Ivebeenreadinglately

The sacred and profaned library

2012-02-24T06:19:00.000-06:00

On Wednesday, I quoted a letter from Machiavelli about how he dressed up before entering his library, as an act of appreciation for the thought and learning it provided him. Today, a counterpoint, from the ever-caustic Lars Iyer, creator the blog Spurious, which became the book Spurious and, now, a second volume, Dogma. I'll have more to say about the many pleasures of Dogma soon, but for today I'll just share a passage about a personal library, appropriate dress, and respect.

The library belongs to Lars's friend, interlocutor, and abusive rotten conscience, W., whom Lars is visiting.

Up another flight to the top floor, and the holy of holies: W.'s study. His bookshelves--not too many, since W. gives away most of his books ("I don't hoard them, like you," he says), but enough for all the essentials. His Hebrew/English dictionary. His volumes of Cohen. His collected Rosenzweigs.

W. is terrified that he will soon have to leave his house--that the humanities at his university are on the brink of being crushed by the overwhelming need to demonstrate value, that they'll soon be replaced by yet another Department of Sport. So he is attentive to his house now, savoring his moments there.

Nonetheless, he doesn't feel the same duty that Machiavelli does to wear his finest robes:

How does he dress himself for scholarship?, I ask him. He wears his dressing gown, W. says. He sits in his dressing gown and reads, looking up difficult German words (which is to say, most of them), in the dictionary.

But such a space can still be profaned:

This is the room where I sleep when I stay. W. pulls out a camp bed and makes it up. He has to fumigate his study after I've slept in it, he says. It has to be re-consecrated, his temple of scholarship.

This, this must be what the ancients meant when they wrote paeans to friendship!

Living the lush life

2012-02-22T19:29:00.000-06:00

{Photos by rocketlass.} "I have a theory," writes Lauren Cerand this week over at The Rumpus, "that elegant people have an aura of impenetrable private sadness, and that good taste and impeccable manners are life’s consolation." What follows is a wonderful essay that interweaves pithy, epigrammatic definitions of elegance and its kin--

Glamour is constructed, elegance is acquired, and charm is innate.

--with elements of her life story and her approach to matters of fashion, furnishing, and self-presentation. It's well-handled, with Cerand coming across as neither unduly proud of nor the slightest bit uncertain about her tastes; her appreciations and definitions are infectious, bolstering the often too timid thought that yes, the sensual details of life are worth your attention, though their value may largely be self-contained, non-transferable. The moment, the day, the existence, is worth it.

It brought to mind a passage from Cyril Connolly's appreciation of the archly over-ripe pleasures of Ronald Firbank, from The Condemned Playground. "For my part," writes Connolly,

I am secretly a lyricist; the works to which I lose my heart are those that attempt, with a purity and a kind of dewy elegance, to portray the beauty of the moment, the gaiety and sadness, the fugitive distress of hedonism.

Elegance gives us something to celebrate on days when little else is on offer--on, as Fitzgerald put it, those "metropolitan days and nights . . . as tense as singing wires." Even then one's tie can be tied, one's creases pressed, one's clauses delicately balanced.

Cerand mentions in passing that in a friendless childhood in the midst of a complicated, riven family, she turned to, of all people, Machiavelli, pulling "the leather-bound edition of The Prince down from the shelf in hopes of gaining insight on how to navigate it all." And, while in the popular portrait of Machiavelli everything takes a backseat to his recommendations for ruthlessness, he, too, understood the essential respect for the world around us that elegance conveys. In the best of his letters, written on December 10, 1513 to his benefactor, Francesco Vettori, he tells of how he enters his library at the end of a day of farming:

On the coming of evening, I return to my house and enter my study; and at the door I take off the day's clothing, covered with mud and dust, and put on garments regal and courtly; and reclothed appropriately, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them with affection, I feed on that food which is only mine and which I was born for, where I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their kindness answer me; and for four hours of time I do not feel boredom, I forget every trouble, I do not dread poverty, I am not frightened by death; entirely I give myself over to them.

And now to straighten my tie, pour a martini, settle in at the piano, and open my lounge player's songbook. And what do I happen to be working on tonight? Nothing else but Billy Strayhorn's unparalleled account of the louche ashes of faded glamour, "Lush Life."

Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels

2012-02-19T21:32:00.002-06:00

I suspect the next couple of weeks are going to be hectic enough to impede blogging, and today's the first bit of evidence: with no time for a proper post, I'll instead simply register my pleasure that the last volume of Edward St. Aubyn's series of autobiographical novels about Patrick Melrose, At Last, has finally arrived in the States and is getting attention.

I read it nearly a year ago when I was published in the UK, and now that it's arrived here, it seems a good occasion to try to bring new readers to the series. I've written about the first four books before, and in particular about their elegant, memorable, witty prose and St. Aubyn's viciously sharp satire. These are not comfortable books--the portrait of drug addiction is truly horrific at times--but they're also incredibly smart and perceptive about human life and failings. In a post about the first four books, I wrote,

There is a payoff, of sorts, for being willing to stomach the darkness of the first couple of novels, as in the most recent two we see Patrick—by no means free of his inherited demons—actively trying to become a better, more complete person, a person he would not instinctively loathe. Aside from the sharpness of the writing, that desire for self-understanding is the real reason to read these St. Aubyn novels. We get a sense, not just from Patrick but from other characters as well, of a real mind sifting through its impressions, feelings, and thoughts in a constant effort to understand itself, make its way forward, and both accept and rein in its worst impulses.

At Last holds true to its predecessors and carries that effort forward. I made the mistake of not making notes when I read it but Sam Sacks in the Wall Street Journal offers a good summary--along with an argument for the value of the whole series. What has stayed with me is the modest sense of hard-won, and still quite fragile, peace that Patrick Melrose has managed to achieve by the end of this fifth book. As Sam Sacks put it at the start of his review, "Patrick Melrose has survived. It was never a sure thing." After a lifetime that started with abuse, then slid into addiction and self-destruction, At Last finds him making what feels like the first truly substantial steps towards something that might be called a real recovery, and it's incredibly moving.

I'll close with the one passage that I do happen have to hand from At Last because I featured it over at the Annex last spring. It's typically well-written and funny, if a bit goofier than is usual for St. Aubyn:

“Uncle Vlad,” as Nancy called him, had helped to assassinate Rasputin, lending his Imperial revolver to Prince Yusopov for what was supposed to be the final kill, but turned out to be only the middle stage between poisoning the energetic priest with arsenic and drowning him in the Neva. Despite many pleas, the Tsar exiled Vladimir for his part in the assassination, making him miss the Russian Revolution and the chance to get bayoneted, strangled, or shot by Russia’s new Bolshevik masters. Once in exile, Uncle Vlad went on to assassinate himself by drinking twenty-three dry martinis before lunch every day. Thanks to the Russian whimsy of smashing a glass after drinking from it, there was hardly a moment’s silence in the house.

Picador has just re-issued the first four books in one volume; you could do worse than spend your week in it, then turn to At Last.

A Hard-man

2012-02-17T18:42:00.001-06:00

A busy week leaves me with nothing to share this Friday night except a bit more from Aubrey's Brief Lives.

It's from the entry for Captain Carlos Fantom, a mercenary captain of horse who served switched from Cromwell to the King during the Civil War. Asked about the switch, Fantom replied,

I care not for your Cause: I come to fight for your half-crowne, and your handsome woemen: my father was a R. Catholiq; and so was my grandfather. I have fought for the Christians against the Turkes; and for the Turkes against the Christians.

He was thought to be indestructible, the result of an incident in which several witnesses watched him defy bullets:

Sir Robert Pye was his Colonel, who shot at him for not returning a horse that he tooke away before the Regiment. This was donne in a field near Bedford, where the Army then was, as they were marching to the relief of Gainsborough. Many are yet living that sawe it. Capt. Hamden was by: The bullets went through his Buff-coat, and Capt. H. sawe his shirt on fire. Capt. Carl. Fantom tooke the Bullets, and sayd he, Sir Rob. Here, take your bullets again. None of the Soldiers would dare to fight with him: they sayd, they would not fight with the Devil.

That's a case where I wish Aubrey had been more clear: did the soldiers not want to fight against Fantom--didn't want to argue or brawl with him, in other words--or did they not want to fight alongside him? The latter seems like an odd reaction: I would think an indestructible comrade would bring a certain rise in morale, unless one fears that bullets follow some law of averages and will find out someone in the company regardless?

Aubrey, always to be relied on in matters supernatural, relates the prevailing theories about Fantom's powers. Fantom reportedly told a friend that

the Keepers in their Forests did know a certain herb, which they gave to Children, which made them to be shott-free (they called them Hard-men.)

Aubrey finds support for the concept in a "Booke of Trialls by Duell in foli (writ by Segar, I thinke)," and in a story from Martin Luther's Commentaries on the First Commandment ("or second Commandment, I thinke the First," continues Aubrey, as usual not troubling with much checking of his sources). A Hard-man, writes Luther, was brought to the court of the Duke of Saxony, where he was

commanded to be shotte with a Musquet: the bullet drop't downe and he had only a blew Spott on his Skin, where he was struck. Martin Luther was then by, and sawe the Bullet drop-downe.

Alas for Fantom, a Hard-man's skin, rumored not to be proof against either a silver bullet or death by cudgel, also turned out not to be immune to the noose: taken up a third and final time for "ravishing" the countryside during the war, he was hanged.

God, I love reading Aubrey. Enjoy your weekend, folks.

"It brings him to a Loosenesse," Or, John Aubrey and Dr. John Pell

2012-02-15T20:03:00.000-06:00

In the midst of poet Ted Walker's charming, modest memoir of childhood, The High Path (1982)--one of a number of minor memoirs I've read lately, the result of having falling for UK publisher Slightly Foxed's irresistible list of same--the author describes the poor quality of the school he attended as a teen, Steyning Grammar School, and its staff of "ungifted amateurs." World War II was partly to blame, competent teachers having been called away to address the realm's more pressing needs, and Walker acknowledges that by the 1950s,

better men were to replace most of--but not all--the incompetent, the cruel, the ignorant, the snobbish, the prejudiced, the mad, the dangerous, the sexually perverted.

Yet, puzzlingly, the school was well thought-of among parents in the region. Walker can't figure it out: Steyning seems to have shown no signs of academic distinction at any point in its three-plus centuries--its only claim to fame being

a former pupil [who was] a seventeenth-century mathematician who invented the division sign and earned himself a page in Aubrey's Brief Lives.

And that's where I had to put the book down for a bit--for if ever a passage called out, "Levi, investigate!", this was clearly it.

The mathematician is Dr. John Pell (1611–1685), and Aubrey's account of his life and achievements is a wonderful reminder of the strange and entertaining qualities that make Aubrey worth returning to again and again. He begins with the bare facts, in his usual fashion:

John Pell, S. T. Dr., was the son of John, who was the son of John. His father dyed when his son John was but 5 yeares old and six weeks, and left him an excellent library.

Am I wrong in imagining that Aubrey's presentation suggests that to be a reasonable tradeoff, to be fatherless but well booked?

Aubrey traces Dr. Pell's career, which leads him, against all his inclinations, to the church, for, as the Lord Bishop of Lincoln laments to him,

Alasse! what a sad case it is that in this great and opulent kingdome there is no publick encouragement for the excelling in any Profession but that of the Law and Divinity.

After at first turning down offers of benefices in favor of continuing his mathematical studies, Pell eventually was driven by poverty (brought about in part because Oliver Cromwell died before getting around to paying him for some work as envoy of the Protectorate to Switzerland) to accept two parishes, one from "Gilbert Sheldon, Lord Bishop of Lundon," and one from the newly crowned Charles II. The livings were far from auspicious: he was given

the scurvy Parsonage of Lanedon cum Basseldon in the infamous and unhealthy (aguesh) Hundreds of Essex (they call it Killpriest sarcastically) and King Charles the Second gave him the Parsonage of Fobing, 4 miles distant.

You would be forgiven for thinking that a smart pastor might want to make his seat in Fobing rather than in Killpriest, but you'd be wrong:

At Fobbing, seven curates dyed within the first ten yeares; in sixteen yeares, six of those that had been his Curates at Laindon are dead; besides those that went away from both places; and the death of his Wife, servants, and grandchildren.

And J. F. Powers's curates think they have it bad!

Pell not unreasonably thought this worthy of complaint, but when he put his case for the "unhealthinesse" of his benefice to Sheldon, who in the interim had been raised to the Archbishopric of Canterbury, he received scant sympathy:

[S]ayd my Lord, I doe not intend that you shall live there. No, sayd Pell, but your Grace does intend that I shall die there.

If a library is sufficient compensation for a lost father, perhaps the opening for a perfect bon mot is compensation for the ague?

Aubrey goes on to profess his personal friendship for Pell, and to display astonishment that one so learned should continue on so poor, living in

an obscure lodging, three stories high, in Jermyn Street, next to the signe of the Ship, wanting not only bookes but his proper MSS, which are many.

Poverty, however, seems not to have kept Pell from his studies in mathematics; while Aubrey fails to mention the invention of the division sign, he does note more vaguely that Pell "was the first inventor of that excellent way or method of the marginall working in Algebra." Oh, and that

Dr. Pell haz often sayd to me that when he solves a Question, he straines every nerve about him, and that now in his old age it brings him to a Loosenesse.

Money, nonetheless, continued to be a problem, and death found him "so indigent that he wanted necessarys, even paper and Inke, and he had not 6d in his purse."

The Life closes with an almost too perfectly Aubreyan touch, a bit of information seemingly out of nowhere, left on its own without support or clarification:

He dyed of a broken heart.

It is always a thing to be hoped that the gods pay little attention to the idle curses of ten-year-olds, but it seems especially important in this case, lest poor Pell be roasting in hell for all eternity on a spit shaped like this: ÷.

Youth's a stuff will not endure

2012-02-13T06:13:00.000-06:00

Edmund Wilson, writing on Proust, said that the narrator of In Search of Lost Time

has proved the fatal impossibility of ever finding our happiness in another individual. A woman will not, and cannot, live in the world in which we would have her--that is, the world in which we live, which we ourselves imagine; and what we love in her is merely the product of our own imagination: we have supplied her with it ourself.

Proust's view is far gloomier than mine, but he does describe as well as anyone the sense of falling in love, not with a person, but with your projection of them. Young love is particularly susceptible to that mistake: we've simply not had the experience, in the years of our first, fumbling adulthood, to know better. In The Unquiet Grave Cyril Connolly writes,

Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.

And in those years when we first take that wrong turning, we do so with such brash confidence, such certainty, that we wouldn't have consulted a map even if we'd had one.

That's what kept coming to mind as I read John Cotter's novel of misplaced love, vague artistic ambition, aimlessness, and drunken nonsense, Under the Small Lights (2010) in one long, absorbed sitting on Saturday. Jack, a twenty-year-old college student, spends a summer drinking and drugging with a pair of recently eloped friends, wasting away the warm days being tempted and teased by the wife of the couple. They skinny-dip in her parents' pool; they kiss in the kitchen when the party's in the den; she snuggles up to him in bed when her husband's away. He spends the summer convincing himself simultaneously that she wants to sleep with him as badly as he wants to sleep with her, that he's going to sleep with her, and that somehow they're also not going to do that because her husband is his best friend. Parties come and go; other girls offer alternatives; the relationship remains painful and impossible.

Cotter dresses the story in prose that matches the haze of drunken dreams with the precision of young memory. Listen to the consonance and assonance in this description of some ill-advised firing of bottle rockets:

I re-lit them and ran back, priding myself on how well my drunk legs hopped the trail. Back together, we saw them flare up then turn on us. Burning, they sent a blue streak straight our way. They hadn't been crooked wrong in the rock but the flare-up on take-off sent them looping, burning blue over gold. As we turned and streaked away I could hear Paul and Corinna panting in my ears. Then I was concentrating on my own running. By the time the flares went bang behind us, Corinna was ahead by twenty yards. I'd drifted off to the side of one of the warehouses. I knew all of our hearts must be pounding a fury but I could only feel my own.

The prose is particularly well-suited to what Cotter is trying to capture: that moment when youth teeters into adulthood, when the languorous pace and lifelong friendships of childhood begin to give way to the fast-flicker rush of adult life, with its consequences and regrets, and new, more subtle forms of monotony and change. The summer is one long deferral of responsibility and consequence, peopled with characters who are starting for the first time to see themselves plain, and really wonder whether who they are is who they want to be. Jack watches his friend Star:

Much of the Star I knew was composed of parts of Corinna she'd caught or memorized. Still, I felt at a loss to watch her change into someone more like Mara. I recognized her low threshold for imitation. Seeing how Bill paused a little before answering any question in a way that centered the action on his answer, I'd started doing it myself. Recently I'd noticed myself unconsciously copying the way Paul ran the tip of a cigarette around the inside rim of an ashtray, never tapping it. But to see Star taking on what I was convinced were Mara's tics (who else?)--the way she tossed her head to move the hair from her eyes, or wearing the same shirt three or four days in a row--made me feel unsteady.

None of this is new territory, of course--I found myself thinking of Edmund Wilson's portrait of dissolute, confused Bohemian New York, I Thought of Daisy, while a funny running scene of drunken artistic collaboration on the shores of Walden in winter called to mind Withnail and I--but Cotter makes it fresh and engaging, with characters whose mistakes make us ache.

Elsewhere in The Unquiet Grave, Cyril Connolly writes,

Art is memory: memory is re-enacted desire.

Under the Small Lights convincingly takes us back to those years when all we were was an inchoate bundle of desire, and our every action was an attempt to figure out the forms we wanted it to take.

Chess

2012-02-08T21:06:00.003-06:00

In Monday's post I quoted an amusing bit from Frank Brady's biography of Bobby Fischer, Endgame, about Russian grandmaster David Bronstein. But for some reason Brady didn't describe Bronstein when he made his first appearance, so yesterday, as I made my way through the book, I encountered this:

Bronstein looked like what one might picture a chess player to look like. Bald-pated, with horn-rimmed glasses, and often dressed in a black suit and white shirt, he was actually the prototype of the grandmaster character Kronsteen in the James Bond film From Russia with Love (except that Kronsteen had hair) and the game played on-screen in that film was based on a real one Bronstein had against Spassky.

The photo below, however, makes him look a bit less sinister than that sounds.

I also really enjoyed this description of one of Fischer's early opponents, Milan Matulovic,

a twenty-three-year-old master who would become infamous in the chess world for sometimes touching a piece, moving it, and then--realizing it was either a blunder or a weak move--returning the piece to its original square, saying, "J'adoube," or "I adjust," and moving it to another square or moving another piece altogether. The "j'adoube" statement is the customary announcement when a player wishes to center or adjust one of his opponent's pieces, but according to the Laws of Chess this must be done before touching the piece, or the mover risks yielding a forfeit. . . . Matulovic "j'adoubed" his pieces after the fact so often that years later he earned the nickname "J'adubovic."

As someone with only a passing knowledge of the chess world, I like this revelation of such an odd quirk--it brings to mind baseball players and their endless variety of tics and rituals, some nearly as irritating as Matulovic's must have been. (I'm looking at you, Nomar.)

Brady's book is a delight overall, full of great scenes and offering as much insight as it seems possible to have into the sad, unpleasant mind of Bobby Fischer. I do wish, however, that there were more actual chess in it. I know that Brady, aiming at a mass audience, had to walk a fine line; a general reader--even one who is picking up a book about Bobby Fischer--can't be assumed to understand the intricacies of chess notation or even the game itself. When Brady tells the stories of key matches, he almost never mentions specific moves: a move is labeled daring, or a blunder, but it's rarely identified. The frustrating thing is that I know it's possible to tell more without getting bogged down. Walter Tevis's brilliant The Queen's Gambit, which tells of a Bobby Fischer–style female prodigy, draws much of its drama from carefully described moments in individual games, and Dorothy Dunnett's harrowing human chess game in Pawn in Frankincense begins and ends with clearly described moves*, such that you can visualize the board position, and thus what's at stake in this game where captured pieces are instantly garroted and Lymond's team is composed of people he loves.

What's strange is that even as Brady seems to deliberately avoid game detail, he nonetheless throws in the occasional term or concept without explanation. He refers to a pair of passed pawns without glossing them, for example, and it isn't until the fifth or sixth time that a game is adjourned partway through that he explains the sealed-move procedure (and he never takes the logical next step of explaining the thinking behind the rule).

I should be clear: these are quibbles, small flaws in a good book. Having pointed them out, it seems only right to end by highlighting one of my favorite parts. It comes in 1960, when Brady had dinner with the seventeen-year-old Fischer in New York, and it's a beautiful account of genius, obsession, and the palpable feeling of watching someone who's working on a different plane from the vast majority of us. Brady asks Fischer how he's going to prepare for an upcoming tournament, and Fischer perks up:

As he talked, he looked from me to the pocket [chess] set, back and forth--at least at first--and spat out a scholarly treatise on his method of preparation. "First of all, I'll look at the games that I can find of all the players, but I'm only really going to prepare for Bronstein. Spassky and Olafsson, I'm not that worried about." He then showed me the progression of his one and only game with Bronstein--a draw from Portoroz two years earlier. He took me through each move the two had made, disparaging a Bronstein choice one moment, lauding another the next. The variety of choices Bobby worked through was dazzling, and overwhelming. In the course of his rapid analysis, he discussed the ramifications of certain variations or tactics, why each would be advisable or not. It was like watching a movie with voice-over narration, but with one great difference: He was manipulating the pieces and speaking so rapidly that it was difficult to connect the moves with his commentary. I just couldn't follow the tumble of ideas behind the real and phantom attacks, the shadow assaults: "He couldn't play there since it would weaken his black squares" . . . "I didn't think of this" . . . "No, was he kidding?" . . . He then began to show me, from memory, game after game--it seemed like dozens--focusing on the openings that Bronstein had played against Bobby's favorite variations. Multiple outcomes leaped from his mind. But he didn't just confine himself to Bronstein's efforts. He also took me on a tour of games that Louis Paulsen had played in the 1800s and Aaron Nimzowitsch had experimented with in the 1920s, as well as others that had been played just weeks before--games gleaned from a Russian newspaper.

All the time Bobby weighed possibilities, suggested alternatives, selected the best lines, discriminated, decided. It was a history lesson and a chess tutorial, but mainly it was an amazing feat of memory. His eyes, slightly glazed, were now fixed on the pocket set, which he gently held open in his left hand, talking to himself, totally unaware of my presence or that he was in a restaurant. His intensity seemed even greater than when he was playing a tournament or match game. His fingers sped by in a blur, and his face showed the slightest of smiles, as if in a reverie. He whispered, barely audibly: "Well, if he plays that . . . I can block his bishop." And then, raising his voice so loud that some of the customers stared: "He won't play that."

I began to weep quietly, aware in that time-suspended moment I was in the presence of genius.

Which brings to mind two things--both reminders, for the pedagogically inclined reading instrumentalists among us (which I don't tend to be) that even adventure fiction offers lessons we can apply later. First is one of the main themes of George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, stated most clearly in this scene from A Dance with Dragons:

There is always someone quicker and stronger, Ser Rodrik had once told Jon and Robb. He's the man you want to face in the yard before you need to face his like upon a battlefield.

The second is the most unforgettable moments in Lev Grossman's The Magicians and The Magician King, which are moments when the young wizards--full, as youth will be, of self-confidence and recklessness--are forced to confront the fact that there are powers in the universe, and to those powers they, with all their knowledge and bravado, are but gnats. I used the word harrowing above, so maybe here I'll resort to soul-shaking. In more mundane terms, those scenes, and Brady's account, call to mind that moment--a salutary one, let's be clear--when, at nineteen or twenty, we meet someone who is really, really smart . . . and we are forced to recalibrate everything we think we know about ourselves.

The almost infinitely consoling flip side of that realization is that the universe is capacious enough that rocketlass and I can enjoy playing terrible, blunderous, ridiculous chess together year after year nonetheless.

"Frank Lloyd Wright will not hear a word against the sauerkraut," Or, People are strange

2012-02-06T19:49:00.000-06:00

{Photo by rocketlass.} I make no bones about the fact that one of the things I look for in books, and particularly in nonfiction, is simple human oddity. Oh, sure, there are other things to be learned from reading about the lives of others--facts about other times and places, information about how others have grappled with problems or questions we may be facing ourselves--but at base, what I tend to be looking for is the entertainment afforded by the strange ways people behave.

And, having encountered a number of good examples lately, the time seems ripe for a roundup. Lariats away!

1 Will Friedwald's Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers (2010) is such a jam-packed, endlessly fascinating book that it makes me wish that I had a similar guide to every field of culture that interests me. I suppose that Bill James's Historical Baseball Abstract (2000), if he would ever update it again, would almost suffice for baseball, while John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists (2011) will do in a pinch for literature. But neither book makes the claim to completeness that Friedwald's guide does, nor does either offer nearly as much biographical information or critical analysis as Friedwald's book. It's a true joy, the product of decades of attending to vocalists, leavened with a distinct aesthetic and accompanying opinions, clearly stated but not intrusive.

And then there are the great lines, ranging from aphoristic descriptions (Tony Bennett is "the Pangloss of pop") to moments of insight, like "More than anyone else, Garland was Jolson's greatest heir." Though Bobby Short grew up in the Midwest and first became a star in Los Angeles, he nonetheless "embodied the Californinan's idea of New York elegance." "If there's such a thing as Anglo-Saxon soul," Jo Stafford's folk recordings are it. Chet Baker's singing

is, from the first note, utterly disarming. Yes, you can qualify a word like "disarming"--it may be true that either it is or it isn't, but some things are more disarming than others, and Baker's singing is one of them.

But I'm getting off topic! I was to focus on human oddity!

So you get this, from the part of the entry for Mary Martin that covers her time in Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun:

It's been said that Martin is a more feminine Annie than Ethel Merman--which is kind of unfair. La Merm, blustery and brassy as she was, never struck me as butch. Could there be a more extreme way for a woman to prove her heterosexuality than to marry Ernest Borgnine?

Okay, so it's not exactly odd behavior: that wasn't really the reason Merman married Borgnine. But oh, the thought!

2 I've written about James Lees-Milne's charming biography Another Self (1970) before, but, prompted by a beautiful Slightly Foxed edition, I've been paging through it again. I think you'll enjoy this wonderfully bizarre portrait of an aged widow at Lees-Milne's boyhood church who served as bell-ringer:

Although really far too old and frail, Mrs Hartwell refused to relinquish the bell rope with its fluffy stripes in red, white and blue, called I believe the "sally." She regarded the pulling of it as her sacred duty, which she would surrender to no one, until the breath, as she put it, was out of her body. The act was sometimes attended by alarming manifestations. For bell ringing, even with one rope, necessitates a sense of rhythm in the ringer. Mrs Hartwell lacked this sense. Occasionally she would pull too soon, or too late. The rope thereupon gave a jerk and if she failed to let go--it was not in her nature to let go of things--she would be swept up the belfry. When this happened she would either cling to the rope until it came down again, or she would swing on it until her feet touched a ladder kept permanently fixed to the wall to enable workmen or builders to go up the tower. With astonishing agility for a person of her years she would scramble down the ladder and resume ringing as though nothing had happened.

The line that makes the picture is the aside, "it was not in her nature to let go of things."

3 For a fan of, a Michael Dirda once put it, "the higher gossip," Craig Brown's One on One (2011) is a great resource. Brown builds a daisy chain of 101 incidental meetings between prominent figures--most of them artists or writers, but also including religious figures, movie stars, and even Hitler--offering a brief, quote-rich account of A's meeting with B, followed by the same for B's meeting with C, C's meeting with D, and on. I'm about a third of the way through the book, and thus far the highlight, easily, is Evelyn Waugh's encounter with Alec Guinness, about which more sometime soon. Today, however, I'll share a bit from Frank Lloyd Wright's encounter with self-styled religious guru George Ivanovich Gurdjieff.

Gurdjieff doesn't come off well in either this account or the preceding one, which finds him meeting devotee P. L. Travers. In that entry, Brown writes about Gurdjieff's "unseemly" personal habits:

In his palatial flat at his institute in Paris, he often didn't bother to visit the lavatory, preferring to defecate willy-nilly. "There were times when I would have to use a ladder to clean the walls," recalls one of the residents."

The encounter with Wright is less disgusting, but only just. By invitation, Gurdjieff came to Taliesin, where he succeeded in roping in Wright within twenty-four hours; this famously stubborn and strong-willed man bowed to Gurdjieff in almost every realm. Including the kitchen:

Before his stay is over, he has made everyone cook great quantities of sauerkraut from his own recipe, involving whole apples, including their skins, their stem and their cores. Even his most devoted disciples find it hard to swallow. On his departure from Taliesin, he leaves behind two fifty-gallon barrels of the stuff. In the first flush of discipleship, Frank Lloyd Wright will not hear a word against the sauerkraut. He insists the barrels must be transported to his Fellowship's desert camp in Arizona, watching attentively as they are loaded onto a truck.

Wright's control only extends so far, however: somewhere in Iowa, the crew driving the truck dumps the barrels in a ditch.

4 The trip to Wright's kitchen serves nicely to bring us to the oddity that got me going on this theme today in the first place, a moment from Frank Brady's Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall (2011). Twelve-year-old Bobby Fischer is watching a high-profile tournament, with all the Cold War trappings, between a US team and a Russian team. Brady writes,

And then there were the players, gathering onstage, waiting for the signal from the referee to take their places and commence their games. Soviet player David Bronstein asked for a glass of lemon juice--no, not lemonade, but real lemon juice, he insisted--which he downed in what looked like one gulp.

Surely he at least made a face?

US Open champion Donald Byrne, on the other hand,

said he was so on edge that he spent the entire day before the match trying not to think of chess, reading the romantic prose of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Which seems like an error, no? Is anything quite black-and-white in Hawthorne?

"Boswell's perpetual doses of clap," or, Oh, thank the gods for the weekend

2012-02-03T20:26:00.000-06:00

Is it in the jelly-side-down nature of things that a ten-hour workday, in which it's impossible for hours at a time to escape the computer's gravitational pull, will necessarily fall on a Friday?

Such, at least, has been today, and it leaves little time or mental capacity for blogging. So herewith, a bit about Boswell I happened across in Anthony Powell's journals the other day, from the entry for December 31, 1987:

Reread three vols of Boswell's Journals. . . . As with Pepys, tho' in quite different manner, I cannot really like Boswell, who undoubtedly had good points, capacity for taking keen interest in other people in spite of his own overweening egotism (of which he was completely aware, one of his good qualities) and ability to describe them. One can't really forgive him for behaving so odiously to the dog given him by the Corsican General Paoli. Also one gets rather sick of Boswell's perpetual doses of clap (unlike Casanova he probably never got cured by a severe regime, which Boswell was temperamentally incapable of keeping). At the same time he must be given credit for not suppressing his less attractive side.

It's no surprise that Powell is attracted to Boswell's "keen interest" in others, since that was Powell's most salient characteristic as a writer. I don't remember the dog Powell refers to, and a quick online search isn't turning anything up--anyone familiar with that story? It doesn't sound likely to be anything but awful, but I wonder whether Boswell's maltreatment of the dog would have seemed noteworthy in amid the more common animal cruelty of the eighteenth century?

The journal entry continues in a more somber vein:

This year ended on a pleasant note. I doubt it I would ever again have energy to write another novel, even a short one, trouble being largely identification of author's point of vie, vis-a-vis other people, so hard to establish in changing world as one gets older. Such ideas as one has must go into this journal.

Powell's final novel, The Fisher King had been published the year before, when he was eighty-one. It's his most Dance-like standalone novel, full of people speculating about the lives, histories, and motivations of other characters they only half know; it's funny and lively and effective. It doesn't feel like an ending, though it was. It does, however, close appropriately:

The rain had abated a little, though not altogether. In spite of foul weather there was exhilaration in the northern air. The leaden surface of the loch was just perceptibly heaving in the wind, still blowing from time to time in fairly strong gusts. On the far side of the waters, low rounded hills, soft and mysterious, concealed in luminous haze the frontiers of Thule: the edge of the known world; man's permitted limits; a green-barriered check-point, beyond which the fearful cataract of torrential seas cascaded down into Chaos.

And on that note, it's the hour for a martini and some time at the piano. May your reading this weekend keep Chaos at bay.

Simon Raven

2012-02-01T21:09:00.000-06:00

A friend asked in an e-mail earlier this week whether I had read Simon Raven. The name was familiar, and I knew he was an English novelist, but that was about as far as I could get. But when my friend pointed out that there are those who plump for Raven over Anthony Powell--who say that Raven's roman-fleuve, Alms for Oblivion, is better than Powell's . . . well, I had to go check this out for myself.

I've grabbed the first novel in the sequence, The Rich Pay Late (1964), from the library, and it'll go to the top of my post–George R. R. Martin stack. Before that, however, I thought I'd take a quick trawl through the home shelves to figure out where I'd encountered Raven. I started with Powell's diaries and memoirs, but his only appearance there is as one of many who congratulated Powell on being named a Companion of Honor in the early days of 1988.

Raven does, however, turn up in Michael Barber's biography of Powell. Barber is describing the pervasively present absence of Nick Jenkins, Powell's narrator in A Dance to the Music of Time, and he brings in a "pungent" description by Raven of Jenkins's tone:

It's the tone of a gentleman's club, really, with a slight breath--not exactly of the slums creeping in--but a breath of corruption. It's a bit like sitting in, say, White's or Brooks's, and every now and then somebody opens the window and a rather nasty smell--not exactly of shit--well, yes, of shit, but also of corpses--comes into the room. And somebody makes a polite observation as to the nature, respectively, of shit and corpses and closes the window for the time being. That's how it strikes me.

Despite the tone of disapproval, Barber says that Raven admired Powell's novels--though from that account it's hard to escape the conclusion that he didn't get them. His example isn't wholly inaccurate, but it leaves out the breadth of Powell's range of subject and interest: the oddities that are simply oddities, not signs of corruption; the things done for love (often self-love) rather than power or status; the comedy of expressed individuality. Raven makes it sound like Powell seeks credit for exposing hypocrisy, while leaving the genteel world essentially intact. Far from it--rather, Powell is interested in making us see the complexity and strangeness that underlie even worlds (and people) we think we know well.

Barber goes on to draw what seems a useful distinction:

Raven is explicit. Powell is implicit. In Raven's fiction the source of the nasty smell--a steaming turd, a festering cadaver or whatever--is there on the carpet for all to see. In Powell's fiction we never really establish what it is or where it comes from, only that it stinks. Raven's characters simply ring for a servant to clear up the mess, following which they settle back in their armchairs as before. He is, for all his lurid effects, a cosy writer. Powell, most emphatically, is not. His characters will probably have to live with that smell whether the window is open or not because it may, after all, be the drains (but try telling that to the club secretary). "The world is never a very nice place," he said more than once. "Tony's far more melancholy and serious than I am," was Raven's comment.

Raven also turns up elsewhere in Barber's bio, and while neither of these instances is useful for comparison's sake, they're too irresistible to pass up. Of Violet Powell's ability to demolish the character of an absent person in conversation, Raven said, "Chop, chop, chop--until there was nothing left but a bit of gristle." And then Barber offers Raven's recollection of an excuse that Violet once told him Cyril Connolly had given for not being able to write: "He told her he couldn't write for a month after he'd come."

The Guardian's obituary for Raven was also written by Barber, and it's a joy, opening brilliantly:

The death of Simon Raven, at the age of 73 after suffering a stroke, is proof that the devil looks after his own. He ought, by rights, to have died of shame at 30, or of drink at 50.

Barber also described him as combining "elements of Flashman, Waugh's Captain Grimes and the Earl of Rochester."

The reference to Waugh made me think that even though they're of different generations surely Nancy Mitford would have encountered such a creature, or at least enjoyed gossiping about him. Initially I struck out in her letters, too, until I turned to the slim volume of her correspondence with bookseller Heywood Hill. Raven turns up there in a letter from Nancy of January 15, 1971. Having been asked by her neighbor, Mme. Suchard, to recommend some "light English books" for her nephew and godson of seventeen, "a lazy boy who is learning English," she had ordered some Penguins from the bookshop, which, on arrival, she dispatched to her neighbor.

The next day she loomed, saying, "These books--you know we are not very go-ahead in my family--could you very kindly see if they are really suitable for a young boy?" Well, two of them had disgusting naked women on the cover. I got away with them (as they were called things like Rose of Tibet) by saying the women were goddesses. The third had a picture of a boy dressed for cricket fondling a naked lady (my dear, lucky it was a lady, in view of the contents) & written on the cover "A novel of strange vices" which of course even Mme Suchard could translate. I simply grovelled--said I couldn't believe it of MY MOTHER's old bookshop, one of the most respectable in London.

And then there's the punchline:

Well, I couldn't be bothered to send back strange vices & I read it--too brilliant, screamingly funny & disgusting beyond belief. It's called Fielding Gray by S Raven--I do recommend it.

And that is why I knew and remembered Raven's name!

More to come on this front later, I expect.

Whatever it is I think I see, or, Some resemblances from the weekend

2012-01-30T21:53:00.000-06:00

Let's start with the one that seems least likely to be intentional. From George R. R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons:

The cheesemnonger laughed so hard that Tyrion feared he was about to rupture. "All the gold in Casterly Rock, why not?"

"The gold I grant you," the dwarf said, relieved that he was not about to drown in a gout of half-digested eels and sweetmeats, "but the Rock is mine."

I'm surely not the only one who immediately thinks of Mr. Creosote, right?

Okay, fine: that's just a case of me seeing what I want to see, like when I mistake a windblown plastic bag in a vacant lot for a cute bunny hopping happily along. (Still, the Pythons did have a thing for cheesemongers and dwarves, no?) But what about this one, also from A Dance with Dragons:

His fellow drinkers were talking about dragons now. . . . "Wasn't there some princess, too?" asked a whore. She was the same one who'd said the meat was grey.

"Daena," said the riverman. "That was the sister. Daena of Dragonstone. Or was is Daera?"

"Daena was old King Baelor's wife," ssid the oarsman. "I rowed on a ship named for her once. The Princess Daena."

"If she was a king's wife, she'd be a queen."

"Baelor never had a queen. He was holy."

"Don't mean he never wed his sister," said the whore. "He just never bedded her, is all. When they made him king, he locked her up in a tower. His other sisters, too. There was three."

"Daenela," the proprietor said loudly. "That was her name. The Mad King's daughter, I mean, not Baelor's bloody wife."

Now, for all his overuse of the word "jape," Martin isn't much of a one for jokes--but that said, doesn't this exchange call to mind the perpetual, booze-clouded, fact-free discussions overheard at the O. J. in the Dortmunder novels? A deliberate allusion? Perhaps not, but I do find it comforting to think that drunken discourse never changes much, across centuries or imaginary continents.

Finally, an allusion that I do think is surely deliberate. Penelope Lively's new novel, How It All Began, a gently comic and unassuming look at the ramifications of one small change in the lives of a number of contemporary Londoners, features as its most fun character a self-regarding retired historian, Lord Peters. He is of course writing his memoirs; they are of course little more than the lightly fleshed-out contents of his Rolodex. After lost lecture notes lead to a debacle that leaves him feeling old and out of touch, he happens across a Simon Schama program and is inspired. "One has vastly underestimated television, I've come to realize," he tells his assistant. Then he turns to his niece, who is an interior decorator, and tells her of his plans for a series of half a dozen hour-long programs about the Augustan age:

"So where you come in, my dear, is to sort out some key person I should be getting in touch with. I'm not particularly au fait with that world, and you have so many contacts all over the place, don't you? You are always telling me about your prominent clients."

Marion stared across the table at him. Challenged, it would seem. Hoist with one's own petard, is that it? Trust Uncle Henry to put you on the spot when it suits him.

"Well . . . actually, I'm not at all sure that I . . . "

"Someone well established at the BBC, or the other outfit--whatever it's called." He waved a deprecating hand. "One of those in charge of program making. I wondered initially about going straight to the top chap at the BBC, the . . the . . ."

"Director-General, I think."

"Quite. Find out who he is and put the proposal to him--but, on second thought, it makes more sense to deal with the people who're going to actually do the program, don't you think? So--who do you suggest?"

It won't surprise you to learn that getting a TV show made involves a bit more than calling up the right man. In the process of being turned down, Henry makes the acquaintance of a recently minted PhD in history named Mark, who decides that Henry could be his meal ticket for a while. On seeing Henry's study, Mark says, wholly without irony, "Books do furnish a room, don't they?" Anthony Powell fans will of course recognize the reference, and if the name Mark hasn't already brought to mind Powell's character Mark Members, Mark's next step surely will: he insinuates himself as Lord Peters's archivist, a sinecure that will secretly leave him plenty of time to turn his dissertation into a book. "It's Henry now, no more Lord P.," notes Lord Peters's personal assistant, whom Members has elbowed aside a bit. "Got his feet properly under the table, he has."

Which, Powell fans will surely agree, is a very Mark Members thing to do. And that makes me, scoring generously, one for three in the allusion department for the weekend. Given all the nonsense floating around the brain at any given point, that doesn't seem like too bad a score.

Nero Wolfe stoops to ask

2012-01-27T20:03:00.001-06:00

Let's stick with Rex Stout one more day. After all, the weekend is upon us, and while Nero Wolfe, from all I can tell, doesn't let that interfere with his usual schedule, for the rest of us that means shedding the routine, loosening up a bit, and enjoying good company--like that of Nero, Archie, and the gang.

Speaking of the gang, check out Archie's description of the apartment of Saul Panzer, ace operative for hire, in "Fourth of July Picnic" (1958):

Saul Panzer, below average in size but miles above it in savvy, lived alone on the top floor--living room, bedroom, kitchenette, and bath--of a remodeled house on Thirty-eighth Street between Lexington and Third. The living room was big, lighted with two floor lamps and two table lamps, even at seven o'clock of a July evening, because the blinds were drawn. One wall had windows, another was solid with books, and the other two had pictures and shelves that were cluttered with everything from chunks of minerals to walrus tusks. In the far corner was a grand piano.

Let's pause for a moment to raise a glass to 1958. Oh, I know that many things were worse then, and I harbor no substantial illusions about wishing I could go back to that time. But to think of the days when an detective op for hire, even one who, as Archie would point out, is the best in the business, would have 1) a wall "solid with books" and 2) a grand piano in 3) his spacious Manhattan apartment! It's hard not to let just wee bit of those-were-the-days creep in, no?

Thinking of Saul brings me to another moment found in the same book, And Four to Go, which collects four holiday-themed Wolfe stories. In Wednesday's post I quoted an exchange from the first page of the story "Easter Parade" in which Archie was refusing Wolfe's request that he try to snatch a rare orchid of which Wolfe is envious from the coat of a woman in an Easter Parade. Nero asks whether Ollie Cather, another of their regular operatives, might be willing to do it instead.

"I doubt it. Not just for the two C's, but he might as a personal favor to you."

Wolfe made a face. "I won't solicit a favor."

Instead, Archie agrees to find a man of looser morals and lighter pocketbook whom he can convince to do the deed. Wolfe, however, would also like Archie to be there with a camera as a backup. The problem is that it's Sunday, and Sundays are Archie's day off, sacrosanct when there's no big case on. "It's no go," says Archie,

"because as you say, my Sundays are mine, and I would only do it as a personal favor for you, and you won't solicit a favor. Too bad."

"I should have qualified that. There are only four people of whom I would ask a favor, and Orrie is not one of them. You are."

"Then go ahead and ask. Call me Mr. Goodwin."

His lips tightened. "Mr. Goodwin," he said coldly, "I solicit a favor."

It's amazing what lengths a man will go to for envy.

All of which leads to an obvious question: who are the four people? Archie is one, but who else? Saul, perhaps? He definitely ranks above Orrie, or Fred Durkin, the other operatives, in Wolfe's esteem. Fritz Brenner, the cook? Theodore Horstmann, the orchid specialist who lives in the brownstone so as to be close to Wolfe's orchids? Other ideas? The Wikipedia offers a nicely fleshed-out list of supporting characters, if you need a refresher. I'm open for suggestions.

Time, change, and the comfort of some illusions of permanence

2012-01-25T21:11:00.001-06:00

The January 13 issue of the Times Literary Supplement included a really nice, brief piece by Will Eaves about his new job teaching English and creative writing at Warwick University and the memories it's called up of his own undergraduate days. These lines in particular caught my eye:

I want to have settled into my new life the way I wanted to be grown up. That's the trouble with second chances and new lives: they are usually only mildly variant copies of first chances and old lives, and it's the mildness of the variation that induces vertigo, the small change heading for the large consequence.

I was struck by this passage not so much because of its actual content, but because of the way it harmonized with thoughts I've had recently about time and change. If I were somehow to encounter my seventeen-year-old self, I think what would surprise him most (aside perhaps from my disdain for the mullet he wore with such pride) is that adulthood doesn't entail some sort of final arrival, a reaching of a point beyond change. I would never have formulated my conception of adulthood that way back then, but looking back it's obvious that's what I thought: you work through high school, and you work through college, then you find something to do and you do it. And on and on.

Which, in a lot of ways, I have. My life is for the most part ridiculously stable: I've had the same employer for thirteen years, the same home for twelve, the same wife for eleven. That stability is what I want and what I like, and I'm extremely fortunate to have it. But--and this is what would have surprised my teenage self--that still leaves a lot of scope for continual challenge and change, at work and in the rest of life. You may be good at your job, but every day presents a new set of problems to be handled if you want to keep the ball rolling smoothly along; the same for marriage, or friendships, or even hobbies or habits. There is a sense in which every day we must make our world anew, coping with the small or large changes that go on in the background--and affect the texture--of even the most stable life. I've encountered religious believers who say that we should give thanks that every day god deigns to continue creating the world; to some extent, adult life feels like that to me--that if we want our lives to keep going and keep being the way we hope they'll be, every day we're challenged to address them as if they're new and need our full, focused attention.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying thank god for Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe. When I was picking books to read over Christmas--the holiday when, in the midst of my family, I most clearly can see and be grateful for the unchanging foundations of my life--I chose some of Stout's many stories of Wolfe and Archie and the gang at West 35th Street. At Christmas you want comfort food, you want to support yourself in that illusion that this happiness will never change, this group of people will never not be around you in the glow of the tree.

Thus Nero Wolfe is perfect, for his world is beautifully static. Oh, there are alterations--by 1958, for example, Wolfe has a TV (with a remote, no less!)--but they are extremely minor. In a larger sense, nothing at all changes: Archie neither ages nor worries about it; Wolfe never mellows; the staff of Wolfe's brownstone never turns over; even the police who curse his interference and meekly accept his collars neither get promoted nor retire. Stout offers the pleasures of permanence and reliability. The fretting and stress in Stout is about cases and criminals and Wolfe's mood, never about planning for the future or coping with the fact that nothing lasts forever.

"Nothing doing," says Archie, on the first page of "Easter Parade."

"If you wanted me to hook something really worth while, like a Mogok ruby, I might consider it. For what you pay me I do your mail, I make myself obnoxious to people, I tail them when necessary, I shoot when I have to and get shot at, I stick around and take every mood you've got, I give you and Theodore a hand in the plant rooms when required, I lie to Inspector Cramer and Sergeant Stebbins whether required or not, I even help Fritz in the kitchen in emergencies, I answer the phone. I could go on and on. But I will not grab an orchid from a female bosom in the Easter parade. There is--"

"I haven't asked you to," Wolfe snapped. He wiggled a finger at me. "You assumed I was headed for that, but you were wrong. I only said I wanted to hire someone for such an errand--someone adroit, discreet, resolute, and reliable."

"Me, then," I insisted.

We wouldn't want it any other way.

Other writers can be similarly comforting in their fashion--ones as different as Barbara Pym and Ross Macdonald come to mind--but no one else other than P. G. Wodehouse (another favorite Christmas author) offers such a complete world, almost medieval in its unchanging perfection and assurance that everything has and always will have its place. It's a comforting illusion for these darkest days of winter.

Just one more book . . .

2012-01-23T19:20:00.000-06:00

One more book . . .

One more book, he had told himself, then I'll stop. One more folio, just one more. One more page, then I'll go up and rest and get a bite to eat. But there was always another page after that one, and another after that, and another book waiting underneath the pile. I'll just take a quick peek to see what this one is about, he'd think, and before he knew he would be halfway through it.

That's Samwell Tarly, speaking, a bookish boy stuck in a warrior's world in George R. R. Martin's A Feast for Crows, the fourth book in his ongoing Song of Ice and Fire series. After several years of avoiding the series--primarily because rocketlass thought Martin's prose would likely bother me--I dove in just after New Year's. And now, like Samwell, I find I finish one book and think, well, I'll just take a look at the next one before I pick up something else . . .

They're far from perfect novels. They're too long, Martin's technique of shifting the narrative viewpoint among more than a dozen characters brings nearly as many frustrations as it does pleasures, and rocketlass is right: Martin's sentences aren't mustering a challenge to the likes of Nabokov. If I never read the word "jape" again, or read another description of a festering sword wound, I'll be happy. But they are compelling: Martin's muddy, bloody, vicious medieval world is more convincing than Tolkien's, his characterizations are much richer, as are his battle scenes, and his plotting is spectacular. I often say that one of the things I like best about sports is that you truly don't know how things are going to turn out, a pleasure that even the best literature, the most thrilling of novels or films, doesn't often afford. Narrative arcs are too familiar, and they're broken too rarely, to offer the pleasures of real uncertainty. But that's what Martin delivers: his world is actually dangerous, and by the end of a book or two, you start believing that any character really could die at any time.

On top of that, Martin does retain some of Tolkien's Norse-borrowed sense of the long march of history and the tales that accompany it. This passage, from A Storm of Swords, isn't typical, but it's a nicely compact example of the way his characters are constantly thinking about, and living in a world inflected by, the tales of past heroism:

The Nightfort had figured in some of Old Nan's scariest stories. It was here that Night's King had reigned, before his name was wiped from the memory of man. This was where the Rat Cook had served the Andal king his prince-and-bacon pie, where the seventy-nine sentinels stood their watch, where brave young Danny Flint had been raped and murdered. This was the castle where King Sherrit had called down his curse on the Andals of old, where the 'prentice boys had faced the thing that came in the night, where blind Symeon Star-Eyes had seen the hellhounds fighting. Mad Axe had once walked these yards and climbed these towers, butchering his brothers in the dark.

If that doesn't stir some remnant of the fantasy-loving twelve-year-old in you, then these books aren't for you. It reads like a flight of authorial fancy, like Martin started in on that paragraph and was having so much fun he just kept going--"the thing that came in the night" and "butchering his brothers in the dark." But it's better than that: many of these stories are ones we've heard, in whole or in part, already; of others we'll hear later. Martin has created a world, written its history, and peopled its present. It's quite an achievement.

So now I have not quite two novels to go before I find myself in the position of the readers Neil Gaiman chided on his blog and the New Yorker raised a puzzled eyebrow at last year: waiting and waiting and waiting for the sixth novel in order to find out what happens next.

Which does set A Song of Ice and Fire apart from the book that finally drives poor Samwell Tarly to get up and see to his duties: Septon Jorquen's Annals of the Black Centaur, an "exhaustively detailed account of the nine years that Orbert Caswell had served as Lord Commander of the Night's Watch":

There was a page for each day of his term, every one of which seemed to begin, "Lord Orbert rose at dawn and moved his bowels," except for the last, which said, "Lord Orbert was found to have died during the night."

If you're interested in reading more about Lord Orbert and his bowels, Jorquen's history can be found, alongside a number of other books from Martin's world, available for checkout in the Invisible Library.

Pym, Powell, Murdoch, Bayley

2012-01-19T21:22:00.000-06:00

John Bayley's introduction to the 2009 Virago edition of Barbara Pym's A Glass of Blessings (1958) might as well have been written specifically for me, as it brings in two writers very close to my heart, Anthony Powell and Bayley's wife, Iris Murdoch.

Powell, as I've noted before, was a fan of Pym, writing in his journals in 1992,

From being merely tolerant of [her] as a novelist, I have now got into the swing of her style and characters, find the books very amusing. . . . She is one of the few novelists I regret never having met.

But Bayley reveals much more:

Addicts of Pym tend to get together to discuss their heroine, and that happened to me with Powell. We agreed, for example, that his own immortal character Kenneth Widmerpool might have walked out of a Pym novel, together, of course, with his mother in her famous "bridge coat," a garment that much delighted Pym.

I think Widmerpool is ultimately too grasping to fit in a Pym novel, but his mother--good god, yes!

About Murdoch, Bayley offers the passing observation that she was "never a fan of Pym's novels," but liked her greatly as a person. His invocation of the pair in his introduction is perfect, for A Glass of Blessings is simultaneously the most Powellian and most Murdochian of the Pym novels I've read (which at this point is most of them).

The Powell links are easy to trace--indeed, it's hard to imagine any Powell fan not perking up at a couple of points in the novel when the narrator and protagonist, Wilmet Forsyth, a thirty-five-year-old married housewife, reflects, Nick Jenkins&8211;like, on the people around her. Here, for example:

At that moment I heard the bell ring and shortly afterwards Sir Denbigh Grote came into the room, rubbing his hands together as if it were a cold afternoon. He looked so much like a retired diplomat is generally supposed to look, even to his monocle, that I never thought of him as being the sort of person one needed to describe in any detail. What did seem unusual was his friendship with Miss Prideaux, who in spite of being a gentlewoman had only been a governess in some of the countries where he had served in a much higher capacity. It could only be supposed that retirement, like death, is a kind of leveller; and that social differences had been forgotten in the common pleasure of recalling garden parties at the embassies to celebrate the sovereign's birthday, and other similar functions which few people would have been capable of discussing at all knowledgeably.

It's Powell to a T--especially from "It could only be supposed" on; the internal reflection is pure Nick Jenkins, especially in its focus on the effects of the passage of time on status and class relations. Pym even uses a semicolon, like Powell, where an ordinary writer would use a comma! The Murdoch echo is more muted, but ultimately, I think, just as inescapable for a fan of both writers. A Glass of Blessings, like many Pym novels, turns on a character who fails to imagine the full scope of the lives of those around her--and is thus surprised when they a revealed to be fully rounded humans, acting on emotion and sentiment, instead of plodding along on the familiar paths she's assumed they'd follow. Late in the novel Wilmet lies abed, thinking about some news she's just had delivered about an acquaintance:

I lay awake for rather a long time, either because of the coffee or my confused thoughts. It seemed as if life had been going on around me without my knowing it, in the disconcerting way that it sometimes does, like the traffic swirling past when one is standing on an island in the middle of the road. Sybil and Professor Root, Piers and Keith, Marius and Mary--the names did sound odd together--all doing things without, as it were, consulting me.

One of Murdoch's great themes is the way that our solipsism blinds us to the reality--and separateness, difference--of other people, and, while usually stated more quietly than in Murdoch's novels, it's also one of Pym's recurring points. Even people we think of as good friends can regularly surprise us with their actions--and, more, with the reminder those actions bring that we're not after all the center of the universe. (Of course--what supplies much of the humor in Pym--we would never think of ourselves as the center of the universe . . . it just happens that only rarely can we achieve the critical distance required to escape our own glorious shadow.)

That said, I'm not surprised that Murdoch wasn't a fan of Pym's novels. She should have been, clearly: the two were working different sections of the same field. But Pym had none of Murdoch's glittering skill with--and love of--plot, none of her excessive qualities, none of her confidence in (and fear of) the tranformative, even demonic powers of love and passion (to say nothing of true eros, which has a deliberately muted place in Pym). Pym, as Bayley puts it in "Barbara Pym as Comforter," an essay he contributed to "All This Reading: The Literary World of Barbara Pym (2003), "offers the comfort of total non-insistence." She simply presents lives as they are, with the absolute minimum of drama required to sustain a novel; one of the most impressive things about A Glass of Blessings is how little of note happens in the book. Where Murdoch is everywhere overflowing, Pym is everywhere restrained.

And yet perhaps there was a late rapprochement. Bayley concludes "Barbara Pym as Comforter," with a few words about his late wife:

The novel is, ultimately, a very personal form, so I will conclude on a personal note. My wife, the novelist Iris Murdoch, suffered in the last years of her life from Alzheimer's disease. When she had been well and writing her own novels, I would sometimes read her bits of Pym that had amused or delighted me. I continued to do this when she was ill, and she always smiled at me or at the writer, even if she did not understand. After I had put her to bed, I came down for my own drink and supper, during which I usually and avidly read a Pym. The novels not only sustained but calmed and satisfied me during those days, as nothing else could.

A key thing that we learn from Pym is that one should take what comfort one can; the world offers little, and we should hold tight to it. Who knows what Iris Murdoch understood, much less appreciated, of what her husband read her, but the comfort the thought brought him was as real as anything.

Serendipity--or divine intervention?

2012-01-17T06:38:00.000-06:00

One of my favorite books of 2009 was Karl O. Knausgaard's A Time for Everything, a moving, disturbing, haunting Norwegian novel about evil and good, history and myth, angels and man, and our age that tries so strenuously to deny the existence of all but the last of those subjects. Two years ago, I wrote that the book reminded me of Tolstoy:

Imagine Tolstoy's ruminations on history shifted to ruminations on the role of angels; his empathy applied to a Cain who watches Abel, crazed by visions of angels, begin to lose his moorings. Imagine a Tolstoy who chooses to retell the story of the flood, not from the perspective of Noah, but from that of his doomed sister. There is real horror here: the human cost of divine anger has never, in my experience, been more clearly, achingly described. At the same time, the loving attention lavished on characters whose fates we know--and dread--reminds us of the necessary role of love in all creation, authorial or divine.

In a review for Bookforum, Eric Banks doesn't evoke Tolstoy, but he does discuss its fundamental earnestness--Knausgaard is serious about these stories--and places it in an old tradition:

Knausgaard's rotund novel seems itself out of time, a throwback to the grand European novel of midcentury; it is at once a sort of faux theological disquisition; a philosophical quest for the meaning of time, decay, and exile; and an unabashedly literary excursion into storytelling, with digressions narrating the psychological dynamics of Cain and the deprivations of Noah's extended family in Nod.

The intertwined sadisms of God and man in A Time for Everything call to mind a line from E. M. Cioran's Tears and Saints: "The creation of man was a cosmic cataclysm, and its aftershocks have become God's nightmares." From the earliest days, when God posted an angel with a flaming sword at the edge of Eden, through the devastation of the flood, to the present, when the the book's narrator mutilates himself in hopes of understanding the infinite, Knausgaard makes us see the strange dance of divine and human. Two years on, what comes to mind most often are the horrors of a world where divine punishments is believed in because it is seen in undeniable action; the dread conjured up by Knausgaard's image of a mad Noah stumping around the farmyard or a sadistic Abel tormenting a wounded shepherd remains vividly with me.

Just after Christmas, I was thinking about A Time for Everything--prompted, I think it's safe to assume, by the more benign angels of Christmas decorations--and wishing another book by Knausgaard might appear in English. And (to stick to appropriate language) lo, and behold, when I got home that night, I found in the mail a galley of a new book by Knausgaard that Archipelago Books will be publishing in May! My prayers had been answered! (Well, as nonbeliever, I hadn't exactly prayed, but if any deities attend to half-formed hopes, it's surely the Gods of the Book-Drunk, right?)

And, um, it's called My Struggle. Really. That can't be ignorance, so it must be a joke, but wow, that's gutsy. Oh, and it's Book One. According to the copy, it tells the story of novelist Karl O. Knausgaard's struggle with self-doubt after his father has drunk himself to death, as Knausgaard "breaks his own life story down to its elementary particles, often recreating memories in real time, blending recollections of images and conversation with profound questions in a remarkable way."

The title makes me a bit skeptical, the subject a bit more so, but Knausgaard earned so much credit with me through A Time for Everything that I'm inclined to trust him. And then, on page two, a passage like this--

The moment life departs the body, it belongs to death. At one with lamps, suitcases, carpets, door handles, windows. Fields, marshes, streams, mountains, clouds, the sky. None of these is alien to us. We are constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of death.

--reminds me of why. The book won't be published until May, so you probably won't hear more from me about it until then, but suffice it to say I'm grateful to the Gods of the Book-Drunk for delivering it to my doorstep.

Shakespeare and the Baconians

2012-01-13T06:25:00.000-06:00

James Shapiro's Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010) isn't quite the book its title and subtitle would suggest: Shapiro isn't particularly interested in the question itself, taking it as established that, yes, Shakespeare was the author of the works commonly attributed to him (and when Shapiro finally gets around to laying on the evidence for that position, it's like watching a rested boxer casually rain blow after cruel blow on a tottering rival). Rather, he's interested in why fairly large numbers of intelligent people since the eighteenth century have raised the question, and seized on other claimants.

The result is an absolutely fascinating book about changing ideas of art, authorship, and genius; more than anything, it's about the risks of ahistorical thinking, and of looking at people in the distant past as if they were our contemporaries, their thoughts, emotions, and actions as clearly understandable and interpretable as our own.

The book is full of interesting figures and incidents, some of the best having to do with the Baconian camp and their search for coded evidence of Francis Bacon's authorship. Key for the Baconians was The Great Cryptogram: Francis Bacon's Cipher in the so-Called Shakespeare Plays (1888)--a book whose title could hold its own with those of any of today's sensationalist pop histories--by Ignatius Donnelly. Donnelly's explanation of how a laborious application of Bacon's cipher to Shakespeare's works revealed hidden messages caught the eye of such luminaries as Mark Twain and Helen Keller, despite the fact that, Shapiro explains, his use of the cipher was a complete mess:

Even with his complex arithmetical scheme, Donnelly had to fudge his word cipher, which was based on the numerical distance between his arbitrarily chosen key words. Worse still, he constantly miscounted in order to arrive at satisfying results. Cryptologists who have examined his method have concluded that he "described Bacon's own cipher without understanding it" and "showed a fatal inclination to sieze on whole words which happen to be in both the vehicle and the message to be deciphered." It also turned out that his cipher could produce virtually any message one wanted to find.

As I read, I kept thinking of one of the funniest moments in all of P. G. Wodehouse's work: when, in "The Reverent Wooing of Archibald," a young Mulliner nephew gets buttonholed by a Baconian:

The aunt inflated her lungs.

“These figure totals,” she said, “are always taken out in the Plain Cipher, A equalling one to Z equals twenty-four. The names are counted in the same way. A capital letter with the figures indicates an occasional variation in the Name Count. For instance, A equals twenty-seven, B twenty-eight, until K equals ten is reached, when K, instead of ten, becomes one, and T instead of nineteen, is one, and R or Reverse, and so on, until A equals twenty-four is reached. The short or single Digit is not used here. Reading the Epitaph in the light of the Cipher, it becomes: ‘What need Verulam for Shakespeare? Francis Bacon England’s King be hid under a W. Shakespeare? William Shakespeare. Fame, what needst Francis Tudor, King of England? Francis. Francis W. Shakespeare. For Francis thy William Shakespeare hath England’s King took W. Shakespeare. Then thou our W. Shakespeare Francis Tudor bereaving Francis Bacon Francis Tudor such a tomb William Shakespeare.’”

The speech to which he had been listening was unusually lucid and simple for a Baconian, yet Archibald, his eye catching a battle-axe that hung on the wall, could not but stifle a wistful sigh. How simple it would have been, had he not been a Mulliner and a gentleman, to remove the weapon from its hook, spit on his hands, and haul off and dot this doddering old ruin one just above the imitation necklace.

Shapiro is sensitive enough to human foibles and the turns of history that his portrayals evoke not murderous rage but, most often, sympathy, and even pity for hours and years and lives wasted in fruitless search of a chimera. Sure, there are forgers and charlatans aplenty, but they're outweighed by the number of genuine seekers who latched onto this idea out of misguided feelings of affinity with the author of such great works, and a misplaced certainty that genius could never have had so humble a human home as that suggested by the meager facts of Shakespeare's biography.

A loaf of bread, a quart of milk, a stick of butter . . .

2012-01-11T06:11:00.000-06:00

Okay, one last tidbit from Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything before I file it away in the proxy memory of my bookshelves. In the course of setting the scene of ancient memory science, Foer cites Pliny the Elder's Natural History,

the first-century encyclopedia that chronicled all things wondrous and useful for winning bar bets in the classical world, including the most exceptional memories then known to history. "King Cyrus could give the names of all the soldiers in his army," Pliny reports. "Lucius Scipio knew the names of the whole Roman people. King Pyrrhus's envoy Cineas knew those of the Senate and knighthood at Rome the day after his arrival. . . . A person in Greece named Charmadas recited the contents of any volumes in libraries that anyone asked him to quote, just as if he were reading them."

And to think I used to be impressed by my ability, years after I was out of college, to remember the names and rooms of everyone who lived in my freshman-year dorm. Sheesh. Clearly I've got to step up my game.

John Sutherland and James Hogg

2012-01-09T06:25:00.000-06:00

For the past few weeks, I've been taking great delight in dipping into John Sutherland's Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives, which was published in the fall in the UK by Profile Books and will appear stateside from Yale in the spring. Here's how much fun it is: Sutherland's survey, which he acknowledges is idiosyncratic, leaves out Penelope Fitzgerald, Barbara Pym, P. G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Dunnett, Donald Westlake, Rex Stout, and others of my favorites, while including such far less interesting figures as Michael Crichton, Paul Auster, Patricia Cornwell, to name just a few; Sutherland also evinces a very English casualness about grammar that sees him peppering the page with dangling and misplaced modifiers; in addition, when he approvingly quotes the best, most laugh-out-loud funny line in Lucky Jim, he misquotes it and leaves out the most important, funniest word ("the smallest glass Jim had ever been offered" rather than "the smallest drink he'd ever seriously been offered"); and on top of that he mistakenly identifies Nick Charles as the "thin man" of the title of Hammett's novel about him--yet despite all of those reasonably serious quibbles, I heartily recommend the book to any lover of literature and biography, especially Anglophiles. It's witty, it's perceptive, it's crammed full of great lines and unusual bits of information conveyed in the best telegraphic brief lives tradition. It's clear that it's a book I'll be consulting and enjoying for years to come.

Today, I'll share a tidbit from Sutherland's entry on James Hogg. Hogg, explains Sutherland, wrote his masterpiece, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, "[i]n a desperate attempt to raise money for family dependants now as numerous as a small clan." Perhaps he should have chosen a more straightforward tale, something like what his friend and patron Walter Scott was retailing from nearby, for Hogg's truly strange, powerful tale of predestination and the devil at his work in rural Scotland,

failed spectacularly to hit the public taste of the time. It earned the author £2 in "profits" (miscalled) in the two years Longman kept the book in print. There were moves on their part to recover the £ advance. The few reviews the novel received concurred in finding it "trash"--and indecent. It was certainly far rawer meat than most fiction offered the circulating libraries. One strains, for example, to imagine Isabella Thorpe and Catherine Morland reading it together before going off to their morning session at the Bath Pump Room.

Even a century later, the book was still dividing readers: Edmund Gosse, in a piece taking up a book published in praise of Hogg, wrote,

When it first appeared, in 1824, it was received very coldly and suspiciously, but it presently found admirers, and has never completely lacked them. Those, however, who have occupied themselves with it have always done so cautiously. They have admitted its incoherence, but have insisted on its vigour and intensity. They have apologised for its faults of construction.

Goss, after actually stooping to a "whole Hogg" joke, continues,

But there are many readers who are not affected by inconsistency of handling, and are indifferent to logic if a tale amuses them. They may still find entertainment in the imbroglio of the unfortunate Colwin family, many of whose remarkable adventures are told with great vigour and picturesqueness.

Gosse does acknowledge that it is "an extraordinary book," but he closes his essay by questioning Hogg's purported literary bravery--he "was no Moliere."

It seems sadly appropriate that, after skating on the thin ice over poverty for nearly his entire career as a writer, Hogg, Sutherland tells us, "while curling, . . . fell through the ice on Duddingston Loch, below Arthur's Seat, and never fully recovered." For most of the dead, even this nonbeliever can't help but vaguely wish that they spend eternity in something approximating heaven; for Hogg, I find myself also wishing that he at least got to stop off for a bit in Hell and receive the thanks of its monarch for his unforgettable, convincing portrayal.

Giulio Camillo's Theater of Memory

2012-01-05T06:25:00.000-06:00

Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (2011) doesn't hold a lot of surprises for anyone who's already familiar with the ancient mnemonic device of the memory palace, but it's a fun book nonetheless, full of such odd characters as contemporary savants, wildly nerdy mental skill competitors, and historical promulgators of memory enhancement techniques.

The most fascinating member of that last category is Guilio Camillo, an Italian philosopher who in the sixteenth century convinced Francis I of France to fund the construction of a "Theater of Memory" that would essentially be a physical representation of the sort of mental memory palaces that had been crucial to orators, philosophers, and others in the days before printing. Here's how Foer describes what Camillo proposed:

Camillo's wooden memory palace was shaped like a Roman amphitheater, but instead of the spectator sitting in the seats looking down on the stage, he stood in the center and looked up at a round, seven-tiered edifice. All around the theater were paintings of Kabbalistic and mythological figures as well as endless rows of drawers and boxes filled with cards, on which were printed everything that was known, and--it was claimed--everything that was knowable, including quotations from all the great authors, categorized according to subject. All you had to do was meditate on an emblematic image and the entirety of knowledge stored in that section of the theater would be called immediately to mind, allowing you to "be able to discourse on any subject no less fluently than Cicero." Camillo promised that "by means of the doctrine of loci and images, we can hold in the mind and master all human concepts and all the things that are in the entire world."

As you might guess from the mention of the Kabalah, there was to be a mystic, magical component to the memory theater as well, one which Camillo promised he would reveal to no one except Francis I.

It seems a scale model was built and stuffed with, if not the entirety of human knowledge, then at least a substantial number of data cards. Francis Yates, in The Art of Memory (1966), offers a bit more detail:

When next Viglius writes to Erasmus, he has been to Venice and met Camillo, who has allowed him to see the Theatre (it was a theatre, not an amphitheatre, which will appear later). "Now you must know," he writes, "that Viglius has been in the Amphitheatre and has diligently inspected everything." The object was thus clearly more than a small model; it was a building large enough to be entered by two people at once; Viglius and Camillo were in it together.

Viglius's letter continues:

He calls this theatre of his by many names, saying now that it is a built or constructed mind and soul, now that it is a windowed one. He pretends that all things that the human mind can conceive and that we cannot see with the corporeal eye, after being collected together by diligent meditation may be expressed by certain corporeal signs in such a way that the beholder may at once perceive with his eyes everything that is otherwise hidden in the depths of the human mind.

At this distance of time and culture, it's hard to know how seriously to take Camillo's own protestations--for all we know, he may have been wholly sincere in his belief that the proper facts and symbols, properly arranged, could unlock occult secrets. But to modern ears, he certainly does sound like a huckster, doesn't he? And, sadly if not surprisingly, the theater was never built to full scale, and the model disappeared to history before the sixteenth-century was out, so we have little more than tantalizing, if eyebrow-raising, glimpses of Camillo's plans and system.

Yates tells another story about Camillo that, while not bearing on his theater, seems worth sharing:

Camillo and his theater were as much talked about at the French court as they were in Italy, and many legends about his stay in France are extant. The most intriguing of these is the lion story, one version of which is told by Betussi in his dialogues published in 1544. He says that one day in Paris Giulio Camillo went to see some wild animals, together with the Cardinal of Lorraine, Luigi Almoni, and other gentlemen, including Betussi himself. A lion escaped and came towards the party.
The gentlemen were much alarmed and fled hither and thither, except Messr Giulio Camillo, who remained where he was, without moving. This he did, not in order to give proof of himself, but because of the weight of his body, which made his movements slower than the others. The king of animals began to walk round him and caress him, without otherwise molesting him, until it was chased back to its place.

Camillo's own explanation, apparently repeated regularly, was that the lion, a creature of the sun, recognized the "solar virtue" that Camillo bore because of his role as a magus. Did I mention that he comes across like a snake oil salesman?

"With the most possible vigor and imagination," Or, To the new year!

2012-01-03T06:25:00.000-06:00

I'll let Dmitry Samarov lead off the new year, with this bit about the holiday from his book Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab:

No one threw up in the cab. In other words, my most fervent New Year's wish had been granted. An indication of a fairly restrained evening. The hordes went about their celebrating with workman-like efficiency; collecting fares did not present any special challenge or above-and-beyond effort, every last rider remembering where he or she lived with a bit of encouragement, no unwelcome advances nor invitations to tussle.

I tend to refer to New Year's as my least favorite holiday of the year, for the simple reason that any holiday whose high point is pegged to an hour that represents the outer limits of my potential bedtime is inherently suspect.

It's not as if parties are really my kind of scene to begin with. I'm much more of a quiet-drink-with-a-friend, long-dinner-party kind of socializer; full-scale parties always leave me a bit at sixes and sevens, feeling that I ought to make an effort to meet strangers but stymied by the fact that they're, well, strangers.

That basic discomfort caused me to smile when I read, in Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, about the plans that Ed Cooke, a memory contest champion from England, drew up for his twenty-fifth birthday party. Held in a barn on his parents' estate (always a good first item for the party checklist, no?), the party was designed as "an experimental vessel fo his philosophy of parties," a framework, in Cooke's words, "for manipulating conversation, space, movement, mood, and expectations so that I can see how they influence one another." Foer, drawing on notes presumably taken early in the evening's imbibing, explains how Cooke did it:

Glittery textiles hung from the rafters to the floor, dividing the room into a collection of small rooms. The only way in or out was through a network of tunnels, which could be navigated only by slithering on one's belly. The space under the grand piano was turned into a fort, and a circle was formed around the fireplace out of a collection of raggedy couches that had been stacked on top of tables.

"The people who actually get through the tunnel networks have been through an adventure. They have had to struggle a tiny bit, and therefore upon arrival, they feel a sense of gratitude, relief, and accomplishment, and are committed to the project of having a good experience, with the most possible vigor and imagination." . . . I crawled behind him through a ten-foot-long pitch-black tunnel and emerged into a room filled neck-deep with balloons. Each room, he explained, was supposed to function like a chamber of a memory palace. His party was designed to be maximally memorable.

Clearly, Cooke's party wouldn't be for everyone, but I find it attractive: a party with an unusual purpose, a focus, an odd component or three would at a minimum provide strangers with a few minutes of conversational material before the awkward pauses begin to predominate.

This new year's found me laid up with, judging by my cough, some vigorously horrible bastard child of TB and the croup, so I was already asleep when the neighborhood's symphony of illicit fireworks and wailing sirens was just warming up. Dmitry Samarov, I trust, was out all night, just as on that earlier new year's:

The sky is beginning to lighten when I open the mailbox. A letter from the AARP, complete with member's card, awaits my attention. Had this night really lasted a decade? In any case, it is time to reset the calendar and start the whole damn thing over again . . .

Here's to 2012, folks. May it bring you good reading.

Holiday cheer

2011-12-19T06:30:00.000-06:00

To take us into Christmas, I'll share a few lines of introductory material that Robert Irwin quotes in Visions of the Jinn, from The Child's Arabian Nights, published in 1903 with illustrations by William Heath Robinson:

When reading these stories, all children will do well to remember the following:

First of all they are only for good boys and girls; and if you, small reader, do not happen to be good, then put the book down at once and go to bed.

Secondly, if you have already gone to bed, and are reading there, then you must know that you are not doing the right thing; so close the book as well as your eyes and go to sleep.

Thirdly, they are not to be read in bed in the morning, when all should be up and getting ready for breakfast.

Fourthly, you must not cry at the stories, nor laugh too loud; or, perhaps, they will be taken from you.

Fifthly, and lastly, you are not to turn up the pictures before reading the stories; or you will be like the boy who picked out all the plums from his cake, and did not care to eat it afterwards.

Bit of a killjoy, that Robinson, no?

Well, the holidays being upon us, I'm going to advise you to ignore all the above advice. If there's ever a time for reading in bed, and for laughing and crying out too loudly at stories, it's Christmas. May Scrooge bring you the goose as big as the errand boy. "There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn't believe there ever was such a goose cooked."

With this post, I'm closing down the shop for the year; I'll see you in 2012. Merry Christmas, folks. Thanks for reading.

Visions of the Jinn

2011-12-16T06:50:00.000-06:00

I don't usually go in for assembling a best-of-the-year list. It's neither my own style nor the style of my reading: I tend to be reading at least as many old books as new, and my trawling through the contemporary is haphazard enough that I couldn't presume to offer an authoritative assessment.

But this year I'm going to break with tradition because there's one book that, in this age of e-everything, deserves to be singled out for great praise: Robert Irwin's Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights. Published by Oxford University Press, it's a huge--nearly 10" x 13"--and absolutely stunning, with more than 150 full-sized color reproductions of illustrations created for old editions of The Arabian Nights. It's a lavish, eye-popping, amazing book.

I wish I had images to share. They run the gamut of style and technique: the detailed engravings of Dore; the lush paintings of Maxfield Parrish; the black-and-white seductiveness of Beardsley; the solitary, menaced figures of William Heath Robinson; and much more, all beautifully reproduced. Any fan of book illustration will find something here to cherish. Irwin points out that the Nights provided an unusually open field for illustrators:

The material came from diverse sources and was put together by different hands. There was no single narrative voice and this had an important consequence for its later illustration in the West, since unlike other texts that were popular choices for illustration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the amount of visual cuing provided by the narrative varied considerably from story to story. For example, in "The Story of the Semi-Petrified Prince," the interior of the palace is evoked in some detail, but in other, later tales a palace is often just a palace. So with some stories the illustrators must have found themselves constrained by the text in front of them, while with other stories the austerity of the narrative might set their imaginations free.

What becomes clear very quickly is just how much our impressions of these stories are tied in with the history of their illustration; these are the images that come to mind when we hear of Sinbad and Ali Baba and Haroun al Raschid.

Alongside the reproductions, Irwin presents brief assessments of the key illustrators, including some biographical detail and setting them in the context of their era and their peers. Once in a while, the tracing of influences offers a wonderful moment of the unexpected conjunction of different artistic worlds like this one:

Aged only fifteen, [Frank Brangwyn] worked for a while for William Morris. Late in life, Brangwyn would still recall the tremendous impact that the pattern of a Persian carpet in Morris's house made upon him.

And thus is born an Orientalist artist; Irwin quotes Theophile Teinlen as saying of Brangwyn's work,

One can truly say that these things are painted by a child of the North whose eyes, having seen the Orient, have stayed forever dazzled, marvelling, and filled with sunshine.

Irwin himself is a great scholar of the Arabian Nights (having published a companion whose only flaw is that it's not 1,001 pages long) and of the history of Orientalist scholars and late-Victorian engagement with the East; when he brings all that knowledge to bear on this specific facet of that history, the result is dazzling.

The only drawback of Visions of the Jinn is the price: at $225, it's clearly aimed at libraries and collectors. But if you've spent a lifetime loving these stories and the history of how they entered--and forever changed--the literary history of the West, it's an unforgettable book. I'll be turning to it again and again and again over the years.

Apologies to Trollope

2011-12-14T07:01:00.000-06:00

After Friday's post that took issue with Trollope's complaint about Dickens's prose style, a reader wrote to argue that I was being unfair to Trollope. And he's right: Trollope's complaint was specifically about the idea of Dickens's prose as a model for beginning writers--which, even today, when the buzzing, wild genius of Dickens's descriptive energy is more widely recognized, it would be disastrous for a young writer to attempt to mimic. It would lead to pastiche at best; baggy, affected nonsense at worst.

But it was for the closing of my post that I owe Trollope the real apology: after he recommended Thackeray as a better model, I noted that at least he hadn't nominated himself. I was being flip on a Friday night, and Trollope deserves better. By all accounts, Trollope was a man of appropriate self-assessment, neither over- nor under-selling his achievements. He was a working writer who found success, and he was proud of that fact, but he didn't make claim to be a genius. In a piece on Trollope's autobiography, Michael Dirda quotes a couple of assessments from the book:

Above all, he is surprisingly harsh about his own creations. Take those two novels mentioned above, Doctor Thorne and The Bertrams. The first soon ranked among his most popular titles; the other long lay among his most ignored. Yet, says their author, "I myself think that they are of about equal merit, but that neither of them is good." His own favorites among his books are those about the politician Plantagenet Palliser, especially The Prime Minister--which the critics damned. Orley Farm, he observes, possesses his best plot, but "taking it as a whole," The Last Chronicle of Barset is "the best novel I have written."

Dirda also includes a great anecdote that I can't help but pass on:

Once, when he overheard two clergymen complain that the celebrated Mrs. Proudie of the Barsetshire novels had grown tiresome, he went up and told them that she would be dead within the week. And so she was.

Almost anyone involved, even peripherally, in the literary should also appreciate Trollope for being what he was: a writer who lived a life with relatively little drama, worked for the Post Office every day for decades while still finding time to write, and matter-of-factly turned out prose. No sturm und drang here. Dirda uses Trollope's own account to calculate that at Trollope's pace of 3,000 words per day, every day, he would have turned out a novel the length of Gatsby in a month. John Sutherland, in his magnificent new Lives of the Novelists, says that Trollope's reliability and speed ended up working against him:

He had produced too many novels too quickly for the public's appetite. Sales and payments fell--not catastrophically but palpably.

Crime fiction fans will recall that one of the reasons Donald E. Westlake always gave for writing under so many pen names was that he was writing too fast for his publishers' taste; they didn't want to flood the market with Westlake books. Trollope, one assumes, never considered that option--and wouldn't a Trollope novel be recognizable under any name, regardless?

Sutherland claims that the falling sales led to a "gloom [that] found magnificent expression in his mordant satire on the morals of his age an the decay of Englishness, The Way We Live Now." He goes on to point out something else that distinguishes Trollope from the best of his contemporaries:

The title [of The Way We Live Now] points to a salient feature of Trollopian art. Thackeray, Dickens and George Eliot consistently antedated the action of their novels by decades. Trollope invariably writes about "now." Sic vivitur, as his favourite Latin proverb put it--thus we live.

And with that, The Duke's Children goes into my bag for my next trip. That's another point--and not a minor one--in Trollope's favor: he's reliable enough that, if pressed, you can pack nothing but a book by him for a trip and still depart with confidence. He's certainly not going to let you down.

Like a cat on your lap

2011-12-12T07:22:00.000-06:00

{Photo by rocketlass.}

After spending more than a week wholly wrapped up in Middlemarch, with its ambition to paint a vivid, emotionally and intellectually rich portrait of the life of an 1830s village, it was with real pleasure that I sat down last night with a book of much more modest aims, Jacques Poulin's Mister Blue (1989, translated from French by Sheila Fischman in 2011).

Whereas Eliot wanted us to take in the world, and, having done so, understand it, all Poulin is asking of us in Mister Blue is to pause a moment, attend to the world, and reflect. The novel is told in the quiet, contemplative voice of Jim, a writer who says of himself,

I'm not very good at introspection. Generally what I do is glide along the surface of things like a drifting raft that knows nothing about what goes on in the depths of the sea.

And while that's an exaggeration, it's not terribly far off the mark: Jim lives alone with his cat, Mister Blue, on a cliff overlooking a river outside Quebec City. He plays tennis with his brother. He tries to write every morning. He watches the fog roll in and the sky change with the seasons. He thinks, but he is at the same time relatively untroubled by thought.

And that's about it--until he notices a boat anchored in the river, and, on investigating a nearby cave, finds a bedroll, some supplies, and a copy of The Arabian Nights with the name Marie K. inside. He soon develops an obsessive love for the book's mysterious, missing owner, and that love is but the first change in a summer that will see him meet new people, turn his novel in a new direction, and open his house--and eventually his heart--to a damaged orphan girl, La Petite.

I suspect that sounds hideously treacly, so I should rush to reassure you that it's not like that at all. Poulin's narration is reticent, controlled, even elegant, and as far from sappy as you can imagine. There is nothing so cut-and-dried as "healing" in this novel; what there is instead is care, and dailiness, and the ways they can effectively interact. There is a love of stories, and an acknowledgment of their power (that doesn't oversell it); there's a wry humor, and a nod to the silly ways we can act when we're chasing ghosts and obsessions of our own creation. And there's a sense of gentle, melancholy mystery, as well. Not for nothing is La Petite reading Le Grand Meaulnes: the whiffs of fairy-tale strangeness that emanate from that book are here, in muted form, as well.

Gentleness is a key word here. Late in the novel, La Petite tells Jim,

"I'm a person . . . who always wants to bite. I'm like an alley cat that everybody's mistreated: my normal reaction is to want to bite and scratch. But when I read your books, it's as if I've been given permission to be not so aggressive, to be gentle for a little while. As if somebody had told me: Be gentle if you want, nothing will happen, no one will harm you."

To project an air of gentleness without boring a reader--to wrap a reader inside it and make them glad for it--may be a small ambition, but when it's achieved, the result can be marvelous. I've mentioned already that Mister Blue called to mind Le Grand Meaulnes, but I also found myself thinking of a pair of very different books, of similarly narrow compass that belies rich self-knowledge: J. L. Carr's A Month in the Country, which shares Mister Blue's sense of fruitful solitude, and Gregoire Bouillier's The Mystery Guest, which has a similarly captivating atmosphere and idiosyncrasy of thought. Both are deliberately modest; both are lasting favorites.

At this time of year, when the air crackles with stress, one could do worse than set aside two hours to spend with Mister Blue and Jim. If you can take in some of their gentleness and calm, you'll be a good ways towards the best of the holiday spirit.