My Weekly Book

Portrait of a Killer - Patricia Cornwell

I picked this up off the library shelf knowing that it was going to be an extremely controversial read. This is the book, after all, in which best-selling crime author Patricia Cornwell turns her hand to non-fiction and attempts to build a case for an extremely well-regarded Impressionist painter, Walter Sickert, being Jack the Ripper. This is not the first time his name has been linked with the Ripper case but is, I believe, the first time anyone has gone as far as Cornwell does towards accusing him.

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Wanting a little bit of background before I started reading, I consulted the Internet and what I found almost unanimously condemned Cornwell about equally for her theories and for her presumption in committing them to paper – this last leading to many accusations that she has developed an obsession with the case. For instance, here’s a passage from a review in the New York Times (see links at bottom of page) by Caleb Carr, an American novelist and military historian with an interest in Victoriana and Sherlock Holmes:

Her belief that the efforts of all Ripperologists before her have been misguided is unsettling, too. ”I have avoided the recycled inaccuracies that have metastasized from one book to another,” she declares — a somewhat tasteless way of saying that she hasn’t bothered to study thoroughly such scholars of the case as Donald Rumbelow, Martin Fido, Paul Begg and others.

Now, here’s my problem with this. Having since read this quote from Cornwell in context, I don’t believe this is a very accurate representation of what she is saying. It seems to me to be about previous attempts at Sickert scholarship rather than Ripper scholarship, as Carr presents it. It occurs on page 62 of my hardback edition at a point where Cornwell is suggesting that Sickert’s estate has had a powerful influence on preserving his posthumous reputation and that, due to its control, biographies of the author published so far are more like hagiographies. When I come across things like this in reviews it leads me to one of two conclusions: either the reviewer has read the book in a hurry and made a simple error or they are trying to twist the material to fit their own purposes, something I do think should be avoided on occasions when the author under review is being accused of exactly this same sin.

And here’s a second example. This from the same NY Times review:

Cornwell notes that as a boy Sickert underwent several surgeries to correct a ”fistula” of some kind. If that fistula was penile, Cornwell posits, then the three painful surgeries could — provided they were failures — have left Sickert genitally deformed, impotent and incapable of having children, all of which would indeed be rich soil out of which to grow a frustrated sexual predator. Therefore, Cornwell simply decides that not only was Sickert’s fistula in fact penile, but that the surgeries were bungled. Small matter that the surgeon who performed the procedures was an expert in rectal and venereal diseases, and that there is no record of his ever having performed surgery for a penile fistula on anyone. Even smaller matter that, later in life, one of Sickert’s friends would scold him for fathering illegitimate children, or that at least one of those alleged children would eventually turn up. No, the penile deformity is postulated, and very soon it is treated for all practical purposes as a fact.

All well and good. Maybe Cornwell has made unwarranted assumptions. Or maybe the reviewer has done the same, in light of the following paragraph of Cornwell’s book, also on page 62, in which she says:

I must admit that I was shocked when I asked John Lessore about his uncle’s fistula and he told me – as if it were common knowledge – that the fistula was a “hole in [Sickert’s] penis.”

Rather an important piece of corroborating evidence, this statement from a family member, I should have thought, and yet Carr treats it as if it simply does not exist. This is not the first time I’ve noticed this kind of thing in the NY Times books section – another example is AS Byatt’s famous attack on JK Rowling which merely succeeded in demonstrating a marked ignorance of her source material and suggested that Byatt really should have taken the time to acquaint herself slightly better with Rowling’s work before launching such an intemperate and public attack. I am, of course, very wary of trying to define a trend based on just two examples but feel this may be a symptom of an unpleasantly elitist view of what constitutes worthwhile culture and I find that it merely serves to make me feel more favourable towards the subject of the attempted hatchet job, as it has done on this occasion. And more confident about making my own mind up as opposed to relying on the opinions of others.

However, one statement made by Carr I fully agree with. Early on in the piece he says: “this book is a prosecution, not an investigation” and, if you read it with this in mind, I think you will find it much more satisfying. All Dan Brown’s troubles (as far as a man who has earned that much money can be said to have any) appear to me to stem from the decision to put the words “all descriptions of artwork, architecture, documents and secret rituals in this novel are accurate” inside his most famous book and then to back this up with further, similar statements on his website. This has provided a handy cross for every one of his agenda-ridden critics to nail him to, and I fear that Patricia Cornwell’s publisher has done exactly the same by putting the subtitle “Case Closed” on the cover of this book. This is by no means an objective account of the evidence for Walter Sickert being Jack the Ripper but that does not mean it is necessarily an invalid piece of work. What it does very successfully is to argue the case in the adversarial fashion that is the basis for both the English and the American legal systems. It takes every clue that could point towards Sickert and explores its possible relevance to the fullest extent.

As the readers, we able to act as armchair judge and jury and we can employ some of the checks and balances usually found in a courtroom. We can decide if we find a piece of evidence compelling, whether we think a defence lawyer would be able to strike it down or if we believe it should not be put before the jury at all. We can differentiate between direct and circumstantial evidence and we are also able to imagine ourselves into the role of prosecutor – on the weight of evidence presented here, would we be happy to see the case against Sickert taken to court? Let’s have a bit of faith in human nature and assume that most people interested enough to take the book off the shelf and to plough through its nearly-400 pages have sufficient wit to make up their own mind about what Cornwell has written without needing self-appointed cultural guardians to tell them what to think.

For what it is worth my view is that it is a really interesting and disturbing read by an author who goes a long way towards immersing herself and us in the historical realities of Victorian London, who writes with considerable sympathy for the Ripper’s victims and who can bring a fascinating and entirely genuine perspective on some of the modern techniques of forensic science to this historic series of crimes. I read her comments about possible reflections of the crime in Sickert’s art and writing with considerable interest although I am not sure whether this comes under the category of stuff a good defence brief would be able to take down. I was interested in the sections dealing with the letters written to the police about the Ripper murders and in Cornwell’s reasons for believing they may have been written by Sickert (linguistic signature and the fact artists’ materials were used). As to the reliability of the DNA evidence Cornwell claims to have uncovered, I simply don’t feel competent to judge this bearing in mind the havoc that the interpretation of expert testimony has wrought in several recent court cases relying on probability, especially those examining mothers accused of child abuse. I think there are many occasions on which she draws overly slender parallels between what are most likely unrelated events, and many others when she has compelling points to make.

Having taken some time to familiarise myself with the controversies surrounding the book before sitting down to read it, I found that it stood up considerably better than I was expecting, and I am now wondering whether the critical reaction may indeed have been provoked by some degree of snobbery towards a very successful woman crime writer involving herself in an area considered inappropriate for her talents. This is not to suggest that the book is perfect or that her hypothesis is necessarily right. Just that I wish I hadn’t allowed myself to be distracted by the snobbery of a gang of largely male and very self-satisfied critics before I started reading it.

Some links:

• Author’s website
• Wikipedia: Patricia Cornwell
• Wikipedia: Portrait of a Killer
• Wikipedia: Jack the Ripper
• Wikipedia: Walter Sickert
• Bookreporter.com: Portrait of a Killer (positive to neutral)
• NY Times review (negative)
• USA Today review (neutral)
• Washington Post webchat
• Artcyclopedia: Portrait of the artist as a serial killer
• Casebook: Patricia Cornwell and Walter Sickert - a primer
• BBC News: Author denies Ripper ‘obsession’
• The Guardian: Sickert’s nemesis returns to the scene
• The Independent: Throwing Down the Gauntlet - Cornwell challenges critics
• Slate: Pat the Ripper

This entry was posted on Friday, April 27th, 2007 at 8:44 pm and is filed under 2007 reading challenge, Reads I recommend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.