bloodedly without risking internecine clashes is long overdue for exposure. When a lion approaches, we do not take it for a peacemaker.

HENRY HARDY
Wolfson College, Oxford.

[13 February 2004]

Religious dialogue and circle-squaring

Sir, – Like the two women whom Sydney Smith saw insulting one another from houses on opposite sides of an Edinburgh alley, John Kenrick (Letters, February 27) and I shall never agree in our Oxbridge exchange about inter-faith dialogue, arguing as we are from different premises. Indeed, many libraries have already been filled with discussion of what divides us, a discussion set to continue inconclusively as long as our species exists. But even within these limits there are misunderstandings and traducements to be avoided. A number of these appear in Kenrick’s latest boutade.

1. Resort to personalities or speculative psychoanalysis only weakens a serious case. If I am ‘cavalier’ and (worse?) ‘an intellectual’, this is irrelevant to the argument, as are my alleged fear of religious dialogue and my fixed mindset.

2. To talk ‘as if some believers think that God is round and others think that God is square’ is not a reductio ad absurdum. The key credal differences between faiths are indeed of that order, as in the case of (lack of) belief in a triune God, or in the divinity of Jesus. Compare a discussion between proponents of driving on the left and those favouring the right: they may search for ‘areas of agreement’ as hard as they like, but if the outcome is a decision that both practices shall run amicably in parallel, or that the middle of the road be adopted as a compromise, blood will flow.

3. Political disagreement is not analogous to religious disagreement. Politics negotiates paths among plural values that need not claim primacy in all circumstances, whereas part of the central essence of religion is to achieve unified, universal truth. Deep plurality is ineradicably incompatible with (at any rate mainstream) religious belief. That’s why political parties are not inevitably at ideological loggerheads, whereas different religions cannot accept the validity of one another’s claims without the fudging of which I wrote before (Letters, February 13). If the objectives of religious dialogue go beyond the pragmatic modus vivendi that all people of goodwill desire, they are delusory, unless they amount to the suppression of all but the one (which?) true religion.

4. I did not suggest that believers should refuse to speak to members of other faiths, let alone that any such conversations are ‘meaningless’. Kenrick speaks of ‘preposterous caricature’ and ‘knocking down a straw man’; let him put his own house in order. Of course dialogue is better than defiance.

5. If religious certainties exist, says Kenrick, ‘the search for them offers the hope of unity rather than division’. This remark is deeply unrealistic and uninformed by history. An amicable joint search may be just conceivable, but since the belief that such certainty has been discovered can become murderous, we had better not even look for it, especially as (see Kant) it isn’t available to us humans.

6. Nazi and Communist savagery, according to Kenrick, shows where we end up without religion. Nonsense: it shows where we end up without humanity. Does he really think the record of religion any better as regards ‘desire for total power over people’s lives’? The problem is in the claim to indubitable truth (in whose name human life and dignity may be sacrificed), whatever form its justification may take.

7. The view that ‘respect for a transcendent wisdom’ is the only thing ‘truly capable of checking human cruelty’ beggars belief. Tell that to the Spanish Inquisition, or Osama bin Laden, or indeed the marines. Such ‘respect’ has amply shown that it is every bit as likely to license cruelty as to check it. The religious outlook has, at best, no monopoly on tolerance, respect, sympathy or mutual understanding.

8. If, as I believe, no literal meaning can be given to the claim that certain texts are divinely inspired, the onus, pace Kenrick, is on those who think otherwise to justify themselves.

9. In his last paragraph Kenrick accepts that religious dialogue ‘ultimately aims at establishing the truth’ (my italics). Precisely: that’s why it’s ultimately going nowhere.

HENRY HARDY
Wolfson College, Oxford.

[not published]

Kingsley Amis and depression

Sir, – I fear I may be stating the obvious, but I’ll take the risk.

In his introduction to Kingsley Amis’s ‘lost poem’, ‘Things tell less and less’ (May 14), Zachary Leader refers to ‘the poem’s dark mood’. This strikes me as a considerable understatement. The symptoms Amis describes are surely those of full-dress clinical depression, or something pretty close to it. At any rate, they correspond to those I myself have experienced in that condition.

It seems likely that Kingers had known depression by 1972, when he wrote in Kingsley Amis on Drink, ‘When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness, anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover.’ But in his case it wasn’t (just) a hangover, to judge from his comment on Stuart Sutherland’s Breakdown (1976): ‘This is what a breakdown is really like.’ It is odd that Leader doesn’t use this sort of evidence to date the poem more precisely – and perhaps earlier than his guess of the late 1970s or early 1980s.

HENRY HARDY
Wolfson College, Oxford.

[21 May 2004, edited]

Kingsley Amis’s depression

Sir, – I am impressed with Christopher Hitchens’s knowledge (Letters, May 28) of his Kingsley Amis, unless of course he got the passage he quotes from Kevin Michael Grace’s blog, The Ambler, where it is most of ‘thought for the day’ for April 26. In any event, the evidence he adduces for dating Amis’s poem ‘Things tell less and less’ (May 14) to the late 1970s strikes me as persuasive, if not decisive, and I withdraw my suggestion that the poem might have been written earlier.

It is also plausible, surely, to attribute chronic anhedonia to Amis, even if its literary expression was afforced by empathy with, and insight drawn from, the experiences of fellow sufferers, Stuart Sutherland in particular. Anhedonia is certainly the symptom of depression as I know it that leaps out most obviously from the poem. I remember in particular looking at a self-evidently beautiful view without feeling its beauty at all.

As for the onset and duration of his putative condition, Amis himself provides two useful clues in his Memoirs (1991). He tells us that he was treated at the Littlemore (psychiatric) Hospital near Oxford at the age of twenty-four (i.e. c.1946); his biographer Eric Jacobs adds that this was because he suffered from anxiety and panic attacks (a syndrome sometimes associated with depression). Amis also writes: ‘Just the other day I went on my doctor’s advice to another shrink, for depression this time.’

May I take this opportunity to correct two errors in my previous letter (May 21), written when I was away from Oxford and unable to check all the details I gave? The title of the 1972 book by Amis from which I quoted is not Kinsgley Amis on Drink, but On Drink. And, in the sentence I chose, the words ‘depression, sadness’ should be followed by the important parenthesis ‘(these two are not the same)’. The passage in question appears in a piece first published as ‘Rude Awakening’ in the Daily Telegraph Magazine in 1970.

HENRY HARDY
Wolfson College, Oxford.

[4 June 2004]

Saul Kripke

Sir, – In his review of Saul Kripke’s Reference and Existence (March 14) – lectures delivered in Oxford in 1973 but published only last year – Peter van Inwagen devotes a good deal of space to regretting the forty-year delay in publication. A main source of his regret is that (according to him) other philosophers have been working ‘in complete ignorance’ of the lectures, and so have had to waste time (re)discovering for themselves the theory they expound.

This is not quite right. Ever since the lectures were given, the many philosophers who attended them have been spreading the ideas they contained. This is how things work in philosophy. Moreover, Kripke himself records in his preface that a transcript has been available in Oxford for many years: it was I who edited the transcript, made from tape-recordings, in 1973–4; and in 2001, increasingly pessimistic about publication, placed a copy in Oxford’s Philosophy Library, as I recorded in a letter in your columns (March 16, 2001). Kripke adds that this transcript ‘had had, since then, a modest life of its own, passed on among members of the profession, sometimes even being discussed and criticized in print’.

But I do agree with van Inwagen in regretting the delay in formal publication. I urged Kripke to publish, on many occasions, as did others, but our pleas fell on deaf ears. Kripke, of course, is not the first costive philosopher. As I observed in a TLS ‘Viewpoint’ article (December 26, 1980), ‘It is a neurosis common among academics, and specialised in by philosophers, to be reluctant, even afraid, to go into print.’ I instanced Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and rashly attempted to explain and defuse the neurosis. With the arrogance of youth I suggested that to give in to it ‘is frequently irrational and sometimes immoral’. I blush at this sweeping judgement now. But there still seems to me an element of truth in the charge of irrationality. How is is that Kripke can be so very diffident (as he is in his preface) about lectures of which Professor van Inwagen writes: ‘I cannot begin to convey […] the subtlety, richness and beautiful logical coherence of Kripke’s treatment’? Kripke’s modesty is disarming, but to the extent that it lies at the root of his long-standing reluctance to publish his ideas (and I am sure this is not the whole story), we must, on balance, think both modesty and reluctance against reason.

HENRY HARDY
Wolfson College, Oxford.

[28 March 2014, 6]