Essays and reviews

MICHAEL DIRDA’S WASHINGTON POST REVIEWS: from August 23rd 2012 to February 17, 2008. Book World: ‘Cracking the Egyptian Code,’ by Andrew Robinson, explores hieroglyphs • •

by Michael Dirda Aug. 23, 2012

Open almost any glossy magazine — especially if it’s sponsored by an airline — and you’re likely to find an advertisement for Rosetta Stone, a computer-assisted program for learning a foreign language. Roughly 200 years ago, however, the original Rosetta Stone provided the key to deciphering the most beautiful and enigmatic of all writing systems, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. The man who finally cracked the code was a young Frenchman named Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832). But first some background. Since the time of Herodotus, Europeans had been fascinated by hieroglyphs, those little pictographs of birds, geometrical figures, snakes, crouching lions, shepherd’s crooks and striding figures so familiar to us from such movies as “The Mummy.” This mysterious writing appeared on sarcophagi and the walls of royal tombs, on clay shards, obelisks and bits of papyrus. But what did the individual symbols mean? The last known use of hieroglyphs occurred in A.D. 394, but the writing system had already grown esoteric, used principally by a priestly caste and pretty much a mystery to everyone else. As a result, hieroglyphs came to be regarded as emblematic or allegorical, each figure a concentrate of complex meaning, like a cross or the diagram of a fish among Christians. While learned scholars guessed at the significance of the various squiggles and symbols, no one could actually read the writing. All that began to change in 1798when Napoleon’s armies invaded Egypt. The emperor brought not just a military force but also a small corps of savants and scientists, who eventually produced a ninevolume “Description of Egypt.” So when, in July 1899, near Rashid — known as Rosetta to Europeans — a squad of engineers unearthed a slab containing three parallel inscriptions, it was sent right off to headquarters in Cairo. The importance of the find was immediately recognized and copies of the inscriptions made. Eventually, though, the French lost the Rosetta Stone to the victorious English, and it now resides as the jewel of the Egyptian halls of the British Museum. The Rosetta Stone contains essentially the same information — a court decree — in three scripts: hieroglyphics, a kind of Egyptian cursive now called Demotic, and ancient Greek. Early would-be decipherers quickly realized that recognizable names in the Greek section must appear in the other sections, as well. The Demotic lettering, it was determined, spelled out its words as did the Greek. The hieroglyphs apparently didn’t conform to this pattern. But, then, everyone knew they were symbolic, not phonetic.

Except, as it turned out, they could be both, as Champollion gradually came to recognize. Champollion was born in Figeac, the son of a bookseller. His 12-years-older brother, JacquesJoseph, went on to become a noted paleographer and librarian and eventually curator of manuscripts at the National Library in Paris. The two were close and Champollion-Figeac — as Jacques-Joseph came to be known — fostered and supported his more brilliant sibling’s career.

By the time he was 15, Champollion was telling the mayor of Grenoble, the city to which the family had moved, that “I wish to devote my life to knowledge of ancient Egypt.” Besides learning Latin and Greek at school, he began to teach himself “Oriental” languages, eventually studying in Paris under the great Arabist Silvestre de Sacy. In this new biography, Andrew Robinson quotes a letter in which Champollion describes course work in Hebrew, Syriac and Chaldean, then adds, “In the evening at five o’clock I am with Dom Raphael, who makes us translate the fables of La Fontaine into Arabic.” Champollion grew especially fluent in Coptic, which had once been widely spoken in Egypt. In the period 1809-14, the young Champollion was back teaching and working in Grenoble and soon addressing his attention to the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone. As it happened, a great English polymath, Thomas Young, was also investigating the Stone’s mysteries. Today Young is honored for his groundbreaking work on the wave theory of light and his studies of the human eye (he discovered the phenomenon of astigmatism). But, as Robinson repeatedly stresses, he deserves much of the credit for preparing the way for Champollion’s eventual breakthrough. Like others since, in other fields, Champollion wanted to grab all the credit. In any event, it took him several more years to realize that the Rosetta Stone’s hieroglyphs actually do spell out words, though they can also refer to larger concepts. Some of Champollion’s thinking was purely logical, as basic as comparing the total number of words and hieroglyphs, and noting the number of individual hieroglyphic signs. Robinson reconstructs some of Champollion’s reasoning: “So 1,419 hieroglyphs corresponded to 486 Greek words; and among these 1,419 hieroglyphs there were only 166 individual signs. If each hieroglyph truly represented an idea or word, then one would have expected similar numbers of hieroglyphs and Greek words, and a larger set of separate signs, each one representing a different idea or word. All of a sudden, it must have struck Champollion that the hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone could be explained not by a purely ‘ideographic’ system, but by a small set of frequently employed phonetic hieroglyphs .  .  . mixed with many more non-phonetic hieroglyphs that stood only for ideas or words.” In short, these ancient Egyptian figures could be used as an alphabet, though some could also remain symbolic. Without any vowels indicated, deciphering an inscription nonetheless remains tricky and has been likened to reading a rebus, one of those childhood diversions in which, say, a picture of a bee is used for the verb “be” — except that, in the case of ancient Egyptian, it might also stand for the letter B or even the insect itself.

Although Robinson, who has written books about lost languages and the history of writing, relates Champollion’s short life with authority, the great code-breaker didn’t leave much personal material behind and seems to have spent most of his time being ill or studying in libraries. He was, however, an ardent supporter of Napoleon, distinctly prickly and eager to demand all the glory for a discovery that built, in part, on the work of others. In his later years, Champollion actually managed to travel to Egypt and helped acquire important artifacts there and from collectors, which led to his appointment as the first professor of Egyptology at the College de France. Alas, his health declined — possibly from drinking Nile water — and he suffered a stroke before he could complete his magnum opus, a grammar of ancient Egyptian. He died at age 41. If you’ve enjoyed books like Michael D. Coe’s “Breaking the Maya Code” or David Kahn’s massive history “The Codebreakers,” you should take a look at “Cracking the Egyptian Code.” But be prepared: Robinson does his best to be sprightly, but much of the material about the Rosetta Stone’s decipherment requires close attention.

Charles Rosen, ever refining our approach to the arts of the past • • •

by Michael Dirda Aug. 15, 2012 Read Later

Is there a more cultivated man alive than the pianist and polymath Charles Rosen? Years ago, at Cornell, I heard him play Beethoven’s “Diabelli Variations” to a packed audience. In 1972, “The Classical Style,” his incisive study of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, deservedly won the National Book Award. In 1995 “The Romantic Generation” — originally presented as the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard — applied the same precision of thought and analysis to the work of such concert-hall mainstays as Schubert, Liszt, Chopin and Berlioz. But Rosen isn’t just a music man. With Henri Zerner, he brought out “Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art,” its chapters ranging from “Caspar David Friedrich and the Language of Landscape” to reflections on the influence of academic art. Whether he scrutinizes a painting, a piece of music or a work of scholarship, Rosen nearly always uses his findings to build a larger argument or critique a flawed enterprise. He is particularly drawn to questions of canon, reception and audience — which isn’t surprising given his long tenure as professor of music and social thought at the University of Chicago. The pianist, after all, does have a PhD — in French literature. As if recording, scholarship and teaching weren’t enough to occupy him, Rosen also regularly appears in the New York Review of Books. There he writes not just about music and art, but also about literature, reflecting on new editions of Rousseau and Sade, the genius of Montaigne, the

poetry of La Fontaine and Mallarme, the career of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the American years of W.H. Auden. All these last named literary essays appear in “Freedom and the Arts,” which brings together Rosen’s journalism from the past dozen years, along with a few pieces reaching back into the 1990s and even one to 1979 (“Resuscitating Opera: Alessandro Scarlatti”). The book also includes a halfdozen pieces about Mozart; long biographical appreciations of Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann and Elliott Carter(whom Rosen justly reveres); judicious yet devastating reviews of “The New Grove Dictionary of Music” and Richard Taruskin’s six-volume “Oxford History of Western Music”; an examination of Theodor Adorno’s sociological music criticism; and several articles about opera. However, Rosen opens and closes this essay collection with reflections on the artist and tradition, reminding us that revolutionaries are often far more deeply engaged with the canon than those who simply pastiche, in watered-down ways, its more obvious elements. Wagner, Debussy and Stravinsky, he writes, “gave new life to the Western tradition while seeming to undermine its very foundations.” More surprisingly, Rosen worries that our current rage for rediscovering obscure composers and authors might swamp the canon with minor figures. “The history of music begins to collapse under the strain of too many works.” We simply “cannot look at every picture, read every book; critical evaluation is not so much ideological as practical. .  .  . Some of the past has to be suppressed for the rest to become visible.” He also points out, however, that to appreciate new music and literature, one usually needs to be exposed to it regularly: Much that initially sounds rebarbative or is read with difficulty will release its beauty and pleasure only over time.

In several essays Rosen emphasizes how much of our older serious music was never meant to be presented in a concert hall. Most of the early keyboard repertoire was intended for private or semiprivate delectation. “Only two of Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas were played in Vienna in public during his lifetime.” Similarly, “Few members of the musical public today know that if we wish to experience Schubert’s song cycles as Schubert’s contemporaries would have heard them, we must imagine them as being sung to a few friends.” Certainly the deepest pleasure of music derives from an engagement with its making, by working through a printed score. One might argue that Bach’s “Art of Fugue” gives more satisfaction to those who play it than to those who hear it. As Rosen stresses, up until the 20th century, many people in a concert audience would have learned a musical instrument, usually the piano, and thus might have already played the program on their own. Even symphonies were widely available in piano reductions for four hands. Such listeners were consequently grounded in an active understanding of the score. Alas, “learning to sing and learning to play the piano have been supplanted today by collecting records.” In short, a once-informed audience has gradually been displaced by those who fetishize virtuoso performances but don’t actually understand or fully appreciate the music. For Rosen, greater knowledge always brings greater pleasure. Consider: I once heard the elderly Arthur Rubinstein play a concert in Marseille. Many conservatory students were there, clutching pocket scores as they made their way to the cheap seats in the upper balconies. Early in the

program, when Rubinstein was perhaps 20 seconds into a Chopin ballade, a youthful voice suddenly and loudly shouted out: “Plus vite” — “Faster.” Discourteous, yes, and Rubinstein never faltered or sped up. But that cheeky student was engaged with the music far more than the gently dozing audience. Throughout “Freedom and the Arts,” Rosen stresses that a full appreciation of the arts requires “a juggling act that keeps the nostalgia of the past and the exigencies of the present in balance.” Take opera. All too often, he notes, contemporary opera productions misrepresent Mozart or Wagner by egregiously, often outrageously, modernizing the action and setting, usually in an effort to generate publicity or buzz. Nowadays, even the singers are upstaged by the set designer. “Rethinking the entire work to give it a novel meaning undreamt of before is the easier and cheaper route, but only speciously creative,” Rosen says. Instead, one needs to respect an opera’s “historical integrity and authority without necessarily insisting upon a routine repetition of the realizations of the past.” What we require is less attention to gimcrackery, and “new approaches that are sensitive to every detail of the music and respect the logic and sense of the dramatic action.” Seldom does a book of essays so unashamedly champion study and scholarship as does “Freedom and the Arts.” Rosen buys expensive Oxford editions of the works of philosopher Francis Bacon; he enjoys (and sometimes critiques) the much-admired Pleiade editions of the French classics. Annotations, historical commentary and textual variants aren’t just clutter, he reminds us; they provide context: Serious editions lessen the alienness of older masterpieces, allow us to “reposition” them in their time and show us that even the greatest work “did not spring into the world a fullgrown classic.” Let me end by pointing out that Rosen practices what he preaches: When discussing pieces of music in “Freedom and the Arts,” he frequently illustrates his arguments by reproducing passages from their scores. He quotes poetry in French and German, but he does provide translations (often his own). In short, he expects his readership to be as cultivated as he is. It is a great compliment, as well as a shrewd pedagogical device. One finishes any book by Charles Rosen intellectually reenergized, eager to become a deeper reader, a more attentive museumgoer, a better listener. Lupine savagery in ‘The Werewolf of Paris,’ by Guy Endore • • •

by Michael Dirda Aug. 9, 2012 Read Later

First published in 1933 and out of print for the past 40 years (except for a handsome limited edition from Centipede Press), Guy Endore’s “The Werewolf of Paris” may finally be coming into its own. Like those other horror classics, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” this notorious novel doesn’t just aim for rawhead-and-bloody-bones gruesomeness. Instead, it raises all sorts of wholly modern questions about personal responsibility and the intricate relationship between sex and violence. It covers every aspect of human bestiality, whether manifested in family feuds, warfare, political revolution, clerical pedophilia, incest, cannibalism, sado-masochistic sexual practices, miscarriages of justice, or the callous abuse of the demented. There’s an old Latin tag

“Man is wolf to man” — and “The Werewolf of Paris” proves its universal truth. But don’t worry, horror fans: At the book’s center lurks a shape-shifting monster who rips and devours human flesh. The novel opens with a graduate student in Paris being disturbed in his work by a young woman visiting from America. Eliane soon compels the unnamed narrator to take her to all the hot spots, where she downs bottles of champagne and grows increasingly abandoned in her behavior. Finally, late at night at a restaurant near the Les Halles meat market, Eliane — feeling “hot” — strips down to her underwear and offers herself to anyone who will have her, eventually going off with a complete stranger. This and his own encounter that night with a prostitute lead the narrator and a new acquaintance into a discussion of sexual insatiability as evidence of “possession by the spirits of beasts” and by the spirit of the wolf in particular. “The word wolf is to be recognized in the Latin vulva, and in the word lupanar, a brothel, lupus being Latin for wolf. You know the Roman festival the Lupereales. It would correspond to our carnival and was characterized by a complete abandonment of morals.” As the narrator continues his walk home, he happens upon some trash collectors who have found a hand-written manuscript. He glances at its pages, and the words “lupanar” and “wolf” catch his attention. Written by a 19th-century hack named Aymar Galliez, the largely biographical document offers “an unsolicited defense” of Sgt. Bertrand Caillet at the latter’s court-martial in 1871. Galliez’s memoir begins when a young country girl named Josephine comes to live with the writer’s aunt. She is just 14, but she attracts the attention of the local priest, Father Pitamont, whose family has long been linked to wolfish savagery. During a violent thunderstorm, Pitamont rapes the girl, an act that “unleashes” something inside her, transforming the hitherto demure servant into a promiscuous slut. As the household maid says a few months later, “Everybody, simply everybody has had her.” When taken to task by her employer, Josephine replies: “I like it so, madame. Must I really stop? I’ve tried very hard not to do it, but I can’t stop myself.”

Nine months after the rape, a baby is born at midnight on Christmas Eve. Almost immediately, Josephine reverts to her previous innocent self, losing all interest in sex and focusing her attention wholly on little Bertrand. The child possesses great strength and vitality, gentle but unsettling brown eyes, hair on his palms, eyebrows that meet and the habit of howling wildly when people are about to die. Years pass. By now, most of the household has moved to the country, where Bertrand grows up. The boy is picky about his food, often refusing to eat cooked meals. He also suffers from strange nightmares. One day Bramond, the local forest ranger, discovers two lambs, both dead, one dismembered. “The last wolf sighted in this region had been slain over twenty years ago, so that the appearance of a wolf in this quarter of the departement was considered unusual to say the least.” More deaths occur. Bramond hunts the wolf, eventually glimpses it one twilight and takes a couple of shots but

seems, incredibly, to have missed. That night, he reflects on all that has happened and melts down his wife’s crucifix to make a silver bullet. I’ll stop right there. Much else occurs, some of it horribly gruesome, before the grown Bertrand makes his way back to Paris. When the Franco-Prussian War breaks out soon afterward, he promptly enlists in the national guard. As usual, during such crises, social norms tend to be ignored or turned upside down. As her war work, for example, an aristocratic young beauty named Sophie de Blumenberg serves food and drink for a few hours each night at a canteen frequented by soldiers. She is, of course, properly engaged to a handsome, high-minded nobleman who rather bores her. She is also, far less properly, half in love with easeful death, her dreams revealing a hunger for rough sex and violence. One night at the canteen, Sophie notices Bertrand, and he notices her. I’ll stop right there again — except to say that what follows might not be out of place in “The Story of O” or “Fifty Shades of Grey.” “Her body tensed and then seemed about to dissolve in liquid. . . . If only he would press harder. If only he would crush her. Tear her! Mutilate her!” That’s just the beginning of high-born Sophie’s transformation. Meanwhile, Galliez has come back to Paris, searching for Bertrand and discovering signs of his presence in the desecration of dead bodies, the dismemberment of a prostitute and several other vicious crimes. But in the days of the Siege of Paris, the Commune and the government’s eventual reprisals, when people were reduced to cooking rats and when street justice led to the execution of thousands, who’s going to get overly excited about the half-eaten corpse of a baby or a few missing body parts? Besides, is Bertrand really all that different, or any more culpable, than the murderous and morally flawed people all around him? Throughout his narrative, Endore repeatedly addresses such ethical questions, even as he speculates about inherited traits and propensities. Is Bertrand responsible for behavior he loathes but finds almost impossible to control? Does Sophie’s sexuality derive from the bizarre circumstances of her conception? Are the two young people victims or monsters? Or are they simply insane? In short, how much is this novel a variation on “The Bad Seed” and how much on “Psycho”? Perhaps its closest analogue may actually be still another classic about the savage demons inside us all, Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” However you interpret the rich ambiguities of “The Werewolf of Paris,” the book invokes the emotions we associate with tragedy: terror and pity. Yes, there are info-dumps summarizing the history of lycanthropy and long sections that seem to be little more than potted accounts of revolutionary violence. But Endore stresses how much we are all the playthings of dark impulses beyond our understanding. The insidiousness lies in the pleasure we find in surrendering to those impulses. For, it would seem, only when we let loose the beast within do we experience a secretly longed-for ecstasy.

Jacques Bonnet’s ‘Phantoms on the Bookshelves’

• • •

by Michael Dirda July 26, 2012 Read Later

In his affectionate introduction to Jacques Bonnet’s reflections on reading and collecting, novelist James Salter points out that “a private library of good size is an insolent form of riches.” Bonnet owns 40,000 books, which he reads, marks up and uses for his art-history and literary research — his is a working collection, not a museum of precious rarities. In this case, what’s really “insolent” is that Bonnet’s books are all shelved, all organized, all findable. Anyone with a serious personal library — that means, in Bonnet’s view, 20,000 or more volumes — recognizes that it’s easy to acquire books, but it’s hard to find a place to put them. My collection, for example, probably qualifies as “serious,” although at least two-thirds of what I’ve accumulated over the years currently resides in boxes, either in the basement or in a storage unit. Long ago, Samuel Johnson spoke of turning over half a library to write one book. In my case, I sometimes turn over half my library just to find one book. When that MacArthur grant finally comes my way, I know precisely what I’m going to do with it. There will be miles of mahogany shelving, two long study tables and the best lighting that money can buy. In his breviary-like “Phantoms on the Bookshelves,” Bonnet includes chapters on “organizing the bookshelves” and “the practice of reading,” writes lovingly of his art monographs and catalogues, and offers plenty of anecdotes about his favorite authors and collectors. This is, however, no Gallic version of Nicholas Basbanes’s best-selling “A Gentle Madness” (recently reissued in paperback by Fine Books Press, $15.95), which presents in-depth profiles of bibliophiles and bibliomaniacs. Instead, Bonnet offers a personal ramble through his own library, coupled with chummy and sometimes idiosyncratic pensees about the literary life. For instance, Bonnet distinguishes between “collectors and manic readers.” Henry Folger, who gathered as many Shakespeare first folios as he could find, was a collector; Bonnet, by contrast, is a manic reader, one who grows attached to physical volumes, wants to hold them in his hand and keep them near. In his case, he also admits to “a certain methodical tendency” that drives him “to read all the works of a given writer, then all the books on him or her, then to move on to another writer, or all the books written on a certain subject, or the literature of a certain period, or country,” all the while discovering still other topics of interest. Serious collectors, in other words, focus their energies and cash, while manic readers tend to go wandering through a garden of constantly forking paths. In this speed-obsessed Internet age, Bonnet reiterates that “the important thing is not so much to read fast, as to read each book at the speed it deserves.” He notes that “to pick up a book in your hands and discover what it really contains is like conferring flesh and blood, in other words a density and thickness, that it will never lose again, to what was previously just a word.” To be away from his library, he says, is to feel “handicapped, as if I had been amputated of some vital limb.” Nonetheless, “to play its part properly, the library must be left behind from time to time, so that one can miss it and then gratefully rediscover it. From a distance, it becomes idealized, and helps one to bear the discomfort of travelling. It is waiting for us at home and is already being enriched with the things we are bringing back with us.”

Like many intellectuals, Bonnet scribbles in his books, “in pencil, but also with felt pens or ballpoints. In fact I find it impossible to read without something in my hand.” There are consequences for this intensive engagement with texts. “The tens of thousands of books with their underlinings and marginalia, which have absorbed a large proportion of the money I have earned in my working life, are therefore now of no commercial value.” Not that it matters, since Bonnet never sells any of them. “To lose one’s books,” he proclaims, “is to lose one’s past.” Bonnet likes to know what he paid for his books, especially for those bought secondhand, so he never erases the dealer’s penciled-in price. He notes the once-common phenomenon of searching for a certain volume for months or years, eventually finding it, and then, almost immediately, turning up a second or even a third copy. Art books, he stresses, should never be regarded as a substitute for a museum; they simply help educate our eye and aesthetic sense: “Without preparation, without apprenticeship, without reading, you don’t see anything when you visit an art gallery.” In this regard, Bonnet notes that when the Virgin Mary reportedly appeared to Pope Pius XII, the punctilious connoisseur Bernard Berenson “immediately asked the first question that would occur to an art historian: ‘And in what style?’ ” In general, Bonnet’s own style is pithy rather than expansive. He mentions many books, but usually just their titles. A few favorites stand out: Knut Hamsum’s “Pan,” the works of Fernando Pessoa, Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet” and the wonderfully titled and (unknown to me) novel “The Time Regulation Institute,” by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. Most of his anecdotes are comparably brief. He tells us that the novelist Pierre Louys spent his last years trying to prove that Moliere’s plays were actually written by Corneille. We learn that Gilbert Lely, the great authority on the Marquis de Sade, restricted his library to exactly 100 books: “Whenever he bought one book he jettisoned another.” Benjamin Constant’s “Adolphe” — a classic account of romantic disillusionment — inspired at least four later novels written from the abused Ellenore’s point of view. Bonnet aptly remarks that autobiographies are “no more than a pernicious variant of romantic fiction.” But what about the impact of the technological revolution of the past 25 years? Bonnet concedes that the Internet is an “infinite source of information,” yet it “does not have for me the same magical status as my library.” The physical always possesses an aura, a holy mana, that the digital can only aspire to. When he is surrounded by his books, Bonnet confesses that he feels snug and selfcontained, like Captain Nemo on the Nautilus. As for e-book readers, he doesn’t even give them a passing glance, since “Phantoms on the Bookshelves” was first published in France in 2008. In case you were wondering about Bonnet’s odd title, he explains that a phantom, in French, is a ghost, but it is also the card that librarians leave to mark the place where a volume has been removed from a bookcase. A library is thus a realm where the dead live again, but also the domain of incomplete plenitude: There are always gaps needing to be filled, and desire never ends. Immensely enjoyable, “Phantoms on the Bookshelves” pays concise tribute to the pleasures and rewards of — to borrow James Salter’s phrase — “a life built around reading.”

Gore Vidal dies; imperious gadfly and prolific, graceful writer was 86 • • •

by Michael Dirda Aug. 1, 2012 Read Later

Gore Vidal, 86, a celebrated writer, cultural gadfly and occasional political candidate, died of pneumonia Tuesday at his Hollywood Hills home, according to a nephew. Known for his urbanity and wit — “Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little” — Vidal’s literary career spanned more than 60 years, and he once said that he hoped to be remembered as “the person who wrote the best sentences of his time.” He was an astonishingly versatile man of letters and nearly the last major writer of the modern era to have served in World War II. Having resolved at age 20 to live by his pen, Vidal produced plays for television and Broadway, including the classic political drama “The Best Man”; helped script such movies as “Ben-Hur,” the 1959 epic starring Charlton Heston; and gained notoriety for the campy novel “Myra Breckinridge,” about a transsexual film enthusiast. Vidal also won plaudits from scholars, critics and ordinary readers for historical novels such as the best-selling “Julian,” “Burr” and “Lincoln,” and English critic Jonathan Keates called him “the 20th century's finest essayist.” “United States,” which gathers Vidal’s essays on art, politics and himself, received the 1993 National Book Award. In print or on television — he was a frequent talk-show guest — the worldly Vidal provoked controversy with his laissez-faire attitude toward every sort of sexuality, his well-reasoned disgust with American imperialism and his sophisticated cynicism about love, religion, patriotism and other sacred cows. Vidal was born Oct. 3, 1925, at West Point, N.Y., where his father, Eugene Vidal, was teaching aeronautics at the military academy. His mother, Nina, was the socialite daughter of Sen. T.P. Gore of Oklahoma. Christened Eugene Luther Gore Vidal, the writer later lopped off the first two names “for political as well as for aesthetic reasons.” He said that “this often has been gleefully interpreted as a rejection of my father, whom I liked, in order to become my mother, whom I disliked.” In fact, so great was his antagonism toward his mother that Vidal stopped seeing her during the last 25 years of her life. He hero-worshipped his father, a former Olympic athlete in the decathlon. Young Vidal spent much of his childhood in Washington and was particularly attached to his grandfather. The senator was blind, so the boy spent many hours reading to him aloud, thus inaugurating his lifelong passion for learning and books. In his childhood, Vidal loved L. Frank Baum’s stories about Oz, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan adventures, the fantasies of E. Nesbit, and every sort of history: “The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of Tales from Livy that I’d found in my

grandfather’s library.” By the age of 14, he wrote, “I wanted to know the entire history of the entire world.” Vidal attended St. Albans School, where he fell in love with a fellow student named Jimmie Trimble, who was killed in combat on Iwo Jima during World War II. In his memoirs “Palimpsest” (1995) and “Point to Point Navigation” (2006), Vidal makes clear that this youthful passion, cut short by Trimble’s death, marked his entire life: He never truly loved anyone again, although he would enjoy hundreds of sexual encounters, most of them with anonymous strangers, in which he took pleasure but, as he repeatedly insisted, never gave any except inadvertently.

Although Vidal maintained a more than 50-year partnership with his companion Howard Austen, he constantly underscored that the secret of its longevity was “no sex.” Austen died in 2003. As a teenager, Vidal was sent to boarding school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, from which he graduated in 1943. Rather than go on to Harvard, the 18-year-old enlisted in the Army, serving as first mate on a small supply ship in the Aleutians. That experience inspired his widely praised first novel, “Williwaw,” which appeared in 1946 when the author was 20. After he was discharged from the Army, Vidal decided to bag college and live in New York as a full-time writer. Before long, he became an intimate confidant of diarist Anais Nin, a friend of playwright Tennessee Williams and the author of two more novels, including “The City and the Pillar” (1948), an account of two all-American boys and what was — until then — “the love that dare not speak its name.” Although that book is viewed as a pioneering work of gay literature, its casual acceptance of homosexual impulses offended some critics — and Vidal's subsequent seven novels went unnoticed by Time magazine, Newsweek and the New York Times. As a result, Vidal later wrote: “I was carefully erased from the glittering history of American Literature. . . . Twenty years ago, there was an academic study of the five hundred — or was it five thousand? — truly great American novelists since the Second War. I was not of their company. I had slid down the page to a footnote.” Because most of his fiction of the 1950s — even now admired works such as “Messiah” (1954), the study of a religious cult — proved commercially lackluster, Vidal decided to earn his living largely by writing TV dramas, Broadway plays and movie scripts. He cranked out three mysteries under the pen name Edgar Box, starting with “Death in the Fifth Position” (1952). With the money from the commercial writing, Vidal paid the mortgage on a grandly pillared Greek-revival manse called Edgewater, located on the banks of the Hudson River near Rhinecliff, N.Y. There, he threw parties attended by rising literary notables such as Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer, critics Lionel and Diana Trilling, and movie stars Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman (who became his close friends). Over time, the writer’s circle of high-profile acquaintances included John F. Kennedy and Britain’s Princess Margaret, although he was closer to composer and writer Paul Bowles and beat legend

Jack Kerouac. In fact, Vidal and Kerouac were physically drawn to each other. While checking into the Chelsea Hotel for a tryst, they signed their real names, and Vidal told the bemused clerk that that page of the hotel registry would one day become famous. Although Vidal enjoyed a varied social and sexual life, he nonetheless worked hard. On Broadway he hit pay dirt with “Visit to a Small Planet” (1957), in which an alien named Kreton lands on Earth and announces that human beings are his hobby. It deftly skewers contemporary mores and Cold War anxieties.

The even more highly regarded political drama “The Best Man” (1960), which was nominated for a Tony Award as best play, presented a behind-the-scenes look at the wheeling and dealing between two men competing for the Democratic presidential nomination. Both plays were made into films, the first starring Jerry Lewis; the second, Henry Fonda and Cliff Robertson. Ah, Hollywood! As Vidal announced in the opening sentence of his memoir “Point to Point Navigation”: “As I now move, graciously, I hope, toward the door marked Exit, it occurs to me that the only thing I ever really liked to do was go to the movies.” His passion for the films of the 1930s, in particular “The Mummy” and “The Prince and the Pauper,” shaped his imagination, as did some of the stars: “Margaret Sullavan,” he once wrote, “never simply kicked the bucket. She made speeches, as she lay dying; and she was so incredibly noble that she made you feel like an absolute twerp for continuing to live out your petty life after she’d ridden on ahead, to the accompaniment of the third movement of Brahms’s First Symphony.” As a screenwriter in the 1950s and occasionally afterward, Vidal contributed to many films, often without screen credit. He wrote a teleplay that provided the inspiration for “The Left-Handed Gun” (with Paul Newman as Billy the Kid); he was called in to doctor “Ben-Hur” (and tweaked the script to suggest a homosexual subtext to explain the relationship between the epic’s hero and his enemy Messala); and he worked with Tennessee Williams on the hothouse melodrama “Suddenly, Last Summer” (featuring a troubled Elizabeth Taylor and an even more troubled Montgomery Clift). In his later years, Vidal appeared with some frequency in films, notably Federico Fellini’s “Roma” (1972), in which he played himself. By the early 1960s, after 10 years of writing plays and movie scripts, the not yet 40-year-old Vidal achieved his goal of financial independence. He had made his own way, and much of the work had been fairly honorable. As he noted with his usual astringency: “To be truly commercial is to do well that which should not be done at all.” For the next three decades, Vidal spent much of his life in Italy. In Rome’s libraries, he researched a novel about the emperor Julian, which rose to the top of the best-seller list and relaunched his moribund career as a novelist.

In general, the older Vidal published three kinds of fiction: historical novels set in the ancient world, such as “Julian” and “Creation” (which features Socrates, Zoroaster, the Buddha and Confucius); campy fantasies that mocked American prejudices and conventionalities, the most famous of which is “Myra Breckinridge” (1968), a send-up of B-movies, sexual politics and California; and the so-called American Chronicle, a series of seven novels — the best known are “Burr” (1973) and “Lincoln” (1984) — detailing the secret political history of the United States. “To make the past live,” Vidal said, “is a lovely task.” Vidal also grew more prominent as a pundit, on TV and in the pages of the New York Review of Books and other periodicals. Although he had written essays and reviews since the 1950s, Vidal increasingly cast himself as a modern-day Voltaire, commenting on the nation's follies with waspish asperity and wit. “There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise,” he said.

In print or onscreen, Vidal could be guaranteed to say something entertainingly outrageous about American imperialism or contemporary sexual mores. Again and again, he insisted that everyone is really bisexual: “There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo- or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.” Everything and anything could be skewered with stiletto-like finesse, and nothing was sacred: Vidal maintained that various prominent Jewish intellectuals acted as an Israeli fifth column, argued that the family was largely a means of keeping workers in their exploited place and concluded that in American democracy, “numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.” During the heated days of the national conventions of 1968, Vidal squared off on the issue of freedom of speech with conservative pundit William Buckley. The pair ended up losing their cool and trading insults — “Crypto-Nazi,” Vidal said. “You queer,” Buckley shot back. Over the years, Vidal mockingly dismissed many of his rivals, including Truman Capote, whom he loathed, and John Updike, as well as favorites of the academy such as John Barth, William Gass and Thomas Pynchon. Vidal collected the best of his discursive prose in “United States” (1993), a mammoth volume of literary essays, political polemics and autobiographical reminiscences for which he received the National Book Award. It included a scandalously frank account of the Kennedys entitled “The Holy Family” and a series of irreverent takes on U.S. presidents, including John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. When scholars squawked, Vidal proved that he had done his homework and gleefully showed up one academic after another. But if politics was in Vidal's view always corrupt, it grew even more so after World War II. “I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning,” he said. Before air conditioning, “the politicians would abandon Washington in the summer; now they stay around all through the year, making mischief.”

Vidal's best essays were not his attacks but his appreciations. For all his elegance, the multitalented writer clearly regarded himself as something of an old-fashioned bookman, believing that accurate and entertaining description should be the main function of a critic. He also believed in rediscovering the unfashionable. Over the years, he produced exemplary appraisals — composed in ballpoint pen on yellow legal pads — of dozens of once-undervalued writers, such as Dawn Powell, Italo Calvino, William Dean Howells, Logan Pearsall Smith, Paul Bowles, Thomas Love Peacock, Louis Auchincloss, Sinclair Lewis and Frederic Prokosch. More often than not, Vidal had read their complete works. That some of those writers continued to be neglected only supported one of his laments: The age of the reader is passing, and we are living through its twilight's last gleaming. Although Vidal found success as a writer and intellectual, he failed in his attempts to gain political office. He twice ran unsuccessfully in elections, campaigning for Congress in 1960 when he lived at Edgewater and then for the Senate in 1982 when he had taken a residence in California. Yet politics had been in his blood since childhood: Through his father and grandfather, he had known politicians as powerful as Franklin Roosevelt and as colorful as Louisiana governor Huey Long. His mother’s second husband, Hugh D. Auchincloss, was the stepfather to Jacqueline Kennedy. He could count Jimmy Carter and Al Gore as distant cousins. In his later years, Vidal grew even more vehement in his political convictions, speaking out against American imperialism after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and denouncing the invasion of Iraq (see his 2002 book “Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta”). Vidal once pointed out that his literary genealogy included “Petronius, Juvenal, Apuleius — then Shakespeare — then Peacock, Meredith, James, Proust.” Like those cultivated and witty writers, Vidal cast a cold eye on the society of his time and resolutely upheld the values of urbanity and pleasure against the onslaughts of the barbarian, the puritan and the philistine. “Always a godfather, never a god,” he quipped at a christening. Michael Frayn triumphs with ‘Skios,’ a madcap romantic comedy • • •

by Michael Dirda July 19, 2012 Read Later

Do you remember Michael Frayn’s madcap play-within-a-play “Noises Off”? Have you read his satire “Towards the End of the Morning” (a.k.a. “Against Entropy”), frequently called the funniest send-up of journalism since Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop”? Are you, perhaps even now, searching for the perfect comic novel for the beach, the hammock or some lazy summer weekend? Say “yes” to any of these questions and you should immediately head for your bookstore to buy a copy of Frayn’s new book, “Skios,” a romantic comedy constructed with the quick cutting and pace of a Marx Brothers movie. Neatly managing to preserve the ancient unities of time, place and

action, the novel takes place entirely on the blissful Greek isle of Skios and focuses on the increasingly hilarious consequences of multiple cases of mistaken identity. The plot itself is a symphonic elaboration of Saki’s “The Schartz-Metterklume Method.” In that famous short story, a bored London socialite, mistaken for a governess, decides to play the part to the hilt, with hilarious consequences (culminating in little children acting out the rape of the Sabine women). In “Skios” the coolly beautiful Nikki Hook is the personal assistant of Mrs. Fred Toppler of the internationally renowned Fred Toppler Foundation, this last being something like an Aspen Institute of the Mediterranean, nobly dedicated to wisdom and civilization. Central to the foundation’s yearly calendar is the Great European House Party, in which well-to-do people — mainly Americans — hobnob with the island’s “embedded,” intellectuals, renowned figures such as Swedish theologian Alf Persson and V.J.D. Chaudhury, “the great authority on comparative underdevelopment.” During the House Party, the days are just packed. Guests spend time “in seminars studying Minoan cooking and early Christian meditation techniques” or “in classes watching demonstrations of traditional Macedonian dancing and late medieval flower arrangement.” These cultural labors are interspersed with “swims and siestas, with civilized conversation over breakfast and midmorning coffee, over prelunch drinks, lunch, and postlunch coffee, over afternoon tea and snacks” and, of course “further spiritual refreshment over dinner and various pre- and postdinner drinks.” Still, the absolute acme of each House Party is the Fred Toppler Lecture, and this year Nikki has chosen the speaker. Dr. Norman Wilfred will address guests and distinguished visitors on “Innovation and Governance: The Promise of Scientometrics.” Nikki, who dreams of one day heading up the foundation herself, is more than a little worried. There is something about the word “promise” that has recently made her heart sink, but she heads for the airport with her usual chipper smile and cool demeanor and discreetly blonded hair. Meanwhile, the 50ish, fat and balding Dr. Wilfred is idly daydreaming about romantic adventure on Skios, imagining a cool young woman with discreetly blonded hair in her late 30s. As it happens, though, another man is indulging in similar thoughts. Oliver Fox is around 40, with a charming lopsided smile and a mop of light blond hair he occasionally flicks out of his eyes. A charming liar, he has arrived in Skios to hook up with Georgie, a 30-something woman he sweet-talked into spending a week with him at an island villa, a rendezvous that she has carefully hidden from her boyfriend, who is off sailing with his buddies. But as both Dr. Wilfred and Oliver stand waiting for their bags — which, as it happens, look exactly alike — all their intended plans and daydreams are about to veer onto another course. Without going into details, Oliver, on the spur of the moment, pretends to be Dr. Wilfred and hurries away with Nikki, even as the master of “scientometrics” finds himself mistaken for Oliver and taken by taxi to the elegant island love nest. Meanwhile — in such novels, there is always a meanwhile — Georgie arrives a day before she’s expected and hurries to the villa, where she excitedly crawls into bed with the man she thinks is Oliver, even as the real Oliver, making his way to Nikki’s bungalow, gets lost and ends up in the bedroom of no less than Mrs. Fred Toppler — the former dancer Bahama LeStarr — who is entertaining the sinister Mr. Vassilis Papadopoulou.

By this point, Frayn’s whizbang plot is just getting started. I haven’t mentioned the look-alike taxi drivers Spiros and Stavros, the amazing business of three switched suitcases, the excavations going on for a supposed Olympic-sized swimming pool, the mysterious crate of “Marine diesel spares” or the fact that Nikki and Georgie were at school together. Oh, yes, and the reappearance of the goddess Athena. From time to time, Frayn, putting on his philosopher’s hat, interrupts his neatly orchestrated zaniness to reflect a bit on the nature of personal identity and the limits of determinism. As “Skios” itself proves, sometimes what is supposed to happen isn’t necessarily what does happen. To my mind, Frayn slightly hurries through the finale of his book, but even then he certainly doesn’t scant the farcical fireworks. This is one of the most amusingly complicated novels since David Lodge’s “Small World.” While the word “Skios” suggests the Greek root for “knowledge” or “knowing,” most of the characters in Frayn’s novel don’t have a clue about what’s going on. No matter. By page 2, readers will know without any doubt that they are in for a wonderful time. “Coquilles, Calva & Creme: Exploring France’s Culinary Heritage — a Love Affair with Real French Food,” by G.Y. Dryansky • • •

by Michael Dirda July 13, 2012 Read Later

This Saturday, July 14, is France’s national day of celebration, the equivalent of our Fourth of July. In times past, it was also the unofficial start of summer vacation, back when civilized nations mandated six weeks off to eat, drink and relax. Here, in today’s Washington, many of us are lucky to be away from work for six days in a row. For those who long for that French holiday they’re never likely to get, at least not this year, “Coquilles, Calva & Creme,” by G.Y. Dryansky with Joanne Dryansky, will be sheer torture. I mean that in the best sense. Here is a catalogue of refined pleasure, a chronicle of fabulous restaurants and famous acquaintances, a gastronomic memoir focused on the heritage of “real French food.” In these pages, the Dryanskys travel everywhere, dine well and drink heartily, hobnob with aristocrats and members of the Universal Cassoulet Academy. They also periodically bewail the rise of exquisite food — the tiny portion beautifully presented — and the cult of the celebrity philosopher-chef. For most of us, though, “Coquilles, Calva & Creme” is largely a book to dream over, since we will never eat ortolans — those tiny birds are now protected by law — or devour fresh black truffles, or sip a 19th-century wine (seldom any good), or spend the weekend at the Mouton estate with Baron Philippe de Rothschild.

Gerry Dryansky and his wife, Joanne, traveled to Paris in the early 1960s, and, after a brief stint at the Herald Tribune, he landed a job covering fashion for Women’s Wear Daily. In later years, he became the European correspondent for Conde Nast Traveler. These, it’s hardly worth saying, are jobs that many of us would kill for. In explaining how he learned about food, Dryansky writes: “Think about what it was like to have an expense account that required me to keep in good contact, across the best tables in Paris, with the fashion makers and their business partners — and added to that, to be able to discover the newest, the best restaurants in town, as part of reporting about the city to guide the New York fashion world.” Dryansky recalls high-living days of lunches at Maxim’s and the Brasserie Lipp — where Aristotle and Jackie Onassis might drop in for a bite — and long dinners with Coco Chanel and chats with the reclusive Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, in both senses, Pierre Berge. He evokes, too, the nightlife of the era: “At Regine’s .  .  . you’d find Francoise Sagan alone with a scotch at her table in the entry, while deep inside, Catherine Deneuve, sitting with David Bailey, would be playing with her long blonde hair. A group of Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, among them Claude Chabrol and Jane Fonda’s onetime husband Roger Vadim, would hang out at the bar chez Castel, making wry comments about the young people .  .  . King Hassan of Morocco’s brother, Moulay Abdallah, spent a lot of time at Castel’s, when he was in Paris, but Jean Castel refused to let the king in. His Royal Highness arrived at the door with his bodyguards and wanted them to enter with him. Jean refused, unless they left their guns in the car. The king was not amused, and left.”

Dryansky also recalls a weekend spent with Rothschild and his wife, Pauline, back when the couple “would not only invite persons they liked or admired to stay at Mouton, the invitation sometimes came, for those in other countries and less financially privileged, accompanied by plane tickets.” He notes that “Philippe would have his breakfast in bed last until late morning, while he translated Elizabethan poetry into French. Four soft-boiled eggs would arrive on his tray, and he would open each of them and eat the one that was cooked closest to his liking.” In this same chapter, Dryansky recounts a dinner-table conversation between Rothschild and the wine authority Alexis Lichine: “ ‘I drank the Mouton ’68 lately,’ [Lichine] said. ‘Felt enormous respect for it.’ “ ‘Really?’ Philippe said, raising an eyebrow. ‘A mediocre year to say the least. The grapes were all saturated with rain. It was a terrible August.’ “ ‘I meant the 1868, Philippe,’ Lichine replied.” Dryanksy loves such stories. He once entered a restaurant’s single bathroom just after it was vacated by the Duchess of Windsor — and he graphically describes what he discovered. He reminds us that former French president Francois Mitterand ate prohibited ortolans as his last meal

when he was dying of cancer. Because she slept at the Ritz Hotel rather in her Paris apartment, Coco Chanel was able to avoid paying French taxes. In a chapter about the great chefs of France’s past, Dryansky recalls that Auguste Escoffier worked for Cesar Ritz and that “one of his last accomplishments was training a pastry chef who would abandon the trade. His name was Ho Chi Minh.” More than once, Dryansky comes off as a bit of a snob: When describing the curry at La Coupole, he writes that it was “nothing like what I’d had staying on a houseboat that came with a cook on Lake Dal, in Srinagar when Kashmir was heaven on earth, instead of the opposite as it is now.” Off and on throughout these pages, Dryansky critiques star chefs, lambastes “molecular cooking” as transforming food into edible “foam” and regrets the cult of restaurants as theaters and meals as performances. He prefers the easygoing James Beard to the persnickety Julia Child and he assails the wine authority Robert Parker as favoring harsh, overly alcoholic vintages. For the second half of “Coquilles, Calva & Creme” Dryansky and his wife travel around France, visiting centers of regional cuisine. They enjoy seafood in Normandy, eat doves in Basque country and bouillabaisse in Marseille, dine on calves brains in Lyon (where a tradition exists of great women cooks) and savor cassoulet in Carcassonne. Occasionally, they transcribe favorite recipes for dishes such as choucroute garnie and blanquette de veau. While this “tour de France” in dozens of meals is an epicure’s delight, it is also slightly repetitive — you might want to space the chapters out rather than gorge on one right after another. In general, Dryansky writes entertainingly, without rising to the sensual prose poetry of M.F.K. Fisher or the high-energy zing of Anthony Bourdain. I suspect that the book was constructed out of magazine articles, since several anecdotes and quotations are repeated more than once (e.g., Christian Millau’s comment on contemporary cooking: “It all comes down to two things, the media and the money.”). Occasionally, Dryanksy’s sentences sound slightly awkward, as if he had transcribed them from French: “The last time we were here, we’d come on a reportage for Bon Appetit.” Still, if you’re a Francophile, oenophile or gourmet, and you’re stuck here in D.C. this Quatorze Juillet weekend, you can certainly find an escape to a better world in “Coquille, Calva & Creme.” There’s an old saying to describe earthly bliss: To live like God himself in France. Dryansky should know. Book World: ‘Guy Vernon,’ by John Townsend Trowbridge, a witty narrative poem • • •

by Michael Dirda July 5, 2012 Read Later

Now and then, poets are properly valued or their genius recognized only long after their deaths. Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickinson are just the two most famous instances. Alas, their rough contemporary, John Townsend Trowbridge (1827-1916), isn’t likely to join them in the pantheon of the truly great. As poet and critic William Logan emphasizes, Trowbridge was simply a

“literary odd-job man” who turned his hand “to whatever a hand can be turned to,” producing “gouts of poems, a string of plays, and at least forty novels.” But sometimes, not often, but sometimes, the merely competent writer will inexplicably produce a masterpiece. Daniel Keyes, an otherwise undistinguished science-fiction author, will live forever because of one brilliant, heartbreaking short story: “Flowers for Algernon.” John William Burgon is immortal for a single line from his poem “Petra”: “A rose-red city half as old as time.” And now Trowbridge, the forgotten American hack, will be read again because of this rediscovered “novelette in verse,” one of the wittiest and most winning narrative poems since its great precursors, Pope’s “Rape of the Lock” and Byron’s “Don Juan.” “Guy Vernon” really is what its champion William Logan claims: a forgotten — if minor — masterpiece. The action largely takes place in the years just before the Civil War. A wealthy Louisiana plantation owner, on a trip North, woos and wins a beautiful young Brooklyn woman 20 years his junior. However, Guy Vernon and his new wife, Florinda, both carry secrets within their breasts. Guy’s is somehow associated with his foppish “high-yellow” servant Sam, usually called Saturn because of all his rings. Florinda’s secret is less mysterious: Before she married Vernon, she had been in love with a young writer, a journalist and would-be poet named Rob Lorne. Even in his name, as Logan points out, the poor man is “twice lorn.” Early on in their marriage, the seemingly happy newlyweds visit Cuba: . . . that rich land of tropic fruit and tree, Fair Island of the orange and banana, And endless summer in a sapphire sea! Land of the cocoa and mahogany, Voluptuous, balmy nights and wondrous stars, Of Creole beauties and the best cigars. Note the lilting, light-verse rhythm and the air of the tongue-in-cheek. “Guy Vernon” is many things — a mystery story, a social satire, the history of a romantic triangle — but it is, above all, an example of sustained wit and wordplay. “The muse should be a trifle too familiar / Than pompous, adipose, and atrabiliar.” In Cuba, Vernon grows strangely moody, then announces, without explanation, that he must hurry back to his plantation, accompanied only by Saturn. Florinda is immediately booked for a passage to New York, where she is to await his return. By now, she is doubly unhappy, not only because her husband has suddenly abandoned her but also because she has glimpsed the handsome Rob Lorne on the streets of Havana. Still, once alone on the high seas, she is at least safe from temptation. The first night out from port, the young beauty dines at the captain’s table:

Florinda! Pale but lovely still, enrapt in The delicate discussion of cold chicken And some engaging topic with the Captain. Just then, amid loud talk and teacups clicking, Over the wing she happened to be picking She looked — and there was Lorne, quite dazed and pallid, Staring at her across a dish of salad. “Picking chicken”? “Pallid . . . across a dish of salad”? This could be a scene out of a screwball comedy. Rob — himself fleeing Havana because of his unexpected glimpse of Florinda — had been trying to bury himself in work and, while cranking out “Newspaper sketches, stories, correspondence, he, / Struggled with his hotel bills and despondency.” (Note Trowbridge’s ingenuity in the zestful rhyming of “correspondence, he” with “despondency.”) Thrown together on shipboard, the young people play risky games with their feelings for each other. “Oh dear, we must not sit here as we do, And talk together! Rob, it isn’t right!” But still they talked together, day and night. Finally back in Brooklyn, Florinda waits to hear from her husband, while weeks go by without a word. She is convinced that Saturn holds some nefarious power over his master. But what could it be? There were those rumors of odd circumstances surrounding Vernon’s birth .  .  . Meanwhile, New York society is all atwitter over Guy Vernon’s unexplained absence. Has the wealthy middle-aged Southerner abandoned his new wife? Was she discovered in the arms of a lover? That young journalist Lorne does seem awfully attentive. And then Vernon returns as suddenly as he had disappeared: Public opinion, having had satiety Of adverse gossip, now began to waver. Vernon had come! And once more Good Society Inclined to take Florinda into favor.

Those who had wronged her graciously forgave her And, having spread the scandal, or received it, Loudly declared that they had not believed it. Similar passages — in which Trowbridge lambastes the unctuous, hypocritical ways of New York’s upper crust — show him at his most buoyantly coruscating: Society is full of politic, Smooth people, courteous, shunning all dissension, Who, should they find even Judas in their clique, Well dressed, would treat him wit

h polite attention

And hardly think it worth the while to mention That most unfortunate misunderstanding He is reported to have had a hand in. Yet what, finally, is Guy Vernon’s dark secret? And what will become of Florinda and Rob? Much more happens before the novelette reaches its appointed end on the battlefields of the Civil War. Logan’s excellent introduction to “Guy Vernon” cannot be bettered, except in one respect: Some readers may feel that he reveals too much of the plot and hints too broadly at the reason for Vernon’s strange behavior. I suggest plunging directly into this tale of sexual intrigue, race and melodrama. There’s nothing particularly difficult about the poem, especially since detailed endnotes explain contemporary terms and allusions. Afterward, one should certainly go back to Logan’s informative essay and learn more about Trowbridge, the textual history of “Guy Vernon,” the intricacies of its stanza form (rhyme royal — the same used by Auden in his exuberant “Letter to Lord Byron”) and much else. Oh, yes, one last thing: The University of Minnesota Press has produced an extremely handsome trade paperback, pleasing in every way. You may never have thought you wanted to read another 19th-century narrative poem after enduring “Hiawatha” in 11th grade, but give “Guy Vernon” a try. It’s a delicious and civilized treat. Book World: In Dave Eggers’s ‘Hologram for the King,’ American dream is deferred • • •

by Michael Dirda June 28, 2012 Read Later

Let us imagine that this novel — about a divorced, middle-aged business consultant trying to save himself from bankruptcy by landing an Internet technology contract with Saudi Arabia — had been written by someone not named Dave Eggers. Most readers, I suspect, would judge it a pleasant evening’s entertainment, easy and enjoyable to read, somewhat familiar in theme. Certainly 54year-old Alan Clay seems yet another in a long line of defeated, messed-up American losers, hoping against hope for a bailout or even for some kind of redemption. In years past, Alan was married to Ruby, an abrasive if good-looking activist who wants, in her loud, unpleasant way, to save the world. (Her ideal mate, Alan later decides, would have been Aristotle Onassis or George Soros.) Back then he worked as an executive at Schwinn, the longclassic bicycle manufacturer. But Alan was part of the team that decided it would be cheaper to build bikes in China instead of the United States. Unfortunately, once the Chinese learned how to produce a solid product, they undercut the American price point and put Schwinn out of business. Since then, Alan has lurched from one misjudged business venture to another, gotten divorced, and is now facing utter ruin: “He had moved from Schwinn to Huffy to Frontier Manufacturing Partners to Alan Clay Consulting to sitting at home watching DVDs of the Red Sox winning the Series in ’04 and ’07. The game when they hit four consecutive home runs against the Yankees. April 22, 2007. He’d watched those four and a half minutes a hundred times and each viewing brought him something like joy. A sense of rightness, of order. It was a victory that could never be taken away.” Alan yearns for such a victory himself, recalling with bitter nostalgia a time when he was “selling actual objects to actual people.” Alas, the America of foundries and factories, of mills and looms, seems to have vanished. Even when trying to establish his own premium, Made-in-America bicycle company, Alan finds himself dismissed as a relict of the past. “Some of the bank people were so young they’d never seen a business proposal suggesting manufacturing things in the state of Massachusetts. They thought they’d unearthed some ancient shaman, full of clues to a forgotten world.” But now, Alan is here, in Saudi Arabia with three young techies from Reliant Corp., convinced that he’s found the answer to his financial woes. In King Abdullah Economic City — a bustling town of the future, still largely in the planning stage — “he and his team would set up a holographic teleconference system and would wait to present it to King Abdullah himself. If Abdullah was impressed, he would award the IT contract for the entire city to Reliant, and Alan’s commission, in the mid-six figures, would fix everything that ailed him.” The epigraph to “A Hologram for the King” comes from Samuel Beckett: “It is not every day we are needed.” And so, like the tramps in “Waiting for Godot,” Alan and his rather colorless team wait and wait and wait for the king’s visit. They sprawl under a plastic tent next to one of the three completed buildings of King Abdullah Economic City and wait. They are, in effect, caught up in a Saudi version of Beckett’s theater of the absurd.

Most of the action of the novel concerns Alan’s search for connection. He writes abortive letter after letter to his beloved daughter Kit, whose college tuition he can no longer afford to pay. He enjoys wisecracking with an on-call driver named Yousef, attends a bacchanal at the Danish Embassy, worries about a lump on his neck — is it cancer? — as the cause of persistent clumsiness, and tentatively embarks on relationships with two women. As time goes by, he recognizes that the entire country of Saudi Arabia “seemed to operate on two levels, the official and the actual.” Consequently, there are episodes that suggest not just the absurd but also the vaguely Kafkaesque, as when Alan stumbles into a hidden world on the third floor of an unfinished apartment building. Instances of drunken, even insane behavior, and the threat of murderous violence also punctuate the novel, interrupting its light comedy. Could we be heading for a shocking denouement a la Paul Bowles or Patricia Highsmith? Mostly, though, time passes; nothing happens. The reader soon adjusts to the leisurely, almost desultory pace of the story, to the relative austerity of the prose. Sometimes Eggers offers neat capsule vignettes: “At the exit they drove past a desertcolored Humvee, a machine gun mounted on top. A Saudi soldier was sitting next to it, in a beach chair, his feet soaking in an inflatable pool.” At other times Eggers grows sententious, perhaps deliberately in Alan’s letters to Kit, but apparently without irony in several vaguely philosophical passages: “Nature tells man that she will kill him anywhere. In flat land, she will kill him with tornadoes. Live near a coast and she will send tsunamis to erase centuries of work. Earthquakes mock all engineering, all notions of permanence. Nature wants to kill, kill, kill, laugh at our work, wipe itself clean.” Throughout “A Hologram for the King,” the narrative deftly counterpoints the present and Alan’s hopes for the future against his memories of the past. Alan recalls a friend who committed suicide, remembers the techniques of door-to-door salesmanship that he learned at Fuller Brush (although he neglects to mention the free samples, which in the summer I worked for the company were the main come-ons), and he calls up sometimes painful memories of his youthful courtship of Ruby, followed by self-pitying outbursts about their unhappy later years: “She had done him great harm, repeatedly — she’d torn him open, thrown all kinds of terrible ruinous stuff inside him, and then had sewn him back up.” Thematically, then, this is a novel about well-intentioned bumbling, about impotence and failure and self-delusion, on both the personal and national level. It is also a novel by Dave Eggers, whose name is synonymous with almost everything hip and cool on today’s literary scene. Is it an accident that the book’s jacketless embossed cover almost appears to proclaim: “A Hologram for the King Dave Eggers”? The acknowledgments — acknowledgments for a novel, mind you — list dozens and dozens of people who read, advised, edited, proofed and helped produce the book. The cynical might wonder if this is a work of art or a corporate product. But put aside such unworthy thoughts, and what do we actually have here? A diverting, wellwritten novel about a middle-aged American dreamer, joined to a critique of how the American dream has been subverted by outsourcing our know-how and manufacturing to third-world nations. That last is certainly a distinctly contemporary touch. However, as for Alan himself: We’ve seen him and his brothers before, in William Dean Howells’s “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” in Theodore Dreiser’s “The Financier” and Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt,” in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a

Salesman” and John Updike’s Rabbit novels. In literature, if not in life, middle-aged businessmen seldom find happiness. Library of Congress’s wonderfully diverse list of ‘Books That Shaped America’ • • •

by Michael Dirda June 22, 2012 Read Later

Most great book lists concentrate on works of the highest literary or scholarly merit. Think of the Harvard Classics, Harold Bloom’s “Western Canon,” the Modern Library’s selection of “the 100 best novels of the 20th century.” Here, the compilers imply, are our cultural masterpieces, the Mount Everests and K2s all literate people should scale in their lifetime. You haven’t read already Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” or James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake”? Get cracking and break out the ropes, climbing shoes and pitons. Happily, the Library of Congress’s latest exhibition, “The Books That Shaped America,” ignores the familiar high-culture shibboleths and embraces cookbooks (Irma Rombauer’s “The Joy of Cooking”) and schoolbooks (McGuffey’s “Primer”), mysteries (Dashiell Hammett’s “Red Harvest”) and science fiction (Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451”), political tracts as well as poetry, both Dr. Seuss and Dr. Spock. Running from Monday to Sept. 29 in the Thomas Jefferson Building, the exhibition — its titles chosen by the library’s staff members after considerable wrangling — puts on display what one might call the classics of upset and troublemaking. When first published, these books shocked people, made them angry, shook up their deepest beliefs. They shamed readers with accounts of racism, greed, corruption, Puritanism and provincial narrow-mindedness. Here are the impassioned works that made us look behind the curtain, into the bedroom and closet and boardroom, at what we were afraid of and at what we covered up. Just skimming through the titles of “The Books That Shaped America” underscores that in this country anything can be questioned,nothing is set in stone, everything can be changed. We are, after all, a nation founded and grounded in revolution. If, however, there is any single, great American theme, it is self-transformation. So here are Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, that stirring guidebook to personal improvement, and Frederick Douglass’s account of his years of slavery and his escape from it, and Thoreau’s “Walden,” arguing the case for self-fulfillment no matter what the opinions of society. Here, too, is one of Horatio Alger Jr.’s rags-to-riches novels, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s great jungle bildungsroman “Tarzan of the Apes,” and Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” in which the poor boy Jay Gatz dreams of all the glittering prizes, and even Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” Jefferson spoke of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” but he might just as well have said: Become who you truly are. If identity is malleable, so, too, are the conditions of life and society. Americans are do-gooders, ready to stand and fight for what they believe is right or attack relentlessly that which is wrong, corrupt or unjust. The library’s list nearly starts with Thomas Paine’s call to arms, “Common

Sense,” then includes W.E.B. Du Bois’s searing “The Souls of Black Folk”; Jacob Riis’s sickening account of urban poverty, “How The Other Half Lives”; Ida M. Tarbell’s classic “muckraking” “History of the Standard Oil Company”; Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” which exposed the insanitary conditions in Chicago’s meat-packing industry; and, finally, in our own time, closes with both “And The Band Played On,” Randy Shilts’s groundbreaking account of the AIDS epidemic and “The Words of Cesar Chavez,” the inspiring leader of the United Farm Workers.

Some conservative thinkers might view the library list as distinctly multicultural, blatantly offering something for everyone. But if America is anything at all, it is multicultural. It’s also refreshing to see William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Allen Ginsberg representing 20th-century American poetry instead of those usual cosmopolitan modernists Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. But Walt Whitman is here, too, and Emily Dickinson, and all of them remind us that the recurrent theme of American literature is loneliness, that somehow amid all our plenty we remain hungry for connection with others. Little wonder that two of the most popular plays in the American theater are about such yearning: Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” and Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Any list yields surprises. If you were to pick the greatest five-year period in American literature, you would be hard-pressed to match 1850-55: Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” (1851), Melville’s “Moby-Dick” (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852), Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” (1854) and Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” (1855). In the careful write-up of Zane Grey’s “Riders of the Purple Sage” there is no mention that the villains of this famous western are Mormons. Sexual politics is another major theme throughout our history, from Margaret Sanger on birth control to Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,”from Alfred Kinsey’s “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” to the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” At the same time, the list doesn’t shy away from such bloated bestsellers as Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War romance “Gone With the Wind,” Ayn Rand’s melodrama-cum-economic tract “Atlas Shrugged” and Robert A. Heinlein’s weirdly libertarian “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Many people might not care for such pop titles, but they are books that others revere, argue about and reread. Happily, the list also includes quieter masterpieces such as Margaret Wise Brown’s “Goodnight Moon,” Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” and Ezra Jack Keats’s “The Snowy Day.” The Library of Congress boldly invites people to register their comments on the exhibition and its titles at its special Web site, www.loc.gov/bookfest. In my case, I was surprised that major works of historical and sociological scholarship didn’t make the cut: Where, for instance, are Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis,” Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class” and W.J. Cash’s “Mind of the South”? Shouldn’t the work of the pioneer-iconoclast H.L. Mencken be represented? And where is the great storyteller of our generation, Stephen King? At the same time, I might argue that “The Education of Henry Adams” is wildly overrated and unworthy of inclusion on the list, its second half being interminably boring. And while Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” was certainly popular, it somehow seems out of place here, being best known as a television series rather than a book.

No matter. This exhibition is meant to generate argument, surprise and controversy. And it will. But the Library of Congress also deserves kudos for having produced this exceptionally imaginative and convincing list of many, if certainly not all, “the books that shaped America.” “The Sovereignties of Invention,” by Matthew Battles • • •

by Michael Dirda June 20, 2012 Read Later

Matthew Battles’s 11 “tales,” as they are called on the title page of “The Sovereignties of Invention,” cover the range of literary parable and fantasy. Several echo the tone — observant, factual, elegant — of our greatest living practitioner of this genre, Steven Millhauser. For instance, here is the opening of “The Dogs in the Trees”: “The first sightings of dogs in trees were reported not long after the Fall equinox. Early rumor came in the form of videos shot at arms’ length on cell phones and hastily uploaded — grainy, shaky, shot with cock-angled intensity, the palsied depth of field swimming as it sought purchase amidst limbs and leaves.” As the narrative develops, more and more dogs are sighted, quietly hunched among the branches. Tethered pets soon begin to bark and howl at night, maddened with desire to be aloft. Oddly enough, nobody makes any serious effort to lower the dogs back to earth. And eventually the animals begin . . . Well, there’s no point in spoiling the story. But one can safely say that it remains mysterious and its final meaning elusive. Indeed, while all of Battles’s tales neatly hook the reader, he seems better at creating symbolic or allegorical situations than resolving them. I frequently finished a story by murmuring, “Huh?” or with the feeling that it was just a bit too precious and derivative, overwrought in both senses of the word. For example, it’s hard not to read the title story, “The Sovereignties of Invention” without thinking of Borges’s classic examinations of sensory overload, “The Aleph” and “Funes the Memorious.” In Battles’s science-fictional narrative, a device records every detail, noticed and unnoticed, of its protagonist’s short run through a park and then allows him to reexperience “the immense interbricolated labyrinths of sensation harvested from that single late-fall jog.” In effect, the unfortunate man discovers a world in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour. Still another story, “The Manuscript of Belz,” uses the background of contemporary religious war to create a homage to “Pierre Menard, Author of the ‘Quixote,’ ” Borges’s little classic in which a French writer recreates, word for word, the text of Cervantes’s “Don Quixote” and by so doing transforms it into a post-modernist masterpiece. Best known as the author of “Library: An Unquiet History,” Battles is currently a program fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. On the one hand, he’s obviously bookish, his work readily calling to mind not just the fables of Millhauser and Borges but also the prose-poems of W.S. Merwin’s “The Miner’s Pale Children,” the imaginative miniatures of Helen Phillips’s

recently published “And Yet They Were Happy,” various forms of literary experiment and even old episodes of “The Twilight Zone.” Yet at the same time, Battles can set a story at a computer conference that features an expert on “crowdsourcing distributed libraries of emotional solidarity.” “The Gnomon,” appropriately enough, then neatly builds to a terrifying representation of “emotional solidarity.”

While he can write simple and evocative sentences, Battles pushes hard for hipness (“quoz”) and even harder for an Updikean specificity that sometimes gives the impression of a young man trying too hard: “Close by the fieldstone break, a small sailboat lay hauled out on a hump of long grass, its sail and rigging furled and wound like some forgotten aegis.” All is well until that final word, which sounds odd and pretentious. What’s more, an “aegis” isn’t some kind of banner or flag, it’s a shield. That sentence appears in “Camera Lucida,” in which a family discovers that an old Polaroid camera produces photographs of scenes from elsewhere or elsewhen. This is an old trope in fantasy and sf, but here Battles uses it to examine the marital tensions between the narrator’s parents. In “I After the Cloudy Doubly Beautifully,” he ingeniously, if wearyingly, mixes Walter Benjamin’s reflections on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” with the aesthetics of machine translation. In “Time Capsules,” the narrator acquires a bag of pills that can reverse the temporal flow: Pop a capsule and you go back one minute in time. Unfortunately, the pills are addictive. “The Sovereignties of Invention” is published as “a Red Lemonade book, available in all reasonably possible formats — in limited artisanal editions, in a trade paperback edition, and in all current digital editions, as well as online at the Red Lemonade publishing community at http://redlemona.de.” Such is multiplatform book production in the early 21st century. Nonetheless, Red Lemonade, like so many other publishers these days, needs to hire some good proofreaders. “The Sovereignties of Invention” is occasionally marred by the kind of unnecessary grammatical errors and phrase duplications generated by overreliance on computers: “a grove of trees that following a low narrow bourne” (instead of “that followed”); “tapping at keys arrayed on neatly on a long tablet.” While Matthew Battles isn’t wholly successful throughout “The Sovereignties of Invention,” let me emphasize that his “tales” are still greatly entertaining. After all, the wonder story is — as it has always been — the most perennially appealing of all the forms of fiction. Gordon Bowker’s ‘James Joyce’: Portrait of the author as a man • • •

by Michael Dirda June 13, 2012 Read Later

On Saturday, June 16, devotees of James Joyce will be celebrating Bloomsday. More than 100 years ago, on June 16, 1904, Mr. Leopold Bloom and young Stephen Dedalus separately wandered the streets of Dublin, crossing paths with teachers, priests, medical students, journalists, a woman in labor, publicans, bar maids, drunks, rabid Irish jingoists, sentimental babysitters and at least one

adulterer, “Blazes” Boylan, not to overlook Stephen’s shiftless father, Simon, the mourners at Paddy Dignam’s funeral and the whores of the phantasmagoric Nighttown. Eventually, Mr. Bloom rescues Stephen from a Nighttown brawl, and the pair return to 7 Eccles St., where Mrs. Bloom — nee Marion Tweedy and known as Molly — will eventually fall asleep after, yes, the most famous stream-of-consciousness reverie in all of modern literature. That, in a nutshell, is the action of “Ulysses” (1922), generally regarded as the greatest 20thcentury novel in English. Of course, there’s a little more to the book than that, as generations of readers, critics, scholars and exegetes well know. Chapters loosely update episodes of Homer’s “Odyssey”; the language sings throughout; narrative conventions are ignored or revolutionized; literary and social taboos are violated (one scene takes place in an outhouse); and the whole book shifts constantly between interior monologue and outward events, between the starkest realism and the subtlest symbolism. “Ulysses” is arguably the most carefully wrought novel ever written — every word, down to its spelling, is there for an artistic reason. It is also a highly autobiographical book, which is why James Joyce’s life has attracted so much attention, starting with the outstanding reminiscences of his school friend Constantine Curran, the transcribed conversations with Frank Budgen, a memoir by his much put-upon younger brother Stanislaus and an early biography by Herbert Gorman. All of these were dwarfed, however, by Richard Ellmann’s monumental “James Joyce,” published in 1959 (revised in 1982) and judged by novelist and Joycean Anthony Burgess, as well as by many readers, as the finest literary biography of the century. Since then, all other biographical writing about Joyce has had to contend with the looming presence of Ellmann’s book. One major critic, Hugh Kenner, strongly lamented its influence, feeling that it had improperly shifted attention away from the work to the life, making the biography, in effect, a fuller, more straightforward version of “Ulysses” and even, to some extent, of the earlier Bildungsroman, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (1916), and the short story collection, “Dubliners” (1914). Most readers who come to Gordon Bowker’s “new biography” will thus want to know: Does this book replace Ellmann? It doesn’t, but it does offer a less awestruck, more warts-and-all account of the writer’s life and character. Hitherto best known for his biographies of Malcolm Lowry and Lawrence Durrell, Bowker writes clearly and forcefully, acknowledges the work of earlier scholars and critics, and generally shies away from any extended analysis of the literary works themselves. His focus, then, is almost strictly on Joyce the human being, the scion of a dysfunctional family, a bohemian misfit at University College Dublin, a Berlitz schoolteacher in Trieste, and, finally, an acclaimed, if sometimes controversial, writer-genius in Paris and Switzerland. He was an excellent amateur tenor, too. A master of satirical science fiction • • •

by Michael Dirda May 17, 2012 Read Later

Let’s say you are a devoted fan of Kurt Vonnegut’s books, love the sardonic comeuppance stories of John Collier and Roald Dahl, own all of Edward Gorey’s little albums and enjoy watching reruns of “The Twilight Zone.” Where else can you find similar instances of sly, macabre wit, of such blackhumored, gin-and-tonic fizziness in storytelling? The answer may be unexpected: among the many masters of satirical science fiction and fantasy. Robert Sheckley — to whom we’ll turn in a moment — is certainly a leading example, but there are others: Avram Davidson, for one, and William Tenn and John Sladek. For example, in Sladek’s “Tik-Tok” — something of an homage to the English cult movie “Kind Hearts and Coronets” — the courteous robot-protagonist starts his steady climb to wealth, social success and a shot at the presidency by not only murdering a little girl but blithely getting away with it. And not just any little girl. A blind little girl. Something similar occurs at the beginning of Sheckley’s “The Monsters,” one of the stories in “Store of the Worlds.” The opening scene brilliantly exemplifies Sheckley’s understated, dryly humorous voice, while also providing a writing-class lesson in how to surprise and hook a reader: “Cordovir and Hum stood on the rocky mountaintop, watching the new thing happen. Both felt rather good about it. It was undoubtedly the newest thing that had happened for some time. “ ‘By the way the sunlight glints from it,’ Hum said, ‘I’d say it is made of metal.’ “ ‘I’ll accept that,’ Cordovir said. ‘But what holds it up in the air?’ “They both stared intently down to the valley where the new thing was happening. A pointed object was hovering over the ground. From one end of it poured a substance resembling fire. “ ‘It’s balancing on the fire,’ Hum said. ‘That should be apparent even to your old eyes.’ “Cordovir lifted himself higher on his thick tail, to get a better look. The object settled to the ground and the fire stopped. “ ‘Shall we go down and have a closer look?’ Hum asked. “ ‘All right. I think we have time — wait! What day is this?’ “Hum calculated silently, then said, ‘The fifth day of Luggat.’ “ ‘Damn,’ Cordovir said. ‘I have to go home and kill my wife.’ “ ‘It’s a few hours before sunset,’ Hum said. ‘I think you have time to do both.’ “Cordovir wasn’t sure. ‘I’d hate to be late.’ “ ‘Well then. You know how fast I am,’ Hum said. ‘If it gets late, I’ll hurry back and kill her myself. How about that?’

“ ‘That’s very decent of you.’ Cordovir thanked the younger man and together they slithered down the steep mountainside.” Back in the 18th century there was a vogue for satirical stories in which Persians or Noble Savages visited Europe, only to make one faux pas after another, often while being sickened by the barbarity and repulsiveness of Western ways. “The Monsters” is this kind of story, but Sheckley works a number of variations on the template of a naif in a strange land. In “Shape,” for instance, 20 successive expeditions have failed to set up the simple transporter device that will open the Earth to invasion by the Glom. What has stopped the aliens? In “The Store of the Worlds,” Mr. Wayne gives everything he has, including 10 years of his life, for something most of us would never think of buying — until we read the last lines of the story. In “The Accountant,” a little boy in a family of witches and warlocks won’t study his sorcery and insists on becoming an accountant. His parents are at wit’s end; they’ve scrimped and saved to send him to the best schools in demonic studies. The kid is breaking his father’s heart, so dad summons up the Demon of Children to “persuade” junior to walk the satanic straight and narrow. It goes without saying that the boy proves more than a match for the Evil One.

If Sheckley is known beyond the confines of science fiction, it is probably for “Seventh Victim,” made into a 1965 movie called “The 10th Victim” (and still fondly remembered for Ursula Andress’s bullet-shooting bra). In a future society, war has been eliminated, but man’s killer instincts remain. So some outlet for his aggression must be found. The outlet is a game, of sorts, overseen by the Emotional Catharsis Board. In it, people alternate being hunters and victims, the object being to kill — or be killed. A hunter knows the name of his victim, but the victim doesn’t know the identity of his hunter. What happens, though, when you’re Stanton Frelaine and the person you’ve been assigned to murder is Janet-Marie Patzig, a beautiful young woman with whom you find yourself falling in love? The 1950s were Sheckley’s heyday, when he graced Galaxy magazine and revealed, again and again, that the 25th century was a lot like consumerist, postwar America. Stories about aliens often turned out to be about — happy coincidence — alienation, or they explored questions of identity and quiet desperation. In his later years, however, Sheckley fell into a serious writer’s block. To get started writing again, he tried everything, even elaborate plot diagrams. As he recalled in a typically tongue-in-cheek essay: “Working with diagrams is fun. First I made mine with an ordinary fountain pen. Then I switched to colored Pentels. For greater efficiency, I worked out a set of color-coded symbols which was well worth the time it took. I also experimented with different modes of lettering to improve clarity. My diagrams grew larger and more complex, whereupon I switched to larger sheets of paper. After that, I got into colored inks. The commercial brands weren’t quite right, so I began to mix my own.” And on and on, ever more hilariously.

That memoir-essay was reprinted in a hefty 1984 collection called “Is That What People Do? The Selected Stories of Robert Sheckley.” Sadly, that sturdy hardback is out of print, but this attractive paperback provides a welcome substitute. You’ll find Sheckley’s most famous stories in either volume. To the New York Review of Books edition, Alex Abramovich and Jonathan Lethem also provide an enthusiastic, if somewhat overwritten introduction: “Sheckley’s little sculptures in syntax emanate a magnetism that still rewards curiosity.” No doubt. In the end, what really matters is that stories like “Pilgrimage to Earth” — a deliciously cynical take on romantic love — are once again available: “Alfred Simon was born on Kazanga IV, a small agricultural planet near Arcturus, and there he drove a combine through the wheat fields, and in the long hushed evenings listened to the recorded love songs of Earth. . . .” The young farmer eventually travels to Earth, which turns out to be a huckster’s paradise, reminiscent of Times Square at its seediest, and there he finds the very woman of his dreams. Poor Alfred Simon. Book World: ‘The Arch-Conjuror of England: John Dee’ by Glyn Parry • • •

by Michael Dirda June 6, 2012 Read Later

Who could resist a new book about the celebrated, notorious “arch-conjuror of England,” Dr. John Dee (1527-1609)? A contemporary of Queen Elizabeth I, Dee possessed what was probably the finest private library in the country. He lived near the Thames in a house with a name that any Gothic novelist would steal in a minute: Mortlake. As a young man, he was a pupil of Gerard Mercator (whose maps are still famous) and studied the works of all the most notable alchemists and natural philosophers of Europe, including Paracelsus, Raymond Lull, Johannes Trithemius and Henry Cornelius Agrippa. Dee might even have met Giordano Bruno, who, during a visit to England, joined the circle of their mutual friend, the occult-minded poet Sir Philip Sidney. (In 1600, Bruno was burned at the stake, ostensibly for his heretical beliefs about the nature of the universe.) In 1584, this English wizard even made a laborious journey to Rudolf II’s Prague, the center for astrological and hermetic research in the 16th century — in essence, the capital of magic. Not only did Dee seek the philosopher’s stone — for turning base metals into gold — and manufacture various mysterious elixirs, he also communicated with “angels” through special crystals, aided by a sinister factotum named Edward Kelley. This polymath speculated about everything from the inhabitants of North America to the kabbalistic meaning of the alphabet, from the existence of the Northwest Passage to the ecological destruction of the Thames through overfishing and the dumping of raw sewage. On the one hand, Dee was unquestionably among the foremost mathematicians and astronomers of the day; on the other, he was also a magus who probed the secrets of the universe, which he found embodied in a mystic symbol he called the “Monas hieroglyphica.”It’s hardly surprising that throughout his career, the former Catholic priest was periodically suspected of being a necromancer, a trafficker with evil spirits. When he fled England for the continent, his library was ransacked and his laboratory destroyed.

Ever since Frances Yates’s exhilarating studies of the Renaissance occult (“Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition,” “The Art of Memory,” “The Rosicrucian Enlightenment,” “The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age”), Dee has exercised an abiding fascination on the modern imagination. E.M. Butler devotes a chapter to him in her historical survey “The Myth of the Magus.” Novelist John Crowley’s epic “Aegypt” cycle brilliantly turns on the history-altering experiments of the arch-conjuror and the psychologically disturbed Kelley, his “scryer” (one who peers into crystals or showstones). There is even an excellent general biography by Peter J. French titled “John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Magus.” I had hoped that New Zealand historian Glyn Parry’s “The Arch-Conjuror of England” would offer an even fuller, more up-to-date look at Dee’s career. Such is not the case. While the book is deeply researched, its focus is primarily on Dee’s relationship to the court and government of England. Parry argues, rather tendentiously, that Queen Elizabeth and her counselors (William Cecil, Robert Dudley, Francis Walsingham) incorporated what one might call magical thinking into their policy decisions. Not so long ago, first lady Nancy Reagan consulted her astrologer regularly; but Parry shows that the queen and her advisers repeatedly drew on Dee’s expertise in casting horoscopes, predicting the future and thwarting occult attacks on Her Majesty.

Like Charles Nicholl’s thrilling “The Reckoning” (about the murder of poet and government agent Christopher Marlowe) and John Bossy’s controversial “Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair” (which contends that during his stay in England the visionary philosopher spied for the French), this book presents still another facet of the dark underworld of the Renaissance. It really was, as Parry titles his first chapter, “a world full of magic.” Catholics genuinely believed that “the ashes distributed on Ash Wednesday, like the ‘palms’ blessed on Palm Sunday” would protect a house from evil spirits. Learned professors probed the esoteric meaning of Aristotle’s resonantly titled treatise “On Coming-to-be and Passing Away.” Dee’s friend, the courtier-explorer Humphrey Gilbert, planned to establish an academy where alchemy would be one of the courses taught. There was rampant speculation that Elizabeth’s reign might usher in the apocalypse. Beyond all this, Protestant England jockeyed for worldly power with the Catholic kingdoms of the continent. In this battle, magic could be a weapon. In 1578, “in mid-August the commissioners charged with London’s security uncovered three wax images under a dunghill, one inscribed ‘Elizabeth’ and two, according to Mendoza the Spanish ambassador, dressed like Privy Councillors. All three were ‘transfixed with a quantity of pig’s bristles,’ apparently witchcraft meant to kill, as the dunghill’s gentle heat melted the images. On 15 August the commissioners sent them to Norwich, Dee arriving just afterwards. .  .  . The panicking Privy Council demanded that Dee speedily ‘prevent the mischief’ they ‘suspected to be intended against her Majesty’s person.’ That morning Dee, ‘in godly and artificial [technical] manner,’ did something he never defined.” Such exciting passages are all too few, as Parry carefully maps the intricacies of political hurly-burly surrounding Dee, Elizabeth and their supporters and enemies. Still, he doesn’t neglect the shocking episode when Kelley transmits an angelic injunction that he and Dee should trade wives. They were

finally persuaded to do so by an appearance of the Archangel Michael and the consequent assurance that the apocalypse would soon begin and they were to be among “the chosen of this last days.” Eventually, Dee, back with his own wife, returned to England and spent his last years in Manchester, relatively ignored, politically impotent and still frequently reviled as a sorcerer. The frail, white-haired mage died at 85, surrounded by alchemical books and mathematical instruments, victim of that “conservative counter-attack on magic as the engine of subversion, which drove it to the margins of the early modern political world.” These days, Dee and his occult practices are part of ongoing research into “the early modern networks of knowledge.” Who would argue against any new insights and fresh discoveries that result? There is, unquestionably, much to learn from the fact-and-speculation-rich pages of “The Arch-Conjuror of England.” But Parry’s relentless concentration on the shadowy politics of the Elizabethan world will tire all but the most resolute and scholarly. Ray Bradbury dies: Appreciation for an author who will ‘live forever’ • • •

by Michael Dirda June 6, 2012 Read Later

When Ray Bradbury, born in 1920, was growing up in Illinois, a traveling carnival came to town. There the young boy watched a kind of magic act performed by Mr. Electro, and afterward hesitantly approached the great wizard himself. Drawing on his mysterious powers, Mr. Electro suddenly anointed Bradbury with his magic sword and dramatically intoned: “Live Forever.” While Ray Bradbury may have died Tuesday at 91, he will, as readers everywhere mourn his passing, nonetheless live forever. Not only was he one of the greatest of all writers of science fiction and fantasy, he also was one of the most beloved. A precocious talent, by his early 20s, Bradbury was being published in Weird Tales, Astounding, and Thrilling Wonder Stories, but would soon go on to be one of the first pulp writers to break into slick magazines like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post. By his early 30s he had produced such anthology and textbook classics as “The Fog Horn,” “The Small Assassin,” “The Dragon,” “Zero Hour,” “The Veldt,” “The Pedestrian,” “The Next in Line,” and “The Last Night of the World,” as well as “A Sound of Thunder,” the most iconic of modern time-travel tales. That’s the one about the guy who kills a butterfly-like creature back in the age of dinosaurs and when he returns to the present discovers that he has changed history — for the worse, the much, much worse. Bradbury’s second book, after a collection of macabre stories (“Dark Carnival”), cobbled together a number of short pieces to produce a whole far greater than its parts, “The Martian Chronicles” (1950). In that melancholy classic, successive waves of invaders from Earth gradually wipe out the Red Planet’s ancient and delicate civilization. Bradbury’s prose was correspondingly lyrical and wistful; the book itself unforgettable. In 1953 the industrious young writer, after much difficulty, then managed to expand his novella “The Fireman” into a short novel. As “Fahrenheit 451,” it opens ominously with the famous sentence “It was a pleasure to burn” and stands with Aldous Huxley’s

“Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” as one of our most troubling, visions of a dystopian future. Its hero, Montag, is one of a corps of firemen entrusted with destroying every book in the world. The novel’s now famous title refers to the temperature at which book paper ignites. In his middle years, Bradbury would produce the script for John Huston’s film of “Moby Dick,” and write such masterpieces of nostalgic fantasy as “Dandelion Wine” and “Something Wicked this Way Comes,” in which a mysterious, threatening carnival arrives in a small midwestern town, as well as the holiday favorite “The Halloween Tree.” In later life, he even turned to writing hardboiled detective novels, the best of them being “Death is a Lonely Business.” But he always remained, in the hearts of many, America’s greatest science fiction writer, eventually being honored by a special Pulitzer Prize for his lifetime achievement. In truth, though, Bradbury’s fantasy, horror and science fiction did more than merely entertain. In all his work, he explored loneliness and the troubled human heart and our deep-seated fear of otherness. In that regard, he became what he always wanted to be — a great storyteller, sometimes even a mythmaker, a true American classic. Live forever, Mr. Bradbury. ‘Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature,’ by Daniel Levin Becker • • •

by Michael Dirda May 31, 2012 Read Later

The “Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle” — the Workshop for Potential Literature — was founded in 1960 by two French polymaths who liked to play with words and numbers. Over a series of meals, the man of letters Raymond Queneau and the scientist and mathematician Francois Le Lionnais gradually gathered those similarly obsessed into a confederation that quickly became known by its acronym: the OuLiPo. That early generation of Oulipians included the writers Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Jacques Roubaud and Harry Mathews. All of them wanted to explore how constraints, mathematical algorithms, strange literary techniques and new forms of wordplay might produce not just bizarre texts but also amusing and memorable stories, poems and novels. The most famous — notorious? — example of an Oulipian work is Perec’s “La Disparition” (“The Disappearance”), a novel written without any word containing the letter E. A tour de force, yes, given that E is the most commonly used letter of the alphabet, although it’s crucial to remember that E, in French, is pronounced the same as “eux,” which means “them.” One way to read the novel, then, is to see it as a meditation on the deaths during World War II of Perec’s parents. The book is, metaphorically, about the disappearance of “them.” He later wrote “Les Revenentes” (“The Specters”), in which the only vowel used is E. People either judge these kinds of authorial limitations as virtuosically clever but aesthetically trivial, or they find them just incredibly cool. The young Daniel Levin Becker, now the reviews editor for the Believer, was so taken with Perec’s work that he traveled to France, helped organize the OuLiPo’s archives, interviewed its members and eventually was himself “co-opted” into the

group. (The OuLiPo has 38 members, five of them women and seven non-French.) Levin Becker relates his experiences at the beginning and end of “Many Subtle Channels”; in between he presents a history of the workshop from its foundation to the present. The result is a distinctly intimate and exceptionally entertaining book. Reacting, in part, against the surrealists who practiced automatic writing that drew its inspiration from the unconscious, the Oulipians advocated a calculated approach to creativity, based on extreme attentiveness to language and lots of cheeky cleverness. “An Oulipian constructs a poem or a novel the way a mathematician proves a theorem — carefully, methodically, embracing a set of rules.” But this doesn’t mean that the results can’t be mesmerizing (see Calvino’s “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler”), sexy (see Roubaud’s three “Hortense” novels) or even simultaneously philosophical and adventure-packed (see Perec’s masterpiece, “Life: A User’s Manual”). If you enjoy crosswords, intricately structured mysteries a la Agatha Christie, puns, hypertext fiction, shaggy dog stories, Bourbaki mathematics, the games of chess and Go, or simply work that boggles the mind, then you really need to discover the OuLiPo.

Most Oulipians are fascinated by homophones — words that sound alike but have different meanings (e.g. “wood” and “would”) — and by the opportunity for play that results. One central Oulipian text, Perec’s “Le Voyage d’hiver” (“Winter’s Journey”), has been amplified by supplementary homophonic titles, including “Le Voyage d’hier” (“Yesterday’s Journey”), “Voyage d’Hitler” (“Hitler’s Journey”), “Voyage du ver” (“A Worm’s Journey”) and others, all enriching the story of a lost poetry manuscript by Hugo Vernier, whose work was stolen by Baudelaire and Mallarme. In “Les Horreurs de la guerre” (“The Horrors of War”), Perec composed a short play in which the dialogue consisted of words that sound like the letters of the alphabet. The first line, “Abbesse! Aidez!” (“Abbess! Help!”) is pronounced just like slurred ABCD in French. As Becker underscores throughout, the OuLiPo’s techniques — constraints that liberate the imagination — are deeply attractive to all sorts of people and work well as group activities. “The point is to learn to write for yourself, for that thrill of doing things you didn’t know you knew how to do.” Years ago, I reviewed a number of books by Perec, Queneau, Roubaud and Calvino, and was seduced into trying some Oulipian games of my own. For instance, I adopted Perec’s alphabetical dialogue for a little play in English called “Awful Bits.” It opens with a Cockney factotum glancing into the laboratory of John Dee, the Elizabethan magus. He says, “ ’Eh! Busy, Dee?” (that is, ABCD). The play proceeds through the alphabet — a replicant is referred to as an “effigy” (FG) — and then reverses itself and goes back from Z to A. Near the end, a Jewish prostitute solicits a sailor, in fact a “Seabee” (CB), then with shame recognizes her own brother “Abie,” (AB) at which point the dialogue begins another descent down the alphabet. Friends advised me not to do this sort of thing again. While there are several anthologies of OuLiPo writings available in English (including a valuable primer by Warren Motte), Becker’s book gives a sense of the real people behind all this linguistic exuberance. He relies on written documents and oral history for his portraits of the early

Oulipians, but brings the current generation to idiosyncratic life. The outgoing Marcel Benabou, for instance, is the author of “Dump This Book While You Still Can!,” which is about reading and not reading, while Jacques Jouet has composed a poem a day since 1992. Jouet insists that an Oulipian should reveal his structural methods because knowledge of them increases the reader’s fascination and appreciation. In contrast, Harry Mathews refuses to demystify his work. “The problem when you see the constraint,” as his ally Perec once said, “is that you see nothing but the constraint.” Becker ends his book by discussing current offshoots of the OuLiPo, especially those concerned with music, painting and photography. I can affirm, utterly without constraint, that he makes an ideal guide to the ingeniously madcap wonderland that is potential literature and art. Book World: ‘The Origins of Sex,’ an early awakening • • •

by Michael Dirda May 25, 2012 Read Later

During the 17th and 18th centuries in England, people’s attitudes toward sexual behavior — and, of course, sexual misbehavior — changed dramatically. To a large degree, this revolution pivoted on the dynamic between private actions and public, civic and religious ideals. How much, or in what way, should society police the erotic life of individuals? Was adultery a crime? Were prostitutes the devil’s snare, or were they the pathetic victims of male callousness and exploitation? Should both sexes be held to the same moral standards? And exactly what standards should those be? In his anecdote-rich, crisply written and impressively well-researched “The Origins of Sex,” Oxford historian Faramerz Dabhoiwala tracks the answers to questions like these. Up until the 17th century, he stresses: “The fundamental principle of conventional ethics was that men and women were personally responsible for their actions, no matter how powerful the temptation. Only beasts and savages gave ‘unrestrained liberty’ to ‘the cravings of nature’ — civilized Christians were rather ‘to bring under the flesh; bring nature under the government of reason, and in short bring the body under the command of the soul.’ ” Allied to this view was the patriarchal principle “that every woman was the property of her father or husband, so that it was a kind of theft for any stranger to have sex with her, and a grave affront to her relatives.” Dabhoiwala cites the aristocratic Margaret Cavendish, who declared that a woman who had been defiled should be immediately put to death by her kinsmen because such unchastity was “an offence to the gods, a reproach to her life, a disgrace to her race, a dishonour to her kindred, and an infamy to her family.” In effect, such views aimed to ensure the health and spiritual wholeness of the community. As Dabhoiwala notes, paraphrasing Saint Augustine, “heresy and adultery were the same kind of crime”: In both instances, “people claimed only to be following their hearts.” But, ultimately, they were guilty because it was “folly to leave religion and morality to personal interpretation.”

During the civil and religious unrest of the 17th century, however, the public disciplining of sexual miscreants began to collapse. The stringency of the Puritans — who reintroduced the death penalty for adultery — gradually backfired. Their overharsh principles appealed only to zealots. Instead of a culture based on neighbors watching neighbors and calling them to task when necessary, sexual policing was outsourced to paid professionals and mercenary informers. Inevitably, complaints arose that regulation had grown inequitable: The rich and the aristocratic were flouting the laws and codes of conduct, while the poor were being unduly punished. Magistrates in their stead no longer felt it was their charge to correct the morals of harlots and scoundrels. They simply judged “particular actions, rather than a person’s general character.” By 1750, writes Dabhoiwala, “most forms of consensual sex outside marriage had drifted beyond the reach of law.” By then, too, England had come to accept a view of society that allowed for a diversity of beliefs about human behavior. Travelers, explorers and scholars reported on the relativity of sexual practice around the world, even the untroubled acceptance of polygamy and incest. Enlightened reason, not hidebound faith, should obviously regulate our behavior. Provided people didn’t injure each other, they should be free to act as they saw fit. Wasn’t the pursuit of happiness the highest goal of life?

This ethical open-mindedness led to a surge of fresh thinking about sexual instincts. Didn’t the Old Testament condone polygamy? Weren’t priests the source of all these unnatural sexual constraints? Even some clergymen began to defend the liberty of men and women to cohabit with as many partners as they liked. John Dryden touches on these speculations at the beginning of his poem “Absalom and Architophel”: In pious times, e’r priestcraft did begin, Before polygamy was made a sin; When man, on many, multiply’d his kind, E’r one to one was, cursedly, confined: When nature prompted, and no law deny’d Promiscuous use of concubine and bride. During the reign of Charles II — “the Merry Monarch” — libertine attitudes toward sex and women also emerged as the mark of an aristocratic gentleman. As the king himself said, he “could not think God would make a man miserable only for taking a little pleasure out of the way.” Sex was a natural appetite, a physical delight to be enjoyed, and not “an unclean passion to be bridled.” It was unreasonable, against nature, to restrain it. Eventually, the ideal of female chastity itself began to be questioned as an artificial construct, merely an instrument to preserve the purity of a bloodline and the proper inheritance of estates.

Throughout the 18th century, more and more women revealed their intimate lives in letters, diaries and novels. Courtesans wrote their memoirs. A culture of sexual openness began to flourish, as the doings of famous whores and notorious rakes became the fodder for cheap broadsides. Gradually, tentatively, even homosexuality began to be acknowledged rather than simply vilified. The great utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham argued for the toleration of virtually every sexual act. Perhaps the most engrossing chapter of “The Origins of Sex” is that devoted to the Cult of Seduction. Here, Dabhoiwala opens with the grabber sentence: “Ever since the dawn of western civilization it had always been presumed that women were the more lustful sex. The most extreme, misogynist version of this argument asserted that women’s minds were so corrupt, their wombs so ravenous, their ‘amorous fire’ so voracious, that truly ‘if they dared, all women would be whores.’ ” But by the 19th century, the poles were reversed: “Women had come to be seen as comparatively delicate, defensive and sexually passive, needing to be constantly on their guard against male rapacity.” This perception of a woman’s fragility and innate moral superiority, along with the consequent conviction that the society of ladies alone would convey polish to otherwise loutish brutes, ultimately reinforced the double standard and further constrained a woman’s personal freedom. These attitudes wouldn’t change, at least in the Western world, until the 1960s, if then. There’s a lot more to “The Origins of Sex,” though I think Dabhoiwala scants the impact of sexual behavior on children and family life. He ends with some reflections on the present, when we “assert the essential privateness of sex and sexuality” and “simultaneously seem to have a growing desire to expose the most intimate details of our lives to the broadest possible public gaze.” He also reminds us that many parts of the world still follow “the same practices that sustained western culture for most of its history,” these being “the theocratic authority of holy texts and holy men, intolerance of religious and social pluralism, fear of sexual freedom, the belief that men alone should govern.” Today, equality and responsibility have become our sexual watchwords, although men and women somehow continue to have their hearts broken. At least in the West, they don’t also have to suffer branding or execution. Michael Dirda reviews Christopher Fowler’s ‘The Memory of Blood’ • • •

by Michael Dirda April 26, 2012 Read Later

To my mind, the highest form of mystery novel is the “locked room” murder or “impossible crime.” While Agatha Christie is the mistress of misdirection with an unequaled gift for plotting, John Dickson Carr remains the master of those howdunits involving what is sometimes facetiously referred to as a “hermetically sealed chamber.” For example, in Carr’s masterpiece, “The Three Coffins,” two murders are committed by seemingly supernatural means. In one, a man is shot at point-blank range while standing in a courtyard covered with freshly fallen snow. His are the only

tracks in the snow. Moreover, there are eyewitnesses who can swear that they saw no one near the victim at the time of the shot and that it wasn’t suicide. How was he killed? If you like such puzzles, especially when they are spiced with a little screwball-comedy dialogue and a touch of the occult, don’t miss “The Memory of Blood,” Christopher Fowler’s eighth novel about London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit. This police team tackles only cases involving sensitive issues that are also a “high risk to public morale.” Like Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, the PCU books feature a half-dozen characters but focus particularly on its senior detectives, in this instance, Arthur Bryant and John May. Now getting on toward retirement, the two friends complement each other, May being more sociable than his partner, knowledgeable about technology and susceptible to any pretty woman who comes along. Bryant, by contrast, is the Sherlock Holmes of the PCU. Bookish, crotchety, anti-establishment, possessing an eidetic memory and a flair for lateral thinking, he gathers “much of his information from a loose network of psychics, healers, New Age fringe-dwellers, police time-wasters and anarchists.” The PCU offices, appropriately enough then, are located in a building that was once a spiritualist temple, a place where Aleister Crowley — here misspelled Alistair Crowley — summoned spirits and where an automaton Madame Blavatsky tells fortunes. The unit’s specialized personnel spend a lot of time there, most of them having no personal lives to speak of. They are all underpaid, rather a thorn in the side of their political overseers, but extremely loyal to each other. When the book opens, Dan Banbury, the unit’s crime-scene manager, is reading “Forensic Analysis in the Home — Volume 4: Drains.” Bryant, we learn, has been working on his memoirs, concentrating on “a selection of our more eccentric cases,” including “the Leicester Square Vampire, that business with the Belles of Westminster, the Deptford Demon, the Shepherd’s Bush blowtorch murders and the hunt for the Odeon Strangler.” Meanwhile, the unit’s doltish acting head, Raymond Land, is completely unaware that his wife is carrying on an affair with her flamenco instructor. As these details already suggest, this is a briskly playful novel, although aspects of it are quite dark, even tragic. In its fourth chapter, “The Memory of Blood” finally kicks into high gear. A rapacious real-estate developer named Robert Julius Kramer is throwing a party for the cast and backers of a play called “The Two Murderers.” Now in his mid-40s, Kramer possesses a trophy wife, a baby son and what he hopes will be a future money-maker, the New Strand Theatre. Fowler has great fun in depicting various theatrical types and hangers-on drinking and gossiping, but quickly zeroes in on the recently hired assistant stage manager Gail Strong, the playgirl daughter of a government minister.

In the course of the cocktail party, Gail and the play’s handsome leading man step out onto a fire escape where they engage in furtive but passionate sex. During their absence, Kramer asks his wife if she’s checked recently on the baby. When the couple enter little Noah’s locked room, they find the window open, an empty crib and, on the floor, a Mr. Punch marionette. The Kramers rush to the window and, to their horror, see the child’s body on the street below.

Shocking, yes, but what makes all this so eerie is Mr. Punch. Forensics determines that Noah has actually been strangled by the marionette. “So what you’re telling me,” says Bryant, “is that after the baby was left alone, Mr. Punch climbed down from his hook, turned the key in the nursery door lock, crept over to the cot, took his rage out on Noah Kramer and fulfilled his mythical destiny to become a murderer.” Why his destiny? Because one of Mr. Punch’s first acts of violence in the traditional puppet play is to throw the baby out the window. Yet why would anyone want to kill an infant? What is the secret meaning of this grotesque and weirdly staged crime? And how was this locked-room murder actually committed? As the novel continues, there will be other deaths. In one the victim is found strangled in a noose next to a puppet of Jack Ketch, the Hangman of the Punch and Judy shows. Bryant, typically, consults experts in the history of puppetry and stage props, visits a white witch and browses in a stack of arcane volumes that includes “ ‘The History of Icelandic Hospitals,’ ‘Confessions of a Soho Call Girl,’ ‘Phrenology for Beginners,’ ‘The Role of Duty in the Operas of Gilbert & Sullivan,’ ‘A Treatise on the Correlation Between Victorian Dental Care & Naval Policy,’ and — open on top of the pile — ‘Poetic Justice: The Morality of Dramatic Puppetry.’ ” At the beginning of the investigation, he is thoroughly exhilarated by “the heady combination of artifice, obsession, esoterica and intrigue.” But then a computer disc of the notes for his highly indiscreet memoirs goes missing, and a sinister official of Internal Security mounts an operation to discredit the entire Peculiar Crimes Unit. Meanwhile, the bizarre murders continue, until the truth is revealed in a Grand Guignol climax — at another party, this time at the London Dungeon, a dilapidated wax museum. It’s all great fun. As always in fair-play mysteries, even those updated for a modern readership and presented, at least in part, with a knowing, ironic wink, the old principles of literary and stage deception hold true: “We saw what we thought happened, not what happened. We saw what someone else wanted us to see.”So if you’re in need of a refreshing light novel for the spring — and who isn’t? — consider “The Memory of Blood.” I know that I’m going to be looking for Christopher Fowler’s “The Victoria Vanishes” and all the other cases of the Peculiar Crimes Unit. Book World: Blue-collar intellectual in ‘Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher’ • • •

by Michael Dirda May 10, 2012 Read Later

More than 60 years ago, a New York editor named Margaret Anderson received a manuscript entitled “Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.” The second paragraph of the preface announced its theme: “All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a

powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance. “All movements, however different in doctrine and aspiration, draw their early adherents from the same types of humanity; they all appeal to the same types of mind.” Being a trade editor, Anderson realized that “Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements” wasn’t likely to jump onto any bestseller lists. So she suggested a new, punchier title, which was accepted by its author, the virtually unknown Eric Hoffer. Since then “The True Believer” has become a modern classic, a work periodically rediscovered to this day, most recently in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Eric Hoffer was, if anything, even more remarkable than his book. When “The True Believer” was published in 1951, he was a largely self-educated longshoremen, aged 50 or thereabouts (there is doubt about his actual birth date), a barrel-chested guy who earned his living by loading and unloading ships on the docks of San Francisco. Close up, Hoffer was genially round-faced, bald, with big hands, seldom going outside without a cloth cap on his head. He lived by himself in a single room, owned next to nothing except his work clothes, some writing supplies and a library card. When he spoke, he revealed a slight German accent and a marked tendency to grow excited about ideas. In the museum world, there is a category called “outsider art,” that is, painting and sculpture created by untrained “folk” artists. Hoffer practiced what one might call “outsider philosophy.” He simply followed his own lights, his own intelligence. As Tom Bethell’s fine critical biography, “Eric Hoffer: The Longshoreman Philosopher,” reminds us, Hoffer loved this country fiercely and was deeply proud to be an ordinary American workingman. Throughout his adult life, though, he devoured serious books, copied out favorite passages from his reading onto index cards, and thought hard about the nature of man as a social, political and religious being. By the time of his death in 1983, he had 11 titles to his credit, including “The Passionate State of Mind,” “The Ordeal of Change” and a “best-of” collection called “Between the Devil and the Dragon.” While Hoffer excelled at the short essay and aphorism, he really shone in discussion: The veteran newscaster Eric Sevareid called his hour-long CBS interview with Hoffer “the greatest filmed monologue I had ever had anything to do with in all my years in television.” Still, this “longshoreman philosopher” was primarily a reactive thinker, usually developing his own train of thought by building on, or contradicting, observations from earlier writers. Bethell devotes an entire chapter to examples of Hoffer’s reading notes.

For instance, commenting on computer pioneer Charles Babbage’s remark, “I cannot remember a single completely happy day in my life,” Hoffer speculates about what makes us happy. “One thing I know beyond doubt. Had [Babbage] overheard someone he respected praise him highly it would have sweetened life for him for more than a day. We are starved for praise. It reconciles us with

life. .  .  . Self-doubt is at the core of our being. We need people who by their attitude and words will convince us that we are not as bad as we think we are. Hence the vital role of judicious praise.” Praise as the source of happiness? Most of us would have listed self-fulfillment or good works or family, but Hoffer avoids the familiar chestnuts, proffering instead a wholly unexpected insight that nonetheless rings true. It’s a gift he displays throughout his writing. In another note, he agrees with G.K. Chesterton that the artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. But sometimes, he adds, even distinguished artists parrot the belief that “enthusiasm, inspiration and an eventful life are vital to the creative flow. Actually, they know better and act differently. They know that what creation needs is hard work and eventless routine.” On another page, Hoffer further stresses that “the writer creates to compensate himself for what he did not experience, for what he could not be.” What was it that this blue-collar autodidact could not be? Bethell begins his book with a mystery. Almost no documentation exists about Hoffer before the mid 1930s, and no one seems to have known him as a boy or youth. His account of a childhood in New York, as the son of poor German immigrants, has proved unreliable and contradictory. Ophthalmologists judge his striking story about suddenly going blind for eight years, before recovering his sight at age 15, as problematic and unlikely. But, of course, blindness would account for the non-existence of school records for young Eric. While Bethell reserves judgment, he leaves the reader convinced that Hoffer probably entered this country illegally as a young man, perhaps from Germany. Whatever his origins, by the 1930s Hoffer was a migrant farm worker in California. When exempted from the World War II draft (because of a hernia), he learned that the longshoremen needed men on the waterfront, and there he found his ideal job — one in which he could work just three or four days a week, leaving the rest of the time for reading, thinking and writing. Soon, too, he found in Lili Fabilli Osborne, the estranged wife of a communist friend, a devoted companion for the rest of his life. Following his involuntary retirement from the docks, in 1964 Hoffer took up a position at Berkeley as a kind of visiting professor, simply coming onto campus once a week to talk for a few hours with students and visitors. He nonetheless deplored what he viewed as the excesses of the 1960s and grew increasingly conservative and crotchety in his later years. Intellectuals, narrowly defined, earned his particular disdain, since they obviously yearn for status and regard, despise ordinary people, and consider it a “God-given right to tell others what to do.” Hoffer was never so presumptuous. As he said, “There is no greater threat to sanity than the taking of one’s life too seriously. No one will miss us long when we are gone. No one will lose his appetite because we are no more.” Tom Bethell, a senior editor at the American Spectator, is clearly in sympathy with many of Hoffer’s conservative opinions, but, more important, he has created a thoughtful, highly readable portrait of a complex man. The author of “The True Believer” was, for instance, an almost fanatical champion of Israel — though no one knows if this avowed atheist might have been Jewish. If you’ve never read Hoffer, or if it’s been a long time since you did, this sympathetic overview of his life and achievement will start you searching for his books.

Maurice Sendak’s imagination took him into the wild, and beyond • • •

by Michael Dirda May 8, 2012 Read Later

The child is bathed, dusted with bath powder, snug in cotton pajamas and, finally, tucked into bed. “Read to me, Daddy.” Which book? “You know the one.” Of course, I do: I reach for the familiar volume, pause over the cover, then turn to the first page: “The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another, his mother called him ‘WILD THING!’ and Max said ‘I’LL EAT YOU UP!’ so he was sent to bed without eating anything. . . .” Many people think that creating a children’s book must be easy. After all, it’s just for kids, can’t be all that hard, right? In fact, the text of a great picture book calls for the skills of a poet. When you’re telling a story in a couple of hundred words, every one of them must be exactly right. And when you’re also telling that story in a dozen or so pictures, every one of them must be a miniature masterpiece. For one artist to manage to do both equally well doesn’t happen very often. Dr. Seuss managed it for a whole series of Early Reader classics. Chris Van Allsburg created a holiday favorite in “The Polar Express.” But if you were to ask anyone — man, woman, child or grandparent — to name the best children’s picture book of the past 50 years, the winner would be Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are.” “Where the Wild Things Are” would also be the winner if you asked people to name their favorite picture book. Unless, of course, they preferred “In the Night Kitchen.” I actually do. In our time, no major picture-book artist has been quite so daring, so utterly insouciant about pushing hard against the limits of his genre as Maurice Sendak. One might safely say that virtually all of his finest books were initially criticized, and sometimes gleefully savaged, as being wholly inappropriate for children. The minotaurs and giant, muscle-bound roosters of “Where the Wild Things Are” looked like kiddie nightmares come alive; Mickey of “In the Night Kitchen” offended with his nudity and his story, which in part suggested a bizarre allegory of the Holocaust; in “Outside Over There” the text and the almost Masonically symbolic pictures seemed too literary, too inbred, too complex, too adult. But, of course, that was the point. There’s darkness and violence and complexity throughout Sendak, just as there is throughout the fairy tales of Grimm and Andersen, just as there is in life.

Sendak’s work allows children to come to terms with their fears and nightmares. The Wild Things can be tamed, turned into big teddy bears, no longer frightening monsters of the id. It’s hardly an accident, then, that Sendak’s major works so often take the form of quests. The story opens in the “real” world, but the heroes or heroines soon journey into a strange fantasy realm populated by bizarre creatures; there they perform a daring act of courage and eventually return to where they began. Such tales clearly image aspects of “growing up.” But they are always initially unsettling. For Sendak’s major dream-books prefer to hint at complicated truths rather than sink us, unthinkingly, into easy pleasures. One can, consequently, return again and again to their eerie pictures and texts, slowly puzzling out ever richer meanings and implications. That sense of risk and danger never wholly disappears. Mickey, of “In the Night Kitchen,” is baked in the oven. Ida’s baby sister is stolen by goblins in “Outside Over There.” The protagonists of “We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy” know homelessness, hunger, bureaucratic knavery and child abuse. The book might even be an allegory about AIDS. For some children, as Sendak reminds us, there isn’t always a cozy place where supper will always be hot and there is cake every morning. Nonetheless, much of Sendak’s early work can be delightfully charming — see “Chicken Soup With Rice”— although already in his little chapter book, “Higglety, Pigglety Pop! Or, There Must Be More to Life,” the canine protagonist Jennie runs away from home simply because “There must be more to life.” As Sendak grew older and more confident, his transgressiveness grew bolder. He seldom tempered his imagery, not even when providing — as he frequently did — decorations to other people’s books, generally using variants of his chubby manikins and dreamy peasant lasses. Just look, for instance, at all the Freudian wish-fulfillments displayed in the pictures for the schoolyard rhymes collected in “I Saw Esau.” To illustrate one punning chant that begins, “I one my mother, I two my mother” and concludes “I ate my mother,” Sendak shows a bawling infant who, given a breast to nurse on, gradually sucks up Mom altogether and then, fat and happy, dances a little jig on a stool — a simple play on words thus becoming an all-too-accurate parable of motherchild relations. Maurice Sendak was always much more than just the creator of “Where the Wild Things Are.” Still, that is the masterpiece. Everything in it works in perfect harmony, even the margins and white space. We first see Max in a small framed image, but as the book progresses, the pictures grow bigger and bigger, eventually bleeding over from the right-hand page to the left. At the book’s climax — the Wild Rumpus — the illustrations fill the double-page spread entirely; there are no margins, no words for this orgiastic abandon. Then the whole process reverses itself. These days, I no longer have small children to read to every night. Yet, from time to time, I still pick up Sendak’s albums, and always find something new to marvel at in them. They are true classics. His best books are so rich that they can be read again and again and again. Even a 5-yearold knows that. ‘The First Crusade: The Call From the East,’ by Peter Frankopan

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by Michael Dirda May 2, 2012 Read Later

“Deus vult!” — God wills it! — was the battle cry of the First Crusade, in which armies of Europe, at the very end of the 11th century, marched off to liberate the holy city of Jerusalem and conquer the infidel Turks, who were then sweeping all before them in Asia Minor. Whatever God’s actual intentions in the matter, and He is known to move in mysterious ways, His representatives on earth, Pope Urban II in Rome and the Emperor Alexios in Constantinople, quite clearly fostered this great martial enterprise for political purposes of their own. The emperor, assailed by enemies on his frontiers and by rivals within his family, was desperate for military aid, just as the pope was comparably eager for a galvanizing cause that would confirm his primacy as the leader of the Christian world. Older studies of this complex military venture — merely one in a series of clashes between “Europe” and “Asia” that goes back as far as the Trojan War and continues to this day — often tend to emphasize its romantic character. In this view, Pope Urban’s electrifying call to arms at Clermont in 1095 is regarded as the starting point for years of heroism and self-sacrifice. That day, in a field in France, the pontiff thundered out that that the Muslims, “a foreign people and a people rejected by God, had invaded lands belonging to Christians, destroying them and plundering the local population.” He then proceeded to detail the horrors inflicted by these demonized Turks: “They throw down altars, after soiling them with their own filth, circumcise Christians, and pour the resulting blood either on the altars or into the baptismal vessels. . . . When they feel like inflicting a truly painful death on some they pierce their navels [and] pull out the end of their intestines. . . . They shoot arrows at others tied to stakes; others again they attack having stretched out their necks, unsheathing their swords to see if they can manage to hack off their heads with one blow. And what can I say about the appalling treatment of women, which is better to pass over in silence than to spell out in detail?” Given such atrocities, how could any respectable Christian warrior hesitate to act? As it happens, Urban’s oratory hardly exaggerated the Turkish ruthlessness, although very soon the Crusaders would slaughter with a comparable barbarity. The subtitle of Peter Frankopan’s highly readable “The First Crusade: The Call From the East” — underscores his revisionist approach to his subject: He seeks to understand the roots of the Crusades in the literally Byzantine politics of Asia Minor during the late 11th century, focusing especially on the empire’s strategic accommodations with its enemies in the aftermath of an ignominious defeat at the battle of Manzikert in 1071. The book’s hero is, in effect, the Emperor Alexios I. Komnenos, who spent his reign in a relentless quest for stability. In some instances, Alexios triumphed on the battlefield, as when in 1091, at Lebounion, he essentially wiped out the marauding Pecheneg nomads. But more often he preferred high-level diplomacy, either co-opting or buying the friendship of various Muslim warlords, although such ententes lasted only until those leaders were killed or died. Eventually, Alexios’s enemies grew too

powerful to be placated. In short order, his dominion over the seaboard and interior of Asia Minor essentially collapsed. There was a coup attempt involving close associates, including his brother. The empire was tottering. Paul Cain’s ‘The Complete Slayers,’ reviewed by Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda March 29, 2012 Read Later

The Black Mask School. The tough-guy writers of the ’30s. The boys in the backroom. The masters of noir. All those phrases have been used to describe the pioneers of hard-boiled, American crime fiction. Long disdained, the best of these pulp storytellers began to be rediscovered in the 1980s when Black Lizard, Arbor House and other publishers reprinted novels by Cornell Woolrich (“The Bride Wore Black”), Jim Thompson (“The Killer Inside Me”), Edward Anderson (“Thieves Like Us”), James M. Cain (“The Postman Always Rings Twice”) and Horace McCoy (“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”). More recently, the works of Dashiell Hammett, creator of the Continental Op, and Raymond Chandler, chronicler of Philip Marlowe, have both been enshrined in the stately Library of America. They are joined there this week by an omnibus of five David Goodis novels, including “Dark Passage” and “The Moon in the Gutter.” It’s certainly appropriate that such fiction — as American as a Colt .45 — should be honored, read and studied. But the Library of America does tend to sanitize the look and feel of work that originally appeared in cheap magazines with leggy blondes or rumpled private eyes on the covers. There’s no worry about that with this Centipede Press edition of Paul Cain’s complete works, consisting of the novel “Fast One,” published in 1933, and 15 short stories, including all those in the author’s only other book, the 1946 digest “Seven Slayers.” On the retro dust jacket of “The Complete Slayers,” artist Ron Lesser boldly highlights a dame dressed in nothing but her extremely well-filled underwear. She delicately fingers a cigarette-holder in one hand and a smoking gun in the other. So you might want to take off the dust jacket when you read this terrific book on the subway. Paul Cain (1902-66) — no relation to James M. Cain — was the pen name for Hollywood screenwriter Peter Ruric, who was also known as George Ruric and who was born George Sims. What little is known about his life — largely as a Hollywood hack — isn’t really important, though editors Max Allan Collins and Lynn Myers Jr. provide a short account of his screenwriting career. What does matter is Cain’s lean, stripped-down prose, affectless narrative voice and killer stories, almost all of them for Black Mask magazine. No less an authority than Raymond Chandler described Cain’s style as “some kind of high point in the ultra hard-boiled manner.”

Near the end of one of the stories in “The Complete Slayers,” the protagonist is hustled into a car by some gangsters. “When we got out of town a ways we went faster. It was very cold. “I said: ‘Hurry up.’ “Neilan turned and grinned at me. I could see his face a little as we passed a street light. He said: ‘Hurry up — what?’ “ ‘Hurry up.’ The cold was beginning to get in to the pit of my stomach, and my legs. I wanted to be able to stand up. I wanted it standing up, if I could.” Note how Cain doesn’t tell us that Red is going to be killed. There’s no need. For Red, what matters is that he meet his end properly, without breaking the tough-guy shell that defines his life. In another story, an important character’s death is described in as offhand a fashion as is imaginable: “There, after a little while, life went away from him.”

In general, Cain’s characters aren’t private eyes, though they are required to solve mysteries and piece together who murdered this guy or that. In “Black” the protagonist is an enforcer for a criminal syndicate. Many seem to be professional gamblers, laconic high-rollers who are as good with their fists as they are with a pair of dice. In the novel “Fast One” — constructed out of five novelettes about the power struggles among some West Coast racketeers — the anti-hero Kells is utterly amoral; his dipsomaniacal girlfriend is known simply as Granquist (she has a tendency to curl up and fall asleep wherever she is). As William F. Nolan writes in his introduction to this dark masterpiece: “It chills the soul: You don’t read it, you survive it.” That is more than most of its characters do. When “Fast One” first appeared, the New York Times attacked the novel as “a ceaseless welter of bloodshed and frenzy . . . a bedlam of killing and fiendishness.” The narrative’s point of view is nearly always external: People talk, actions are starkly described, no explanations are given, and we can only guess what Kells or other characters are thinking. The prose is similar to Hemingway’s, but even leaner. In the book’s opening section, Kells is beaten and kicked unconscious, then thrown into a locked room on a gambling ship. He escapes and goes looking for the money he’s owed: “Swanstrom was sitting at the desk with his back to the door. Another man, a spare, thin-haired consumptive-looking man, was sitting on a chair on the platform, one of the .30-30s across his knees. He looked at Kells and he looked at the big blue revolver in Kells’ hand and he put the .3030 down on the platform.” Now and again, Cain injects the kind of wry humor or striking comparison we associate with Chandler: “Amante looked at me as if I’d betrayed him and all his family and then finished by

stealing his rollerskates.” “Amante’s sneer was the kind people probably wear just before they get their throat cut by the sneeree.” A murdered man’s widow speaks with a voice “like little chunks of lead falling into a rainbarrel.” Another woman’s face “was as expressionless as a mop.” Centipede Press is mainly known for its lavish editions of classics of science fiction, fantasy and horror. “The Complete Slayers” is, by Centipede’s usual standards, a relatively modest production (limited to just 500 copies). It features interior art throughout by Ron Lesser and a 13-page “cover gallery,” displaying small color reproductions of dozens of issues of Black Mask, as well as the various paperback editions of “Seven Slayers” and “Fast One.” Each Cain story, moreover, is prefaced with a short appreciation by a contemporary mystery writer. Bill Pronzini, Joe Gores, John Lutz, Edward D. Hoch and others duly sing the praises of Paul Cain. Unfortunately, duty requires me to register a few complaints. Although Cain’s stories seem to have been set in type with reasonable care, the book’s table of contents includes an egregious misspelling in a title — “The Tasting Machine” appears as “The Tasting Maching” — and the editors’ introduction and afterword are both marred by sloppy writing, confusing punctuation, misprints and inattentive proofing (“and fathered several two sons”). This is a pity, given the handsomeness and obvious desirability of this edition of “The Complete Slayers.” But let’s keep these caveats in perspective: There’s absolutely nothing to criticize about the knockout stories inside the book — or about that knockout blonde on its cover. Osip Mandelstam: ‘Stolen Air: Selected Poems’ • • •

by Michael Dirda April 19, 2012 Read Later

April is Poetry Month, and to many readers that means guilt. Poetry is like exercise: We know it’s important, we know we should get more of it, and yet it all seems so hard, so daunting. A novel, after all, entertains us with a story; nonfiction increases our knowledge of the world. But poems — what do they do? Back in school, our teachers would stress the arcana of alliteration and assonance; in 12th grade we’d be tasked with guessing what lines such as “Else a great prince in prison lies” might possibly mean. Sometimes, of course, poems did speak of lost love, shattered dreams and the thousand natural angsts that teenage hearts are heir to. “To His Coy Mistress” was really pretty hot. But modern poetry? Don’t you need a philosophy degree to appreciate Jorie Graham? Aren’t the Formalists really, well, stiff and formal? And John Ashbery’s work is just melodious stream of consciousness, right? There’s Billy Collins, of course, and Maya Angelou, but people say they’re little more than clever greeting-card versifiers. All these are excuses. You need to read poems just as you need to do those exercises. Not because they’re good for you — which they are — but because they will make you feel good. Poetry also will make you smile, or weep, or remember. You don’t need to analyze symbols or spend hours

explicating every line. Just pick up a book of poems — say “Stolen Air,” a collection of Christian Wiman’s versions of the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam — and turn, almost at random, to “Night Piece”: Come love let us sit together In the cramped kitchen breathing kerosene. There’s fuel enough to forget the weather, The knife is ours and the bread is clean. Come love let us play the game Of what to take and when to run, Of come with me and come what may And holding hands to hold off the sun. Mandelstam wrote that in 1931, when he was already suffering the ostracism and hardship of being a serious poet under Stalin’s dictatorship. As he famously observed: “Only in Russia is poetry respected, it gets people killed. Is there anywhere else where poetry is so common a motive for murder?” Mandelstam would die in the Gulag Archipelago in 1938 at the age of 47. With the possible exceptions of Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva, who were his close friends, Mandelstam is generally viewed as the greatest Russian poet of the past century. He also was a brilliant prose writer, and if there’s a better short memoir than “The Noise of Time,” I’ve yet to run across it. In its pages Mandelstam evokes the sights and smells and sounds of a St. Petersburg childhood in the years just before the Revolution. The poet’s later years were chronicled, in heartrending detail, by his wife, Nadezhda Mandelstam, in two great acts of witnessing, “Hope Against Hope” and “Hope Abandoned.” Mandelstam’s poetry has been much translated, perhaps most notably by W.S. Merwin and Clarence Brown (in a volume now available in paperback from New York Review of Books Classics). Wiman’s Mandelstam is much freer than theirs or almost anyone’s, being re-creations in English by a poet who knows no Russian but relies instead on trots, the advice of knowledgeable friends like Ilya Kaminsky (who supplies a lengthy introduction to this slender book), and his own sense of language. Because Wiman possesses real verbal dexterity and a flair for wordplay, these poems — even at their grimmest — are a delight for the ear.

Consider such phrases as these: “the old lullaby of alibis” or “the kisslessness / Of emptiness” or “Choice roses chucked from Rolls-Royces” or even “the wheeze and laze of asthmatic days.” Sometimes the lines are neatly satirical: “To pose under a portico in a nimbus / Of self and with a

dead animal for a hat.” Others are full of black humor: “the splendid official, who on a lark / Hopped a daytime train without his papers, / Now pickaxes ice with a quiet tribe of lepers.” Some pack a story into a simile: “Like a happy man undone by an alley-flash of lace.” Still others combine allusion with epigram: “You were no one’s wholly, and you were no one’s fool.” Throughout, too, Wiman gently, faintly echoes earlier poems. “Night Piece” plays off Christopher Marlowe’s “Come live with me and be my love.” Gerard Manley Hopkins reverberates throughout the book, most notably in “we are sulk-soft, silk-kneed, mild.”Other touches are more tentative, a matter of rhythm or a single word: “I teach an executioner how to kill / By teaching birdsongs to a man” — could this be Theodore Roethke’s “I knew a woman, lovely in her bones” transmogrified? In the same poem, we’re told that “the phone squats like a watched frog” — an almost-echo of Philip Larkin’s “Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life?” And could “Father, friend, O my cold counselor” be a wave to Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”? Maybe, maybe not. Yet anyone who has stood in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles can appreciate this evocation of a bureaucracy far worse than Washington’s: Official paper, officious jowls, unswallowable smells Of vomit, vodka, cells, bowels, And all these red-tape tapewords gorging on reports. Choir, stars, your highest, your holiest silences. . . . But first, sign here on the dotted line That they may grant you permission to shine. While there is much to enjoy in “Stolen Air,” Wiman — the editor of Poetry magazine — encourages readers to seek other approaches to the poet as well as his own. Every translation offers its own magic and beauty, its own insight. In Merwin and Brown’s edition, the poem “Tristia” opens: “I have studied the science of good-byes, / the bare-headed laments of night.” Wiman’s version begins: “There is, I know, a science of separation / In night’s disheveled elegies, stifled laments.” I love Merwin and Brown’s first line; Wiman’s lacks its romantic wistfulness. Yet “disheveled elegies” strikes me as marginally superior to “bare-headed laments of night.” Other people may feel different. No matter. What does matter is that you need to ease your guilt about not reading enough poetry. Stop by your local bookstore and pick up “Stolen Air” or browse the poetry shelves at the library and sample a few other collections, preferably by living writers. Greater Washington boasts such distinctive voices as Linda Pastan, Stanley Plumly, Joshua Weiner, our current poet laureate Philip Levine, Elizabeth Arnold, E. Ethelbert Miller, Michael Collier and Jane Shore among many others. Such poets reward their readers anytime, not just in April. ‘The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard,’ reviewed by Michael Dirda

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by Michael Dirda March 21, 2012 Read Later

On its title page, “The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard” is identified as “a special publication” of the Library of America. In other words, Brainard isn’t slyly being added to the official canon of great American writers, nor is he meant to be regarded as an author comparable in importance to, say, gothicky Charles Brockden Brown or 19th-century novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe. Still, he’s a lot funnier than either and worth reading right now — and not in that rosy, impossible future when we picture ourselves methodically working our way through all the black-jacketed Library of America classics. Brainard (1942-1994) was a painter, set designer and writer, a beloved figure of the Greenwich Village cultural scene of the 1960s and ’70s, and, terribly, a victim of the AIDS epidemic. Today he is best known as the author of one of the most original and — to use a debased word — enchanting books of our time: “I Remember” (1970). In that endlessly entertaining litany, Brainard simply lists, one after another, the random memories that spring to mind when he murmurs the phrase “I remember.” For anyone of a certain age, the result is an astonishingly vivid evocation of childhood in post-World War II America. Brainard grew up in Tulsa, but many of his strobe-lit recollections will be familiar even if you spent your early years in Maryland or Ohio. Let me transcribe a fair number of entries, partly for the pleasure of it and partly to convey just how Brainard keeps you turning the pages: “I remember the first time I got a letter that said ‘After Five Days Return To’ on the envelope, and I thought that after I had kept the letter for five days I was supposed to return it to the sender.” “I remember pop beads.” “I remember radio ball game sounds coming from the garage on Saturday afternoons.” “I remember zipper notebooks. I remember that girls hugged them to their breasts and that boys carried them loosely at one side.” “I remember white bread and tearing off the crust and rolling the middle part up into a ball and eating it.” “I remember ‘Your front door is open.’ Or maybe it was ‘Barn door.’ Or both.” “I remember ‘Payday’ candy bars and eating the peanuts off first and then eating the center part.” “I remember playing hopscotch without ever really knowing the rules.”

“I remember Dole pineapple rings on a bed of lettuce with cottage cheese on top and sometimes a cherry on top of that.” “I remember crossing your fingers behind your back when you tell a lie.” “I remember ‘Ma and Pa Kettle.’ ‘Dishpan hands.’ Linoleum. Cyclone fences. Shaggy dog stories. Stucco houses. Pen and pencil sets. Tinker Toys. Lincoln Logs. And red blue jeans for girls.” “I remember after Halloween my brother and me spreading all our loot out and doing some trading.” “I remember little wax bottles with very sweet liquid inside.” “I remember ‘dress up time.’ (Running around pulling up girls’ dresses yelling ‘dress up time.’)” “I remember big black galoshes with lots of metal foldover clamps.” “I remember baby shoes hanging from car rear-view mirrors.”

“I remember baby shoes hanging from car rear-view mirrors.” “I remember ‘Silly Putty’ in a plastic egg.” “I remember fantasies of being in jail, and very monk-like in my cell, hand-writing out a giant great novel.” “I remember Kon-Tiki.” “I remember egg salad sandwiches ‘on white’ and large cherry Cokes, at drugstore counters.” “I remember ‘Double Bubble’ gum comics, and licking off the sweet ‘powder.’ ” “I remember, after school, a period of three or four minutes of lots of locker doors being slammed. And long corridor echoes.” “I remember Creamsicles and Fudgesicles and Popsicles that broke (usually) in two.” “I remember the chocolate Easter bunny problem of where to start.” “I remember red rubber coin purses that opened like a pair of lips, with a squeeze.” “I remember ‘pick-up sticks,’ ‘tiddly-winks,’ ‘fifty-two pick-up,” and ‘war.’ ” “I remember ‘spin the bottle’ and ‘post office.’ ”

“I remember movies in school about kids that drink and take drugs and then they have a car wreck and one girl gets killed.” As these examples show, Brainard presents his memories in a consistently flat, factual manner, eschewing commentary or the least smile of irony. Naturally enough, some of the entries — unrepresented here — deal with young Brainard’s bodily functions and sexual discoveries. But these, too, are part of growing up. Much of Brainard’s other work might be loosely described as prose poem or humorous essay or watered-down surrealism. In “People of the World: Relax!” he draws comic-book figures and inserts unexpected thought and speech balloons into the panels. Thus a stalwart Dick Tracy is seen thinking, “Beware of boys in tight pants,” and Li’l Abner ruminates, “Put on a clean white shirt and relax.” Nearly every page of Brainard is similarly mysterious, inconsequential and fun. For instance, under “Chocolate,” one of “Twenty-three Mini-Essays,” he writes, “The story of chocolate is sweet and bitter and sometimes nutty.” That’s the entire mini-essay. Such conciseness runs throughout Brainard’s work. Take this two-sentence short story: “Ten years ago I left home to go to the city and strike it big. But the only thing that was striking was the clock as it quickly ticked away my life.” Or try the even shorter “No Story”: “I hope you have enjoyed not reading this story as much as I have enjoyed not writing it.” “The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard” also offers capsule portraits of friends; travel diaries about Washington, New England and Bolinas, Calif.; a meditation on the fear of death; reflections on art; a list of Brainard’s favorite quotations (“Get it while you can” — Janis Joplin); and scores of oddly surreal observations and casually overheard phrases: “Things we see from car windows are remembered for many years”; “I love to embroider, but that’s about as far as I go.” In a section called “Nothing to Write Home About,” Brainard even presents his economic platform: “My idea about money is similar to the gypsy idea about money: that a man’s wealth is based not so much upon how much money he has, as upon how much money he has spent.” The novelist Paul Auster provides an enthusiastic introduction to “The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard” and actually attempts a taxonomic analysis of the topics covered in “I Remember.” An appendix usefully identifies most of the writers and artists mentioned in the later pages. For instance, the poet Ron Padgett, who edited these pieces, first met Brainard in elementary school. While “The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard” may not be a fully canonical Library of America title, it is certainly a superbly engaging bedside book, full of springlike exuberance, energy and wit. But, to quote Brainard himself, “Don’t take my word for it — ask any seal hunter.” Book World: ‘Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives,’ by John Sutherland • •

by Michael Dirda April 13, 2012

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Read Later

A tremendously exhilarating book, John Sutherland’s history of fiction in English from John Bunyan and Aphra Behn to Patricia Cornwell, Alice Sebold and Rana Dasgupta is less a work of scholarship than it is a catalogue of pleasures. Indeed, there’s something distinctly gossipy, almost salacious, in Sutherland’s fascination with the messy lives of authors. Sexual indiscretions, alcoholism, ill health, financial desperation and early death are virtual leitmotifs, running throughout these 800 pages of potted literary biography. For example, toward the end of his entry on Edith Wharton, he quotes a steamy passage from an unpublished sketch called “Beatrice Palmato.” Who knew that the corseted grande dame of American letters could write stuff so hot and graphic it can’t possibly be quoted in a family newspaper? Ostensibly, Sutherland’s title — “Lives of the Novelists” — alludes to the biographical-critical masterwork of Samuel Johnson, “Lives of the Poets.” But Sutherland is less an interpretative genius than he is a literary entertainer. In some ways, his book might be better likened to the lipsmackingly scandalous “Brief Lives” of the 17th-century eccentric John Aubrey or even to the “Curiosities of Literature” of that snapper-up of unconsidered trifles Isaac D’Israeli. This means you can read Sutherland for fun as well as for (cultural) profit. Daniel Defoe, he tells us, once failed in a scheme to harvest musk “from the anus of cats,” and Laurence Sterne’s corpse was stolen from its grave and “recognized — just before dismemberment — on a medical school dissection table at Cambridge.” Despite his taste for the louche and eye-popping, Sutherland — the retired Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London — unquestionably possesses the proper academic bona fides. His earlier works include “The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction” (a 900-entry biographical encyclopedia that he wrote from scratch), important books about Thackeray, Walter Scott and Mrs. Humphry Ward, and several studies of bestsellers and the popular fiction market. For decades now, he has also been a fixture in Britain as a reviewer for the top literary periodicals and newspapers. As if he were its custodian, Sutherland seems to know every room in the House of Fiction, from the dank basement where the chained monsters slaver to the formal drawing rooms of Jane Austen and Henry James. Although a critic like Harold Bloom disdains Stephen King, without, perhaps, having done more than glance at one of his books, it’s clear that Sutherland has read nearly all King’s novels and grasped his storytelling genius: “What sets King apart from other super-selling authors is his constant straining against the limitations of genre.” I really can’t underscore enough the range and sprightliness of “Lives of the Novelists.” Sutherland discusses the cowboy novelists Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Max Brand and Louis L’Amour; writes shrewdly about the mystery-thriller specialists Edgar Wallace, Eric Ambler, Margery Allingham, Leslie Charteris (creator of “The Saint” and a founder of Mensa), Mickey Spillane, Ian Fleming, Dick Francis and Trevanian; and emphasizes the sociological influence of such classic children’s authors as L. Frank Baum, Kenneth Grahame, Enid Bagnold, Richmal Crompton and Captain W.E. Johns (creator of Biggles). Although he covers “good” bestsellers such as Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone

With the Wind” and Marilyn French’s “The Women’s Room,” he doesn’t neglect influential “bad” ones, such as Harold Robbins’s “The Carpetbaggers,” Jacqueline Susann’s “Valley of the Dolls” and, even, William L. Pierce’s rancid “The Turner Diaries.” There’s something, in short, for every taste and, implicitly, an invitation to try some new or exotic items from fiction’s smorgasbord.

In this regard, Sutherland is particularly useful in pointing out neglected books and writers: “Two things are routinely said of [Robert] Bage by those (few) who ever get around to reading him: one is that more people should read him and the other that ‘Hermsprong’ qualifies as the most bizarre title in English literature.” Lewis Wingfield’s “The Curse of Koshiu,” subtitled “A Chronicle of Old Japan,” is “quite as good as [Ian] Fleming’s ‘You Only Live Twice,’ or James Clavell’s “Shogun.’ ” Benjamin Disraeli’s “Sybil” contains “the most graphic depictions of working-class wretchedness to be found in Victorian fiction,” and George Eliot’s short story “Janet’s Repentance” is “the first study of female alcoholism in literature.” Not least, we are reminded that Amanda Ros, the author of “Irene Iddesleigh,” is a leading candidate for “the world’s worst novelist.” While Sutherland can be tantalizing — as in his description of a cunningly structured mystery, “Tony and Susan,” by Austin M. Wright — he sometimes says too much, regularly giving away a book’s denouement. This is particularly distressing because Sutherland emphasizes plot-driven fiction: The Jim Thompson entry, for example, reveals — or wrecks — several key scenes in “The Killer Inside Me.” At the same time, Sutherland can brilliantly sum up an author’s overall esthetic: Anthony Burgess’s writing, is “marked by a Joycean verbal exuberance, tempered by cosmic melancholy.” At least some of “Lives of the Novelists” is recycled material from reviews, essays and other journalism. No shame in that. But this does lead to occasional idiosyncrasy. The essay on Thomas Hardy traces the novelist’s obsession with hanging, that on William Faulkner focuses almost entirely on “Soldier’s Pay,” and the Philip Roth entry dwells inordinately on “The Facts.” Sutherland’s so-called “Must Read Text” for Graham Greene is “The End of the Affair,” which seems an odd choice, and for John Cheever he picks, even more unexpectedly, “Falconer.” After noting that Kingsley Amis pronounced “The Space Merchants,” by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, “the best SF novel ever written,” Sutherland adds, “It has my vote as well.” This is crazy. “The Space Merchants” is entertaining and influential but very much a period piece. There are a score of better science-fiction novels. But, then, arguing with Sutherland can be part of the fun. Why Michael Avallone rather than Rex Stout? Is Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano” a greater work than Ralph Ellison’s excluded “Invisible Man”? Should Brian Aldiss be replaced by Philip K. Dick or Ursula K. Le Guin? On the whole, Sutherland seems to shy away from fantasy, and you will look in vain for entries on Thomas Love Peacock, Ronald Firbank, Mervyn Peake, J.R.R. Tolkien, Angela Carter or John Crowley. He also strikes me as rather lukewarm about Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and, more surprisingly, Anthony Powell. By contrast, Sutherland reveres Elmore Leonard, regards Julian Barnes’s “Flaubert’s Parrot” as “a high point in twentieth-century literature,” declares David Lodge “the greatest comic novelist of our time,” and rightly views J.G. Ballard as, quite simply, “one of the very greatest writers of his time.”

Early in his book, Sutherland suggests, almost casually, that “the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to be the supreme virtue of a novel.” That phrase “solidity of specification” aptly describes the nuggety, factual approach in these essays; there’s nothing gaseous about Sutherland’s writing. By its heft, “Lives of the Novelists” might look like an academic tome, but it reads like one of those unputdownable blockbusters you take to the beach. J.-H. Rosny aine: ‘Three Science Fiction Novellas: From Prehistory to the End of Mankind’ • • •

by Michael Dirda April 6, 2012 Read Later

Some readers might remember the 1981 film “Quest for Fire.” Set among ancient hominids who speak a kind of proto Indo-European language (invented by Anthony Burgess), it garnered several European awards and an Oscar for best makeup. It also brought a small measure of attention to J.H. Rosny aine — that last word means “senior” — who had written the 1911 novel upon which the movie was based. After Jules Verne, the Belgian-born Rosny (1856-1940) is probably the greatest of all French-speaking science-fiction writers, although only a few of his works have been readily available in English. Happily, thanks to the Wesleyan Early Classics of Science Fiction Series, three of Rosny’s finest novellas can now be enjoyed in authoritative translations. Never having encountered any of his fiction, I was unprepared for the power and beauty of “The Xipehuz,” “Another World” and “The Death of the Earth.” There’s nothing hokey or dated about these startling visions of Otherness, although they were first published more than a century ago. You won’t read better science-fiction stories — or even better stories — this year. Let me give you just a taste of each. “The Xipehuz” opens 1,000 years before the rise of Nineveh and Babylon. A nomadic people called the Pjehou are traveling through a forest just before sunset. As the tribe and their animals enter a clearing, where they hope to camp, they discover a “phantasmagorical sight”: “a large circle of bluish, translucent cones,” each with a star near its base. As well as the cones, the clearing contains other entities, some “strata-like” and others cylindrical. Stunned, the Pjehou can only imagine that the entities are gods. All at once, however, these shimmering organisms sense the presence of observers: “And suddenly, their stars pulsating and vibrating, the cones became elongated, the cylinders and the strata made a rustling noise like water thrown on flames, all coming toward the nomads with accelerating speed.” The attack is overwhelming, as these obviously sentient creatures employ some sort of electrical discharge to stun or kill the humans. Oddly, however, they immediately cease their aggression at a certain fixed limit of the forest. Beyond that boundary, one is safe. From this dramatic opening, Rosny goes on to describe the culture of these bizarre and apparently invulnerable beings, noting that they undergo constant metamorphosis, in which “cones tended to stretch into cylinders,” even as “cylinders were expanding their sides, while the strata changed partially into curves.” Worryingly, it gradually becomes apparent that the Xipehuz, as they are soon

called, are growing in number, and as their population increases, so does their perimeter of action expand. Unless they are stopped soon, the Xipehuz will wipe out mankind and take over Earth. In “Another World,” Rosny presents the first-person account of the early years of a young man who is apparently a mutant. His skin is violet, his movements incredibly agile, his fast speech incomprehensible and his eyes “corneous” and opaque. Yet, with those strange eyes, he can peer into a parallel world that interpenetrates our own, one that is populated by diaphanous “Beings” who are “moving next to and all around man, without man being aware of it.” Those who live on land the boy calls the Moedigen, and those who inhabit the air the Vuren. Could they be related to the Xipehuz? ‘The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank’ • • •

by Michael Dirda March 7, 2012 Read Later

Freud insisted that during the analytic hour, the psychoanalyst should maintain the detachment of a surgeon, staying reserved, objective and unemotional. It’s hard not to find this ironic, given the often soap-operatic lives of the men and women who formed Freud’s inner circle. Doctors sometimes like to be perceived as Olympian gods, but these letters remind us how often gods are venal, petty, jealous and spiteful. The excellent book “The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis” focuses on the early career of Otto Rank, one of Freud’s most gifted disciples. To ordinary readers, Rank is probably best known for “The Myth of the Birth of the Hero,” initially published in 1909 and then revised and amplified in 1922. In the 1909 version, Rank explores the significance of hero myths, finding in them variations on the infantile fantasy to kill the father, take his place and possess the mother. In the later edition, Rank retains much of this initial Oedipal interpretation but enlarges his scope to examine more closely the hero’s actual birth, usually closely associated with water. This is important, because in the 1920s, Rank made birth trauma central to his understanding of neuroses. Where Freud focused on anxieties directed at the father, Rank looked to those involving the mother. As newborns, we are torn from a happy and serene environment in the womb; thus, our first experience of life is the feeling of loss and confusion. The mother consequently becomes the locus of satisfaction when she nurses and cradles the child and of anxiety when she is absent. That initial separation from prenatal security, note editors E. James Lieberman and Robert Kramer, “reechoes through life: in weaning and walking, forming and losing relationships, joining and separating from groups, and facing death.” In 1906, Rank joined what became the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society; he was 22 years old, and Freud was 50. For a brief, shining moment, Rank belonged to a brotherly corps that included such famous names as Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, Karl Abraham, Sandor Ferenczi and Ernest Jones. But as the years went by, this fraternity gradually grew more like the primordial horde described in Freud’s “Totem and Taboo”: The strongest of these “sons” turned on their “father” and broke away from the received Freudian doctrines. For instance, where the clinical

Freud emphasized sexuality and the first half of life, the more mystical Jung explored our later years, when we must achieve psychic wholeness and an acceptance of death. Adler, in his turn, developed a psychology based on social dynamics; he coined the term “inferiority complex.” For many years, though, the young Rank served as Freud’s go-to lieutenant. Although the letters they exchanged reveal some of the inner workings of their minds, there is much more about the tensions and conflicts inside the psychoanalytic school. This history is elaborated by the editors in long, bridging sections that serve as a virtual potted history of psychoanalysis up to the late 1920s and — it must be admitted — a relief from the overly faint italic type used for the quoted letters themselves.

That history is rather deflating. Freud is obsessed with finding rich donors, creepily undertakes to analyze his daughter Anna, and, after the death of his 4-year-old grandson, announces that he will never care about anyone again. Ferenczi carries on an affair with a married woman and former patient, then falls in love with her daughter. Abraham and Jones are deeply jealous of Rank, and the latter accuses him of being “ a swindling Jew.” As these letters proceed, there are moments when they grow almost comical in a distinctly Woody Allen vein. Freud obsesses about acquiring more of his preferred blotting paper, describes New York as “a deranged, anal, Adlerish mess” and sternly informs Rank, who has been enjoying the little zoo in Central Park, that “the only zoo really worth seeing is in The Bronx.” When Freud decides to have surgery for a growth in his mouth — the first signs of cancer — he doesn’t say anything to his family but goes to an outpatient clinic. Complications result, and “the Professor” is placed in the only available bed “with a deaf-mute dwarf as a roommate.” In a long letter written to Freud on Aug. 9, 1924, Rank finally vents his personal and ideological frustrations: “I have the definite impression that you don’t wish to see certain things or that you can’t see them, for sometimes your objections sound as though you hadn’t read or heard what I actually said.” Of his colleagues, he declares that their “plans and conspiracies” are “unworthy of a scientific movement” and that they are “more interested in intrigue for its own sake than in attaining any definite goals.” Not surprisingly, everyone then turns on the heretic. But then, four months later, appears the shocking letter of Dec. 20, 1924, in which Rank abjectly confesses that he has “come to myself again.” Sounding like one of the brainwashed at the Moscow show trials, he denounces his neurotic betrayal of “the Professor” and seeks forgiveness from all those close to him. Lieberman and Kramer suggest that Rank’s drastic mood swings indicate bipolar disorder. Whatever the case, the Freudian establishment never wholly trusted him again. Rank continued to write monographs — including a famous one on “the double” and several on art — but he eventually moved to Paris to establish his own practice while also visiting New York regularly. He died in 1939 at the age of 55.

In essence, Freud believed in psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on theory, while Rank championed psychotherapy, with its emphasis on patients and the assuagement of their ills. In Rank’s actual practice, say his editors, a “here-and-now relationship . . . is the basis of transformation. The effective therapist provides above all a meaningful human connection.” Nonetheless, there is never any lasting resolution of the soul’s confusions since our lives are divided into “two emotional currents: one toward separation and individuation, the other toward connection and union.” In a statement that underscores his significance to modern therapeutic thinking, Rank declared: “The patient must learn to live, to live with his split, his conflict, his ambivalence, which no therapy can take away, for if it could, it would take with it the actual spring of life. The more truly the ambivalence is accepted the more life and the possibilities of life will the human being have and be able to use.” As Lieberman and Kramer add, “Neurosis is an unwillingness to accept this ambivalent condition of life, saying No to necessary suffering — ‘a refusal of life itself.’  ” On the surface, living with ambivalence doesn’t seem very different from Freud’s observation that successful therapy simply allows the patient to replace neurotic misery with ordinary unhappiness. In the end, both thinkers recognize that it is not just work but love, the unconditional love of another who accepts us for who we are, that makes life bearable and meaningful. Book World: ‘Pavane,’ by Keith Roberts, holds up decades later • • •

by Michael Dirda March 5, 2012 Read Later

A pavane is a stately dance, one with all its steps set out, with a clear beginning and a foreseen end . To my ear, the word itself sounds melancholy, with an air of plangency that fits this achingly beautiful novel perfectly. First published in 1968 and now reissued by Old Earth Books as a handsome large-size paperback, “Pavane” is one of the masterworks of modern science fiction, a book that has won the admiration of such contemporary giants of the field as Neil Gaiman , China Mieville , Terry Pratchett , Christopher Priest and William Gibson . On the cover — itself a striking example of Leo and Diane Dillon’s distinctive artwork — George R.R. Martin , author of “A Game of Thrones,” calls Roberts’s book “a masterpiece .  .  . one of the greatest alternate world stories ever told.” Technically, “Pavane” is what science-fiction readers call a “fix-up,” that is, a novel constructed from a series of separately published but linked stories. In the book’s prologue, we learn that in 1588 an assassin murdered Queen Elizabeth I, and the Spanish Armada successfully planted the flag of Spain on English soil. In short order, all the Protestant nations of Europe were then overturned by a resurgent Catholic Church. As the subsequent centuries have rolled by, the world has remained largely medieval, the most advanced technology permitted by the Church being the steam engine. As Roberts writes, to some these “were years of fulfillment, of the final flowering of God’s Design; to others they were a new Dark Age, haunted by things dead and others best forgotten; bears and catamounts, dire wolves and Fairies.” Those fairies, or Old Ones, are particularly

important as preservers of heretical ancient knowledge, so much so that in the middle of the 20th century, “rebellion was once more in the air.” There are six stories, called “measures,” in “Pavane,” and together with a coda these cover roughly four generations. England itself speaks five major languages: “the Norman French of the ruling classes, Latin of the Church, Modern English of commerce and trade, the outdated Middle English and Celtic of the churls.” Small details — such as the sacking of Florence by the mercenaries of Pope Orlando — further remind us that history has gone down a different timeline. Roberts, however, focuses almost entirely on a single section of Dorset, the towns and countryside around the castle of Corfe Gate. In “The Lady Margaret,” Jesse Strange inherits his family’s locomotive-based hauling business. From his story we learn of the papal bull of 1910, “Petroleum Veto,” which has forestalled the development of the gas engine. In “The Signaller” a young boy named Rafe undergoes apprenticeship in the secretive Guild of Signallers, which operates the network of semaphore towers by which information is transmitted around the country and to Europe. Another young man, in “Brother John,” is transformed by his encounter with the Court of Spiritual Welfare, better known as the Inquisition.

At one point in this last story, Brother John experiences that desideratum of nearly every alternate history: a vision of “our” world, the “real” world. “He saw the machines flying above the land, skimming like bubbles on the surface of the sea. He saw wonders; lightning chained, the wild waves of the very air made to talk and sing. All this would come to pass, all this and more. The age of tolerance, of reason, of humanity, of the dignity of the human soul.” At their best, alternate histories focus on people, much like ourselves, who are trying to get on with their lives in a world that is subtly, or substantially, different from our own. Think of Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” or George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Throughout “Pavane,” Roberts’s overriding concern is with the fragile human heart. His stories are suffused with loneliness and longing, with hopes and the dashing of hopes. In “The White Boat,” a young girl pins her dreams of a better life on a mysterious sailing ship, feared by her father, that sometimes appears in the bay near her village. In “Lords and Ladies,” Jesse Strange’s free-spirited niece Margaret falls in with the aristocratic Lord Robert of Wessex, whose family owns the great castle of Corfe Gate. She, too, experiences unsettling visions in which places are somehow skewed and twisted, but her sense of being unstuck in time she attributes to the influence of the Old Ones, the Fairies. In the last full-length story, her daughter, the Lady Eleanor, will lead the armed uprising against the established order of things — and will be helped by the Fairies. All the characters of “Pavane” are deeply sensitive, but Eleanor is also fiercely indomitable. At one point, she is kidnapped and one of her people cruelly murdered by supposed agents of the king and pope. In a level voice, she curses her captors in the five languages of England and promises them death. The kidnappers are unexpectedly thwarted, and Eleanor confronts their leader: “He tried to barter with her then, or beg his life; but she stared at him as if he spoke an unknown tongue. ‘Ask

mercy of the wind,’ she said, almost wonderingly. ‘Beg to the rocks, or the great waves of the sea. Don’t come and whine to me . . . ’  ” Roberts concludes “Pavane” with a somewhat problematic coda, one that compels the reader to think again about the action of the novel and of the Church’s role in it. He also suggests that history is governed by a kind of eternal recurrence, that once before, “beyond all the memories of men, there was a great civilization” that rose and flourished until there came “a burning, an Armageddon.” This Arnold Toynbee-like rise and fall of civilization, set against the backdrop of the Catholic Church, calls to mind Walter M. Miller Jr.’s comparably moving and provocative novel on this theme, “A Canticle for Leibowitz” (1960). Some years ago, Anthony Burgess — himself no slouch as a writer of alternate histories and dystopian sci-fi — chose “Pavane” as one of the 99 best novels written in English since 1939. I would add that it is also one of the most thought-filled, a book with the glowing but somber majesty of a stained-glass window, constructed from the most disparate bits and fragments, from the tesserae of multiple lives. What’s more, Roberts creates considerable suspense throughout, and his prose can be frequently joyous and lyrical, especially in descriptive passages. And yet, despite its optimistic coda, one closes this book riven with a sweet sadness, as at the end of some great tragedy. ‘The Last Pre-Raphaelite,’ by Fiona MacCarthy • • •

by Michael Dirda Feb. 23, 2012 Read Later

Last fall, I happened to find myself in Princeton, N.J., with a few hours to kill. Having discovered that the only secondhand bookshop in town had closed, I headed for the Princeton Art Museum. En route, I stopped at the university library, which had mounted a wonderful exhibition of William Hogarth’s 18th-century satirical prints — “Marriage a la Mode” and “A Rake’s Progress,” among others — and, naturally, I figured that would be the highlight of the day. I was wrong. In the museum, almost in a corner, I came upon a tall stained-glass panel designed by Edward Burne-Jones. It was of St. Cecilia, patron saint of music, dressed in blue. Her face — with that soulful, ethereal look we associate with the Pre-Raphaelites in general and Burne-Jones in particular — was so serenely beautiful that I stood there, transfixed. I finally tore myself away to continue my tour of the other galleries, but, five minutes later, found myself drawn back to stare some more. A quarter-hour later, the guards announced that it was closing time. During his lifetime, Burne-Jones’s art frequently had this mesmerizing effect on people. The girls and women he portrayed in his pictures, as well as the pictures themselves, were “stunners.” With eyes like deep pools, collagen lips and great masses of hair, these iconic beauties can be seen on dust jackets and posters to this day. Think back, for instance, to A.S. Byatt’s “Possession,” which attracted many initial buyers just because of its striking cover: Burne-Jones’s “The Beguiling of Merlin.”

Any new biography of Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) starts off in the shade of Penelope Fitzgerald’s beautifully written life, published in 1975. Fiona MacCarthy is no match for Fitzgerald on a sentence-for-sentence basis — but who could be, given that Fitzgerald was one of the finest novelists of the 1980s and early ’90s? But MacCarthy makes up for this through her unrivaled knowledge of that thread of English painting and decoration we think of as the Arts and Crafts movement (and its later descendants). She has, for instance, written standard books about the great polymath William Morris, the Bloomsbury group’s Omega Workshops and the influential stonecutter, type designer and printmaker Eric Gill. In her preface to “The Last Pre-Raphaelite,” MacCarthy sums up Burne-Jones as “the licensed escapist of his period, perpetrating an art of ancient myths, magical landscapes, insistent sexual yearnings, that expressed deep psychological needs for his contemporaries.” She underscores that he strongly believed “in the power of art to counteract the spiritual degradation, the meanness and corruption he saw everywhere around him in the ruthlessly expansionist, imperialistic Britain” of the 19th century. Little wonder, then, that the artist’s most famous paintings, tile works, drawings and tapestries illustrate scenes from romantic legends (“Pygmalion,” “King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid,” “Cupid and Psyche”); Malory’s “Morte d’Arthur” (“The Sleep of Arthur in Avalon,” “The Arming and Departure of the Knights of the Round Table on the Quest for the Holy Grail”); fairy tales (“Briar Rose,” “Beauty and the Beast”); and Chaucer (the illustrations for the coveted Kelmscott Press edition of the poet’s works). Two of his best-loved paintings — “Green Summer” and “The Golden Stairs” — are group portraits of young girls in flower, in the latter case of virtually angelic figures descending a series of winding steps.

Burne-Jones maintained that a picture should be, as he said, “a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be — in a light better than any light that ever shone — in a land no one can define or remember, only desire — and the forms divinely beautiful.” Nearly all his finished work displays the distinctive stillness, solemn beauty and other worldliness I saw in his St. Cecilia, often further imbued with a touch of heartache or subdued eroticism. Edward Burne-Jones’s mother died shortly after giving birth to him, and her absence colored his childhood, leaving him prey to insecurity and depression. At Oxford, he met the young William Morris, and the two quickly became best friends for life, forming an artistic partnership that would change English art. Rotund “Topsy” and lanky “Ned” enthused over John Ruskin’s books on early Italian art, happily joined the circle around the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and eventually came to know such controversial figures as Swinburne, Whistler and Wilde. Although Morris went on to become a founder of English socialism, Burne-Jones ended up an uneasy pillar of the cultural establishment. He enjoyed close connections to three prime ministers: William Gladstone, through their daughters’ friendship; Arthur Balfour as a patron and admirer; and Stanley Baldwin, who was a nephew (as was the writer Rudyard Kipling). Throughout her book, MacCarthy makes clear that Burne-Jones was a greatly likable man: “I get to work with reluctance at 10, wish I was dead at eleven, get hungry at 12, and all the rest of the day wish I was a gentleman and hadn’t to paint.” Like most artists, he didn’t make much money on his

art initially. But he had devoted and wealthy patrons, an occasional subvention from John Ruskin, and eventually a steady income from the tiles and stained glass he designed for Morris and Company’s interior decoration business. In due course, Burne-Jones’s house and studio, the Grange, became a lodestone for aesthetic London. And for women of all ages. The painter was drawn to pantherine beauties (such as the Greek Maria Zambaco, with whom he enjoyed an intense affair), to wronged wives in need of help and to adorable young girls. In many cases, these amours went no further than intensely flirtatious friendships. Burne-Jones simply couldn’t resist feminine beauty, despite the unhappiness his indiscretions caused his stoic and long-suffering wife. In the way of artists ever and always, his various sweethearts ended up lending their features to imagined saints, sirens and heroines. MacCarthy’s “The Last Pre-Raphaelite” is one of those books one can happily live in for a week, but some readers might feel that it lingers needlessly over the details of several Italian trips or digresses too much into the lives of subsidiary characters — though not enough into that of the shady Charles Augustus Howell, who persuaded Rossetti to dig up his wife’s grave to retrieve the poems buried with her. My own favorite pages focus on a series of Burne-Jones’s watercolors inspired by romantic flower names: “Love in a Mist,” “Ladder of Heaven,” “Grave of the Sea” and dozens of others. Burne-Jones’s public art is nothing if not serious, but his private drawings — many reproduced by MacCarthy — are whimsical, self-mocking and winningly intimate. A whole series makes fun of William Morris’s girth; one shows a self-caricature of the artist surrounded by all his “unpainted masterpieces”; still others decorate envelopes to child-friends. These tossed-off sketches, so full of good humor, reveal something of why Edward Burne-Jones was so beloved by those who knew him. Today, of course, he has emerged from a period of eclipse to become one of the most admired of all English painters of the 19th century, arguably second only to Turner. “Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters,” translated and edited by Michael Hofmann • • •

by Michael Dirda Feb. 15, 2012 Read Later

About a dozen or so years ago, I decided to review a novel by Joseph Roth called “The Tale of the 1002nd Night.” At the time, I knew almost nothing about Roth (1894-1939), except that he was Austrian, Jewish and the author of a book I’d heard called a masterpiece, “The Radetzky March.” Only later did I learn that he was also a highly regarded journalist (mostly for the Frankfurter Zeitung), liked to live in hotels and died in Paris at the young age of 44, at least in part because of overwork and alcoholism. Reading “The Tale of the 1002nd Night” proved a revelation. In it, the shah of Persia visits fin-desiecle Vienna and is dazzled by the European women at a ball: “Thus far, the women he had known had been of two kinds: either naked bodies or arrangements of drapery. But here were both together, at one and the same time! A gown that seemed to want to

fall of its own weight, and yet clung to a body: it was like a door that wasn’t locked and wouldn’t open. When the women curtsied to him, the Shah caught a glimpse of cleavage and then the downy hair on an exposed neck. And the split second in which the ladies raised their skirts with both hands before bending at the knee had something indescribably modest and at the same time fabulously indecent about it: it was like a promise that they had no intention of keeping. . . . How inexhaustible the amorous arts of the Occident must be!” Clearly, I had been wrong to imagine that Roth was one of those lugubrious and weighty Central European novelist-thinkers in the mode of Thomas Mann or Hermann Broch. I immediately went out and read “Hotel Savoy,” “The Radetzky March” and “The Legend of the Holy Drinker,” all three quite different, yet packed with historical and psychological insight and characterized by a kind of urbane comedy. In the years since then, W.W. Norton has reissued many of Roth’s novels, along with his collected stories, two volumes of journalism (“What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933” and “Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939 ”), and now this hefty selection from the writer’s letters. Counting this new volume, the poet Michael Hofmann has translated 10 books by Roth, and we are all in his debt and Norton’s. Just try any of the titles I’ve mentioned. Don’t, however, begin with “Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters.” Although it contains brilliant passages and apercus, these can only partly compensate for too many pages of business correspondence and grim 1930s-era ideological argument. As Hofmann tells us, none of Roth’s letters to his parents, wife and lovers survive. In those to publishers and friends, he mainly complains about how short he is on cash and how hard he’s been working. Over and over, Roth’s plaintive cry is “I am miserable, industrious, poor, and abandoned.” He’s also prickly, fiercely independent, shrewd and constantly on the go — from Austria to Germany to France to Russia. He claims to live out of two suitcases and doesn’t even own copies of his own books. As the years go by, his life, never easy, grows increasingly calamitous. After his fragile wife, Friedl, is diagnosed with schizophrenia, her hospital bills mount up. He, himself, suffers from catarrh, serious eye ailments, blackouts and cirrhosis. With Friedl in an asylum, he falls in love with just the wrong women: a 20-year-old whose parents eventually lock her away in a nunnery, then a penniless and sickly woman with two “Negro” children by a rich Cameroonian who refuses to pay child support.

In his dealings with others, Roth shows himself to be frank to the point of insolence. For years he depends on the largesse of the bestselling writer Stefan Zweig, yet he doesn’t hesitate to berate Zweig’s ideas and criticize his grammar. When a French friend translates one of Roth’s books, he bluntly tells her that the result is just awful, then adds, “I fail to understand how a perfectly objective criticism should strike you in light of a personal grievance.” In general, Roth doesn’t think much of his more famous contemporaries either, who are either too popular (Zweig, Franz Werfel, Jacob Wassermann) or too hermetic (James Joyce, Proust). He even hates the movies.

Still, there’s no question that the man knows how to write! I marked a score of funny and shrewd sentences: “The aspiration of the German woman to march through a busy life on flat heels is already halfway to socialism.” “The most important difference between the American and the German is that the former uses the technology as naturally as a baby drinks milk, while the latter is incapable of making a phone call without lyrical commentaries on what a great thing the telephone is.” “A novel is not the place for abstractions. Leave that to Thomas Mann!” “I’ve never doubted that publishers of all nationalities are businessmen. What annoys me is that they’re bad businessmen.” “I am incapable of vacuous writing.” After Hitler comes to power, Roth departs for France — a country he loves — and never returns to Germany. He recognizes, long before many others, that the Third Reich will soon usher in hell on earth. In the meantime, his own hell of poverty, work, drink and desperation never lets up. Finally taken to a Paris hospital suffering from delirium tremens, Roth dies there — the official cause declared to be pneumonia — and is buried on May 30, 1939. At least he was spared the horrors that lay ahead for the European civilization he so loved and adorned. One of the writer’s friends, Soma Morgenstern, composed this moving portrait of Roth in his early 40s: “He looked like a sixty-year-old alcoholic. His face, once so animated and alert, with its prominent cheekbones, and short jutting chin, was now puffy and slack, the nose purple, the corners of his blue eyes rheumy and bloody, his head looking as if someone had started plucking it and given up part way, the mouth completely covered by heavy, dark red, Slovak-style drooping mustaches. .  .  . When summoned to the telephone, he slowly hobbled away with the aid of a stick, his thin legs in narrow old-fashioned pants, his sagging little paunch at odds with his birdlike bones.” Pathetic, yes, but Morgenstern then adds that nonetheless this “east Galician Jew made the impression of a distinguished, if somewhat decayed, Austrian aristocrat — in other words, exactly the impression he had striven all his life to give, with every fiber of his body and soul.” As a journalist, Joseph Roth proudly said, “I paint the portrait of the age.” As an artist, he did that and more: He made it live in novels of rare elegance, wit and beauty. Read some of them and then come back to these letters. Michael Saler’s ‘As If,’ on literary ‘virtual realities’ • • •

by Michael Dirda Feb. 9, 2012 Read Later

At least since the 18th century, there have been periodic complaints that the world has been drained of enchantment. Once, every meadow, grove and stream seemed appareled in a celestial light. People believed in some sort of natural supernaturalism surrounding them, or felt other worlds enriching our own, whether they were the realms of Faery or the Christian heaven.

Then came the fall. Rationalism, new technology, the disappearance of traditional religious beliefs, the population shift from the country to the city, the rise of democratic governments — all leached the marvelous from existence, leaving humanity roiled in the gloomy condition we call modernity. Is there no way to re-enchant our mundane, dreary lives while preserving the myriad benefits of the machine age? According to cultural historian Michael Saler, during the late 19th century — the fin de siecle — people attempted to do just this through an increasing immersion in the fantastic. Spiritualism, the occult, Eastern beliefs and extreme aestheticism offered various paths back to Eden. But all too often these creeds — like some of their modern successors — required one to surrender reason and independent thought as a prerequisite to entering the lost garden. As an alternative, argues this brilliant if sometimes densely written book, one might instead turn to an early form of virtual reality. Through certain literary texts, people found that they could immerse themselves in various imaginary or secondary worlds. Moreover, by maintaining a sense of irony, they could experience enriching delight without surrendering to delusion. In effect, “As If” explores the rewards of participatory fandom, concentrating on three groups: the devotees of Sherlock Holmes, especially the famous literary and dining club called the Baker Street Irregulars; the connoisseurs of H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos; and the scholarly enthusiasts of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth. To some onlookers, people who pretend that Sherlock Holmes existed, who don’t laugh at Lovecraft’s tentacled or piscine horrors, or who take the trouble to learn Elvish should all go out and get a life. One might reasonably answer: That’s just what they’ve done. By periodically inhabiting vicarious realms, they have created a second life, discovered a way to gladden their souls, gained fresh perspectives on the real world and enjoyed a genuine human connectedness with their fellow enthusiasts. People accomplish this, Saler repeatedly stresses, through the maintenance of “the double consciousness” of the ironic imagination — a willingness to play a game whole-heartedly while understanding that it is only a game. This is, in essence, the same attitude we bring to enjoying a conjurer’s performance: We revel in the tricks and illusions without believing that they are achieved through actual magic. Such “as if” play, one might argue, is a source of inner enrichment and essential to our full humanity. Virtual communities and environments teach us, in the words of critic Marie-Laure Ryan, “to live, work, and play with the fluid, the open, the potential.”

As Saler points out, “as if” activity requires not so much “the willing suspension of disbelief” as “the willing activation of pretense.” Historically speaking, certain rich, multi-layered works have encouraged such “activation of pretense” through the use of scholarly and scientific paratexts — that is, maps, documents, footnotes, charts, glossaries, historical timelines, photographs,

illustrations and allusions to events outside the story proper. This material plethora displayed a playful seriousness and encouraged a serious playfulness from readers. Saler mentions, for instance, the 19th-century Hetzel editions of Jules Verne. These elaborate, oversize volumes, bound in gorgeously decorated covers (featuring a Vernean collage of elephants, submarines and balloons) and packed with detailed yet evocative steel engravings, are book-worlds that one can live in. As a child, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre adored the Hetzel editions, remembering them as “magic boxes” and little theaters. Such works were spectacular, in both senses of the word. Books alone, however, aren’t enough to foster an ongoing virtual reality. One also requires “public spheres of the imagination,” places where fans can gather, argue and deepen their understanding of the sacred texts. Often the first such sphere is simply the letters page in a magazine, but before long there are “societies, fanzines, and conventions.” In the chapter “Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes,” Saler emphasizes that the great detective isn’t just logical, he is also distinctly imaginative. Holmes the aesthete perceives the world as an Arabian Nights realm of mystery, full of a “hidden import” of which he alone is aware. Using the same combination of deduction and imagination characteristic of their hero, members of the Baker Street Irregulars “play the game,” as they call it: When they rigorously deduce fanciful meanings in Holmes’s adventures, they employ the rational techniques of modernity to further a sense of enchantment. In his Lovecraft chapter, Saler describes the scientific aura surrounding the Cthulhu Mythos, and how later weird-tale writers and readers have added to these stories of Yog-Sothoth and the Old Ones. But he looks particularly at the correspondence, conversations and other exchanges between the author and his admirers — that is, at “the public sphere” of the Cthulhu Mythos — and speculates that the resulting discussions and debates helped Lovecraft mature as a man as well as a writer. Hence, the artistic richness of his later work, his eventual repudiation of his racist views of non-Anglo-Saxons and his newfound sympathy with Norman Thomas’s style of socialism. For Tolkien, Saler says, “re-enchantment through fantastic Secondary Worlds was not a rejection of modernity, but rather a corrective to its one-sided emphases.” By “cross-dwelling in another world” — Middle Earth — “a visitor could benefit from the perspectives and practices that she might not find in the context of her own world.” To Saler, Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” is centered on the idea of home, the enchanted realm to which, like the hobbit Sam, we long to return or, perhaps, that we hope to restore. To investigate this theme, Saler surveys Tolkien’s life in terms of his “nationalist, aestheticist, and religious views.” Despite the novelist’s expressed horror at allegorization, Saler views Tolkien’s masterpiece as a paean to a certain kind of English homeyness and decency, threatened by our “robot age” and the economic sway and cultural vulgarity of the United States. However, Tolkien strongly believed that stories, especially “sub-creations” that shape an imaginatively inhabitable secondary world, possess the power to “console, redeem, and inspire.”

Living in the realm of “as if” thus keeps us truly open and affirming as human beings. We learn “to entertain provisional identities, provisional narratives, and provisional worlds.” As a result, we gain an understanding of “contingency and difference” and a wariness of all inflexible, essentialist doctrines. “As If” doesn’t address the current forms of virtual reality, i.e., computer games and simulated worlds. Perhaps that will be Saler’s next book. In the meantime, “As If” reminds us that, through real play in imaginary gardens, we can enhance the lives we lead in this alienated modern world. Dirda reviews each Thursday in Style and conducts a book discussion for The Washington Post at wapo.st/reading-room. His latest book, “On Conan Doyle,” was recently published. The story of a 104-year-old life: ‘Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind,’ reviewed by Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda Jan. 18, 2012 Read Later

Just before World War I, Jacques Barzun — roughly rhymes with “parson” — used to play marbles with the great French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who died in 1918. When, in 1920, Barzun’s parents decided to emigrate to America, their 12-year-old son began to improve his elementary English by reading Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” and by carrying a pocket dictionary with him wherever he went. Seven years later, he graduated from Columbia University at the top of his class, Phi Beta Kappa with a major in history, winner of the William H. Fox Memorial Prize and the Philolexian Prize in essay and oratory, the class valedictorian of 1927. Barzun was all of 19 years old. He is now 104. During the intervening 85 years or so, Barzun has been, for decade after decade, one of America’s leading cultural historians and men of letters. For many years he taught “Great Books” at his alma mater — often in tandem with his friend the literary critic Lionel Trilling — and later became Columbia’s provost. He lectured at universities around the country, translated occasionally, appeared on radio and TV programs, and served as president of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He reviewed for every major magazine and periodical, becoming chief book columnist for Harper’s in the late 1940s and one of the founders and judges of the MidCentury Book Society in the 1950s. Following his retirement from Columbia in 1975, Barzun took up still another job as a literary adviser and consultant to Scribners. At age 92, he capped his career by producing the mammoth “From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life” (2001). But even that late summa, a surprise bestseller, scratches only the surface of Barzun’s intellectual range. Consider just a handful of his other book titles: “Race: A Study in Modern Superstition” (1937); “Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage” (1941); “Teacher in America” (1945); “Berlioz and the Romantic Century” (1950); “Music in American Life” (1956); “The Modern

Researcher,” with Henry F. Graff (1957, with many later editions); “Follett’s Modern American Usage” (1966); “A Stroll With William James” (1983); and “An Essay on French Verse for Readers of English Poetry” (1990). Michael Murray discusses all these books, often in considerable detail, in his intellectual biography “Jacques Barzun: Portrait of a Mind.” As the subtitle suggests, the more personal aspects of his subject’s life are only lightly sketched in. Murray does stress, however, that after a broker absconded with the family’s funds, a very young Barzun assumed the main financial responsibility for his parents. This, in part, accounts for all the outside literary activity: He needed the money. We learn, too, that in person Barzun loves our national game — “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball” — and every kind of pun, that his intellectual heroes and models include Samuel Butler, Bernard Shaw, Montaigne and, most of all, William James, and that he is in public urbane and courteous, even courtly, although sometimes seeming cold and aloof.

Barzun was, from the very beginning, an excellent teacher. In one of his first history classes, he tells us, there “was a beautifully dressed man of about forty, with very black hair and a signet ring with a diamond and a tie pin; he was done up to the nines. At the end of the first semester, he came to me and said: ‘I am a Turk, and I want to express my gratitude because in your dealing with the Turkish question you have been perfectly fair. This means so much, I want to tell you that if ever at any time someone stands in your way or has done you harm, here is my card, just call me, and he will be taken care of.’ ” Barzun adds, “I have strewn the byways with my victims.” Perhaps the most fascinating chapter of this affectionate yet sometimes slightly dry book is the one entitled “Simple and Direct.” Here Murray describes Barzun’s lifelong working methods: “To begin with, whether perusing a volume of philosophy, or merely skimming a novel or short story, he early developed the habit of making indexes on flyleaves. Some fifty heads denoted his special interests. . . . After finishing a book that gripped him, he would spend a day or two mentally summarizing what he thought of it. The process was a kind of unconscious sifting, more in the back of his mind than the front. .  .  . When he found an interesting author, he tried to read everything he or she had written. . . . Finally, as a complement to the notes he wrote on flyleaves, he formed the habit of making slips. These were three-by-five pieces of paper, not cards, on which he jotted down thoughts, ideas, references, phrases, observations, and puns. He would fasten the slips together by topic, which for easy sorting he would have marked in a corner, and then put them in folders and then, when a folder grew unwieldy, in boxes. By the time the accumulation reached a certain bulk, it had begun to turn into a book.” One of those slip-created books is my own favorite among Barzun’s many works, and perhaps his most enduring. Written with his boyhood friend, the physicist Wendell Hertig Taylor, “A Catalogue of Crime” (revised edition, 1989) lists more than 5,000 novel-length mysteries, collections of detective stories, true-crime books and assorted volumes celebrating the delights of

detection. Every entry is annotated, and a succinct critical judgment given. The authors do favor the classic puzzles of the Golden Age — roughly 1900 to 1950 — but it is here that the contemporary reader wants expert guidance. Barzun is a particular admirer of Rex Stout, having elsewhere published an essay in which he argues that Archie Goodwin, the legman for the obese, orchid-growing detective Nero Wolfe, is a modern avatar of Huck Finn and one of the great characters of American literature. That essay, by the way, can be found in “A Jacques Barzun Reader” (2002). Edited by Murray, it makes the ideal complement to this solid intellectual biography. For much of his career, Barzun has been regarded, and sometimes disparaged, as a traditionalist, a conservative thinker critical of modern orthodoxies and convinced that, culturally, the 20th century had grown decadent and fuzzy-minded. Against the loss of standards and our age’s myriad confusions, he has long stood for an engaged critical intelligence, built on serious reading, skill in writing clear and direct English, and “a long tradition of thought.” To Barzun it remains, as Murray’s book stirringly reminds us, “a matter of honor to keep up the fight for the cultured, civilized life.” That’s one of the few fights that’s always worth fighting. Review: ‘Tender Hour of Twilight’ revives glory days of publishing • • •

by Michael Dirda Feb. 1, 2012 Read Later

Editors seldom earn much notice outside the world of publishing. Edward Garnett fostered the careers of Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, but, I suspect, far more people remember his wife, Constance Garnett, the first great translator of Chekhov, Dostoevsky and many other Russian writers. In this country, only one editor ever appears as a “Jeopardy!” answer: Maxwell Perkins, who worked with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Yet Richard Seaver is, arguably, just as important to our time as Garnett and Perkins to theirs. While a young man in Paris, preparing a Sorbonne thesis on James Joyce, he happened upon — and was bowled over by — the fiction of a middle-aged and virtually unknown Irishman. With dogged persistence, Seaver urged the work of Samuel Beckett on his friends, with some of whom he edited a small English-language magazine called Merlin. In due course, Seaver and his colleagues printed Beckett’s short stories in the magazine, translated some of his French fiction into English and published the early novel “Watt.” When “Waiting for Godot” opened to a mostly empty house, Seaver was among the few there for that historic first night. He recalls the famous review — which Seaver finds “damning,” although it seems a brilliant precis to me: “This is a play where nothing happens. Twice.” A half-dozen years later, having returned to the United States with his French bride, the violinist Jeannette Medina, “Dick” Seaver joined Grove Press. In tandem with its owner, Barney Rosset, Seaver continued to champion Beckett but also helped establish Grove as the lightning-rod publisher of the 1960s. From the beginning, Rosset and Seaver set themselves against censorship of

any kind. Despite suits and First Amendment trials that dragged on for years, Grove brought out Lawrence’s unbowdlerized version of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” Jean Genet’s “Our Lady of the Flowers,” William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch,” John Rechy’s “City of Night,” Hubert Selby Jr.’s “Last Exit to Brooklyn” and Pauline Reage’s “The Story of O,” as well as a great deal of controversial nonfiction, including “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” and Eric Berne’s best-selling “Games People Play.” Grove also published the now legendary countercultural magazine the Evergreen Review and established a lock on printing avant-garde plays — not only Beckett’s but also those of Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and many others. A related film division made available the screenplays for movies such as Alain Robbe-Grillet’s “Last Year at Marienbad,” produced Beckett’s “Film” (starring Buster Keaton) and imported from Sweden the soft-core classic “I am Curious (Yellow).” In “The Tender Hour of Twilight,” Seaver looks back on these two heady periods of his life. In the first half, he re-creates the excitement of living in Paris as a young man, growing fluent in French, traveling around Europe and falling in love with several free-spirited young women. “Thirty cents a day would get you a hotel room — not with bath, mind you . . . The room had a bed, a basin, a table, and a chair. Around the corner were the public baths, where for a few francs you could take a scalding-hot shower. Payment by the quarter hour. . . . If your budget was really tight, you could take a douche double, two for the price of one, the sex of your co-showerer up to you, no questions asked by the management.”

In those days, 25 cents would buy you a liter of red wine from a cask — if you brought along your own bottle. Over that gros rouge and cheap pasta dinners, the Merlin crowd would gather to discuss their magazine and how they might finance another issue. The regulars included founder Alexander Trocchi, who became a heroin addict and wrote “Cain’s Book” (published by Grove); poet Christopher Logue, now remembered for his modernized versions of several sections of “The Iliad”; Patrick Bowles, co-translator with the author of Beckett’s “Murphy”; and the elegant Austryn Wainhouse, who rendered the major works of the Marquis de Sade into English. As Wordsworth wrote of his own time in Paris, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive /  But to be young was very heaven.” In these pages, Seaver describes meeting the disturbingly walleyed and intimidating Jean-Paul Sartre, being charmed by Orson Welles and becoming friends with the painter Ellsworth Kelly (whom his then-girlfriend tried to seduce, even after Seaver pointed out that Kelly was gay). But none of these eminences prepares Seaver for Brendan Behan, the former Borstal boy and a legendary drinker even by Irish standards. Shortly after Behan storms into Seaver’s life, the playwright asks — at 4 in the morning — if there might be “anything to eat handy?” While devouring Camembert cheese and sausages, he solemnly intones, between mouthfuls, that “food .  .  . is the great enabler.” Seaver is impressed by the phrase but asks his unwelcome and temporary roommate what it means. “To get on with the drinking,” Behan slurs back. “Without food you pass out much too quickly.”

And then there’s Maurice Girodias, the notorious force behind the Olympia Press, which somehow published Beckett, Miller and Vladimir Nabokov (“Lolita”), partly through the profits from its notorious Traveller’s Companion line, a series of pornographic green-covered paperbacks (to which the Merlin group, desperate for cash, contributed more than a few titles). Once back in New York as a second in command at Grove, Seaver worked frequently on projects with the flamboyant and litigious Girodias. It was Seaver, under the pseudonym Sabine d’Estree, who produced the exquisite English translation of Olympia Press’s “Histoire d’O” — “The Story of O.” Like so many stories of the 1960s, “The Tender Hour of Twilight” culminates in the 1968 Democratic presidential convention in Chicago. Esquire magazine decided to send a trio of controversial literary figures to cover the convention: Burroughs, Terry Southern (co-author of “Candy”) and Jean Genet. Seaver and his wife went along to help translate for Genet. Esquire, in its turn, sent an unflappable young editor to be their major-domo and chaperone: None other than John Berendt, later the author of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” In this section, Seaver reproduces sections of his diary, setting down his impressions of Allen Ginsberg chanting “om” in Lincoln Park, the pincer movement of the Chicago police, and the eventual charge upon and beating of the protesters. Back in 1968 there wasn’t as much competition for what newscaster Eric Sevareid then called “the most disgraceful spectacle in the history of American politics.” Richard Seaver died before he could edit these memories into a finished book. But his wife, Jeannette, has done a superb job, even if the narrative ends somewhat abruptly with Seaver’s departure from Grove. (He and Jeannette went on to start their own publishing house, Arcade, and continued to bring out important new writers.) No matter. If you’re at all interested in modern literature, Paris, the 1960s or the “golden age of publishing,” you won’t want to miss “The Tender Hour of Twilight.” Michael Dirda reviews Maureen F. McHugh’s ‘After the Apocalypse: Stories’ • • •

by Michael Dirda Jan. 4, 2012 Read Later

In the way of readers everywhere, I simply picked up “After the Apocalypse” and idly turned to the first page, without any particular expectations. Mainly, I just wondered what these stories were about, what Maureen F. McHugh’s voice sounded like. I did know that she had written “China Mountain Zhang,” a novel that had won the James Tiptree Jr. Award, and that Small Beer Press specialized in literary fantasy and science fiction. This is how the first story, “The Naturalist,” begins: “Cahill lived in the Flats with about twenty other guys in a place that used to be an Irish bar called Fado. At the back of the bar was the Cuyahoga River, good for protection since zombies didn’t cross the river.” Zombies? In Cleveland?

At some point in the future, something happens — McHugh doesn’t quite say what — and cities suddenly begin to be plagued by zombies, so much so that it “seemed like the end of the world,” until the government got them “under control.” Cleveland, however, has been left a “zombie preserve” — and a dumping ground for hard-core inmates from prisons around the country. Inside the city, Cahill and various felons survive as well as they can, scavenging from deserted buildings, dodging the flesh-eaters, checking each other for telltale scratches after any encounter. Still, “life in the zombie preserve really wasn’t as bad as Cahill had expected. He’d been dumped off the bus and then spent a day skulking around expecting zombies to come boiling out of the floor like rats and eat him alive. He’d heard that the life expectancy of a guy in a preserve was something like two and a half days.” Luckily, Cahill joins a group that has fortified part of the Flats, once home to neon-lit bars and restaurants, with a perimeter of junked cars and rubbish, creating the kind of urban compound one associates with “Escape from New York” or “The Road Warrior.” Now zombies are mainly encountered only during scavenging forays into downtown. McHugh’s story really kicks in when a foraging party chances upon a zombie: “She was black and her hair had once been in cornrows, though now half of it was loose and tangled. They all stopped and stood stock still. No one knew how zombies ‘saw’ people. Maybe infrared, like pit vipers. Maybe smell. Cahill could not tell from this far if she was sniffing. Or listening. Or maybe even tasting the air. Taste was one of the most primitive senses. Primitive as smell. Smelling with the tongue. “She went from standing there to loping towards them. That was one of the things about zombies. They didn’t lean. They didn’t anticipate. One minute they were standing there, the next minute they were running towards you. They didn’t lead with their eyes or their chins. They were never surprised. They just were. As inexorable as rain. She didn’t look as she ran, even though she was running through debris and rubble, placing her feet and sometimes barely leaping.” And then she is on them, and the men start to swing their heavy metal pipes. McHugh’s narrative pace never lets up, though “The Naturalist” soon morphs into something far more than just a zombie horror story. Cahill wants to understand the creatures, and he’s willing to go to inhuman lengths to do so.

I read “The Naturalist” straight through and then, ignoring the usual advice to wait a while before starting the next story in a collection, kept right on going to “Special Economics.” It focuses on a young girl making a little money by performing hip-hop in a Chinese market, one that overflows with second-hand stuff: “When over a quarter of a billion people died in four years, there was a lot of second-hand stuff.” The cause, it turns out, was a massive bird flu epidemic. However, Jieling eventually finds a job working in a biotech factory, helping to make “bacterial computers,” largely for the American market. Before long, “Special Economics” segues into a study of friendship and survival.

Well, after that I couldn’t stop reading. In “Useless Things” an unnamed woman fabricates “reborns,” dolls that look like newborn infants. “The point is to make them look almost, but not quite, real. People prefer them a little cuter, a little more perfect than the real thing.” Living alone, the narrator depends on her dogs for protection and on a well that is going dry. Global warming has escalated dramatically, and people regularly head north, toward the Great Lakes. There are hints that the Southwest is reverting to tribalism. Every story in “After the Apocalypse” takes place in the near future, and usually in the aftermath of some global disaster. In “The Kingdom of the Blind,” two programmers for a medical facility realize that their giant software system has achieved “awareness.” In “The Lost Boy: A Reporter at Large,” a pair of dirty bombs explode in Baltimore, one at the Inner Harbor, the other near BWI. In “Going to France,” certain people gain the ability to fly. And in the last story, “After the Apocalypse,” a young mother and her junior-high-school-age daughter join the refugees heading toward Canada. In the wake of “the big Disney World attack where a kazillion people died,” the United States’s economy simply falls apart, and not even the natural bonds of family survive it. McHugh possesses a wonderfully easygoing narrative voice, one that sucks you right into her stories, whether she’s focusing on convicts, computer nerds, Chinese teenagers, fat girls desperate for love or an amnesiac young man suffering from dissociative identity disorder. Think of “After the Apocalypse” as a series of Phildickian futures, as seen through the eyes of working-class characters out of Jayne Anne Phillips. The nightmarish surroundings quicken each story’s sense of threat and danger, but the real interest remains in depicting ordinary people trying to get on with their ordinary lives as best they can, despite diminished expectations or radically altered circumstances. One last thing: If, for some reason, you are one of those people who still regard all science fiction as cowboy adventures in space, just try any of the stories in “After the Apocalypse.” I’m willing to bet that you won’t be able to read just one. Book World: Try dusting off ‘Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use’ • • •

by Michael Dirda Jan. 25, 2012 Read Later

Many readers suffer a tormented relationship with book jackets or, as most people call them, dust jackets. I certainly do. In my youth, I admired the private libraries of writers and professors who discarded these garish and easily torn outer coverings from their books, leaving only the subdued cloth bindings. As a result, serried rows of soft blue and faded burgundy lined their substantial mahogany shelves. To my youthful eyes, such personal libraries looked grown-up, serious; the books were clearly tools rather than icons or decorative objects for furnishing a living room. Nonetheless, en masse they still conveyed a welcoming, clubbable warmth suggestive of leather chairs and brandy. Alas, such libraries are definitely a thing of the past. Not because of e-books but because of dust jackets. As any modern collector knows, the presence of a dj, particularly one in fine condition, dramatically affects the value of a book. A jacketless first printing of “The Great Gatsby” (1925)

might set you back a couple of thousand dollars. But a copy in a fine jacket could easily go for a couple of hundred thousand dollars. Or more. Nobody blithely discards book jackets now, no matter how gaudy they seem, no matter how imprinted one’s heart is with memories of oldfashioned scholarly libraries. As G. Thomas Tanselle sternly reminds us, “The truth is that the unjacketed copy is simply a defective copy.” Sigh. He’s right, of course. After all, Tanselle is our leading authority on all matters bibliographical, the greatest American textual scholar since Fredson Bowers. While his essays and occasional polemics demand close attention from the reader, they are invariably models of clear statement and precise argument, every point being supported by the most scrupulous scholarship and attention to detail. In “Book-Jackets: Their History, Forms, and Use,” Tanselle reminds us that paper coverings for books are much older than is commonly imagined. In 1929, John T. Winterich of Publishers’ Weekly asked, “How old is the dust-jacket?” Scholars and dealers soon reported the existence of jackets on several 1890s titles by Stephen Crane, on Lewis Carroll’s 1876 book-length poem “The Hunting of the Snark” and on Dickens’s last novel, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” published in 1870. Eventually, a few examples turned up from the 1830s, even as a small number of 1820s titles were discovered with proto-jackets, i.e., envelope-like sleeves or sheaths. Tanselle speculates that from at least as early as the 1870s, books were commonly being issued in some kind of jacket. But try finding one. In 40 years of collecting and research, Tanselle is aware of fewer than 1,900 copies of 19th-century books with surviving dust jackets. He lists them all in the second half of this book. Before 1820, publishers didn’t need slipcovers for their wares. Although some books might be issued in temporary boards with spine labels, most were typically sold as loose sheets. Purchasers would then commission bookbinders to sew these pages together and attach plain or decorative covers to the resulting text-block. But when finished books with cloth bindings became the norm in the 1820s, merchandising conventions changed. Detachable paper wrappers began to be used as protective devices to prevent a book from growing shopworn, soiled or faded by the sun. Although practices differed from publisher to publisher, these jackets — initially regarded as temporary — soon expanded beyond their original function: The front cover might reproduce the volume’s frontispiece or an interior illustration; the back might list other titles by the author or include descriptions and endorsements of the book’s contents. Soon, the inside flaps were being employed for similar advertising and promotion.

In short, virtually all the elements of 20th-century book jackets were present from relatively early on in their development, albeit without consistency or standardization. By the 1910s, publishers had clearly shifted their design attention from a book’s binding to the graphic possibilities of its dust jacket. A hundred years ago, a volume’s cover might still be stamped with a striking image or gorgeous decorations. Today, underneath the flashy jackets of 21st-century books, one generally finds only colored pieces of cardboard. As Tanselle stresses, one can draw conclusions about publishing history and practice only when one possesses hard, physical evidence, and the more of it the better. He laments the loss of 19thcentury dust jackets largely because without them, one is deprived of important bibliographical

information. A flap might say “Fifth printing” or provide a picture and short biography of an otherwise little-known author. Blurbs, then as now, are both items in their authors’ bibliographies — Thomas Pynchon fans collect certain books just for his back-cover endorsements — and clues to the literary networking of the day. In more modern books, the key issue is one of authenticity: Is the book wearing its proper jacket, or has it been dressed in borrowed finery? Dealers and collectors sometimes upgrade a less than perfect copy by removing a tattered dj and replacing it with a better one. Such sophistication, as it is called, short-circuits the historical evidence. The book is no longer as it was when issued by the publisher. It has been corrupted. “Book-Jackets” is a superb work of scholarly investigation, broad enough to touch on the development of blurbs, the artists involved in early cover design and the need for accurate description of dust jackets in library catalogues. Still, I wish Tanselle had addressed more fully the matter of mylar protectors, widely used to guard fragile djs from being torn or stained. From the cover photograph of his own collection, some, but not all, of Tanselle’s books show jackets enclosed in mylar (not glassine, cellophane or plastic, which can degrade and harm the dj). Purists feel that this see-through armor takes away a certain aesthetic connection with the book; others are grateful for the security that protectors offer. But, as I say, jackets are vexing. Should you read books with their jackets on or off? (I take them off.) Is there any good reason to acquire a facsimile dj? (Tanselle says there isn’t.) Should old djs ever be brightened up by a restorer? (No. Modest conservation is another matter.) Should research libraries stop removing jackets from their open-shelf books? (Yes, says Tanselle, or at least they should be catalogued and preserved.) Should I just stop worrying about things like this and buy an e-book reader? Hmm. I suppose I could, but what would be the fun in that? John C. Tibbetts’s ‘The Gothic Imagination,’ reviewed by Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda Dec. 29, 2011 Read Later

The cover of “The Gothic Imagination” depicts a futuristic city threatened by a glowering satanic figure framed against a starry night sky. While John C. Tibbetts may teach film at the University of Kansas and write often about classical music and theater, that painting — and several drawings scattered throughout his book — make clear that he’s also a talented artist. Still, the key to this volume of “Conversations on Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction in the Media” can actually be found in Tibbetts’s middle initial, C. It stands for Carter. Tibbetts’s father was an early science fiction fan who named his son after Edgar Rice Burroughs’s second great hero, John Carter of Mars. (The first, of course, is Tarzan, Lord Greystoke.) Unlike many sons, Tibbetts embraced his destiny and became a serious reader and collector of fantasy and sci-fi. The questions he asks in these far-ranging interviews — with H.P. Lovecraft scholar S.T.

Joshi, artists Maurice Sendak and Gahan Wilson, 1950s television actor Frankie Thomas (star of “Tom Corbett, Space Cadet”), the cast of “Star Trek,” and a half-dozen important novelists from Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury to Kim Stanley Robinson — reveal a deep knowledge of what fans call, quite simply, “the field.” The book opens with a preface by Richard Holmes, in which the noted biographer and historian of the Romantic era attempts to define the Gothic imagination. Holmes points to “a quite oldfashioned notion: the inexhaustible wonder of the universe.” A few pages later Tibbetts adds that the writers of fairy tales, horror stories, science fictional prophecies and steampunk novels focus on “terror and wonder” rather than “sentimental love and reason.” Theirs, he adds, is a transgressive imagination. Later still, Harold Schechter, an authority on the American Gothic, reminds us that “we thrive on the kinds of entertainments folklorists call ‘wondertales’: beguiling, gripping, swiftly paced stories that trigger a very basic and powerful emotional response in the audience: astonishment or terror, laughter or tears, suspense or erotic arousal.” He insists that we all have a hunger for “violent spectacle, to feed that primitive part of ourselves that William James called ‘the carnivore within.’ ” Even more simply, Stephen King says, “I just want to make commonplace things as unsettling as possible.” The English writer Ramsey Campbell notes that in his own horror stories he’s actually writing about the decline of Britain, “about the frustration, meaningless, helplessness of seeing your environment change overnight around you.” The dapper Peter Straub reveals that John Ashbery’s “The Tennis Court Oath” inspired his own dark fiction: “That book made it possible for me to write. What staggered me about it and what really did change my life was that those poems seemed to make no sense at all! Yet, they were perfect. They had a sort of power and authenticity and rightness that was inexplicable to any of the means or techniques that I had been taught. . . . Well, my books are like these poems.”

By contrast, when Suzy McKee Charnas decided to write about vampires, she realized that she loathed the creature’s typically Byronic persona. So in her neglected classic “The Vampire Tapestry,” Dr. Edward L. Weyland is “not a Romantic hero, not a guy who’s lonely out there in eternity all by himself,” but is instead “a predator, a tiger, a sabre-toothed tiger — and we are the prey.” According to novelist and historian of science fiction Brian Aldiss, movie director Stanley Kubrick once asked him, “What do people do who don’t make films or write science fiction?” On the basis of “Dr. Strangelove,” “A Clockwork Orange” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Aldiss concludes that Kubrick was, in fact, “the great sf writer of the age.” Such insights and anecdotes mingle throughout “The Gothic Imagination.” Bob Kane, creator of the DC Comics superhero Batman, recalls that he was inspired by a Leonardo da Vinci design for manpowered flight using bat wings and by his childhood memories of Douglas Fairbanks Sr. as Zorro, “the most swashbuckling dare devil I’ve ever seen in my life.” Wilson Tucker, who invented the term “space opera” to describe intergalactic adventure fiction, observes that his own work tends to be people-focused, while some science fiction writers clearly prefer “concept stories.” If Arthur C. Clarke, he says, “writes about a space elevator going from the earth to the moon, his hero is really an elevator.” Frederik Pohl, now in his 90s, reveals how he collaborated with Cyril Kornbluth on their classic sci-fi satire “The Space Merchants” (1953), which focuses on Madison Avenue’s

attempt to sell people on the idea of moving to inhospitable Venus. As Pohl wryly declares, “all fiction is lying, but advertising is pernicious lying.” “The Gothic Imagination” isn’t just about writing, however. Art historian Tim Mitchell points us to Caspar David Friedrich, whose haunting landscapes and solitary figures disclose “a twilight world, vaguely existing between light and darkness.” (Later, Chris Van Allsburg mentions that Friedrich “was on my mind when I did ‘The Polar Express.’ ”) Albert Boime similarly considers the horrific art of Henry Fuseli (“The Nightmare”), Gericault’s depiction of the insane as well as his gruesome “Raft of the Medusa,” and the nightmarish late paintings of Goya, such as “Witches’ Sabbath” and “Saturn Devouring His Son.” As an authority on both the classical repertory and the ghost story, Jack Sullivan lists his favorite examples of spooky music, from Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” to Scriabin’s late piano sonatas (No. 9 is called “Black Mass”) to Bernard Herrmann’s score for “Psycho.” Sullivan notes that “the apocalyptic quality” of so much early 20th-century art and music — “the sense of an ominous building of un-containable forces about to explode” and the constant probing of “the darker recesses of the psyche” — was “symptomatic of a cultural malaise that many historians view as a premonition of the Great War, and that continued long after it.” Given the plenty on offer in “The Gothic Imagination,” all but the most severe critics are likely to be forgiving of the book’s numerous typos and transcription errors. After all, here Joe Mugnaini talks about his unforgettable illustrations for Ray Bradbury’s early fiction; Douglas Greene, biographer of John Dickson Carr, theorizes about the psychological appeal of the locked-room mystery or miracle crime; Greg Bear and Gregory Benford argue the nature of science fiction; and anthropologist Cynthia Miller traces the social and artistic implications of steampunk. Memorably defined by James P. Blaylock as “Technofantasy in a neo-Victorian Retrofuture,” steampunk is for Miller nothing less than magic, “breathtaking and terrifying at the same time,” whether paired with “science fiction, melodrama, or even the Western.” A sense of magic, “breathtaking and terrifying at the same time” — isn’t this yet another way of characterizing “the Gothic imagination” as well as much of the strongest fiction and cinema of our time? My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York,’ by James Wolcott • • •

by Michael Dirda Jan. 13, 2012 Read Later

Compared with James Wolcott, most literary journalists write like Amish farmers, their sentences plain as bib overalls. Not so this longtime columnist for Vanity Fair. Wolcott’s prose is high maintenance, bangled with astonishing similes and metaphors, oiled to a high gloss. This is language on parade, as restless as the hopped-up patter of a carnival pitchman, as zingy as H.L. Mencken mocking a revivalist tent show. Admittedly, some slower readers might be overwhelmed by all the action on the page, and yearn for the more sedate pace and gentler irony of what Wolcott calls “the E.B. White elf academy.” But if you can surrender to the rush of this swooping carnival ride of a

book, you’ll have a wonderful time with “Lucking Out.” Memoirs don’t come more entertaining than this. Others — not I — may have known that Wolcott, this pillar of snappy journalism, grew up in working-class Maryland and attended Frostburg State, before dropping out to take the Greyhound ride to New York, where he planned to become the next Norman Mailer. Such back stories seldom lead to Hollywood endings — and yet. After much wheedling, Mailer’s fanboy did land a job doing scut work for the Village Voice, which gradually led to the occasional assignment and then a regular gig. In those days, Wolcott covered the arts, pop culture, the youth scene. No niche journalist, he reviewed rock albums and punk concerts, wrote about television shows and downtown plays, even became something of an expert on what the humorless Susan Sontag called “the pornographic imagination.” In whatever he published, Wolcott shrewdly reasoned that it was “better to be thumpingly wrong than a muffled drum with a measured beat.” What mattered was to “find a focal point for your nervous energy, assume a forward offensive stance, and drive to the finish line. . . . No matter how short a piece there has to be a sense of momentum and travel, rather than just allotted space being texted in.” Before long, the Voice writer’s chutzpah and verbal snare drum attracted the attention of none other than New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael. For many readers, Wolcott’s portrait of Kael will be the high point of “Lucking Out.” He’s affectionate, utterly admiring, a bit wistful and very, very funny, especially when recalling visits to the New Yorker, then notable for the crotchets of its staffers and a distinct high-table seriousness: “Ostentation was considered poor form and vulgar taste, with noise the rudest intruder of all, the sound of unmoderated laughter a breach of monastic protocol that would have the church mice poking their heads out doors and then retreating to add another link or two to the paper-clip necklace they were assembling.” The brash Kael, however, eschewed the magazine’s “evenly smoothed embalmed non-reflectivesurface perfection. She sanded down the jagged edges of her reviews to piercing effect. She was slangy the way New Yorker writers were slangy in the thirties, before excess propriety and hallowed obeisance to the fine-toned points of craft outfitted writers with clerical collars.”

Note those clerical collars. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to recognize how often Wolcott draws on his Catholic upbringing for his best and cruelest put-downs. William F. Buckley Jr.’s conservative ephebes are said to “roll out the full regalia of his rococo tics — the tongue flicks, eyebrow lifts, purring vowels, pencil-eraser nibblings, and Oxbridge stammerings that often preceded a tart retort — as if they were conducting Latin mass on Mars.” A friend’s snobbery, Wolcott recalls, “Came across as brattiness, not the pinched anality of someone awaiting Susan Sontag’s next encyclical.” The film “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” — based on the premise that the wages of a casual pickup is death — was “directed by Richard Brooks as if he were carrying a wooden cross and crying ‘Repent ! ’ ”

Really, Wolcott seems incapable of writing a tired sentence. Summing up the vibe and intensity of CBGB’s — the gritty punk-music showcase — he insists that it wasn’t at all the sort of “dive where posh debutantes or downtown gamines in black leggings could find ravishment at the seam-ripping hands of a sensitive brute who worked at the Strand Bookstore by day, club-hunted by night, and knew how to weld.” Isn’t that great? Yet Wolcott in praise-mode can be just as good. Of the ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, he rhapsodizes, “Petite, precise and imperishably young, she appeared enveloped in a personal quiet so profound that she seemed to dance under a glass bell, like an enchanted cricket.” This star of George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet, he goes on, “spun pure silk out of herself, so becalmed and mission-borne that she seemed to be erasing the connecting dots of the choreography in a continuous breath of movement, in thrall to a higher calling and a guidance system she had personally installed.” Hold on a second: Does this mean that the habitue of CBGB’s and champion of Patti Smith and the Talking Heads is also a balletomane? Yep. As Wolcott confesses, Balanchine “awakened the sensitive feminine side of me that had been lying dormant under all that Mailer and Peckinpah, an admission that I have usefully learned over the years can bring any conversation to a dead halt.” While he may admire pirouettes and grand jetes, Wolcott never grows froufrou: “I was once sitting with Pauline in the last row of a literary panel discussion downtown starring Cynthia Ozick and Joyce Carol Oates, who were trading honeydew compliments back and forth as if they expected Eudora Welty to show up with a wide-brimmed hat and a watering can.” Small wonder that Wolcott knows so well why novelists hate members of his profession. “The Critic is the undermining inner voice maliciously put on the intercom to tell the whole world (or at least the tiny portion of it that still cares), You’re no good, you were never any good; your mother and I tried to warn you this novel was a mistake, but, no, you wouldn’t listen, Mister-Insists-He-Has-Something-to-Say.” In multiple ways, Wolcott’s memoir is a celebration of youthful flesh. Punk musicians and performance artists, drug addicts and sex addicts, Rabelaisian critics and exquisite dancers — all gloried in the body as a source of artistic energy and pleasure, of fun. The ’70s came to an end, as does “Lucking Out,” with the advent of AIDS and the assassination of John Lennon. At one point, the critic John Leonard summed up a memoir by another, older critic: “It’s an old story, and even my own, so let’s be brief. Once upon a time you were a Wunderkind, and now, oh so suddenly, you’re an old fart.” Wolcott says simply, “A hard fact of life,” before concluding with a phrase that illuminates his own wonderful book, “which is why it’s best not to linger on what awaits at the last depot and relish the memory of when we were young farts, and free.” Adam Sisman’s ‘An Honourable Englishman,’ reviewed by Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda Dec. 14, 2011 Read Later

It’s easy to recommend this superb biography of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914-2003) as one of the best books of the year. First of all, it’s by Adam Sisman, author of the enthralling and award-winning “Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson.” There, Sisman revealed how a priapic, feckless and often drunk Scotsman created the single greatest biography of all time. Here, he now writes with a comparable liveliness and authority about one of the most gifted, beguiling and controversial scholars of the 20th century. “An Honourable Englishman” is a long book, but every page offers high-order literary entertainment. Second, it is also a welcome addition to that delicious subgenre that portrays the antics, quarrels and love affairs of the English upperclasses and literati as a kind of real-life soap opera. If you enjoy works by or about Evelyn Waugh and the Mitford sisters, or histories of the gentlemen spies and code-breakers of Bletchley Park, or accounts of the internecine battles of eminent Oxford and Cambridge scholars, or glimpses of modern-day Fleet Street in action, then this is the holiday gift for you. Trevor-Roper was a key player in all these overlapping worlds. Third, one of the chapters of “An Honourable Englishman” — entitled “Expert” — provides a mesmerizing, almost hour-by-hour reconstruction of the entire sorry business of the Hitler diaries. Those under 40 may not recall that in 1983, the German newspaper Stern and the English newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch ran splashy front-page stories announcing the discovery of the Fuhrer’s private notebooks, some 60 volumes altogether. Under time pressure to validate this find, Trevor-Roper proclaimed the archives genuine but came to recognize, when it was too late to stop the presses, that he had been hoodwinked by forgeries. As a stand-alone piece of journalism, these pages rank with some of the best reporting of our time. The Hitler-diaries fiasco occurred toward the end of Trevor-Roper’s career, when he had already established himself as an authority on Nazi Germany, largely because of “The Last Days of Hitler.” That 1947 bestseller led the young Oxford don, who had spent the war years analyzing German radio transmissions, into journalism and broadcasting. As Sisman shows, this siren call of media celebrity — the quick gratification afforded by book reviewing, the allure of well-paid assignments in the pleasant places of Europe, the handsome fees for lectures abroad or appearances on television, as well as the never-ending expenses of a high-maintenance and aristocratic wife — distracted Trevor-Roper from the magisterial works he longed to write about 16th- and 17thcentury England. He died with half-a-dozen books unfinished, his initial promise unfulfilled. Or was it? He was, after all, appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, beating out his longtime rival A.J.P. Taylor (the subject of Sisman’s first biography). He was even raised to the peerage as Lord Dacre of Glanton. His students included such distinguished historians (and occasional rivals) as Lawrence Stone and Michael Howard. Still, there was no masterwork on the English Puritans or Oliver Cromwell, only, in 1976, another bestseller, the delicious “Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse,” which related the fantastic career of a forger and conman in turn-of-the-century China. It remains the best book of its kind since A.J.A. Symons’s “The Quest for Corvo.”

In fact, as Sisman suggests and many believe, Trevor-Roper was at heart an essayist, a master of the short form, and journalism helped him focus his wide learning. As a boy, he’d grown up in a

middle-class household in which the parents never displayed affection. Though he was the finest classicist in his year at Oxford (before he switched to history), he drank relentlessly as an undergraduate, drove his car at reckless speeds and frequently fell from his horse when riding to hounds (a favorite pastime), as if he were trying desperately to find some physical release for his frozen emotional self. As a don, he was widely regarded as inhuman, coldly ironic, frightening. For a long time he was even thought to be asexual. When, at 39, he did fall into a love affair with an older, married womon (who eventually became his wife), she complained that he never whispered any endearments or even murmured that he loved her. By inclination, Trevor-Roper seems to have been a mandarin litterateur. His true mentor wasn’t his tutor J.C. Masterman, but rather the wealthy American bookman Logan Pearsall Smith, known for his brittle aphorisms collected as “Trivia.” Smith took up Trevor-Roper (as he did, at other times, the writer Cyril Connolly and the art critic John Russell) and urged his young disciple to live a life devoted to reading and scholarship and the composition of beautiful sentences. Following Smith’s death, Trevor-Roper transferred his devotion to his mentor’s famous brother-in-law, the equally refined art connoisseur Bernard Berenson. Little wonder that Trevor-Roper grew into such an exacting prose stylist, valuing clarity of thought and expression above all else. But as a scholar he was, instinctively, a controversialist, an upsetter of received opinion and long-held truisms. Most famously, in “The Elizabethan Aristocracy: An Anatomy Anatomised,” he argued against the seemingly incontrovertible view that the aristocracy was on the decline and the gentry on the rise in early modern England; it was, he maintained, with compelling evidence, quite the other way ’round. More generally, he could never resist an opportunity to take a dig at organized religion, especially Catholicism. The novelist Evelyn Waugh, as a defender of the faith, frequently excoriated the Oxford historian, once declaring that only “one honorable course is open to Mr. Trevor-Roper. He should change his name and seek a livelihood at Cambridge.” Alas, Waugh wasn’t alive to appreciate the irony when his old enemy became Lord Dacre and assumed the mastership of Cambridge’s Peterhouse College. For most ordinary readers, Trevor-Roper is known for his thrilling introductions to editions of Tacitus, Gibbon and Macaulay. For those of a more scholarly bent, his various collections of lectures, academic papers and reviews — including “Men and Events,” “Renaissance Essays,” “Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays,” “From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution” and “History and the Enlightenment” — are seemingly inexhaustible repositories of dry wit and carefully marshaled erudition. Just to read Trevor-Roper on Robert Burton and “The Anatomy of Melancholy” or on the historian Clarendon or on “The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century” or on the philosopher David Hume is to feel that one is, in a small way, a citizen in the Republic of Letters. Detailed, funny and beautifully paced, “An Honourable Englishman” is one of the fullest and most intelligent biographies of a modern scholar ever written. Its readers are in for a treat. ‘The Annotated Peter Pan,’ by J.M. Barrie • •

by Michael Dirda Dec. 22, 2011

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Read Later

While staged versions of Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” and performances of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” ballet pretty much dominate the more secular side of the holiday season, it’s good to remember that there are plenty of other wonderful stories and theatrical events for this happy time of the year. Sherlock Holmes fans reread “The Blue Carbuncle,” described by Christopher Morley as “a Christmas story without slush.” O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” is a classic, and Damon Runyon’s “The Three Wise Guys” should be. My own favorite uletide book has long been John Masefield’s magical and spooky “The Box of Delights,” which climaxes at midnight during a great cathedral’s Christmas Eve service. And then there’s “Peter Pan.” We sometimes forget that its opening action occurs just about now; after all, the maid of the Darling family is making Christmas pudding on the night the children fly off to Neverland. In England, of course, going to see “Peter Pan” onstage is a longstanding holiday tradition, while in the United States baby boomers cherish their memories of the annual December TV broadcast of the Mary Martin/Cyril Ritchard musical. To this day, “Peter Pan,” which was first presented in 1904 in London, remains the greatest play for children ever written. But its 1911 novelization — titled “Peter and Wendy” — is another matter. As Maria Tatar’s sumptuous, annotated centennial edition reminds us, J.M. Barrie’s book defies numerous boundaries. It opens with the famous sentence, “All children, except one, grow up,” which already hints at the narrative’s pervasive melancholy. After all, the story offers more than just a celebration of play, of childhood, of the imagination’s power; it is also a troubling meditation on the passage of time and the darkness that awaits us all. “To die,” says Peter, “will be an awfully big adventure.” Is there, in fact, any children’s classic more death-haunted than “Peter Pan”? Or one more rife with strangeness? Mrs. Darling can rummage around in the minds of her children, Wendy, John and Michael. The nanny in an otherwise conventional middle-class household is a lumbering and preternaturally sensitive Newfoundland dog who, at one point, seems to speak English. Neverland itself exists first as a shared dream, long before the three siblings learn how to reach the tropical island. Whoever forgets Peter’s directions: Just follow the second star to the right and fly straight on till morning. While from the air, Neverland may seem quite small, it manages to be populated by Lost Boys, pirates, Indians, mermaids and wild beasts, including a pack of wolves and one particularly notable and determined crocodile. The gentleman-buccaneer Capt. James Hook — said to be the only man to strike fear into the heart of Long John Silver — actually attended Eton (in the play his last words are “Floreat Etona” — May Eton Flourish). Throughout the story, Hook and Peter are disturbingly twinned, each regularly mistaken for the other, as if the boy and the pirate were secret sharers of a single identity. The tiny fairy Tinker Bell and the Indian princess Tiger Lily bristle with the jealousy and sexual desire of grown women.

On the whole, the storytelling is full of verbal humor, parody and wonderful slapstick, yet its final chapter — when Peter returns to London at spring-cleaning time and discovers that Wendy has

grown up — can still bring tears to adult eyes. As Tatar stresses, “Peter and Wendy” is constantly shifting registers, being at once a children’s tale of thrilling adventure and derring-do; a multilayered text with a slippery, self-conscious narrator; and, not least, a work about what we lose by accepting the responsibilities of adulthood. But then being a grown-up inevitably means feeling regret and loss, emotions alien to Peter, who lives only in the moment and for whom “make-believe and true were exactly the same thing.” Tatar’s “The Annotated Peter Pan” offers far more than just explanatory marginal notes and illustrations from earlier editions. Fully half her volume contains supplementary material of the highest interest. She provides an introductory essay, a biographical precis of Barrie’s life, and the entire suite of photographs that make up “The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island,” an album created to memorialize a holiday that Barrie spent with three, of the eventually five, Llewelyn Davies boys, the true begetters of “Peter Pan.” Along the way, Tatar addresses our contemporary uneasiness about Barrie’s apparent obsession with these children (and their mother) but comes down firmly against the view that he was some sort of pedophile. While Tatar doesn’t reprint “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens” — the chapters from “The Little White Bird” that first introduced Peter Pan to the world — she does reproduce all that volume’s superb illustrations by Arthur Rackham. Not least, Tatar offers Barrie’s proposal for a screen treatment of “Peter Pan,” followed by a survey, with stills, of the various cinematic versions of the story, including such associated films as “Hook” and “Finding Neverland.” Twenty pages are devoted to critical or interpretative passages from the writings of critics and the memoirs of actors. A last essay, by Christine De Poortere, reminds us that Barrie’s will left the profits from “Peter Pan” to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. Every year brings one or two “annotated” editions of various out-of-copyright classics. I’ve read a good many of them, and all have their merits. While Martin Gardner’s groundbreaking “The Annotated Alice: ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ and ‘Through the Looking-Glass’  ” remains the nonpareil of the genre, I would place Tatar’s “The Annotated Peter Pan” a close second. But bear in mind that its commentary is geared to adults: A child should first encounter the story straight on. For that story remains magical, in all its important elements: Lost shadows; fairy dust; “You just think lovely wonderful thoughts”; the deliciously campy Captain Hook and his toadying bosun, Smee; that poisoned cake with green icing; Peter’s famous plea: “If you believe, clap your hands; don’t let Tink die”; and, of course, that best of all piratical threats: “There’s none can save you now, missy.” The last chapter — when Peter finally returns for Wendy and instead flies away with her daughter Jane — is beyond praise: “  ‘He does so need a mother,’ Jane said. “  ‘Yes, I know,’ Wendy admitted rather forlornly; ‘no one knows it so well as I.’ ”

Yet the book doesn’t end there. One day, Barrie tells us, Jane will have a daughter, Margaret, who will eventually have a daughter, and each in her turn will be Peter’s mother, “and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.” That last word is the final proof of Barrie’s genius. Alexander Maitland’s “Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer,” reviewed by Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda Nov. 23, 2011 Read Later

The cover of this fine, detailed and perhaps slightly overlong biography depicts a barefoot Bedouin and his sparsely laden camel standing alone in the middle of sandy nothingness. It is only by peering closely that one can make out the beaky nose and English features of Wilfred Thesiger (19102003), whose “Arabian Sands” (1959) is widely regarded as one of the greatest travel books of modern times. T.H. White — the revered author of “The Sword in the Stone” — once called it, with forgivable exaggeration, “the best book I have ever read.” Illustrated with Thesiger’s haunting black-and-white photographs and characterized by a terse lyricism, this desert classic records two grueling camel journeys, undertaken in the late 1940s, across the forbiddingly desolate Empty Quarter of Arabia. Oddly enough, Thesiger waited a decade to write up his Arabian adventures, which included climbing and crossing sand dunes 700 feet high, murderous threats from warring Arab tribes, and near-constant hunger and thirst — and then did so while cozily ensconced in a hotel in Copenhagen. He composed his other famous book, “The Marsh Arabs” (1964), while residing in a pensione in Florence. As Alexander Maitland reminds us, this great wanderer through Arabia, Persia (as he called Iran), Central Asia and Africa was emphatically a man of contradictions. When Thesiger was in the desert, he dressed as his Arab companions did, honoring the nomad’s principle that “everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance.” But back in London, he would don a bowler hat, sport a dark three-piece suit and carry a rolled umbrella, the very picture of conservative English traditionalism. One friend said that he was “the sort of man who will happily walk barefoot for months across a waterless desert, subsisting on a handful of dates and occasional sip of camel’s piss, but who, back in civilization, cannot endure the most trivial discomfort. He becomes frantic even if his egg isn’t boiled right for breakfast.” Born in what was then Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), Thesiger counted himself as much a citizen of that country as of England. The eldest of a colonial administrator’s four sons, he wrote that his childhood in Abyssinia, and especially the memory of its spear-carrying warriors, implanted in his soul “a lifelong craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums, and it gave me a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovations in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world.”

As a scion of an upper-class family, Thesiger attended Eton and Oxford, but he spent his summer vacations roaming around northern Africa, hunting and exploring. He loved reading the adventure fiction of John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad, and regarded T.E. Lawrence as a role model. At Oxford, he squeaked through with a third-class degree in modern history but distinguished himself as a champion boxer.

Tall and exceptionally strong, Thesiger never drank alcohol but loved sweets (especially chocolate), was prickly and rather humorless, hated to feel cold, adored his mother, enjoyed rousing martial music and was apparently decisively celibate. While he openly admired the beauty of young Arab and African men, and always employed one or two as his companions or servants, Thesiger claimed to be revolted by the very idea of physical love-making. Still, anyone who looks at the expressive photographs he took of various young tribesmen will recognize that he gazed at their often androgynous beauty with the eyes of a lover. He once declared men to be more “graceful than women, ‘who bulge in all the wrong places.’ ” From the beginning, Thesiger, who could speak fluent Arabic, nearly always “travelled on foot with tribal companions and baggage animals, almost never accompanied by another European.” Early on, he chose to live a “hard man’s life” and, quite literally, to go where no Europeans had gone before him. On one early journey, in which he determined that the Awash River in what is now Ethiopia ended in Lake Abhebad, 14 of his 18 camels died of starvation. During his 20s, he spent five years in the Sudan, where he “shot seventy lions, being charged no fewer than sixteen times.” Among the Nuer, Thesiger killed four elephants and once harpooned a hippo. But afterWorld War II, in which he served in North Africa and was awarded a Distinguished Service Order, he gradually gave up hunting for sport. In the 1950s, Thesiger lived off and on for seven years in the marshes of southern Iraq, an area once thought to be the location of the Garden of Eden. (This water land was later drained and essentially destroyed by Saddam Hussein.) Here he once again adapted to the native lifestyle, living in a reed hut, traveling by canoe, helping to herd water buffalo and killing wild boar. (By the time Thesiger left the marshes in 1958, writes Maitland, he had shot “approximately a thousand wild boar.”) But Thesiger also functioned as the region’s doctor, treating “boils, dysentery, eczema, ulcers” and other ailments. Once he excised a diseased eye. He also performed, on boys and men, thousands of circumcisions. At intervals, Thesiger would leave the marshes and visit England or travel in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some of these later adventures were recorded in “Desert, Marsh and Mountain” (1979). On one such journey, he famously encountered the travel writer Eric Newby, who had attempted to climb Mir Samir with his friend Hugh Carless. Thesiger, immaculately turned out in native gear, couldn’t help but mock the softness of Newby and Carless when the pair started to blow up air mattresses before sleeping on stony ground. Knighted in 1995, Sir Wilfred spent his later years living in Kenya with several adopted African “sons.” By 2000, however, he had begun to suffer from both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, eventually dying in an English hospital in Croydon at the age of 93. Just before he breathed his last, Maitland tells us, Thesiger turned to someone by his bedside and demanded, “What is your tribe?”

Today, reading about Wilfred Thesiger’s exploits as a hunter and explorer can be slightly disconcerting. Did he represent the last gasp of British colonialism? Were his adventures mainly a closeted homosexual’s need for easygoing male companionship? With other people, of whatever nationality, he was obviously domineering, quick to take offense and unforgiving. Still, of his talent as a photographer and a writer, there is no question: “Arabian Sands” and “The Marsh Arabs” aren’t just classics of reportage, they are unforgettable works of art. Anthony Horowitz’s ‘The House of Silk,’ a Sherlock Holmes novel, reviewed by Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda Nov. 16, 2011 Read Later

It is the year 1890, the month of November, and Sherlock Holmes is rapidly recovering from three days and nights of starvation, part of an elaborate ruse to trick a murderer, in “The Adventure of the Dying Detective.” Only a few weeks before that, he had solved the ingenious mystery of “The Red-Headed League.” His friend and chronicler, Dr. Watson, no longer lives at 221B Baker St., having wed Mary Morstan, whom he met two years previously in “The Sign of the Four.” But, as “The House of Silk” opens, Mrs. Watson has just left for a stay with friends in the country, and her husband has, temporarily, moved back into his old rooms. And so the stage is set for one of the greatest cases of Victorian England’s greatest detective. There are 56 short stories and four novels in the established canon of the Sherlock Holmes adventures. But Dr. Watson tantalizingly alludes to a number of others, “for which the world is not yet prepared.” Recall some of their titles: “The Giant Rat of Sumatra,” “The Politician, the Lighthouse, and the Trained Cormorant,” “The Amateur Mendicant Society” and “The Singular Adventures of the Grice Patersons in the Island of Uffa.” Don’t they all inspire reverie and speculation? (Note, for instance, the word “in” rather than the expected “on” in that last case. Is that significant? Holmes constantly reminds us of the importance of trifles.) Many of these unpublished cases repose in a safe-deposit box at Cox and Co. in Charing Cross Road. Among them, till recently, was “The House of Silk,” characterized by Watson as “simply too monstrous, too shocking to appear in print.” He adds that full knowledge of the facts “would tear apart the entire fabric of society.” Writing in what must be 1915 — when the great detective is dead and his elder brother, Mycroft, retired — Watson announces that he is leaving instructions that his account of these horrors remain sealed for 100 years. Somehow, though, Anthony Horowitz — well known as the author of the Alex Rider novels for young people and the scriptwriter for a number of British television series (most notably “Foyle’s War”) — managed to free the manuscript a few years in advance of that century mark. All readers and Sherlock Holmes fans will be grateful that he has. “The House of Silk” opens when a rather foppish art dealer comes to Holmes because he feels in danger from a silent, mysterious man who wears a distinctive flat cap and bears a livid scar on his

face. Who could this ruffian be? Edmund Carstairs eventually relates an extraordinary story involving a train robbery in America and a shootout with a notorious gang led by a pair of Irish twins. Carstairs is convinced that a survivor from that shootout has marked him for revenge. But is this supposition correct? On his voyage back from America a little over a year before, the traumatized Carstairs met and soon married an attractive widow named Catherine Marryat. Some of his servants regard her as bringing a needed breath of fresh air into the rather stiff and sorrowful Carstairs household. The art dealer’s mother has just recently died, his spinster sister has grown increasingly paranoid, and one Irish serving boy has even begun to behave in a sullenly provocative manner. Something is clearly amiss. Yet why does the great detective chiefly want to know if Mrs. Carstairs is able to swim?

Before long, Holmes and Watson call in the street urchins known as the Baker Street Irregulars to help locate this elusive and threatening American, at which point what had seemed a relatively simple affair starts to grow increasingly byzantine and dangerous. A frightened young slattern mentions “the House of Silk”; a body is found horribly tortured and mutilated; Mycroft Holmes — who sometimes “is” the British government — strongly warns his brother off the case; and one night Watson finds himself the guest of a certain reclusive professor of mathematics, highly esteemed for his groundbreaking work on the Binomial Theorem. At the climax of this exceptionally entertaining book, Holmes solves not one but three interrelated mysteries. One can only applaud Horowitz’s skill in integrating the case of the Flat Cap Gang with that of the House of Silk. His mimicking of the style and tone of Arthur Conan Doyle is equally impressive. Here, for instance, the two Holmes brothers one-up each other at the Diogenes Club: “ ‘My dear Sherlock!’ Mycroft exclaimed as he waddled in. ‘How are you? You have recently lost weight, I notice. But I’m glad to see you restored to your old self.’ “ ‘And you have recovered from influenza.’ “ ‘A very mild bout. I enjoyed your monograph on tattoos. Written during the hours of the night, evidently. Have you been troubled by insomnia?’ “ ‘The summer was unpleasantly warm. You did not tell me you had acquired a parrot.’ “ ‘Not acquired, Sherlock. Borrowed. . . . You have just returned from Gloucestershire.’ “ ‘And you from France.’ “ ‘Mrs. Hudson has been away?’ “ ‘She returned last week. You have a new cook.’ “ ‘The last one resigned.’

“ ‘On account of the parrot.’ “  ‘She always was highly strung.’ ” Throughout the narrative, Watson and Holmes repeatedly allude to various earlier cases and readers familiar with the Sherlockian canon will enjoy identifying “The Devil’s Foot,” “The Speckled Band,” “The Final Problem” and several other stories. Try your luck, for instance, in pegging the possible sources for the following articles found in Sherlock Holmes’s possession when he is arrested by the police: “A pair of pince-nez, a length of string, a signet ring bearing the crest of the Duke of Cassel-Felstein, two cigarette ends wrapped in a page torn from the London Corn Circular, a chemical pipette, several Greek coins and a small beryl.” From time to time, the older Watson mentions with shame his failure to grasp the suffering of the criminal heart or to fathom the full extent of the Victorian neglect of the poor, downtrodden and abandoned. This growing understanding of social ills is not just admirable on Watson’s part, but also central to solving the mystery of the House of Silk. Setting aside some embarrassing typos and proofreading errors (Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Morstan are both misspelled on successive pages), “The House of Silk” is an altogether terrific period thriller and one of the best Sherlockian pastiches of our time. ‘Death Comes to Pemberley,’ by P.D. James • • •

by Michael Dirda Dec. 7, 2011 Read Later

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a restless reader in possession of a quiet evening must be in want of a mystery. Should that reader, moreover, happen to be a devotee of “Pride and Prejudice” or an admirer of the detective stories of Baroness James of Holland Park, more commonly known as P.D. James, or ideally of both, one may safely surmise that “Death Comes to Pemberley” will be the must-have present of the holiday season. In its stately yet witty pages, Mr. and Mrs. Fitzwilliam Darcy (the latter nee Elizabeth Bennet) find themselves caught up in a murder case, one complicated by romance, a family curse, ghostly apparitions, dark doings and, not least, the reappearance of their old nemesis, Mr. Wickham. What’s not to like? Six years after the marriage of Mr. Darcy to Miss Bennet, the couple are happily settled at Pemberley. They have two healthy sons, ages 5 and 2. In nearby Highmarten reside Elizabeth’s beloved sister Jane and her husband, Bingley, and their three children. The two families often meet for dinner, and old Mr. Bennet regularly visits his favorite daughter, usually spending most of his time happily ensconced in the library. Having quickly won over the servants and the local people, the new mistress of Pemberley has brought a springlike vitality to the household and grown to love her new life. When the novel opens, it is the day before Lady Anne’s ball, the great yearly celebration honoring the memory of Darcy’s mother, and Elizabeth is worried. Not about the ball itself, but about Darcy’s sister, Georgiana. Once nearly ruined by the smooth-talking and unscrupulous Wickham,

Georgiana is now a handsome but quiet young woman in her 20s. In recent months, it has grown clear that two very different men have fallen in love with her: Darcy’s cousin Col. Fitzwilliam and a young lawyer named Henry Alveston. Georgiana would never marry without love, but, as Elizabeth knows, neither would she marry without Darcy’s approval: “And what if it came to a choice between Colonel Fitzwilliam, his cousin and childhood friend, heir to an earldom, a gallant soldier who had known Georgiana all her life, and this handsome and agreeable young lawyer who admittedly was making his name but of whom they knew very little? He would inherit a barony, and an ancient one, and Georgiana would have a house which, when Alveston had made his money and restored it, would be one of the most beautiful in England. But Darcy had his share of family pride and there could be no doubt which candidate offered the greater security and more glittering future.” That night before the ball, the Darcys, Bingleys, Col. Fitzwilliam, Alveston and Georgiana gather for a rather subdued dinner: “The atmosphere was not helped by the tempest outside. From time to time the wind howled in the chimney, the fire hissed and spluttered like a living thing and occasionally a burning log would break free, bursting into spectacular flames and casting a momentary red flush over the faces of the diners so that they looked as if they were in a fever.”

This “Northanger Abbey” mood grows even more gothic when a coach suddenly emerges from out of the night, careening drunkenly as it races toward the front doors of Pemberley. “Elizabeth and the rest of the company crowded to the window and there in the distance saw a chaise, lurching and swaying down the woodland road towards the house, its two sidelights blazing like small flames. Imagination provided what was too distant to be seen — the manes of the horses tossed by the wind, their wild eyes and straining shoulders, the postilion heaving at the reins. It was too distant for the wheels to be heard and it seemed to Elizabeth that she was seeing a spectral coach of legend flying soundlessly through the moonlit night, the dreaded harbinger of death.” And so the nightmare begins. While many writers have composed sequels to the various Austen masterpieces, James manages to preserve the flavor of “Pride and Prejudice” while also creating a fairly good whodunit. Some aficionados of the detective story will almost certainly guess big chunks of the plot, even if the details may be somewhat elusive. No matter. This is a novel one reads for its charm, for the chance to revisit some favorite characters, for the ingenious way James reworks — or resolves — old elements from Austen. At one point, for instance, we learn that Wickham was briefly employed by Sir Walter Elliot (see “Persuasion”), and two characters from “Emma” provide a solution to one of the subplots. Nearly all the minor characters are sharply drawn. Consider the distinctly Sherlockian Dr. McFee: “His reputation as a sinister eccentric was also not helped by his having a small upstairs room equipped as a laboratory where it was rumoured that he conducted experiments on the time taken

for blood to clot under different circumstances and on the speed with which changes took place in the body after death.” At times James channels quite perfectly the tone of her famous model. There are the Austenian bons mots: “Since even the most fastidious among us can rarely escape hearing salacious local gossip, it is as well to enjoy what cannot be avoided.” We are regaled with a long letter from the wonderfully insufferable Lady Catherine de Bourgh and hear in some detail about the latest vulgarities of Mrs. Bennet. James even includes a page or so about the married life of Austen’s greatest comic character, the Rev. Mr. Collins who, when learning of the crime wave at Pemberley, prophesies “a catalogue of disasters for the afflicted family ranging from the worst — Lady Catherine’s displeasure and their permanent banishment from Rosings — descending to public ignominy, bankruptcy and death.” As the novel advances, James quietly stresses the tension between the conservative, established traditions of Pemberley and the changes issued in with the dynamic 19th century, among them the growing recognition of women’s rights, emendations to the judicial code and increasing regard for the professions. But James hardly neglects Austen’s great theme — who will marry whom? Take Bingley’s sister: “It was generally known both in London and Derbyshire that Miss Bingley was particularly anxious at this time not to leave the capital. Her pursuit of a widowed peer of great wealth was entering a most hopeful phase. Admittedly without his peerage and his money he would have been regarded as the most boring man in London, but one cannot expect to be called ‘your grace’ without some inconvenience, and the competition for his wealth, title and anything else he cared to bestow was understandably keen.” P.D. James is now in her 90s, but one need make no allowance for age to enjoy “Death Comes to Pemberley.” It is a solidly entertaining period mystery and a major treat for any fan of Jane Austen. Umberto Ecos The Prague Cemetery, reviewed by Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda Nov. 9, 2011 Read Later

Ambitious writers are often said to challenge their readers. That’s certainly true in the case of Umberto Eco and his latest novel, “The Prague Cemetery,” but not, perhaps, in quite the expected way. Let’s backtrack for a moment. Eco’s first work of fiction, “The Name of the Rose” (1980), was set in an isolated medieval monastery, densely written and larded with passages in Latin, replete with theological speculation, almost entirely without female characters and concerned, in large part, with a lost manuscript by Aristotle. On the surface, none of this cries out international bestseller. Nonetheless, because “The Name of the Rose” was also a clever murder mystery, featured a Sherlock Holmes-like monkdetective and made readers feel intelligent just to have it on their shelves, whether they read it or not, the book made Eco’s name and fortune.

From there, the exuberant Italian — half savant, half bon vivant — went on to juggle a distinguished academic career focused on semiotics and cultural history with gigs as an occasional newspaper columnist and, every few years, the publication of a new novel. These last have tended to be what I call antiquarian romances: big books such as “Foucault’s Pendulum” and “The Island of the Day Before” that are packed with encyclopedic learning and often revolve around the occult, secret societies and conspiracy theories of history. While “The Name of the Rose” was made attractive by the presence of William of Baskerville and by the naive young acolyte who narrates the story, Eco’s latest book, by contrast, features almost no one who isn’t contemptible or loathsome. In a loose sense, “The Prague Cemetery” can be viewed as an attempt to explore the mind of a fanatic from within, to explain the hate-filled prejudices and publications of the 19th century, and to proffer a plausible background for the composition of the notorious anti- Semitic screed “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” In typical Eco fashion, the novel neatly links together most of the conspiracy mythologies of the era. Behind every war, every revolution, every financial triumph or disaster, the enlightened can always detect the hidden hand of the Jesuits, the Jews, the Freemasons, the Carbonari, the secret police, international anarchism or even Satan himself. Setting aside the novel’s structural complexities, “The Prague Cemetery” basically traces the life and career of the half-Italian, half-French Simone Simonini. Brought up by a grandfather who blamed the Jews for everything and by a father who saw the malign influence of the Society of Jesus everywhere, young Simonini grows up obsessed with the notion of conspiracy. Intellectually, he is molded by his reading of the era’s most lurid fiction, in particular, Alexandre Dumas’ “Joseph Balsamo,” about the occult charlatan Cagliostro, and Eugene Sue’s melodramatic serials featuring Jesuit masterminds, esoteric Masonic rituals and even the immortal Wandering Jew. Later, as a young man, Simonini discovers that he possesses a gift for imitating anyone’s handwriting, a taste for dressing up in clerical vestments, and a horror of female flesh and every form of sexuality. He exhibits as well a Parisian gastronome’s obsession with exquisite food and almost no moral sense whatsoever.

As the years roll by, our protagonist — one can hardly call him a hero — works as a spy and forger, eventually betrays everyone he knows and periodically catches up on the latest in bomb technology. He acts as a murderous double agent within Garibaldi’s army, presents an eyewitness account of the Paris Commune and its savagery, helps to falsely incriminate Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, eventually suffers what might be a case of split personality and even encounters the young Sigmund Freud. Oh, yes, and he also participates in a Black Mass and imagines the Final Solution. Eco certainly doesn’t stint on sensationalism. But neither does he make up very much of this. Nearly all the characters, tracts, newspapers and events in the book are drawn from the historical record. It’s only Eco’s imagination that connects all these elements to a single shrewd and repulsive little worm. Here, in effect, is a conspiracy theory of conspiracy theories. There’s certainly much to admire in “The Prague Cemetery.” Eco writes brilliantly about food, for instance. Simonini is an epicure who daydreams about recipes as other men do about women. The

mere mention, he says of the specialties provided by the Cafe Anglais, “makes me feel that life is worth living.” Throughout his narrative, Eco also integrates dozens of contemporary steel engravings, almost transforming his book into a graphic novel. And it’s fun to hear the echoes of J.K. Huysmans’s famous novel about rival Satanists, “La-Bas” (“Down There”), or to identify at least some of Simonini’s many allusions, such as — to take an easy one — his reference to “that consumptive Polish pianist kept by a degenerate woman who went about in trousers” (Chopin and George Sand). Better still, every few pages Eco proffers a memorable, even aphoristic observation: “Someone said that women are just a substitute for the solitary vice, except that you need more imagination. .  .  . When a spy sells something entirely new, all he need do is recount something you could find in any secondhand book stall. . . . Any defamatory work ought to be readable in half an hour. . . . A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.” From his own early reading as well as his later experience, Simonini soon proclaims the “Universal Form of every possible conspiracy,” that is, our human proclivity to always find a culprit for life’s major setbacks and thus to confirm what we, subconsciously, already “know.” Which is, of course, that none of us are ever truly responsible for our failures or misfortunes. We have, in fact, been held back and our dreams dashed by dark forces leagued against us. Nowadays, these might be the old-boy WASP, Ivy League network. Or those commie pinko-liberal sympathizers at work in our government. Or the Jews. It’s equally obvious that people of much less talent than we possess unjustly succeed because they are backed by Them, meaning the Mafia or the Church of Scientology or the all-powerful gay-lesbian lobby. Utter nonsense? Yes. Yet what makes all this tricky, of course, is that sometimes such suspicions aren’t wholly without substance, especially if one happens to be, for instance, black, Muslim, disabled or homosexual. “The Prague Cemetery” is thus only partly historical. It addresses both humankind’s most nefarious bigotries and some unpleasant contemporary truths, notably that all too often our sense of “identity is now based on hatred . . . for those who are not the same.” One of the book’s anti-Semites is so completely deluded that he finally announces that “the idea that Christ was Jewish is a legend created by people who were Jews themselves. . . . Jesus was in fact of the Celtic race, like we French.” Who could doubt such a self-evident truth? “The Prague Cemetery” is certainly engrossing and cautionary, but it mainly offers, to adopt Joseph Conrad’s biblical-sounding phrase, the appalling fascination of the abomination. Be aware, then, that Umberto Eco hasn’t produced anything close to what one might call a fun read or a light entertainment. “The Prague Cemetery” is, in fact, an all-out horror story. ‘Is That a Fish in Your Ear?’: Translations brought to light • • •

by Michael Dirda March 6, 2012 Read Later

David Bellos runs the program in translation and intercultural communication at Princeton University and is clearly a man who has thought hard about what it means to transform something

written in one language into something analogous in another. But he’s not just a linguistic theoretician. Bellos’s own translations, from the French of novelists Georges Perec and Romain Gary, are dazzling examples of creative re-creation, in both senses of that last word. One Gary work — about a literary hoax — was cleverly Englished as “Hocus Bogus.” “Is That a Fish in Your Ear?” derives its odd title from the universal translator described in Douglas Adams’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Just stick a Babel Fish in your ear and you can instantly communicate in any language. In principle, mutual linguistic understanding should then lead to mutual understanding. “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner,” as the French saying goes. Perhaps. In his absorbing and wide-ranging book, Bellos addresses virtually every aspect of translation. He discusses “what translation does,” the dominance of English as the world’s major “interlanguage” and the various linguistic theories of Edward Sapir, Ferdinand de Saussure, Leo Spitzer, Vladimir Nabokov and Noam Chomsky (with nearly all of whom he takes issue). He praises the demanding work of simultaneous interpreters, demonstrates the ingenuity of caption writers for comics and of subtitlers for foreign films, and reflects on the character of Bible translation in the 20th and 21st centuries. He even explodes the insidious cultural implications behind the widespread (but inaccurate) belief that Eskimos possess 100 words for snow. There are pages about translation’s place in international law and business, as well as a potted history of automated language-translation machines. In short, Bellos looks at every conceivable issue surrounding the relationship between a “source” language and a “target” language, while loading his chapters with anecdotes, arguments and striking examples. For instance, in the section “Why Do We Call It ‘Translation’?,” Bellos begins by discussing C.K. Ogden, co-author of “The Meaning of Meaning” (1923). Ogden believed that many of the world’s troubles “could be ascribed to the illusion that a thing exists just because we have a word for it.” He called this phenomenon “Word Magic.” As Bellos wryly notes, “Candidates for the label include ‘levitation,’ ‘real existing socialism,’ and ‘safe investment.’ These aren’t outright fictions but illusions licensed and created by the lexicon.” In Ogden’s view and presumably Bellos’s as well, Word Magic “stops us from questioning the assumptions that are hidden in words and leads us to allow words to manipulate our minds.” Here, in embryo, lurks the Newspeak of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Bellos’s nimble wit runs throughout his book. “It’s a well-known fact that a translation is no substitute for the original.” Pause. “It’s also perfectly obvious that this is wrong. Translations are substitutes for original texts. You use them in the place of a work written in a language you cannot read with ease.” What translators actually do, argues Bellos, “is find matches, not equivalences, for the units of which a work is made, in the hope and expectation that their sum will produce a new work that can serve overall as a substitute for the source.” He takes pains to show that readers often cannot distinguish a work that is translated from a work originally composed in their own tongue. He strongly believes that anything expressed in one language really can be “shared” with readers in another. Our culture is based on just this conviction. “The history of Western poetry is the history of poetry in translation.”

What ultimately matters is fidelity to form and context: “Translators do not translate Chinese kitchen recipes ‘into English.’ If they are translators, they translate them into kitchen recipes.” Yet what of the widespread feeling that a novel by, say, Georges Simenon should somehow sound French even when it’s in English? Bellos demonstrates that “foreign-soundingness” is “only a real option for a translator when working from a language with which the receiving language and its culture have an established relationship.” For English-speakers, that generally means French or Spanish. After all, how can you present what it feels like to write in Chuvash to a reader who hasn’t the slightest acquaintance with Chuvash? From here Bellos goes on to stress the implications of language status, of whether one is translating “up” or “down.” That is, translations up toward a “more prestigious tongue are characteristically highly adaptive, erasing most of the traces of the text’s foreign origin; whereas translations down tend to leave a visible residue of the source, because in those circumstances foreignness itself carries prestige.” In other words, the U.S. editions of foreign novels have traditionally sounded smoothly American in their English, while translated American crime fiction, for example, tends to preserve its Americanness and doesn’t try to pass as wholly French or Italian. More subtly still, Bellos wonders about what he calls a “third code,” the propensity, or at least the possibility, that translations by Constance Garnett — whether of Chekhov, Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky — all tend to sound like Constance Garnett. Not least, Bellos reminds us that translating into English is a sadly ill-paid occupation, largely a hobby for amateurs or a sideline for college professors. But translators from English into German or Japanese are often as famous in their own countries as the foreign authors they work with. In a chapter on dictionaries, Bellos unexpectedly praises Roget’s Thesaurus, not so much as a help for writers struggling for the right word, but as a work that drives home on every page that “to know a language is to know how to say the same thing in different words,” that, in essence, “all words are translations of others.” Nonetheless, true intercultural communication can only start with a leap of faith — with the willingness to trust a stranger. “For [that trust] to exist, huge intellectual and emotional obstacles to taking the word of another for the word of the source have to be overcome. They can be overcome only by a shared willingness to enter a realm in which meaning cannot be completely guaranteed. That kind of trust is perhaps the foundation of all culture.” After all, each time you speak, you reveal “who you are, where you come from, where you belong.” It follows from this “that translation does not come ‘After Babel.’ It comes when some human group has the bright idea that the kids on the next block or the people on the other side of the hill might be worth talking to. Translating is a first step toward civilization.” “Is That a Fish in Your Ear?” strikes me as the best sort of nonfiction, an exhilarating work that takes up a subject we thought we understood — or knew we didn’t — and then makes us see it afresh. Such high-order scholarly popularizations, accomplished with the grace and authority of a David Bellos, are themselves an irreplaceable kind of translation. Andrew Krivak’s ‘The Sojourn,’ reviewed by Michael Dirda • •

by Michael Dirda Nov. 16, 2011

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In the opening pages of this powerful, assured first novel, a desperate mother throws her baby into a river. An act of madness? Quite the contrary. It is the only possible way to save the child’s life. Packed with violence and death, yet wonderfully serene in its tone, Andrew Krivak’s “The Sojourn” — shortlisted for this year’s National Book Award — reminds us that one never knows from where the blow will fall and that, always, in the midst of life we are in death: “His foot slipped from the poor hold he had chosen on the next step and he pitched forward and began to slide and spin sideways down the hill, letting go of the rifle, which picked up its own speed and outstripped him as it dropped straight and slammed into a rock not twenty yards from my father and went off, shooting the man through the heart. He was dead before he came to rest.” Although “The Sojourn” starts in Colorado at the very end of the 19th century, most of its action takes place in Central Europe in the years before, during and after World War I. In the wake of three sudden deaths, Ondrej Vinich abandons his plans for a new life in America and takes his young son back home with him to the “ol’ kawntree,” that is, to the Slovakia of the AustroHungarian Empire. So that the boy will have a home, he marries a widow who — in good fairy-tale fashion — spends all the household money on food for her own two sons while starving little Jozef. In a rage, Ondrej, now working as a shepherd, takes Jozef along with him into the mountains. There, year after year, father and son speak only in English, read American books such as the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, and grow in their love for each other. Unexpectedly, this family of two becomes three when a cousin of Ondrej asks him to care for her illegitimate child. Zlee is just a bit older than Jozef, and the two grow up as virtual brothers. They also grow up as expert marksmen. In one tense and dramatic episode, the two teenage boys hunt a big cat — a lion or puma — that has been ravaging their livestock. Nonetheless, Jozef, who narrates the novel, is slightly in awe of Zlee. His foster brother looked, he tells us, “like some Russian wolfhound, a gaze of regal and indifferent contentment on his face until he pounced, usually to avenge someone weaker who had no means of defending himself, but often enough simply to fight anyone who wore his strength like meanness on a sleeve, and then there was no way of escaping Zlee’s lupine determination to stand and strike, until someone dropped and stayed down.” When World War I breaks out, the two young men enlist and soon find themselves part of an elite corps of snipers, taught by a wounded veteran named Sgt. Maj. Bucher: “The sharpshooter should consider himself above rank and disregard it, as it is rank that ought to be hunted first, killing from the top down in order to leave an army leaderless and demoralized. Search for whom and what seems out of the ordinary, he instructed us. The nonuniform, the affectation. Field glasses around the neck out in the open. A scarf of school colors catching the wind. A knitted pullover. An umbrella.”

“  ‘To desire rank is to desire death,’ he intoned aphoristically. ‘You must find the soldier of rank, and find in yourselves the will to remain calm, silent, and alert. Then kill as though it were your only chance to live.’ ” If the early pages of “The Sojourn” sometimes recall Cormac McCarthy (especially “The Crossing”), the heart of the book is a harrowing portrait of men at war, as powerful as Ernst Junger’s classic “Storm of Steel” and Isaac Babel’s brutally poetic Red Cavalry stories. In one episode worthy of old thriller writers such as John Buchan and Geoffrey Household, Zlee and Josef must hunt down their opposite number, a phantom-like enemy sharpshooter who almost never misses. Although “The Sojourn” is rightly marketed as a literary novel, it should also appeal to fans of Stephen Hunter’s sniper novels and David Morrell’s early thrillers, and I really shouldn’t say any more about its plot, certainly not about the sudden deaths on the snowy mountain pass or the raped Gypsy girl or the bags of gold hidden in a cave. Yet throughout, Krivak returns, again and again, to the love between a father and his son, to the burden of tragic memories, and to the fraught nature of national or ethnic identity. As Jozef says at one point: “What was a Czecho-Slovak to me, though, a boy raised among Carpathian peasants in a Magyar culture, professing loyalty in a poor school to a Hapsburg, and speaking a language in secret they spoke in a land called America?” Let me end with a good word for the judges of this year’s National Book Award. In nominating “The Sojourn” for the NBA shortlist, the judges obviously passed over books published with more hoopla by bigger trade houses. Yet what better use is there for a literary prize than to draw attention to fine work that might otherwise be missed? So, this time, at least, the system has worked. We should be grateful all around — to Andrew Krivak for writing such a good book, to Bellevue Literary Press for publishing and promoting it, and to the National Book Award’s fiction jury for recognizing and honoring its excellence. Michael Dirda reviews ‘1Q84,’ by Haruki Murakami • • •

by Michael Dirda Oct. 19, 2011 Read Later

Two weeks ago, Haruki Murakami was widely rumored to be among the front-runners for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He didn’t win — this year. But Murakami is clearly one of the most popular and admired novelists in the world today, a brilliant practitioner of serious, yet irresistibly engaging, literary fantasy. He has already been honored with the Kafka Prize, the Jerusalem Prize and the World Fantasy Award. His best-known novels — “A Wild Sheep Chase,” “Kafka on the Shore” and “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” — have even established Murakami as something of a cult author among college-age readers. Perhaps the American writer he most resembles, in multiple ways, is Michael Chabon. Murakami’s latest novel, “1Q84,” is an immensely long book, originally published in three volumes in Japan (the first two parts in 2009, the third last year). Still, you’ll be glad that Knopf decided to bring out the English version as a single massive hardcover: Once you start reading “1Q84,” you won’t want to do much else until you’ve finished it.

Murakami possesses many gifts, but chief among them is an almost preternatural gift for suspenseful storytelling. Here he once again explores his favorite theme, succinctly stated by a character in his previous novel, “After Dark”: “The ground we stand on looks solid enough, but if something happens it can drop right out from under you. And once that happens, you’ve had it: things’ll never be the same.” When “1Q84” opens, a young woman named Aomame finds herself stuck in gridlock on Tokyo’s elevated Metropolitan Expressway. Carrying a “sharp object in the bottom of her shoulder bag” and dressed to the nines, Aomame is worried about being late for a critical appointment. As if reading her mind, the taxi driver suddenly mentions that there’s an emergency service stairway nearby, and that it leads down to a street close to a subway stop. He doesn’t recommend that she climb down these rusty stairs, especially in a miniskirt and heels, but the subway offers her only chance to avoid being late. As Aomame opens the door of the cab, the driver mysteriously says: “Don’t let appearances fool you. There’s always only one reality.” Yes and no. By the time Aomame reaches a deluxe hotel for her appointment — hers, by the way, is “a profession requiring specialized techniques and training” — she is no longer in 1984. The world has “switched tracks,” and she has entered a kind of parallel reality, which she eventually dubs 1Q84. Not much seems terribly different at first, but gradually she learns that certain aspects of history (and cosmology) have changed, and that nearly all these changes are linked to a mysterious commune called Sakigake. At its inception, Sakigake resembled any other organic cooperative run by ’60s dropouts and onetime college radicals. But it has recently filed with the government as a religious institution and grown increasingly secretive and wealthy. There is talk of a mysterious but never seen Leader. Meanwhile, Murakami establishes a second story line, alternating Aomame’s increasingly dangerous adventures with those of a lonely would-be novelist named Tengo. Against his better judgment, Tengo has been talked into secretly revising a short novel called “Air Chrysalis” so it can win a major prize. The plot is fantastic — involving Little People who emerge from the mouth of a dead goat — but its 17-year-old author is even stranger. Beautiful but unnervingly expressionless, FukaEri can scarcely read or write, and her speech is unnaturally clipped and laconic. She insists that the details of her novel are absolutely true and that you can even see the Little People “if you try.” Until she ran away at the age of 10, Fuka-Eri lived at Sakigake.

Slowly, unknowingly, Aomame and Tengo work their way toward each other, even as contending forces try to prevent or promote their meeting. Along the way, each interacts with a series of striking characters. There’s an immensely wealthy dowager who has founded an organization to help battered wives and (secretly) punish abusive husbands; a gay bodyguard of the utmost efficiency with a taste for philosophical speculation; a deformed lawyer of dogged determination and razorlike intelligence; a young policewoman with a penchant for rough sex; Tengo’s dying father, who has spent his life going door to door as a collection agent; and, not least, a man who rapes — or perhaps is raped by — pre-pubescent girls. Murakami’s novels have been translated into a score of languages, but it would be hard to imagine that any of them could be better than the English versions by Jay Rubin, partnered here with Philip

Gabriel. Fuka-Eri peers into Tengo’s eyes “as if she were looking into an empty house with her face pressed up against the glass.” In a photograph, President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone resemble “a couple of men in the construction industry discussing how they were going to switch to cheap, shoddy building material.” Tengo’s editor, Komatsu, “was tall and gangly, with an oversized mouth and an undersized nose. He had long limbs and nicotine-stained fingers, reminiscent of those failed revolutionary intellectuals in nineteenth-century Russian novels.” While “1Q84” is distinctly Murakamian, some of its elements do pay homage to other masterpieces. For instance, when Aomame is led into a darkened room to meet the Leader, the scene calls to mind a very similar one in G.K. Chesterton’s nightmarish “The Man Who Was Thursday.” An air chrysalis bears more than a little resemblance to the cocoons containing replicants in the film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” The strange story of the “town of cats” obviously derives from Algernon Blackwood’s horror classic “Ancient Sorceries.” Throughout, too, Murakami fosters an ever-intensifying aura of the uncanny by repeated references to Janacek’s “Sinfonietta,” by allusions to the bizarre rituals surrounding the Leader and his shrine maidens, by the haunting phrase “irretrievably lost” and, most ominously, by the sudden presence in the sky of two moons, the one we know and the other small and greenish “as though thinly covered with moss.” It’s not a good sign when a certain character notices that his tongue has become coated with what looks like greenish moss. Despite its great length, Murakami’s novel is tightly plotted, without fat, and he knows how to make dialogue, even philosophical dialogue, exciting. In the very middle of the book, Aomame’s long discussion with the Leader about the nature of good and evil recalls Ivan’s conversation with the Devil in “The Brothers Karamazov.” Still, Murakami can then turn around and describe hotel pickups and “all-night sex feasts” or imagine a sinister equivalent to the MacArthur Foundation. He creates mysteries about Tengo’s parentage, suggests that one character has been reincarnated with memories of her previous life, and hints that the Little People may be intent on undermining humanity but to do so require the services of a Perceiver and a Receiver, who must, in some way, be united as one. It is even intimated that Tengo’s storytelling may have been the engine that transported Aomame into the world of 1Q84. There’s no question about the sheer enjoyability of this gigantic novel, both as an eerie thriller and as a moving love story. Nonetheless, Murakami doesn’t neatly solve all its mysteries or tie up all his threads. “1Q84” also treads close to being a grandly conceived yet still slightly pulpy melodrama, something like a more fantastical “Atlas Shrugged.” There’s even a cliffhanger at the end of nearly every chapter. For me, though, there’s just no getting round two crucial facts: I read the book in three days and have been thinking about it ever since. ‘The Letters of Samuel Beckett,’ reviewed by Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda Oct. 12, 2011 Read Later

When this second volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters opens, he is on the run from the Nazis, who have just taken Paris. When it ends, in 1956, the Irish writer will have produced nearly all his major work: the trilogy of novels consisting of “Molloy,” “Malone Dies” and “The Unnamable”; the dense “Texts for Nothing”; and, not least, two of the greatest plays in world literature: “Waiting for Godot” and “Endgame.” There are no surviving letters from the war years, during which Beckett participated in the Resistance’s legendary “Gloria” network. But in 1945, he is again back in Paris writing stories and short novels that no one wants: “They go out into the usual void and I hear little more about them.” To supplement a small family allowance, he translates (mainly for the literary magazine Transition and, later, for a UNESCO anthology of Mexican poetry) while his lifelong companion Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil earns a little as a dressmaker. They both spend a lot of time looking at art — Beckett is enthusiastic about the paintings of Jack B. Yeats (younger brother of the poet W.B. Yeats) and Bram van Velde — and he discusses aesthetics frequently with the critic Georges Duthuit. Yet as he enters his 40s, he is still drifting: “I see advertised in to-day’s Irish Times an editorial vacancy on the staff of the RGDATA (Retail Grocery Dairy and Allied Trades Association) Review at 300 pounds per an. I think seriously of applying. Any experience of trade journalism would be so useful.” Fortunately for world literature, he doesn’t send in his résumé. Instead, he announces a momentous decision: “I do not think I shall write very much in English in the future.” With this commitment to French, Samuel Beckett embarks on 10 years of astonishing creativity. He takes just six months in 1947 to produce “Molloy,” rests for a month then starts “Malone Dies,” which takes about the same amount of time. A footnote informs us that “Waiting for Godot” was written between October 1948 and January 1949. In the evenings, he devours mysteries or goes back to favorite books like “that most moving and beautiful novel Theodor Fontane’s ‘Effi Briest’. . . . I read it for the fourth time the other day with the same old tears in the same old places.” When not writing or complaining about his health and the onset of old age, Beckett happily plants trees and digs in the garden of a small house he’s found 30 miles outside of Paris: “Fifteen or twenty years of silence and solitude . . . I feel this evening that that would suit me, and suit me the least badly possible. I have bought a wheelbarrow, my first wheelbarrow! It goes very well, with its one wheel. I keep an eye on the love-life of the Colorado beetle and work against it, successfully but humanely, that is to say by throwing the parents into my neighbor’s garden and burning the eggs. If only someone had done that for me!” That last sentence is characteristic of the gloomy Beckett we all love. Beckett’s fortunes start to improve when he is taken up by the English-language magazine Merlin and then by Jerome Lindon, head of the French publishing house Editions de Minuit. He might have said to them what he later wrote to his American publisher Barney Rosset of Grove Press: “I hope you realize what you are letting yourself in for.”

He was never, for instance, going to bowdlerize his writing or promote it through any form of publicity. As Deschevaux-Dumesnil explains on his behalf: “Beckett will not hear of being interviewed, whether orally or in writing. I fear that on this he is not to be budged. He gives his work, his role stops there. He cannot talk about it. That is his attitude. . . . One must take him as he is.” Repeatedly, Beckett insists that his writing speaks for itself: “I know no more about this play than anyone who manages to read it attentively. . . . I do not know who Godot is. I do not even know if he exists. And I do not know if they believe he does, these two who are waiting for him.” Nonetheless, Beckett does regularly comment on how “Waiting for Godot” should be presented. To its French director Roger Blin, he writes: “The spirit of the play, in so far as it has one, is that nothing is more grotesque than the tragic, and that must be put across right to the end, and particularly at the end.” He protests to a German director: “If my play contains expressionist elements, it is without my knowledge. . . . Nor is it, for me, a symbolist play, I cannot stress that too much. First and foremost, it is a question of something that happens, almost a routine, and it is this dailiness and this materiality, in my view, that need to be brought out. . . . The characters are living creatures, only just living perhaps, they are not emblems. . . . Godot himself is not of a different species from those he cannot or will not help. I myself know him less well than anyone, having never known even vaguely what I needed.” And to a Canadian would-be producer he stresses: “Do try and see the thing primarily in its simplicity, the waiting, the not knowing why, or where, or when, or for what.” Despite success in Europe, “Waiting for Godot” only gradually finds its audience in the United States. At its premiere in Miami, many theatergoers walk out, having been led to expect the “laugh sensation of two continents.” At one point, though, Beckett grows practically giddy over talk that its two tramps might be played on Broadway by Buster Keaton and Marlon Brando. Still, Beckett’s most emotional letter in an entire volume of wonderful letters is elicited by a performance of “Godot” by prisoners in a German penitentiary. Beckett writes: “In all my life as man and writer, nothing like this has ever happened to me. . . . To whatever my play may have brought you, I can add this only: the huge gift you have made me by accepting it.” While “Godot” is gradually making his name, Beckett reluctantly embarks on the translation of his French novels into English, “an indigestion of old work with all the adventure gone.” He says, repeatedly in one way or another, “My God how I hate my own work.” He imagines a future volume called “Posthumous Droppings.”

As it happens, few writers have been better served by their editors than Samuel Beckett. This sumptuous volume, “The Letters of Samuel Beckett: Volume 2, 1941-1956,” like its predecessor and the two that will follow, is beautifully designed and laid out, while the editorial apparatus includes lavishly detailed notes, yearly chronologies, an extensive biographical appendix and more than 90 pages of introductory matter, highlighted by a brilliant summary essay by editor Dan Gunn. The letters in French — at least half of them — are followed by English translations. Anyone who admires Beckett will want to read and own this book. Recommendations for Halloween reading • • •

by Michael Dirda Oct. 27, 2011 Read Later

Between Halloween and Twelfth Night (traditionally Jan. 6) lies the best time of the year. And I don’t say that just because I was born in November. You’ve got wonderful holidays to enjoy, as well as family get-togethers, school breaks and all those long, chilly evenings, perfect for watching old movies and rereading old books — or even for delving into strange tomes and forbidden grimoires. For this is, above all, the season for supernatural tales and impossible crimes, for the kind of stories one imagines enjoying by a fireside, while sitting in a soft chair, under an eiderdown, with a hot drink near at hand. For such moments — whether real or only imagined — you should look for some of the following new books, available from a range of small publishers. Floating Worlds: The Letters of Edward Gorey & Peter F. Neumeyer, edited by Peter F. Neumeyer (Pomegranate, $35). If you’re a fan of the late Edward Gorey, revered for his crosshatched drawings and his innocently macabre booklets with such titles as “The Insect God” and “The Hapless Child,” you’ll certainly want to add this beautifully produced album to your collection. Not only does it contain Gorey’s working correspondence with Peter Neumeyer about a series of children’s books they created together during the 1960s, but it also reveals Gorey to be as fine a letter writer as he was an artist. Addicted to movies of every kind and era, a regular at the ballet and an astonishingly wide-ranging reader, Gorey shares all these passions with Neumeyer. He regularly decorates his envelopes and letters with drawings and copies out quotations from his favorite books: “There is a sentence from ‘The Aunt’s Story’ by Patrick White which I have always remembered: ‘Life is full of alternatives but no choice.’ ” Not only does this admirer of the most delicate Japanese verse enjoy “Blood Fiend” and “Brides of Blood,” but he also plans to see “Barbarella” twice — this in the era before VHS tapes and DVDs. Sometimes, Gorey drops in sentences that might be captions from one of his own little chapbooks: “Do you think it is too late for me to devote my life to something to do with String?” And how can you resist anyone who writes, “Another day fraught with fruitless endeavour confronts me”? A wonderful present for yourself or any Gorey enthusiast. The Duel of Shadows: The Extraordinary Cases of Barnabas Hildreth, by Vincent Cornier, edited by Mike Ashley (Crippen & Landru, $18). If you’re a fan of the locked-room mysteries of John Dickson Carr or the enigmatic cases of the early Ellery Queen, this is the book for you. Between the mid-1930s and early 1950s, Cornier wrote a dozen mystery stories that take the impossible-seeming crime to new heights. A man is suddenly transformed into stone, a bullet

fired during an 18th-century duel manages to wound a man in the 20th century, a Venetian goblet disappears from a man’s hand but not before somehow injecting a killing poison. In this last, it turns out that the victim was murdered “by a sound, by a stone, and by a flower that grew on the Plains of Altare, in Italy, four hundred years ago.” Crippen & Landru has published more than 90 collections of short stories by both celebrated and forgotten mystery writers. This is the latest in its “Lost Classics” series. Michael Dirda reviews ‘Hav,’ by Jan Morris • • •

by Michael Dirda Sept. 29, 2011 Read Later

Located on the Eastern Mediterranean seaboard, the city-state of Hav has been, at least till recently, all too little known to most Americans. A kind of Levantine crossroads thronged with multiple cultures and religions, Hav traces its origins to the heroic Achilles and his followers, the Myrmidons. Over the centuries, it has been a center of the salt trade with Asia, an outpost of the crusaders, a secret meeting place for the heretical Cathars, a playground for imperial Russia, and, since 1985, a wealthy and rather vulgar destination for tourists and a hub for international commerce. Jan Morris — one of the most celebrated travel writers of our time — first visited Hav more than 25 years ago, when the city still maintained most of its ancient traditions and much of its faded elegance. In her new book, “Hav,” she brings together her early writings on the city, “Last Letters From Hav,” and the more recent “Hav of the Myrmidons.” From the opening pages of “Last Letters From Hav,” Morris depicts an almost other-worldly realm: “On the left, bathed in golden sunshine against a cobalt sea, was the city of Hav, with elaborately hatted ladies and marvelously patrician beaux sauntering, a little disjointedly where the tiles met, along a palm-shaded corniche.” After checking into L’Auberge Imperiale du Chemin de Fer Hav, Morris gradually discovers that Hav is, in many ways, an amalgam of all the great and exotic places she has ever visited. Consider its morning market: “Apparently unregulated, evidently immemorial, it seemed to me . . . partly like a Marseilles fishwharf, and partly like the old Covent Garden, and partly like a flea-market, for there seemed to be almost nothing, at six in the morning, that was not there on sale. Everything was inextricably confused. One stall might be hung all over with umbrellas and plastic galoshes, the next piled high with celery and boxes of edible grass. There were mounds of apples, artistically arranged, there were stacks of boots and racks of sunglasses and rows of old radios. There were spare parts for cars, suitcases with images of the pyramids embossed upon them, rolls of silk, nylon underwear in yellows and sickly pinks, brass trays, Chinese medicines, hubble-bubbles, coffee beans in vast tin containers, souvenirs of Mecca or Istanbul, second-hand-bookstalls with grubby old volumes in many languages — I looked inside a copy of Moby Dick, and stamped within its covers were the words ‘Property of the American University, Beirut.’

“In a red-roofed shed near the water, shirtsleeved butchers were at work, chopping bloody limbs and carcasses, skinning sheep and goats before my eyes; and there were living sheep too, of a brownish tight-curled wool, and chickens in crude wicker baskets, and pigeons in coops. Women shawled and bundled against the cold sold cups of steaming soup. On the quay Greek fishermen offered direct from their boats fish still flapping in their boxes, mucous eels, writhing lobsters, prawns, urchins, sponges and buckets of what looked like phosphorescent plankton.”

Hav is very much a polygot city — part Trieste, part Alexandria, part Nepenthe. Over the course of six months, Morris observes the annual Roof-Race across the town and the harvest of the exotic snow raspberries (a delicacy more expensive than truffles). She meets European ex-pats and Arabs and Turks and Greeks. She admires the ancient House of the Chinese Master near the Great Bazaar and in the Yuan Wen Kuo district wanders through the dilapidated Palace of Delights, which during the 1920s was packed with clubs, restaurants, gambling booths and sideshows, not to mention the more sophisticated attractions of the discreet House of Secret Wonders. The “dirleddy,” as the polite Havians call Morris, even finds herself the guest of both an urbane caliph in exile and the Kretev indigenes, who look like “gypsy Rastafarians” and live in mountain caves. Over the centuries, Hav — despite its remote location — regularly attracted the most surprising people, including Russian grand dukes and their ballerina mistresses, composers like RimskyKorsakov (who adopted a Havian melody for the main theme of “Scheherazade”) and novelists such as Pierre Loti, James Joyce and D.H Lawrence. Frederic Chopin and George Sand stopped briefly “after their unhappy holiday in Majorca.” The Victorian explorer Richard Burton — never entirely reliable — once claimed to have decapitated a man in a bathhouse in the city’s Arab quarter. Even Hitler was rumored to have surreptitiously visited for a day or two before being picked up by a waiting submarine. It wasn’t so long ago, either, that the Hav Maison de la Culture might feature Colette or Andre Malraux lecturing on “The Meaning of Frenchness or Allegory in Provencal FolkDance.” In the 1960s, the city’s easygoing lifestyle quite naturally drew its share of hippies, flower children and American draft dodgers. The symbol of Hav is the maze, and it’s little wonder that Morris finds it easy to lose herself in this almost unreal city. After a while, some readers may even begin to wonder if Hav just might be as imaginary as Lake Wobegon. It does seem appropriate that typically Havian art, according to the painter Manet, always “looks as though it has been gently smudged by rain, or blurred by woodsmoke.” Alas, everything changed after the Intervention. “Last Letters From Hav” ended in August 1985 with black fighter planes screaming over the city and warships sailing into the harbor. In “Hav of the Myrmidons” — published in 2006 in Britain but only now in the United States — Morris finds herself invited back, after two decades, to see the wonders of the new Holy Myrmidonic Republic, dominated by high-tech industries and oil production, strict religious observance, and the frequent rewriting and erasing of history. Gone is the old “gaudy eclecticism that made the old city so compelling.” Instead, the 21st-century Hav has become crudely vulgar and totalitarian, its landscape shadowed by the ominous Myrmidon Tower, its government a theocracy ruled by the socalled Perfects.

An appalled Morris soon learns that snow raspberries are now mass-produced and canned, then exported under the brand name Havberries. Migrant workers have been brought in — and exploited — to build airfields, while the Kretevs have been relocated to urban slums. A huge Disneyish tourist complex for the super-rich has replaced the once slightly louche and rundown casino. In short, Hav, which was for centuries rooted in history and the “overlappings of ancient cultures,” has been turned into a crass, post-9/11, stultifying 21st-century horror. The city’s full story — insofar as the full story will ever be known — can be found in this handsome paperback. Still, most readers are likely to prefer “Last Letters From Hav,” that beautifully written, nostalgic excursion to the final station stop on the Mediterranean Express, the Hav where Eric Ambler might have set one of his atmospheric spy thrillers of the 1930s or where a doddering Ruritanian prince might try to cadge a glass of champagne. That romantic down-at-heel city no longer exists, if it ever really did. Alas, the Holy Myrmidonic Republic — under various names — is all too real. Stephen Greenblatts The Swerve, reviewed by Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda Sept. 22, 2011 Read Later

THE SWERVE How the World Became Modern By Stephen Greenblatt Norton. 354 pp. $26.95 Years ago, the Yale critic Harold Bloom promulgated “clinamen” — that is, “the swerve,” a term derived from Lucretius’s philosophical poem “On the Nature of Things” — as central to his controversial theory of literary influence. Writers, Bloom speculated, swerve away from the dominion, the overpowering authority, of earlier masters to clear a poetic space for their own work. Since then, other literary theorists — many of them, as you would guess, French — have employed their own notions of “clinamen.” So it seems odd that Stephen Greenblatt in “The Swerve” never mentions this familiar Bloomian use of “clinamen.” Perhaps Greenblatt, who attended Yale, is himself swerving away from an older anxiety-producing master. Or has he, in fact, like the later Bloom — the Bloom who churns out theme anthologies of his favorite poems — resolutely entered into the popularizing phase of his career? When young, Greenblatt was the principal founder of the New Historicism, in which texts are examined in close connection to their culture and times, and soon rose to become one of our most noted Shakespeare

scholars, the holder of a chair at Harvard and the general editor of that great academic moneymaker “The Norton Anthology of English Literature.” But then in 2004, he brought out “Will in the World,”a life and times of Shakespeare, and this proved — such things do happen — a bestseller. In the book, Greenblatt spoke with considerable authority, reflecting a lifetime of thought and speculation about Shakespeare’s plays and career. But “The Swerve,” an account of how the rediscovery of the Latin poet Lucretius shook up the Renaissance, is a work that a journalist or a hard-working amateur might have produced, a sprawling paraphrase of other people’s research. Greenblatt’s 41 pages of end notes and 26 pages of bibliography conscientiously reveal his mining of old and recent scholarship, whether John Addington Symonds’s “The Revival of Learning” (the second volume of his 19th-century classic, “The Renaissance in Italy”) or Ingrid Rowland’s recent “Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic.” In short, this is a book that feels a little mushy and over-sweetened, in the way of so much popular history with an eye on the bestseller list. In this vein, Greenblatt’s subtitle — “How the World Became Modern” — makes an arguable but slightly histrionic claim: Lucretius’s “De rerum natura” (“On the Nature of Things”), unearthed after centuries in an unknown monastery by the book hunter Poggio Bracciolini in 1417, pushed European civilization away from the religiosity of the Christian Middle Ages into a worldview that we recognize as our secular own. Many readers are surprised to find that a book-length Latin poem, written in the 1st century B.C., is so remarkably beautiful and gripping, without being any less a didactic work of Epicurean philosophy, one that sets forth a resolutely materialist view of “the nature of things.” According to Lucretius, the gods may exist, but they are utterly indifferent to humankind. Atoms — very much like our modern idea of atoms — are the sole building blocks of the cosmos. Because the atoms occasionally wobble or swerve as they fall through space, collisions result, and from these collisions various complicated, sophisticated agglomerations are created, including people. Souls do not exist, and there is no afterlife. When we eventually die, our atoms disperse and our particular selves utterly disappear. Consequently, it is foolish to fear death since, in effect, we’ll never know we’re dead. Instead, we should simply enjoy this world and relish its pleasures (of which sex is a prominent example). The most truly wise, however, will prefer a simple, unruffled Epicureanism — the quiet enjoyment of plain but good food, the conversation of friends, an existence far removed from the hurly-burly of ambition and “making it.” David Lodges A Man of Parts, reviewed by Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda Sept. 14, 2011 Read Later

HG. Wells’s life (1866-1946) has always read like a novel. And now it is one. Or is it? David Lodge’s “A Man of Parts” hews closely to all the known facts about Wells, derives much of its dialogue from his letters and memoirs and includes no made-up characters.

The book also draws many details from the numerous secondary works devoted to Wells and his distinguished contemporaries. After all, the author of “The Time Machine” and “The War of the Worlds” — not to overlook “Tono-Bungay” and “The Outline of History” — knew Henry James, Arnold Bennett, Bernard Shaw, Ford Madox Ford, the children’s author E. Nesbit, all the movers and shakers of the Fabian socialists, the Russian writer Maxim Gorky and many, many others. He also slept with an astonishing number of women, including some noted writers (Rebecca West, Dorothy Richardson), at least one Cambridge undergraduate, the daughters of friends, a possible Russian spy (Moura Budberg), a black Washington prostitute named Martha, birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger and, according to his own calculations, perhaps 100 other women. Why? Or, perhaps, why not? “A Man of Parts” explores, with great verve, Wells’s lifelong attempt to honor his own complexity, to be true to himself as a sexual being, a loving family man, a creative artist and an ambitious social thinker. Long ago, Lodge made his reputation with “Changing Places,” “Small World” and “Nice Work,” widely praised satires of academic life. Yet, for all their laughs, these books were, in a way, “condition of England” novels, rich in reflections on the way we live now and regularly depicting the undercutting of dreams by reality. In “A Man of Parts” we again see a protagonist who tries to make his ideals — artistic, erotic and societal — come true, seems to succeed for a while and then finds everything falling apart. But there’s a difference between this new book and the older ones. In “Small World” Professor Morris Zapp was generally thought to be closely based on the well known academic Stanley Fish. When A.S. Byatt brought out “The Children’s Book” — set among many of the same people as “A Man of Parts” — she called her E. Nesbit character Olive Wellwood. But here H.G. Wells really is H.G. Wells and E. Nesbit is E. Nesbit. What lies behind this decision to ignore the usual boundaries dividing fact from fancy? In most historical novels, a fictional character acts against the background of, say, the French Revolution or the Indian Mutiny. Think of Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s “The Scarlet Pimpernel” or George MacDonald Fraser’s “Flashman in the Great Game.” This is the model established by Walter Scott, and it allows the novelist a kind of imaginative breathing space. The character can think and act with relative freedom, unlike the historical figures who are, more or less, straitjacketed by the established facts of their famous lives. There is another, trickier model, however. Sometimes, the biographical record is so rich and full that a novelist will risk impersonating a figure from the past. Think now of Robert Graves’s “I, Claudius,” which reads, quite convincingly, like the actual memoirs of the Roman emperor. In “A Man of Parts,” Lodge writes in this other, more difficult tradition and succeeds brilliantly.

H.G. Wells was born the son of a housemaid, left school at 14, worked for a time in a draper’s shop and essentially educated himself. He was short — he believed because of his impoverished diet

as a child — and never completely lost his cockney accent. But he was also a genius. In his early stories alone, Wells established and explored virtually all the major ideas of what we now call science fiction. Nonetheless, Lodge scarcely refers to this work. He’s primarily interested in Wells the Edwardian novelist and ideologue, and how the man’s erotic life affected his career and the people close to him. In nearly all the mature fiction and nonfiction, Lodge reminds us, Wells consistently argues for a more rationally arranged world. He envisions future Utopias where free love flourishes, where a ménage a quatre is possible, where young women speak openly of their sexual desires. Yet sex, as Wells comes to know from his experience, is a vexing issue. As he tells one infatuated young thing, “It’s both wonderful and ordinary.” When he writes “The Sea Lady,” an early work about a mermaid, he wonders whether it’s “a fable illustrating the destructive effect of sexual love, or celebrating its transcendent power? He didn’t really know.” Readers of “A Man of Parts” will ask themselves the same question and probably give the same answer. Even if you’re well up on Wells’s life and writings, Lodge makes his novel-cum-biography mesmerizing. Here is the young writer’s unfortunate first marriage to a sexually frigid cousin, his second marriage to Jane, who quietly accepts his affairs as the cost of being a part of his life, and his liaisons with Rosamund Bland, Amber Reeves and West, all three intelligent young women half his age. Each reappears in his fiction. As Wells says, “If you’re writing about contemporary life, there’s really no alternative but to draw on your own.” In “Ann Veronica,” for instance, the heroine — mainly based on Reeves — forthrightly tells her married biology teacher: “ ‘I want you. I want you to be my lover. I want to give myself to you. I want to be whatever I can to you.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Is that plain?’ ” Because Lodge describes, more or less, all the major affairs in Wells’s life, his book does grow just slightly repetitive after a while. As the long-suffering Jane shouts out when learning of her husband’s involvement with yet another young woman: “For God’s sake, H.G.! .  .  . Not again!” Lodge does speed through several of the later liaisons. In Lodge’s hands, though, these numerous affairs all function as test cases, illustrations of the ineradicable and contradictory nature of human beings. Intellectual Fabian parents argue for free love, yet balk when their daughters engage in it. Time and again, passion cools, then rekindles, then finally dies into friendship. Wells bullies one reluctant mistress into marriage so he can get rid of her and return to the serenity of his family and work. In their later years, he and West are both appalled when their grown (and illegitimate) son announces that he’s leaving his wife for his mistress. Lodge orchestrates the biographical narrative of “A Man of Parts” with his usual easy-going lightness and grace. Nonetheless, this is — for all its Wellsian particularities — still the common human story of how life, sooner or later, defeats our dreams. It’s also a terrifically enjoyable novel. Book World: ‘Stranger’s Child’ by Hollinghurst is an absorbing century

• • •

by Michael Dirda Oct. 6, 2011 Read Later

Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Stranger’s Child” could hardly be better, and it’s a mystery to me — and to many others — why it didn’t make this year’s recent shortlist for the Man Booker Prize. Perhaps quiet perfection is out of fashion in our noisy era. “The Stranger’s Child” opens in the golden sunshine just before World War I, as a young Cambridge undergraduate named George Sawle brings home a poet friend, with whom he is clearly infatuated. During the weekend, Cecil Valance charms 16-year-old Daphne Sawle, escapes into the surrounding woods for a tryst with George, and scribbles a poem called “Two Acres.” Not much else happens, but the consequences of this visit are enormous for the Sawle and Valance families. Its aftereffects will last 100 years. In this initial section of a book rich in facets and characters, Hollinghurst effortlessly channels the tone of E.M. Forster’s early novels. The dinner-table banter alludes to Tennyson and Lytton Strachey, Wagner’s operas and the Cambridge secret society known as the Apostles, while beneath the decorous surface of the conversation run myriad erotic tensions. A distinctively Edwardian high-spiritedness abounds, whether Hollinghurst describes Cecil’s pagan worship of the dawn or the young serving boy Jonah who “could write neatly, and could read almost anything, given the time.” In the second section (of five), the novel grows darker, even as it enters the giddy world of Evelyn Waugh. Daphne has married and become the mistress of a grand Victorian house with 20 servants. Her husband, however, is having its interior modernized so that the drawing room now resembles a room in “some extremely expensive sanatorium.” Cecil Valance, we learn, died in World War I at the age of 25, but “Two Acres” has become an anthology piece, certain to be enjoyed “as long as there are readers with an ear for English music, and an eye for English things.” Or so asserts “Sebby” Stokes, one of the late poet’s particular admirers, who has come down to Corley Court to gather material for a brief memoir. He is clearly modeled after “Eddie” Marsh, the literary executor of Rupert Brooke. Again, Hollinghurst sets the entire action during a single country-house weekend — preserving the dramatic unities of place, time and action. He effortlessly juggles several points of view (including a 6-year-old’s), slowly revealing people’s true characters while keeping the reader guessing about the erotic intentions of various guests: Who is having an affair with whom? Many secrets are hinted at: Did Cecil write “Two Acres” for Daphne or for George? What precisely were his relations with Sebby Stokes? Moreover, people have aged and changed. Daphne’s attractive mother — seen a decade earlier as a lonely young widow — has missed her chance to remarry. A former lover of Cecil’s has entered into a stolidly passionless marriage: He and his wife “look much more like colleagues than like a couple.” The choleric Dudley Valance, himself a writer, feels increasingly jealous of his dead older brother’s fame. Daphne’s children are afraid of their brutish father.

In the third section, Hollinghurst jumps to the swinging ’60s, when people say “fab” and a night out requires a “tight-fitting suit and zip-up ankle-boots with built-up heels.” Here he alternates his viewpoint between two young gay men, one a bank clerk named Paul Bryant and the other, Peter Rowe, a teacher at a private school housed in the former Corley Court: “No one, it was felt, could want to live in such a place, but as an institution of learning it was pretty much ideal.” By now “Two Acres” is a regular school text, slightly sentimental, of course, but regularly memorized. No longer is homosexuality the furtive “love that dares not speak its name” or viewed as simply an element of the artistic temperament. In the 1960s, gays are starting to come out of the closet, even if muscle magazines are still running coded personals: “Undisciplined bachelor (32) would like to meet strong-minded person with modern outlook.” Not surprisingly, people are also beginning to wonder about the Cecil Valance myth. Official literary histories describe him as a ladies’ man, capable of writing from the front lines to two women, asking each if she will be his widow. But now scholars are digging deeper. “Was the era of hearsay about to give way to an age of documentation?” Michael Holroyd — mentioned by name — is researching his tell-all life biography of Strachey and the Bloomsbury Group. At her 70thbirthday party, Daphne reveals that she is at work on her memoirs. The fourth section takes place a dozen years later when Paul Bryant has become a book reviewer, specializing in gay subjects. Anyone who’s worked for a newspaper will recognize the accuracy of Hollinghurst’s sketch of the Times Literary Supplement: “Paul balanced the stack of books he’d already chosen on the edge of a table scattered with sugar and ground coffee. Here the reek of Gitanes smoke was laced with that of sour milk. In cracked old mugs with comic logos, bluish crusts of mould were forming. The books table itself, ten volumes deep, had a broken leg propped up on other books that presumably would never be reviewed. The squalor was remarkable, but no one who worked here — young men in olive-green corduroy, good-looking women chatting on the phone about Yeats or Poussin — appeared to notice it. They sat in their low cubicles, walled in by rubbish, books and boxes, half-eaten meals, old clothes, and great slews of scrawled-over galley proofs.” For his own first book, Paul has embarked on a biography of Cecil Valance and hopes to persuade the surviving members of the family — Daphne, George and Dudley — to reveal their secrets. Will he succeed? In the final pages of “The Stranger’s Child,” Hollinghurst carries the story of Cecil and his legacy into the present moment. Initially inspired by people and places he loved, then edited by his most intimate friends, taught in schools and written about in a biography, Cecil’s poetry now claims the attention of queer theorists, while his every scrap is sought after by rare book dealers. Yet secrets remain. While I’ve described the general arc of “The Stranger’s Child,” I’ve deliberately kept Hollinghurst’s neatly timed revelations inviolate and only hinted at his range, his ear for dialogue and his almostTolstoyan clarity about time’s ravages and surprises. He shows us Daphne, for instance, as a girl, wife, lover, widow and crone — all different, yet all of them Daphne.

Most novelists tend to be slightly showoffy, in one way or another; it’s how they make clear that what they’re doing is art. But Alan Hollinghurst doesn’t need to be a prose Johnny Depp. Instead, he writes with the relaxed elegance and unobtrusive charm of a Cary Grant. Part social history, part social comedy and wholly absorbing, “The Stranger’s Child” does everything a novel should do and makes it look easy. Michael Dirda reviews ‘We Others,’ stories by Steven Millhauser • • •

by Michael Dirda Aug. 31, 2011 Read Later

For almost 40 years, Steven Millhauser has been creating fables of identity, exploring how an irruption of the magical or inexplicable can unexpectedly transform a life or an entire society. In a loose sense, he is a writer of literary fantasies, belonging to that fabulist line that runs from the “Arabian Nights” stories through the unsettling tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann on to the magic-realist masterpieces of Kafka, Nabokov, Borges and Calvino. His work illustrates the very definition of the uncanny — that moment when the homey or familiar suddenly swerves into something rich, strange and menacing. In general, Millhauser’s style blends a peculiar wistfulness with a fanatical attention to the particular: He has said that “one never forgives a work of art that is general and vague.” Like his illustrious antecedents (and such near contemporaries as Russell Hoban, Angela Carter, John Crowley and Michael Chabon), Millhauser calmly mixes fairy tale and literary experiment, surreal nightmare and ecstatic vision, gorgeous prose and sly humor. But he also adds a profound Americanness. Is there a better evocation of a middle-class childhood in the 1950s than his novel “Edwin Mullhouse”? Millhauser owns the smell of fresh tar on streets, the creak of gliders on wooden porches, the rivalries of the playground and all those rainy Saturday afternoons playing Clue and reading comic books. Most impressively, though, he skirts the real danger of sentimentality through an iron control of tone: Millhauser’s voice on the page is cool, reserved, profoundly courteous. Unusually, he often employs the first-person plural, drawing his readers into a shared dream or nightmare. Take the opening to “The Invasion From Outer Space”: “From the beginning we were prepared, we knew just what to do, for hadn’t we seen it all a hundred times? — the good people of the town going about their business, the suddenly interrupted TV programs, the faces in the crowd looking up, the little girl pointing in the air, the mouths opening, the dog yapping, the traffic stopped, the shopping bag falling to the sidewalk, and there, in the sky, coming closer . . . ” Along with “The Invasion from Outer Space,” “We Others” contains six additional new stories, as well as 14 selected from “In the Penny Arcade” (1986), “The Barnum Museum” (1990), “The Knife Thrower” (1998) and “Dangerous Laughter” (2008). In an author’s note, Millhauser tells us that he has chosen the ones “that seized my attention as if they’d been written by someone whose work I had never seen before.” Sadly, he hasn’t reprinted any of his superb novellas from “The King in the

Tree” (2003) and “Little Kingdoms” (1993) nor the novella-length tales embedded in his baroque extravaganza, “From the Realm of Morpheus” (1986). One might argue with some of his selections and omissions — where is the gorgeous “Cathay”? — but I’m glad for the inclusion of his single most famous story, “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” which earned a World Fantasy Award in 1990 and later was made into a movie (called simply “The Illusionist”). It opens irresistibly:

“In the last years of the nineteenth century, when the Empire of the Hapsburgs was nearing the end of its long dissolution, the art of magic flourished as never before.” If you can close “We Others” at this point, then Millhauser is not for you. Some of us, though, could no more stop breathing than stop reading him. “Eisenheim the Illusionist” is only one of several stories that explore the conjunction of art and obsession. Other examples here include “August Eschenburg,” in which the title character creates astonishing clockwork automatons, and “The Knife Thrower,” which relates just one of the elegant Hensch’s troubling performances: “He held the six knives fanwise in his left hand, with the blades pointing up. The knives were about a foot long, the blades shaped like elongated diamonds, and as he stood there at the side of the stage, a man with no expression on his face, a man with nothing to do, Hensch had the vacant and slightly bored look of an overgrown boy holding in one hand an awkward present, waiting patiently for someone to open a door.” Illusion and reality, the power of the imagination, the nature of storytelling, childhood wonders, romantic yearning, a taste for the erotic and slightly perverse — these themes recur throughout Millhauser. “The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad” neatly interweaves three story lines: a portrait of Sinbad in retirement in his garden, an account of his fabulous, hitherto untold eighth voyage, and a brief history of scholarship about “The Arabian Nights.” Sometimes, nearly all his signature motifs merge, as in the new story “Tales of Darkness and the Unknown, Vol. XIV: The White Glove.” Millhauser frequently riffs on earlier works of art, and this tale of obsession is, among other things, a variant of Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark.” Through his penchant for lists and catalogues, Millhauser is also drawn to imagining vast, shadowy structures that seem to contain entire alternate worlds, such as the gargantuan buildings in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “Martin Dressler” (1996). In “The Next Thing,” another of the new stories, he depicts an underground, Wal-Mart-like shopping paradise that insidiously destroys an entire town and turns its customers into brainwashed slaves. “We Others” also reprints his most famous example of a boundless cave of wonders, “The Barnum Museum.” Consider just some of the items available in its gift shop: “Mysterious rubber balls from Arabia that bounce once and remain suspended in the air, jars of dark blue liquid from which you can blow bubbles shaped like tigers, elephants, lions, polar bears, and

giraffes .  .  . boxes of animate paint for drawing pictures that move, lacquered wooden balls from the Black Forest that, once set rolling, never come to a stop .  .  . storybooks from Finland with tissue-paper-covered illustrations that change each time the paper is lifted, tin sets of specially treated watercolors for painting pictures on air.” Of all the new stories, my favorite is probably “The Slap”: “One September evening when Walter Lasher returned from the city after a hard day’s work and was walking to his car in the station parking lot, a man stepped out from between two cars, walked up to him, and slapped him hard in the face.” Soon afterward, the same handsome stranger, in a well-cut trench coat, strikes again. And again. Why? “We were peaceful, law-abiding inhabitants of a suburban town, trying to raise our kids in a difficult world, while keeping our lawns mowed and our roof gutters free of leaves.” By the time the reign of slapping ends, the townspeople have been irrevocably altered. The longest of the new stories, “We Others,” is a ghost story told from the viewpoint of the ghost, who is haunted by his memories of corporal existence and by a yearning to connect with someone, if only a fat, middle-aged schoolteacher who lives alone. I thought it went on just a bit too long, but other readers may feel otherwise. What is beyond question, though, is that Steven Millhauser possesses the wand of an enchanter. In his books the wonders never cease. Jonathan R. Ellers Becoming Ray Bradbury, reviewed by Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda Aug. 17, 2011 Read Later

Yes, “Becoming Ray Bradbury” is published by a university press, yet it isn’t at all academic. Every page is packed with fascinating material about one of this country’s most beloved writers, still with us in his 90s. If you’re a Bradbury fan, at the very least you’ll want to read it — and then, more likely than not, you’ll end up buying your own copy anyway. Jonathan R. Eller knows his subject’s early life and literary career inside out, which is just what you’d expect from the co-founder of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana UniversityPurdue University in Indianapolis. This book isn’t, however, a full biography; it only traces Bradbury’s career up to 1953, when its subject is all of 33. This is when the young writer set sail for Europe, where he would help develop the screenplay for John Huston’s “Moby Dick.” By then Ray Bradbury had already come a long way from the teenager who sold newspapers on a Los Angeles street corner, relied on the public library for most of the books he read and produced a fanzine called Futuria Fantasia. Because science fiction fandom resembles an extended family, its members often squabbling but indissolubly connected by a deep bond, early on Bradbury benefited from the mentorship of such masters of pulp fiction as Henry Kuttner, Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett. Brackett, in particular, not only dissected the young writer’s juvenilia but also provided an early link to Hollywood. (As a young woman, Brackett worked with William Faulkner on the screenplay for “The Big Sleep”; nearly 40 years later, she worked with George Lucas on “The Empire Strikes Back.”)

By his early 20s, Bradbury began to be published in magazines like Weird Tales, Astounding, and Thrilling Wonder Stories, as well as several detective pulps. When at the typewriter, he would work as if possessed, whether by the Muse or by what Kipling called an inner Daemon, generally drafting a story in a single session. And what stories these were! Between 1941 and 1953, Bradbury produced such classics as “The Fog Horn,”“The Small Assassin,” “Zero Hour,” “The Veldt,” “The Pedestrian,” “The Next in Line” and “The Last Night of the World,” as well as “A Sound of Thunder,” the most iconic of modern time-travel tales. (That’s the one about the guy who kills a butterfly-like creature back in the age of dinosaurs and when he returns to the present discovers that he has changed history — for the worse, the much, much worse.) By the middle 1940s, Bradbury had also broken into such upscale magazines as Collier’s, Mademoiselle, Charm and even the New Yorker. His style — richly metaphoric, and often lyrical or wistful in tone — had quickly separated him from that of the usual action-oriented pulp fictioneer. From the beginning, Bradbury was distinctly a prose-poet, lyricizing his own fears and yearnings, as obsessed with childhood as Wordsworth. Before long, the young author’s work began to be reprinted in annual anthologies of the year’s best short fiction. His admirers rapidly grew to include such literary eminences as Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden.

Most dramatically, though, from 1947 to 1953, Bradbury brought out all but one or two of his best books. In “Dark Carnival” — issued by the revered weird-tales press Arkham House — he gathered many of his eeriest early tales. His second book, “The Martian Chronicles,” cobbled together a number of short pieces to produce a whole far greater than its parts. In that melancholy classic, successive waves of invaders from Earth gradually wipe out the red planet’s ancient and delicate civilization. This was followed by two more collections: “The Illustrated Man” — in which a carny’s animate tattoos give rise to the book’s various stories — and “The Golden Apples of the Sun” — showcasing the art of Joe Mugnaini, whose illustrations were to become inextricably identified with Bradbury’s fiction. To cap all this activity, in 1953, the industrious young writer, after much difficulty, managed to expand his novella “The Fireman” into a short novel. “It was a pleasure to burn” — so begins “Fahrenheit 451,” which stands with Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” among the most haunting visions of a dystopian future. Because of the book (and films based on it), almost everyone knows that 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which book paper ignites. It is the job of Bradbury’s troubled hero, the fireman Montag, to trace and destroy every book in the world. But then one day. . . . During these same miracle years, Bradbury worked hard, but unsuccessfully, to transform a number of his Green Town short stories — about idyllic Midwestern summers and ominous traveling shows and childhood adventures — into what he was then calling “the Illinois novel.” While they wouldn’t yet gel into “Dandelion Wine” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” the foundational narratives — like “The Black Ferris” — were already written. Such fecundity is astonishing and probably couldn’t be maintained. By the mid-1950s, Bradbury began to slow down, his once geyserlike production of new stories reduced to a trickle. Perhaps he was distracted by film, radio and stage work, or by the creation of Ray Bradbury as a brand name,

or because he deliberately distanced himself from the mainstream of fantasy and science fiction. In later years Bradbury did produce several good books, but detective novels such as “Death Is a Lonely Business” (1985) possessed little of the early magic. In partial compensation, worldly honors have been abundant, capped recently by a special Pulitzer Prize. Eller’s book is grounded in biography, but it seeks especially to illuminate Bradbury’s intellectual and artistic evolution, focusing on the books he read and the teachers, agents and editors with whom he worked. For instance, Christopher Morley’s now unjustly forgotten fantasy “Thunder on the Left” adumbrates many of the elements of Bradbury’s Green Town stories, and “Winesburg, Ohio” may have given the author of “The Martian Chronicles” the model for a novel made up of separate but thematically linked short narratives. Above all, though, Eller stresses that Bradbury’s distinctive oeuvre grew out of his intense desire for perfection and a refusal to slant his work to any particular magazine or market. Almost from the first, the young author tried to persuade Doubleday to remove their usual science fiction logo from his books. In his later years, Bradbury seems to have acquiesced in allowing publishers to refer to him as “the greatest living science fiction writer,” but, in truth, he isn’t and probably never was. Like J.G. Ballard, another visionary who doesn’t quite fit comfortably in any genre, Bradbury actually writes about “inner space,” about loneliness and troubled hearts and our deep-seated fear of otherness. In that regard, he is simply what he always wanted to be: a great storyteller, sometimes even a mythmaker, a true American classic. Book review: ‘Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane,’ by Andrew Graham-Dixon • • •

by Michael Dirda Sept. 7, 2011 Read Later

In the preface to this enthralling life of Caravaggio (1571-1610), the greatest Italian painter of his time, Andrew Graham-Dixon invokes as one of his touchstones Charles Nicholl’s “The Reckoning,” a prizewinning biography of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593). It’s easy to see why. Both the Italian painter and the English playwright were shadowy, prickly characters, with a liking for lowlife and street violence; both appear to have been sexually adventurous (prostitutes, boys); and both were often in trouble with the law. Marlowe was finally murdered in a quarrel over a tavern bill (i.e., the reckoning), while Caravaggio killed a man in a sword fight, eventually dying himself at the age of 38, at least in part from the aftereffects of a vendetta-like ambush. Not much is known about Caravaggio’s personal life, and so Graham-Dixon — taking his cue from Nicholl, who faced the same problem with the secretive Marlowe — makes up for the biographical scarcity through an intense use of archival information about the people the painter knew, a close attention to contemporary events and social currents, and, not least, probing analyses of the artist’s major works. Insights are also drawn from Caravaggio’s near contemporaries, among them the essayist Montaigne and the painters Orazio Gentileschi and his daughter Artemisia (Graham- Dixon transcribes her account of being raped).

As a result, “Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane” reads like a historical-swashbuckler-cumdetective-story while also providing an up-to-date introduction to some of the most admired paintings in Western art. Early on, Graham-Dixon acknowledges the excellence of Helen Langdon’s 1998 life of the artist (and reveals that Langdon put some of her own research at his service) but points out that new archival discoveries have affected her account of the painter’s later years. Throughout, he takes pains to counter any reductionist views of Caravaggio’s art as fundamentally homosexual in character. Most important of all, though, Graham-Dixon writes with verve and clarity about the work as well as the man and his times. When describing Christ and an angel descending from heaven in a rather weak painting, for example, he notes that they “lean awkwardly across a snapped branch of a laurel, like a pair of parachutists stuck in a tree.” The son of a stonemason, Michelangelo Merisi grew up near Milan in the town of Caravaggio; hence his later name. It was an era of the deepest religious fervor. Carlo Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan, was promoting a return to an extreme Christian piety. Between 1576 and 1578, the bubonic plague wiped out a fifth of the population of the diocese of Milan. Popular religious tableaux of the time emphasized a stark, even gruesome realism in contrast to the ethereal and metaphysical art favored by Florentine aristocrats. Caravaggio — “the first self-conscious primitivist in the entire history of post-classical Western art” — pushed an intense naturalist aesthetic to its limits.

Despite a brief apprenticeship to the “eclectic and mediocre” Simone Peterzano, Caravaggio seems to have been largely self-taught and to have found his style early on. He played up the contrast of darkness and light; he worked directly on the canvas without the use of preliminary sketches, and he painted directly from life, posing a local prostitute as the Madonna, a fleshy fellow artist as a sexually ambiguous Bacchus, and his own apprentice as a come-hither Cupid and a pubescent John the Baptist. The resulting paintings — emphasizing the Venetian tradition of rich color over the Tuscan-Roman preference for clarity and design — are astonishingly involving and psychologically troubling. When Caravaggio portrays the dead, whether Christ, Lazarus or Mary, they look really dead. There’s nothing even faintly idealized about them. “For Caravaggio, making images is a way of focusing the mind. To paint something is to isolate it for the purposes of contemplation.” He would invariably transform sacred story into living drama: You are there at the martyrdom of Saint Peter as the executioners strain to lift up the heavy cross; you are there when the persecutor Saul is struck down while on the road to Damascus. This latter painting — “The Conversion of Saint Paul” — is boldly dominated by a close-up of the hindquarters of a huge, frightened horse, near which the future saint lies on the ground, blinded by the light of God, his arms outstretched like those of a baby reaching for his mother. While Caravaggio’s work presents a “theater of Christianity,” the artist himself was hardly a conventional believer. According to one story, when the painter was offered holy water in a church, he asked what it was for and was told that it would cancel venial sins. “Then it is no use,” he replied. “Because mine are all mortal.” Graham-Dixon speculates that Caravaggio may actually have earned money as a pimp. He certainly seems to have been bisexual. When Caravaggio’s Judith cuts off the head of Holofernes, the diaphanous fabric of her bodice quite noticeably reveals that she is

sexually excited. Another of his paintings depicts the Virgin Mary bending over the Christ child — and displaying the cleavage of a Sophia Loren. As Graham-Dixon sums him up, “Caravaggio lived his life as if there were only Carnival and Lent, with nothing in between.” Periodically, Caravaggio’s own tormented face appears among the figures in his paintings, thus suggesting a subtly confessional and even self-accusatory aspect to his work. His “emphatic chiaroscuro” is deftly used to reveal spiritual blindness or insight, as in “The Supper at Emmaus,” when the illuminated Christ is finally recognized by his two astonished disciples, but not by the shadowed innkeeper. Caravaggio’s thoroughly popular, indeed pauperist realism, combined with his use of color and tenebrist effects, changed the course of art history. “The painting of such seventeenth-century masters as Rembrandt in Holland, Georges de La Tour in France, Ribera in Spain, even the work of much later Romantic artists such as Gericault and Delacroix, all are inconceivable without the pictorial revolution first unleashed by Caravaggio,” Graham-Dixon writes. In his later years, guilty of murder and on the run from the Roman authorities, Caravaggio made his way to Malta, trading his artwork — portraits and altarpieces — for the protection of the Knights of Saint John. But eventually he got into a fight there, was imprisoned, somehow escaped and furtively made his way to Sicily. Again, he was welcomed because of his art, but one night he was viciously attacked just outside a tavern known to be a brothel for gays. His face was slashed, his wounds severe. When he recovered enough to travel, he cut a deal for a pardon — more paintings, this time for a cardinal — and was returning to Rome when he died suddenly en route. The cause of his death is unknown. For a period in the 19th and early 20th century, Caravaggio’s art was out of fashion, even thought to be slightly vulgar in the eyes of some collectors: There are no paintings by him in Washington’s National Gallery of Art. But over the past half-century, his reputation has continued to grow immensely, and it is not too much to say that we are all Caravaggisti now. Michael Dirda reviews ‘This Shared Dream,’ by Kathleen Ann Goonan • • •

by Michael Dirda Aug. 10, 2011 Read Later

Many people are convinced that Washingtonians — or at least those who work for the federal government — don’t actually live on the same planet as the rest of the country. Kathleen Ann Goonan’s “This Shared Dream” suggests that this view is almost right. This excellent science fiction novel is part “Inception,” part “Back to the Future,” part “Jumanji” — and it takes place almost entirely in Washington and Northern Virginia. When the novel opens in 1991, Sam Dance, an engineer, and his wife, Bette, a Montessori teacher, have been missing for a long time. First, Bette simply vanished in 1963; then, more than a decade later, Sam did the same. No one knows why they disappeared or whether they are alive. The couple did leave behind a rambling old house, with a perennial trust set up for its maintenance and care.

They also left behind three now grown children, Jill, Brian and Megan, who have been more or less scarred by the mysteries surrounding their parents’ lives and their own childhoods. Rumor has it, for instance, that Bette may have been an elite OSS spy in Europe during the 1930s and ’40s. Sam definitely served in World War II with his friend Wink, and the two seem to have been involved with research into a force more powerful than atomic fission. A device harnessing this mysterious energy has even been envisioned by the enigmatic Eliani Hadntz, a brilliant physicist (and physician) who believes that the world could be made more humane through the right kind of early childhood imprinting and the reinforcement of empathy in people’s brain chemistries. In the first chapter of “This Shared Dream,” the 41-year-old Jill Dance is just finishing her last class as a PhD candidate in political science at Georgetown University. Though generally a superb student, she occasionally makes strange errors, once hurriedly writing in a paper that John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Which, of course, isn’t true. “Kennedy had not been assassinated,” she recalls, when confronted about it. “Not here. He was an international statesman, a celebrity, the father of the space program, as well as the father of several children born to women not married to him.” By the novel’s second chapter, Jill has been incarcerated in St. Elizabeths for probable schizophrenia. In reality, she secretly bears a horrible burden: Twenty years earlier she destroyed an entire world, and possibly her parents as well. “This Shared Dream” is a sequel to Goonan’s “In War Times” (2007), winner of the John W. Campbell Award, and fans of that earlier book will know immediately what’s going on. But the skillful Goonan offers enough hints to bring new readers quickly up to speed. It’s not giving away anything to reveal that a Hadntz Device was developed and that it can morph into multiple shapes, transmit molecular agents that affect the brain’s empathy centers and somehow be used to navigate time streams. Only a very few people are aware of its existence and capabilities, among them Sam and Bette Dance. They also know that, at times, history reaches a kind of temporal crossroads, a highly charged nexus, and Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas was one. Book review: Beryl Bainbridge’s ‘The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress’ • • •

by Michael Dirda Aug. 29, 2011 Read Later

A few months back, the people behind the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s highest honor for fiction, decided that the late Beryl Bainbridge deserved a special award. When the much beloved writer died last year at age 77, tributes galore came from such notables as biographer Michael Holroyd and novelist A.N. Wilson, and most of them mentioned that Bainbridge had been nominated for the Booker on five occasions and never won. She was the perennial “Booker bridesmaid.” So a contest was held: Which of Bainbridge’s titles deserved a posthumous award? The winner was “Master Georgie” (1998), an intricately structured short novel about a surgeon (and amateur photographer) in the Crimean War. It opens this way:

“I was twelve years old the first time Master Georgie ordered me to stand stock still and not blink. My head was on a level with the pillow and he had me rest my hand on Mr. Hardy’s shoulder; a finger-tip chill struck through the cloth of his white cotton shirt. It was a Saturday, the feast of the Assumption, and to stop my eyelids from fluttering I pretended God would strike me blind if I let them, which is why I ended up looking so startled. Mr. Hardy didn’t have to be told to keep still because he was dead.” Now that’s what I call a hook. Bainbridge wrote 17 novels, and “The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress” is the mysterious last, at once witty, engrossing and macabre. But then those words could describe almost all of Bainbridge’s work. In general, her novels — as compact as those of Ivy Compton-Burnett or Penelope Fitzgerald, both of whom she sometimes resembles — tend to divide into the loosely autobiographical and the more or less historical. For instance, “An Awfully Big Adventure,” about a second-rate troupe of English actors, took off from the young Bainbridge’s own theatrical experience (and became the basis for a superb film starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman). By contrast, “According to Queeney” focuses on Samuel Johnson’s relationship to Mrs. Thrale and “Every Man For Himself” on the doomed Titanic voyage. I first became aware of Bainbridge in 1978, when she brought out “Young Adolf,” a fictionalized account of the 23-year-old Hitler’s visit to Liverpool in 1912. That alone should give new readers some idea of her unsettling imagination. In “The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress” a young Englishwoman named Rose arrives in a United States riven by civil unrest. It is 1968: The Vietnam War is escalating, Martin Luther King Jr. has recently been assassinated and violence seems endemic nationwide. Rose is in her mid-to-late 20s, works in a Liverpool dental office and has taken three weeks’ holiday to search for a mysterious Dr. Wheeler. While she was growing up, Wheeler had been something of a foster-father and wise counselor to her, and she feels a deep connection to him. Her trip, though, is being financed by a middle-aged Washington Harold, who also wants to locate Wheeler for reasons of his own. Rose, he figures, will help lead him to the doctor, who may be working for some sort of political or intelligence organization. From the beginning, Harold is intent on making the almost penniless Rose feel a sense of obligation to him: “It would make her more compliant when the time came.” That sounds more than a little sinister.

Rose’s character is hard to read: At times she seems a total innocent, almost a period flower-child. She doesn’t like to bathe, wears the same shapeless raincoat all the time and often behaves like an extremely naive female Candide, wide-eyed in a strange and savage land. But there are darker sides to her character, too, and, when she wants to, she can effortlessly manipulate the people around her. She steals, regularly wheedles cigarettes from strangers, periodically recalls disturbing episodes from her childhood — including an illegitimate baby — and tells lies with blithe abandon: “ ‘He was a great friend of the poet, Robert Lowell .  .  . You’ve heard of him?’ “ ‘Who hasn’t?’ said Rose.”

In structure, the novel traces Harold and Rose’s journey by camper from Baltimore and Washington to Southern California, the road trip being the traditional form through which foreign authors satirize American life: Think of such novels as Kafka’s “Amerika,” Nabokov’s “Lolita,”J.G. Ballard’s “Hello America.” In just 162 pages, Bainbridge’s odd couple attend a dinner party given by a Washington power couple; encounter a series of ominous characters who rant about religion, race and politics; are caught up in a bank hold-up; try to help a woman permanently addled by lysergic acid; hide the body of a murdered man; and meet a hypnotist who darkly claims to be able to control and manipulate anyone. Throughout, there are frequent allusions to horse-racing, love affairs gone wrong, suicide and the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Dr. Wheeler may be staying, along with presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy and his campaign staff. As is often with Bainbridge, the real joy of her book lies in its deadpan humor. Rose tells us, for instance, that “she wasn’t into wine; in her opinion it took far too long to make one feel cheerful” and that she had “spent most of her childhood crouched on the stairs listening to her parents calling each other names.” At one hotel, she drops in on a meeting of Theosophists: “Rose took a seat at the back and then moved forward; she didn’t want to draw attention to herself by looking solitary. The proceedings began with a prayer to Him on High followed by a rendering of ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ sung without accompaniment by an elderly lady in a coal-black wig.” Similarly grotesque scenes and characters recur throughout “The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress.” When Rose and Harold stop at a farm near Santa Ana, they meet a woman named Philopsona whose elderly mother “sat in a chair overlooking the fields, dressed in a nightie and a straw hat, clutching a woolly rabbit and the remains of a charred handbag.” Later, “Philopsona cooked them lunch, the ingredients home-grown, even the chicken. The birds, she trumpeted, were her pride and joy, each one with a name and fondled from birth. She never allowed anyone but herself to wring their necks. ‘It wouldn’t be right,’ she assured Rose. ‘They need somebody they can [expletive] trust!’ The one they were about to devour was called Nessie.” In the end, “The Girl in the Polka-Dot Dress” is strong on atmosphere, incident and wit, while remaining rather nebulous and tantalizing in its plot and resolution. So it’s not quite as fine a novel as those various Booker short-listed titles. Still, you’ll almost certainly enjoy Beryl Bainbridge’s dry humor and her book’s pervasive sense of menace. It’s an odd combination, but Bainbridge brings it off beautifully. Larrie D. Ferreiro’s ‘Measure of the Earth,’ reviewed by Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda July 27, 2011 Read Later

What is the shape of the earth? For centuries people knew the planet was essentially spherical, but by the 18th century debate began to rage over whether it might bulge at the equator or be somewhat elongated at the poles. Did the Earth, in effect, resemble an exercise ball when someone sits on it, or does the planet look like an egg standing upright in its carton?

The latter was the more widespread view, ultimately derived from Descartes, but Isaac Newton had recently argued for a bulging equator, since it played into his newfangled theories about gravitation. On the surface, so to speak, the resulting controversy may seem trivial or even nationalistic, just one more of those heated quarrels among philosophers and scientists over an apparently trifling matter. Yet without knowing “the figure of the Earth” one couldn’t reliably determine geographical location. Navies couldn’t navigate with precision, land surveyors would be a bit off in their calculations, explorers might go astray. To resolve matters, the French and Spanish joined forces in what Larrie D. Ferreiro describes in “Measure of the Earth” as the first cooperative international scientific expedition. A team, sympathetic to Newton’s view, would travel to what is now Ecuador and measure the exact length of a degree of latitude near the equator. This would then be compared with the same measurement taken in France. If the latter was larger, Newton was right. The 1735 Geodesic Mission to the Equator mainly consisted of a trio of mismatched French scientists and a pair of efficiently practical Spanish naval officers. It is a wonder that the enterprise ever succeeded. Gathering together everything that can be known about the mission, Ferreiro reveals, yet again, how much the objective ideals of science may be practiced by very flawed human beings. To start, a project that on paper should have required at most three years ended up taking nearly a decade. The overall mission leader, the ambitious Louis Godin, lacked every management skill: He was arrogant and absolutist, kept crucial information to himself, spent government money with abandon (a good deal of it on a prostitute with whom he’d grown infatuated), and generally alienated everyone with whom he worked. Charles-Marie de La Condamine, by contrast, was a worldly and wealthy friend of Voltaire, as much an adventurer as a scientist and one of those men whose actions regularly combined “curiosity, bravery, and sheer idiocy.” Pierre Bouguer, who had not really wanted to join the expedition, eventually became its de facto chief, ousting Godin. Bouguer’s book, “The Figure of the Earth,” later became the standard scientific account of the Geodesic survey. After months of difficulties and delays on the island of Saint Domingue, the French group was joined by two Spanish naval officers: Jorge Juan y Santacilia and Antonio de Ulloa y de la TorreGuiral. Ferreiro clearly admires these young men for their quiet professionalism. They were capable engineers, expert swordsmen, deeply sympathetic to the native peoples and openly outraged by colonial atrocities. The two friends would eventually go on to distinguished maritime and diplomatic careers, and are still venerated by the Spanish navy: “From 1851 until the modern day, three pairs of warships have borne their names.”

Eventually, the full team reached its destination, the city of Quito. Following further squabbles and reversals, the scientists, along with their servants and slaves, finally began their measurements. They first created a baseline, “an absolutely straight path, seven miles long and just eighteen inches wide.” Then, on the slopes of the nearby mountains and volcanoes of the Andes, they erected “large pyramids of timber, straw, and fabric, whitewashed with lime and lye, to make signals that could be clearly seen through a telescope, even at thirty miles’ distance.” Using these pyramids — and

sometimes just their large tents — as focal points, they gradually calculated the dimensions of a chain of gigantic interlocking triangles running south along the Andes. This triangulation extended a little over 200 miles to the city of Cuenca. Nothing went smoothly. Frequent cloud cover impaired accuracy during key sightings. The group suffered from altitude sickness, dysentery and malaria (the latter cured by quinine from the cinchona tree, which the scientists studied), hostile colonial administrators, lack of funding and internal strife. At one point, a riot erupted at a Cuenca bullfight, and the expedition’s surgeon, Jean Seniergues, was beaten and stabbed, dying of his wounds. After war broke out between England and Spain, and British naval forces ravaged the nearby seaports, Ulloa and Santacilia were ordered to provide military leadership and assistance. Despite such complications, the team eventually completed its setup and, using an instrument called a sector, made a series of simultaneous celestial observations and calculations. These determined that the length of a degree of latitude at the equator was 68.7 miles. This, notes Ferreiro, is “within fifty yards of the modern accepted value.” The result proved that “the length of a degree of latitude shortened considerably toward the equator, as a result of its bulging out from the axis. Bouguer and La Condamine had confirmed that the planet was indeed oblate and that Newton was right.” When the pair eventually returned to France, both were feted by their scientific colleagues. La Condamine’s action-packed “Abridged Relation of a Voyage Made in the Interior of South America” soon became an international bestseller. But Godin, who knew he had wrecked his career, stayed behind, partly redeeming himself when, after a huge earthquake, he oversaw the reconstruction of Lima into “one of the most gracious cities in South America.” In “Measure of the Earth,” Ferreiro has produced an astonishingly detailed account of the Geodesic Mission and its importance. He has mined all the sources, visited the key sites, balanced conflicting historical documents and memoirs, and produced a book that is gripping, authoritative and fair. In particular, Ferreiro reminds us that this expedition — despite the frequent foolishness and ineptitude of its members — became one of the great scientific adventure stories of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Moreover, it “inaugurated a spate of large-scale international scientific expeditions that rewrote our understanding of the planet, and it gave us the concept of South America as a unique place, separate from its mother country of Spain, which would eventually give birth to the new nations of Latin America.” The memory of the mission also spurred a young naturalist named Charles Darwin to undertake his own voyage to the equator, with notable consequences. Above all, though, “Measure of the Earth” reminds us that scientific research requires luck, perseverance and cash as much as genius and vision, that scientists are often all too human, and that groundbreaking discoveries are soon superseded, forgotten or taken for granted. If you enjoy reading popular histories of science — such as Dava Sobel’s “Longitude” or Jonathan Weiner’s “The Beak of the Finch” — you should certainly add Ferreiro’s “Measure of the Earth” to this tropical summer’s reading list. Book World: ‘The Secret Lives of Hoarders’ •

by Michael Dirda

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June 30, 2011 Read Later

Anyone who seriously collects anything — whether books, vintage clothing, pulp magazines, vinyl records, old comics, classical CDs, manual typewriters or Golden Age movies on tape and DVD — at least occasionally thinks about hoarding. If, like me, you regularly visit thrift shops and usedbook stores and yard sales in search of, well, all the items just mentioned, you sometimes think, while driving home with a trunk full of “treasures”: Has this gotten out of control? Do I have a problem? Just asking the question suggests that “yes” is the right answer. Still, I figure that I’m only at Stage One of Matt Paxton’s “hoarding scale.” I’ve got clutter and I’ve got a basement full of “stuff,” but my house isn’t structurally damaged, there aren’t narrow passageways between piled up newspapers and trash, and the upstairs rooms are neat and tidy (excepting, of course, the bedroom of my youngest, at-home-in-the-summer son). But, as one reads “The Secret Lives of Hoarders,” it’s hard not to hear a small voice whispering, “There but for the grace of God . . . . ” Paxton runs Clutter Cleaner, a Richmond-based company that specializes in total-house cleanup. In the more extreme cases described in this engagingly written book, that means the removal of mountains of garbage and the bodies of dead pets, the excavation of almost geological strata of trash, the occasional discovery of long-lost valuables, and, in many cases, a referral to appropriate counseling for the homeowner. The most famous hoarders in American history are the Collyer brothers, whose story has inspired both articles and novels, most recently E.L. Doctorow’s “Homer & Langley.” Living in a New York mansion stuffed with newspapers and debris, one sibling was accidentally crushed to death by falling junk, and the other, unable to move on his own, gradually starved. One or two of the people in “The Secret Lives of Hoarders” make the Collyers look like rank amateurs. “Rank” is the mot juste too. Time and again, Paxton mentions the stench — from urine, feces and decaying food — that he encounters on a job. Take the case of Margaret, who “had been hoarding so many years that her possessions had started to decompose at the bottom of her five-foot piles. Everything in her double-wide trailer home was either broken, rotting, or chewed or peed on by the fifty or so dogs that had free run of the place. There was extensive water damage from broken pipes, with walls and ceilings split and falling down in spots. The house stank, it was hot, and the air was thick with dust. Cobwebs waved from the ceiling and flies buzzed at all the windows. “In the kitchen, spoiled food stank up the refrigerator, and dirty dishes were molding in the sink. Cockroaches scattered whenever items were moved. The narrow walkways between the piles were swimming in a thick brown muck that actually sucked one of Margaret’s clogs off her foot as she walked through the kitchen on cleanup day. She ignored it and kept walking.”

Usually called in by a relative or the local government, Paxton often needs to spend time just easing the hoarder into accepting the need for a cleanup. In many cases, he recognizes that once he’s gone, the steady accumulation will start again.

Why do people want to hang on to things? In most instances, hoarding is a form of compensation. Most extreme hoarders are depressed. Some suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Paxton, who sometimes works with therapists, writes that “there always seems to be an emotional event that triggers the behavior. . . . Collecting things is what hoarders frequently do to comfort themselves after trauma.” He adds: “Becoming a hoarder is not unlike becoming a workaholic or an exercise fanatic as a way to escape a difficult life or event. People can turn to these activities just like hoarders rely on acquiring and holding on to their stuff.” In short, “hoarders aren’t slobs who don’t care about being clean. They are people struggling with overwhelming emotional issues. A pile in a hoarder house isn’t a pile of stuff; it can be many things: a pile of sadness, a pile of quitting, or sometimes even a pile of hope. It’s never really about the stuff.” In the course of his book, Paxton describes all kinds of obssessives. Shopaholics, for instance, find that “purchasing an item gives them a rush of temporary joy, so purchasing more items seems like it should give them an even bigger rush. The collecting gets out of hand when hoarders become so compulsive that they can’t limit it.” One possible countermeasure, Paxton suggests, is using only cash to make purchases. Shelling out $20 bills provides the kind of reality check that just signing a credit card slip never can. What about the various sorts of collectors? “What I see is that 99 percent of the time the collection has little or no value. But hoarders are convinced that they are sitting on a gold mine. Bringing in an impartial third party can clear this up, because it’s harder to argue with an expert.” He stresses that this “can be a really hard moment for a hoarder who has a lot of money and emotion invested in the collection.” Tell me about it. According to Paxton, the hoarding impulse, like alcoholism, can never be wholly conquered. “Therapists I know report that 60 to 85 percent of hoarders backslide.” One must combat the impulse every day. What’s more, life after the cleanup can actually grow more complicated: “During the hoarding phase, the hoarder has been telling himself or herself that everything else — debt, relationships, health, job — will be dealt with once the house is clean. Now the house is clean, and those problems all come crashing down on the hoarder.” Americans tend to like owning things, but few of us are quite so over the top as the people described in “The Secret Lives of Hoarders.” Yet Paxton’s book does make clear that our collections can readily turn into accumulations and the accumulations into random clutter, and before you know it, you’re living in a house full of Barbie dolls or canned goods or designer purses or Blondie memorabilia or old books and almost nothing else. Don’t laugh. You haven’t seen my basement. Book World: ‘Irish Essays’ by Denis Donoghue plumbs new depths

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by Michael Dirda Aug. 3, 2011 Read Later

For many years, the Times Literary Supplement never identified its reviewers. It was felt that anonymity ensured high critical standards and allowed for greater forthrightness in the expression of opinion. When, however, the TLS finally abandoned this practice, the honor of the very first signed front-page review was given to Denis Donoghue. For more than 50 years, Donoghue has been part of that elite community of distinguished literary scholars — others include Christopher Ricks, George Steiner and Harold Bloom — who write and review regularly for the general public. In more than 30 books, he has addressed aspects of modernism, literary theory and the Irish tradition in literature. Recently, however, the Henry James Chair of English and American Literature at New York University has brought out booklength essays on such old-fashioned topics as beauty and eloquence. (Henry James would have approved.) For me, though, “Warrenpoint” — a brilliant reminiscence of growing up in Ireland as the son of a police sergeant — remains a particular favorite among Donoghue’s many excellent books. It deserves to be far better known (as does “Not Entitled,” the comparably superb memoir of Donoghue’s longtime critical coeval, the late Frank Kermode). “Irish Essays” gathers together 14 of Donoghue’s major reviews and talks of the past decade, with Swift, Yeats, Joyce and Beckett being the four points of his compass. But Donoghue also pays attention to such eminent contemporaries as William Trevor, John McGahern and Roddy Doyle. It should also be noted, if only in passing, that he is himself the father of Emma Donoghue, one of the most admired Irish writers of her generation. Donoghue’s opening essay, “Race, Nation, State” — originally the Parnell Lecture at Magdalen College, Cambridge — examines these three deeply fraught concepts in Irish history and culture. Donoghue doesn’t shy from political statement: “As for my own sentiments: I remain a nationalist, but I think it most unlikely that Unionists in the North will ever be persuaded to make common cause with the South. Ian Paisley, David Trimble, Peter Robinson and their ancestors have been in the North for 370 years: they still think of themselves as British rather than as Irish. . . . In the meantime I do not condone a single act of bloodshed, nor do I think that the social conditions in Northern Ireland, wounding to Catholics as they have been, have ever justified the taking up of arms. At the same time, the desires embodied in the republican traditions can’t be merely suppressed, any more justly or effectively than loyalist desires which have a strong historical right to persist.” Perhaps the most important essays in this handsome paperback — the cover reproduces a section of “The Book of Kells” — are those devoted to the two greatest prose works of Irish literature: Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” and Joyce’s “Ulysses.” In “Reading ‘Gulliver’s Travels,’ ” Donoghue notes that the unimaginative Gulliver repeatedly adopts the standards and point of view of whatever society he finds himself in. He thinks small among the Lilliputians and big among the Brobdingnagians and like a horse among the Houyhnhnms. In effect, Donoghue argues, Swift’s masterpiece reveals how

readily we may be conditioned into accepting a set of ideas and values, such that “the enforced system becomes our second nature and determines our fate.”

Donoghue enlarges this thought: “Any system can become a prison: a tradition we have inherited, a style we have adopted, an official terminology that tells us what to think. These days, we often refer to it as ideology, a system of assumptions on which people are persuaded to live; it is all the more powerful, the more it seems to be self-evidently valid. ‘Gulliver’s Travels’ is only superficially about big men and little men: it is really about entrapment.” The dark comedy of “Gulliver’s Travels,” he concludes, “arises from the discrepancy between our vaguely acquired sense of what it means to be human and our more pressing fear that ‘being human’ depends — more than we care to realize — upon favorable local circumstances. When circumstances change, being human is the last thing we can be assured of being.” While Swift may have been satirizing John Locke’s theory that our consciousness depends on external events and sensations, today “Gulliver’s Travels” reads like an Orwellian fable about brainwashing and Stockholm syndrome. At the beginning of the essay “A Plain Approach to ‘Ulysses,’ ” Donoghue packs an enormous amount of information into what is, quite possibly, the best short introduction to Joyce’s masterpiece. He points out, for instance, that the original of the book’s hero, Leopold Bloom, was one Alfred H. Hunter, who helped the young Joyce out of a drunken fracas. He notes that Dante treats Ulysses as a fool because the Greek hero is more curious about the world than concerned with his soul. Joyce, Donoghue writes, consequently makes “curiosity one of Bloom’s charming qualities. We find it endearing that Bloom is so undemanding, so willing to be interested in the parade as it passes and in the associations his mind makes as it goes along.”Joyce, he also reminds us, once claimed that he himself had “the mind of a grocer’s assistant.” Among Donoghue’s gifts as a critic is his generous habit of drawing on or arguing with the work of other scholars. In the course of these pages, the great critics of the mid-20th century all roll out: William Empson, R.P. Blackmur, F.R. Leavis, Hugh Kenner, Donald Davie,Helen Vendler. Like T.S. Eliot, Donoghue also quotes brilliantly. Discussing “A Vision,” Yeats’s occult outline of history and human types, Donoghue cites the poet’s belief that “there is some one myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.” Is this true? Jungians might say so. But then Yeats, the apprentice mage, was always longing to discover the secret order in life’s disorder, always reaching, in Donoghue’s words “for mastery, a style of command.” That said, throughout these essays, Donoghue notes how often Irish writers are torn between reality and reverie, between the world as it is and the half-seen world beyond the fields we know. Certainly, a mythic ground bass sounds through nearly all the high modernist masterpieces — think of the use of the Gaelic pantheon in Yeats or the substratum of Homeric epic in Joyce. William Trevor similarly enriches his stories with this “larger perspective” by “appealing to certain Italian Renaissance paintings” or noting “intimations of continuity and recurrence in the natural world, the rhythms of winter and spring.” Significantly, Roddy Doyle rejects anything smacking of the mystic or Celtic twilighty. In his play “War,” a quiz show asks the contestants: “Who said ‘Romantic

Ireland’s dead and gone. It’s with O’Leary in the grave’?” Nobody can identify this famous line from early Yeats — thus proving its truth. For all its merits, “Irish Essays” is neither a quick read nor an easy one. Still, its demands on the reader are regularly leavened with nice touches of dry wit. John McGahern, Donoghue notes, sets his novels in the country parish of Leitrim, adding that “he has taken full possession of it, though one might remark that it is not a strenuously contested part of the world.” The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown, by Paul Malmont • • •

by Michael Dirda July 21, 2011 Read Later

This much is true. In 1944 the science-fiction magazine Astounding published a short story called “Deadline.” In it, the author, Cleve Cartmill, described a superbomb very much like what was then being developed in New Mexico by the physicists of the Manhattan Project. Worried that there had been a major security leak, the FBI questioned both Cartmill and Astounding’s editor, the legendary John W. Campbell. It is also true that the science-fiction writers Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and L. Sprague de Camp worked together at a naval laboratory in Philadelphia doing research for the war effort. Perhaps even more astounding and amazing, if not entirely unknown, is the fact that L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, was himself once a prolific pulp-magazine writer, a president of the major writers guild of the time and part of a sex-and-magick cult run by Jack Parsons, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Let me stress that all these items are part of the historical record. You can look up many of the details in William H. Patterson’s biography of Heinlein, Asimov’s memoirs, and various histories of science fiction and Scientology. At this point, however, novelist Paul Malmont enters the picture. In his previous pulp-historical thriller, “The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril,” the heroes were none other than Walter B. Gibson and Lester Dent, the creators, respectively, of the Shadow — “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” — and Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze. Fans of that earlier book will be pleased to learn that both Gibson and Dent reappear, albeit as subsidiary characters, in “The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown.” (The odd title plays off the names of three of the best-known fantasy and science-fiction pulp magazines.) In these pages Malmont discloses still another thread in the “secret history” of the 20th century. Suppose that a motley group of hack writers, famous for cranking out tales of bug-eyed monsters, robots, gosh-wow space cadets and faster-than-light travel, actually discovered that a superweapon, one as powerful as any imaginary death ray, was not only possible but had actually been invented.

What if Wardenclyffe Tower — a scientific folly designed by Nikola Tesla early in the 20th century — was more than just a giant broadcasting antenna that never quite worked? As a certain colonel tells Heinlein and company: “There have been rumors ever since Wardenclyffe was shut down that Tesla was up to something else there other than trying to create a new form of electronic communications. Something potentially devastating. In these letters he wrote in the last year of his life he claimed to be able to use an invention of his to knock an entire fleet of aircraft from the skies or sink an armada in an instant. . . . I need you to help me find out what happened at Wardenclyffe. We need to know why the Nazis consider it a Wunderwaffe. A wonder weapon.” In recent years, books like “The Amazing, the Astounding, and the Unknown” have become increasingly common, as the barriers between fiction and nonfiction, and especially between fantasy and history, have grown more porous. Real and imaginary people mingle freely in most 19th-century steampunk stories. Tim Powers, for instance, features the poets Percy Shelley and John Keats as major characters in “The Stress of Her Regard.” Mark Hodder’s “The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack,” winner of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award, turns explorer Richard Burton and poet Algernon Swinburne into Victorian-era secret agents.

Still, “The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown” is a somewhat troubling case. Just when you’re settling down for pulpy adventure, the book grows soul-bruisingly serious. Throughout, Malmont contrasts the search for the truth about Tesla’s Tower — did it, for instance, cause the famous 1908 Tunguska explosion in Siberia? — with sometimes painful accounts of the domestic and sexual lives of his characters. So we hear about open marriages, suicide attempts, life traumas, erotic rituals, sexual difficulties and all sorts of marital unhappiness (and happiness in the case of the de Camps and the Dents). From having read several of the books used in Malmont’s research (they are listed in an appendix), I know that most of what he describes about these young writers isn’t fiction. While Malmont generally sympathizes with Heinlein, Asimov and even Hubbard, we’re always aware of who these figures are, of what they became, and even of how we once chatted with them on the phone or at a convention. Such knowledge generates a distinct aesthetic dissonance, even a slight revulsion, as if one weren’t only a novel reader but also a peeping Tom. “The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown” feeds this confusion by its series of amusing injokes. John W. Campbell complains that he doesn’t want to be in “the Isaac Asimov mag business.” (Since 1977, Asimov’s Science Fiction has been a major sf magazine.) On a train Heinlein murmurs the phrase “So it goes,” then passes along some pulp magazines to a young soldier named Kurt, who has heavy eyebrows. While sailing to the Aleutians, Hubbard chats with “Herbie,” a Seabee who wishes he could see a desert, “a lovely, dry, brown desert full of hot sand.” Many readers, and most serious science-fiction fans, will smile at these sightings of Kurt Vonnegut and Frank Herbert, author of “Dune.” But after a while, one starts to look for them. For the most part, our main heroes embody the qualities associated with their own fiction. Heinlein is the chief, omnicompetent and commanding but ready to fall in love (with Virginia Gerstenfeld, who would become his third wife). De Camp appears as the encyclopedic know-it-all, familiar with both ancient engineering and the byways of history and myth but also rabidly devoted to H.P. Lovecraft. Asimov is portrayed as the classic nerd: immensely smart, but wimpy, afraid of heights,

preferring his typewriter to his unhappy bride. Hubbard comes across as the most complex character in the book: Brash, vulgar and sexually rapacious, he is already prone to strange visions and fantasies. To a large extent, the novel chronicles his early progress toward “Dianetics” and Scientology. Despite its ambition, “The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown” never quite lives up to its title. It opens slowly, breaks up its narrative among too many different characters and plot lines, and is unpersuasively framed as a story related by physicist Richard Feynman. Frequent comic episodes, some verging on slapstick, don’t wholly come off. Nor are the big scenes — involving secret tunnels underneath the Empire State Building or the final showdown at Tesla’s Tower — altogether fresh. I couldn’t follow much of the science, and Hubbard’s feverish dreams reminded me of accounts of bad LSD trips. Still, if you’re already a fan of any of the writer-heroes of this novel, you’ll probably be irresistibly drawn to “The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown.” And the book does have some good moments. It’s almost worth reading just to arrive at the pronouncement: “Oh my God! . . . You’ve vaporized Isaac Asimov!” Book review: ‘Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist,’ by Peter L. Berger • • •

by Michael Dirda July 14, 2011 Read Later

Who knew that sociologists regard economists in roughly the same way the Redskins view the Dallas Cowboys? In this memoir of his scholarly career, Peter L. Berger writes that, with a few exceptions, economists are “as impervious as fundamentalist mullahs to any language other than the one allegedly revealed to them, and to them alone.” He later approvingly cites a conversation with Bernard Lewis, in which the distinguished Islamicist confesses that he’s been thinking of writing an essay on economics but has settled only on the opening lines: “In the history of human thought science has often come out of superstition. Astronomy came out of astrology. Chemistry came out of alchemy. What will come out of economics?” In “Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist,” Berger makes clear that while he may be an authority on religion and modernity, he isn’t himself solemn or pontifical. He came to this country as a teenager from Vienna and, being without any money, enrolled in the New School for Social Research because he could work during the day and attend classes at night. He started in 1949 and earned a doctorate in sociology in 1954. At the sherry party celebrating his newly awarded PhD, he recalls meeting one of his advisers, who spoke to him in German: “Very well, Berger. You are now a doctor. Congratulations. But tell me: Do you really believe all the nonsense you wrote in this dissertation?” Berger then comments: “He smiled warmly as he said this. His intention was clear: He knew that there was no way of replying to his question without appearing to be foolish. ‘Yes, I believe the

nonsense’? ‘I don’t think I wrote any nonsense’? I said nothing, just laughed; he laughed too. He just wanted to make me a little uncomfortable and to stop me from having delusions of grandeur. In this he succeeded.” In his memoir, Berger certainly displays a particularly cleareyed sense of self. Though he once planned to become a Lutheran minister, he makes obvious his liking for jokes, attractive women, smoking and lively coffeehouse conversation. He tells us that he cranked out his immensely popular “Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective” (1963) in all of three weeks. A few years later, during summer holidays, he wrote (and published) two novels, one of which, “The Enclaves,” involves a protagonist who navigates various alternate realities and includes “the legend of a lost realm of eastern Hungarians,” the Magyar section of the New York Public Library and an erotic master-slave fantasy. Since the 1970s, Berger admits to having felt increasingly removed from — or marginalized by — contemporary sociology, having no flair for quantitative analysis and little sympathy with leftist political agendas. As a social scientist, he stresses that his research is as “value-free” as he can make it, but that as a man, he is a moderate Christian, and as a citizen, he is what we might call a cultural conservative. He doesn’t disguise the fact that wealthy Texas businessmen and right-leaning think tanks have often sponsored his work.

That work, however, has been exceptionally varied. His master’s thesis focused on Puerto Rican Protestants in East Harlem; his dissertation, on the Iranian Bahai movement. The latter, he writes, “was a detailed application of Max Weber’s theory of the ‘routinization of charisma’ — the process in which a passionate movement led by an extraordinary leader mutates into a formal organization administered by bureaucrats.” The Bahai sect conformed to this pattern, though Berger also hypothesized that before “routinization” sets in, “the most radical version of the movement’s message will win out over more moderate ones.” During the mid-1950s, Berger served in the Army, and in the late 1950s, he taught at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina. These experiences shocked him into an awareness of American prejudice. He gradually came to believe that sociology’s “humanistic” purpose lay in debunking “the fictions that serve as alibis for oppression and cruelty” and, in particular, “unmasking the murderous ideologies underlying the death penalty, racism, and the persecution of homosexuals.” From these convictions, Berger has never wavered. Berger’s most influential scholarly book, “The Social Construction of Reality” (written with Thomas Luckmann), appeared in 1966 and has sometimes been viewed — quite wrongly, he stresses — as part of the deconstructive school associated with Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. The French thinkers, he writes here, maintain that “since all reality is socially constructed, there is no objective truth or at least none that can be accessed. Indeed, there are no facts, only ‘narratives.’ There is no objective way to make epistemological judgments as between the ‘narratives.’ But what one can do is to ‘deconstruct’ them — that is, to unmask the interests that they invariably express. These interests are always expressions of the will to power — of class, or race, or gender.”

In contrast, Berger strongly emphasizes that he does believe in facts and empirical evidence, though he fails to make clear — at least to me — how his own debunking humanism radically differs from the unmasking process of French deconstruction. I suppose that he would emphasize that in his research he is far more theoretically objective and “value-free.” In his later career, Berger has spent a good deal of time studying East Asian capitalism, arguing that it provides a model for how one may modernize without discarding traditional beliefs. Indeed, he contends that modernity doesn’t invariably induce secularism or, in Weber’s wistful phrase, “the disenchantment of the world.” Rather than an absence of gods, says Berger, what typically results is pluralism, a multiplicity of belief systems. Having lost the certainties supplied by a taken-forgranted religion, people find themselves desperate for “mediating structures” to “stand between individual life and the megastructures of a modern society, notably the state, the economy, and other vast bureaucracies.” Without such buffers, which include the family, neighborhood, church and voluntary associations, “individuals will experience the social order as alien or even hostile, and the large institutions of society, especially the state, will lack legitimacy because of this remoteness from the values by which people live.” Hence, Berger infers, Pentecostal religions have flourished in the modern world because they provide the humanity and warmth otherwise absent from so much of capitalist society and from established, i.e., bureaucratized religion. A Pentecostal church offers a loving, personal God and the refuge of a caring community. In effect, people join out of self-interest rather than theological conviction. Berger’s notion of “mediating structures” bears more than a little resemblance to his teacher Alfred Schutz’s concept of “finite provinces of meaning” — that is, “realities into which one may temporarily escape from the reality of everyday life (other examples are aesthetic experience, religious experience, the worlds of abstract thought).” To this list, Berger would add humor, and he ends his deeply engaging memoir with a series of jokes, including the following definition: “An economist: Someone who knows everything — and nothing else.” I guess he just couldn’t resist. ‘A Most Dangerous Book’? Depends who’s reading it. • • •

by Michael Dirda July 7, 2011 Read Later

No woman, according to New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, was ever ruined by a book. But Christopher B. Krebs, a classics professor at Harvard, makes a strong case that an early ethnological monograph, written in the first century in Latin by the Roman historian Tacitus, may have warped the cultural identity of an entire nation. In my old Penguin translation, “Germania” — “On Germany” — runs fewer than 40 pages, but, like other comparably short documents, such as the Declaration of Independence and “The Communist Manifesto,” its influence has been earthshaking. As the Penguin translator, H. Mattingly, frankly writes in his 1947 introduction, the book is “a detailed account of a great people that had already begun to be a European problem in the first century of our era.”

“Germania” is an early work by Tacitus (circa 56-120), whose greatest achievement, the “Annals,” provides our best account of Roman history under such “bad” emperors as Tiberius and Nero. As a stylist, Tacitus is famous for his terseness, mordant wit and a prose that can be both poetically dense and grandly magnificent. Krebs, in “A Most Dangerous Book,” neatly characterizes it as “sparkling and serrated.” “Germania” (published in 97-98) concisely describes the customs and character of dozens of loosely affiliated northern tribes but also functions as an implicit moral tract: While Romans have sunk into softness and debauchery, the tough, blond barbarians living around the Rhine are unwaveringly loyal to their leaders, fierce in battle, without interest in gold and other baubles, obedient to their gods, chaste when young and faithful to their spouses when married. Why are these Teutons such admirable physical specimens and moral beings? In the most unwittingly pernicious sentence of his superbly readable book, Tacitus writes at the opening of Chapter 4: “For myself I accept the view that the people of Germany have never been tainted by intermarriage with other peoples, and stand out as a nation peculiar, pure and unique of its kind.” The Germans are, in short, racially homogenous. This accounts, Tacitus adds, for their common body type: blue eyes, flaxen hair, huge frames. Moreover, since battle is viewed as the sole worthwhile activity, young warriors are intensely devoted to their band (comitatus) and will fight to the death for their leader. Drinking to excess is almost the only vice among these noble savages, though they do sometimes sacrifice human beings in their religious ceremonies. As Krebs reminds us, Tacitus was largely unread and half-forgotten during the Middle Ages and rediscovered only by Renaissance humanists. “Germania” survived in just one manuscript. At first, Italian commentators, such as Enea Silvio Piccolomini — later Pope Pius II — viewed it as a chronicle of uncouth beastliness. These pagan tribes had no literature and no art; they dressed in bearskins and slept on the ground. But Northern scholars saw the book differently: What the ancient Teutons “lacked in cultural refinement they more than made up for by moral rectitude.” New editions and translations of “Germania” gradually appeared, and soon this “golden booklet” had established itself as the foundation work of German cultural identity.

From then on, those ancient barbarians were praised for never having been conquered by the Romans. The German language, it was maintained, possessed a deep history and continuity that mongrelized Latin tongues such as French and Italian could only envy. The ancient Aryan culture was obviously led by wise druids, inspired soothsayers and epic-singing bards. Drawing in part on their reading of Tacitus, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) and others began to promulgate a vision of a transnational Germanic people, or “Volk.” The German spirit, or Geist, took on an increasingly mystic and mythic quality. And so did Tacitus’s little book. “From the turn of the nineteenth century,” as Krebs writes, “the Roman historian was twisted to testify to the purity not only of the mores and the language but also and increasingly of the racial constitution of the Germanic ancestors as members of the Caucasian, then Aryan, and finally Nordic race. Racially pure the Germans had been; racially pure they should be again.”

In those romantic years, the “Volkish” program embraced Teutonic folklore as chronicled by Jacob Grimm, the Northern myths as transformed by Richard Wagner into “The Ring of the Nibelung,” and various theories about racial degeneration and ethnic purity. Throughout this period, Tacitus was read as providing the template for what a true German should be, though his text sometimes needed to be slightly bowdlerized — those human sacrifices were emended as scribal errors. In 1871, the German “Volk” — long divided into separate states such as Prussia and Saxony — were finally united under the empire of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Already a key text in German history textbooks, “Germania” took on a darker identity in the 20th century as “a Bible for National Socialists.” The “golden booklet” obsessed Heinrich Himmler, so much so that the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany ordered special forces to steal the oldest surviving manuscript from an Italian villa. (They failed.) As Reichsfuehrer of the SS, Himmler deliberately modeled his dreaded elite troops after Tacitus’s descriptions of the tightknit bands of young warriors. As he ominously proclaimed in his diary, “Thus shall we be again.” Himmler duly insisted on SS initiates physically conforming to the blond muscleman ideal, even though, as Krebs notes, Himmler himself was “dark-haired, near-sighted, and flat chested.” One Nazi wit actually dared to remark, “If I looked like Himmler, I wouldn’t even mention the word race.” In the final chapter of “A Most Dangerous Book,” Krebs underscores that less ideologically motivated scholars, from Beatus Rhenanus, a Renaissance contemporary of Erasmus, to Eduard Norden, the leading German Latinist of the early 20th century, recognized that “Germania” is a text deeply grounded in its own time. Many of the characteristics Tacitus ascribes to the ancient Germans, Norden proved, were actually traditional attributes conventionally assigned to all sorts of peoples in early histories and poems. In short, Krebs emphasizes, “Tacitus did not write a most dangerous book; his readers made it so.” Christopher B. Krebs is a young academic, but he has produced a model of popular intellectual history. By tracing the fortunes of Tacitus’s “Germania,” Krebs shows us how scholarship both recovers and distorts the past, how ideas take on lives of their own and how our cultural beliefs bear political consequences. Along the way, he provides a powerful justification for classical studies in a time when they are often shamefully neglected. In every way, “A Most Dangerous Book” is a most brilliant achievement. Book World: ‘My Faraway One’ • • •

by Michael Dirda June 24, 2011 Read Later

MY FARAWAY ONE Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, Vol. I, 1915-1933 Edited by Sarah Greenough

Yale. 814 pp. $39.95When I showed “My Faraway One” to an air-conditioning guy at work in my house, he said, “You’re going to read that? It’s as fat as a dictionary.” True enough, but talk about a book bargain! At a time when an ordinary novel might cost $25 or more, you can acquire for just under $40 the intimate correspondence between two of the most important and influential American artists of all time: the great photographer Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) and the arguably even greater painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986). When the two met, Stieglitz was in his early 50s, married and a long-established eminence. He produced the celebrated photographic journal Camera Work, ran a small gallery and championed the contemporary art of both Europe and America. O’Keeffe, by contrast, was in her late 20s, essentially unknown and working mainly as an art teacher at the West Texas State Normal College. They first spoke at Stieglitz’s gallery 291 in the fall of 1915, O’Keeffe wrote and thanked the photographer for his interest in her work, and before long the two were corresponding regularly, almost daily, with increasing flirtatiousness and intimacy. After a few months, an overwhelmed O’Keeffe confessed: “I think letters with so much humanness in them have never come to me before — I have wondered with everyone of them — what it is in them — how you put it in — or is it my imagination — seeing and feeling — finding what I want — ” A few months later, she had grown a bit more coquettish: “You mention me in purple — I’d be about as apt to be naked — don’t worry — !” Finally, O’Keeffe openly admits: “— I’m getting to like you so tremendously that it some times scares me — “Tired tonight — all sorts of things knotted in me in such a tangle — having told you so much of me — more than anyone else I know — could anything else follow but that I should want you — want you in a curious way — it’s a mixture of the way I’ve wanted my mother at times — but not just that — it’s the man too — ” Stieglitz immediately writes back: “You are a very, very great Woman. — You have given me — I can’t tell you what it is — but it is something tremendous — something so overpowering that I feel as if I had shot up suddenly into the skies & touched the stars — ” It hardly takes a Sherlock Holmes to deduce where all this is leading. Before long, as well as talking about theories of art and alluding to friends like the revolutionary Emma Goldman, the photographer Edward Steichen and the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, old Alfred has begun to complain about how his wife doesn’t understand or appreciate him. “She is a really pathetic person — she can’t connect two thoughts — an untrained brain — a great self-will — obstinate — & not much deep feeling — or rather fine feeling — Full of theories & conventional ideas.”

O’Keeffe, meanwhile, is still in Texas, busily going on sunset drives with all the local men and sending Stieglitz provocative observations: “I too only like certain kinds of kisses — certain kinds of touches.” Stieglitz’s letters soon grow to 40 pages and more, as he speaks openly of dreams in which “I had you in my arms.” To that O’Keeffe answers that she wanted to kiss his letter — “it seemed made for lips.”

In 1918, the belle of West Texas State Normal College finally traveled back to New York, at which point her romance with Stieglitz became more than epistolary. In one astonishing letter of May 16, 1922, O’Keeffe describes, in pornographic detail, what she feels like when “fluffing,” the term sometimes used by the couple to describe love-making. The besotted artists married in 1924. During his youth, Stieglitz had made his name by photographing New York in winter, the dirty canals of Venice and, once, the teeming masses on a crowded ship (his greatest single work: “The Steerage”), but now he took hundreds of pictures of his beloved “Little Girl,” many of them nude studies. Because of these often daring images, O’Keeffe’s own work was soon regularly interpreted from a sexual viewpoint, and her sensuous paintings of flowers were described, at first coyly and almost always to the artist’s annoyance, as essentially vaginal. For its first half, the letters of “My Faraway One” obviously chronicle a love story. But in 1929, O’Keeffe traveled to New Mexico, where she found herself drawn to the landscape, the people and the sense of freedom she discovered there. However, Stieglitz, now in his 60s and suffering from angina, stayed at a country house on New York’s Lake George. During the summer, the photographer’s daily letters reflect an increasing desperation and misery, as he grows convinced that he is not only losing the woman he loves but that he has also become a “dead useless thing.” He burns a lot of his early work and starts planning for the disposition of his estate. Meanwhile, O’Keeffe, happy in the sun, ignores her husband’s accusatory and pathetic outpourings. Instead of “Dearest Duck,” she opens her letters without a salutation and maintains that it is he who is to blame for the literal and metaphorical distance between them: “I have put out my hand to you so many times of late and more often than not felt you turn away from me.” She reaffirms her own need for independence: “I have not wanted to be anything but kind to you — but there is nothing to be kind to you if I cannot be me.” And, then, the past seemingly repeats itself. A young volunteer at Stieglitz’s current gallery makes clear that her adoration for his work extends to the man. Soon the revivified photographer is writing long love letters to Dorothy Norman, taking nude photos and complaining that his wife has never really understood him. Naturally, old Alfred tells O’Keeffe that she should stay as long as she wants in New Mexico, her work comes first after all, don’t worry about me. All this human drama — and much else — appears in their letters, but is usefully clarified in the excellent footnotes and interspersed biographical material by editor Sarah Greenough, an authority on the work of Stieglitz and O’Keeffe. Without her additions, the book would often read as the somewhat repetitive exchanges between a rather abstract and sententious Stieglitz and a gushy, landscape-maddened O’Keeffe (“Gosh” is her favorite word). While both artists are compulsive

letter-writers, neither is a compelling writer per se. It’s what they are outside this correspondence that matters. When “My Faraway One” pauses in 1933, these two giants of American culture are still going strong. A second volume will eventually carry their correspondence forward until 1946 and the death of Alfred Stieglitz. Georgia O’Keeffe would live on, a “very very great Woman,” for another 40 years. Books: ‘The Judges of the Secret Court’ • • •

by Michael Dirda June 17, 2011 Read Later

For years I’ve been hearing about David Stacton (1923-1968). Dead at the age of 44, the author of historical novels set in ancient Egypt, Napoleonic Europe, Japan and pre-Columbian America, Stacton was chosen in 1963 by Time magazine as one of the finest young novelists in America. Others among the anointed few included John Updike, Joseph Heller, Ralph Ellison and Philip Roth. These days Stacton’s name frequently appears near the top of another list — that of 20th- century American writers deserving rediscovery. Happily, New York Review Books has taken the hint and issued a handsome paperback edition of one of Stacton’s finest works, “The Judges of the Secret Court” (1961). You’ll recognize the book by its striking cover — the close-up of a gun barrel, pointed directly at the reader. Far more than just “a novel about John Wilkes Booth,” “The Judges of the Secret Court” — haunting title — depicts the complex aftershock of the Lincoln assassination on a surprisingly large circle of people, including the various conspirators, the famous Booth family of actors and the Washington politicos who seize on the death of the president for their own purposes. Every one of these characters, even if he or she only appears for a paragraph or two, is conveyed with vivid, blazing life. For instance, Stacton sums up the care-worn Lincoln: “He was wistfully a little tired of doing his best to be the world’s father, when what he wanted, sometimes, was someone to bring him a shawl when he was cold.” What most surprises about this “historical” novel is its urbane, mildly epigrammatic style. Stacton is never florid or old-fashioned. He writes with lean economy and speed, with what John Crowley in his superb introduction calls a “gripping cold attentiveness.” Even though most readers will know the general outlines of the events, Stacton keeps up the dramatic tension throughout: Will Booth manage to get away? Will the innocent, as well as the guilty, be hanged by a vengeful government? Wilkes himself is depicted as a self-centered, spoiled mama’s boy, half dandy, half rake, an actor who looks upon his life as one constant performance. He has a theatrical hunger for fame, and no ethics, only manners. On the afternoon before the assassination, Booth briefly calls to mind his fiancee, Bessie Hale, the daughter of an ex-senator:

“Thinking of her, he made that little gesture, his favourite, which was habitual with him, a quick tugging at the handkerchief in his breast pocket, with head modestly downcast, like that of a white cockatoo preening itself. It went so perfectly with the single syllable ‘m’dear,’ which only actors seem able to pronounce. That syllable came out so naturally after some young miss had played the piano or paid a compliment: ‘M’dear, you have lovely shoulders: you play so well.’ ‘M’dear, you flatter me.’ He had been photographed making that gesture. It was his favourite photograph.” Particularly proud of his crisp tailoring, this jumped-up Southern gentleman regularly studies the shiny leather of his boots, twirls the rowel of his spur. This vanity — a kind of hubris — neatly enough leads to his downfall: When the escaping Booth leaps to the stage from the presidential box, a spur catches in an overhanging flag, such that he lands awkwardly and breaks his leg.

While most novelists might focus on the events leading up to the assassination, Stacton begins on the day itself and moves Booth and Lincoln to their destiny with crisp, clocklike efficiency. As the actor enters Ford’s Theatre, he asks a local drunk to hold his horse, then assumes the noble air that his role demands: “It had impressed him, walking down the stage box corridor, that the walk to the scaffold is much the same as the criminal’s march to the crime. It has the same inevitable pace. Yet the corridor was empty and he was no criminal. He was the hero, girding himself for an heroic act. He could only deplore that the setting was so shoddy. Still, he could see the damnable villain’s back. “Opening the door, he stepped inside, took out his deringer, cocked it, and shot the President. The time was 10:15.” End of Chapter Five. After the quick buildup to the murder, Stacton immediately slows the pace. He details the shock of the audience and the cast of “Our American Cousin”; zeroes in on the doctors and hangers-on around the dying Lincoln; and finally reveals the impact of the assassination on the world. Newspapers typically given to denouncing the president tear up their pages to run “laudations and long descriptions of the nation’s grief.” At this point we meet the true villain of the novel, not the self-deluding popinjay Booth, but the cruel and power-hungry secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton. While Lincoln is pronounced “the last of the old men,” Stanton is distinctly “one of the new men,” who “want nothing for themselves but the prerogatives of their office.” The secretary of war is, in fact, that familiar 20th- century type, a proto-Stalin: “He proposed to arrest everyone in sight. It was his usual method, for he had come to believe that all the world was guilty of something. It was merely necessary to discover of what, and that could be proven better in the Old Capitol Prison than in court.”

In the last quarter of the novel, Stacton reveals Stanton’s self-aggrandizing policy in action as the supposed conspirators face a farcical monkey trial. None of the Washington insiders, including Vice President Andrew Johnson, comes across as much more than a venal opportunist or half-drunk poltroon. At one point a Miss Holloway tells Booth, “Patriotism isn’t the same as loyalty.” Throughout “The Judges of the Secret Court,” people are faced with difficult, often conflicting loyalties — to family, to friends, to the lost cause of the South, to various ideals, noble and ignoble. Wilkes’s admirably responsible older brother Edwin nearly breaks down from his sense of oppressive family responsibility and guilt. In the end, though, Edwin turns his pain inward to create in his signature role a suffering Hamlet constantly tormented by the unexpected murder of a noble king. Edwin Booth became 19th-century America’s greatest actor. “The Judges of the Secret Court” isn’t just a novel about John Wilkes Booth; it is a vision of what life and the world do to us. No one, writes Stacton, ever sees the invisible, draconian judges of his title. “But they are there: the whole world is a courtroom, every life is a trial,” and, though we plead, plead, plead, in the end we are all found guilty — if only of being ourselves. Books: ‘The History of Mr. Polly’ by H.G. Wells • • •

by Michael Dirda June 9, 2011 Read Later

While H.G. Wells (1866- 1946) remains best known today for what he called his “scientific romances,” he was far more than just the author of “The Time Machine,” “The Island of Dr. Moreau” and “The War of the Worlds.” The founder of modern science fiction was also a major social novelist of the Edwardian period. Henry James and Arnold Bennett praised his books, and he was widely regarded as their peer. All too often, though, today’s readers only vaguely recognize such titles as “Kipps,” “Love and Mr. Lewisham,” “Tono-Bungay,” “Ann Veronica” and “The History of Mr Polly.” So Weidenfeld & Nicolson should be congratulated for making these deeply interesting novels available again. Rather than try to discuss them all, however, it seems more sensible to pick one to illustrate Wells’s distinctive merits as a novelist. “The History of Mr Polly” (1910) is a disturbing comic masterpiece that might have gotten its start from Thoreau’s remark that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” It could also be seen — at least in its first two-thirds — as a more gently satirical and masculine counterpart to Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary.” Like Emma Bovary, the lower-middle-class Alfred Polly, a subordinate window dresser in a department store, reads novels and dreams of a life of wild freedom and romance: “Deep in the being of Mr. Polly, deep in that darkness, like a creature which has been beaten about the head and left for dead but still lives, crawled a persuasion that over and above the things that are jolly and ‘bits of all right,’ there was beauty, there was delight; that somewhere — magically

inaccessible perhaps, but still somewhere — were pure and easy and joyous states of body and mind.” Alas, Mr. Polly soon grows convinced that he has fallen into the wrong trade, even the wrong life. Caught in his unsatisfying existence, he views the human condition as one in which we merely struggle, and struggle in vain. We waste our energies trying, quite uselessly, “to get obdurate things round impossible corners.” As his friend Parsons complains about life in the modern world, there’s “no Joy in it, no blooming Joy!” But then Mr. Polly’s father dies, leaving him a tidy sum from insurance, and the little clerk realizes that he might do something more, something different. But what? “I think,” writes the omniscient Wells, that “his distinctive craving is best expressed as fun — fun in companionship.” Almost immediately, Mr. Polly meets the three Larkins sisters at the lavish and hilarious funeral supper for his father, where hitherto unknown relatives have come to drink and chow down. Our poor hero sips a little too much sherry and ends up flirting with all three sisters. Worse still, because of his habit of “drinking at the poisoned fountains of English literature,” as Wells puts it, bumbling Mr. Polly attempts rakish compliments, believing that “it becomes a man of gaiety and spirit to make love, gallantly and rather carelessly.” In due course, “Elfrid” — as the girls call him — finds himself sucked into the Larkinses’ orbit and, almost in spite of himself, eventually proposes to one of the sisters, though not the one he’d been intending to ask. In short order, the newlyweds have set up a small shop in the village of Fishbourne. “One did ought to be happy in a shop,” Mr. Polly tells himself. “Folly not to banish dreams that made one ache of townless woods and bracken tangles and red-haired linen-clad figures sitting in dappled sunshine upon grey and crumbling walls and looking queenly down on one with clear blue eyes. Cruel and foolish dreams they were.”

Are they now? The seventh chapter of this unjustly neglected novel opens with one of the most lugubrious sentences in English fiction: “For fifteen years Mr. Polly was a respectable shopkeeper in Fishbourne.” However, his dreams haven’t wholly died within him. They live on as “an insatiable hunger for bright and delightful experiences, for the gracious aspects of things, for beauty.” While his marriage isn’t altogether disastrous, neither does it feed his soul. His wife had immediately “ceased to listen to her husband’s talk from the day she married him.” Their shop is tawdry, its cheap goods seldom wanted. Mr. Polly’s only escape is, again, through reading, often the travel accounts of intrepid explorers to the distant corners of the earth. “Meanwhile he got little exercise, indigestion grew with him until it ruled all his moods, he fattened and deteriorated physically, moods of distress invaded and darkened his skies, little things irritated him more and more, and casual laughter ceased in him. His hair began to come out until he had a large bald space at the back of his head. Suddenly one day it came to him . . . that he would soon be forty, and that his life during that time had not been worth living, that it had been in apathetic and feebly hostile and critical company, ugly in detail and mean in scope — and that it had brought him at last to an outlook utterly hopeless and grey.” What is left for Mr. Polly? Nothing, he decides, but to kill himself. And from that moment on, Wells’s protagonist discovers in himself a new energy, a new courage. And that ultimately leads him to quite a different end from the one he plans for himself.

If you want to enjoy some excellent lower-class English humor, there’s plenty of it in Mr. Polly’s relations with his fellow clerks, with his wife and her family, and with the various shopkeepers of Fishbourne. But this humor doesn’t hide the fundamental angst at the heart of this novel, the despondent cry that all of us utter at one time or another: Is this my life? Is this all there is? In the end, Wells — that great social visionary — proclaims that with enough boldness and determination even the least of us may live, to borrow another phrase from Thoreau, “the life which he has imagined.” As Wells boldly proclaims: “But when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstances, those unsubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If the world does not please you you can change it. Determine to alter it at any price, and you can change it altogether.” Let me close by saying that, despite its perfectly innocuous title, “The History of Mr Polly” is — long before Camus and Sartre ever wrote — a classic of radical existentialism, and, after 100 years, still amusing, unsettling and powerfully contemporary. Books: ‘Correspondence: An Adventure in Letters,’ review by Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda May 12, 2011 Read Later

If you loved Helene Hanff’s “84, Charing Cross Road,” this is the summer book for you. As you may recall, Hanff’s little classic of bibliophilia presents the letters between a feisty New York writer and a gentlemanly English bookseller, the result being a kind of epistolary romance, with sidelights on many of the older classics of English literature. N. John Hall — the world’s leading authority on Anthony Trollope and Max Beerbohm, as well as a longtime New Yorker — has adopted this format for his comparably delightful, if fictional, “Correspondence: An Adventure in Letters.” Larry Dickerson, “as American as you can get,” is a retired bank clerk who has inherited a cache of letters written to his great-great-grandfather, a 19th-century English bookseller. But these aren’t just any letters. Jeremy MacDowell corresponded with the greatest novelists of the day: Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Trollope, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Butler. As the baseball fan Larry boasts, “How’s that for a line up?” From all of these authors, MacDowell elicited frank statements of their literary aims and opinions. He also managed to snag two letters from Charles Darwin and several from the critic George Henry Lewes, the consort of George Eliot, as well as a few from the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell about the Brontes. Having decided to sell this amazing archive, Larry writes to Christie’s auction house in London and soon initiates a series of e-mails with Stephen Nicholls of the books and manuscripts department. The two men — the unread, slightly vulgar but intelligent American and the suave, well-educated Englishman — gradually come to like and trust each other. Before long, Larry decides he wants to transcribe all the letters himself, partly with the idea of producing a little book in honor of his great-great-grandfather. This leads to an intense course of reading and study, enrollment in a class

on the Victorian novel at the New School, and a series of discussions with Stephen about book illustrations, 19th-century publishing practices, the nature of narrative and the impact of Darwinism. But that’s just the contemporary thread of “Correspondence.” Inspired no doubt by the example of Beerbohm’s virtuosity as a pasticheur, Hall boldly re-creates a dozen or so seemingly genuine letters from Dickens, Hardy and others. In these, Hall mimics the various authors’ styles convincingly, while the opinions they express reflect our modern knowledge of their lives and work. Here, for instance, Thackeray discusses his friend, the multi-tasking Anthony Trollope: “He himself is right now charged with running nearly half of the Post Office of England. And he does it thoroughly while getting up withal every morning at five and writing a couple of thousand words on his latest novel. Then, after three hours’ writing, he has breakfast, turns up fresh as paint at the Post Office and works fanatically at his ‘chief occupation’ — getting letters to go where they’re supposed to go. And in season he hunts every day. He’s not altogether human. . . . In all departments of life (he also manages to play whist every night at the Garrick Club and to spend an hour a day reading — oh my! — the Latin classics), Trollope evidences prodigious staying power. Of his writings since ‘The Warden’ and ‘Barchester Towers’ I’ve read most of what he has done — nobody could read everything; he’s a veritable locomotive. One book is practically as good as the next — and that’s saying much.”

And here is George Eliot commenting on Dickens: “But it is only fair for me to say — and these lines are of course private and intended for your eyes only — that Dickens lacks a concern for what I have called the suppressed transitions in human behaviour. He really does think that people for the most part are either terribly good or terribly bad. .  .  . This means that Dickens misses the intermediateness, the grey areas in personalities. But perhaps he wanted to miss them. Perhaps he meant to create glorious fables or myths and not ‘realistic” stories. I say this as one who has tried, and often failed, at the latter.” In this “Adventure in Letters,” N. John Hall thus manages to convey a good deal about the Victorian novelists and their aesthetics, and to do so in a playfully entertaining manner. Jeremy MacDowell’s own letters and notebooks provide the additional perspective of a shrewd contemporary reader. Of Wilkie Collins’s “The Woman in White,” MacDowell writes: “Disappointing. Perhaps the most ingenious plot ever conceived. But overwritten, too long, descriptions boring, the dialogue fair at best. Character of Fosco [the novel’s villain] best thing in the book. Unless it be the old hypochondriac Frederick Fairlie. So Collins, for all his storytelling inventiveness, is not a good writer.” This is certainly an apt assessment of the book’s strengths and weaknesses (though, to my mind, the brilliant and brilliantly controlled plot overshadows any deficiencies). As the novel proceeds, Larry grows ever more sure of his own literary judgment, there are quiet revelations about Stephen’s personal life, and tension mounts when a brash New York manuscripts dealer learns about the letters. Near the end, Larry declares that of all he’s read, “I like ‘Vanity Fair’ and Trollope best. I don’t like ‘Wuthering Heights’ — it’s a teenage girl’s book in my humble

opinion. .  .  . Hardy’s ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ wiped me out, in spite of his big words and abstract nouns. It’s a fantastic ‘read.’ The mystery is how can anything that sad make you feel good. .  .  . I know people in this game are forever quoting Virginia Woolf as to saying that George Eliot’s ‘Middlemarch’ is one of the handful of novels in English written for grown-ups. I don’t believe it, and the only mention of it in the correspondence is Samuel Butler saying he hated it.” In one of his e-mails, Larry writes that an English scholar would be better at explaining Victorian matters than “some American professor sitting over here and claiming to be an expert.” Shocked at such anglophilia, Stephen quickly replies that “the leading scholars in bringing Victorian novelists back into favour have been, for the most part, Americans — you yourself mentioned Edgar Johnson for Dickens; for Thackeray it’s Gordon Ray; for George Eliot it’s Gordon Haight — and so on. Trollope, too, though I can’t think of the name at the moment.” I suspect that N. John Hall had particular fun writing that last sentence. ‘The First Detective’: A devil extraordinaire • • •

by Michael Dirda June 3, 2011 Read Later

I first heard of Vidocq when, in college, I read several of Balzac’s novels. In “Pere Goriot,” the book’s provincial young hero, at sea in 19th-century Paris, is befriended by a daring criminal mastermind named Vautrin. In “Lost Illusions” and “The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans,” a worldly prelate turns out to be Vautrin in disguise. Ultimately, Balzac tells us, this elusive Napoleon of crime shifts allegiances and, when last glimpsed, has risen to become head of the Paris secret police. Vautrin, I learned from my teacher, was based on the amazing Eugene-Francois Vidocq (1775-1857). As James Morton reminds the reader in his introduction to “The First Detective,” Vidocq led the kind of devil-may-care life that most men simply daydream about. When little more than a boy, he ran away from home, lost all the money he had stolen (from his father’s shop) in a drunken debauch at a brothel, then landed a job with a circus. Exceptionally strong, apparently irresistible to women and an excellent swordsman (as well as a master of the French foot-fighting technique called savate), Vidocq passed the first half of his adult life as a soldier, thief, smuggler, gambler and convict. No prison could hold him, as he escaped from one after the other, often through the use of ingenious disguises. Eventually, Vidocq switched sides. Faced with a long sentence on a chain gang, this natural-born, if somewhat unscrupulous, survivor cut a deal. Why not, he asked, set a thief to catch a thief — or rather many thieves? In 1809, while still locked up in La Force prison, Vidocq quietly began to pass along information and cellblock gossip to the authorities. In 1811, given his freedom, he started a new career with the Paris police, at first snitching on his former companions in larceny, then tracking down the culprits behind various robberies and killings, and sometimes acting as an agent provocateur. Within a year, he had founded the undercover division of the police — the Surete — and had become its first chief.

As such, Vidocq regularly hired ex-cons and prostitutes as his agents, attempted to prevent crimes and not just solve them, and — no surprise here — somehow managed to enrich himself. Under his command, the Surete captured thousands of criminals (about 1,500 a year). In 1827, though, Vidocq fell from favor, being accused of graft and blamed for the recidivism of some of the rough men and women he employed. Almost immediately, he did what all public officials do when they leave office: He published his memoirs. In 1828, the four volumes of his life and adventures became an international bestseller. One modern translator has said that they contain nothing less than “the best criminal stories in the world.” Yet Vidocq’s career was far from over. During the last 25 years of his life, he poured money into a paper mill, which failed; started the first private detective agency (the Bureau des Renseignements — that is, the Office of Information); repeatedly got into trouble with his staid successors at the Surete; traveled to London with a kind of “Chamber of Horrors” show, which displayed instruments of torture as well as the manacles and weighted boots he had worn as a prisoner; and dined out regularly with the high and the mighty. What host or hostess could resist the postprandial stories of this charismatic rogue?

Those stories, of course, sometimes smacked of fiction — could anyone have packed quite this much experience into one life? — and to this day there are questions about the authenticity of at least some of the anecdotes in the “Memoirs.” Still, it’s little wonder that Vidocq directly inspired Balzac’s mastermind Vautrin and to some degree all the great fictional criminals and detective heroes of the later 19th century, including Dickens’s Magwitch (from “Great Expectations”) and Poe’s Dupin (who mentions him by name in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”). In Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” the two main characters — convict-escapee Jean Valjean and his relentless pursuer, Inspector Javert — are modeled, respectively, after the young and middle-aged Vidocq. More recently, this almost-mythic figure has appeared in “Vidocq” — a movie given a fantastic, graphic-novel treatment similar to that of Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes — and in Louis Bayard’s superb historical thriller“The Black Tower.” What we need now is a new edition of Edwin Gile Rich’s 1935 English abridgement of the memoirs, or better yet, a wholly new translation. \"The First Detective: The Life And Revolutionary Times Of Eugene-Francois Vidocq Criminal, Spy and Private Eye\" by James Morton (OverlookPress. 266 pp. $27.95) In the meantime, lacking anything better, James Morton’s biography provides a fast-moving introduction to “the Terror of Thieves.” While Morton often just summarizes episodes from the memoirs, he does carry his biography into Vidocq’s later years. What troubles me about the book, however, is its jaggedy, haphazardly digressive style and an air of casualness verging on the sloppy and vulgar. At one point Vidocq is described as “a few swallows short of a liter bottle.” A woman is called “one of the most high-spirited if not reckless fillies of her time.” Throughout, Morton seems to leave out transitional sentences or abruptly refer back to elements he hasn’t actually mentioned. At other moments, he suddenly brings in facts, sometimes striking ones, that nonetheless verge on the non sequitur: Discussing a former English prostitute suspected of murder, he concludes: “She died in 1840. It was the year that in Brussels photography was first used for police purposes.” He even botches Oscar Wilde’s famous quip by claiming that “no sensible man can help laughing at the

death of Little Dorrit.” He means Little Nell (Little Dorrit doesn’t die). He somehow mistakenly names Rastignac, instead of Lucien de Rubempre, as the object of Vautrin’s attentions in “The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans.” Above all, “The First Detective” lacks clarity of design, even as the plethora of names makes it difficult to keep track of which criminals are which. Nonetheless, Vidocq’s life is so exciting that one tends to partially excuse these lapses. Here is an account of the notorious robbery of the Lyons Mail and a history of the Sanson family of executioners. Here are walk-on roles for the gourmet Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, revered for his monumental “Physiology of Taste”; the poet Lamartine; the notorious murderer Pierre-Francois Lacenaire, who claimed to have been inspired to a life of crime by reading Vidocq’s memoirs; and even Jean Gaspard Deburau, the mime-hero of Marcel Carne’s great film “Les Enfants du Paradis.” Vidocq knew them all. His was truly an astonishing life and one that awaits a biography to match it. The Paper Garden by Molly Peacock • • •

by Michael Dirda May 26, 2011 Read Later

“One afternoon in 1772,” writes the poet Molly Peacock, the 72-year-old widow Mary Delany “noticed how a piece of colored paper matched the dropped petal of a geranium. After making that vital imaginative connection between paper and petal, she lifted the eighteenth-century equivalent of an X-Acto blade (she’d have called it a scalpel) or a pair of filigree-handled scissors — the kind that must have had a nose so sharp and delicate that you could almost imagine it picking up a scent. With the instrument alive in her still rather smooth-skinned hand, she began to maneuver, carefully cutting the exact geranium petal shape from the scarlet paper. “Then she snipped out another. “And another, and another, with the trance-like efficiency of repetition — commencing the most remarkable work of her life.” “The Paper Garden” is a beautifully designed, eye-catching book — there’s a picture of an opium poppy on the cover — but it’s also as intricately made as Mary Delany’s paper flowers. Peacock doesn’t aim just to retell the sometimes chattellike, sometimes independent existence of an upperclass woman whose acquaintances ranged from Jonathan Swift and the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks to the King and Queen of England. Nor is she content simply to set up a counterpoint with her own background, career and second marriage (to James Joyce scholar Michael Groden). Instead, she weaves in and out between the two, using Delany’s flower mosaics as the starting points for reflections on love, family, art, friendship, illness and vocation. As Emily Dickinson observed, “The career of flowers differs from ours only in inaudibleness.” Most important, perhaps, Peacock’s book is a celebration of second chances and the possibility — so attractive to those of a certain age — of an unexpected blossoming late in life. Certainly, Delany succeeded in creating a new art form, an early form of collage, and by the time of her death at 87

(in 1788), had managed to produce 985 examples of her paper marvels. As Peacock says over and over, and as the modern reader will confirm, it’s almost impossible to believe that these astonishingly realistic botanical images are built up out of little pieces of stationery. Peacock reconstructs Delany’s life from the more than 3,000 pages of her letters — many to a beloved sister — and from the earlier scholarship of Ruth Hayden (author of “Mrs Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers”). Peacock’s own journey down the paper garden path opens with her first glimpse of Delany’s work at the Morgan Library in New York City, followed by years of circling before she finally decides to write about it. Thus, following the example of A.J.A. Symons’s biographical classic “The Quest for Corvo,” Peacock’s book is as much about herself and her experiences in tracking down Delany material as it is about the old lady herself. We hear of the poet’s alcoholic father, her high school sweetheart, her divorce, her affectionate conversations with the 86-year-old Ruth Hayden. At the back of the narrative, though, is a recurrent interest in those chief obsessions of later years: incapacity and death.

This takes a terribly personal form for Peacock because her husband suffers from melanoma and must regularly monitor his health. In one striking paragraph, she describes the muscular, normally assured and efficient Groden waiting for his checkup: “But sometimes, sitting in a hospital gown on an examination table in Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, the man seemed to shrink to half his size, and someone else seized and froze his face, not the fleet boy but a static, narrow half-being, afraid and deathly still. It was as if he were diminished into a sculpture, all of the gestural energy that makes a person large sized down into gray stone. It was as if the blue snowlight from that freezing hotel room in New Hampshire” — where they first made love — “had funneled its cold energy into him but stunned him, as if he had become an illustration from a fairy tale. He was gone, lost to me, in a netherworld of ice that also was his youth, my youth, our first sex together now frozen and — dead. Suddenly he would mobilize on the gurney and lift an arm for the doctor, and become flesh again.” (Michael Dirda/ ) - ‘’The Paper Garden: An Artist (Begins Her Life's Work) at 72’’ by Molly Peacock Peacock’s sentences beautifully evoke the distressing diminution of self that affects people in hospital gowns, of whatever age. But note, too, that her prose pushes its wintry imagery hard, aspiring to an overtly poetic richness. “The Paper Garden” is written in just this emphatically lyric mode, which may tire some readers. But there’s no denying the fascination of Mary Delany’s story, starting with her arranged marriage at 17 to a truly disgusting, fat old man in his 60s. Happily, at 23 she awoke one morning to find him dead by her side. Years later, she was resolutely wooed by a clerical friend of Swift’s named Patrick Delany, and the two passed a serenely happy middle life together. Only after her husband’s death did Mary experience her eureka moment when she realized that cut paper could emulate petals and sepals.

Along the way to that discovery, Peacock conveys an enormous amount about 18th-century English life. She discusses the practice of cutting silhouettes, spends two pages detailing the layering of clothes that an elegant lady’s ensemble required, touches on shell collecting, paper-making and close female friendship. She traces Mary’s tentative courtship by Charles Calvert, a.k.a. Lord Baltimore, whose two names echo throughout Maryland, his fiefdom in Colonial America. Such famous botanists as John Bartram and Mark Catesby make brief appearances. And, of course, Peacock describes how Mary Delany “selected plants in bloom, set up, and began to cut, carve, scissor, and position, reposition, think again, pose, re-pose her assemblage of botanical portraits.” Appropriately, each chapter of “The Paper Garden” begins with a full-page color illustration of a poppy, magnolia, thistle or other flower by Delany. Here, then, is not only an introduction to a unique artist, but also a whole bouquet of thoughts and observations about the flow of life: “To search a drawer or a pocketbook or a botanical bibliography, even to search a littered table or beneath the leaf of a geranium, means feeling for one’s conscience and one’s heart, looking for something that will complete — with a key, a tissue, a truth, a love, a victory, a seed — an instant of one’s being, or perhaps one’s whole life. In a sliver of knowledge, time is obliterated and reinstated. A single instance, the fall of a petal, or the swirl of the paper that imitates and becomes it, flourishes an answering likeness.” Book review: ‘What There Is to Say We Have Said,’ edited by Suzanne Marrs • • •

by Michael Dirda May 19, 2011 Read Later

Eudora Welty and William Maxwell. Are there two more beloved figures in American literature of the second half of the 20th century? Folks in Jackson, Miss., still talk about Miss Welty in the way that people in Charlottesville, Va., have been known to refer to Mr. Jefferson. Shortly after Maxwell died in 2000, just a few of the admirers of this longtime New Yorker editor brought out a volume of “Memories and Appreciations.” Contributors included such eminent fiction writers as John Updike, Donna Tartt, Alice Munro, Charles Baxter and Shirley Hazzard, as well as such comparably distinguished poets as Edward Hirsch, Anthony Hecht, Ellen Bryant Voigt and Michael Collier. Welty first started corresponding with Maxwell in 1942 when she was 33 and he 34. She’d already published “A Curtain of Green” (1941), her first collection of stories, and novella “The Robber Bridegroom” (1942). Amazingly, at that time the New Yorker regularly rejected the work she submitted, and it wasn’t until 1951 that Maxwell was able to persuade his masters to accept “The Bride of the Innisfallen.” The next year the magazine took “Kin” and “No Place for You, My Love.” (They would have been blind fools not to.) Yet from the beginning, this was more than just a professional correspondence. Maxwell not only worked with writers, he made them his friends, almost members of his family.

For Welty was, by no means, his only pen pal. According to the introduction to “The Element of Lavishness: Letters of Sylvia Townsend Warner and William Maxwell” — a wonderful volume, by the way — Maxwell also wrote regularly to John Cheever, Updike, J.D. Salinger, Frank O’Connor, Tennessee Williams, Mary McCarthy, James Thurber and Vladimir Nabokov, among others. How he found the time is a mystery, since all his letters make clear that his wife, Emmy, and their two daughters were the axes of his life, along with his garden, the growing of roses and his favorite kind of reading: other people’s letters. Somehow, though, he also managed to work on his own writing. “They Came Like Swallows,” (1937), “The Folded Leaf” (1945) and “Time Will Darken It” (1948) transformed memories of a Midwestern childhood and family unhappiness into bittersweet works of art. While these novels were deeply admired, only his last, “So Long, See You Tomorrow” (1980), which won the William Dean Howells Medal, garnered the acclaim they all deserved. Today Maxwell’s novels and short stories are, like Welty’s, represented by two volumes in the Library of America. Most letters between writers are largely given over to envy, spite, wisecracks, discussions of money, the short-sightedness of award committees, soured love affairs and the innumerable horrors of the literary life. Readers looking for such gossip will be disappointed by “What There Is to Say We Have Said.” Welty never refers to her intimate relationship with Kenneth Millar (better known as detective novelist Ross Macdonald), nor does Maxwell tattle about his famous colleagues at the New Yorker. Instead, the two writers talk about family happiness and tragedy; they trade rose cuttings and books, describe their Christmas decorations. Throughout, they show to each other — and to seemingly everyone they meet — a gentle courtesy, a generosity of spirit, a love for people that is as strong as their love for literature. As Maxwell says at the close of one letter: “Well it’s wonderful to be alive. Wonderful to be a writer. Wonderful to grow roses. Wonderful to care. Isn’t it?”

Of course, Maxwell seems to lead a charmed life, full of long holidays and civilized pleasures: “We are having a lovely January, reading our Christmas books (V. Woolf’s Journals, Berenson’s Renaissance Art), having our ice skates sharpened, enjoying 10 inches of snow & collecting concert and theatre tickets in our bureau drawer against February torpor. This afternoon we are going to see the new wing at the Metropolitan.” At times, Welty’s might be the life of any genteel Southern spinster: “It’s been 95 and 96 the last couple of weeks, regular courtroom weather, Edna Earle would say. Figs look hopeful this year, after none for the last two, and just the thought of a bowl of cold ripe ones with cream on them for breakfast is worth all the rest of July to the undersigned. I wish I could see you some. . . . Now and then a few of us go up to a little country hotel and sit on the upstairs porch and rock awhile quietly, having drinks in the shade and country stillness, or we sit in the dark in somebody’s Jackson porch to talk & play records.” When the pair do comment on their vocation, it’s always worth paying attention. Maxwell describes writing as “moving sentences here and there, and getting effects and making the imaginary reader smile,” then later defines the novel as “a long piece of prose narrative with the breath of life in it.” Welty confesses, “As you know, I generally work at more removes or with more disguises from my own life than I did in this story.” She nearly sinks a short novel with the dreadful title “The Flickering Light of Vision,” but Maxwell persuades her to go with “The Optimist’s Daughter.” Later on, she bucks him up: “I wish you wouldn’t have any fears about the stories, but as one of the

same kind of sufferers over my own I understand — that sudden dropping away of all confidence in any given sentence that looks you in the face.” Both can be quietly funny. When Welty receives an unexpectedly large check from the New Yorker, she says, “Heavens! Heavens, I’m going to have the outsides of my upstairs windows washed by the Jackson House-Cleaning Service, 12 men on ladders! Thanks.” On a trip down the Nile, Maxwell writes, “I feel I am in the land of Sunday School cards.” In her excellent introduction to “What There Is to Say We Have Said,” editor Suzanne Marrs quotes Welty on the vivid intimacy, the “personal truth of a human being” that can be found in letters: “What we’ve been told need not be momentous, but it can be as good as receiving the darting glance from some very bright eye, still mischievous and mischief-making, arriving from fifty or a hundred years ago.” Just so — and what William Maxwell says of Eudora Welty’s writing might also be said of this very book: “I go about reading aloud to people, and what I read aloud . . . is the passage [in the essay “Words into Fiction”] about your being taken as a child to see Mammoth Cave. If I had to choose between it, and Plato’s allegory, I would choose it, though I am fond indeed of the allegory. But this is the way all writing ought to be, a marvel, a joy, a joke, an experience in itself, something seen in an Easter egg, a treasure, I cannot tell you how you enriched me by writing it.” Michael Dirda reviews Arthur Phillips’s ‘The Tragedy of Arthur’ • • •

by Michael Dirda April 21, 2011 Read Later

What is “The Tragedy of Arthur”? Is it, as the evidence suggests, an edition of an unknown play by William Shakespeare, prefaced, quite properly, with a detailed history of the events leading up to the discovery of the 1597 quarto, the basis for the present Random House text? The reader must judge. Given our contemporary inclination to skepticism about everything, it is only natural that some uncertainties will always remain about the play’s authorship. Much of the critical introduction by Arthur Phillips does sound — to be charitable — rather like typical family memoir. But then Phillips is no scholar of the Elizabethan stage, simply the lucky owner — in a sense, the “onlie begetter” — of the single surviving copy of “The Tragedy of Arthur.” By trade a novelist, he admits that his own feelings for Shakespeare, shaped largely by paternal bardolatry, are ambivalent at best. In these very pages he even names Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as “the real greatest writer in English literature”! Perhaps a kindhearted reader — grateful for Phillips’s role in bringing to light this masterpiece — should just shrug off the writer’s egregious allusions to his own life and every one of his books, starting with “Prague.” It does seem strange, however, that Jennifer Hershey, the Random House editor behind this project, permitted Phillips to quote at length from their sometimes heated private correspondence. Given that none of the tests — of paper, ink and style, by several experts — have proved inconsistent with what the play appears to be, it’s little wonder that Random House has gone ahead and published, with considerable fanfare, “The Tragedy of Arthur.” The text is printed in its

entirety, with explanatory footnotes, albeit with Elizabethan spellings modernized for the presentday reader. Such a presentation will hardly satisfy Shakespeare scholars, but for anything more sophisticated we will have to wait for the New Arden edition, which, we can only hope, will be overseen by someone at least as accomplished as the late William Henry Ireland. Of course, there are those who deny outright the play’s authenticity and others who may even accuse Arthur Phillips of nothing less than fraud. To minimize any possible unpleasantness, Phillips has tried to cover himself, rather feebly, by insisting that the dust jacket of “The Tragedy of Arthur” declare, in tiny type, “a novel by Arthur Phillips.” But who’s fooling whom? The first line of the book’s actual preface forthrightly, boldly proclaims: “Random House is proud to present this first modern edition of ‘The Tragedy of Arthur’ by William Shakespeare.” One could hardly be less ambiguous than that. Besides, would any sane 21st-century author spend uncounted hours fabricating a five-act drama in Elizabethan blank verse? Even without all the expert testimony, “The Tragedy of Arthur” certainly sounds Shakespearean: “Our backs are pressed to th’raging Humber’s waves; / There is no way but forward, as in life.” Admittedly, the speeches do contain a few unsettling observations about the relationship between the real and the counterfeit, as when Arthur tells his beloved Guenhera, “What can I say that was not elsewhere false?” or later soliloquizes, “So abjuration is forbidden me. / I am no author of my history.”

Still, even the most cursory reading of the more than 250-page preface makes clear Phillips’s complete, virtually confessional honesty. He doesn’t try to hide the fact that his con artist father was sentenced to prison for forgery. If anything, he is overzealous in his need to tell us everything that might influence our understanding of “The Tragedy of Arthur.” He describes his deep affection for his twin sister, Dana, an actress well known to theatergoers in the Twin Cities. He makes no secret of his ambivalent feelings for his often absent dad, nor does he hide the various erotic escapades of his youth and the breakup of his marriage to a Czech model. Being a novelist, he naturally falls into a style of reminiscence that could be likened to fiction. But is a man to be suspected of contrivance simply because he happened to be born on April 23, the same day as William Shakespeare? I suspect that most readers will greatly enjoy Phillips’s easygoing and digressive, if admittedly self-absorbed introduction. Just think of the joyless academic prose that a professional Elizabethan might have produced! As for the occasional parallels between the play’s action and elements in Arthur Phillips’s own life, are these not simply further proof of Shakespeare’s universality? In the mirror of his genius, we all see ourselves. Yet there is, as it happens, some third-party evidence to lend support to the genuineness of “The Tragedy of Arthur.” Through some sort of editorial inadvertence, the publicity packet sent to reviewers included a letter between Phillips and Random House attorneys about a possible breach of contract as well as a disturbing report from a firm of well-known investigators. From these, it is clear that Phillips did all he could to distance himself from the play and, indeed, to prevent its appearance. Why? Because he could not shake off his suspicion that it had been created — through means unknown to science — by his own father. Fortunately, Phillips’s contract and the

preponderance of scholarly opinion have ensured that the world is now able to read, and appreciate as it deserves, “The Tragedy of Arthur.” Still, mysteries remain concerning the play’s provenance and just how it came to be found in Minneapolis. One possible explanation takes an anti-Stratfordian line. Shakespeare, Phillips’s sister has suggested, was merely the frontman for the true authors of his supposed works, a secret duo consisting of Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, and an unsung Jewish poet of genius named Binyamin Feivel, who later changed his name to Ben Phillips. The 1597 quarto of “The Tragedy of Arthur” — its cover reproduced as a frontispiece in this Random House edition — was simply passed down in the Phillips family until it reached the present day. Despite all this corroborative material and reasonable guesswork, there are doubtless readers who will still regard “The Tragedy of Arthur” as some kind of post-modern, tongue-in-cheek trick, as an elaborately structured comic novel in the form of a memoir about a Shakespeare-obsessed, dysfunctional family. In such a view, Arthur Phillips has simply used his own artistry, so similar to his father’s con-artistry, to create a mirage, an illusion, an elaborate textual trompe l’oeil. Pfui. As soon doubt the truthfulness of Lucian’s “True History” or impugn the careful editorial commentary in Nabokov’s “Pale Fire.” Certainly, “The Tragedy of Arthur,” however you view it, shows off a writer at the top of his game. Just remember what Touchstone says in “As You Like It”: “The truest poetry is the most feigning.” Rhetorically speaking: Farnsworth’s guide to verbal persuasion • • •

by Michael Dirda May 9, 2011 Read Later

Soon, all across this fair land, assembled multitudes of young people will sit restlessly listening to commencement addresses. On such solemn occasions, the distinguished speakers, as they look out upon the bright, shining faces of the graduating classes, typically feel obliged to do more than just talk and tell jokes. Instead, they declaim, they orate, they moralize, they rise to the heights of what is commonly called rhetoric. “Let not this generation be one which .  .  . ” “Into your capable hands I bequeath to you this challenge.” “Go forth with eager heart and sturdy mind.” Fundamentally, rhetoric is the art of persuasion, embracing all those verbal tricks, patternings and syntactic subtleties used to gain assent from an audience. Yet insofar as any speech varies from the ordinary, we instinctively tend to be suspicious of it. Can such elevated, slightly artificial discourse be sincere? Aren’t we being persuaded by false tugs on our heartstrings or faulty logic dazzlingly presented? Thus, rhetoric is widely regarded as the tool of the fast-talking scam artist, the sleek courtroom showman, the rising political demagogue. In fact, as Ward Farnsworth — a professor of law at Boston University — demonstrates in his witty handbook, the various rhetorical techniques are actually the organizing principles behind vivid writing and speech. Unfortunately, because too few of us know Latin and Greek, the terminology describing these devices can seem off-puttingly alien. So “Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric”

offers pronunciation guidance, as well as definition: “Anaphora (a-na-pho-ra) occurs when the speaker repeats the same words at the start of successive sentences or clauses.” More important, this handbook also provides a slew of examples to reveal how great writers have added force and color to their sentences by employing these tropes or figures (as they are sometimes called). Chiasmus, for instance, “occurs when words or other elements are repeated with their order reversed.” John Kennedy’s most famous sentence is built on chiasmus: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Notice that the president also employed anaphora in the initial repetition of the word “ask.” By contrast, repetition of a word or phrase at the end of a series of sentences is called epistrophe. Dan Quayle once boldly likened himself to John Kennedy, provoking Lloyd Bentsen, who was running against him for vice president, to protest: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy; I knew Jack Kennedy; Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Farnsworth points out that here “the repeated element, Jack Kennedy, is put at the front rather than the end of the third clause, then moved back to the end for the finish. The variety adds to the force of the device when it resumes.” Farnsworth concludes that “the general purposes of epistrophe tend to be similar to those of anaphora, but the sound is different, and often a bit subtler, because the repetition does not become evident until each time a sentence or clause ends.” In anadiplosis, the close of one sentence or phrase is picked up to become the first part of the following sentence or phrase. Farnsworth cites “A Christmas Carol,” when Marley’s ghost says of the chain he wears: “I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.” To better appreciate sentence rhythm, Farnsworth suggests that the student “mentally rewrite passages as they might have otherwise been composed and to ask what is gained and lost. This last passage from Dickens could have been written with anaphora (of my own free will I girded it on, and of my own free will I wore it) or epistrophe (I girded it on of my own free will, and I wore it of my own free will). Instead he uses anadiplosis to put the repetition on the inside rather than at the start or finish; this keeps the choices made by the speaker in the more prominent start and end positions, and so makes them strong while still stressing the common feature they share — the free will, which is repeated in succession. Anadiplosis also creates a different cadence than the other devices: a march up the hill and back down again.” Many sentences or passages contain more than one figure. Isocolon, for instance, is “the use of successive sentences, clauses, or phrases similar in length and parallel in structure.” When I wrote “they declaim, they orate, they moralize,” this parallelism shows isocolon (as well as anaphora). Farnsworth warns that “an excessive or clumsy use” of isocolon can create “too glaring a finish and too strong a sense of calculation.” Of the 18 rhetorical forms that this book emphasizes, I myself am fondest of polysyndeton and asyndeton. The first is the repetition of conjunctions, as in this extended example from Thoreau: “If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man — then you are ready for a walk.” In contrast, asyndeton shows the avoidance of a conjunction when it might be expected: “But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.” Insert an “and” before that last phrase and see — or rather hear — how much weaker Lincoln’s sentence becomes.

I haven’t the space here to describe praeteritio, in which “the speaker describes what he will not say, and so says it, or at least a bit of it” — but I have just illustrated its use. Still now that I think about it further, I will discuss praeteritio, or at least write this sentence to demonstrate metanoia, in which a speaker changes his mind about whatever has just been said. No doubt, by this point some readers have already made up their own minds that “Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric” is altogether too arcane. Yet it isn’t really (prolepsis — anticipating an objection and meeting it). Admittedly, the book is not what you’d call an easy read (litotes — affirming something by denying its opposite), but it generously repays the attention you give it. Let me close with an example of hypophora — asking a question and then answering it: Should you buy “Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric”? If you’re at all interested in the techniques of writing, yes. At the very least, you’ll learn that that last sentence, with its inversion of the usual word order — “yes” at the end instead of the beginning of the sentence — is an instance of anastrophe. “The Emperor’s Body’’: A love triangle amid a macabre mission • • •

by Michael Dirda April 27, 2011 Read Later

More than 40 years ago, Peter Brooks — who now teaches at Princeton after a long career at Yale — brought out a study of late 18th- and early 19th-century French writers. It was called “The Novel of Worldliness” and concluded with reflections on the work of Stendhal. How appropriate, then, that his new book, and second novel (“World Elsewhere” appeared in 1999), is a highly Stendhalian affair, with the great French writer himself being one of three major characters. “The Emperor’s Body” is, loosely speaking, a work of historical fiction, set in 1840. Drawing on diaries, letters and memoirs, Brooks describes the French expedition to retrieve the body of Napoleon Bonaparte from its tomb on the island of St. Helena and return it to Paris for reinterment in the Hotel des Invalides. Philippe Chabot, a handsome, sensitive and perfectly mannered young aristocrat, leads this somewhat macabre mission. A third of the book, written from his perspective, presents this junior diplomat’s perplexities over the reality, legend and legacy of Napoleon in the quarter century since his death. When not reflecting on the emperor’s mystique, Philippe moons over Amelia Curial. This auburnhaired beauty, daughter of a famously tempestuous mother, has been strangely noncommittal about his obvious wish to marry her. Amelia is, in fact, a classic Stendhal heroine, passionate, generoushearted and thoughtful, determined to realize her own nature, no matter what the strictures of society: “I am not going to let my life be ruled by worry about my reputation.” As Philippe voyages to St. Helena and back, Amelia journeys into herself. But the young woman’s quest — for personal authenticity, for a vocation — soon grows entangled with a third narrative, centered on Henri Beyle, the 57-year-old French consul at Civitavecchia, better known to posterity under his pen name Stendhal. While Philippe is conscientious and reserved and Amelia full of fire and resolve, Beyle is, as he has always been, a highly self-aware yet

distinctly wistful man of the world. As he says, what’s interesting is “what someone is like past fifty. It takes that long to become a character of some depth. It is the weight of past history that makes someone interesting, the accumulation of past loves.” At the moment, however, Henri Beyle feels rather in the doldrums. Aside from desultorily performing his consular duties, he regularly daydreams about the women in his past, recalls his youthful adventures with Napoleon’s army and makes episodic visits to an old flame in Siena for mutual comfort. Recently, though, he has taken to mulling over a possible novel, one based on the news reports about the expedition that has just set out to retrieve Napoleon’s body. He even tries to imagine what Philippe Chabot must be like, what would bring this young man happiness. Then, one afternoon, the consul unexpectedly meets Amelia, who is visiting friends in Rome after the sudden death of her mother. He is utterly bowled over, primarily by Amelia herself, but also by vivid and intimate memories of her mother Clementine, “the most passionate woman he had ever encountered.” Instinctively, Beyle begins to play the gallant and wit, remarking, for instance, that “neglect of duty is a finely tuned instrument I have learned to make the utmost use of.” But he doesn’t need to impress Amelia, who is quite willing to reveal her inmost thoughts:

“Men are so stupid. At least the ones my age. They speak of their eternal devotion, their desire for a future of domestic bliss. Slavery and more slavery. Boredom.” Instead of such domestic suffocation, Amelia wants “adventure. Worlds to conquer.” Beyle comments that she should have been born a man, to which Amelia boldly replies: “You don’t like me as I am?” Beyle looks hard at the pale but intense young woman and says: ( Michael Dirda / ) - “The Emperor's Body: A Novel” by Peter Brooks. “Of course I do. You have the spirit I always dreamed of in a woman. If ever you can find the right man, he will be a most fortunate fellow. I envy him already.” At which point, Amelia glances up into his eyes and says, “Why must you talk of another man?” Beyle is overwhelmed. From here on, the novel takes up a series of very worldly questions: Why does Amelia offer herself to Beyle? Should the aging writer accept this unexpected gift? (“Isn’t it time to begin to behave with the dignity of age, for once?” he tells himself, and to “stop pretending to be one of your young heroes?”) What will Amelia do about Philippe’s proposal when he returns? What will happen to them all? Amelia Curial is Brooks’s own creation, but her mother Clementine — Menti — really was one of Henri Beyle’s great loves. Many readers will recognize at least some of the novel’s numerous Stendhalian touches: Beyle alludes to “the happy few” who appreciate his work and writes that the destiny of his novels is “to be read in 1940.” He dreams of what it would be like to be invisible (one of his imaginary “privileges”). He mentions Balzac’s enthusiastic but off-the mark review of “The Charterhouse of Parma.” A woman’s “grave smile and serious eyes” remind him of a Correggio

painting. He gives thanks for the glorious music of Mozart (but where are his other favorites, Rossini and Cimarosa?) After some reflections on love-making, Beyle even concludes, “That’s all it is” — an echo of Julien Sorel’s famous post-coital observation in “The Red and the Black” (“Is that all it is?”). The aging consul even compares himself to his own shrewd but weary-hearted Count Mosca, while the name Amelia is the anagram of “Lamiel,” the heroine of Beyle’s last incomplete novel about a woman who practices absolute freedom. At the climax of “The Emperor’s Body,” its thematic and plot strands come together, some “twisted, fraying at the ends, snapping even,” as the dead Napoleon finally reaches his new resting place. Philippe wonders whether his long absence during the voyage to and from St. Helena has cost him the love of Amelia. Beyle realizes that his own youth is buried with the emperor in his tomb. And Amelia impulsively acts, with consequences only clearly revealed in an epilogue set in 1851. Peter Brooks made his reputation as a literary critic and scholar, but it’s obvious that he possesses an enviable gift for elegant and urbane narrative. He reminds me a little of another superb writer who only began to write fiction late in life: Penelope Fitzgerald. I suspect that she admired Stendhal, too. ‘The Philosophical Breakfast Club’ by Laura Snyder, reviewed by Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda March 24, 2011 Read Later

This fine book — essentially a history of British science during the first two-thirds of the 19th century — examines the interwoven lives of Charles Babbage (1791-1871), John Herschel (17921871), William Whewell (1794-1866) and Richard Jones (1790-1855). In their time, all were famous, but today only the first is still a name to conjure with. The cranky, irascible Babbage imagined, then built a small model of what he called a “Difference Engine,” and worked out plans for the even more sophisticated “Analytical Engine.” In short, as every reader of Victorian steampunk fiction knows, Babbage invented the computer. His friends, moreover, were no slouches. Whewell coined the word “scientist,” suggested that geologist Charles Lyell name historical epochs “Eocene,” “Miocene” and “Pliocene” and gave Michael Faraday the terms “ion,” “cathode” and “anode.” Whewell became a professor of mineralogy, produced a book on scientific method that inspired a young man named Darwin, translated Homer’s “Iliad” into hexameters and spent the second half of his adult life as the master of Trinity College, Oxford, the most influential academic post in Britain. Richard Jones, the least notable of the four, made his mark as a critic of David Ricardo’s hardhearted economics and influenced the more socially aware thought of John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx. The only child of William Herschel, the emigrant German astronomer who discovered the planet Uranus, John Herschel eclipsed his father in the wide range of his scientific interests. First notable as a chemist and a mathematician, he later charted the stars of the Southern Hemisphere, produced a massive catalogue of nebulae and was instrumental in the development of photography, showing William Henry Fox Talbot how to fix an image so that it wouldn’t fade.

These lifelong friends first met at Oxford, where Herschel hosted, in 1812 and 1813, what we would now call Sunday brunches during which the conversation touched on every aspect of science, religion and society. From the beginning, the quartet shared two convictions: Science must be grounded in careful observation and exact measurement, and it should benefit humanity. Drawing on astonishing energy and learning, even by Victorian standards, they helped bring about the transformation of science from a hobby into a profession. In the course of their careers, as Laura Snyder writes: “They had publicly called for public funding for scientific innovation. .  .  . They had brought to the public’s attention the issue of scientific method, writing popular books and articles on the subject. They had advanced the idea that the methods of one science (geology) could be brought to bear on another (economics). They had argued for professorships in the sciences at the universities, and for adequate lecture rooms, laboratories, and salaries for those professions. .  .  . They had been instrumental in the formation of scientific societies,” including the Astronomical Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Notably, too, their personal influence extended far and wide. To choose just one example: Whewell teamed up with Francis Beaufort of the Hydographic Office to study tides. Beaufort, as every sailor knows, gave his name to the scale still used to gauge the wind’s force. But as Snyder casually reminds us, Beaufort was also “the government official who approved Charles Darwin for the position of naturalist on the voyage of HMS Beagle.” Snyder is a historian of science, and whenever her fab four start on a new project she regales the reader with its past history. Thus, in the course of her book, she explains Francis Bacon’s inductive method, the early development of automata (including Jacques de Vaucanson’s notorious “Defecating Duck” with its 400 moving parts), the history of economics and the care of the poor, the discovery of photography in Europe and England, the stormy life of Byron’s daughter Ada (who, as the mathematically gifted Countess Lovelace, assisted Babbage in his work), the New York Sun hoax claiming that Herschel had discovered “bat-men” on the moon, the controversies surrounding the rival mathematicians who calculated the existence of Neptune, the search for the magnetic poles, the development of an English form of telegraphy quite different from that of Samuel Morse and the methods of cryptanalysis used by Babbage in his solution to the famous “Vigenere” code, the supposedly “indecipherable cipher.” In short, “The Philosophical Breakfast Club” is as wide-ranging and anecdotal, as excited and exciting, as those long-ago Sunday morning conversations at Oxford. Snyder just can’t resist a good story or an odd factoid. For example, prior to outlining in detail the workings of Babbage’s Difference Engine, she informs us that “the first mechanical calculating device known to have been constructed was designed by Wilhelm Schickard (1592-1635) of Wurttemberg, later part of Germany. Schickard was, impressively, Professor of Hebrew, Oriental Languages, Mathematics, Astronomy, and Geography at the University of Tubingen. Schickard was well acquainted with the famous astronomer Johannes Kepler, discoverer of the elliptical shape of planetary orbits, who had come to Tubingen to help defend his mother when she was accused of being a witch.” That a great scientist’s mother might have been a witch — to learn such a fact is half the charm of reading history. Elsewhere, Snyder notes that Babbage invented the “penny post” in which the sender paid for a single stamp, good nationwide, rather than having a letter’s recipient charged according to the

distance the letter had traveled. “Babbage calculated that the cost of sorting the mail and determining the appropriate postage cost more than what the postal service earned by the extra postage.” Some readers may find Snyder almost too generous with her anecdotes and back-stories, but to me her book is an example of popular intellectual history at its near best. What’s more, “The Philosophical Breakfast Club” forms a natural successor to Jenny Uglow’s “The Lunar Men” (which focuses on 18th-century chemist Joseph Priestley, inventors James Watt and Josiah Wedgwood, and polymath Erasmus Darwin), and Richard Holmes’s “The Age of Wonder” (in which William Herschel and his sister Caroline are prominent figures, along with chemist Humphry Davy and botanist and head of the Royal Society Joseph Banks). As it happens, the final chapter in “The Philosophical Breakfast Club” looks briefly ahead to the careers of James Clerk Maxwell and Lord Kelvin, so perhaps there’s yet another volume needed to bring the history of British science into the 21st century. In the meantime, allow Laura Snyder to introduce you to the obsessive Charles Babbage and his busy, hardworking friends. Armstrong’s bountiful journey ‘In Search of Civilization’ • • •

by Michael Dirda April 14, 2011 Read Later

What does the word “civilization” mean? Philosopher John Armstrong opens his engrossing “In Search of Civilization” by imagining a late-night discussion program in which four panelists propose different definitions. \"In Search of Civilization: Remaking a Tarnished Idea,\" by John Armstrong (Graywolf. 197 pp. $24) To the first panelist, a civilization consists of simply “what is shared and taken for granted by whole societies.” The second insists that “civilization is connected to the development and deployment of wealth and material power.” It’s what people mean when they say they’re out in the country, miles from civilization. A third speaker — Armstrong identifies him as a languid aesthete — murmurs that the word refers to “the sophisticated pursuit of pleasure,” to elegance and the enjoyment of good food and wine. The last panelist asserts that civilization “doesn’t indicate what is normal in a society; it picks out the grandest, most noble achievements,” that is, the great life-giving ideas, the best that humankind can achieve. In the rest of his book, Armstrong examines more deeply these definitions and their implications for us today. In his opening discussion of the “clash of civilizations” — the title of a well-known book by Samuel P. Huntington — he emphasizes that the rich accomplishments of China, the West and Islam are not in conflict, but are rather “on the same side in a clash between cultivated intelligence and barbarism. The irony is that such barbarism too often goes under the name of loyalty to a civilization.” In fact, true civilization is “the life-support system for high-quality relationships to people, ideas and objects.” (Love, Armstrong explains, is the one-word version of the phrase “high quality of relationship.”) Civilization, then, seeks “to find and protect the good

things with which — potentially — we can form high-quality relationships.” It also “fosters and protects the qualities in us that allow us to love such things for the right reasons. The qualities that inspire love are: goodness, beauty and truth. And when we love these qualities, we come to possess the corresponding capacities of wisdom, kindness and taste.” To be civilized, Armstrong argues — with a nod toward Matthew Arnold’s influential essay “Culture and Anarchy” — each of us should strive to become our best self. This requires us to be attentive to ends rather than means. Cellphones, he observes, may allow us “to communicate more often, to take more photographs, to locate restaurants; but these resources do not automatically help us reach the ‘ends’ they ideally serve: good conversation, deep relationships, convivial evenings, the appreciation of beauty.” Whatever “the cross-currents of fashion,” we need to bear in mind those goals in life that truly matter. Thus Armstrong doesn’t deride cellphones or any other aspect of technology, but he does emphasize that “civilization is material prosperity plus something else. The character of that something else is to do with inner life: the prosperity of the soul.” What matters is that an increase in material comfort be accompanied by a corresponding expansion in spiritual growth, by the nurturing and diffusion of “wisdom, kindness and taste.” To many, Armstrong admits, these three words will sound old-fashioned and elitist. But they shouldn’t. The real task of art and intelligence is “to shape and direct our longings, to show us what is noble and important.” Rather than happiness, per se, civilization should promote what Armstrong calls “flourishing,” a sense of personal “satisfaction grounded in character and action.” Later chapters of Armstrong’s study take up some of the psychological aspects of civilization. For instance, our tragic sense of life is “founded on the fact that not all good things are compatible: it may be (for most people) impossible to have a happy marriage and a raucous erotic life; or to have a well-paid job and follow your own vocation; it may be that you cannot live in the place where you most want to live; responsibility is tedious and frightening; yet taking responsibility is important.” In the face of such inner conflicts, as well as life’s normal vicissitudes, civilization should help “strengthen us to face inevitable disappointment and suffering,” largely by instilling the stoic virtues: “the capacity to do without, to postpone pleasure, to make ourselves do things we do not want to do (when there is good reason to do them); to put up with minor irritations, to avoid complaint and useless criticism.” Armstrong also emphasizes the spiritual benefits of paying attention to “little things.” He points to the Japanese ritual of the tea ceremony in which an ordinary activity may — through “care, authority, direction and focus of attention, the accumulation of experience, the winnowing of the essential from the irrelevant” — be raised to a life-enhancing art, infusing value and meaning into people’s daily lives far beyond the period of the ceremony itself. Just so, Armstrong reminds us, “the central ambition of the civilizing process is to develop — and improve — the quality of our relationships . . . to ideas, places, people, objects, difficulties and opportunities, memories, ambitions.” There’s much else in this carefully written book: reflections on barbarism and decadence; a defense of “charm” in education; thoughts on the true experience of art; and the importance of transmitting to others what we love. In particular, the study of history, philosophy and the arts can supply us with “ideal achievements” worth emulating and integrating into our present-day lives. Our inner

selves hunger for “the cultivation and education of depth,” just as our souls yearn for “higher things” and our intellects need “mental space” to foster open-mindedness, a receptivity to new ideas and the ability to live with ambivalence. The heroes of civilization, Armstrong concludes, are those who teach us “how to combine devotion to noble values with an acceptance of the ways of the world.” Such a one was the Roman orator, public servant and philosopher Cicero, who could appreciate the refinement and cultivation of the Greeks while still honoring “the robust military and administrative capacities of Rome.” This view of the past — as a repository of humane values and inspiring examples — was central to the Renaissance and later centuries, but has been largely pooh-poohed by our smug and smirky age. If you enjoy books such as the recent studies of Montaigne by Saul Frampton and Sarah Bakewell or regularly pick up the easygoing philosophical essays of Alain de Botton, you should look for “In Search of Civilization.” It’s a serious book, written with directness and simplicity, about what it means to live — in every sense — a good life. Geoff Dyer’s ‘Otherwise Known as the Human Condition’: Witty essays on life • • •

by Michael Dirda April 8, 2011 Read Later

According to publishing wisdom, readers don’t buy collections of anything, least of all collections of essays and occasional journalism. I’ve never understood the reasons for this, since I know that many people turn to the essays and reportage in magazines before anything else, except the cartoons. A good review or article opens our eyes to some new subject, while the author’s tone, voice, style — call it what you will — carries us along. What we value, in particular, is contact with a well-stocked mind and an appealing or provocative personality. Geoff Dyer belongs to that seemingly never-ending line of smart and witty Englishmen and women of letters. He himself might point to D.H. Lawrence — the subject of his most famous nonfiction book, “Out of Sheer Rage” — as his mighty progenitor, especially the Lawrence of the essays and travelogues. Yet there’s a tubercular austerity about Lawrence that is alien to Dyer, who during the 1980s and ’90s was very much into sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Like other hedonists of letters, such as Cyril Connolly and Kingsley Amis, Dyer is more than just a good critic; he’s also extremely funny, passionate about women, drink and life’s varied pleasures, a bit of a show-off and immensely enjoyable to read. “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition” draws on the past 25 years of Dyer’s journalism, selecting material from “Anglo-English Attitudes” and “Working the Room,” two retrospective collections published only in Britain. The 65 or so pieces are divided into cleverly titled sections: “Visuals,” “Verbals,” “Musicals,” “Variables” and “Personals.” As this suggests, besides books, Dyer’s passions include photography, music and, not least, his own sweet self. Like many other writers, Dyer finds in photography an impetus to philosophical and erotic reverie. He falls in love with a sunbather photographed by Jacques Henri Lartigue and imagines the

conversation between an Italian soldier and a woman with a bicycle in a picture by Robert Capa. A chapter on Richard Avedon deconstructs the “contrived naturalness” of that artist’s many images of celebrities: “In one of his most famous portraits, [writer] Isak Dinesen looks like she was once the most beautiful woman in the world — about two thousand years ago.” Dyer includes his deeply moving, yet scholarly, introduction to “What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney,” who died of AIDS, then follows with a sharp appreciation of the outsider art of the Czech Miroslav Tichy, who worked with a cheap Russian camera and juryrigged hardware, scavenging and “building his equipment with whatever came to hand: a rewind mechanism made of elastic from a pair of shorts and attached to empty spools of thread; lenses from old spectacles and Plexiglas, polished with sandpaper, toothpaste, and cigarette ash.” Surely, such a determined artist went on to surreptitiously chronicle political atrocities or social injustice? Not at all. Tichy crept around swimming pools and secluded parks snapping pictures of women, preferably with as few clothes on as possible. Dyer shrewdly likens him to the leering British comedian Benny Hill.

In the middle of “The Awakening of Stones: Rodin” — a meditation on the French artist, the sexuality of his sculpture, and Jennifer Gough-Cooper’s photographs of his work — Dyer refers to his essay as “this ragbag of quotations.” In just a few pages, he cites Milton, Blake, Rilke, Baudelaire, Yeats, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein,” a late novel by John Updike, and several contemporary art critics. Is this too much? Maybe. At times, Dyer sounds as if he were datadumping or name-dropping — or just channeling his inner George Steiner. In the “Verbals” section, Dyer offers essays on more than a dozen writers ranging from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Don DeLillo, Lorrie Moore and James Salter. In a particularly neat phrase, he both sums up and mildly criticizes Salter’s great novel “Light Years” as being “saturated with its own intensity.” He also reprints two superb introductions: to the gossipy “Goncourt Journals” and to Rebecca West’s magisterially digressive “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.” Of the latter, a twovolume travel book about 1930s Yugoslavia that is “one of the supreme masterpieces of the twentieth century,” Dyer tellingly observes that its rambling pages are held together largely by tone. He adds that West’s best work “is scattered among reportage, journalism, and travel — the kind of things traditionally regarded as sidelines or distractions.” With similar approval, Dyer underscores that the distinctive appeal of journals, like those of John Cheever, lies in “the way that the incidental and irrelevant do not get pushed aside as must happen in the course of more streamlined narratives.” Like the genre-bending Dyer, many of his favorite writers — another is W.G. Sebald, revered for autumnal masterpieces such as “Austerlitz” — aim to meld essay, fiction and reminiscence. Given the contents of the other sections of “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition,” Dyer must surely rival Clive James and Christopher Hitchens in “intellectual nomadism.” To use his own term, he is “a literary and scholarly gate-crasher, turning up uninvited at an area of expertise,

making myself at home, having a high old time for a year or two, and then moving on elsewhere.” Thus, besides all I’ve mentioned, this hefty collection contains a survey of books about the war in the Middle East, a report on a Paris fashion show, a visit to Albert Camus’s Algeria, an analysis of all the John Coltrane versions of “My Favorite Things” — Dyer’s attention to detail rivals that of an opera queen discussing bootleg recordings of Maria Callas — and musings about the sexual charge of luxury hotel rooms. He closes his book with the “Personals” section, which should more accurately be called “Even More Personals” because everything in these pages is suffused with the author’s wry and brazenly honest self. Among the “Personals” are accounts of a youthful passion for Spider-Man comics, a portrait of Dyer’s working-class family, the dazzling “On Being an Only Child” and several short memoirs of a young manhood spent taking drugs, living on the dole and chasing girls. Not least, the book’s title piece, “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition,” gradually builds to a virtuoso dissertation on routine, obsession and the quest for the perfect doughnut. Years ago, Geoff Dyer’s dad gave him a bit of worldly advice: “Never put anything in writing.” As always, it’s a good thing that sons never listen to their fathers. Nicholas Frankel reframes ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’ • • •

by Michael Dirda April 4, 2011 Read Later

Today avatars and simulated selves carry out complex lives online, and we commonly regard such activities as peculiar to the computer age. But are they? In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, writer after writer developed the theme of the Double Life or the Secret Self. Think of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” and Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Man With the Twisted Lip” (in which the upper-class Neville St. Clair regularly disguises himself as a crippled beggar to earn money to support his stylish wife and establishment). The famous Victorian sex diary “My Secret Life” and the Jack the Ripper murders testify, in their differing ways, to a similar division between public respectability and private obsession. “He’s a regular Jekyll and Hyde” remains a description of anyone with two radically different sides to his personality. But Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” may be even more troubling than Stevenson’s masterpiece. Everyone knows its central premise: The beautiful Dorian Gray remains, as we now say, forever young, while his hidden portrait ages and grows increasingly horrifying, a vivid representation of the elegant sensualist’s every sin and evil act. In pages redolent of fin-de-siecle languor and sparkling with bons mots, Wilde’s only novel raises several seriously troubling questions: If one could live a life of absolute freedom, would the result be happiness or a nightmare? How much of our complex selves do we deny or sacrifice to conventional morality? What, most simply, is this book really about? To Nicholas Frankel, editor of “The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition,” the novel is a lightly coded text about homoeroticism, what Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s lover,

famously dubbed “the love that dare not speak its name.” The centrality of the sexual is, Frankel maintains, much clearer in the original typescript, which forms the basis for this edition. Scholars have long been aware that Wilde — responding to reviews that warned of the story’s “uncleanness” — toned down the sexual elements in the 1890 Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine version and added some new plot elements for the 1891 book publication, notably the sentimental chapter in which the actress Sybil Vane gushes to her mother about her handsome but unknown admirer and the scenes late in the novel set in the opium dens and murderous streets of London’s East End. But, as Frankel emphasizes, the Lippincott editors had already slightly bowdlerized Wilde’s original story, deleting words such as “mistress” and excising whole sentences and paragraphs, making the book 500 words shorter and less overtly offensive to contemporary morality. This Harvard edition of the untouched typescript is thus a necessary acquisition for any serious student of Wilde’s work. Yet the label “uncensored” is somewhat deceiving, leading a naive reader to think he or she is being given the whole and complete novel, rather than a preliminary (though perhaps artistically superior) version of it. Wilde simply added too much to the 1891 book edition for any other text to replace it as standard, even if some of the later material about crime and poverty seems out of place. Besides, one really does want as much of the witty, Mephistophelean Lord Henry Wotton as possible.

However, Frankel’s is also an “annotated” edition, which means that this slightly oversize volume proffers an abundance of explanatory material. There are pictures and title page illustrations, period references are identified, and nearly every page is provided with a mini-essay on some aspect of the book’s artistry. For instance, Frankel repeatedly points out verbal echoes and parallels from Wilde’s other works, in particular “The Importance of Being Earnest.” That play is also a study of double lives, of how the stern and upright country gentleman Uncle Jack takes on the identity of his wicked, bachelor brother Ernest whenever he goes up to London. Yet in that case, Wilde produced the airiest and most perennially delightful comedy in modern drama, while in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” he treats a very similar theme as gothic melodrama and mystery, and arguably as tragedy. Frankel, who teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University, takes particular pains to identify books that influenced Wilde’s novel. These include, most prominently, Charles Maturin’s “Melmoth the Wanderer,” in which the protagonist sells his soul to the devil for an extended life; Balzac’s “The Wild Ass’s Skin,” wherein a man acquires a magical piece of leather that allows him to gratify every desire (while shrinking each time he is granted one of his wishes); Walter Pater’s “Studies in the History of the Renaissance” with its concluding call to pack one’s days with fresh sensations and to “burn always with this hard, gemlike flame”; and J.K. Huysmans’s “A Rebours” (“Against the Grain”), the supposed model for the curious yellow-backed book that inspires both Lord Henry and Dorian. “One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner.” In the text here presented, Wilde actually gives that poisonous novel a title, “Le Secret de Raoule, par Catulle Sarrazin.” More wisely, he left it unnamed in the book version.

In the long ninth chapter, Dorian — very much like Des Esseintes in “A Rebours” — extols his morbid tastes in literature, painting and history, as well as his theories of psychology (prefiguring Freud). “To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of thought and passion.” In particular, Dorian loves the worst excesses of the Italian Renaissance, especially tales of papal Ganymedes, Borgia incest and his own ancestor Elizabeth Devereux, of whom “strange stories .  .  . were told about the death of those to whom she granted her favours.” As entertaining and informative as his marginalia can be, Frankel is unavoidably selective in his annotations. For instance, he duly identifies Vernon Lee (the pen name of Violet Paget) as the author of “Euphorion,” a source for several of the more scandalous Renaissance anecdotes. But I’ve long wondered if Wilde might also have been influenced by Lee’s “Amour Dure,” one of the most haunting Victorian tales of the uncanny. The story, which first appeared in Murray’s Magazine in 1887, describes a sexually irresistible beauty who corrupts and destroys every man who loves her and whose portrait exerts a mesmerizing power. Of course, a great work of art inevitably raises as many questions as it answers. That’s why it remains a classic, a book that generation after generation returns to. If you’ve never read “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” I’d still suggest you start with the 1891 version, widely available. But after this enthralling novel has left you shaken and disturbed, look for deeper understanding in Nicholas Frankel’s superb annotated edition. Celebrating Montaigne, celebrator of life • • •

by Michael Dirda March 28, 2011 Read Later

Suppose that Earth was invited to join the Intergalactic Congress of Planets, and its chair-being, Zinglos-Atheling, wanted to know more about our strange species. What one person in history would you choose to best represent humanity? On the one hand, Socrates and Jesus are a bit too saintly (or more than saintly) to be wholly representative; on the other, Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan are, as the saying goes, all too human. You could hardly go wrong by picking Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), the subject of these two excellent books. This French nobleman retired to his book-lined tower in his late 30s and spent the next 20 years in self-scrutiny, gradually revealing more about himself than anyone had ever done before. His essays — Montaigne originated the genre — discuss philosophies of life, quote widely from the ancients and are full of anecdotes from Plutarch, but they also tell us that their author is short, suffers terribly from kidney stones and wishes he didn’t have such a small penis. Above all else, Montaigne celebrates life in all its glorious messiness, while reminding us that nothing matters more than human connectedness and kindness to people and animals. An endlessly digressive writer, Montaigne is as much raconteur as moralist, and his book offers some of the best after-dinner conversation in the world. You can never be sure what this French humanist will say next. The innocuous-sounding “On Some Lines of Virgil” isn’t about Latin

poetry; it’s about sex and eroticism. His greatest single essay — and his last — bears the majestic title “On Experience.” In it, Montaigne reminds us that no matter how high our social status, we all still sit on our own bottoms. Sarah Bakewell’s “How to Live,” which first appeared last fall to deserved acclaim, has a slight tendency to longwindedness, and its chapter titles verge on the irritatingly cutesy (e.g., “How to live? Do a good job, but not too good a job”). No matter. The book is packed with useful information: Bakewell clarifies the nature of stoicism and scepticism, looks into the lives of Montaigne’s parents, his wife and his adopted daughter, Marie de Gournay (who first edited the essays), and examines closely Montaigne’s famous friendship with Etienne de La Boetie. Asked to explain why he cared so much for his friend, Montaigne could only say: “Because it was him; because it was me.” No better definition of love has yet appeared. All in all, “How to Live” touches on every aspect of Montaigne’s thought, life and influence, and culminates in a fascinating chapter on the complicated textual history of the “Essays.” In the end, Bakewell concludes that Montaigne’s greatest lesson is that “life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself” and that our troubled 21st century “could use his sense of moderation, his love of sociability and courtesy, his suspension of judgment, and his subtle understanding of the psychological mechanisms involved in confrontation and conflict.”

To understand Montaigne’s emphasis on the human need for touch, Frampton turns to proxemics, the “anthropology of people’s relationship to each other in space” and kinesics, “what their movements and gestures reveal.” Fundamentally, he emphasizes, Montaigne “is preoccupied with what the link between our minds and our bodies can tell us about the nature of mankind more generally.” Human presence, human proximity “is thus at the heart of morality” and “the basis of happiness itself.” For Montaigne, says Frampton, friends are simply “people that you go and see.” Like his father, the essayist suffered from kidney stones, that most excruciatingly painful of ailments, and one that ultimately killed him. Only one of Montaigne’s six children lived to adulthood. Civil war raged all around him. Yet Montaigne never surrendered to despair. Even “the stone,” as Frampton shows, helped him better appreciate “what it is to be.” As Montaigne writes: “Is there anything sweeter than the sudden change when, after extreme pain, by ejecting the stone I recover, in a flash of lightning, the beautiful light of health, so free and so full?” This is how we should always savor our lives. But more often than not, says Montaigne, “we are never at home, we are always beyond ourselves. Fear, desire, hope, still push us on toward the future, and deprive us of the feeling and consideration of that which is, to distract us with the thought of what will be, even when we shall be no more.” Orson Welles once declared Montaigne “the greatest writer of any time, anywhere.” Certainly the wise reader will use Bakewell and Frampton as springboards into the essays themselves. Almost any translation will do, whether John Florio’s florid Elizabethan classic or the sensitive modern versions of Frame and Michael Screech. When we look into Montaigne’s “Essays,” we find ourselves. 'The Word Exchange' book review: Old English poetry isn't lost in translation

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by Michael Dirda Feb. 17, 2011 Read Later

JR.R. Tolkien once described "Beowulf" - and by extension much of Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, poetry - as "a drink dark and bitter: a solemn funeral-ale with the taste of death." He further emphasized - in his scholarly essay "The Monsters and the Critics" - what he called the "unrecapturable magic" of ancient English verse. In poems like "The Seafarer," "The Wanderer" and "The Battle of Maldon," "profound feeling, and poignant vision, filled with the beauty and mortality of the world, are aroused by brief phrases, light touches, short words resounding like harpstrings, sharply plucked." Note that Tolkien calls this poetry's magic "unrecapturable." Because of "The Word Exchange," that's no longer entirely true. Nonetheless, a little of this bleakly dour alliterative verse - even in superb modern English versions - goes a long way. This isn't gaily ribboned Camelot or Merrie Olde England. This is a wintry February world of cold iron, gray dawns, stoicism and lonely exile, with little brightness to life apart from an occasional cup of mead in a thane's household or a shining ring bestowed by some noble lord to an honored warrior. When these poems aren't about the epic defense of a narrow place against odds, they frequently give Christian dogma and story a distinctive Dark Age twist. For example, "The Dream of the Rood" - called "The Vision of the Cross" in Ciaran Carson's translation - presents the Crucifixion from the Cross's point of view. "This man of mettle - God Almighty - then stripped off/for battle; stern and strong, he climbed the gallows." Eventually, "battle-weary," the "dear warrior" is taken down by His followers. In the future, the Cross becomes God's army's banner so that none need fear God's wrath "who bear upon their breast" this "brightest emblem." Anglo-Saxon phrases, as Tolkien observes, often resound "like harp strings, sharply plucked." In his preface, Seamus Heaney points to a supreme example of such resonance. Although "The Battle of Maldon" - about a bloody encounter between native Anglo-Saxons and invading Norsemen - stands among the half-dozen greatest old English poems, it is still a fragment, one that tellingly opens with the words "brocen wurde," that is "[it] was broken." Those two words, Heaney writes, "could almost function as a very condensed history of Anglo-Saxon poetry." For the Anglo-Saxon hegemony was shattered in 1066, when the Norman French conquered England and brought with them their softer, more flowing tongue. The resulting hybrid, Middle English, while still sometimes hard going, is recognizably a language we still speak. It is Chaucer's dialect: "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote." But Anglo-Saxon remains alien. "The Word Exchange" includes original poems - 123 of them - on its left-hand pages and the English versions on the right. "Caedmon's Hymn," traditionally viewed as the oldest surviving example of such poetry, opens this way: "Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard." With effort one can make out that the words mean roughly: Now we shall praise the heavenly kingdom's guardian. It's relatively easy to see the English word "heaven" joined to the German word "Reich," while "weard" calls to mind the old phrase "watch and ward." But things grow more difficult in the

second line with "meotodes meahte and his modgethanc."(I've used "th" to represent the Old English letter called a thorn.) Harvey Shapiro renders these two lines this way: "Guardian of heaven whom we come to praise/who mapped creation in His thought's sinews." The more than 70 poets called upon by the anthology's editors, Greg Delanty and Michael Matto, are certainly distinguished. The roster includes Heaney himself ("Deor"), Paul Muldoon ("Wulf and Eadwacer"), David R. Slavitt ("The Battle of Maldon"), Derek Mahon ("Durham"), Robert Hass ("The Battle of Brunanburh") and Yusef Komunyakaa ("The Ruin"). Much Anglo-Saxon verse takes the form of riddles, charms, prayers and maxims, and scores of these are Englished by Billy Collins, Carol Muske-Dukes, Michael Collier, Molly Peacock, Dennis O'Driscoll, Jane Hirshfield and others equally notable. Many of the poets were assisted by Matto, who provided "cribs, glossaries, and interpretive direction." In an appendix, David Ferry, Eamon Grennan, Rachel Hadas and nine other contributors offer mini-essays on their experience of turning Anglo-Saxon into modern English. Mary Jo Salter's was perhaps the most daunting task, as she had not only to translate "The Seafarer" but also to resist the influence of a powerful precursor: Ezra Pound's classic (if slightly truncated) version, a masterpiece of sinewy diction and syntax. Adopting a smoother line, Salter opens: "I can sing my own true story/of journeys through this world,/how often I was tried/by troubles." The narrator goes on to contrast loneliness at sea and life on the land, with Salter at one point employing language that seems to echo the depiction of spring in Horace's famous "Diffugere nives" ode: "Groves break into blossom,/the towns and fields grow fair/and the world once more is new." She ends with the maximlike observations: "A man must steer his passions,/be strong in staying steady/. . . . Let us ponder where our true/home is, and how to reach it." Anyone who has been put off Anglo-Saxon poetry because of the stiffness or academese of older translations will discover much to enjoy in "The Word Exchange." Almost everything is here, with the exception of the book-length "Beowulf." Still, bear in mind that the softer passions are seldom mentioned, and this is definitely not a book for a late Valentine's Day present. But there is wonderful stuff here, as in these closing lines from Bernard O'Donoghue's translation of "Widsith," the reflections of a wandering poet: So the minstrels of men go wandering by the dictates of fate through many lands. They express what is needed and compose thanks. Always, south or north, they find someone with wise taste for poems, generous with gifts who wants his name raised before the people, to achieve valor, before everything fails,

light and life together. He earns their praise: so under heaven gains exalted glory. Michael Dirda - Book World: Michael Dirda on Nigel Smith's biography of poet Andrew Marvell • • •

by Michael Dirda Jan. 20, 2011 Read Later

Yale University Press 400 pp. $45 In 1921, T.S. Eliot, commemorating the tercentenary of Andrew Marvell's birth, coyly referred to the poet as "the former member for Hull" - that is, Parliament's representative from the provincial city of Hull. Eliot wasn't simply being cute. While most of us think of Marvell (1621-1678) as the author of the best seduction poem in the English language, he was known to his contemporaries as a private tutor, a hardworking civil servant and an occasional diplomatic emissary (to Holland and Russia). He was also quite probably a secret agent. "To His Coy Mistress," "The Garden," "Upon Appleton House" and his three or four other familiar masterpieces weren't even published until 1681, three years after his death. Nigel Smith, a professor of English at Princeton University, is Marvell's editor in the invaluable Longman's Annotated English Poets series, and he has certainly mastered everything that can be learned about this elusive, shadowy and very private man. While Smith expresses the hope that his biography will "make Marvell known to the widest possible readership," his isn't an easy task, given a paucity of personal anecdote and the fact that the poems most people care about are those Marvell wrote in his 20s or early 30s. The last 25 years of his life were largely devoted to government work and occasional verse satires on the politics of the day. As a result, "Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon" focuses throughout on the distant politics of 17thcentury England and on Marvell's reactions to it, whether in his public career or in his private writing. The son of a clergyman, the poet started off a royalist, spent much of the civil war abroad, welcomed Oliver Cromwell (while showing sympathy and admiration for the doomed Charles I, who was beheaded in 1649), and ultimately worked closely as an assistant to the protectorate's secretary of foreign tongues: none other than John Milton, who by that point in his life had gone blind. When Cromwell died, it is said that Marvell, Milton and John Dryden walked together in the funeral cortege.

Following the restoration of the monarchy, Marvell served in Parliament, published religious and political pamphlets, including "An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England" (1677), and eventually died poor. A Mary Marvell, nee Palmer and possibly his former landlady, dubiously claimed to be his widow. Smith is open to this possibility, in part because Marvell's sexuality was distinctly heterodox. Misogyny and pedophilia have been detected in some of his poems, but so have hints of homosexuality (reinforced by contemporary rumors). The satirical poet Samuel Butler even implied that some kind of genital accident left Marvell a eunuch.

No one knows for sure. As Smith writes, Marvell "had few friends and generally did not trust people. He liked drinking but would not drink in company." As Washingtonians know, public responsibilities sometimes require not only discretion but also secrecy and the maintenance of a low profile. Still, there are signs that this lifelong civil servant felt frustrated and disappointed, was subject to jealousy and sneering, and regarded himself as fundamentally an outsider. Little wonder that Marvell's verse often leaves us unsure of where he and we stand, distinguished as it is by ambiguities, ironies and a liking for what the ancients called "concordia discors" (dissonant harmony). To the common view of Marvell as a somewhat Olympian figure, incorruptible and patriotic, Smith suggests that his poetry might have resulted from "a brilliant sublimation of a set of social and sexual confusions and frustrations." Eliot regarded Marvell as the product of European - that is to say Latin - culture, neatly defining his wit as "a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace." An early Marvell poem such as "On a Drop of Dew" employs the elaborate metaphysical conceits we associate with John Donne; the "Dialogue Between the Soul and Body" - a very Yeatsian title - depicts "a Soul hung up, as 'twere, in Chains/Of Nerves, and Arteries, and Veins." In "The Definition of Love," Marvell dramatically announces that his love "was begotten by despair/Upon Impossibility." "The Garden" contains the famous couplet "Annihilating all that's made/To a Green Thought in a Green Shade," and "An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" hauntingly tells us that Cromwell's destiny was to bring about Charles I's downfall and so "to ruin the great Work of Time." All these are famous lines. But in any rereading of Marvell's poetry one regularly discovers striking passages in unexpected works, such as this opening to "The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C." in which human life is likened to one long act of drowning: So Man, declining always, disappears In the weak Circles of increasing Years; And his short Tumults of themselves Compose,

While flowing Time above his Head does close. While "Upon Appleton House" may be Marvell's most sustained poem, it is overlong for most modern tastes, being composed of descriptions of a country estate with Horatian reflections on rural ease, coupled with advice to its owner, Lord Fairfax, and a look to the future of his little daughter Mary, for whom Marvell was employed as a tutor. Perhaps only in "To His Coy Mistress" did Marvell avoid both obscurities and longeurs and get everything precisely right. From its opening "Had we but World enough, and Time," it presents the "carpe diem" theme with syllogistic inexorability. The first strophe describes how the lover would be happy to praise his mistress from the beginning to the end of time: "My vegetable Love should grow/Vaster than Empires, and more slow." Alas, as he says in the next section, "at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot hurrying near/and yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity." In short, "the Grave's a fine and private place/But none I think do there embrace." Only one logical deduction is possible: "Now, therefore," the speaker concludes, as the poem grows faster and more intense, "while thy willing Soul transpires/At every pore with instant Fires,/Now let us sport us while we may." Instead of surrendering to time's ravages, "let us roll all our strength, and all/Our sweetness, up into one Ball; and tear our Pleasures with rough strife,/Through the Iron gates of Life." Love-making's joy is, finally, both thrillingly brutal and ecstatic. Such poetry appeals directly to almost anyone's emotions and experience, but much of Marvell's other writing is far more deeply grounded in his own time. For such fine but distinctly historical work most readers will need some help, and Smith, whether in his annotated edition of Marvell's poems or in this critical biography, is the man to see. An Enlightened Life,' reviewed by Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda Dec. 9, 2010 Read Later

Say "Adam Smith" (1723-1790), and many people will know that he wrote "The Wealth of Nations" (1776), the foundational treatise of modern economic thought. But for most of us Smith has usually been more honored (or vilified) than actually read. Too often he has been reduced to a phrase - "the invisible hand" - or to his advocacy of what we now call laissez-faire capitalism. Many people aren't even aware of what he regarded as his greatest work, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" (1759). Thus, one good reason to read Nicholas Phillipson's excellent intellectual biography is to gain a more nuanced understanding of Smith and, in particular, of his vision of an all-embracing science of man. Born in the small town of Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and brought up by a widowed mother to whom he was devoted, Smith made himself immensely erudite in the way of so many 18th-century

philosophers. A youthful student of the ancient Stoics, he became an admirer of his contemporary Voltaire; a superb university teacher at Glasgow and Edinburgh (one of his pupils was Samuel Johnson biographer James Boswell); and, in due course, the second-greatest luminary of what's often called the Scottish Enlightenment. The greatest, David Hume (1711-1776), that most likable and readable of all modern philosophers, was his best friend. "I am positive you are wrong in many of your Speculations," Hume once teased Smith, "especially where you have the Misfortune to Differ from me." While some 18th-century thinkers talked constantly about themselves (Rousseau) or were memorably chronicled by disciples (Johnson), Adam Smith resolutely guarded his privacy. He left few letters and insisted that all his manuscripts - apart from an essay on the history of astronomy be destroyed by his executors. He did occasionally travel outside Scotland: to Oxford for the equivalent of postgraduate study (mostly consisting of intense private reading); to London, where he got to know Edmund Burke and other members of Johnson's "Club"; and even to Europe as the tutor of the young Duke of Buccleuch. During his last dozen years, his position on the Scottish Board of Customs made impossible any sustained scholarship, even though he had long planned to write "a sort of Philosophical History of all the different branches of Literature, of Philosophy, Poetry and Eloquence" and "a sort of theory and History of Law and Government." As Phillipson explains, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments " is Smith's attempt to "develop a coherent and plausible account of the processes by which we learn the principles of morality from the experience of common life." At its heart lies the fundamental importance of sympathy, of the ethical power of the imagination. In essence, we can through our imaginations identify with the suffering or joy of others. "I judge of your sight by my sight, . . . of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them." Smith concluded that we gradually learn to evaluate conduct through the growth of "an impartial spectator," derived from our experiences of sociability and daily life. "We may like," Phillipson summarizes, "to believe that the voice of the impartial spectator is the eternal voice of conscience or of the deity, but in reality his voice is that of the world to which we belong." The virtuous man or woman needs self-command in order to live a life suitably directed by the impartial spectator. As the years went by, Smith's thinking about society led him to economics and its sometimes unpalatable truths: "Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor." Smith soon grew convinced that labor established value, arguing, in Phillipson's words, that the "opulence of a nation was to be measured in terms of the flow of consumable goods and not its reserves of gold and silver." When Phillipson discusses "The Wealth of Nations," it's hard not to discern parallels between Smith's time and our own. For instance, the collapse of Scotland's great Ayr Bank caused severe economic damage for half a century. It resulted, Phillipson says, from "the insatiable demand for credit from projectors and improvers anxious to cash in on a boom. The bank expanded rapidly, its notes being said to have represented two-thirds of the entire paper currency of the country. But it overtraded, discounting bills of exchange almost on demand and accruing a dangerous amount of insecure debt." Sound familiar?

Perhaps surprisingly, "The Wealth of Nations" also cautions against the commercial sector's inherent rapacity and monopolizing spirit. The interests of the nobility, merchants and manufacturers, Smith maintains, are never the same as those of the general public. In fact, he states almost axiomatically that "the government of an exclusive company of merchants, is, perhaps, the worst of all governments for any country whatever." Rather, we should avoid all obstructions to trade, whether through attempted monopoly or through government regulation, and we should focus on domestic industry. Our innate self-regard may then lead to a greater general prosperity. As Smith says, in his most famous sentences: "By preferring the support of domestick to that of foreign industry," an individual "intends only his own security, and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." There's far more to Smith's arguments about what Phillipson calls "the exchange and circulation of goods, services and sentiments" than can be touched on here. But in the last resort, says Phillipson, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" and "The Wealth of Nations" were together a call to Smith's contemporaries "to take moral, political and intellectual control of their lives and the lives of those for whom they were responsible." That's still a call worth heeding. The fascinating life of an English writer, essayist and 'opium eater' • • •

by Michael Dirda Dec. 30, 2010 Read Later

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) stands, with William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, among the best essayists of the romantic era. Aside from a Gothicky novel called "Klosterheim," virtually everything De Quincey wrote was relatively short, though his range was exceptionally broad: conservative political tracts, tales of terror (the best is "The Avenger"), articles about classical literature and assorted literary reminiscences, chiefly of the poets Wordsworth and Coleridge. At the end of his life, his collected works spanned 14 volumes. This is remarkable because, for most of his adult existence, De Quincey was an opium addict, an alcoholic in all but name, and a man who spent years dodging creditors, constantly moving from one rented room to another. What money he didn't spend on laudanum - his preferred opiumalcohol mixture - he spent on buying thousands of books, many of them pricey and rare. For years he rented Dove Cottage, Wordsworth's old home in the Lake District, and essentially used it to store his library and papers. Though from an upper-middle-class family and exceptionally well educated in Latin and Greek, De Quincey nonetheless dropped out of Oxford, eventually married his housekeeper (who bore him eight children) and was regularly shamed by public announcements of his nonpayment of bills. He contributed to multiple magazines, Blackwood's being the best known, and sooner or later quarreled with nearly all his editors. In person, he was diminutive (under five feet tall) and exceptionally courtly in his manner and speech. Today De Quincey is remembered, and by some revered, for his evocative (at times purple) prose and for two or three of the most influential works of the 19th century, the most famous being the

autobiographical "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater." No less an authority than William Burroughs has called "Confessions" "the first, and still the best, book about drug addiction. . . . No other author since has given such a completely analytical description of what it is like to be a junky from the first use to the effects of withdrawal." In this lucid, deeply researched biography, Robert Morrison makes plain that De Quincey wasn't just a recreational user, but truly a slave to his habit. He would regularly pop pills - laudanum capsules that he kept in a snuffbox - even in the presence of company. Although De Quincey tried repeatedly to break the drug's hold over him, the consequent shakes, fevers and depressions would eventually destroy his resolve. And yet two sections of "Confessions" are honestly titled: "The Pleasures of Opium" and "The Pains of Opium," for the drug lifted some of life's burdens, even as it imposed others. It also allowed for vivid, hallucinatory dreams and memories, often of the dead: the beloved sister whom De Quincey lost when young, the prostitute Ann who shared his early miseries, the 3-year-old Wordsworth daughter he played with and adored, his own deceased children. In opium visions they might all, for a moment, live again. Throughout his life De Quincey wrote repeatedly about himself in what one might call supplements to the "Confessions." These include "Suspiria de Profundis" ("Sighs From the Depths") and "The English Mail-Coach," which opens with a paean to speed, to the thrill of racing along pitch-black roads at night, and ominously titles one chapter "The Vision of Sudden Death." If, in some lights, De Quincey may be viewed as a proto-Burroughs, as well as a British cousin to Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire, he might with a stretch even be seen as an ancestor of the J.G. Ballard who wrote "Crash." As a practicing literary critic, De Quincey memorably distinguished between "The Literature of Knowledge and the Literature of Power," that is, between those works that add to our stock of learning, that teach, and those that move us and affect our souls. "The Literature of Knowledge" is inherently provisional and, like any science text or cookbook, open to additions and revision; not so the "Literature of Power." As De Quincey writes, "A good steam-engine is properly superseded by a better. But one lovely pastoral valley is not superseded by another, nor a statue of Praxiteles by a statue of Michael Angelo." This hard-scrambling journalist's other permanent contribution to scholarship - an anthology favorite - is "On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth." Here De Quincey probes the "peculiar awfulness" and "a depth of solemnity" he had always felt when, after Macbeth and his wife have murdered the king, they suddenly hear the sound of knocking at the castle door. In De Quincey's view, the killing of Duncan occurs during a "suspension and pause in ordinary human concerns," in a kind of temporal "parenthesis," and the knocking signals the return to the normal goings-on of the world, while also revealing to the Macbeths the full horror of what they have just done. Murder, in fact, always deeply fascinated De Quincey and comes to the fore in his wittiest essay, the savagely deadpan "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts." Conceived as a lecture to a society of connoisseurs, it remains the foundational text for the grisly black humor of films such as "Kind Hearts and Coronets" or Patricia Highsmith's novels about the talented Mr. Ripley. As our lecturer observes: "Something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed, a knife, a purse, and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature."

Alas, the wholly aesthetic murder can be elusive: "Awkward disturbances will arise; people will not submit to have their throats cut quietly; they will run, they will kick, they will bite; and, whilst the portrait-painter often has to complain of too much torpor in his subject, the artist in our line is generally embarrassed by too much animation." What's more, the practicing connoisseur requires firmness of character. Otherwise, "if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing, and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. Once begin upon this downward path, you never know where you are to stop. Many a man dated his ruin from some murder or other that perhaps he thought little of at the time." If you've never read Thomas De Quincey, you should first pick up a good selection of his writings. Afterwards, when fascinated by the man, as you will be, turn immediately to this excellent, detailed and often harrowing biography, "The English Opium-Eater." Edmund de Waal's 'The Hare With Amber Eyes,' a family history through art • • •

by Michael Dirda Sept. 2, 2010 Read Later

By Edmund de Waal Farrar Straus Giroux. 354 pp. $26 For nearly 100 years the Ephrussi family was a major force in European grain, shipping and banking, with offices in Odessa, St. Petersburg, Vienna, Paris and London. Their wealth and urbanity rivaled that of the Rothschilds. Isaac Babel and Sholom Aleichem include rich Ephrussis in their short stories. Proust modeled his hero Charles Swann in part after the Parisian connoisseur Charles Ephrussi, patron of Manet, Degas and Renoir and owner and editor of the Gazette des Beaux Arts. Viktor -- the head of the family in the first half of the 20th century -- counted among his Viennese friends the writers Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler. His poetical daughter corresponded with Rilke. The monumental Palais Ephrussi, employing 17 servants, was located on the Ringstrasse, not far from the offices of Sigmund Freud. "The Hare With Amber Eyes" tells the astonishing story of the Ephrussis' fortunes, in both senses. Its author, distinguished English potter Edmund de Waal, is the great-grandson of Viktor, but his essayistic exploration of his family's past pointedly avoids any sentimentality over the vanished pomps of yesteryear. Nonetheless, a kind of lyrical artiness in the writing style, along with a bizarre refusal to identify the sources of quoted material, may take some getting used to. But stick with the book: "The Hare With Amber Eyes" belongs on the same shelf with Vladimir Nabokov's "Speak, Memory," André Aciman's "Out of Egypt" and Sybille Bedford's "A Legacy." All four are wistful cantos of mutability, depictions of how even the lofty, beautiful and fabulously wealthy can crack and shatter as easily as Fabergé glass or Meissen porcelain -- or, sometimes, be as tough and enduring as netsuke, those little Japanese figurines carved out of ivory or boxwood.

For only the netsuke survive from the once vast Ephrussi collections of paintings, furniture and bric-a-brac. When the Nazis took over Vienna, the family's loyal maid Anna simply hid these miniature works of art in her mattress, some 264 pieces depicting turtles and tigers and rats, a boy with a helmet and samurai sword, a naked woman and an octopus, a hare with amber eyes. Edmund de Waal eventually inherited the collection, and it serves to link the various parts of his story as he traces how the netsuke pass from one family member to the next, like the lovers in Arthur Schnitzler's play "La Ronde." Charles Ephrussi first acquired the collection during a boom in "japonisme" in late-19th-century Paris. Charles was the art expert, having written a book on Dürer and employed the poet Jules Laforgue as a secretary. He was even included -- in the background, wearing an incongruous top hat and black suit -- in Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party" (now the most famous painting of Washington's Phillips Collection. When Charles?s taste eventually switched to 18th-century French art, perhaps in an effort to play up his Gallic bona fides during the Dreyfus Affair, when Jews were under suspicion and worse, he decided to give the netsuke as a wedding gift to his cousin Viktor in Vienna. Viktor was scholarly and artistic, the family?s younger, spare, son ? until his older brother, the intended heir to the family business, suddenly absconded with their father?s mistress and was quickly disinherited. Then, like Michael Corleone in "The Godfather,? Viktor found himself forced to become the head of the family, against his own studious inclinations. In those days, writes de Waal, many sons of successful Jewish fathers, "had a common anxiety about their futures, lives set out in front of them on dynastic tram-lines, family expectations driving them forward. It meant a life lived under the gilded ceilings of their parents? homes, marriage to a financier?s daughter, endless dances, years in business unspooling in front of them. It meant pomposity, over-confidence, the parvenu. It meant billiards in the billiard-room with your father?s friends after dinner, a life immured in marble, watched over by putti." For Viktor, "all those dreams of writing a magisterial history of Byzantium were lost." Instead, the former cafe bohemian bowed to necessity, put on a suit and took a desk at the Ephrussi bank, soon marrying 18-year-old Emmy, the daughter of a baron. The beautiful Emmy enjoyed finery ? she would change three times a day ? and took a succession of lovers, but seems to have been a good mother, enjoying quietly languorous evenings spent reading aloud with her sons and daughters: "Together they would take down the heavy picture books with their rich maroon covers. Edmund Dulac?s Midsummer Night?s Dream, Sleeping Beauty and, best of all, Beauty and the Beast with its figures of horror. Each Christmas brought the new Fairy Book of Andrew Lang, ordered from London by the children?s English grandmother: Grey, Violet, Crimson, Brown, Orange, Olive and Rose. A book could last a year." Such douceur de vivre never lasts. deDe Waal?s chapter about what happened to Viktor and Emmy when the Nazis paraded into Vienna is, for all its sickening familiarity, still deeply horrifying. The Jews are targeted. A brownshirt mob ransacks the family?s apartments and heaves an exquisite Louis XVI desk through an upper-story window. The Gestapo beats and harangues the elderly Viktor until he signs away his home, property and business. Emmy commits suicide. Fortunately,

their younger son, Rudolf, manages to flee to the United States, because a friend offers him a job working for, of all things, a cotton company in Paragould, Ark. Only through the legal brilliance and persistence of their older daughter, Elisabeth ? the first woman to receive a doctorate in law from the University of Vienna ? is Viktor able to make his way with a single suitcase to England, where he ends his life in Tunbridge Wells, living with Elisabeth and her Dutch husband, Hendrik de Waal. During World War II itself, Viktor?s older son, Iggie, who had earlier run away "to New York, to boys and to fashion," joined the American army, where the Ephrussi flair for languages ? everyone in the family spoke fluent German, French, English and Russian ? made him a valuable member of the intelligence corps. At the start of the 1950s, the rootless Iggie then moved to Japan, where he worked for a Swiss banking firm ? blood, it seems, will out. There he found peace and happiness with a loving Japanese partner. In their elegant apartment he displayed the netsuke collection in a special case. Today, the netsuke reside in Edmund de Waal?s London home, where his children occasionally, and surreptitiously, play with them. Sometimes, de Waal thinks back over all the artists and painters and lovers and aristocrats and businessmen who have handled and admired these "small Japanese things," which have come to represent the concentrated essence of his family?s tumultuous history. Still this enthralling book leaves one oddity unexplained: Why doesn?t it include any close-up pictures of the miniatures themselves, especially of the titular "Hare With Amber Eyes"? Guy Gavriel Kay's historical fantasy, • • •

by Michael Dirda June 20, 2010 Read Later

Roc. 573 pp. $26.95 Guy Gavriel Kay's "Under Heaven" isn't quite historical fiction, nor is it quite fantasy. It's set in a slightly reimagined Tang dynasty China, sometimes seems reminiscent of films like "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and depicts the unimaginable consequences of a single generous gift. Most important of all, it is the novel you'll want for your summer vacation. The young Shen Tai -- lapsed scholar, discharged army officer, onetime acolyte of the Kanlin warrior priesthood -- has spent two years burying the bones of the soldiers who fell at a great battle between Kitai (China) and the empire of Tagur (apparently Mongolia). His father commanded the Kitai forces at Kuala Nor and died, broken in spirit by the immense loss of life, some 40,000 men. As an act of expiation and mourning, Tai lives among the howling ghosts and properly inters their bleached bones, making no distinction between those of his people and the Tagurans.

As a result, Cheng-wan -- the White Jade Princess and wife of the Tagur ruler -- decides to honor this pious work by bestowing on Tai a gift of 250 Sardian horses, the so-called Heavenly Horses, animals of unparalleled beauty, swiftness and rarity. As they say, every blessing is also a curse. Not even the Kitai Emperor -- may he live forever -- possesses such a herd of Sardians. To acquire them, men would kill, prostitute their daughters, betray their masters. Such horses, after all, could determine the fate of battles, or even empires. On the very evening Tai receives notice of the White Jade Princess's unexpected largesse, he is the object of an assassination attempt. Almost immediately, Tai's world, along with many of its established verities, begins to collapse, as the young man gradually realizes that he is now at the center of subtle political machinations at the Kitai Imperial Court. There his calculating older brother serves the new and insecure prime minister, who is also the man who stole Tai's beloved, the courtesan Spring Rain. There the hugely fat barbarian general, known as Roshan, lays his plans. There Wen Jian -- the greatest beauty of the age -- diverts the aged emperor, while playing dangerous games of her own. To insure his life, Tai makes it widely known that he has left the horses with a friend in Tagur and they will be released to no one but himself. In the meantime, he slowly makes his way back to Xinan, the silken capital city of Kitai. As in any epic fantasy, Tai makes friends along the way. Spring Rain sends a black-clad Kanlin warrior to protect him. Her name is Wei Song, and at one point she fights six men, whirling silently in a courtyard, a sword in each hand. Tai meets The Banished Immortal, the poet Sima Zian (based on Li Bai, aka Li Po), always drunk, always wise in the ways of the world. These two and Spring Rain he can count on. Nobody else. The milieu presented in "Under Heaven" is, on the surface, one of the most exquisite beauty and courtesy. Honor, right-thinking, decorum count. "Let fall your weapon. Doing so offers you a small chance of living. Otherwise there is none." But consummate graciousness may cloak the most immense cruelty. After would-be assassins are interrogated by a provincial general, Tai is told that the "two men, when encouraged to discuss their adventurism tonight, suggested only one name of possible significance before they each succumbed, sadly, to the exacting nature of the conversation." We later learn that one of these men "had been castrated, his organ stuffed in his mouth. His eyes had been carved out and they had cut off his hands." Yet the world of "Under Heaven" is not only polite, Machiavellian and ruthless; it is also spooky. Ghosts can kill, female were-foxes seduce, shamans take control of a man's soul or employ swans to search for enemies. The Kanlin can speak the language of the wolves. Pledged to be married to a barbarian prince, Tai's sister Li-Mei finds herself taken to a cave by a zombie-like creature -- halfman, half-wolf. There she undergoes a mystical experience among what are clearly the ancient bronze statues now commonly known as the "Tang horses." Her destiny will be as strange as that of her two older brothers.

Indeed, Li-Mei and the other women of "Under Heaven" are its most memorable characters. Wei Song obviously feels more for Tai than is proper to a disciplined Kanlin warrior. The resolute Spring Rain risks everything for her former lover: "Why, and how, does one voice, one person, come to conjure vibrations in the soul, like an instrument tuned? Why a given man, and not another, or a third?" Why, indeed? "She hasn't nearly enough wisdom to answer that. She isn't sure if anyone does." And then there's Wen Jian. She dominates the page as she does any room she enters. Kay makes you feel the power and breathtaking seductiveness of this 21-year-old beauty, who can treat the brutal Roshan like a giant baby, who views the world as her plaything, who is convincingly the kind of woman for whom an ordinary man might sacrifice his life or for whom an emperor might throw away his kingdom. At one point, Wen Jian makes a surprise visit to Tai at an inn. An altercation ensues. Wen Jian is not amused. " 'It was uncivilized. There was violence in my presence, which is never permitted.' She lifted her hand from his leg. 'I have instructed my under-steward to kill himself when we reach Ma-wai.' "Tai blinked, wasn't sure he had heard correctly. " 'You . . . he . . . ?' " 'This morning,' said the Beloved Companion, 'did not proceed as I wished it to. It made me unhappy.' Her mouth turned downward. "You could drown in this woman, Tai thought, and never be found again. The emperor was pursuing immortality in the palace, men said, using alchemists and the School of Unrestricted Night, where they studied the stars and asterisms in the sky for secrets of the world. Tai suddenly had a better understanding of that desire." Guy Gavriel Kay is a much honored Canadian writer of historical fantasy, perhaps best known for the three-part "Fionavar Tapestry" and for "Tigana" and "A Song for Arbonne." As a young man, he assisted Christopher Tolkien in editing J.R.R. Tolkien's epic "The Silmarillion." For "Under Heaven" Kay has chosen a spare, slightly courtly style, but nonetheless moves his plot along at a rapid clip. At the same time, he continually thickens his novel with appealing minor characters, thus adding to the story's overall richness as well as suggesting that much else is going on just outside our narrative field of vision. As Kay's historian-like narrator observes: "Every single tale carries within it many others, noted in passing, hinted at, entirely overlooked. Every life has moments when it branches, importantly (even if only for one person), and every one of those branches will have offered a different story." "Under Heaven" ends where it began, among ghosts. Everything quietly, ineluctably fades into history, as into those mists one sees on Chinese scroll paintings. Besides, all these myriad wonders and struggles and heartbreaks occurred a long time ago, in a world that never actually existed -until now.

Michael Dirda on Michael Scammell's 'Koestler' • • •

by Michael Dirda Jan. 21, 2010 Read Later

By Michael Scammell Random House. 689 pp. $35 WP BOOKSTORE Who now reads Arthur Koestler (1905-1983)? My guess: only a few people past age 50 and the occasional student of 20th-century political history. While biographer Michael Scammell argues for Koestler's importance as a memoirist ("Arrow in the Blue" [1952], "The Invisible Writing" [1954] ), the only book he's still known for is "Darkness at Noon" (1940) -- a novel describing how the revolutionary Rubashov is brainwashed into confessing to crimes he never committed. Everything else Koestler published now seems dated, largely forgotten or simply crackpot. Yet, besides the novels and memoirs, that also includes moving and still provocative books on Zionism, sex, the Spanish Civil War, evolution and parapsychology. Koestler was, in fact, primarily a journalist of genius, a passionate witness to most of the political nightmares and cultural tumult of the early and mid-20th century. Along the way, he also managed to cruise the Arctic Circle in the Graf Zeppelin dirigible, spend weeks on death row in one of Generalissimo Franco's prisons, make love to scores of women and drop acid with Timothy Leary. In every way, Dundi Dods Arthur Kosztler lived intensely. Born to a Hungarian Jewish family in Budapest, he grew up in cultivated and decadent Vienna. As a boy he was drawn to a career in science or engineering -- and was, as Scammell notes, perhaps the only intellectual of his time who could change a fuse. Like so many Central Europeans, the young Koestler possessed an enviable facility for languages and was thus able to work as a reporter in Palestine, France, Germany, Russia and Spain throughout the 1920s and '30s. He interviewed Thomas Mann and Sigmund Freud, traveled around Central Asia with poet Langston Hughes, revered the writer-adventurer André Malraux and, when the Nazis invaded France, borrowed suicide pills from the critic Walter Benjamin. Benjamin ultimately used his, as did Koestler during a moment of desperation. But in the latter's case they upset his stomach and he vomited out the poison. Benjamin's stomach wasn't so sensitive. After heroic efforts, Koestler eventually managed to escape to England, where he became a pal of George Orwell and turned himself into an English writer, virtually an establishment figure. During the 1940s the worldwide success of "Darkness at Noon" -- it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and an enormous bestseller in France -- made him rich, and the now former communist was able to afford a succession of homes in Paris and Austria, on the island of Ischia and in Bucks County, Pa. Koestler's postwar circle of friends was equally cosmopolitan, ranging from the existentialists Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (with whom he once spent a

night) to the poets Stephen Spender and W.H. Auden to the critic Edmund Wilson and the Partisan Review crowd. During the early 1950s, Koestler helped organize the anti-communist Congress for Cultural Freedom (later revealed to be backed by the CIA), contributed a memoir about his disillusionment with the Party to the essay collection "The God That Failed" (1950) and spearheaded the movement to abolish the death penalty in England. But in the 1960s he grew increasingly fascinated by fringe science and wrote sympathetically about Lamarckism, ESP, levitation and psychedelic drugs. By the 1980s a man who once dueled with swords against anti-Semites in Vienna was regularly playing chess with the rising young novelist Julian Barnes. He had also joined a society espousing euthanasia and "self-deliverance." Finally, at age 77, suffering from Parkinson's disease and leukemia, Koestler successfully committed suicide, along with his two-decades-younger wife, Cynthia. She wrote that she couldn't face life without him. Since his death Koestler's reputation has doubly faded: Not only are his books unread, but the man himself has been characterized -- by an earlier biographer -- as little more than a serial rapist and sexual bully. Despite his short stature and pugnacious look, the charismatic Koestler found it easy to pick up women, and virtually all of them agree he could be a brutal lover. Scammell does his best to explain Koestler's crass behavior as either typical of the male insensitivity of his generation or as compensation for an innate lack of self-confidence, verging on self-hatred. Maybe. Certainly, the hard-drinking, promiscuous Koestler wasn't a happy man. Scammell relates this telling exchange between the author of "Darkness at Noon" and the author of "Nineteen EightyFour": George Orwell said, "When I lie in my bath in the morning, which is the best moment of the day, I think of tortures for my enemies." Koestler replied, "That's funny, because when I'm lying in my bath I think of tortures for myself." Readers looking for a terrific biography, as well as a gripping work of intellectual history, shouldn't miss this record of "the literary and political odyssey of a 20th-century skeptic." Every page is enthralling, starting with the chapter epigraphs: "A novelist is someone who hates his mother" -Georges Simenon; "One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, and from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires" -- Albert Einstein. Of course, one expects such excellence from the multiply gifted Michael Scammell, the biographer of Solzhenitsyn, translator of Nabokov's "The Gift" (in collaboration with its famously difficult author) and the founding editor of the magazine Index on Censorship. Koestler's friend Sartre always maintained that writers should address their own time and not worry about the judgment of posterity. Certainly, Arthur Koestler aimed in both his fiction and nonfiction to be relevant, to affect and alter the course of history. He was, as the French say, engagé, i.e. committed. As such, he identified with the tradition of social realism, once even dismissing the artsy experimental novels of Proust and Woolf. But theirs are the books that have lasted, not those powerful and occasionally tract-like works of John Dos Passos or André Malraux - or Arthur Koestler.

In the epilogue to this work of attempted reparation, Scammell expresses the hope that it may lead new readers to Koestler's "Spanish Testament" (1937), "Scum of the Earth" (1941) and "The Yogi and the Commissar" (1945) as well as some of his later books. It would be good if this would happen, for the man was, like so many journalists, a witty and scintillating writer. But I won't be holding my breath. Book World: Michael Dirda on 'Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing' • • •

by Michael Dirda Nov. 5, 2009 Read Later

By Michael Slater Yale Univ. 696 pp. $35 It's the sheer energy that astonishes. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) began to publish the monthly chapters of what became "The Pickwick Papers" (1836-37) when he was only in his mid-20s. This was immediately followed by "Oliver Twist" (1837-39), which actually started appearing in magazine form while serialization of "Pickwick" was still going on. Thus the young writer was bringing to a close the greatest picaresque comic novel since "Don Quixote" and almost simultaneously creating the piteous Oliver ("Please, sir, I want some more"), the grotesque Fagin and the murderous Bill Sikes. But then Dickens was the ultimate workaholic multi-tasker. As Michael Slater shows in this magnificent account of "a life defined by writing," Dickens was somehow able to produce one masterpiece after another; oversee major magazines (Bentley's, Household Words, All the Year Round); turn out a steady stream of essays and muckraking journalism; speak at fancy banquets and act in amateur theatricals; write hundreds of letters to friends, business associates and admirers; read and analyze in detail the work of would-be novelists; help organize guilds for writers and homes for wayward girls; support an extended family (parents, 10 children, various in-laws and relatives, a mistress and the mistress's mother); travel to America, Italy, Switzerland and France; co-author plays in which he starred (most famously, "The Frozen Deep," written with Wilkie Collins); and, at the end of his life, present the most famous dramatic readings of all time: When Dickens, dressed in immaculate evening clothes, re-created Bill Sikes's murder of the prostitute Nancy, his prompt-copy famously said, "Terror to the end." Women in the audience fainted dead away and men broke down and openly wept. In English literature, only Shakespeare rivals Dickens's imaginative fecundity. Just start listing some of his characters: the miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, the deluded Miss Havisham, the repulsively unctuous Uriah Heep and, of course, the improvident yet ever upbeat Mr. Micawber, for whom something is bound to turn up. But there are scores of others, from Mr. Pickwick's servant Sam Weller and the arch-hypocrite Pecksniff to the self-sacrificing reprobate Sydney Carton ("It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done") and the almost Shakespearean comic nurse Mrs. Gamp. After encountering them, moreover, does anyone ever forget that model for all government

bureaucracies, the Circumlocution Office, or the endless legal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce or the death of Little Nell, which in its time produced near mass hysteria? Considered as writing alone, Dickens's prose is so rich, varied and untrammeled that James Joyce himself would envy it. The man could take a simple signature phrase for a minor character -- such as "Barkis is willing" or the Fat Boy's "I wants to make your flesh creep" -- and make it simultaneously comic, touching and immortal. He could describe a thick and smothering London fog so powerfully that a Cornell professor named Vladimir Nabokov could spend an entire hour on the author's subtle artistry (and did: see Nabokov's "Lectures on Literature"). Not only a great creative imagination, though, Dickens was also a social crusader, regularly lashing out at human callousness and injustice. In "Bleak House," for instance, the little crossing-sweeper Jo has been given nothing at all by life; indeed, he hears the Lord's Prayer for the first time only as he dies. After which, Dickens lets us have it: "Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us, every day." Charles Dickens himself was born the son of a minor government official who eventually fell on hard times and ended up spending some months in a debtor's prison. During that period, his bookish son was sent out to work among the rough lads of a blacking factory. The mature Dickens kept all this past hidden from his contemporaries, never quite realizing that it had provided him with the best education he could have asked for: During those hardscrabble years, he truly learned about life and about London life, in particular. As Slater reminds us, Dickens always drew enormous energy from just wandering the streets of the monstrous and teeming metropolis. There have been plenty of previous biographies of England's greatest novelist, most notably the early life by his friend John Forster, the once standard scholarly account by Edgar Johnson (in two volumes) and the detailed, idiosyncratic and best-selling "Dickens" by novelist Peter Ackroyd. None of those books is short, nor is this one. Yet Slater's new biography actually feels somewhat austere: Slater sticks to the known Gradgrindian facts, emphasizes the writing and public performances, seldom goes in for much scene-painting or gratuitous anecdote, and refuses to speculate unduly without evidence, whether about Dickens's intimate relations with the young actress Ellen "Nelly" Ternan -- did they have an illegitimate son, as has been frequently suspected? - or about the resolution of his last, unfinished book, "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." But Slater's calm march through the life and work of "this very strange genius" consequently feels completely trustworthy, as befits a scholar who has been a past president of both the International Dickens Fellowship and the Dickens Society of America. He repeatedly underscores what Dickens called the "strict attention, perseverance, and exertion" that the writer brought to all his work, including his topical journalism and the brilliant if comparatively little-known essays collected as "The Uncommercial Traveller." Individual chapters, and long ones at that, are devoted to the composition of each of the major books, in particular the panoramic "condition of England" novels of the author's later years: "Bleak House," "Little Dorrit" and "Our Mutual Friend." Throughout his pages, Slater periodically insists that Dickens's greatest love wasn't Maria Beadnell, who rejected him when young and then reappeared in middle-age having grown fat and lost her

looks, nor Catherine Hogarth, the woman he married (and later cruelly wrote out of his life). Neither was it Catherine's younger sister Mary, who died in Dickens's arms and whose ring he wore from then on, nor even Ternan. No, above all these, Dickens loved his adoring public and quickly established an intimate, almost bloglike relationship with his readers through his prefaces, talks and journalism and, of course, by publishing his work in weekly or monthly magazine installments. People came to think of "Boz" -- the pen name he adopted for his earliest sketches -as virtually a friend of the family. Over the course of his life, the lionized Dickens met Queen Victoria and two American presidents, counted Washington Irving and Longfellow among his American admirers, regularly socialized with fellow litterateurs Edward Bulwer Lytton, Thomas Carlyle and Wilkie Collins. Hans Christian Andersen once stayed with him for five weeks. "Boz" was even interviewed by two writers whose imaginative intensity rivaled his own: Edgar Allan Poe and Fyodor Dostoevsky. To the latter, Dickens confessed that there were two people in him, one good, one bad. The Russian shot back, "Only two people?" (I love that.) Still, it is amazing that a mere decade after he had started writing, the 34-year-old Charles Dickens was world famous and the first of a series of collected works -- the so-called Cheap Edition -- was being published, to be followed in his lifetime by the Library Edition, the People's Edition and the Charles Dickens Edition, among others. When the novelist died of a stroke, halfway through "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," he was only 58, though photographs make him look 20 years older. By all accounts, he simply seems to have burned himself out, like some literary version of the alcoholic Krook, who notoriously self-combusts. Many modern readers, I think, rather neglect Dickens, disdaining him as melodramatic and sentimental. Instead, we revere Jane Austen for her subtle wit or turn to Henry James for his delicate analyses of human motivation. But Dickens really is our prose Shakespeare. For proof, try almost any of his novels or just watch a DVD of the Royal Shakespeare Company or the BBC dramatizations of "Nicholas Nickleby," "Oliver Twist" or "David Copperfield." When Thackeray, whose "Vanity Fair" was then being published to wild acclaim, first read the scene of young Paul's death in "Dombey and Son," he famously -- and rightly -- cried out: "There's no writing against such power as this -- one has no chance!" For anybody who wants to know more about this dynamo of Victorian letters, Michael Slater's superb biography is the one to read. Michael Dirda - Book World: Michael Dirda on 'Neverland' by Piers Dudgeon • • •

by Michael Dirda Oct. 29, 2009 Read Later

J.M. Barrie, the Du Mauriers, and the Dark Side of "Peter Pan" By Piers Dudgeon

Pegasus. 333 pp. $26.95 There might be scarier books this Halloween season, but it's unlikely that any will be as luridly creepy as "Neverland." Even if you already know a little about the sinister background of J.M. Barrie's classic play, "Peter Pan," you will be in for a shock. In these pages Piers Dudgeon presents a multi-generational history of psychological domination and submission, unnatural family relations, predatory abuse and suicide. He also connects three great works of the popular imagination: George du Maurier's late-19thcentury bestseller "Trilby" -- the novel in which the evil Svengali, through hypnosis, transforms a beautiful tone-deaf girl into a singing sensation but in the process destroys her soul; J.M. Barrie's death-haunted "Peter Pan," once titled "The Boy Who Hated Mothers"; and Daphne du Maurier's Gothic romance about spiritual possession, "Rebecca." Dudgeon's biographic thesis is that George du Maurier, while an art student in Paris, learned hypnosis, first sending his mistress into submissive trances and later using mind-control to focus his own imagination. Through intense concentration, he suggested in his first novel, "Peter Ibbetson," a person could actually escape the bounds of time and space: That book's imprisoned hero, by "dreaming true," achieves blissfully ecstatic reunions with his beloved while his body remains locked in his cell. As it turns out, the young Scots writer J.M. Barrie extravagantly admired "Peter Ibbetson" -- he later gave his "demon boy" Peter Pan its hero's first name -- as well as the later "Trilby." According to Dudgeon, he then grew obsessed with du Maurier and his children, and in due course came to mesmerize and manipulate two generations of the family. *** A mama's boy, only a little over 5 feet tall, and almost certainly impotent, Barrie, in Dudgeon's view, found a virtually sexual pleasure in manipulating others. First, he inveigled his way into the good graces of George du Maurier's daughter Sylvia and her lawyer husband, Arthur Llewelyn Davies, then he gradually captivated Sylvia's spirit so fully that she would choose to spend her Christmas holidays with him rather than with her husband. Barrie, says Dudgeon, "lived for the power-play dynamics of the relationship. That was his sex. His thrills came, for example, from the tension between the way the new Sylvia rose to the almost supernatural influence he seemed to exert over their lives, and the guilt and shame the old Sylvia felt about leaving Arthur and going abroad with him." Later, after the conveniently early deaths of both husband and wife, "Uncle Jim" boldly assumed the guardianship of the couple's five sons, the original Lost Boys of "Peter Pan." The three eldest never wholly escaped Barrie's Svengali-like influence. "All the du Mauriers captivated by Jim lived their lives within his imagination, losing their souls to him thereby." George, whom Barrie morbidly adored and psychologically abused (he essentially relates one of their nights together in his autobiographical novel "The Little White Bird"), was killed during the Great War; Barrie always credited him for Peter Pan's famous line: "To die will be an awfully big adventure." Michael, the most beautiful, drowned himself at 20, and, to Dudgeon, "there is a programmed inevitability about Michael's death, and the programmer is Uncle Jim." Finally, Peter, a lifelong melancholiac, eventually threw himself under a train.

Surprisingly, Barrie repeatedly seems to reveal the truth about his secret self throughout his many autobiographical fictions and fantasies: "In the house of Mr. and Mrs. Darling," he writes, "there never was a simpler happier family until the coming of Peter Pan." He then adds, even more explicitly: "Peter had seen many tragedies, but he had forgotten them all. . . . 'I forget [people] after I kill them.' " As D.H. Lawrence acidly observed after the death of Michael, "J.M. Barrie has a fatal touch for those he loves. They die." Barrie's malign influence also embraced Sylvia's actor brother, Gerald du Maurier, who became the little Scot's puppet in return for riches and stardom: Gerald played Captain Hook, the hero of "The Admirable Crichton" and one of the main characters of the unnerving drama about missed opportunities, "Dear Brutus." For this last, Barrie included a shocking scene in which Gerald's character and his imagined daughter outrageously flirt and sexually tease each other. Dudgeon regards this scene as an example of sympathetic magic. He promulgates that a truly powerful text can foster and direct its subject into certain forms of behavior. After playing this role on the stage, Gerald, we're told, took to telling his teenage daughter Daphne about his sexual conquests, was seen to paw the girl in public and deliberately encouraged her own confessed attraction to him. Late in life, Daphne confessed to a friend that she and her father had "crossed the line" -- though later she denied that actual intercourse had taken place. Dudgeon also suggests that in her writing Daphne learned to draw on the technique of "dreaming true" to create her powerfully hypnotic visions of the past. Many of her late stories of horror and the supernatural feature a figure reminiscent of Barrie. Barrie's influence -- at least in Dudgeon's view -- may even have caused the death of Robert Falcon Scott near the South Pole. The two men became friends after the explorer's first Antarctic expedition and, according to Dudgeon, Scott was gradually infected with Barrie's boyish ideas of the heroic. By 1911 Scott had "changed into a man who was self-confident, self-important, petulant, and possessed of a sense of the significance of 'the explorer' as the custodian of the British heroic vision, one who needed to suffer and show courage and discipline and duty and endurance, and who would therefore eschew the 'modern' technology of exploration because it was, in effect, 'cheating.' Scott had become a fantasist, and his expedition was a tragic disaster." And who inspired this fantastic and fatal self-image? J.M. Barrie. *** While one certainly reads "Neverland" compulsively -- if only with a sense of what one might call "the fascination of the abomination" -- Piers Dudgeon's book is nonetheless highly problematic. Much is speculative and the evidence circumstantial at best. One senses throughout a tendentious author with a thesis, a hobbyhorse that he rides hard, right into the ground. Dudgeon's prose and approach are also deliberately sensationalistic rather than even-tempered and scholarly. There's evidence of carelessness or haste, too -- Walter Besant is called George Besant; Dudgeon refers to writer Anthony Hawkins at one point and to Anthony Hope at another, without any indication that he realizes that they are the same man (Anthony Hope Hawkins dropped his last name for books like "The Prisoner of Zenda"). At least once, Dudgeon even fails to pursue an important lead that would support his obsessive thesis: Barrie's first play, he indicates in a footnote, was called "Richard Savage." Grubstreet hack Richard Savage, according to his friend Samuel Johnson, grew maniacally obsessed with his mother, an aristocratic divorcee who -- he claimed -- refused to acknowledge that he was her illegitimate son.

From the very beginning, then, any reader of "Neverland" must feel hesitation in wholly accepting its zealous author's thesis that Barrie was some kind of Mephistopheles. Nonetheless, some facts are certainly there: "Trilby," "Peter Pan" and "Rebecca" do possess a strange family resemblance; Barrie did usurp a father's place in the lives of the Llewelyn Davies boys; and Daphne du Maurier did feel sexually confused, embark on lesbian affairs and suffer an eventual breakdown. Is there a link? Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps all lives are simply a lot messier and troubled than we commonly acknowledge, and did we but know the full truth, few of us would escape whipping.

Michael Dirda - Book review: 'When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish' by Martin Gardner • • •

by Michael Dirda Oct. 22, 2009 Read Later

And Other Speculations About This and That By Martin Gardner Hill and Wang. 246 pp. $26 On Saturdays when I was a boy of 14 or 15, it was my habit to ride my red Roadmaster bicycle to the various thrift shops in my home town. One afternoon, at Clarice's Values, I unearthed a beat-up paperback of Martin Gardner's "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science," a collection of essays debunking crank beliefs and pseudoscientific quackery, with wonderful chapters about flying saucers, the hollow Earth, ESP and Atlantis. The book, Gardner's second, was originally published in 1952 under the title "In the Name of Science." I probably read it around 1962 and found it -- as newspaper critics of that era were wont to say -- unputdownable. In 1981 as a young staffer at The Washington Post Book World, I reviewed Gardner's "Science: Good, Bad and Bogus," a kind of sequel to "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science," and found it . . . unputdownable. A few years later, in 1989, I wrote about "Gardner's Whys & Wherefores," a volume that opened with appreciations of wonderful, if slightly unfashionable, writers such as G.K. Chesterton, Lord Dunsany and H.G. Wells. I wrote at much greater length in 1996 about Gardner's so-called "collected essays" -- really just a minuscule selection -- gathered together as the nearly 600-page compendium "The Night Is Large." There I called its author our most eminent man of letters and numbers. By that last word I was alluding to Gardner's celebrated Scientific American columns devoted to mathematical games and recreations. Written over the course of 25 years, these are currently being repackaged by Cambridge University Press as "The New Martin Gardner Mathematical Library";

the most recent volume, No. 3 of a planned 15, is titled "Sphere Packing, Lewis Carroll and Reversi." Amazingly, Gardner is largely self-taught in mathematics. I give all this personalia just to underscore that I've been an awestruck Martin Gardner fan my entire life -- but then I'm in very good company. Gardner's admirers have included Arthur C. Clarke, W.H. Auden (who particularly cherished "The Ambidextrous Universe," a study of symmetry and asymmetry), Noam Chomsky, Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Douglas Hofstadter and the entire French literary group called the Oulipo (the Workshop for Potential Literature). Of course, Gardner is particularly revered -- by all kinds of people -- for his most famous book: "The Annotated 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' and 'Through the Looking-Glass' " (later complemented or replaced by "More Annotated Alice" and "The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition"). That first book virtually launched the entire mini-genre of "annotated" classics, among which are Gardner's own "Annotated 'Casey at the Bat' " and "Annotated 'Night Before Christmas.' " And that's still not all. This essayist and skeptical inquirer has also written about magic, philosophy, religion and poetry. His Dover paperback titled "Best Remembered Poems" -- I keep a copy on my nightstand -- gathers the sort of old-fashioned sentimental verse that begs to be recited aloud. The anthology includes poems like "Evolution," whose virtues Gardner extols in one of the essays collected in this latest volume of his "speculations about this and that." He tells us that he once heard the great magician Harry Blackstone recite "Evolution" in its entirety at a dinner party: When you were a tadpole and I was a fish, And side by side on the ebbing tide We sprawled through the ooze and slime, Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian fen, My heart was rife with the joy of life, For I loved you even then. In subsequent stanzas we follow the narrator and his beloved as they evolve into amphibians, apelike mammals and early hominids. Their time-transcending love never alters: And that was a million years ago, In a time that no man knows; Yet here tonight in the mellow light, We sit at Delmonico's . . .

Then as we linger at luncheon here, O'er many a dainty dish, Let us drink anew to the time when you Were a Tadpole and I was a Fish. Gardner's essay on "Evolution" praises metrical rhyming verse and tells us what little is known about the poem's author, the turn-of-the-century journalist Langdon Smith. A similar but even longer article discusses the forgotten Ella Wheeler Wilcox, best known for the line "Laugh and the world laughs with you;/Weep and you weep alone." Astonishingly popular in her day, Wilcox used her verse to champion what was called "New Thought," a "feel good" and "get rich" religious movement of the early 20th century. Norman Vincent Peale and his "power of positive thinking" is a later offshoot. In general, "When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish" might be called a Martin Gardner sampler, bringing together both new pieces and golden oldies. It includes the personal essays "Why I Am Not a Paranormalist" and "Why I Am Not an Atheist," as well as several mathematical articles (one on Fibonacci sequences), an explanation for why remarkable coincidences aren't so remarkable ("Was the Sinking of the Titanic Foretold?"), several scathing critiques of religious fundamentalism (see, in particular, the pieces on Ann Coulter, Frank Tipler and Oral Roberts's son, Richard), and enthusiastic introductions to L. Frank Baum's "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and "The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus" and to G.K. Chesterton's "Tales of the Long Bow" and "The Coloured Lands." The book ends with a defense of democratic socialism. Overall, Gardner's main theme is still the one he has sounded for going on 60 years: "Our nation is weakened when large numbers of citizens . . . are scientific illiterates." If you're already addicted to Martin Gardner's plain prose, gentle, reasonable voice, exhaustive research and relentless logic, you will want to add this book to your collection. If that collection is like my own, it's already quite a large one. Perhaps only Dana Richards -- Gardner's bibliographer and a computer science professor at George Mason University -- knows just how many books and magazine articles this lively polymath has given the world since the 1930s, when he began to write as a student at the University of Chicago. New readers, however, may find some of the earlier books mentioned above to be better first introductions than the "scribblings" and "stray pieces" of "When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish." In one essay here -- on Hilaire Belloc's critique of Darwinism -- Gardner mentions being 94 years old and residing in an assisted living facility in his home town of Norman, Okla. He's still writing. While Martin Gardner has always called himself "strictly a journalist," he should really be honored as one of this country's greatest cultural treasures. President Obama, are you listening? Michael Dirda - Book World Michael Dirda: Dave Eggers Re-does Maurice Sendak in 'Wild Things' •

by Michael Dirda

• •

Oct. 16, 2009 Read Later

McSweeney's. 288 pp. $19.95 Sigh. Here's yet another example of a contemporary writer paying homage to, and screwing around with, an earlier masterpiece. Poor Jane Austen, in particular, has suffered innumerable such depredations, the latest being the grotesque "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies." In "The Wild Things," Dave Eggers -- who, in a sense, is self-publishing this book, because he founded McSweeney's -- has taken Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" and turned a timeless picture-book classic into a contemporary problem novel for children 8 to 12. Of course, its marketers hope that grown-ups -- racked with nostalgia or fans of Eggers's popular earlier work -will read "The Wild Things" as a kind of enriched version of their long-ago bedtime favorite. Yet where Sendak created a poetic blend of words and pictures to depict typical childhood impulses, fears and desires, Eggers has crimped these universals, reducing them to the upswellings of confusion and rage felt by an 8- or 9-year-old after his parents' divorce. Yes, the general outline of Sendak's story is still there: Max misbehaves in his wolf suit, sails to an island inhabited by rolypoly monsters, becomes their king and eventually returns home a wiser child. But everything has been made trendy, diminishing the original's archetypal resonance to syrupy movie cliches. This is especially so in the first third of the novel, set in our world. Once on monster island, the book grows more charming and witty. But it never loses its cynical manipulativeness, starting with a dedication that demands the Heimlich maneuver to preventing gagging: "For Maurice Sendak, an unspeakably brave and beautiful man." Come on now. After the comma, every one of those words is California Speak worthy of "The Simpsons' " Troy McClure. Sendak did catch major flak early in his career -- the nightmarish Wild Things were too scary for little kids; some parents and librarians were indignant that Mickey, the hero of "In the Night Kitchen," was shown naked -- but for the past 30 years or more the man has been a living god. (See, for instance, Gregory Maguire's recent homage, "Making Mischief.") So let's not exaggerate here. In truth, "The Wild Things" has less to do with Sendak's original picture book than with the young adult novels of the 1970s and '80s. Just before the fantasy tsunami hit with J.K. Rowling, YA fiction was dominated by depressing accounts of children coming to terms with every sort of social and psychological trauma then available: a gay parent, drug addiction, teen pregnancy, racism, uncertain sexual orientation, worries about body image, prejudice of every sort. Although such books are obviously useful, they nonetheless readily slide into kiddie socialist realism, contrived stories of bravery and redemption, packed with uplifting morals for the troubled and confused. Give me Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys any day. "The Wild Things" belongs in this gloomy tradition. Young Max lives with his divorced mom, his adolescent sister (who has recently discovered boys) and his mom's three-nights-a-week lover, the dippy, hippiesh Gary. Max's dad lives in an apartment in the city, sometimes forgets to call or visit and has hooked up with the "pretty in a loud way" Pamela. Max's mother cries a lot.

Meanwhile, the neighborhood is going to hell. The old houses are being torn down and being replaced by McMansions. When a new kid moves in and proves to be a possible friend for the lonely Max, the boy's mother turns out to be insane about the omnipresence of "Molesters! Drugs! Homeless! Needles!" She actually sends her son to a quilting class. As for the plot: Max rides his bike, builds a fort, starts a snowball fight, takes revenge on his evil sister and goes around worrying about why he's so bad. One presumes that the action takes place sometime in the recent past, since there are exercise tapes and personal computers, but no mention of text-messaging or Game Boys. So much for the first third of the book. Matters do improve dramatically once Max reaches the island of the Wild Things. These are hairy and horned creatures, "ten or twelve feet tall, four hundred pounds each or more. Max knew his animal kingdom, but he had no name for these beasts. From behind they resembled bears, but they were larger than bears, their heads far bigger, and they were quicker than bears or anything so large." One looks like a gigantic rooster. Yet these Boschian monsters also resemble typical American adults: One is depressed, another complains about everything and still another talks like a prissy English teacher: "Carol, can I speak to you for a second?" By the way, Carol turns out to be male -- why, it's hard to say, unless it's an attempt to undercut a reader's sexist expectations. Still, however deeply sensitive these creatures may be, they are still as short-tempered and unfocused as colicky pre-schoolers, and their general fallback position when thwarted is "if you do that again, I swear I'll eat your head." The Wild Things prove even more impulsive, ferocious and destructive than Max himself. (And some of Max's recorded behavior does suggest the need for intervention; at one point he dumps seven buckets of water over his sister's bed and belongings). But, as King Max's sojourn on monster island continues, it's clear that his adventures with his new subjects subtly mirror the real life he left behind: The free-for-all of the wild rumpus recalls a vacation weekend when his aunts, uncles and cousins crammed themselves together in a small cabin in Colorado. At a later feast, the Wild Things actually get drunk and flirtatious like his mother's friends at her out-of-control New Year's Eve party. One monster named Katherine gradually emerges as an ambiguous mother figure, going so far as to symbolically give birth to a new Max and then to murmur, possessively: "Please don't go, Max. You're a part of me." More than anything else, though, the Wild Things want the same impossibilities that Max dreams about: "To make everything better for everyone always for all time." Throughout the book, Eggers's viewpoint remains that of Max's child-mind, yet he regularly undercuts his hero with nudge-nudge adult humor. A Wild Thing will start talking about another monster's "aura" or mention a fear of the "void." When Max insists that a war will be a swell way to pass the time, Eggers insinuates double-edged remarks, so that we know we're supposed to think about terrorism and the invasion of Iraq: Max "was wrong to ban rocks, or even animals. The key was to use any or all weapons at one's disposal, but to just make sure you won when you used them." When Max finally sails back home, he finds -- as in Sendak's original -- that his supper is still hot: Those who visit fairyland or the folkloristic Other World always return to find that either a century has passed or no time at all. But because of his experiences with the unruly Wild Things, Max has

begun to master his emotions and to sympathize more fully with his mother. He is, in short, starting to grow up. But then what other ending could there be? All in all, Dave Eggers's "The Wild Things" is intermittently amusing but far more conventional than it should be. Eight- to 12-year-olds will like the book, but older readers -- those "children of all ages" -- won't be starting a wild rumpus over it. Book World: Michael Dirda on E.L. Doctorow's 'Homer & Langley' • • •

by Michael Dirda Sept. 3, 2009 Read Later

Random House. 208 pp. $26 Nearly everyone who collects anything with any degree of obsessiveness has heard of Homer and Langley, the protagonists of E.L. Doctorow's latest historical fantasia. Usually, the pair are simply referred to as the Collyer brothers. Eccentric, reclusive and at least half crazy, the two resided in a huge New York brownstone in Harlem that they had inherited from their gynecologist father. Over the course of their lives, Homer and Langley gradually packed every room and the back yard with newspapers and cast-off junk. Eventually, only narrow passageways connected the brothers' burrowlike living areas. When a booby-trapped tunnel collapsed onto Langley, he was crushed and suffocated, while his trapped brother, who was blind, slowly starved to death. Officials claim that they removed 100 tons of refuse from the building. All that is true. You can look it up on Wikipedia. But, as with his much admired novels "The Book of Daniel," "Ragtime," "Billy Bathgate" and "The March," Doctorow again creatively reconfigures and amplifies the historical record. The real Collyer brothers died in 1947; in Doctorow's "Homer and Langley," they live into the late 1970s. In the novel they have no siblings; in actuality, there was a sister. Of course, such divergences from "fact" are unimportant: Doctorow is writing a work of fiction, not a dual biography. He imagines the Collyers' inner lives and all the servants, socialites, gangsters, hippies and bankers they interact with. In a somewhat March-of-Time fashion, the brothers' experiences are obviously made to hold up a mirror to the 20th century. Some might call it a distorting mirror, since they find the world to be largely depressing, horrific and constantly invasive. Langley, especially, regards people and events with a grim, sardonic humor. Still, it's the blind Homer who tells this modern epic tale, steadily tapping away on a Braille typewriter. He opens by depicting Gilded Age New York, when his well-to-do parents regularly traveled to Europe and sent home crates of souvenirs: "ancient Islamic tiles, or rare books, or a marble water fountain, or busts of Romans with no noses or missing ears, or antique armoires with their fecal smell." He adds, with dry wit, that "there were always presents for Langley and me, things to really excite a boy, like an antique toy train that was too delicate to play with, or a goldplated hairbrush."

Before long, though, disasters arrive in a flurry: The teenaged Homer loses his sight, the older Langley is gassed in World War I, and both parents suddenly die during the great flu pandemic of 1918. The two brothers, severely chastened by these awful experiences, turn increasingly inward, even as Langley begins his compulsive collecting: "When Langley brings something into the house that has caught his fancy -- a piano, a toaster, a Chinese bronze horse, a set of encyclopedias -- that is just the beginning. Whatever it is, it will be acquired in several versions because until he loses his interest and goes on to something else he'll be looking for its ultimate expression." In fact, while Homer is essentially an artist, a lover of music and words, Langley is a man of grand theories. He speculates that history is based on everything being constantly replaced, that poetry is full of ideas but fiction is just stories, that one could construct a single ideal edition of the daily newspaper and thus capture all of American life in "what he called Collyer's eternally current dateless newspaper, the only newspaper anyone would ever need." In a sense, Doctorow's novel provides -- in outline form -- a comparable Platonic overview of American life in the 20th century, touching on familiar and perennial American obsessions, including xenophobia, racism, criminality, imperialism and religion: Homer sleeps with an ambitious Irish immigrant maid; the Collyers' cook is African American with a cornet-playing nephew from New Orleans; during the Depression the brothers hope to make ends meet by hosting tea dances in their salon. They meet gangsters and corrupt policemen; employ a Japanese Nisei couple during the early part of World War II; learn about the Holocaust from a Jewish veteran of the Great War; see people they care about horribly murdered; and during the Vietnam War era actually become gurus to a band of pot-smoking flower children, largely because they, too, never cut their hair and dress in tattered army fatigues. As it happens, the brothers also inspire a series of underground cartoons, rather like those of R. Crumb, in which they are depicted as "gray-haired lechers with little heads with bulging eyes and buck teeth and," as Langley says, "our legs get wider as they reach the ankles and our feet are fitted with enormous shoes." In the 1960s and '70s, the pair watch game shows and the moon landing on TV, and argue about the 900 suicides of the Jim Jones cult. During the notorious New York blackout, Homer leads people to safety like the blind slave at the end of Bulwer Lytton's "The Last Days of Pompeii." All this ebb and flow of history is filtered through the sensibility of the two brothers, and thus everything is tinged with a kind of gray sadness. Take the Depression-era tea dances, at which Homer mans the Victrola: "Whenever I happened to play one of the livelier numbers, the dancers would leave the floor. Anything fast and happy, and they would sit right down. I would hear the chairs scraping. I said to Langley, The people who come to our tea dance have no fight left in them. They are not interested in having a good time. They come here to hold each other. That's basically what they want to do, hold one another and drift around the room."

He concludes that the dances are nothing but "occasions for public mourning." Actually, to hold one another and drift around the room is a pretty good description of the human condition. As the years go by, these once nattily dressed scions of a wealthy family grow into Samuel Beckett characters, surrounded by garbage, eating out of cans, scavenging their drinking water from a public faucet in the park. Is this, in allegory, the grim history of the United States during the last century? Do the Collyers represent the endpoint of our current culture of gated communities and the constant acquisition of more and more stuff? The brothers themselves certainly never find any happiness in their tottering piles of junk -- and almost none in their entire lives, for that matter. To think, as Homer says with wonder, that "as little boys we sat on the thick rugs and pushed our toy cars along the patterns." But, then, Homer is the sentimental one, the musician, the lover. As the atheist Langley observes, "To be a man in this world is to face the hard real life of awful circumstance, to know there is only life and death and such varieties of human torment as to confound any such personage as God." There's a briskness to "Homer & Langley" that never flags, and its solitary protagonists -- two lost souls -- possess a half-comical, half-nightmarish fascination. They seem, at once, symbols of both American materialism and of American loneliness. Think of Melville's "isolatoes," or of all those forlorn men in shirt sleeves and the dispirited women of Edward Hopper's paintings, or of Hank Williams singing "I'm so lonesome I could cry." In real life, the Collyer brothers are kin to the hermitlike diarist Arthur Inman, up in his Boston bedroom, paying strangers to tell him about their sex lives, or to the bohemian Joe Gould, at work on his mammoth oral history of our time, or to . . . But why go on? The darkness surrounds us, and awaits. "And so do people pass out of one's life," concludes the insightful if sightless Homer Collyer, "and all you can remember of them is their humanity, a poor fitful thing of no dominion, like your own." Book World: Michael Dirda Reviews 'The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard' • • •

by Michael Dirda Sept. 17, 2009 Read Later

THE COMPLETE STORIES OF J.G. BALLARD Introduction by Martin Amis Norton. 1,199 pp. $35 J.G. Ballard, who died earlier this year at the age of 78, was once acclaimed by the novelist Kingsley Amis as "the most imaginative of H.G. Wells's successors." Not a bad encomium for a British science-fiction writer. On the other hand, Martin Amis goes his father one better by suggesting that Ballard might well be "the most original English writer of the last century." In particular, Amis fils praises "the marvelous creaminess" of Ballard's prose and "the weird and sudden expansions of his imagery." Ballard is, in truth, a literary surrealist, and his dreamlike narratives reveal a psychoanalytic intensity reminiscent of Kafka's more somber fables, Conrad's

"Heart of Darkness," George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and both William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" and William Burroughs's "Naked Lunch." As Ballard once said, "The only truly alien planet is Earth," and so his sui generis science fiction relentlessly explores the darker reaches of what he once dubbed "inner space." There are no ray guns and bug-eyed monsters in the nearly 1,200 pages of "The Complete Stories of J.G. Ballard." Instead, Ballard's stories are, in his own words, "mental explorations, evocative journeys in the mind." Little wonder that the sf author he most resembles is our own homegrown chronicler of paranoia Philip K. Dick. Yet Dick's work is fundamentally sociable, a paean to unacknowledged goodness and the quiet satisfactions of ordinary life. Ballard's protagonists tend to be isolated visionaries who inexorably pursue their obsessions to the point of madness or death, typically reaching self-fulfillment through nothing less than self-immolation. In their exaltation, they all feel that they are -- to borrow the title of one of Ballard's books -- "Rushing to Paradise," and rushing, moreover, ecstatically, with arms outstretched. Ballard's greatest fictions are nearly all examples of the liebestod -- the lovedeath. This is most obvious in his novels. In "The Drowned World" (1962), Earth's temperature has risen, the ice poles have melted, and cities lie half-submerged in steamy Triassic swamps. The scientisthero ends by offering himself to the blazing sun and heat, half sacrificial victim, half man-god. "Crash" (1973) -- made into a controversial film by David Cronenberg -- dissects the perverse sexuality of car crashes. Ballard boldly called the novel "pornographic science fiction," but one editor, after having read the manuscript, put it more simply: "The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help." Ballard pushed his vision to its limits in "The Atrocity Exhibition" (1970), which contained a halfdozen experimental, nonlinear meditations on the intersection of celebrity, sex and death. The original American publisher of these "condensed novels" suppressed his edition because of such stories as "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" and "Why I Want to [Expletive] Ronald Reagan" (both included in "The Complete Stories" -- but where are the others, including "You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe"?). Even very late novels, like "Super-Cannes" (2000), examine violence, drugs and deviant sexuality as a response to the stresses of modern life: "Sexual pathology is such an energizing force. People know that, and will stoop to any depravity that excites them." Despite the unsettling provocation of nearly everything he wrote, Ballard's most perfect work -filmed by Steven Spielberg -- was his most seemingly conventional: Depicting the schoolboy Jim as he struggles to survive during the Japanese occupation of wartime Shanghai, "Empire of the Sun" (1984) is one of the great novels of our time, with something of the brutal beauty found in the fiction of Cormac McCarthy. The real Jim's youthful experiences in "this terrible city" later provided Ballard with his trademark iconography: low-flying aircraft, wrecked automobiles, drained swimming pools, abandoned hotels, fetid rivers and lagoons, even an affectless, half-mad protagonist (near the end of the novel, Jim comes to believe he can raise the dead to life). All these motifs -- along with a few others, like barren deserts and empty beaches -- recur throughout "The Complete Stories."

Perhaps surprisingly, Ballard believes strongly in plot, and, with a few exceptions, his stories are intensely gripping without ever being upbeat or reassuring. In style, his work combines an almost medical precision with an astonishing power for evocative description by the simplest means. "Not one of the twenty elevators in the apartment building now functioned, and the shafts were piled deep with kitchen refuse and dead dogs." There, in miniature, is the world of "High Rise" (1975), a novel in which the tenants of a luxury residence gradually regress to savagery. Usually, Ballard's stories open with a striking sentence, then plunge the reader directly into some hallucinatory environment -- a super-crowded city ("Billennium"), the deserted bunkers of Eniwetok ("The Terminal Beach"), the decadent resort of Vermilion Sands ("Prima Belladonna") -and eventually conclude with an ambiguous and enigmatic epiphany. Eerie and melancholy, they unsettle like a Dalí painting or a Helmut Newton photograph. Consider, for instance, the ominous first sentence of Ballard's "The Voices of Time": "Later Powers often thought of Whitby, and the strange grooves the biologist had cut, apparently at random, all over the floor of the empty swimming pool." Immediately, Ballard creates a sense of mystery. As in a ghost story, the word "Later" implies that Powers will be forced to reconsider his understanding of Whitby. That a biologist cut the "strange grooves" somehow makes them all the more sinister. Finally, there's the quiet shock of that adverb, "apparently." Something deeply disquieting is happening to our world in this science-fiction classic. And it is science fiction. Of course, when people hesitate to use that dreaded phrase, they generally resort to talking about "magic realism" or "fable." Certainly, Ballard's sophisticated sf readily allows for just this sort of weaseliness. "The Drowned Giant," for instance, might actually be by Borges or García Márquez, though it is also an oblique homage to the man Ballard regarded as "the most intelligent writer who ever lived," Jonathan Swift. It opens this way: "On the morning after the storm the body of a drowned giant was washed ashore on the beach five miles to the north-west of the city." This satirical parable was originally published as "Souvenir," but that title probably makes over-explicit its meaning: At first the dead giant resembles a perfect Greek god in form and beauty, but before long the loutish locals clamber all over its body, sit on its face "like flies," and cut swastikas into the dead flesh. Within a few days they are slicing off body parts as mementos, before finally boiling the remaining bits in great vats, like whale blubber. Sometimes Ballard pays even more obvious homage to an earlier work of art. "The Sound-Sweep" and "Studio 5, the Stars" play variations on their author's favorite film, "Sunset Boulevard," as hapless protagonists are drawn to aging divas and femmes fatales. "A Question of Re-Entry" updates "Heart of Darkness," when a U.N. investigator, searching for a downed space capsule, encounters a Kurtz-like figure in the South American backcountry. "All day they had moved steadily upstream, occasionally pausing to raise the propeller and cut away the knots of weed, and by 3 o'clock had covered some seventy-five miles. Fifty yards away, on either side of the patrol launch, the high walls of the jungle river rose over the water." We may have made this journey before, but who would want to stop reading?

Ballard's most influential stories were written mainly in the early 1960s, and typically focus on people breaking down as a result of radical environmental and technological changes. But this hefty volume permits a reappraisal of his excellent, if somewhat neglected, short fiction of the 1970s and '80s. Look, for instance, at "The Dead Time," which is a trial run for "Empire of the Sun"; "The Index," which is literally an index, but one that gradually reveals a hidden mastermind in 20thcentury cultural, political and religious life; and "War Fever," wherein the city of Beirut is kept in a state of constant civil war because it allows the rest of the world to be at peace. Several of the late stories deal with what Ballard called "memories of the space age" and are even set around Cape Canaveral. "Just as the sea was a universal image of the unconscious," a character speculates in "The Venus Hunters," "so space was nothing less than an image of psychosis and death." Even in his later work Ballard brilliantly evokes spiritual torpor, with a characteristic soupcon of dry humor: "I, too, was once an astronaut. As you see me sitting here, in this modest café with its distant glimpse of Copacabana Beach, you probably assume that I am a man of few achievements. The shabby briefcase between my worn heels, the stained suit with its frayed cuffs, the unsavoury hands ready to seize the first offer of a free drink, the whole air of failure." This speaker -- the narrator of "The Man Who Walked on the Moon" -- appears in a hundred movies, and in a dozen previous Ballard stories, always unkempt but "composed and self-possessed, like a Conradian beachcomber more or less reconciled to his own weaknesses." In "The Complete Short Stories of J.G. Ballard" devastated worlds are matched with even more devastated psyches. But these aren't simply "myths of the near future," they are probes sent down into the desolate heart of the here and now. As Ballard knew, reality has become just a subgenre of science fiction. Book Review: Michael Dirda on 'The Ends of Life' by Keith Thomas • • •

by Michael Dirda July 23, 2009 Read Later

By Keith Thomas Oxford. 393 pp. $34.95 When young, we are all aesthetes, eager to enjoy a wondrous world full of beauty, promise and reward. The experience of life itself seems enough to keep us busy and happy. So we fall in love and go to work and find success or not, and the decades roll by. In later years, however, we become unwilling philosophers. A parent unexpectedly dies. The nowgrown children go off on their own. Work suddenly loses its savor. Before long, we are taking long walks and wondering about the old perplexities: What makes for a meaningful life? How should we pass our too few days upon this Earth? What really matters?

Keith Thomas's "The Ends of Life" examines the ways that people answered those questions from the early 16th century to the late 18th. To do so, this cultural historian -- author of the classic "Religion and the Decline of Magic" (1971) -- investigates six areas that have traditionally supplied aims for purpose-driven lives: Military prowess, work and vocation, wealth and possessions, honor and reputation, friendship and sociability, and fame and the afterlife. In each case, he presents his evidence largely through quotations from contemporary letters, memoirs, court testimonies and other documents. As Thomas's own connecting prose is graceful and sometimes crisply epigrammatic, "The Ends of Life" is a pleasure to read. The book opens by exploring the very idea of personal fulfillment during a time when religion contended that it wasn't so much life that mattered as afterlife. In general, all people were supposed to be satisfied with their lot and to work out their salvation within it, whether they were assigned by God to be peasants or aristocrats. "Those who failed to adhere to conventional expectations," Thomas writes, "whether in their religion or their tastes or their personal behaviour, were accused of the great vice of 'singularity,' of following their 'private fancy and vanity.' 'Desire not to be singular, nor to differ from others,' warned a Jacobean cleric, 'for it is a sign of a naughty spirit, which hath caused much evil in the world from the beginning.' " Nonetheless, throughout the 17th century the notion of individuality and personal uniqueness grew ever more prevalent. Long ago, Aristotle asserted that every man should aim to realize his inner nature, but now the "great motor behind the sense of individual identity was the growth of a market economy, in which land, goods, and labour were freely bought and sold. New economic opportunities gave rise to personal competition and mobility. They widened the scope for personal choice in such matters as dress and domestic equipment; and they made acquisitive and ego-centred behaviour increasingly common." People soon rose above their station: Isaac Newton's father had been unable to sign his own name. By the 1630s, the physician-essayist Thomas Browne could write that "every man truly lives, so long as he acts his nature, or some way makes good the faculties of himself." Thomas's second chapter opens with a ringing sentence that calls to mind Gibbon or Macaulay: "Since time immemorial, all societies which depend upon force for the acquisition and retention of their means of subsistence have regarded physical courage as the supreme proof of manhood." For nobles, military valor provided the validation of their lives and status, and there was no more desirable death than a glorious one upon the field of battle. Yet even this heroic ideal was gradually ousted by a more civilian model of masculinity, "with the emphasis laid not on physical aggression, but on strength of character. Conquering one's own passions was a greater achievement than conquering other men." In his third chapter, Thomas shows how work -- originally performed because of economic necessity or physical constraint -- came to be seen as potentially rewarding in itself. A person's job might be drudgery, but it could now also be a career, a vocation. Leisure consequently became suspect. The idle, Thomas Jefferson maintained, "are the only wretched," while Marx eventually promulgated the radical notion that labor could be the ultimate form of self-realization.

Today, Thomas concludes, "the highest prestige attaches not to leisure, as in the past, but to extreme busy-ness." In discussing wealth and possessions, Thomas neatly defines a luxury as "an object of expenditure inappropriate to the purchaser's social position," considers the aristocrat's need for monumental opulence as a sign of his importance, and then takes up the complicated notions of taste and fashion. He cites scholar William Leiss, who wryly notes that in modern times "individuality is attained by assembling a unique collection of commodities." Kurt Vonnegut puts this even more brutally in "Slaughterhouse-Five": "Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from the things she found in gift shops." The performance of heroic deeds, a career of rewarding work, the accumulation of riches and luxuries -- each of these "roads to fulfillment" still has its adherents. So, too, does the notion of gaining honor, of having one's superiority publicly recognized. In Chapter 5, Thomas examines the meanings clustering around the concepts of reputation, integrity and shame. Take sexual morality. Once upon a time, "chastity to women was what courage was to men, the primary constituent of their honour." Yet this and other publicly bestowed virtues gradually diminished in importance when society began to recognize the individual's right to privacy and a personal life. Similarly, friends and family were once pragmatically viewed as little more than mutual support systems or politically useful alliances. But by the 18th century the domestic sphere, the realm of intimacy, had emerged as the site of our most reliable satisfactions. In his last chapter, "Fame and the Afterlife," Thomas addresses the real heart of human restlessness -- our fear of oblivion. As Walter Raleigh is supposed to have said, "We die like beasts, and when we are gone there is no more remembrance of us." While some of us hope for a place in paradise, many others look to more earthly forms of immortality. In the words of that anatomist of melancholy Robert Burton: "Tombs and monuments . . . epitaphs, elegies, inscriptions, pyramids, obelisks, statues, images, pictures, histories, poems, annals, feasts, anniversaries . . . they will . . . omit no good office that may tend to the preservation of their names, honours, and eternal memory." Certainly every artist dreams that his work will carry on his or her name forever. As Horace -- accurately in his case -- wrote at the end of his odes: "Non omnis moriar" ("I will not wholly die"). But, of course, oblivion awaits nearly all of us. "The farce of dustiny," James Joyce called it. Today, Thomas concludes, most people simply look for subjective if temporary happiness in some of the areas he has outlined, especially in "their work and possessions, the affection of their friends and families, and the respect of their peers." In appreciating the modest satisfactions of daily existence, one discovers "the ends of life." A sensible, reasonable answer, worthy of Epicurus. Nonetheless, many people are still going to maintain, like the doggy heroine of Maurice Sendak's "Higglety Pigglety Pop!," that "there must be more to life." And who can blame them for their endless dissatisfaction? Such is life. Book Review: Michael Dirda on 'The Greeks and Greek Love' by James Davidson • • •

by Michael Dirda June 18, 2009 Read Later

By James Davidson | Random House. 789 pp. $45 Enthralling if overlong, "The Greeks and Greek Love" is written in part as a counterblast to Kenneth Dover's classic "Greek Homosexuality" (1978), which has been deeply influential in contemporary cultural studies. Dover argued that same-sex relationships among males in ancient Greece focused on sodomy, and that the submissive role was deeply humiliating. By contrast, the aggressive or dominant partner could freely engage in any amount of episodic sex without serious consequences to his career or reputation. For Davidson, a professor of classics and history at the University of Warwick, this model leaves much to be desired and overlooks one important fact: actual love, the devotion of a couple to each other. He stresses that Dover -- and his followers, who included Michel Foucault -- proffered a vision of eros that ignores affection and true partnership. "By equating being in love with having sex, by confusing Greek sex with Greek Love, a courting couple with a couple in a relationship, Dover not only sexualized passionate eros, but made homosexual relationships look intrinsically impermanent, and by the same token trivial." Though Davidson never says it outright, "The Greeks and Greek Love" tacitly validates modern same-sex marriage, just as Dover's older study now seems to reflect the pre-AIDS era of promiscuous casual sex. In the first section of his book, Davidson focuses on the meaning of Greek erotic terminology and Athenian sexual mores. His starting text is "The Symposium," Plato's classic dialogue on love. In particular, he focuses on the speeches of Pausanias, who describes the elaborate Athenian courtship ritual between admirer (erastes) and admired (eromenos). Here Davidson overturns the typical view of Greek love as a kind of pedophilia, an older male (the erastes) forcing his brutal attentions on a young boy (the eromenos). In fact, a family's sons were carefully protected in Athenian society, and it was taboo for any unrelated man even to talk privately to them. Instead, sanctioned love affairs focused not on the pubescent but on 18- or 19-year-olds, young males who were neither boys nor full-fledged adults. Davidson dubs this group "striplings." As puberty seems to have set in four or five years later than it typically does today, these striplings would still be attractively beardless -- Greek men didn't trim their facial hair -- and at the acme of their masculine beauty. Their devotees were generally only a few years older than they were and often behaved with the giddiness of a modern fan club. Rather than being aggressors, groups of infatuated erastai (plural of erastes) would essentially worship a youthful heartthrob from a distance, writing poems, sighing heavily and frequently offering gifts. In this Greek system, Davidson explains, eros ran in one direction: The besotted admirer, who "just can't help himself," did all the work while the hard-to-get beloved maintained his distance and apparent indifference. Still, it was ultimately the eromenos's decision whether to favor any particular man. For the Greeks, such favoring (charizesthai) had to avoid even the hint of quid pro quo or commodification: To exchange sex for money or political advantage was prostitution, and that taint would wreck an entire life. Everything instead should be built on a kind of gracious giving. With luck, philia, "intimate love," a true bond, might result. All in all, the course of samesex love was highly formalized, usually culminating in rituals that look a lot like marriage ceremonies. Quite often, Davidson concludes, Greek homosexuals led their entire lives as committed and faithful couples.

In the middle section of his book, Davidson surveys and analyzes some of the literary and mythological models of same-sex relationships available to Greeks of the 5th century B.C. Among them are Achilles and Patroclus, Apollo and Hyacinthus, Zeus and Ganymede (whose name gave us the word "catamite"), Heracles and his traveling companion Iolaus, and Alexander the Great and his minister Hephaestion. Here, too, Davidson underscores that differing "homosexualities" existed in the various Greek city-states: Elaborate two-month-long abduction rituals in Crete, the Sacred Band of Thebes (a warrior elite consisting of male couples) and austere Spartan sexual protocols, including a bizarre form of lovemaking in which the younger partner remains swaddled from head to foot in his cloak. In his final chapters, Davidson sums up his understanding of Greek love and attempts to trace its origins. He notes, for instance, that the gymnasium or training ground seems to be a common background element in vase paintings. He suggests that when applied to men, the Greek word "kalos" (beautiful) probably didn't mean prettiness, so much as the well-muscled "physical splendor" appropriate for a great warrior. He underscores that from a civic viewpoint, an erotic bond between two men could strengthen -- or damage -- the state by cutting across the usual loyalties to clan or class. Davidson tentatively concludes that the template for Greek love might be traced back to the Bronze Age and, in particular, to chariot warfare. This last was organized as a two-man operation, consisting of a driver and a spearman, who needed to work closely, indeed intimately, together. Perhaps this tradition partially explains the frequent analogy comparing the amorous soul to a chariot yoked to unruly horses. Davidson can be delightfully unruly himself, mixing high and low styles, supporting his serious scholarly points with humorous and even campy flourishes. Take, for instance, his portrait of Helen of Troy in her later years: "Over twenty years after she was seduced and got carried away by Paris, Helen is nevertheless no Norma Desmond: a little ashamed of all the heroes who died for her, to be sure, but bitter, surely not, and she's still got it -- whatever it was she had -- wonderfully charming and mysterious, quietly self-confident, and ever so slightly from another planet." James Davidson chose the title for his book with care. It really is about love, about long-term philia rather than just temporary lust. As he says with epigrammatic forcefulness: "Those who care only for sex give homosexuality a bad name." Michael Dirda on 'In Other Rooms, Other Wonders' by Daniyal Mueenuddin • • •

by Michael Dirda Feb. 15, 2009 Read Later

Norton. 247 pp. $23.95

Because of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Rohinton Mistry, to mention just a few of the most prominent authors, American readers have long been able to enjoy one terrific Indian novel after another. But Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is likely to be the first widely read book by a Pakistani writer. Mueenuddin spent his early childhood in Pakistan, then lived in the United States -- he attended Dartmouth and Yale -- and has since returned to his father's homeland, where he and his wife now manage a farm in Khanpur. These connected stories show us what life is like for both the rich and the desperately poor in Mueenuddin's country, and the result is a kind of miniaturized Pakistani "human comedy." In the original Comédie humaine, Balzac had the ingenious notion of tying his various novels together by using recurrent characters. Eugène de Rastignac is the protagonist of Le Père Goriot but is subsequently glimpsed in passing or sometimes just referred to in several other books. In like fashion, Mueenuddin interlaces eight stories, while also linking them to the household of a wealthy and self-satisfied landowner named K.K. Harouni. In "Saleema," for instance, Harouni's elderly valet, Rafik, falls into a heartbreaking affair with a young maidservant, and we remember this, with a catch in our throat, when in another story we see him bring in two glasses of whiskey on a silver tray. In "Our Lady of Paris," we discover that Harouni's nephew is madly in love with a young American woman named Helen; later on, we discover that he is married -- to an American named Sonya. Many of Mueenuddin's stories conform to a common dynamic: We learn about a character's past, then zero in on the central crisis of his or her life and, even while we expect more development, suddenly find everything wound up in a paragraph or two: "The next day two men loaded the trunks onto a horse-drawn cart and carried them away to the Old City." (Flaubert or Chekhov might have written that.) In other instances, even so minimal a resolution remains cloudy: Mueenuddin just stops, having given us all that we need to know about the future or lack of future in a love affair or a marriage. The epigraph to In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is a Punjabi proverb: "Three things for which we kill - Land, women and gold." Throughout the book the Harounis are gradually selling off their ancestral lands to pay for business losses and a Eurotrash lifestyle. (Two of the patriarch's three daughters reside in Paris and London.) Nearly everyone in the book is more or less corrupt. In "Provide, Provide" we learn of the machinations of Jaglani, the manager of K.K. Harouni's estates in the Southern Punjab. When Jaglani "would receive a brief telegram, NEED FIFTY THOUSAND IMMEDIATELY," he would "sell the land at half price, the choice pieces to himself, putting it in the names of his servants and relatives. He sold to the other managers, to his friends, to political allies. Everyone got a piece of the quick dispersion. He took a commission on each sale." But even the immensely shrewd and politically powerful Jaglani has his weakness. He begins to sleep with his driver's sister, a young woman he employs to cook and clean for him: "Finally he could not deny to himself that he had fallen in love, for the first time in his life. He even acknowledged her aloof coldness, the possibility that she would mar his life. And yet he felt that he had risen so far, had become invulnerable to the judgments of those around him, had become preeminent in this area by the river Indus, and now he deserved to make this mistake, for once not to make a calculated choice, but to surrender to his desire."

In Mueenuddin's Pakistan, happiness is usually short-lived. Jaglani's beloved develops a urinarytract infection, then discovers she cannot bear children. A man finally achieves success, only to be diagnosed with cancer. When a party girl resolves to change her life, she discovers how hard it is to be virtuous. On every page there are wonderful, surprising observations and details: A judge says of his wife that "you need only see her disjoint a roast chicken to know the depths or heights of her carnality." The rich young Sohail Harouni suddenly recites from memory some poetry by James Merrill. An old caretaker builds a wooden cubicle that can be dismantled and simply carted away whenever he needs to move. In every instance, Mueenuddin convincingly captures the mindset or speech of any class, from the hardworking Nawab, a roustabout electrician with 11 daughters, to the flamboyantly decadent Mino, who imports tons of sand to his country estate for a "Night of the Tsunami" party. But my favorite character is the mysterious judicial clerk Mian Sarkar: "There is nothing connected with the courts of Lahore that he has not absorbed, for knowledge in this degree of detail can only be obtained by osmosis. Everything about the private lives of the judges, and of the staff, down to the lowest sweeper, is to him incidental knowledge. He knows the verdicts of the cases before they have been written, before they even have been conceived. He sees the city panoptically, simultaneously, and if he does not disclose the method and the motive and the culprit responsible for each crime, it is only because he is more powerful if he does not do so." Mian Sarkar -- half Sherlock Holmes, half Jeeves -- actually functions as a detective in "About a Burning Girl," and the result is the most light-hearted of Mueenuddin's stories. I was only sorry that he didn't include more about this "man of secret powers." Maybe he will in his next book. As should be clear, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is a collection full of pleasures. I saw only a single improbability in it: At one point, a gorgeous young wife grows dissatisfied with her hard-working and high-minded husband's routine love-making. So she dons a pair of stockings and a garter belt and, otherwise naked, lies fetchingly in their candle-lit bedroom. The husband comes in, glances at her and says, "So that's how you wear those!" and then begins to trim a broken fingernail and talk about a problem on the farm. Not even a Princeton graduate, which he is, could be quite such a moron. · Michael Dirda on 'Fool' By Christopher Moore • • •

by Michael Dirda Feb. 8, 2009 Read Later

Morrow. 311 p. $26.99 In "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead," Tom Stoppard had the clever idea of retelling "Hamlet" from the point of view of two of its minor characters. Even before that, James Thurber addressed the problem of "The Macbeth Murder Mystery," treating Shakespeare's Scottish tragedy as if it were an Agatha Christie whodunit. It turns out that Macbeth and his good lady were falsely blamed for the death of King Duncan, the real murderer being absolutely the least likely character. Similarly, the 1950s film "Forbidden Planet" gave a science-fiction twist to "The Tempest," even as the musical "West Side Story" copied and updated the plot of "Romeo and Juliet."

As the king of dramatists, Shakespeare has long invited every form of pastiche, parody and general lèse-majesté. But to turn the darkly depressing "King Lear" into a comedy requires more than ordinary chutzpah. Yet who better to give it a try than Christopher Moore, author of the famously outrageous and funny Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal? As Moore's prefatorial "Warning" to Fool explicitly states, the result is "a bawdy tale." Very bawdy. We're talking country matters here, the beast with two backs, coxcombs and poxes, scullions and cullions, all the most intimate body fluids and exudations. In truth, Fool is exuberantly, tirelessly, brazenly profane, vulgar, crude, sexist, blasphemous and obscene. Compared to Moore's novel, even Mel Brooks's hilariously tasteless film "Blazing Saddles" appears a model of stately 18th-century decorousness. To quote carelessly from Fool would strain the forbearance of this family newspaper. Suffice it to say that variants of the f-word and its English cousins -- the marginally more acceptable, because less familiar "shag" and "bonk" -- appear on every page, not only as intensifiers and expletives but also as apt descriptions for what is happening right before our eyes on the tapestried divan with Princess Goneril or behind the arras with her sister Regan. Virtually every woman in this novel -- from the cook and the laundress to a holy anchoress and three witches -- demonstrates what Moore calls, in one of his rare euphemisms, "a generous spirit in the dark." Our narrator and hero is Pocket, King Lear's jester or fool. Originally a foundling reared by nuns and once a traveling mummer (actor/acrobat/clown), he is a young man of multiple talents: Pocket can forge letters, throw knives with deadly accuracy, caper with equal ease among the high and the low and, most of important all, make the melancholy Cordelia laugh. He even boasts an apprentice named Drool, a man-mountain of limited intelligence but spaniel-like loyalty and a not-too-distant cousin of Mongo from "Blazing Saddles." As the novel opens, old Lear has been persuaded to divvy up his kingdom among his three daughters and in return expects arias of impassioned devotion and gratitude, which the hypocritical (but very sexy) Goneril and Regan enthusiastically deliver. Cordelia refuses to exaggerate her affection for her father and is duly sent packing, married off without a dowry to the king of France. Ye Olde Britain is then divided between the two lying-through-their-teeth sisters, the medieval equivalents of Vampirella and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. Before long, Lear's darling daughters are cuckolding their ducal husbands while conspiring against each other and with the sleekly wicked Edmund, the bastard son of the Duke of Gloucester. Once fully heart-broken and divested of his retainers, the now howling-mad Lear is driven from his castle into the raging storm, with only Pocket left to set matters right. Can he do it? So many things are rotten in the state of Britain, and a fair number of them involve cold-blooded murder, madness, sexual frenzy and rape and, of course, torture (up to and including the plucking out of eyes), not that one should discount the occasional ghostly visitation, a bit of sorcery and witchcraft, and allout war. Needless to say, Pocket turns out to be much more than just your ordinary fool in motley. All comedies approach the tragic, avoiding it at the last minute through some fateful revelation or convenient deus ex machina. In Fool Moore takes a tragedy -- after all, "Lear" ends with almost everybody dead -- and plays it for laughs, largely through the exuberance of the novel's shaggy, slangy diction. Pocket spiels like a music-hall comedian, with a relentless spate of winking and blatant sexual banter and a constant patter of quips, japes and backtalk. Take this confrontation with the satinly evil Edmund:

"I said, 'Thou scaly scalawag of a corpse-gorged carrion worm, cease your feast on the bodies of your betters and receive the Black Fool before vengeful spirits come to wrench the twisted soul from your body and drag it into the darkest depths of hell for your treachery.' " 'Oh, well spoken, fool,' said Edmund. " 'You think so?' " 'Oh yes, I'm cut to the quick. I may never recover.' " 'Completely impromptu,' said I. 'With time and polish -- well, I could go out and return with a keener edge on it.' " 'Perish the thought,' said the bastard." I suspect that such deadly politeness owes more than a little to the similarly elegant sarcasm found in films like "The Princess Bride" and comparable fractured fairytales. While much of the humor of Fool is Rabelaisian and full of priapic gusto, Moore will stoop to any form of joking. Virtually every geographical location is a bad pun of the groan-inducing variety, my favorite being the city of Lint-upon-Tweed. The three witches are named Parsley, Sage and Rosemary, and when the old knight Kent naturally asks, "What, no Thyme?" witch Rosemary answers with a badabing: "Oh, we've the time if you've the inclination, handsome." An ambitious troupe of traveling mummers hopes to stage the classic but ever-fresh "Green Eggs and Hamlet." The king of France is named Jeff. There are, naturally, more than a few pokes at modern-day politics and religion. On the very first page we are told that a thousand years ago "George II, idiot king of Merica, destroyed the world." We also learn that "after the Thirteenth Holy Crusade," it was decided that to avoid future strife "the birthplace of Jesus would be moved to a different city every four years." Less welcome, indeed an artistic misjudgment, is the steady dog-trot of word-notes and definitions at the bottom of the page. These interrupt the narrative flow for no discernibly good reason. They're not funny, so they can't be sending up the kind of annotation found in scholarly editions of Shakespeare, but neither are they particularly useful. Does it really matter to tell the reader, without even a glint of humor, that a chamberlain is "usually a servant in charge of running a castle or household" and that an iamb is "a metrical foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable"? While usually a merry prankster, at times Pocket grows as melancholy as Jaques in "As You Like It" and then speaks with a somber, if slightly tongue-in-cheek, Shakespearean majesty: "Oh, we are but soft and squishy bags of mortality rolling in a bin of sharp circumstance, leaking life until we collapse, flaccid, into our own despair." Sometimes our hero even grows sentimental: "Ah, Goneril, Goneril, Goneril -- like a distant love chant is her name. Not that it doesn't summon memories of burning urination and putrid discharge, but what romance worth the memory is devoid of the bittersweet?" But before long, Pocket shucks off such unprofessional wistfulness and

is back to his usual self, as in this typical riposte: " 'Shall I disrobe for my punishment?' I offered. 'Flagellation? Fellation? Whatever. I am your willing penitent, lady.' " While Fool is certainly amusing -- especially when read while snowbound in Ohio during late January -- its blithe crudity can grow a little tiresome at times, no matter how much one generally admires Moore's copious and almost Bard-like razzmatazz. I also wondered if anybody, except Drool, could fail to guess the identities of the various mysterious or ghostly personages, let alone have any trouble in foreseeing Pocket's eventual destiny. No matter. If you like Benny Hill's leering music-hall routines or Terry Pratchett's satirical Discworld novels, or George MacDonald Fraser's rumbustious Flashman adventures, not to overlook the less well known comic fiction of, say, Tom Holt and Tom Sharpe, you're almost certain to enjoy Christopher Moore's latest romp. Besides, its hero prances around with bells on. No fooling. · Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda on 'Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting' by Kitty Burns Florey • • •

by Michael Dirda Feb. 1, 2009 Read Later

By Kitty Burns Florey Melville House. 190 pp. $22.95 Like many people over the age of 40, I still have a callused knobby excrescence on the third finger of my right hand, the place where pencils and ballpoints and fountain pens have been resting ever since I first began to learn the Palmer method of cursive handwriting. Kids no longer have this "writer's bump," since cursive isn't seriously taught any more. For the most part, young people born into the computer age can, by focusing hard, just about sign their names in longhand, but otherwise they rely almost entirely on printing or, more and more often, keyboarding. Today Truman Capote would have to quip: "That's not writing, that's word processing." Sad to say, I just typed the above paragraph on a laptop. No handwriting implements were involved in the production of those sentences. I do feel mildly guilty about this: In four broken coffee cups scattered artfully around my desk are a half-dozen fountain pens -- among them an old Esterbrook (a gift from the writer Glenway Wescott), a Pelikan with an italic nib, a handsome Namiki retractable -- and scores of Bics, rollerballs, felt tips and gel markers, as well as innumerable pencils, most of them with the names of museums, universities or other cultural sites etched on their sides. As it happens, I do use most of these hand tools of the writer's trade, usually the pencils, when scribbling notes in the margins of books I'm reviewing. Nonetheless, so poor is my script that these notes often turn indecipherable even to me after just a few hours. It's seriously frustrating to read: "The really important point is amxiwyby sowkymx, rather than roeqcz or kfghi."

As Kitty Burns Florey points out in her highly enjoyable Script and Scribble, clear and readable handwriting does matter: "The TV drama ER often tackles the issue: in one 2007 episode, Dr. Izzie Stevens tells the interns she's supervising, 'Penmanship saves lives! Is that a 7, or is that a 9? If I have to ask myself that in the middle of an emergency, your patient is dead. You killed him. With your handwriting. Think about that!' " In contrast to medical cacography, which can kill us, calligraphy -- that is, "beautiful writing" -simply takes our breath away. The novelist John Crowley, for instance, is almost as well known for the elegance of his handwriting as for the elegance of his prose -- which is why a special edition of Little, Big sold out so quickly: Subscribers could choose a favorite passage, and Crowley would personally copy it out for them. Once, following a lecture by the professional scribe Sheila Waters, I managed to snag the big pieces of paper upon which she casually drew her magnificent O's, A's and M's. Even these throwaways were so striking that I had them framed and hung on a wall of my apartment. Script and Scribble actually mentions Waters, as well as one of her most famous commissions: a handwritten and illuminated copy of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood. But a mention is almost all we get, and before long Florey is on to some other aspect of handwriting practice and history. Because she's witty and often endearingly autobiographical (she includes illustrations from her third-grade writing workbook), the reader is happy to follow her into any byway of penmanship. Still, this account of "the rise and fall of handwriting" never aims to be more than a breezily enjoyable introduction. Those seriously intrigued by the subject will want to go on to the books that Florey mentions, in particular Edward Johnston's classic Writing & Illuminating & Lettering and Wilfred Blunt's Sweet Roman Hand: Five Hundred Years of Italic Cursive Script. That said, Script and Scribble really is charming and does offer chapters on such matters as the origin of letter forms, the development of the pen and pencil, and the evolution of various schools of handwriting practice in America. In our history the great names are Platt Rogers Spencer, whose much admired script will be familiar from the distinctive Coca-Cola logo, and A.N. Palmer, whose methods for teaching cursive dominated the lives of elementary school students for most of the last century. Palmer himself learned from a writing master named George Gaskell, author of several practical works, among them Gaskell's Compendium of Forms, Educational, Social, Legal and Commercial. That desirable volume includes sample letters such as this delightful one from a concerned mother to her daughter away at school: "I have been somewhat alarmed because your last two letters do not run in that strain of unaffected piety as formerly. What, my dear, is the reason? Does virtue appear unpleasant to you? Are you resolved to embark in the fashionable follies of a gay, unthinking world?" Am I alone in regretting the disappearance of such elegantly corseted prose? Probably. One chapter of Script & Scribble may seem slightly out of place: A longish account of graphology, the interpretation of character through the study of how one shapes letters and words. Florey seems to half believe in this pseudo-science, even as she recognizes how authorities pooh-pooh its supposed findings and predictions: She notes, for instance, that "the British Psychological Society ranks graphology alongside astrology: both possess 'zero validity' in determining personality."

My favorite chapter, that on "Writing By Hand in a Digital Age," opens with several pages about contemporary novelists who still use pens for at least their initial drafts: Mary Gordon, Paul Auster, J.K. Rowling, Toni Morrison ("pencil and yellow pad"), Joyce Carol Oates, John Irving, Patrick Leigh Fermor, William Boyd, Jim Harrison and Wendell Berry, among others. Even the prolific Stephen King likes to write in longhand: "He was forced to do so when sitting at the computer became painful after he was struck by a car in 1999, and continues to prefer it." In this chapter, Florey also discusses the value of manuscripts and rough drafts in deepening our understanding of the published poem or novel. Today, though, she concludes that the only place where extended writing by hand commonly continues is in the keeping of diaries. While Florey clearly (and rightly) admires Portland, Ore., where the schools teach italic handwriting, she ends by advocating a stripped-down blend of italic and printing as a possible ideal for classrooms. I wish. Alas, as she herself writes, "In the world of incessant testing and 'No Child Left Behind,' there's scant time for handwriting instruction. For the most part, beautiful penmanship now lives on the planet where people gather around the piano and sing, watch Gunsmoke on TV, and go to major-league baseball games in the afternoon: it's the planet of nostalgia." Who would disagree? But some of us happen to love that old planet. After reading Script and Scribble, I feel like digging out my beat-up calligraphy manuals by Tom Gourdie, Marie Angel and Lloyd J. Reynolds. Of course, I also need to clean out the dried ink from my italic pen. But before you know it, even Ludovico Arrighi -- the great Renaissance master of italic -- will be envying my p's and q's. · Michael Dirda on 'Searching for Cioran' • • •

by Michael Dirda Jan. 25, 2009 Read Later

By Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston Edited by Kenneth R. Johnston Indiana Univ. 284 pp. $27.95 The philosophical essayist E.M. Cioran (1911-1995) was born and educated in Romania, where he belonged to an extraordinary generation of young intellectuals, one that included the historian of religion Mircea Eliade (The Myth of the Eternal Return, The Sacred & the Profane) and the playwright Eugene Ionesco ("The Bald Soprano," "Rhinoceros"). Like his friends, the young Cioran eventually left Romania, in his case traveling to Paris on a scholarship in the late 1930s. Somehow he eked out an existence during the war years and in 1949 emerged as a French writer with his first book in that language, Prècis de decomposition, translated as A Short History of Decay. While this won him critical praise and a major prize, Cioran nonetheless continued to live the life of an impoverished undergraduate, eating in student cafeterias, sleeping in university housing or cheap hotel rooms. He seems to have owned almost nothing.

Only in about 1960 did he acquire a garret-like apartment, even though he had by then published several other books, now regarded as modern classics, both for the purity of their French and the starkness of their pessimistic thought: All Gall is Divided, The Temptation to Exist and History and Utopia. These, along with such later collections of essays and aphorisms as The New Gods, The Trouble with Being Born and Anathemas and Admirations were all translated over three decades by Richard Howard, starting in the late 1960s. They made an enormous impact on readers, eliciting long appreciations by Susan Sontag, William Gass and many others. In these books, Cioran is largely a master of the pensée -- what one might call the philosophical aphorism. As he once said, his work characteristically "foundered somewhere between the epigram and the sigh!" For the fatalistic Cioran, the master-thinkers include the Buddha, Marcus Aurelius, Pascal and Chamfort, Lichtenberg and Nietzsche. In the darkness of his themes -- the sadness of life, hypochondria and sickness, despair, failure, death, the decline of the West -- he recalls his contemporary Samuel Beckett, whom he admired: "The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from life. One dreams of a Catalogue of Disappointments which would include all the disillusionments reserved for each and every one of us, to be posted in the schools." "To live is to lose ground." "According to a Chinese sage, a single hour of happiness is all that a centenarian could acknowledge after carefully reflecting upon the vicissitudes of his existence. . . . Since everyone exaggerates, why should the sages constitute an exception?" "Love's great (and sole) originality is to make happiness indistinct from misery." "Only what we have not accomplished and what we could not accomplish matters to us, so that what remains of a whole life is only what it will not have been." Throughout his life in France, Cioran (whose name the French pronounce "Cee Oh Rahn") notoriously sought to avoid fame -- "I am an enemy of glory" -- but not, it turns out, for entirely philosophical reasons. As Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston reveals in this biography and memoir, Cioran had in his youth -- like Eliade to an even greater extent -- espoused right-wing nationalist views, full of zealotry and tinged with anti-Semitism. While originally intending to write a full biography, Zarifopol-Johnston died before she had progressed beyond the rough drafts of Cioran's Romanian years. These sections her husband has edited, along with her research diary. Thus Searching for Cioran presents portraits of the young Cioran, full of visionary passion and ambition, and of the aged philosopher, suffering from Alzheimer's disease in a Paris hospice. There is also a long account of Zarifopol-Johnston's own thoughts and feelings when she returned to her native Romania to speak with Cioran's brother and surviving friends. The resulting book presents a young provincial's progress: an idyllic childhood as the son of an Orthodox priest, intense periods of reading, a fondness for drink and prostitutes, resentment of

Romanian backwardness, increasing ambition and, following a period of study in Hitler's Berlin, the adoption of repugnant political views. Only when Cioran came to France was he able to transform himself into "the ironic moralist and elegant stylist so admired today." To his biographer, Cioran's evolution follows "what Erik Erikson calls 'a classical pattern of repudiation and devotion.' First, repudiation of a career as a Romanian intellectual; next, temporary devotion to an extreme ideology, apocalyptic nationalism, that was for him always problematic; then, the sense of a spiritual mission which gradually narrowed its focus from the nation to the self, finally mobilizing the creative capacities of the self into the born-again writer." Throughout, Zarifopol-Johnston seeks to understand Cioran rather than accuse him, aiming above all to avoid any simple-minded "trial mentality." The young Cioran saw being Romanian as a misfortune. He was reared, he felt, in a backwater country, home to a primitive culture and an obscure language. "Forgive me God because I was born Romanian" became his personal motto. He grew up feeling simultaneously bored and disgusted with Romanian life, increasingly prey to vicious insomnia and even to epileptic fits. Like so many romantic young men and women before him, he also "believed in the prestige of unhappy passions." After schooling in Bucharest, Cioran won a scholarship to Berlin, where he skipped classes and began the practice of what he called "abstract indiscretion." This impudent style of philosophizing, observes Zarifopol-Johnston, appears throughout his youthful and mature writing: As an example, she cites Cioran's mot: "Jesus was the Don Juan of agony!" In his early 20s, Cioran returned home from Germany and suddenly emerged as a full-blown writer. "Between 1934 and 1937, the year of his self-exile to France, Cioran published four books in Romania, of which one, On the Heights of Despair, was a paean to lyricism, another, Romania's Transfiguration, was a paean to totalitarianism, and a third one, Tears and Saints, was a meditation on mysticism, an extreme form of religious lyricism. These three books mark three important stages -- existential, political, and religious -- in young Cioran's personal identity crisis." On the Heights of Despair and Tears and Saints are now both available in English translations by Zarifopol-Johnston. But not Romania's Transfiguration, which the older Cioran condemned and largely tried to suppress (though late in his life he did allow republication of an edited version, but only in Romanian). In this book, we are told by his biographer, Cioran "recommends, with utmost seriousness, extreme measures such as the extermination of three quarters of Romania's population, the 'fanaticization' of its remaining population, and dictatorship as the sure means to create a 'Romania with China's population and France's destiny!' " This call for radical change was made even more reprehensible because Cioran openly sympathized with the Iron Guard, a fascistic and mystical military organization supposedly devoted to "moral and spiritual change, ethnic 'regeneration' by returning to Orthodox Christian values, and 'salvation' through asceticism and sacrifice." While Zarifopol-Johnston points out both continuities and rifts between the thought of the "Romanian" Cioran and the "French" Cioran, her biography unfortunately breaks off just at the crucial, lost years: that first decade in Paris, when Cioran turned his back on his native country, his language and his wrong-headed youthful enthusiasms before re-emerging as a master of French prose in A Short History of Decay. Still, she does include a wrenching portrait of the writer's last years, when an intellect that valued lucidity and self-awareness above all else was cruelly destroyed

by the ravages of Alzheimer's disease. The very last section of Zarifopol-Johnston's book provides an equally dismal account of squabbles over Cioran's literary estate and the right to quote from some of his unpublished works. Despite its fragmentary character, Searching for Cioran offers valuable material about an important writer's early life. Nonetheless, it is too incomplete to be more than a supplement to some fuller future biography. In the meantime, readers can still return to, or discover, Cioran's own almost hyperbolically desolate essays and aphorisms. Turn to virtually any page and you are likely to find some striking, if lugubrious observation. "Any and all water is the color of drowning." "When you know yourself well and do not despise yourself utterly, it is because you are too exhausted to indulge in extreme feelings." "Only one thing matters: learning to be the loser." E.M. Cioran crisply summarized life's essential absurdity -- his own and yours and mine -- in a wonderfully cheeky and dismissive phrase: "After all, I have not wasted my time, I too have fidgeted, like anyone else, in this aberrant universe." · Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda on • • •

by Michael Dirda Jan. 18, 2009 Read Later

Other Great Pretenders By Paul Maliszewski New Press. 245 pp. $24.95 Paul Maliszewski grew interested in the psychology of faking and forgery when he worked as a young journalist for a small business magazine. Bored, he began to send in letters to the editor under various pseudonyms. These letters, commenting on recent articles, were sly exercises in satire and humor. For example, when the Dow fell in 1997 "Gary Pike" wrote in to describe how he had been "listening" to the Dow, but until one day "I called and called, but the Dow said nothing in return, answering only in silence." As Maliszewski clearly knows, the Tao of Asian philosophy is pronounced Dow, and in a famous phrase "The Tao is Silent." Building on his personal experience with hoaxing, Maliszewski gradually began to publish articles -in the Baffler, McSweeney's and Bookforum, among other periodicals -- about the nature, variety and meaning of modern fakery. Collected here, these pieces cover the phony journalism of Jayson Blair of the New York Times and Stephen Glass of the New Republic; the whole-cloth memoirs of James Frey; the art forgeries of Elmyr de Hory and Han van Meegeren; the provocations of conceptual artists like Sandow Birk (who created a series of "historical" paintings about a supposed war between Northern and Southern California) and Joey Skaggs (who constructed an elaborate website for a nonexistent organization promoting cemeteries designed to resemble theme parks); brief histories of some imaginary poets and their work (the Spectra hoax and the Ern Malley affair); and, finally, novelist Michael Chabon's "fictional" memoir about his childhood encounter with a

Holocaust survivor who turned out to be a Nazi soldier, only who wasn't since he didn't really exist. While Maliszewski does talk to a number of the fakers he discusses, for the most part he acknowledges that others before him have done the primary sleuthing. His own essays and interviews are not so much potted versions of sometimes familiar stories as attempts to understand the psychology of deception. Why are we so readily duped? The short answer is that con games confirm what we already want to believe. The made-up news stories and fudged memoirs fit certain "forms," as Maliszewski calls them: "Fictional journalism is essentially a careful imitation of journalistic forms. That is, the articles are convincing because they adhere closely to the unstated conventions, assumptions, and predilections of a particular publication, a particular kind of article, or a particular editor. Journalists who fake are extraordinarily sensitive to the ways in which their stories are a series of sometimes conventional, often routine forms." Fakers derive their power from our own expectations and prejudices. Stephen Glass's talent, writes Maliszewski, "lay less in the originality of his imagination than in his solicitous ability to seize on whatever the conventionally wise were chatting about at cocktail parties and repackage it in bright new containers, selling the palaver right back to them. Nobody was the wiser." Studied more closely, though, Glass's "wild inventions form a thin skin stretched over a fairly standard body of accepted truth and mainstream opinion. Glass's imagination is not, in other words, all that original. It is, in fact, crushingly banal. How else to explain his production of so many fabrications that deliver, in story after story, the shared assumptions of the editorial class in new and perhaps slightly surprising forms?" Shared assumptions is a key. Back in 1916, the work of the imaginary "Emanuel Morgan" and "Anne Knish" -- the leading figures in the so-called "Spectra" school of poetry -- was instantly taken to be cutting edge, echt modern, the latest thing. In fact, the Spectra poems were doggerel, created by the traditionalist poets Witter Bynner and Arthur Davison Ficke to mock the free verse of such movements as imagism and vorticism. Spectra, says Maliszewski, elegantly "demonstrates that any new writing, from reporting to reviewing to intellectual journalism, finds the easiest path to publication by seeking the consensus and falling into the deep groove of what's already written and held to be true." Everyone knows that if it's incomprehensible, then it must be avant-garde poetry. The more incomprehensible, the better the poetry. The shrewd faker fulfills the needs of his audience. When conceptual artist Joey Skaggs fielded questions from reporters about his fake website, "I made up answers I thought they'd like." He adds that "my experience has shown me that most journalists don't want to screw up a good story with reality, and they will talk themselves out of questioning the story to death." As the saying goes, some stories are too good to check. What fakers do, then, is simplify complexities; they feed our secret prejudices and beliefs. This is one reason why many forged Old Masters look so ludicrous a generation or two after they were created: The forgeries reflect, and often overemphasize, the artistic beliefs of their own time about earlier works. Van Meegeren's knock-offs of Vermeer are designed to match the dreams and theories of 1930s art scholars. They are pastiches, and soon begin to look it.

The same is true of fake newspaper articles. These tell us the stories we want to hear, rather than the stories that are really out there. As a result, emphasizes Maliszewski, they damage serious work, for "there are articles -- real articles, these, about true subjects -- that cannot be easily written or are not practical to publish simply because they don't fit one of the accepted forms." While Fakers is certainly entertaining and thoughtful, it nonetheless remains a hit-skip collection of articles rather than a sustained narrative. Fakery cries out for even more attention. After all, so much of modern life and culture is sham and ersatz. Ours is a world of public relations spin and post-modern irony, of staged "reality" shows and the smoke and mirrors of corporate bookkeeping and political double-talk. Is it real or is it Memorex? Does it matter? Is modern-day wrestling fake when we know that it's as choreographed as a Balanchine ballet? We love movies about elaborate cons and capers ("The Sting"), as well as those that deliberately trick the viewer, such as "The Sixth Sense," "House of Numbers" and "The Spanish Prisoner." Everyone's favorite science fiction novelist, Philip K. Dick, obsessed constantly about the difficulty of distinguishing the human from the replicant, the authentic from the imitation. Because of weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist, because of imaginary connections with 9/11 terrorism, we invaded Iraq. There's a little in Fakers about the Enron scandal, but obviously nothing about the alleged Ponzi schemes of Bernard Madoff. Given the experience of just the last few years, Maliszewski will never run out of fresh material. At the heart of fakery lies the same impulse that makes art: design. As Maliszewski says, "life is an unedited mess. Life is so many spools of raw videotape, a long and winding transcript preserving every 'uh,' 'um,' and 'oh.' Life, were it like a movie, painfully lacks dramatic arcs." But a news story or a book requires those dramatic arcs, needs some kind of theme, focus or organizational principle to make it readable. It's not by accident that the modern memoir -- that most fudgeable of forms -often follows the same pattern as the 17th-century spiritual autobiography: I was a horrible sinner, I saw the light, and I have now come forward to testify to my redemption and be an example to others. As Maliszewski notes: "Our fakers are believed -- and, at least for a time, celebrated -because they each promise us, screen-gazing and experience-starved, something real and authentic." That siren-song allure of the real and authentic still gets us every time. We're all suckers for a good story, especially one that, according to the slang phrase, "tells it like it is" -- or rather how we imagine it must be. · Michael Dirda on 'William Hazlitt' • • •

by Michael Dirda Jan. 11, 2009 Read Later

By Duncan Wu Oxford Univ. 557 pp. $45 This is a distinctly eye-opening biography for anyone who knows William Hazlitt principally as an essayist, moralist and master of English prose. In such anthology favorites as "On Reading Old Books," "On Going a Journey," "On Wit and Humour" and "On the Feeling of Immortality in

Youth," Hazlitt (1778-1830) comes across as a genial observer of the passing scene, full of insight into the perplexities of the human heart, and pithy and wise enough to earn comparison with Montaigne. Just consider the spirited lead sentences from the four essays just mentioned: "I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire to read at all." "One of the pleasantest things in the world is going a journey, but I like to go by myself." "Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be." "No young man believes he shall ever die." Hazlitt always speaks from the page with this mix of intimacy and epigrammatic punch, no matter what the topic. And his topics are legion: the pleasures of hating; "Hot and Cold"; bare-knuckle boxing (see that early classic of sports reporting "The Fight"); reflections on acting (and beautiful actresses); what it's like to sit for one's portrait; the prose style of Edmund Burke; "Persons one would wish to have seen"; the want of money ("It is hard to go without one's dinner through sheer distress, but harder still to go without one's breakfast"); and myriad short profiles of the great figures of the day, including Coleridge and Wordsworth. Hazlitt's 20-page "My First Acquaintance with Poets" is probably the finest short memoir in English. Still, the essayist's signature theme must be the gloomy one of a disappointed life. In "On the Fear of Dying," he writes that when young "we eye the farthest verge of the horizon, and think what a way we shall have to look back upon, ere we arrive at our journey's end; and without our in the least suspecting it, the mists are at our feet, and the shadows of age encompass us." In one of his lectures, from a series mainly devoted to Elizabethan drama, he describes the writer's lot: "An author wastes his time in painful study and obscure researches, to gain a little breath of popularity, meets with nothing but vexation and disappointment in ninety-nine instances out of a hundred; or when he thinks to grasp the luckless prize, finds it not worth the trouble -- the perfume of a minute, fleeting as a shadow, hollow as a sound. . . . He thinks that the attainment of acknowledged excellence will secure him the expression of those feelings in others, which the image and hope of it had excited in his own breast, but instead of that, he meets with nothing (or scarcely nothing) but squint-eyed suspicion, idiot wonder, and grinning scorn. -- It seems hardly worth while to have taken all the pains he has been at for this!"

"I am not, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, a good-natured man; that is, many things annoy me besides what interferes with my own ease and interest. I hate a lie; a piece of injustice wounds me to the quick, though nothing but the report of it reach me. Therefore I have made many enemies and few friends."

In these latter passages we glimpse the rough outline of Duncan Wu's biography. Wu, perhaps the leading Hazlitt scholar in the world, portrays Hazlitt as the great bare-knuckles, no-holds-barred prose fighter of the Romantic era. No gentle antiquarian of letters -- Hazlitt's friend Charles Lamb might better fit this image -- the man was a prickly Grub Street hack, and a particularly grubby and prickly one at that. Shy among swells and society, Hazlitt preferred the company of prostitutes and sharpers, and he liked his liquor. As a freelance journalist, he wrote constantly to keep the wolf from the door, wrangled incessantly with his editors, fiercely supported unpopular causes (political dissent, the French Revolution) and sooner or later fell out with almost everyone he knew. With an Asperger's-like unconcern for consequence, he consistently ignored his own best interests, admirably refusing to trim his opinions in any way, even when it meant severely criticizing his friends or their paintings, poems and politics. He even seems to have gone out of his way to bait Wordsworth and Coleridge, the heroes of his youth, who all too soon repudiated the revolutionary ideals of 1789 -- ideals that Hazlitt honored all his life -- and then sacrificed their poetic gifts to preening vanity and blathering pomposity. While Wu repeatedly justifies Hazlitt's journalistic quarrels and contrarian positions, their very number suggests that the author of The Plain Speaker could rival the snarkiest of modern-day bloggers. Indeed, the thesis of this biography is that Hazlitt rose to prominence because he was plugged into the new technology. Thanks to steam-presses and speedier forms of transport, magazines and newspapers could suddenly reach thousands of people in every part of the country. "Of those who fed this new industry," Wu writes, Hazlitt "was the most gifted, the most wideranging in his talents, the most percipient, and by far the best prose stylist." He was also the most widely despised and calumniated; few of his books ever received good notices, and he seldom earned much money from even such masterpieces as Table Talk (familiar essays) and The Spirit of the Age (vignettes of leading cultural figures). As a result, he was nearly always desperate, usually for money, but in the most notorious episode of his life, in quite another way. While married but separated from his wife, the 40ish Hazlitt fell madly for an 18-year-old serving girl named Sarah Walker. He eventually published an overheated record of his infatuation as Liber Amoris, a book that sealed the ruin of his reputation for a century. Wu compares it to such portraits of obsession as Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, though Proust's "Swann in Love" would be an even better analogy. To this day, opinion divides over whether Sarah Walker was a deliberate and callous tease, a kind of slatternly "Belle Dame sans Merci," or whether Hazlitt was little more than a sexual predator and Humbert Humbert. At all events, the besotted journalist divorced his wife for Sarah, then discovered that the girl not only didn't wish to marry him but was also secretly going out with another man. Hazlitt nearly committed suicide and never fully recovered from the lacerating affair. I've always presumed that he was referring to Sarah Walker in this haunting cri du coeur from "My First Acquaintance with Poets": "So have I loitered my life away, reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best. I have wanted only one thing to make me happy, but wanting that have wanted everything." Duncan Wu's life of Hazlitt is a virtual who's who of the romantic era, featuring appearances by William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Keats, Shelley, Leigh Hunt, Byron, Charles Lamb, Walter Scott, Mary Shelley, Francis Jeffrey (editor of the Edinburgh Review), painter Benjamin Robert

Haydon, poet Walter Savage Landor, the great French writer Stendhal (in some ways, Hazlitt's Gallic twin) and dozens of others. Drawing on much new material, Wu chronicles every knowable aspect of his hero's life: Hazlitt, for instance, spent his early years in the United States (where his father helped establish Unitarianism) and seriously took up journalism only in his 30s, after having failed to establish himself as a painter. While scholars will value the wealth of material in Wu's biography (and perhaps take issue with his tendency to defend even Hazlitt's most dubious actions), casual readers may occasionally feel overwhelmed by so much detail about the political, artistic and literary life of the romantic era. Still, even the most casual reader should try a selection of Hazlitt's wonderful essays. Hazlitt was the great champion of "gusto" in art, that expressive power and passion that gives energy to a painting or a poem. His essays, no matter how somber or philosophic their subject matter, overflow with "the full pulpy feeling of youth tasting existence." Such exuberance prevails in everything that Hazlitt undertook, so that even on his death bed this oft-vilified and self-tormented hack of genius could supposedly murmur, "I have had a happy life." · Michael Dirda on 'Somewhere Towards the End' • • •

by Michael Dirda Jan. 4, 2009 Read Later

Norton. 183 pp. $24.95 Thirty years ago the literary critic and editor Malcolm Cowley brought out a memoir called The View from 80. It was, as you might guess, a slender volume about old age, much of it emphasizing the "grow old along with me!/The best is yet to be" approach to the advancing years. I had to assign the book for review and, after some thought, called up the distinguished and elderly scholar Douglas Bush, long a fixture of the English department at Harvard. I had every reason to expect Professor Bush to confirm an image of old age as a time of retirement and happy retrospection, of favorite volumes reread before the fireplace, of glasses of brandy shared with friends while reminiscing over the good times, a period, in other words, of serene pleasures and quiet satisfactions. Wrong. Bush's piece was an angry cry of rage at these familiar clichés. Old age was cruel and bitter, a time of ashes, not warming fires. He wrote that he could hardly read anymore, and when he could, even favorite books seemed stale and unprofitable. His doctors had cut out drink; his diet was restricted; his body gave him nothing but trouble and misery. A once formidable memory was going, and with it the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of a lifetime of scholarship. Those rosy images of a cultivated and leisurely Otium were all mirages. The so-called sunset years were at best tedious and at worst an ordeal. Somewhere Towards the End, Diana Athill's account of growing old, lacks Bush's passion but does underscore that, on the whole, the later years are a time of making do with less of everything

except aches and pain. Only writing -- a talent that the now 91-year-old Athill discovered relatively late in life -- affords some modest pleasure to this former editor for the English publisher André Deutsch. To readers Athill delivers far more than modest pleasure: Her easy-going prose and startling honesty are riveting, for whither she has gone many of us will go as well. She opens by zeroing in on the true essentials of almost any contemporary human life: Physical attractiveness and sexuality. "Appearance," she writes, "is important to old women, not because we suppose that it will impress other people, but because of what we ourselves see when we look in a mirror. It is unlikely that anyone else will notice that the nose on an old face is red and shiny or the broken veins on its cheeks are visible, but its owner certainly will." The development of modern cosmetics has been a godsend to the elderly, she writes, helping to soothe and disguise some of time's ravages. Nonetheless, says Athill, "the most obvious thing about moving into my seventies was the disappearance of what used to be the most important thing in life: I might not look, or even feel, all that old, but I had ceased to be a sexual being." Readers of Athill's Instead of a Letter and her other memoirs know that she once enjoyed an adventurous erotic life: Her heart was broken several times, she refused multiple offers of marriage, and she rapidly came to prefer black men to all others. In her late 50s, though, she discovered that her sexual re sponses to a longtime, and somewhat younger, lover were dwindling: "Familiarity had made the touch of his hand feel so like the touch of my own hand that it no longer conveyed a thrill." When the man fell into bed with a "succulent blonde in her mid-twenties," Athill admits to a sorrowful night. But she is nothing if not candid about her feelings: "What I mourned . . . was not the loss of my loving old friend . . . but the loss of youth: 'What she has, god rot her, I no longer have and will never, never have again.' " A bitter pill, and yet she swallows it, while also recognizing another, no-nonsense truth: "You know quite well that you have stopped wanting him in your bed," she tells herself. "It's months since you enjoyed it, so what are you moaning about? Of course you have lost youth, you have moved on and stopped wanting what youth wants." With the ebbing of sex, other aspects of life soon grew more important to Athill: She took up gardening and enrolled in art classes, came to value the connection with youth represented by a daughter-like friend and her grandchildren, enjoyed being able to continue driving. She explains that to the elderly "your car begins to represent life. You hobble towards it, you ease your unwieldy body laboriously into the driver's seat -- and lo! you are back to normal. Off you whizz just like everyone else, restored to freedom, restored (almost) to youth." While Athill still finds pleasure in reading, she confesses to having "gone off novels," partly because "I no longer feel the need to ponder human relationships -- particularly not love affairs." Instead, she prefers "to be fed facts, to be given material which extends the region in which my mind can wander." She mentions enjoying recent biographies of 18th-century industrialist Josiah Wedgwood, scientist Charles Darwin and wood-engraver Thomas Bewick. All, she says, provided her with the often underestimated gift of "good company." Inevitably, Athill also writes about mortality and religion (she lacks all belief, including the hope of an afterlife). She devotes one of her longest chapters to the hardships of caring not only for herself but also for her former lover, the one who took up with the blonde and with whom she has

continued to live for decades. He is now ill with diabetes, heart disease and a vague, listless anomie. From her description their life together seems alternately boring and wearying. Still, Athill does enjoy two unexpected gifts from old age: One is that late-blossoming talent for writing; the other is a wonderful sense of freedom, of lightness that she feels because nothing matters very much any more. Only after she had retired (at 75 -- she couldn't afford to quit working earlier) did Athill finally shed her pronounced shyness and simply stop caring what other people thought of her. Towards the end of the brilliantly titled Somewhere Towards the End, Athill confesses to regrets over a certain coldness in her personality and laziness in her career. But neither fault torments her. She does think about her own approaching death and concludes, reasonably, "What dies is not a life's value, but the worn-out (or damaged) container of the self, together with the self's awareness of itself: away that goes into nothingness, with everyone else's." What we do with our lives does matter, then, even if we all eventually arrive at the same common end. A refusal to sugar-coat and a commitment to utter frankness, coupled with an engaging style, make Diana Athill's Somewhere Towards the End unusually appealing, despite its inherently cheerless subject. Certainly no amount of mendacity or whining will change the facts: The end of life is hard. With luck and adequate health, you might be able to enjoy a few simple pleasures for a while longer. But that's about it. And be grateful for even the smallest of such favors. Time is not on your side. · Michael Dirda on Unearthing Ghostly Tales of Today • • •

by Michael Dirda Dec. 21, 2008 Read Later

"A sad tale's best for winter. I have one/Of sprites and goblins." Shakespeare surely knew what he was talking about, for what could be better than reading wonderful stories, some sad, some ghostly, during these cold, dark nights? Throughout the world, traditional stories of marvelous adventure and tragic love have long been told at wintertime. In the 19th century, Dickens and others popularized the Christmas ghost story, often with a slightly humorous twist. In the middle of the 20th century, publishers urged classic mysteries for this time of year, most famously in the advertising slogan for Agatha Christie's annual whodunit: "A Christie for Christmas." But where can you find such tales today? Much of the most original fantasy, mystery and horror is now published by small specialty presses. What follows is a list of just a few important independent publishers, highlighting some of their most notable recent titles. Note that the production values of these books generally equal or exceed those of New York trade houses, but the print runs are usually much smaller. Ash-Tree Press (Ashcroft, B.C., Canada). The owners of this press -- Barbara and Christopher Roden -- are the leading purveyors in North America of classic supernatural fiction, both old and new. They named Ash-Tree after a story by M.R. James, who is to the ghostly tale what Arthur Conan

Doyle is to the detective story. This year's publications include volumes devoted to the macabre tales of Henry S. Whitehead (many set in the West Indies), Gerald Kersh (author of the hideous and brilliant "Men Without Bones"), Fitz-James O'Brien ("The Diamond Lens") and the acclaimed contemporary writer Reggie Oliver (Masques of Satan). And don't overlook City of the Sea and Other Ghost Stories, by Jerome K. Jerome, best known for the comic masterpiece Three Men in a Boat. AshTree also publishes the invaluable All Hallows, the journal of the Ghost Story Society. Big Mouth Press (Easthampton, Mass.). This is the new children's imprint of Small Beer Press -publishers of cutting-edge fantasy and science fiction -- and its first offering is Joan Aiken's The Serial Garden: The Complete Armitage Family Stories. Aiken is best known for the rumbustious Dido Twite chronicles, set in an alternate 19th-century Britain and an influence on Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. For sheer charm it's hard to beat these wonderful, dead-pan comic tales about one family's adventures -- nearly always on a Monday -- with ghosts, witches, time travel, the Furies and every sort of magic. Crippen and Landru (Norfolk, Va.). This publisher generally specializes in short-story collections by noted crime writers of the past and present, but one of its recent offerings is a volume of radio plays -- 13 to the Gallows -- by that Golden Age master of the locked-room mystery, John Dickson Carr (in collaboration with Val Gielgud). Another desirable volume, The Archer Files, edited by Tom Nolan, gathers together all the stories about Ross Macdonald's soft-boiled California private eye Lew Archer. Dead Letter Press (New Kent, Va.). Bound for Evil, edited by Tom English, with illustrations by Allen Koszowski, is a hefty collection of stories about accursed and diabolical books. It includes celebrated chillers -- M.R. James's "Canon Alberic's Scrapbook," Robert W. Chambers's "The Yellow Sign" -- but also fine work by many contemporary writers, such as Fred Chappell (that wonderful homage to Lovecraft, "The Adder"), Simon Strantzas ("Leather, Dark and Cold") and Barbara Roden ("Association Copy"). Dead Letter's most recent book is Engelbrecht Again!, by Rhys Hughes, a companion volume to the cult classic The Exploits of Engelbrecht (Savoy), Maurice Richardson's peculiar and funny stories about the eponymous "Dwarf Surrealist Boxer." Mage Publishers (Washington, D.C.). Highly recommended from Mage is Vis & Ramin, by Fakhraddin Gorgani, translated from the Persian by Dick Davis. This little publisher focuses on Persian literature, classic and current, and often works with Davis. Some years back it brought out his version of the Shahnameh -- the great Persian epic -- and now follows with this great (and sexy) Persian romance, a variant of, and possible source for, the Tristan and Isolde story. The New York Review of Books (New York). Under the editorship of the redoubtable Edwin Frank, NYRB Classics has been steadily rediscovering neglected authors and books, such as -- to mention only two of my favorites -- J.R. Ackerley's touching and comic Hindoo Holiday and G.B. Edwards's deeply moving novel about life on the island of Guernsey, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. This fall NYRB brought out My Fantoms, a selection of short works by the 19th-century romantic Théophile Gautier, chosen and translated by Richard Holmes. It includes a memoir of poet Gérard de Nerval, who kept a pet lobster, and Gautier's erotic horror classic "La morte amoureuse" (here called "The Priest") about a young man's double life -- by day a devout cleric but at night, in strangely vivid dreams, the lover of a ghostly enchantress.

Old Earth Books (Baltimore). Other Worlds, Better Lives: A Howard Waldrop Reader, Selected Long Fiction, 1989-2003 is a companion to Waldrop's selected short stories, Things Will Never Be the Same, a volume justly praised by a certain Washington Post reviewer of admirable perspicacity (me). Waldrop parodies and pastiches popular culture and literary tradition with seriously manic brilliance. See, in this volume, his novella-length retelling of the labors of Hercules in 1920s Mississippi, "A Dozen Tough Jobs." PS Publishing (Hornsea, England). As one who can never resist a bookish mystery, especially one with supernatural elements, I was deeply grateful when a friend sent me a copy of The Last Book, by Zoran Zivkovic (translated from the Serbian by Alice Copple-Tosic). Zivkovic is one of the most attractive new writers to enter fantasy recently, and he's been mightily prolific, with much of his work brought out by PS, including his fat collection Impossible Stories. In general, the erudite Zivkovic may be likened to a more playful Borges, touched with a bit of Calvino and Kafka. Prime Books (Rockville, Md.). An imprint of Wildside Press, a publishing leviathan specializing in print-on-demand books and magazines in the field of weird fiction, this company publishes new work by contemporary writers, including Tim Lebbon, Holly Phillips and the versatile Paul Di Filippo. John Langan's unnerving stories in Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters -- about violated graves, antiquarian lore, a strange audiotape and a mysterious statue -- come with an admiring introduction by the award-winning novelist and critic Elizabeth Hand. Tachyon Press (San Francisco). Focusing on science fiction and fantasy, Tachyon brings out a good many anthologies (e.g., The New Weird, edited by Jeff VanderMeer) but recently published two of the last books by the late Thomas M. Disch. The Word of God is a short novel, told from the viewpoint of God, who it seems is also Tom Disch; The Wall of America collects a number of what one might call comic and bitter fables. In the title story, a Homeland Security wall between Canada and the United States is turned into an art gallery by the National Endowment for the Arts. I've collected Disch ever since I met the multi-talented novelist-poet-critic-curmudgeon in 1980 at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston: As massive as a body-builder and covered with tattoos, that night he was wearing a bowling shirt. Disch was clearly a man of letters after my own heart. Tartarus Press (North Yorkshire, England). Like the Garnier volumes in France, Tartarus books possess a uniform appearance, built around a distinctive yellowish paper stock for the dust jackets. While Tartarus specializes in classic fantasy and horror, generally by 20th-century English authors such as Arthur Machen, Walter de la Mare, Sarban and Robert Aickman, its most recent publications gather the unsettling short fiction of two eminent American writers: The Triumph of Night and Other Tales, by Edith Wharton, and The Snow-Image and Other Stories of the Supernatural, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Tartarus also publishes Wormwood, a scholarly journal devoted to supernatural literature. Well, that makes 11 presses, and I should add another for a holiday dozen. But which one? Should it be Hippocampus, which specializes in H.P. Lovecraft scholarship and has just published D. SidneyFryer's The Atlantis Fragments, a collection of sensuously fantastic poetry? Or Subterranean Press, which brings out "best of" story collections by such powerful writers as Lucius Shepard and Michael Swanwick? But how can I overlook Night Shade Books, purveyors of Clark Ashton Smith and Lord Dunsany, let alone Midnight House and Centipede/Millipede Press or even little Mercier Press,

publishers of Brian J. Showers's Irish ghost stories, The Bleeding Horse? And then there's this hot new house called Ex Occidente, which is located in Bucharest but has just issued The Rite of Trebizond, the latest stories by Mark Valentine and John Howard about their "aesthetical occult detective," the Connoisseur. Enough. Today marks the winter solstice -- the longest night of the year -- but there will be plenty of dark and wintry evenings ahead. Be prepared. · Michael Dirda on Robert Louis Stevenson • • •

by Michael Dirda Dec. 14, 2008 Read Later

There comes a time in the life of any young reader when nothing but adventure will do. It is the time when the old classics -- The Count of Monte Cristo, Journey to the Center of the Earth, King Solomon's Mines -- are suddenly the best stories in all the world. Which, of course, they are -- with the possible exception of those that begin this way: The London fog rolls in, and out of the darkness emerge two figures. One is tall, eccentric in his habits, always in search of mysteries and puzzles; the other is his brave and loyal companion, clearly a military man. In the course of their adventures together they will fearlessly penetrate the inner sanctum of The Suicide Club, confront more than one master criminal and solve the theft of the accursed Rajah's Diamond. Holmes and Watson? No, Prince Florizel of Bohemia and Colonel Geraldine, the dashing heroes of Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights (volume I, 1882). As in the intricate tales that Scheherazade told, this duo's two extended adventures offer readers, especially young ones, what critic Mark Valentine describes as "a rare melee of crime, conspiracy, plots, disguises, the gloriously bizarre and the elaborately sinister; piquant characters, foolhardy gentleman adventurers, chases, escapes and alarums; all told with a sardonic humor." Most readers know Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) as the author of the great boys' adventures Treasure Island (1883) and Kidnapped (1886), the classic horror novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and -- to a lesser degree, especially these days -- the simple (and often saccharine) poems and lullabies of A Child's Garden of Verses (1885). This is a respectable amount of writing for a man who was sickly much of his life (tuberculosis) and who died at the young age of 44. But Stevenson wrote much else -- volumes of essays and letters, at least a half-dozen other novels and some masterly short tales of the supernatural ("Markheim," "Thrawn Janet," "The Bottle Imp"). One early critic compared him to Edgar Allan Poe, both writers having been serious artists -- with a taste for slightly mannerist excess -- who essentially originated several of the major subgenres of popular fiction. Among these is one subgenre without a clearly established name. Building on Gothic romance, the more melodramatic city novels of Balzac and Victor Hugo and such sensationalist serials as Eugène Sue's The Mysteries of Paris, Stevenson imagined a romantic underworld hiding in the shadows of the

modern urban metropolis. If you were lucky or persistent enough, you might pass into that netherkingdom, where you would discover a realm of wonder and excitement, Baghdad on the Thames. This is the premise of the New Arabian Nights, and its influence can be detected in the Sherlock Holmes stories, O. Henry's tales of New York (a.k.a. Baghdad on the Hudson), G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, any number of spy novels and modern conspiracy-romances like The Da Vinci Code and even the dream-like Manhattan of Paul Auster. The two multi-part tales of Prince Florizel and Colonel Geraldine typically present one bizarre situation after another: Why should a young man be forced to eat, or give to strangers to eat, dozens of cream tarts? Why has a mysterious gentleman rented a house for one night and then paid dozens of hansom cabs to pick up passersby and bring them to his party? Why should a pretty girl suddenly say to her admirer: "Whatever happens, do not return to this house; hurry fast until you reach the lighted and populous quarters of the city; even there be upon your guard. You are in a greater danger than you fancy. Promise me you will not so much as look at my keepsake until you are in a place of safety." And what is that keepsake? Each of the multiple episodes in "The Suicide Club" and "The Rajah's Diamond" breaks off at a cliff-hanger moment, sometimes resolving one plot line in a hurried postscript, before starting up a further adventure. Such a technique ensures that we enjoy these stories as essentially cozy escapades, sheer romance. That said, for all their complications, these two tales from the New Arabian Nights are virtually straightforward when compared to the intricate plotting of The Wrong Box (1889), a related, and underappreciated, comic novel co-written by Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne. Its principal action derives from an episode of the original Arabian Nights in which a series of people attempt to rid themselves of a corpse, with increasingly comical and macabre results. In Stevenson's updated version, all is brought to a happy conclusion through the machinations of Michael Finsbury, a rowdy solicitor with shady clients; Finsbury is "the Prince Florizel of this comic Arabian Night," as Stevenson once described him. At the heart of the novel is a fortune derived from a tontine, a kind of raffle, pegged to longevity. Families place, say, 1,000 pounds in a common pool when their offspring are young. Interest accumulates over the years, and the entire fortune eventually goes to the last and now decrepit surviving member of the original group of children. In The Wrong Box, two elderly Finsbury brothers -- John and Joseph -- are the only ones from their tontine left alive. But when a train accident apparently kills Joseph, his unscrupulous nephew and heir, Morris, hoping that he can still somehow collect on the tontine, tries to make the world believe that his uncle is merely away in the country. I leave out myriad details, but in due course the supposed corpse of Uncle Joseph is hidden in a keg that is dispatched to Morris's London home. In transit, however, its address label is switched with that of an enormous box containing a stolen statue of Hercules. In the consequent comedy of errors, involving a half-dozen characters, everything is misperceived and misunderstood; and nothing turns out to be what it seems. Michael Finsbury is largely the reason why: He possesses a childlike delight in playing games and going about in disguise. Nonetheless, he also seems to know all and see all, to be here and everywhere. As he tells his cousin Morris, "Every step you take is counted; trained detectives follow you like your shadow; they report to me every three-quarters of an hour; no expense is

spared." This is all bluff, but the phrasing, like so much of the novel, possesses an irresistible histrionic flourish. Sometimes The Wrong Box recalls a P.G. Wodehouse romp, sometimes a Keystone Kops serial. In its way, it's really a kind of British good ol' boys' adventure. As Michael Finsbury observes of one soon-to-be-intoxicated friend: "I never saw a man drink faster. It restores one's confidence in the human race." Both New Arabian Nights and The Wrong Box are available in paperback, though they're also readily available in second-hand cloth editions. Young people will enjoy each of them, though the novel, being more grounded in Victorian culture, may demand an initial effort. Yet at whatever age you discover them, these are wonderful comfort books, unduly overshadowed by Stevenson's more famous masterpieces. · Michael Dirda on 'The Best of All Possible Worlds' • • •

by Michael Dirda Nov. 30, 2008 Read Later

By Steven Nadler Farrar Straus Giroux. 300 pp. $25 Many are likely to know just two facts about the great polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (16461716): first, that he and Newton independently discovered calculus at roughly the same time, then argued over who should get the credit (Newton won); and, second, that he maintained that ours was "the best of all possible worlds," a phrase much mocked in Voltaire's sparkling philosophical satire Candide. If people know anything further about this German thinker, it's likely to be that he spent his life trying to effect a reconciliation between Protestantism and Catholicism and that he postulated the existence of invisible, atom-like "monads" as the metaphysical building blocks of the universe. Poor Leibniz! For all his genius, he seems destined to be overshadowed by others, whether Newton, Voltaire or Spinoza (whom he visited, admired and disputed with) or, as Steven Nadler shows in The Best of All Possible Worlds, even by half-forgotten French priests. Of course, Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) and Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) weren't simple provincial curates; they were, at least for the generation following the death of Descartes, France's strongest theological thinkers (excepting perhaps Pascal, who strangely enough barely figures in Nadler's book). Both Frenchmen knew the young Leibniz during his long stay in Paris, and all three corresponded with one another for decades afterward. Their lifelong, and sometimes heated, arguments about the nature of God form the basis of this engrossing book. Nadler makes clear the importance of their debate: "What was at stake was nothing less than the meaning of existence, the understanding of why things are as they are. The choice was clear: either the universe is ultimately an arbitrary product, the effect of an indifferent will guided by no objective values and subject to no independent canons of reason or goodness; or it is the result of wisdom, intelligible to its core and informed by a

rationality and a sense of value that are, in essence, not very different from our own; or (to mention the most terrifying possibility of all) it simply is, necessary through its causes and transparent to the investigations of metaphysics and science but essentially devoid of any meaning or value whatsoever." The attempt to justify the ways of God to men -- theodicy, a term coined by Leibniz -- lies at the heart of the matter: "Why is there any evil at all in God's creation?" Essentially, Leibniz's answer is: Consider the whole. Explains Nadler, "It is not that everything will turn out for the best for me or for anyone else in particular. Nor is it necessarily the case that any other possible world would have been worse for me or for anyone else. Rather, Leibniz claims that any other possible world is worse overall than this one, regardless of any single person's fortunes in it." What is good for the whole isn't necessarily good for every one of its individual parts or components. As Nadler emphasizes, summarizing Leibniz, "all things are connected and every single aspect of the world makes a contribution to its being the best world." That includes what we call evil. However, Leibniz offers no explanation of just how evil assists the overall goodness of things. (Sometimes he even seems to suggest that it serves to bring the good into greater relief.) We cannot penetrate so far into the Creator's mind or plan. Still "it is inconceivable . . . that an infinitely good and perfect God could choose anything less than the best." This conclusion may satisfy a devout Christian philosopher, but it offers scant consolation when we are in pain, or see the wicked succeed and the worthy fail, or when we face death. Malebranche refined Leibniz's view by imagining that God needed to establish a world that wouldn't require constant adjustment or interference, one that ran on its own, following what He had determined were the simplest, most efficient general principles. Thus, "the actual world is not the most perfect world absolutely speaking; rather, it is only the most perfect world possible relative to those maximally simple laws." In other words, even God compromises. Our world could be better "but only at the cost of the simplicity of the means." Instead, Malebranche's Creator "wills to accomplish as much justice and goodness as He possibly can, not absolutely but consistent with the simplest laws." As Nadler emphasizes, to Malebranche "God . . . is more committed to acting in a general way and to a nature governed by the simplest laws than He is to the well-being of individuals." His "general volitions," as Malebranche dubs these cosmic rules, take precedence over "particular volitions," which are essentially those infrequent violations of the natural order that we call miracles. So it is in the established nature of things for it to rain, and sometimes the parched land receives needed water and sometimes rivers overflow. God isn't going to spend all his time constantly adjusting the weather and a zillion other phenomena just because the results aren't what the locals want or like. What Arnauld objects to in Malebranche (and also in Leibniz) is the supposition that God's nature is like humankind's and that our human intellects can have access to the divine wisdom. God, Arnauld believes, is utterly alien to us -- "a hidden God," to use a Jansenist catchphrase -- and to imagine him making logical decisions, or weighing the pluses and minuses of contrasting worlds, is absurd, nothing but anthropomorphism. (As Spinoza once observed, "a triangle, if it could speak would . . . say that God is eminently triangular, and a circle that God's nature is eminently circular.") In fact, men and women are by their lesser natures incapable of making sense of God or his mysterious ways, and all these presumptuous attempts at theodicy are doomed to failure. God wanted to make the world and so He did, and there's an end to it. In essence, Leibniz believes in God's goodness

and wisdom, and Malebranche further emphasizes His rationality, but to Arnauld God is simply pure, omnipotent will. Which God you believe in matters: "Do we inhabit a cosmos that is fundamentally intelligible because its creation is grounded in a rational decision informed by certain absolute values? Is the world's existence the result of a reasonable act of creation and the expression of an infinite wisdom? Or, on the other hand, is the universe ultimately a nonrational, even arbitrary piece of work? . . . Does the origin of things lie in an indifferent action -- an apparently capricious exercise of causal power -- by a Creator who cannot possibly be motivated by reasons because His will finds no reasons independent of itself? In short, does the universe exist by ratio or by voluntas, by wisdom or power?" There's much more detail, and much greater subtlety, in Nadler's account of these differing theological views of God and His universe. (For instance, Spinoza contributes the further twist that "this is not the best of all possible worlds; it is the only possible world.") Of course, Leibniz, Malebranche and Arnauld all posit a Christian God of some sort, and their arguments may seem quaint to rationalists of a largely secular age. But to those who believe in, or simply wonder about, a God-governed universe, these three 17th-century thinkers raise serious and perennially fascinating questions: Is God moral and rational or completely arbitrary, even capricious? Is it wrong to kill only because God says so, or are there absolute moral values (as Kant would argue in establishing the categorical imperative, his variant on the Golden Rule)? And, to be almost bathetic, if God gives us grace to withstand temptation, why does he sometimes fail to give us enough? Besides this new book, Steven Nadler is the author of a magisterial biography of Spinoza, which I have read and recommend, and of impressive-sounding academic books on Arnauld and Malebranche, which I've only heard of. I can't imagine a better guide to 17th-century philosophical thought. Aimed at the general public, The Best of All Possible Worlds is written simply and clearly, without condescension, flashiness or over-simplification. But it's a demanding book nonetheless, and you need to pay attention. You'll be amply rewarded if you do. · Book Review: 'The Hindus: An Alternative History' by Wendy Doniger • • •

by Michael Dirda March 19, 2009 Read Later

By Wendy Doniger Penguin Press. 779 pp. $35 Any of us might make the same mistake: I didn't really notice the subtitle of Wendy Doniger's massive study, "The Hindus." I knew that she was an eminent Sanskrit scholar at the University of Chicago, author of many books about cultural, religious and folkloric beliefs, and a translator of several Indian classics, including "The Rig Veda" and "The Kamasutra." Her annotations to the latter, that notorious manual of sexual practice, are, I can attest, as entertaining and informative as the book itself.

However, "The Hindus: An Alternative History" is probably too scholarly and specialized for readers looking simply for an introduction to Indian philosophy and religion. In its notes Doniger suggests that her book could be used for a 14-week course, and I suspect that it originated as a series of class lectures. She herself recommends some more conventional histories and guides, including Gavin Flood's "An Introduction to Hinduism," John Keay's "India: A History" and that old standby, A.L. Basham's survey "The Wonder That Was India." While Doniger does trace the evolution of Hinduism from the time of the Indus Valley Civilization (2,500 B.C.) to the present, she deliberately emphasizes a small number of recurrent threads, in particular the ways that "women, lower classes and castes, and animals" have endured or surmounted their traditional status. Horses, for instance, are typically glamorous, cows sacred and dogs despised -- but not always. Having been trained as a philologist, Doniger organizes her history around interpretations of the most revered classics of Sanskrit poetry and philosophy. She begins with the Rig Veda, a collection of hymns to the Zeus-like Indra and other ancient gods. This is a work so sacred that manuscripts display no textual differences: To alter a word was unthinkable. She also examines women, castes and animals in the Upanishads -- essentially, meditations on the meaning of the Vedic rituals and myths -- and the 2,000-year-old Indian epics "The Ramayana" and "The Mahabharata." Consider, for instance, the portrait of Sita in "The Ramayana." In this long poem, the beautiful Sita is kidnapped by an ogre but eventually rescued by her husband, Rama. Unfortunately, after the initial happiness of their reunion, Rama starts to wonder about his wife's chastity during her long imprisonment. Would she not have succumbed or been forced to submit to the lecherous ogre's embrace? Although Sita proves and proves again her innocence, Doniger underscores the crassness of Rama's jealous-husband behavior but also notes certain textual hints that Sita is more sexual than she appears and that her feelings for Rama's brother Lakshmana might well be more than familial. As Sita is the classic model of Indian womanhood, such sacrilegious speculation once led to Doniger being egged at a London lecture. "The Mahabharata" is an immensely long poem -- seven times the combined length of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" -- that relates the history of the five Pandava brothers (who are all married to the same woman, Draupadi -- Doniger expresses regret that she, rather than Sita, didn't provide the template for Indian womanhood). The Pandavas eventually go to war against their cousins, the 100 sons of Dhritarashtra, and the poem climaxes in a great battle. But just before the two armies clash, the formidable warrior Arjuna suddenly recoils from the coming slaughter, overwhelmed by horror and sorrow. In a still moment outside of time, he begins to discuss the meaning of life with his charioteer, the god Krishna in human form. This section of the epic is often read separately, being one of the supreme masterpieces of spiritual literature: the "Bhagavad-Gita," or "Song of the Blessed One." In the end, Krishna persuades Arjuna to let go of personal desire, unite his will to that of God and perform his sacred duty (dharma) in a spirit of acceptance and detachment, without thought of either success or failure. Doniger also tells another story from "The Mahabharata," one in which the five Pandavas are all trying to reach heaven and each drops away, until only Yudhishthira continues on the straight and narrow path, alone except for a stray dog that follows him. At the story's climax, Indra appears to this most virtuous Indian brother and, praising him, requests that he step into his celestial chariot and be transported to heaven -- just as soon as he gets rid of that mangy dog. In the words of the old

Christian hymn, "once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide," and Yudhishthira refuses to abandon this animal who has been so loyal to him. At which point the dog reveals himself to be Dharma, the god of right behavior: "Great king . . . Because you turned down the celestial chariot, by insisting, 'This dog is devoted to me,' there is no one your equal in heaven." Since dogs were traditionally unclean, Doniger notes of this story that "it is as if the god of the Hebrew Bible had become incarnate in a pig." This is characteristic of her cheeky tone, given to jokes and wordplay: According to Doniger, when Sita glimpses a golden deer encrusted with jewels, she is "delighted to find that Tiffany's has a branch in the forest." Such humor -- sometimes charming, as here -- reflects that strange desire of modern academics to be viewed not only as learned but also as hip and funky. While deconstructing her various Indian texts, Doniger duly explores such concepts as karma ("action, or the fruits of action"); ahimsa (nonviolence); bhakti ("passionate devotion to a god"); samsara (the circle of transmigration of souls); and the caste system, consisting of Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors and kings), Vaishyas (merchants) and Shudras (servants), as well as that fifth class, the Dalits, or so-called Untouchables. Just learning Sanskrit words like moksha (release) is an education in itself. Doniger's last chapters are the most historical and by far the easiest. She traces the impact of the British on Indian culture and writes movingly about Kipling's "Kim," that great-hearted novel packed with colonialist attitudes yet full of the utmost sympathy and love for India and its people. She discusses Orientalism, Gandhi, right-wing Indian political groups and Bollywood, before finishing her story by touching on the reception and distortion -- Tantric sex! -- of Hindu culture in the West. Wendy Doniger's erudite "alternative history" shouldn't be anyone's introduction to Hinduism. But once you've learned the basics about this most spiritual of cultures, don't miss this equivalent of a brilliant graduate course from a feisty and exhilarating teacher. Book Review: 'A Strange Eventful History,' by Michael Holroyd • • •

by Michael Dirda March 12, 2009 Read Later

By Michael Holroyd Farrar Straus Giroux. 620 pp. $40 In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Henry Irving (1838-1905) and Ellen Terry (1847-1928) reigned as the king and queen of the English stage. Terry, said Irving's longtime manager, "moved through the world of the theatre like embodied sunshine." As a young woman, she was painted by such Victorian eminences as Whistler, John Singer Sargent and the once equally celebrated G.F. Watts (to whom she was briefly married, albeit without any of what that hypersensitive painter euphemistically called "violent love"). As Mrs.

Watts, she visited the poet Tennyson, at whose house, Farringford, she was immortalized by Julia Margaret Cameron in what has been called one of the "most beautiful and remarkable pictures in the history of photography." Playwright George Bernard Shaw professed his undying passion for her -- but preferred to conduct their love affair entirely by letter. They didn't meet for years. So great was her fame and beauty that young men would say to their sweethearts: "As there's no chance of Ellen Terry marrying me, will you?" As for Irving: He was absolutely electrifying on the stage, a dark, magnetic presence that drew all eyes, whether he was Hamlet or Shylock, Mephistopheles or Thomas à Becket. He even served as the partial model for the charismatic protagonist of an 1897 "shocker" written by that abovementioned stage manager, one Bram Stoker: It was called "Dracula." Known as "the Chief" to his well-paid staff and company at the Lyceum Theatre, Irving became the first actor ever to be knighted. In this group biography of Terry, Irving and their families, Michael Holroyd -- well known for his lives of Lytton Strachey and Shaw -- has produced the most completely delicious, the most civilized and the most wickedly entertaining work of nonfiction anyone could ask for. I have no particular interest in theatrical history, but Holroyd's verve -- his dramatic sense for the comic and the tragic - is irresistible. The book's chapters are pleasingly short, its prose crisp and fast-moving, and every page is packed with bizarre doings, eccentric characters, surprising factoids and a stream of lively and scandalous anecdotes. Terry came from an acting family. Her parents were roving showmen, and nearly all the children were expected to tread the boards. Ellen's older sister Kate was the first "Terry of the age" but gave up her career to marry. At her last, thunderously acclaimed performance as Juliet, the specially commissioned "Kate Terry Valse" was played at the command of the Prince of Wales. In her dressing room afterward her wealthy fiance presented her with a wide gold bracelet. "On the outside was engraved: 'To Kate Terry on her retirement from the stage, from him for whom she leaves it'; and on the inside, in tiny letters, were the titles of a hundred plays in which she had appeared." She was all of 23. But this was nothing compared with the eventual fame of Ellen. At the Grand Jubilee for her 50 years onstage -- held at the Drury Lane Theatre on June 12, 1906 -- the guests included many of the most famous performers of the era: the immortal Eleonora Duse, W.S. Gilbert (of Gilbert and Sullivan), Réjane (the rival of Ellen's friend Sarah Bernhardt), Coquelin of the Comédie Française, the notorious Lillie Langtry, the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Mrs. Patrick Campbell (for whom Shaw wrote the part of Eliza Doolittle) and Enrico Caruso. That night 22 members of the Terry family appeared onstage, including Ellen's brother Fred, who gained world renown playing Sir Percy Blakeney, better known as "The Scarlet Pimpernel." Alas, Holroyd doesn't say if sister Kate's 2-year-old grandson was there, a young fellow by the name of John Gielgud. While Ellen Terry grew up in the theater, Irving, by contrast, spent his childhood in a mining village in Cornwall. But John Brodribb was determined to become an actor, so he changed his name, then spent an arduous decade taking any part he could wangle with provincial acting companies. For years he was mocked for his accent, his occasional stammer, his shortsightedness and his odd "dragging gait." But the young man was indomitable. As Holroyd writes: "His apprenticeship, and then his career, became an unending struggle to master his faults in diction, to

manipulate the mobile features that were evolving from a rather ordinary face and, in short, to gain perfection. By the time this apprenticeship was over and he established himself in London, he had played more than 700 characters." Irving -- prey to melancholy and anxiety when not working -- lived for the limelight. One evening, when he was just starting his London career, the shrew he had impetuously married suddenly asked: "Are you going on making a fool of yourself like this all your life?" Irving immediately stopped the carriage in which they were riding, got out and walked off into the night. Though they never divorced, he never saw his wife again. Even Terry -- his leading lady and probably his lover -once told him flat out "that if she suddenly dropped dead, his first emotion would be grief and his first question would be about the preparedness of her understudy -- and he did not disagree." While Henry Irving worked hard to develop his skills, Terry was a natural, full of fun and flirtatious -- "an April kind of woman." After her annulment, she ran off with an aesthete by whom she had two illegitimate children; at the age of 60 she impetuously married a man half her age. She had little or no financial sense, and exhausted much of her fortune bailing out her two children, Edy and Ted. These two, along with Irving's sons Harry and Laurence, form the focus of the second half of "A Strange and Eventful History." All four managed to break free of their parents and make names for themselves in the theater. Harry created the role of the radical butler in J.M. Barrie's "The Admirable Crichton." His wife, Dolly, played the original Trilby in the drama that gave us that hypnotic villain Svengali. (In later life she took the part of Mrs. Darling in a kind of children's fairy tale that no one thought would last: "Peter Pan.") Laurence, with his wife, Mabel, toured the world playing in Shaw's "Captain Brassbound's Conversion." He also once wrote a play called "Godefroi and Yolande," which deserves immortality if only for the scene direction: "Enter a chorus of lepers." But Irving's sons died in middle age, while Ellen's children, who adopted the last name Craig, lived into the middle of the past century. When not running errands and nursing her mother, Edith Craig designed costumes, worked hard for suffragism and was a member of a lesbian circle that included the novelists Radclyffe Hall and Vita Sackville-West. Her brother, Edward Gordon Craig, grew up to become a visionary stage designer. Having inherited his mother's attractiveness and his godfather Henry Irving's charisma, Gordon Craig used them to wangle financial support from hapless patrons, charm the great Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski and seduce the famous dancer Isadora Duncan, by whom he had a daughter. Before his death at 94, this feckless Svengali fathered at least 13 children by eight different women. Holroyd paints him, with devastating irony, as a sacred monster, undeniably talented but wholly self-centered. As the years and pages go by in "A Strange Eventful History," this long biography starts to feel increasingly Proustian: Here is the flow of life, as one generation passes into the next, as men and women struggle for fame and achievement, then surprisingly find that they have grown old. Henry Irving, who wanted to go "like that," returned one night to his hotel after a performance, slumped down in a chair and died. Ellen lingered into her 80s: "The days are so short -- I wake in the morning -- I meet a little misery -- I meet a little happiness -- I fight with one -- I greet the other -the day is gone." And toward his end, Gordon Craig told visitors, "I was very honoured when our

Queen made me . . . whatever it was." Enough. "A Strange Eventful History" is a wonderful book, deserving applause, bouquets and a rave review in this morning's paper. Michael Dirda on 'The World Is What It Is' • • •

by Michael Dirda Nov. 16, 2008 Read Later

The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul By Patrick French Knopf. 576 pp. $30 V.S. Naipaul established himself as an important writer before he was 30, publishing a handful of fine and often sadly comic novels about his native Trinidad, among these his early masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas (1961). This early flowering was followed by a 25-year period when his nonfiction -- chiefly reports on the cultural and political Zeitgeists of India, Africa, the Caribbean and South America -- revealed him to be something of a modern-day Tocqueville. Like the author of Democracy in America, Naipaul could grasp the essence of a society or historical moment with uncanny precision and express that essence in beautiful, ice-water clear prose. (See, for example, An Area of Darkness, 1964, and The Return of Eva Peron, 1980.) During this period, Naipaul also continued to write fiction but with less frequency, though in his late 40s he produced his most admired novel, A Bend in the River (1979), a masterly Conradian vision of politics, sex and culture in modern-day Africa. Since then his writing, in whatever genre, has grown increasingly idiosyncratic, sometimes even formless and tendentious. That, in précis, is the public career. The young and gifted Naipaul worked hard and gradually achieved literary eminence, wealth and fame through the power of his pen. On the surface, then, his life is a kind of fairy tale, in which the dark-skinned, Oxford scholarship boy from Trinidad steadily gathers up all the glittering prizes, including a knighthood in 1990 and the Nobel for literature in 2001. Certainly, Naipaul deserves his acclaim -- as a writer. His prose is rightly esteemed for its simplicity, beauty and power; his vision of the world duly praised (or vilified) for its fierce honesty. But what of the private man? That's another matter. As Patrick French's nuanced and generous but often dispiriting biography shows, there's not much to like or praise about V.S. Naipaul as a human being. He starts life as a twerp, then fairly quickly becomes a jerk and ends up an old sourpuss. The best overall epithet for him is infantile -- though one shouldn't neglect the claims of such adjectives as whiney, narcissistic, insulting, needy, callous, impolite, cruel, vengeful, indecisive, miserly, exploitative, snobbish, sadistic, self-pitying and ungrateful. Of course, his is, to some extent, the modern artistic sensibility writ very, very large. But even our favorite monsters and divas -- Picasso, Waugh, Callas, Brando -- are never as smarmy and nasty as Naipaul. He can make a spoiled 3-year-old look mature.

Nonetheless, according to French and such one-time friends as Paul Theroux, the young Vidia really could be humorous and charming, and he seems to have been the indulged pet of the English literary and social establishment. On his travels, surprisingly, Naipaul also shows a rare ability to win the confidence and help of other people -- not that he is a person one could ever actually trust. Writers, as Joan Didion once said, are always betraying someone. To all appearances, Naipaul's only loyalties are to his art. Vidyadhar Surajprasad Naipaul was born in 1932 in the British island colony of Trinidad. His family, racially East Indian, was solidly middle-class, owning shops, a big house and even a quarry. Naipaul's father, however, worked as a journalist and dreamt of a writing career, eventually producing one admired book of island stories -- Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales -- and later serving his adoring son as the model for Mr. Biswas. The adolescent Naipaul was shy, intellectually ambitious and, according to one of his sister's, a "wimp," utterly unsure of himself around girls. After attending school at the prestigious Queen's Royal College, he competed for one of three scholarships to England, and came in fourth. But there was apparently some mix-up over Naipaul's exam, and it was decided to allow him a grant after all. At Oxford the brilliant provincial failed to shine. He complained about the cold, the food (he was a vegetarian who occasionally ate chicken), racial prejudice, his fellow Indians and Trinidadians, almost everything. No doubt he had cause. It couldn't have been easy being a "wog," a "nigger" in 1950s Britain. Still, Naipaul managed to win the affection, then love of undergraduate Patricia Hale, whom he eventually married. Unfortunately, their sex life was temperate at best, and before long the repressed but lustful husband began to visit prostitutes regularly. Nonetheless, Naipaul needed the mothering and comfort that Pat delivered, and she, in her turn, dutifully believed in him and his genius for the rest of her generally wretched life. As the years went by, Naipaul increasingly treated her as little more than a servant. There were no children. After Oxford (where he gained only a second-class degree and failed his post-graduate B.Litt), Naipaul eventually landed a job working for the radio program "Caribbean Voices," a position that allowed him to hone his skills as a writer and journalist. In relatively short order, he produced the colorful Trinidadian stories that became Miguel Street (1959), which won the Somerset Maugham Award, as well as the comic novels The Mystic Masseur (1957), recipient of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; The Suffrage of Elvira (1958), which garnered accolades from Anthony Powell, among others; and his Dickensian masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas. When Naipaul brought out his first work of nonfiction, a study of the Caribbean called The Middle Passage (1962), that connoisseur of the classical style, Evelyn Waugh, applauded its author's "exquisite mastery of the English language." Naipaul was hardly out of his dazzlingly productive 20s.

PHOTOS V.S. Naipaul eyes up Margaret Murray. Despite the turbulence in their relationship, she would stay with him for 24 years. (Private Collection. "The World Is What It Is")

Despite these prizes and rising critical esteem, the Naipauls remained relatively poor, and Pat often seems to have drudged at pick-up teaching jobs to pay the rent. But Naipaul's 1964 book on India, An Area of Darkness, finally established his bona fides as a political observer and gadfly. Before long, there were repeated assignments from the New York Review of Books and other publications to report on the post-colonial third world, from Africa to South America. It was while he was in Buenos Aires that Naipaul was introduced to an Anglo-Argentine woman named Margaret Murray. Murray was married and bored, had run through earlier lovers and casually submitted to the writer's impulsive attentions. Before long, the two had fallen into a serious sadomasochistic relationship, Murray eventually declaring herself Naipaul's slave and his penis her god. The hitherto sexually backward wimp in heavy Clark Kent glasses took full advantage of this rapt obeisance. Murray left her husband and three children, repeatedly abased herself in love letters (some of which Naipaul never bothered to open) and even entered into a temporary sexual arrangement with a banker just for a free trip to England to visit her sadistic master. Their carnal games could grow rough, and sometimes Naipaul actually beat her, once bruising her face so badly that she couldn't go out in public. For 25 years the writer encouraged this folie a deux, which verged on a ménage a trois after he told Pat about his mistress. Of course, he framed his confession in such a way as to make it seem that he deserved the real sympathy -- he was cruelly distraught, the emotional turmoil interfered with his work, etc. etc. Pat stayed with him because he needed her. Then after she died from cancer in 1996, Sir Vidia -- as he now was -- threw over the long-suffering Murray and two months later married Nadira Alvi, a Pakistani journalist. French's biography ends at this point. Now in his late 70s, Naipaul has in recent years come to seem increasingly blimpish, less a cultural scourge than a mean-spirited, intolerant crank. He has likened Africans and Indians to monkeys, asserted that there are no great writers any more, broken with friends and repeatedly insulted strangers. French tries to explain such behavior as savage indignation à la Swift or typically mischievous Trinidadian humor. Perhaps. To most people, though, it's just boorishness. Of course, none of this affects the books; they stand on their own considerable merits, especially those published before 1985. Later work, such as the novel Magic Seeds (2004), can be rambling and self-indulgent, or repeat themes better treated earlier. Nonetheless, as a distinguished novelist, Naipaul merits this comparably distinguished biography, one that aims to understand rather than simplistically condone or chastise. French was permitted access to all of Naipaul's papers, and while his book is "authorized," its subject exercised no review or censorship over its often unflattering content. How should one interpret this? As a genuine desire by Naipaul to be remembered in all his complexity? As a sign of smug self-confidence? As utter indifference to people's approval? Perhaps all three. In any case, The World Is What It Is -- the title derives from the desolate opening words of A Bend in the River -- is a superb, clear-eyed study, always sympathetic, balanced and thoughtful, as well as rich in what Joseph Conrad called "the fascination of the abomination."· Michael Dirda on 'Words in Air' • •

by Michael Dirda Nov. 9, 2008

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Edited by Thomas Travisano with Saskia Hamilton Farrar Straus Giroux. 875 pp. $45 Most readers drawn to this wonderful correspondence -- a book to linger and dawdle over for weeks -- will already know at least a little about poets Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979) and Robert Lowell (1917-1977). If you don't, first read at least a few of their poems. For Bishop, you might start with "The Imaginary Iceberg" ("We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship"), the Kafkaesque vision called "The Man-Moth" (inspired by a misprint of "mammoth"), the celebrated villanelle "One Art" ("The art of losing isn't hard to master"), "Questions of Travel" ("Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?") and those two somewhat longer masterpieces "The Moose" and "Crusoe in England." Together they make for some of the best poetry of the previous century. For Lowell, the choices are more difficult, as he wrote a great deal, frequently altered and revised already published work, and nearly always emphasized forcefulness and daring over classical finesse. The simplest course is to read his single, most admired book, Life Studies. This includes elegies for older writers such as George Santayana and Ford Madox Ford ("you were a kind man and you died in want"), poems about Lowell's relatives and ancestors, the famous "Skunk Hour" (dedicated to Bishop) and several portraits of married life, such as " 'To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage' " and "Man and Wife": "you were in your twenties, and I,/once hand on glass/and heart in mouth,/outdrank the Rahvs in the heat/of Greenwich Village. Fainting at your feet." The Rahvs? Philip Rahv was the longtime editor of Partisan Review, as well as a powerful essayist and critic (see his classic analysis of American literature, "Paleface and Redskin"). Among the myriad joys of Words in Air is that it re-creates the glorious heyday of the little magazines and quarterlies, that era when an article or a poem in the Kenyon or Hudson or Partisan Review could actually make a writer's reputation. It was also a time when gods like T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams were still publishing and when half the young poets in America, including Lowell and Bishop, made the pilgrimage to St. Elizabeths Hospital, Washington's psychiatric haven, to spend an afternoon with Ezra Pound. Lowell and Bishop first met in 1947 at a party given by Randall Jarrell, the most feared and influential poetry critic of his time. Before long, Elizabeth and "Cal" (as Lowell's friends called him) were corresponding regularly, discussing each other's work, their mutual acquaintances and almost everything, except their very deepest troubles: When distressed, Bishop sometimes drank to a state of hospitalization, while Lowell would periodically grow so manic that he required sedation and sanctuary in rest homes. Yet they never let their friendship lapse. Indeed, some people even thought they might marry. As Lowell once wrote to Bishop, "Asking you is the might have been for me." But "nothing was said, and like a loon that needs sixty feet, I believe, to take off from the water, I wanted time and space," and so the moment passed. One shudders to imagine the two as a wedded couple, especially since Bishop preferred women and Lowell rockily married three times.

Both were absolutely superb letter writers, mutually admiring, each clearly striving to outentertain the other. Yet even their literary gossip serves the greater purpose of inclusion, support and intimacy. For the most part, Lowell is the more dynamic of the two, the hot kid who lands the plum jobs, then prepares the way for the shyer Bishop to take over after him, as guest at an artist colony, as consultant at the Library of Congress, as Harvard professor. Lowell also writes the more dazzling letters, often peppering them with vivid pen portraits. Here is that previously mentioned artists' colony: "No use describing Yaddo-- rundown rose gardens, rotting cantaloupes, fountains, a bust of Dante with a hole in the head, sets called Gems of Ancient Literature, Masterpieces of the World, cracking dried up sets of Shakespeare, Ruskin, Balzac, Reminiscences of a Happy Life (the title of two different books), pseudo Poussins, pseudo Titians, pseudo Reynolds, pseudo and real English wood, portraits of the patroness, her husband, her lover, her children lit with tubular lights, like a church, like a museum . . . I'm delighted. Why don't you come?" With a deft sentence or two, Lowell can sum up the legendary Delmore Schwartz, William Empson, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath and many others, including the razor-sharp Jarrell: "I think of him as a fencer who has defeated and scarred all his opponents so that the sport has come to be almost abandoned, and Randall stands leaning on his foil, one shoulder a little lower than the other, unchallenged, invulnerable, deadly." Surely, there is no better short description of John Berryman and his world than this: "Saw John Berryman: utterly spooky, teaching brilliant classes, spending week-ends in the sanitarium, drinking, seedy, a little bald, often drunk, married to a girl of twenty-one from a Catholic parochial college, white, innocent beyond belief, just pregnant." For much of her adult life Bishop lived away from the North American literary scene, primarily in Brazil with her beloved Lota de Macedo Soares. But this "minor female Wordsworth," as she calls herself, doesn't just write about landscape and nature. At one religious procession, she reports, a loud speaker orders the spectators to give "a big hand for Our Lady of Fatima." When asked what she would teach were she to come back to the University of Washington, Bishop dryly answers "Remedial English." From time to time, she even outdoes Lowell in pen portraiture:

"The local bookshop is run by an Englishman and his wife who is about 20 years older than he, very cute, really, with dyed bright pink hair. They play chess in the corner and very much dislike being interrupted by a customer. The other day a man I knew went in to buy a book and asked for it timidly. Hugh, the Englishman, said, 'Good heavens, man! Can't you see I'm about to make a move?' " Oh, these letters are just so good! Reading Partisan Review in 1963, an annoyed Bishop asks Lowell, "WHO wrote those idiotic movie reviews? I think she must be somebody's mistress?" (Answer: Pauline Kael.) After acquiring a mynah bird, Bishop announces that she's teaching it to say, "I too dislike it" -- the famous opening words of Marianne Moore's "Poetry." Both poets are insatiable readers. Bishop goes through "just about all Dickens" in order to write a sonnet. Over the years she mentions her pleasure in the letters of Madame de Sévigné and Sydney

Smith, the memoirs of Augustus Hare, Trollope's North America, Kipling's stories, Henry James's correspondence, and even Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Naturally, she reads The Group, the bestseller by her friend and Vassar classmate Mary McCarthy, but without much approval. Lowell is equally impressive. In bed for three days with a cold, he devours Thomas Carlyle's mammoth French Revolution: "Overpowering, and almost as good as Moby Dick when you give in to it. Our century really can't match the best Victorians for nonfictional prose." He studies the ancient Greek tragedies -- one sometimes forgets that Lowell majored in classics -- and boldly attempts English versions of many of the great poems of world literature (see the brilliant and sometimes maddeningly perverse Imitations). Unsurprisingly, Bishop agrees when Lowell says, "I wonder if you ever found reading and writing curiously self-sufficient. There are times when one hardly needs people." Not that these two are unsociable. Lowell confesses, like many a teenager, "I am now on my second month of contact lenses and feel a new man." Bishop unashamedly pulls all the strings she can to get a young Brazilian into Harvard (without success). And they can be blunt with each other too. When, in The Dolphin, Lowell cruelly alters the letters of his second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, causing great hurt, Bishop comes right out and lets him have it: " Art just isn't worth that much." Later, when he's been going on about mortality and the passage of the years, she writes: "I am now going to be very impertinent and aggressive. Please, please don't talk about old age so much, my dear old friend! You are giving me the creeps." When Lowell finally admits to feeling guilty about The Dolphin, she softens the blow: "We all have irreparable and awful actions on our consciences -- that's really all I can say now. I do, I know. I just try to live without blaming myself for them every day, at least -- every day, I should say -- the nights take care of guilt sufficiently." Well, I just can't praise Words in Air enough. As Lowell and Bishop's friend Randall Jarrell used to say: Anybody who cares about poetry will want to read it. · Michael Dirda on 'Gerard Manley Hopkins' • • •

by Michael Dirda Nov. 2, 2008 Read Later

By Paul Mariani Viking. 496 pp. $34.95 Excepting his juvenilia and various fragments, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844- 1889) wrote only about 50 poems, most of them "counter, original, spare, strange." As Paul Mariani tells us in his new critical biography, nobody wanted to publish these angst-ridden, prayerful cries from the heart, and so Hopkins was reduced to sharing his work, via letter, with a handful of friends. Even the most sophisticated of these, the future poet laureate Robert Bridges, confessed to finding "The

Wreck of the Deutschland" -- Hopkins's first masterpiece -- unsympathetic and incomprehensible. After all, its themes were nothing if not seriously theological: God, Nature, salvation, providence, human despair and spiritual exultation. In themselves such religious subjects, which were to remain central to Hopkins's poetry, would have been attractive to the morally earnest Victorians. But Hopkins eschewed the gentlemanly observance of an Anglican curate. His faith burned hot and strong. As a young Oxford undergraduate, he had converted to Catholicism -- being received into the church by Cardinal Newman himself -- and had then, to his family's shock and sorrow, become a Jesuit. As a result, he wrote less from the heart or mind than from the depths of the soul, either celebrating God and His creation or, later on, addressing his own feelings of loneliness and desolation: "Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee. . . . O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. . . . I am gall, I am heartburn. . . . O thou lord of life, send my roots rain." Like John Donne and T.S. Eliot, both of whom he sometimes resembles, Hopkins pressed hard against what were the boundaries of acceptable poetic convention. Instead of employing nice regular rhymes in iambic pentameter, his poems struggle to contain an ecstatic syntax, the words twisting and contorting and breathlessly straining to articulate some almost inexpressible mystery: "How to kéep -- is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or catch or key to keep/Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing away?" As these opening lines from "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo" indicate, Hopkins nearly always ignored the usual tuh-dum, tuh-dum of classic verse for a much looser metric he called "sprung rhythm." This, he wrote, is generated by "scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one strong syllable or it may be many light and one strong." Mariani adds that there might be "one, two, three, or even more unstressed syllables between accents. Or none." Sometimes the resulting poems call to mind the ironhammered alliteration of Old English, made manic with a headlong, rushing breathlessness. They are meant to be recited, not read: Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace, Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks, loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant, girlgrace -Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them with breath, And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs, deliver

Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God.

On the surface, such a swirl of language might resemble logorrhea, yet Hopkins is always striving to be precise, to arrive at what he called the haecceitas, or thisness, the fundamental individuality of an idea or thing. Even now the poetry that resulted seems astonishingly modern. Imagine how rebarbative, how transgressive it must have sounded in the age of Tennyson. There have been several previous biographies of Hopkins, including a fine one by Robert Bernard Martin, an eminent scholar of Victorian poetry. But Mariani's possesses three great strengths: 1) Mariani has lived with Hopkins's poetry his entire life, ever since writing a commentary on the poems as his first book; 2) over the past 40 years, he has produced biographies of American poets who might be loosely viewed as the "sons of Gerard": Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, John Berryman and Robert Lowell; and 3) Mariani is a believing Catholic, with consequent sympathy and insight into Hopkins's religious convictions and experiences. In several ways, then, this is a spiritual biography, intensely focused on the poet's inner life, coupled with close analyses of his major poems. In general, we think of this great poet as a marginalized figure, both as a Catholic in Anglican England and as an artistic innovator of the most daring sort. (Some scholars have claimed that Hopkins was homosexual as well.) But Mariani reminds us that Hopkins's teachers included the great classicist Benjamin Jowett, that he was a friend of Coleridge's grandson and knew the aesthete Walter Pater, as well as many of the Pre-Raphaelites, that he corresponded with a future poet laureate, and that, late in life, he even visited the studio of an Irish painter, where he met the artist's 21-year-old son, a promising lad named William Butler Yeats. Still, it is true that most of Hopkins's adult life was spent as a Jesuit, studying, preaching, working among the poor of Liverpool, going on retreat, instructing students in ancient languages at University College, Dublin. Even though he passionately loved poetry and music, could draw trees and rocks and flowers with a draftsman's skill and describe them with a naturalist's eye ("What would the world be, once bereft/Of wet and of wildness?") and enjoyed learning languages (even difficult ones like Welsh), he was, above all, a spiritual being. The world, he once wrote, was "charged with the grandeur of God." Time and again, Father Hopkins would stop writing poetry for a while, having decided that it was "incompatible" with his vocation. While Mariani rightly emphasizes Hopkins's spiritual and artistic life, he also includes the kind of human details that vivify a biography. The poet noted, "Three of my intimate friends at Oxford have . . . drowned themselves, a good many more of my acquaintances and contemporaries have died by their own hands in other ways." Though a Jesuit, Hopkins remained an Englishman and something of a jingoist, telling Bridges that the British defeats early in the Boer War were "an unredeemed disgrace." He complained that Browning's poems give us "pointless photographs of still life" and "minute upholstery descriptions" and elsewhere confessed that "I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman's mind to be more like my own than any other man's living. As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession." Being familiar from the confession box with humankind at its most sinful and base, Father Hopkins deeply admired Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, adding that his own Hyde was even "worse." Once, according to a student, he looked up from a lecture on Homer's Helen to say, "You know, I never saw a naked woman," adding after a moment, "I wish I had." Like many modern readers, he even regarded "The Windhover" as "the best poem I ever wrote": "I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding/Of the rolling level underneath him steady air."

Hopkins seems to have been quite worn out when he died at age 44, though he may have suffered from undiagnosed Crohn's disease or been the victim of typhoid (rats had been seen in the college drains and kitchen). While Bridges promised Hopkins's mother that he would collect his friend's poems and publish them, he waited until 1918 before bringing out The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. It took 12 years to exhaust the edition of 750 copies. But by then its author had been discovered and acclaimed not only a great poet but also a de facto modernist. Recently, one of those copies of that first edition of the poems sold for more than $7,000. Hopkins once wrote, "I am soft sift/In an hourglass -- at the wall/Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift,/And it crowds and it combs to the fall." This is, of course, the human condition, prey to the tyranny of time. But Hopkins also knew that he had been saved from oblivion or worse by God's gift of His only begotten son. While one may or may not believe this, there can be no doubt that Hopkins himself will be read and loved as long as poetry matters. In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and Thís Jack, jóke, poor pótsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond. · Book Review: 'The Night of the Hunter,' by Jeffrey Couchman • • •

by Michael Dirda Feb. 26, 2009 Read Later

By Jeffrey Couchman Northwestern Univ. 284 pp. Paperback, $24.95 "I see you're looking at my hands," says the Rev. Harry Powell. The black-suited preacher -- played by cobra-lidded Robert Mitchum -- sits on a stool in an ice cream parlor in Depression-era West Virginia. His knuckles are tattooed with the words LOVE and HATE, and in just a moment the hypocritical, sexually repressed, homicidal maniac will mime the never-ending battle between good and evil, between Mr. Right Hand and Mr. Left Hand. No one ever forgets the Rev. Harry Powell's hands, or the switchblade that he carries in his pocket, or the haunting movie through which he slithers like a serpent: "The Night of the Hunter." The only film ever directed by the great character actor Charles Laughton, "The Night of the Hunter" failed miserably when it opened in 1955. But since then it has come to be recognized as one of American cinema's greatest masterpieces. Shot in glorious black and white, this poetic, highly stylized movie is half-Gothic nightmare, half-morality play, a pastoral film noir set along the banks of the serene Ohio River. Cahiers du Cinéma ranks it as the second most beautiful film of all

time (after "Citizen Kane" and just above "The Rules of the Game"). In this enthralling "biography," Jeffrey Couchman traces how the cinematic classic came to be made. Laughton had long been eager to try his hand at directing when his business manager, Paul Gregory, brought him the advance galleys of Davis Grubb's first novel. Laugton read "The Night of the Hunter" in a New York hotel room, and, according to Gregory, suddenly came "wallowing down the hallway in his nightshirt, waving this book, saying, 'We've found it, We've found it!' " They bought the rights for $75,000 even before Grubb's novel was published. But they had chosen well: "The Night of the Hunter" stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for four months. The plot of both the novel and movie is this: The desperate Ben Harper robs a bank and kills two guards, but before he is captured leaves the loot -- $10,000 -- in the safekeeping of his two children, 9-year-old John and 4-year-old Pearl. He makes them promise never to tell anyone where the money is hidden, not even their mother. While waiting to be hanged, Harper occupies a cell with the preacher Harry Powell, who has been sentenced for 30 days for driving a stolen car. Harper refuses to reveal the whereabouts of the money to his wheedling cellmate, but before long Powell -- who we know preys on lonely widows -- is heading straight for Cresap's Landing. There he charms the townsfolk and, more important, the sexually hungry Willa Harper (marvelously played by Shelley Winters). Only young John refuses Powell's unctuous blandishments, but one night he accidentally reveals that he and Pearl know where the stolen money is hidden. As a result, the two children must flee their murderous stepfather, setting off in a skiff to float down the Ohio River, hoping to find a place of refuge. In one particularly eerie scene, the two runaways fall asleep in a hayloft -- until John suddenly hears the barking of dogs, then Mitchum's honeyed voice singing his signature hymn, "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms." A horse and rider slowly amble across the horizon, and the amazed and appalled John cries out, "Don't he ever sleep?" The Devil, we know, never does. Eventually, the children do find a protector in the kindly Miz Rachel Cooper -- played by Lillian Gish -- and the confrontation between good and evil comes to a final struggle at night in a lonely farmhouse. As Couchman repeatedly emphasizes, Laughton aimed to be as faithful to the novel as possible. He even asked Grubb to make drawings of some of his key scenes: a burlesque hall with its flouncing stripper, the preacher's looming shadow on a bedroom wall, the look of a woman's corpse and wafting hair under water. When Grubb chose not to work on the actual shooting script, Laughton hired James Agee instead. Not only an esteemed film critic but also the scriptwriter for John Huston's "The African Queen," Agee had authored his own sui generis masterpiece of Americana, a sustained prose poem about poor Southern families that, with photographs by Walker Evans, became "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." Long thought to be lost, Agee's text for "The Night of the Hunter" turned up in 2003, and Couchman shows that more of it was used in the film than has been generally suspected. Yet even though Agee was given a screen credit, his work as a whole was rejected as overelaborate, and Laughton produced his own fast-moving, stripped-down story. Because some outtakes from the production survive, these also allow us to hear the director patiently explaining to his principals exactly how he wants them to play each scene.

To achieve the dreamlike, stylized look he was after, Laughton took his inspiration from all the darker schools of filmmaking, borrowing from German expressionist shockers (e.g., shadowy streets and narrow hallways shot from unsettling angles), from Universal's 1930s horror movies about relentless monsters ("Dracula," "The Mummy" and "Frankenstein") and from D.W. Griffith's early silents, especially such realistic melodramas as "Broken Blossoms" (starring a young Lillian Gish). Most important of all, Laughton hired Walter Schumann to compose the film's atmospheric music and Stanley Cortez, known for his high contrast blacks and whites, to be his cinematographer. Cortez once flatly stated that of the directors he worked with, only two understood light: Orson Welles and Charles Laughton. Certainly, it is the quality of the light that makes each scene of the movie so striking: the sharp clarity of the open-air picnic, the hideous chiaroscuro of a torch-lit revival meeting, the swirling mist that gathers outside the ice cream parlor when the now spiritually "clean" Willa says goodnight, the soft moon shining through a window into the altarlike bedroom, the bright stars speckling the night sky as the children escape down the river. In the end, though, the publicists didn't know how to promote this Southern Gothic fairy tale about sexual repression, religious hysteria, pursuit and coming of age. Perhaps only Flannery O'Connor could have then appreciated its strange alchemy. Audiences found its unique blending of styles "arty" and off-putting. To some, Mitchum's histrionics could seem, as Shakespeare said of similar rhetorical flamboyance, to out-Herod Herod, while Gish's low-keyed naturalism, combined with her homespun Christian stoicism, often risks sounding corny. Overall, though, as Couchman says, "the film thwarts expectations at nearly every turn." And this perhaps is why it is so endlessly rewatchable, an ever-fresh and darkly American masterpiece. Michael Dirda on 'Dark Water' • • •

by Michael Dirda Oct. 19, 2008 Read Later

By Robert Clark Doubleday. 354 pp. $26 In 1968, when I was 19, I hitchhiked from Aix-en-Provence to Florence, where I spent three days gawking at art in museums, libraries and churches. Today, I've forgotten most of the paintings I saw, but I vividly remember the inscriptions and thick red lines etched high on walls throughout the city: "Il IV Novembre 1966/L'Acqua Dell'Arno/Arrivò a Quest' Altezza" ("On November 4, 1966 the waters of the Arno reached this height.") That height, as Robert Clark notes in Dark Water, his account of the 1966 flood, might be as much as 15 or 20 feet above street level. On that November night 42 years ago, the Arno river overflowed its banks and inundated much of Florence, leaving more than 30 people dead, drowning millions of books and manuscripts and damaging or destroying thousands of paintings. Though terrible and heartbreaking, the flood's consequences might have been even worse were it not for the efforts of a motley crew of art experts, painting and book conservators, wealthy philanthropists and ordinary people, not least the

almost legendary "mud angels." These "angeli del fango" were the young people, most of them in their teens and early 20s, who flocked to the city to help save its heritage. Today in the art world to have worked as a "mud angel" carries the kind of glory that even the fanciest graduate degree is powerless to bestow. Robert Clark opens his book with a succinct, though sometimes overheated, history of Florence and its love-hate relationship with the Arno. Did you know that Tuscany's capital has been flooded scores of times, indeed with almost predictable regularity? Once these inundations were thought to be righteous punishment for the city's myriad vices: "Florentines were known for their excessive interest in the exquisiteness of their clothes and cooking, their outsized civic and personal pride," Clark explains, "but Florence stood out most of all for avarice and envy: lust for the florin, particularly someone else's florins, together with their house, their furnishings, their good fortune, their beauty (and that of their spouses, children, and lovers), and their talent." Florentine Leonardo da Vinci, we are reminded, was obsessed with sketching deluges, roiling waves and torrential waters. We learn that it was Giorgio Vasari, now honored as the father of art history, who decided that Cimabue's great "Crucifix," installed high above the altar at Santa Croce, should be replaced with a ciborio, a kind of tabernacle. As a result, the large panel painting was moved to the church's refectory, where it would remain for 400 years until November 5, 1966, when horrified priests and scholars waded through dirty, oily waters covered with its flaking paint. Within a few days Cimabue's masterpiece was to become the most famous victim of the Arno Flood and the focus of the most intense, if sometimes wayward, restoration efforts. Clark builds to his dramatic action slowly. He describes the gradual discovery of Florence as a "city of masterpieces," where poets might reside (Shelley, the Brownings), critics learn their trade (Ruskin, Berenson) and novelists observe their gauche compatriots on tour (Henry James, E.M. Forster). He reminds us that during World War II the departing Germans blew up all the Arno's bridges, except one: The art-loving Führer insisted against all military logic that the Ponte Vecchio be spared. We also learn that as the American army advanced toward the river, Lt. Frederick Hartt was desperately trying to discover and protect the caves and villas where the treasures of the Uffizi museum had been hidden. Clark's tour of Florentine history even mentions the distinctly minor expatriate writer Dorothy Lees. Why? Because her illegitimate son by the stage designer Gordon Craig (himself the illegitimate son of the actress Ellen Terry) grew up to be David Lees, the celebrated Life magazine photographer who recorded the flood's widespread devastation. Not until page 131 does Clark actually begin his gripping account of the disaster. On the evening of November 3, Piero Bargellini, the mayor of Florence, attended a banquet to honor the American Chamber of Commerce at which a documentary on the Mississippi River was shown. Bargellini then jested: "Don't imagine I was fazed by your movie. Florence has never been afraid of competition: if it keeps raining like this, tomorrow morning the Arno will beat your Mississippi." Within a few hours this would no longer be a joke. First a worker at the Anconella pumping station called a newspaper's night desk to report that everything was under water. His body was later found "embedded in mud inside a hydraulic tunnel." Then 70 thoroughbred horses, locked in their stables at the city park, "drowned, thrashing and screaming." By morning much of the city was cut

off from the rest of the world. But just before the lines went down, the sister of moviemaker Franco Zeffirelli called her brother with the dire news. By dawn Zeffirelli was in a helicopter with a film crew heading for his home town. A day later La Nazione, using printing presses in Bologna, headlined its front page: "Florence Invaded by Water: The City Transformed into a Lake: The Greatest Tragedy in Seven Centuries."

PHOTOS Rescuers carry a painting through flooded streets. (David Lees - Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images) Clark's stories of the flood are the stuff of thrilling documentaries. Trapped in the Museum of the History of Science, its director "escaped across the rooftops to the Uffizi carrying Galileo's telescope." One disabled woman, wheelchair-bound and unreachable because of the anti-theft bars on the windows of her ground-floor apartment, was actually hoisted into the air by neighboring priests using a sheet threaded through the grille. But the floodwaters kept rising and rising, so that - in a macabre scene -- the woman eventually drowned while suspended in her wheelchair high above the floor. "By the end of the day of November 5," Clark writes, "most of the city's museums and churches were either still inaccessible or uninspected, but some 14,000 movable artworks would prove to be damaged or destroyed, sixteen miles of shelved documents and records in the State Archives had gone underwater; three to four million books and manuscripts had been flooded, including 1.3 million volumes at the Biblioteca Nazionale and its catalog of eight million cards; the rare book and literary collections of the Vieusseux Library on the Palazzo Strozzi had been completely inundated, with book covers and pages stuck to the ceiling; and unknown millions of dollars' worth of antiques and objets from Florence's antiquarian shops were destroyed, swept away, looted, or otherwise missing." It was also on November 5 that Ugo Procacci, the superintendent of Florence's monuments and art works, made his way to the Santa Croce refectory, home of Cimabue's "Crucifix." The painting was more than just severely damaged: "perhaps three quarters of the image was gone, either stripped down to the gesso or the canvas beneath it," including half of the face and most of the right side of Christ's body. Procacci's lieutenant, Umberto Baldini -- a highly controversial figure -directed the removal of the painting and soon emerged as the chief force behind the international restoration efforts. Which were extraordinary. In Philadelphia, a tearful Frederick Hartt, who had become a professor and America's leading authority on Italian Renaissance painting, told his art classes about the disaster. The next day he flew to Florence. From all over Europe and America, young people -- the mud angels -- began to make their way to the city. One graduate student at London's Courtauld Institute "left the night of the flood, but not before going to his family's farm to round up all the pumps and hoses he could lay his hands on. Driving day and night across the continent in a Land Rover, he was at the doors of the Uffizi twenty-four hours later." Before long, the care of the

waterlogged books was given over to a group of mainly English book binders and scientists, under the direction of Peter Waters (who spent much of his later career as the much-loved chief of conservation at the Library of Congress). Waters's colleagues included not only the eccentric conservators Christopher Clarkson and Anthony Cains, but also the nearly larger-than-life Joe Nkrumah, a chemist and restorer who stayed in Florence for seven years before finally going home to become director of the National Museum of Ghana. But paintings, not books, remain at the heart of Clark's story, and none more so than the Cimabue "Crucifix." Here, Clark almost coyly approaches the bloody crossroads where the care of priceless art intersects with money, ambition and sex. The middle-aged Baldini coveted power, but he also had an eye for beauty, and didn't fail to notice the young and talented paintings conservator Ornella Casazza. Soon the pair were lovers (and eventually, after their divorces, husband and wife), and she was given the task of restoring the Cimabue. Her work, especially the method adopted to fill in the painting's losses, has been both praised and disparaged. When Clark interviewed Casazza (Baldini was dead), she was in her early 60s, and the smitten writer tells us that the conservator was "beautiful; in fact, she was sexy. I would have done whatever she asked." He admits that Baldini might have eased Casazza's path, but "he did what anyone might do when seized by overwhelming bellezza." You can see that the American writer has imbibed the real Italian spirit. Nonetheless, Clark occasionally segues into strange, almost mystical passages about art and transcendence -- note that odd use of "redemption" in his subtitle -- though these lapses hardly matter given the compelling story he tells. Of course, since Hurricane Katrina, we Americans know all too well the shock and sorrow of a beautiful city suddenly overwhelmed by merciless waters. · Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda on 'Antoine's Alphabet' • • •

by Michael Dirda Sept. 21, 2008 Read Later

By Jed Perl Knopf. 207 pp. $25 In a very loose sense, Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) might be regarded as the Mozart of painters, being best known for his fêtes galantes -- tableaux of 18th-century couples flirting and playing music in soft, shadowy woods, sometimes dressed as figures from commedia dell'arte, often with a lake or allée and some statuary nearby. The atmosphere in much of his work is one of shimmering ambiguity, of joy touched with knowledge of its evanescence, a kind of worldly wistfulness. Adopting an alphabetical format, Jed Perl's elegant little book proffers short essays on Watteauesque topics from "Actors" to "Zeuxis," with stops along the tour for "Backs," "Fans," "Helen of Troy," "Ornament," "Rococo," "Soldiers," "Vignette" and much else. Several of the entries explore the Watteau connection in later artists, and so Perl summarizes an "imaginary

portrait" by Walter Pater, Heinrich von Kleist's essay "On the Puppet Theater," Gérard de Nerval's dream-like short-story "Sylvie," and Paul Verlaine's collection of poems titled Fêtes Galantes. There are, naturally, pieces about Watteau's use of the Pierrot figure, especially in the monumental "Gilles," that full frontal portrait of a clown dressed in ballooning white silk, with a round pie face as sad and enigmatic as Mona Lisa's: Is his a look of weary acceptance of life's vicissitudes or the blankness of near idiocy or, as some critics maintain, the countenance of a secularized Christ? Elusiveness lies at the heart of Watteau's genius. Perl discusses the similar commedia figures in Beardsley and Cézanne, as well as Picasso's saltimbanques and Beckett's tramps. But then he touches on many things, including Watteau's use of color, the nature of classicism and shopping and his own boyhood discovery of art. Certainly, anyone who loves this great painter, or who enjoys seeing a lively mind in action, will find pleasure and instruction in Perl's book. Nonetheless, while Watteau himself is an unalloyed joy, Antoine's Alphabet occasionally can be a little irritating. Sometimes Perl indulges in over-vivid writing: "So it is a magnum opus knocked off as if it were a sketch, an epochal vagary, a symphony amid his chamber music, an oratorical tour de force whispered in a sympathetic ear, a hailstorm of feathers, a lightning bolt as gentle as a summer breeze." At other times, he sinks to glib generalization: "The primal becomes personal, but of course for the individual, what is more primal than the personal?" He also periodically surrenders to private flights of fancy, guessing about the character of lost paintings or comparing a friend's conversation to Watteau's arabesques or making the strange case for Katharine Hepburn as a Watteau woman. Some entries are downright mysterious, in particular "Structure," which describes an unnamed painter in Paris. Yet more often Perl does gets the balance just right, as in his shrewd, and lyrical, meditation on "Men" or his emphasis on the importance of backs in Watteau's iconography: Women are typically seen facing away from us, just turning their heads for a quick glance over their shoulders. Such a perspective allows Watteau to emphasize mystery and flirtatiousness, as well as the beauty of exquisite dresses and bodies when seen from behind. So, too, Perl aptly evokes the mirage-like quality of the artist's work: "The fascination of such a painting is directly related to the fascination of daydreams, for we do not necessarily want to know what they mean so much as we want to linger over them, sink into the luxuriant satisfactions of such fantasies, although we can also be alarmed or even repelled by their power. In daydreams, meaning is never fixed. So it is not strange that Watteau, a painter who comes so close to mirroring their ambiguities, should inspire a great deal of scholarly disagreement, with some arguing that the mood of his work is essentially upbeat, playful, optimistic, while others see the mood as shadowy, melancholy, troubled. Daydreams, of course, can be all of these things at once. The man, the woman, the fountain, the statue, the pond, the ruined building, the grove of trees, the Harlequin, each of the elements can mean many different things, and Watteau struggles with the teeming possibilities." The paintings to which this description most fully applies are the fêtes galantes, and of these the greatest by far is "The Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera." In this masterpiece, amorous couples are about to embark on a boat that will -- depending on which critic you believe -- either take them to or take them away from Cythera, Venus's island of love. Though there is lots of competition, it has long been my favorite painting in the world.

As many people can testify, every so often we encounter a work of art that seems to speak directly to our souls. In my case, I first saw "The Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera" when I was 19, during a summer study program in Paris. From that moment, Watteau's painting immediately joined Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" and Proust's "Swann in Love" as a third great study of eros the bittersweet. But while Wagner and Proust focus on yearning and jealousy respectively, Watteau zeroes in on something harder to define. The seven-foot-wide tableau of "The Pilgrimage to the Isle of Cythera" is suffused with a delicate autumnal wistfulness and languor: the satin and silken couples rise slowly from the ground, hesitant or sorry to begin their voyage; one woman turns her head to look back at Venus's grotto with the deepest longing. The men touch or hold their partners gently, almost cautiously, afraid of breaking the painting's spell. That spell will not last long, of course, but for this one serene moment, this fugitive moment outside of time, the heart's usual riot of wild emotion has yielded to a gracious and infinite tenderness. During that summer, my art teacher at the Louvre spoke, as does Perl in his entry on the painting, of the work's arabesques and spatial rhythm, the softness of its tonalities, the swirling clouds. But she also mentioned a legend concerning Cythera: Happy couples might sail to this blessed isle of perfect love, but none ever arrived. Did I misunderstand my teacher? I've never found any reference to such a legend in my later reading. Yet the story enhances the elegiac lyricism of Watteau's painting: Romantic love is about the promise, the hope of happiness, far more than its fulfillment. In Antoine's Alphabet Perl aptly sums up this haunting quality at the heart of Watteau's work: "In a sense passion's calculated postponement is Watteau's essential subject, so that his paintings become a meditation on the possibilities and impossibilities of love, a meditation on the chance that two people might come together, might for at least a time be turned into one." No other painter better captures love's mystery, that blurring of anticipation and regret, when all is still uncertainty and indecision, when a glance or a touch can mean nothing or everything. · Michael Dirda on 'Anathem' • • •

by Michael Dirda Sept. 7, 2008 Read Later

Morrow. 937 pp. $29.95 While thinking about Neal Stephenson's Anathem, I found myself imagining that I was one of those cartoon heroes suddenly confronted by a moral quandary. On one shoulder sits a little red devil, with a tiny pitchfork; on the other, a cherubic angel in white robes. Each whispers in my ear, and I am tugged first this way and then that. My heart is roiled, I am perplexed and unhappy, caught in a dilemma. For the past 30 years I've been a zealous advocate for literary science fiction and fantasy, arguing that writers such as Gene Wolfe, Thomas M. Disch, John Crowley, Ursula K. Le Guin, Howard

Waldrop and a handful of others are significant American authors, as well as artists of the first rank. More recently, I've been gratified to see old genre prejudices breaking down as younger writers like Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem and Kelly Link garner mainstream honors without rejecting their fantasy and sf roots. This is as it should be: Good books are good books, period. Everything else is just marketing. Which brings me to my quandary. Neal Stephenson has established himself as one of these genretranscending gods, read passionately by geeks and fans, but also admired as a novelist of ideas, a 21st-century Thomas Pynchon. In the best-selling Cryptonomicon he juxtaposes code-breaking during World War II with data encryption in the era of the Internet. A three-volume " Baroque Cycle" -half Umberto Eco mystery, half Dorothy Dunnett swashbuckler -- examines science in the 17th century. All these novels are immensely long, yet it doesn't matter to the growing band of Stephensonians. Excess is clearly the name of the game. This new novel, Anathem, arrives with a major publicity campaign that includes podcasts, e-cards, YouTube appearances, guest blogs and the relaunch of the Neal Stephenson Web site. Everyone has gone all out for Anathem. I fully expected to join the stampede. Alas, I can't even lope slowly alongside the herd. Oh, Anathem will certainly be admired for its intelligence, ambition, control and ingenuity. But loved? Enjoyed? The book reminds me of Harold Brodkey's The Runaway Soul from 17 years ago -- much anticipated, in places quite brilliant, but ultimately grandiose, overwrought and pretty damn dull. That's an awful thing to say about a novel as formidable as Anathem, but there's no getting around it. The made-up language is rebarbative (though often clever), the plot moves with elephantine slowness, and much is confusing (the process of decipherment actually drives the book, as characters and the reader Try to Figure Things Out), and every so often we just stop for a long info-dump or debate about cosmology, philosophy, semantics or similar glitzy arcana. For the most part, Stephenson's prose lacks any particular grace or beauty (at least to my ear), and while he can be mildly satirical at times, these precious moments are few. On the other hand, the descriptions -of buildings, machines, events -- seem to go on for millennia. Sex is referred to, but never actually seen. Alas, there's worse. I also find the book to be fundamentally unoriginal. If you've read Russell Hoban's brilliant Riddley Walker, you've seen punning word coinages done better and more poetically. If you've read Walter M. Miller Jr.'s sf classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, you know that monasteries are havens of civilization and science (in Anathem's case, of high-level mathematics and theoretical physics). Most of all, if you've read Gene Wolfe's four-part Book of the New Sun, you can appreciate how this kind of grand encyclopedic vision, with mysteries at its core, can be brought off with far more elegance, wit and artistry. All these, by the way, are masterpieces -- and not just of "their genre." The plot of Anathem is basically this: It's the far future of an Earth-like planet called Orth. We know it's the far future because we're given a long timeline of the planet's past, and the characters repeatedly refer to major figures from their history. Now Orth's past often recalls Earth's and includes figures who resemble Plato and Descartes, movements like the Reformation, and genocidal wars. Currently, though, civilization has bifurcated: Monasteries preserve theoretical knowledge of science and mathematics, and within their walls the brothers (fraas) and sisters

(suurs) live simple, highly regulated lives, winding clocks, singing religious services, tending gardens. Only occasionally do they mingle with the outside world, that "extramuros" realm of "praxis," which possesses heavy machinery, cell phones, motorized vehicles and video recorders, and yet somehow seems rather rural and 19th-century in its basic character. After a long build-up, the established routines of the cloister of Saunt Edhar -- note the word play: "saunt" blending "savant" and "saint" -- are strangely disrupted. A revered teacher is sent into exile, and our hero, a young fraa named Erasmas, is determined to find out why. With the help of his multi-talented monastery friends, he discovers that his mentor Orolo had been studying some strange lights in the night sky. But what are they? Along the way to solving this mystery, Stephenson treats us to numerous interruptions, discourses, explanations, apologia, mathematical proofs and arguments. All these fraas and suurs are super smart: " 'It's a typical Procian versus Halikaarnian dispute,' I said. 'Avout who follow in the way of Halikaarn, Evenedric, and Edhar seek truth in pure theorics. On the Procian/Faanian side, there is a suspicion of the whole idea of absolute truth and more of a tendency to classify the story of Cnoüs as a fairy tale. They pay lip service to Hylaea just because of what she symbolizes and because she wasn't as bad as her sister. But I don't think that they believe that the HTW is real any more than they believe that there is a Heaven." Attentive readers will actually be able to understand most of this passage. No kidding. More surprisingly, Stephenson sometimes breaks his tone by writing plainly about what sounds like today's world: "An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market." Eventually, Erasmas and his ragtag team all end up leaving Saunt Edhar's, called upon by the secular government to help during some undisclosed state of emergency. In the outside world, these socially naive monks undergo a variety of adventures -- at one point Erasmas is rescued from a mob by an order of kickboxing warrior priests -- and we are, in due course, treated to death rays, multiple universes and, yes, a climax in which the very fate of Orth hangs in the balance. And that's all anyone should say about the plot. Except that the end is really hokey. What forward action the novel possesses is largely generated by the exceedingly gradual unraveling of the various mysteries associated with an alien spacecraft and the past history of Orth. To sum up: Reading Anathem is a humbling experience. Wow, you say to yourself, this guy Stephenson really knows a lot of stuff about philosophy and physics. And he's really ingenious, too, neatly counterpointing Earth/Orth history, creating a series of elaborate puzzles that can only be solved by Encyclopedia Brown and his monastic buddies, and transcribing intellectual conversations that sound like really nerdy Caltech grad students schmoozing at 3 a.m. or Cambridge dons pontificating at high table while they wait for the Stilton to come round. The sad thing is this: None of these more than 900 pages can have been easy to write, or even to outline. Stephenson truly is gifted in the range of material he can draw on and play with. But he is also the sort of ambitious writer who tends to go too far, which is certainly preferable to playing it safe. Still, this novel is at heart artistically simplistic, despite its techno-razzle dazzle. Sigh. The word "Anathem" -- which here refers to either a piece of religious music or an act of

excommunication -- is a portmanteau of "anthem" and "anathema" -- in other words, it suggests a song of rejection. I just hate to be singing it. · Michael Dirda on 'Alphabet Juice' • • •

by Michael Dirda Oct. 12, 2008 Read Later

The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory By Roy Blount Jr. Farrar Straus Giroux. 364 pp. $25 If your eyes have only skimmed over the long subtitle of Alphabet Juice and just vaguely registered that the book has something to do with words, please go back and read the entire subtitle again, slowly. This time listen to the syncopation of the clauses, as well as the alliterative music of the p's and t's, then note the juxtaposition of high and low style ("combinations thereof," "innards"), the punchy yet unexpected nouns ("gists," "pips"), that touch of genteel sexual innuendo ("secret parts"), and the concluding flourish of the gustatory. Like Roy Blount Jr. himself, his new book's subtitle neatly balances real learning with easy-loping charm. But then Blount isn't merely the ah-shucks Georgia boy he might sometimes seem; he's a Georgia boy who was a Phi Beta Kappa at Vanderbilt and has an M.A. in English from Harvard. Moreover, for the past 40 or so years he has supported himself by a versatile and distinctly pleasing way with words, having been successively (or even simultaneously) a sports reporter, essayist, cultural commentator, light versifier, occasional actor, novelist, lecturer, oral storyteller and anthologist ( Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor). Though generally slotted as a humorist (in the down-home vein of Will Rogers and Garrison Keillor), Blount is still serious enough to be a longtime usage adviser to the American Heritage Dictionary, a contributing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and a star of National Public Radio's quiz show " Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me." And therein lies a mystery: Given all this energetic freelancing, how does the man somehow manage to sound -- in person and on the page -- as if he spent most of his time lounging on an old davenport, with a cold Abita Amber in his hand, watching football or basketball on TV? The immensely likeable Blount clearly possesses what was called in the Italian Renaissance "sprezzatura," that rare and enviable ability to do even the most difficult things without breaking a sweat. Take a look at Alphabet Juice. To all appearances, it might be just one more tributary to the neverending stream of books about language and proper usage. Haven't we already had our looseygoosey grammar and diction excoriated by H.W. Fowler ( Modern English Usage), Theodore Bernstein ( The Careful Writer) and John Simon ( Paradigms Lost)? Haven't scholars from W.W. Skeat and Eric Partridge to the latest editors of the Oxford English Dictionary unriddled the etymological mysteries behind our most common words? What makes this book by Roy Blount so special?

Well, Blount, of course. You don't so much read Alphabet Juice as listen to it. The book may be printed, paginated and bound, but I'm guessing that some kind of microchip, probably embedded in the spine, funnels Blount's ingratiating, slightly disingenuous voice directly into your brain. A given entry -- "the f-word," "subjunctive," "menu-ese," "pizzazz" -- may start off with a scholarly account of a word or term's origin, with more than a casual glance at its Proto-Indo-European root, but before long Blount will soft-shoe his way into an anecdote, some comic verse, a bit of wordplay. Look up the phrase "honest broker." Here we learn that "the word broker stems from the Spanish alboroque, a ceremonial gift at the resolution of a business deal, which in turn is from the Arabic baraka, divine blessing. Barack Obama's first name comes (by way of his father, same name) from that word." All fascinating no doubt, but the true Blount wallop -- from out of left field -comes in the next paragraph: "I am told that today a Wall Streeter no longer uses broker as the verb form, but instead endeavors to broke a security. One reason I'm not rich is that I am broker-phobic. I assume they are always trying to unload dreck on people like me and lining up something underhandedly predetermined for insiders: if it ain't fixed, don't broke it." The title Alphabet Juice derives from its author's contention that sound and sense are often strikingly related, that certain letters and combinations of letters possess a gut-level electricity, and that "through centuries of knockabout breeding and intimate contact with the human body" some words "have absorbed the uncanny power to carry the ring of truth." A high-fiber word like "grunt" sounds right for what it means. Good diction thus tends to be sonicky, Blount's neologism for that "quality of a word whose sound doesn't imitate a sound, like boom or poof, but does somehow sensuously evoke the essence of the word: queasy or rickety or zest or sluggish or vim." To write well, then, we need to use our tongue and ears, not only our mind and fingers. For example, Blount makes the case for the word "ain't" by imagining songs called "It Isn't Me, Babe" and "Amn't Misbehavin'." He goes on to say, sensibly, that "anyone attempting to pronounce amn't may attract a crowd of well-wishers admiring his or her pluck, but whatever other words the speaker surrounds it with will be lost." For the most part, though, Blount is no laissez-faire latitudinarian. He bristles at the wide-spread misuse of "hopefully" and our growing tendency to say "I" or "myself" instead of "me." Commenting on the rebarbative acronyms of the Internet (i.e., ROFL -- rolling on the floor with laughter), he writes, with a neat double-entendre: "A medium that requires such terms is not a happy medium." Blount even finds an occasion for brio in his definition of a colon: "an introductory gesture, on the order of 'and now I give you': not quite a tadaaa." Like many writers, Blount is drawn to lists. Alphabet Juice includes his half-dozen favorite one-word sentences (including "Fuhgeddaboudit."), followed by some great sentences of two words ("Jesus wept.") and concluding with a few classic three-worders ("Call me Ishmael."). Several pages take up eccentric names in literature and life, noting the heavy-handed handles of Thomas Pynchon's characters -- Alonzo Meatman, Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, the Reverend Lube Carnal -- and speculating about what James Fenimore Cooper was thinking when he decided to call his romantic hero Natty Bumppo. Blount points out that he has known people named LaMerle Tingle, Snake Grace and Love Beavers, and that "among many reasons New Orleans should not die is that the spokesman for the New Orleans Housing Authority, as of June 2006, was Adonis Exposé."

While Blount loves the New York Times, the South and lively English, he loathes George Bush and notes that our president was the only man ever to leave New Orleans three hours before he had to. Sly digs at Bush and his disastrous policies and deceptions recur with welcome frequency throughout Alphabet Juice. For instance, " Pareidolia is 'seeing things.' Seeing, that is, what you want to see in ambiguous patterns or images. The Virgin Mary on a piece of toast (never, you notice, on a bagel), weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." Blount dubs himself a "shade-tree lexicographer," which calls to mind Sunday afternoons tinkering with a dictionary instead of a timing belt or carburetor. Despite some pretty fancy etymologizing, Blount still comes across as a regular guy: "We know from the writings of Thales of Miletus (or more likely, as in my case, from encyclopedias) that the Greeks knew . . ." But when he wants to, he can deliver a quip or judgment as pointed as anything by a 17th-century French aphorist: "Reading from a monitor, instead of a book, is like playing videogame football instead of tossing a football around." Alphabet Juice, being arranged like a dictionary, is designed for browsing, for flipping through the pages, reading where you will, "without ever being sure you've read it all." Just don't miss the entries about Wilt Chamberlain, the evolution of "D'oh," the naughty but brilliant wordplay of Leonard Bernstein (see "transposition game"), the history of "okay," the last, unlikely words that Lincoln heard before he was shot (see the entry for "socket"), the origin of Goody Two-Shoes, the snappy examples of movie dialogue, the Samuel Goldwynisms ("Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined"), the Willie Nelson story under the entry "appreciate," and the anecdotes, such as the following, used to illustrate "Marriage, impact of word choice upon": "A woman once told me that she made a point of mispronouncing words in fine restaurants because she knew it drove her husband crazy. 'What's this gunnotchy?' she would ask the waiter, pointing to gnocchi on the menu. Once she even pronounced steak to rhyme with leak. Why? Because years earlier, in a snooty French eatery, her husband had expressed embarrassment over her pronunciation of huîtres, and she was still getting back at him." Back in the 18th century, Samuel Johnson could define a lexicographer as "a harmless drudge," but he obviously never foresaw the armed and dangerously funny Roy Blount Jr. · Michael Dirda on 'Mrs. Woolf and the Servants' • • •

by Michael Dirda Oct. 5, 2008 Read Later

MRS. WOOLF AND THE SERVANTS By Alison Light Bloomsbury. 376 pp. $30

This fine book -- superbly researched, often passionately eloquent, and enthralling throughout -gives the lie to a notorious catchphrase: "As for living: Our servants will do that for us." That line - taken from Villiers de L'Isle-Adam's symbolist drama "Axel" -- aptly encapsulates the weary languor of an etiolated aristocracy. But it also points up the huge psychological divide between the ruling classes and their domestic help, which was largely female. While the palely blue-blooded of 100 years ago might have found it comforting, or frightening, to imagine that their servants pulsed with red-hot animal vitality and energy, their actual cooks, chars and maids-of-all-work were generally too exhausted after 80- or 100-hour weeks to think about anything much but a warm bed and sleep. A chilling fact says it all: At the beginning of the 20th century, "the average lifeexpectancy for a woman was forty-six." And, as Alison Light points out, "domestic service was still the largest single female occupation. It remained so until at least 1945." While Mrs. Woolf and the Servants focuses primarily on the interactions between Virginia Stephen, later Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), and the women who cleaned, cooked and cared for her over the course of her 59 years (too few, too few), it also probes the complex nature of dependence and care-giving. "What is entrusted to the servant," Light suggests, "is something of one's self. . . . Servants were the body's keepers, protecting its entrances and exits; they were privy to its secrets and its chambers; they knew that their masters and mistresses sweated, leaked and bled; they knew who could pregnate and who could not get pregnant; they handled the lying-in and the laying-out. Servants have always known that the emperor has no clothes. No wonder they were dubbed the scum of the earth and its salt, as they handled the food and the chamber-pots, returning dust to dust." When Light first read Woolf's diaries, she found herself shocked by the novelist's vehemence, indeed viciousness, in the many entries about her cook Nellie Boxall. Boxall lived with Woolf for 18 years, from 1916 to 1934, and the pair battled constantly. Light decided that she wanted "to understand what they rowed about and what was at stake in this situation which tormented them so much." The resulting story would be about "mutual -- and unequal -- dependence" as well as social difference and class feelings and attitudes. Light thus hopes to understand more fully the complex synergy of forces behind domestic service as well as the tensions between upstairs and downstairs. But she looks into the human soul, too. Ultimately, we are all dependent on others, especially as we grow older and face illness and death. As Light says in a rhetorical question that will give pause to anyone past a certain age, "Who will care for you when your turn comes?" Mrs. Woolf and the Servants opens with some shocking anecdotes about 19th-century life: "Even the most liberal-minded mistress could be autocratic: when Elizabeth Barrett Browning's devoted maid, Lily Wilson, married and had a child, Lily was obliged to send him back to England, so as to concentrate properly on the Brownings' own ringleted boy." Yet the Victorian era was also, as Light reminds us, a time when people took service as a matter of honor and self-esteem: One was a public servant, or in the civil service, or served in a bank. People, in general, "believed the meaning of life could be found only in the dedication to something beyond oneself, in work and in family, however transitory that meaning might be. Domestic servants, too, found dignity and pride, and sometimes an affirmation of their religion, in doing their jobs well." One of these was the nurse Sophia Farrell, who came to work for Woolf's mother and lived to hear of the drowning-suicide of the woman she had cared for as a little girl. Besides Farrell, Light

discusses more than a score of other people who worked for the households of Virginia Woolf and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. While neither of Leslie Stephen's daughters was taught to cook, they were at least slightly more accomplished than their friend Lytton Strachey's sisters, who "couldn't boil an egg." Still, during much of her adult life, the author of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse relied on Nellie Boxall. The idea of independence may have been central to Woolf's life, feminism and aesthetics, but it was nonetheless "Nellie who drew the curtains, brought the lemonade and the trays, who tempted Virginia's appetite with invalid foods, and presumably emptied the chamber-pot which continued to reside under the bed at Monk's House." Throughout these pages, Light stresses how deeply Woolf denigrated the flesh and the physical. "Virginia's word for the underground emotions she associated with servants was 'subterranean,' the baser instincts, so called, of the life of the body and its appetites." Subterranean was an especially apt word (one thinks of H.G. Wells's Morlocks): "For Woolf, as for many others growing up in nineteenth-century urban culture, the topography of the house lent itself as an inevitable metaphor for bourgeois identity, with the lower orders, curtained off, relegated to the bottom of the house or to its extremities, like a symbolic ordering of the body (in English slang, 'back passage' and 'below stairs' have scatological or sexual connotations)." In short, "the figure of the servant was frequently associated with guilt and shame at a longing for a bodily life devalued as merely animal or low." Light's signal achievement in her compelling book lies in divvying up her pages equally between the lives of the servants and that of their mistress. She recreates the world of late Victorian workhouses and orphanages, as she traces the faint outline of the early years of Lottie Hope, who spent her adult life working as a maid for Woolf and other Bloomsbury households. Like many of the domestics discussed in the book, Hope passed from one Bloomsbury to the next, along the way becoming close to Nellie Boxall, with whom she spent her later years (she died in 1973). The two were, apparently, just friends, unlike their famously promiscuous, and sexually complicated, overseers: Vanessa Bell, for instance, was married to art critic Clive Bell, but fell in love with the primarily homosexual painter Duncan Grant, who was at that time involved with bisexual novelist David Garnett. They all lived together, and Vanessa Bell later gave birth to Duncan's daughter Angelica, who grew up to marry . . . David Garnett. Mrs. Woolf and the Servants makes clear that the novelist's "public sympathy with the lives of poor women was always at odds with private recoil." While Woolf may have written about "a room of one's own," she nonetheless "did not ask who would clean it. In The Waves the empty rooms which shimmer in the sunlight are miraculously free of dust. The ideal room, like the ideal body, would be free of dirt and waste." Still, Light reveals that Woolf was evolving in her attitudes during the 1930s, trying to understand the increasing democratization of society. In a sketch scribbled just a month before her death in 1941, she surprised herself by wondering about quite another sort of woman and her special room: Having gone to the loo at the Sussex Grill, Woolf noticed the lavatory attendant. What, she thought, is her life like? "The memoirs of a lavatory attendant have never been written." Throughout Mrs. Woolf and the Servants, Light imbues her sentences with a depth of feeling and lived experience just slightly beyond what is expected: "Everyone who talked about Lottie lit up and laughed at the thought of her. If a life should be judged by what it generates rather than what it accumulates, then maybe Lottie Hope knew the secret of success." She also movingly records the

distinguished diplomat Sir Nicholas Henderson confessing that he loved his childhood nurse "more than any other woman in his life." Above all, though, Light reminds us that even now we must still depend on the kindness of strangers: "All of us begin our lives helpless in the hands of others and most of us will end so. How we tolerate our inevitable dependence, especially upon those who feed and clean and care for us, or take away our waste, is not a private or domestic question but one which goes to the heart of social structures and their inequalities. We rely constantly on others to do our dirty work for us and what used to be called 'the servant question' has not gone away: how could it? The figure of the servant takes us inside history but also inside our selves." As that paragraph makes evident, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants is no dryly academic sociological study. It is an inquiry into the fundamental nature of human intimacy. · Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda on 'Nation' • • •

by Michael Dirda Sept. 28, 2008 Read Later

HarperCollins. 367 pp. $16.99 At one point in this excellent new novel, a boy named Mau desperately needs to find milk for a starving infant. Unfortunately, he's on a virtually deserted island, and there just aren't any cows or nursing mothers around. There is only one possible source of nourishment for the baby, and Mau risks his life to procure it. Even now the thought of what the boy does still makes me shudder. In a lifetime packed with both extensive reading and vivid nightmares, I can honestly say that I have never come across anything quite so . . . well, there is no adequate word to describe an act that is as heroic as it is disgusting. For this scene alone, no reader is ever likely to forget Terry Pratchett's Nation. Not that I would short-change the memorability of its ghosts, cannibals, bloodthirsty mutineers, forbidden burial grounds and secret treasure. Exciting in themselves, these also play their part in Pratchett's latest examination of some fundamental questions about religious belief, the nature of culture and what it means to be human. But let's start at the beginning. When Russian influenza strikes Britain in the mid-19th century, not even the royal family is spared. The king and his 138 immediate possible successors quickly succumb, and the throne descends, improbably, to His Excellency, the Governor of Port Mercia, a trading post far away in the Great Southern Pelagic Ocean. During the consequent state of emergency, that swift sailing ship, the Cutty Wren, immediately sets forth to alert the governor of his new position -- and on board are several mysterious passengers, including five shrouded figures referred to as the "Gentlemen of Last Resort" and two women, one the unlikely sovereign's elderly but formidable mother. She is

aptly described as "a mixture of the warrior queen Boadicea without the chariot, Catherine de' Medici without the poisoned rings, and Attila the Hun without his wonderful sense of fun." As should already be clear, Nation is -- as Terry Pratchett tells us in his author's note -- "set in a parallel universe, a phenomenon known only to advanced physicists and anyone who has ever watched any episode of any SF series, anywhere." It is also what's called a crossover novel, which means that while Nation may be aimed primarily at bright-eyed young adults-- as were Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and the Harry Potter books of J.K. Rowling -- many grizzled old adults are likely to enjoy it, too. You don't even need to know anything about Pratchett's earlier work: It's a stand-alone book, with no connection whatsoever to Discworld. Even though Pratchett's name is virtually synonymous with this justly celebrated fantasy series (more than 35 Discworld titles at last count), he does write outside its frame from time to time. So don't look in Nation for the witch Granny Weatherwax or Captain Vimes of the City Watch or the elderly Cohen the Barbarian or even the Wee Free Men. Oh, a couple of characters sometimes slightly recall Discworld figures: For instance, the sinister Mr. Black's diction resembles that of the suave and dangerous Lord Vetinari, and Death -- a prominent and surprisingly talkative character of the series -- appears here too, though he now goes by the name Locaha. But that's it. Nation remains at heart a novel of ideas, a ferocious questioning of vested cultural attitudes and beliefs. In form it is a classic "Robinsonade," that is, a book in which characters are marooned on a desert island and there create a little civilization of their own. For, as it happens, just about the time that the Cutty Wren leaves England for Port Mercia, the Southern Pelagic Ocean suffers widespread devastation from a monster tsunami. Even that sturdy ship, the Sweet Judy, finds herself caught up by the gigantic mountain of water and is sent crashing onto a small island. The sole survivor of the wreck turns out to be a young girl of 13 who is also, as it happens, the only child of the unlikely new king of England. Poor Ermintrude finds herself seemingly alone on an island inhabited largely by wild pigs and repulsive "grandfather birds." These "ugly-looking things didn't just eat everything, they ate all of everything, and carefully threw up anything that didn't fit, taste right, or had woken up and started to protest." Yet Ermintrude -- or Daphne, as she takes to calling herself since she's always hated her real name - isn't, in fact, alone. Of all the many islanders, just one boy has been spared by the gods: Mau. But spared for what reason, if any? Mau has lost everyone he ever loved, everything he knew, all that he had looked forward to being part of, his entire world. He alone survives of the Nation. Half crazed by grief, he soon starts to hear the ancient voices of the Grandfathers ringing in his ears, constantly whining for the age-old rituals and their special beer and the restoration of the "god anchors" that have been swept away by the great wave. Little wonder that Mau first imagines that the pale Ermintrude, or rather Daphne, must be a ghost. Eventually, of course, these two young people -- a girl who one day might become the Queen of England and the boy who is, by default, the chief of the Nation -- join forces and together begin the long effort of survival. It is a thrilling story.

PHOTOS Terry Pratchett (Marco Secchi - Scoopt/Getty Images) And, as I said earlier, a deeply philosophical one, especially for a young adult novel. Mau's doubts are those that haunt anyone who has lived with undeserved misfortune. Why did the gods destroy the Nation, including innocent children and babies? Do such deities deserve worship? Are they in fact real, or do things simply happen or not happen? What are the claims of tradition against the needs of the present and future? And, most simply, what is a man, and what are his obligations to himself and to others? While Mau's education revolves around such spiritual and intellectual conundrums, Daphne's is more practical: This hitherto sheltered daughter of privilege learns that she is a woman of power, at once strong, resolute and utterly indomitable. By the end of the novel, the girl who had been taught that "a lady should never lift anything heavier than a parasol and should certainly never set foot in a kitchen" will chew the food for a toothless old crone, midwife the birth of a baby, saw off a man's leg, poison a murderer and even descend alone into the realm of the dead. Old crone? Baby? Where, you might wonder, did they come from? Over time, various other survivors of the tsunami gradually make their way to Mau's island, bringing with them their troubles, talents and difficult personalities. The Sweet Judy is gradually stripped of its useful materials: After all, "since there was going to be a future, it would need a roof over its head." Yet always the tireless, hard-working Mau is assailed by the voices of the Grandfathers, mocking his efforts, calling upon him to bring back the old traditions. But Mau has learned to think for himself and ceaselessly wonders about the nature of his world: Who made the white stones called "god anchors"? And what secret lies hidden deep within the cave of the Grandfathers? The ultimate answer to both these questions would be right at home in an Indiana Jones movie. Still, even the most esoteric mysteries diminish in importance before the growing threat of the Raiders, roving cannibals who worship the death-god Locaha. Mau points out that there's nothing much left on the island, so "What have we still got that they would want?" And the old priest Ataba answers: "Skulls. Flesh. Their pleasure in our death. The usual things." Yes, the usual things, indeed. But there's worse yet: It turns out that an evil mutineer named Cox may have become their new leader, and Daphne knows him all too well. "Like crocodiles and sharks, Cox always had a grin for people, especially when he had them at his mercy, or at least where his mercy would be if he had any." While Nation occasionally moves a little slowly, it soon develops great momentum, and we come to care and worry about Mau, Daphne and the others. Moreover, this being a Pratchett novel, the writing is always a pleasure, albeit somewhat muted compared to Discworld's higher-pitched zinginess -- though not always or wholly so: "It was, according to the history books, the fastest coronation since Bubric the Saxon crowned himself with a very pointy crown on a hill during a thunderstorm, and reigned for one and a half seconds."

And then, of course, there's the cook on the Sweet Judy, who transforms his coffin into a wellprovisioned life raft. He tells Daphne, "I got the idea off a harpooner I met when I was working on the whalers." Harpooner, coffin? Could it be? Cookie goes on: "He was a rum 'un and no mistake. Had more tattoos than the Edinburgh Festival and all his teeth filed as sharp as daggers, but he lugged this coffin onto every ship he sailed with so's if he died, he'd have a proper Christian funeral and not be chucked over the side sown up in a bit o' canvas with a cannonball for company. I thought about it myself -- it's a good basic idea, but it needs a little bit of changing. Anyway, I didn't stay long on that ship on account of coming down with bowel weevils just before we rounded the cape, and I had to put ashore at Valparaiso. It was probably a blessing in disguise, 'cause I reckon that ship was heading for a bad end. I've seen a few mad captains in my time, but that one was as crazy as a spoon. And you may depend upon it, when the captain is crazy, so is the ship. I often wonder what happened to 'em all." Yes, Cookie, you were right: That ship and her captain were definitely heading for a bad end. But Nation isn't. It's a terrific, thought-provoking book, and it ends wonderfully. · Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda on 'Nothing to Be Frightened Of' • • •

by Michael Dirda Aug. 31, 2008 Read Later

Knopf. 244 pp. $24.95 If you're clever enough, or hire the right accountants and financial wizards, you can actually dodge paying taxes. The big boys do it all the time. But death -- that's quite another matter. Pace cryonics, there's no way of putting off forever what the philosopher Fontenelle -- who lived to be 99 -- called that "last unpleasant quarter hour." Sooner or later, all of us are going to close up shop. As Philip Larkin said in his mortality-haunted poem "Aubade," "Most things may never happen: this one will." Now in his early 60s, the novelist Julian Barnes tells us that he thinks about death every day, and periodically finds himself bolting upright from sleep screaming, "No, no, no." (Ah, yes: Been there, done that.) As its brilliant title punningly hints, Nothing to Be Frightened Of offers an extended meditation on human mortality, but one that is neither clinical nor falsely consoling. Instead, the witty and melancholy author of Flaubert's Parrot and Arthur & George simply converses with us about our most universal fear: "For me, death is the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about; unless you know and feel that the days of wine and roses are limited, that the wine will madeirize and the roses turn brown in their stinking water before all are thrown out for ever -- including the jug -- there is no context to such pleasures and interests as come your way on the road to the grave. But then I would say that, wouldn't I?" Barnes admits that he sometimes views life as "an overrated way of passing the time." Yet generally the novelist regards the world with bittersweet benevolence: "I remember visiting an elderly and

demented friend in hospital. She would turn to me, and in her soft, rather genteel voice which I had once much loved, would say things like, 'I do think you will be remembered as one of the worst criminals in history.' Then a nurse might walk past, and her mood change swiftly. 'Of course,' she would assure me, 'the maids here are frightfully good.' Sometimes I would let such remarks pass (for her sake, for my sake), sometimes (for her sake, for my sake) correct them. 'Actually, they're nurses.' My friend would give a cunning look expressing surprise at my naivety. 'Some of them are,' she conceded. 'But most of them are maids.' " Throughout Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Barnes unsparingly portrays his parents' final years (laconic father; bossy, vain mother), turns for guidance to Montaigne, Stendhal, Flaubert, Jules Renard, Stravinsky and Ravel, and e-mails his brother, Jonathan, for his views on personal extinction. An expert on the Pre-Socratics and Aristotle, the older Barnes displays an appropriately stoic unconcern. Once, when this expert on ancient Greek was believed to be dying, he breathed what seemed likely to be his last words: "Make sure that Ben gets my copy of Bekker's Aristotle." The philosopher's wife found this "insufficiently affectionate." While Julian examines various attitudes toward death and admits to envying those with religious faith, he himself is agnostic. As he says, "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him." ("Soppy," says his atheist brother.) He then goes on to discuss what the French call "le réveil mortel" -- the wake-up call to the reality of death, that recognition of personal mortality that marks the end of childhood. He also reviews what Montaigne called "the death of youth, which often takes place unnoticed. . . . The leap from the attenuated survival of senescence into non-existence is much easier than the sly transition from heedless youth to crabbed and regretful age." And, of course, he periodically addresses the modern art of living: "Bumper stickers and fridge magnets remind us that Life Is Not a Rehearsal. We encourage one another towards the secular modern heaven of self-fulfillment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job, the material goods, the ownership of property, the foreign holidays, the acquisition of savings, the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn't it -- doesn't it? This is our chosen myth, and almost as much of a delusion as the myth that insisted on fulfillment and rapture when the last trump sounded and the graves were flung open, when the healed and perfected souls joined in the community of saints and angels. But if life is viewed as a rehearsal, or a preparation, or an anteroom, or whichever metaphor we choose, but at any rate as something contingent, something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious. Those parts of the world where religion has drained away and there is a general acknowledgment that this short stretch of time is all we have, are not, on the whole, more serious places than those where heads are still jerked by the cathedral's bell or the minaret's muezzin. On the whole, they yield to a frenetic materialism; although the ingenious human animal is well capable of constructing civilizations where religion coexists with frenetic materialism (where the former might even be an emetic consequence of the latter): witness America." Certainly those gifted with religious faith possess an advantage over those without it: The dying believer will head straight for the door marked Enter, while the rest of us must settle for the one marked Exit. We can only hope to approach that portal with a bit of grace and aplomb. Barnes notes with approval Somerset Maugham's view that "the best frame of mind in which to conduct life" is that of "humorous resignation." One of Barnes's friends shrewdly suggests that "our only

defence against death -- or rather, against the danger of not being able to think about anything else - lies in 'the acquisition of worthwhile short-term worries.' " (This is a technique I myself tend to use: If you're a writer on deadline, you don't really have time to think about being dead.) During a kind of dialogue of self and soul, Barnes even encourages himself to imagine his own passing "through the eyes of others. Not those," he reminds himself, "who will mourn and miss you, or those who might hear of your death and raise a momentary glass; or even those who might say 'Good!' or 'Never liked him anyway' or ' Terribly overrated.' Rather," he continues, one must see death "from the point of view of those who have never heard of you -- which is, after all, almost everybody. Unknown person dies: not many mourn. That is our certain obituary in the eyes of the rest of the world." Throughout Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Barnes periodically likes to stretch our minds with complex ethical dilemmas: "Would you rather die in the pain of being wrenched away from those you have long loved, or would you rather die when your emotional life has run its course, when you gaze out at the world with indifference, both towards others and towards yourself?" Nonetheless, he obviously admires the no-nonsense clarity of the aged Rossini, who scribbled the following on the manuscript of his Petite Messe solennelle: "Dear God, well, here it is, finished at last, my Little Solemn Mass. Have I really written sacred music, or is it just more of my usual damn stuff? I was born for opera buffa, as You well know. Not much skill there, just a bit of feeling, that's the long and the short of it. So, Glory be to God, and please grant me Paradise. G. Rossini -- Passy, 1863." While some people on their deathbeds dutifully rage against the dying of the light, Barnes prefers those who simply remain true to themselves, who depart this life with, say, a gesture of quiet courtliness: "A few hours before dying in a Naples hospital," the Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller "said (presumably in Italian) to a male nurse who was cranking up his bed, 'You have beautiful hands.' " Barnes calls this "a last, admirable catching at a moment of pleasure in observing the world, even as you are leaving it." Similarly, the poet and classicist "A.E. Housman's last words were to the doctor giving him a final -- and perhaps knowingly sufficient -- morphine injection: 'Beautifully done.' " Beautifully done might also justly describe Nothing to Be Frightened Of. A friend once summed up Julian Barnes's own daily existence: "Got up. . . . Wrote book. Went out, bought bottle of wine. Came home, cooked dinner. Drank wine." Some might say: Not much of a life. Yet the philosopher Epicurus maintained that quiet routines like this offer our best response to death: Work hard at what you care about and enjoy moderate pleasures. It's really very good advice, but probably just a little too sensible for the unruly human heart. · Michael Dirda - War and Peace • • •

by Michael Dirda Oct. 28, 2007 Read Later

Translated from the Russian

By Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Knopf. 1,273 pp. $37 In sweep, grandeur and carnage, War and Peace calls to mind the greatest cinematic epics -- "Gone with the Wind," "Lawrence of Arabia," "Dr. Zhivago." The novel takes place against the backdrop of Napoleon's military operations in Europe between, roughly, 1805 and 1812. Tolstoy takes us onto the field at Austerlitz, through the battle of Borodino, to the burning of Moscow and, finally, into the midst of the retreating Grande Arm¿e, worn out by the Russian winter and increasingly picked at by Cossack commando raids. The descriptions of soldiers and battles should satisfy even the most strategic-minded student of Napoleon's campaigns. In these pages men march toward their death with faces "fearful and merry." 192 Still, the alternating scenes "back home" are even more true to the civilian experience of war: Life goes on largely unchanged -- until sons, brothers and lovers begin to be wounded or killed: "The enemy could already be seen ahead. Suddenly, something lashed at the squadron as if with a broad besom. Rostov raised his sword, preparing to strike, but just then the soldier Nikitenko galloped past, leaving him behind, and Rostov felt, as in a dream, that he was still racing on with unnatural speed and at the same time was staying in place. . . . " 'What is it? I'm not moving ahead! I've fallen. I've been killed. . . . ' Rostov asked and answered at the same moment. He was now alone in the middle of the field. Instead of moving horses and hussar's backs, he saw the immobile earth and stubble around him. There was warm blood under him. . ." At some point in their lives, Some day, nearly all serious readers say to themselves, I really should sit down and start War and Peace. For many of us, though, that day never quite comes. After all, the book is enormously long: Some editions take up two, three or even four volumes. Those confined to one, like this new Knopf translation, possess the heft and appearance of small cinder blocks: With the right mortar, you could lay foundations with them. What's more, the book's extensive action embraces multiple storylines, three generations, and half of Europe; and, as the pages mount up, Tolstoy repeatedly theorizes at tedious length about the nature of history. Even the characters names can be confusing--at one point a man named Kuragin courts a young woman named Karagin. Still, for many readers the book's most off-putting element is probably its reputation: It's not just a novel, it's, well, it's . . . War and Peace. But a fine new translation, especially one by the widely acclaimed team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, offers an opportunity to see this great classic afresh, to approach it not as a monument (or mausoleum) but rather as a deeply touching story about our contradictory human hearts. Stressing that their War and Peace sticks more closely to the Russian text than any other, including Louise and Aylmer Maude's semi-canonical 1923 version, Pevear and Volokhonsky retain the considerable amount of French used by Tolstoy's counts and princesses, preserve the author's penchant for word repetition and aim to match his tidy syntactic conciseness. The result certainly reads smoothly, its English being neither egregiously contemporary nor inappropriately oldfashioned. In this respect, the Pevear-Volokhonsky War and Peace joins company with recent

translations of The Tale of Genji, Don Quixote and I n Search of Lost Time, these being among the few works of classic fiction equal to Tolstoy's in scope and richness. Given so capacious and generous a masterpiece, it's simply impossible to do more than offer -- with due humility at how much is being overlooked -- a few introductory propositions for the would-be reader. Nearly every man and woman in War and Peace is deeply flawed, and will make at least one truly terrible mistake in his or her life. This may be an epic, but there are no larger-than-life heroes in it. The main character, Pierre Bezukhov, is illegitimate, clumsy, naive, absent-minded and fat. He has red hands and wears glasses. The exuberant, impulsive Natasha Rostov, the principal heroine, eventually settles down as Tolstoy's ideal woman, but not before her unnaturally repressed libido wrecks her own happiness and that of her fianc¿, the noble-minded Andrei Bolkonsky.

Minor characters tend to be unconsciously corrupt or simply depraved. Boris Drubetskoy starts off as a charming young man and turns into an ambitious, calculating trimmer, always looking out for his advancement. Though the Countess Helene Bezukhov is promiscuous and stupid, her beauty ensures that the world finds her profoundly witty. The gorgeous Helene knows that her smile can reduce all male arguments to nonsense. Salons and drawing rooms reveal the French-speaking Russian aristocracy as venal, unctuous and self-important. Though Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma helped teach Tolstoy how to describe battle, most of War and Peace might be likened to a compact version of Balzac's multi-volume Com¿die humaine. In these pages an old man's heirs connive over his fortune. Parents strive to marry off their worthless children for money and status. Couples form and break up, young girls attend balls, their admirers quarrel and duel, fortunes are lost at cards, babies are born, families face social or financial ruin, and the most cherished dreams are dashed. The book never flinches from showing us deliberate cruelty, repeated heartbreak and survivor guilt. While his villains never change, only worsen, Tolstoy's heroes evolve, deepen, see more clearly into the nature of things. Society, the novelist believes, corrupts us because it is built on falsity and pretense, on role-playing and the acceptance of the unreal. It's all opera. Only the very young and the very holy can ignore the pervasive artificiality. "As with all people, the moment she looked in the mirror, her face assumed a strained, unnatural, bad expression." However, those chastened by suffering or allowed ecstatic moments of insight may sometimes escape the world's meretricious allure. As its title suggests, the novel examines two opposing realms, alternative paths through life. Tolstoy repeatedly contrasts war and peace, the artificial and the natural, erotic torment and family happiness, the city and the country, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Germanic military tactics and Slavic submission to the force of history, intellectual complexities and Christian simplicities, this world and the next. But note that copulative "and" rather than "or" -- we are both apes and angels. Still, our movement through life should be spiritually upward. Some of these same polarities recur in another classic juxtaposition: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Young people nearly always prefer the latter -- Dostoevsky's alienated heroes are anguished intellectuals,

often murderous and dangerously attractive. But then Dostoevsky is fundamentally romantic. By contrast, Tolstoy possesses an almost Homeric indifference to his characters' fate. His only interest is truth. This is Natasha, this is Pierre, he seems to say, I am not creating them so much as simply recording what they felt and did. As Isaac Babel once observed, "If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy." For the author of War and Peace-- and Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Illich and Hadji Murad-- excels in just this unblinking focus, coupled with the artistry to illuminate a scene or a character by employing the exactly right but sometimes startling detail. When Napoleon surveys the field of battle, "on his cold face there was that particular tinge of self-confident, well-deserved happiness that can be seen on the face of a boy who has happily fallen in love." In one of the most endearing scenes in world literature, Tolstoy describes the happy hubbub as Sonya and Natasha ready their young selves for a ball, while the maid crawls on her knees to pin up a dress and Natasha's blushing mother retreats from her husband's embrace "so as not to have her dress rumpled." War and Peace constantly overturns expectations. The great questions of the book, with a surprising set of answers, are the most fundamental ones: Who will die? Who will marry whom? Just when we think that Andrei and Natasha are established as the perfect couple, we realize there are 600 pages to go. One can't even be sure that the admirable Sonya, unwavering in her adoration of the soldier Nikolai Rostov, will be rewarded with the storybook ending she deserves. Much turns on sheer coincidence: When Prince Andrei lies wounded in a field hospital, who should be on the next operating table but the man he has sworn to kill? But, then, God's ways are mysterious, and Tolstoy's main characters are all spiritual pilgrims. Prince Andrei, convinced he is dying, peers at the eternal sky and finds a strange joy. The abused Princess Marya invites holy wanderers into her home and dreams of joining these primitive Christians. Pierre becomes a Freemason as he searches for how best to conduct his life, but learns the answer he seeks only from a saintly peasant. Is love that answer? Not really. To gain peace of soul we must surrender our wills to the will of God. Similarly, Tolstoy insists that Field Marshal Kutuzov is able to defeat Napoleon not through cleverness but by submitting to the historical moment and becoming its instrument. Though Tolstoy believes in spiritual meekness, he still knows the flesh is frail. Sex suffuses every other page of War and Peace. Being in love doesn't prevent characters from frequenting brothels. The rake Anatole Kuragin looks at Natasha and perceives only a youthful loveliness that invites his practiced attentions. Soldiers hoot and whistle at any woman in skirts. In a chapter about the French occupation of Moscow, Tolstoy creates chilling sexual tension, using the kind of simple factual sentences that taught Hemingway how to write. Two Frenchman confront a frightened Armenian family: "One of the soldiers, a fidgety little man, was wearing a dark blue greatcoat tied with a rope. There was a cap on his head; his feet were bare. The other, who especially struck Pierre, was a tall, stooping, thin, flaxen-haired man with sluggish movements and an idiotic expression on his face. This one was dressed in a long frieze coat, dark blue trousers, and big, torn jackboots. The bootless little Frenchman in the dark blue greatcoat went up to the Armenians, said something, and at once took hold of the old man's legs, and the old man at once began to take off his boots. The other one, in the woman's coat, stood in front of the beautiful Armenian girl and looked at her silently,

fixedly, with his hands in his pockets. . . . [Before long] the old man, sobbing, was saying something, but Pierre saw it only fleetingly; his whole attention was turned to the Frenchman in the long coat, who meanwhile moved towards the young woman, swaying slowly, and, taking his hands out of his pockets, put them on her neck. The Armenian beauty went on sitting in the same motionless position, with her long lashes lowered, as if she did not see or feel what the soldier was doing to her." After the main action of the novel is over, Tolstoy -- in a brilliant stroke -- appends a hundred-page epilogue, which brings the surviving characters into conventional middle age. Slender beauties broaden into "fruitful" mothers, military heroes devote themselves to farming, children get sick, recover, grow up. But in real life -- which is what War and Peace aspires to represent, even, in a sense, to be -- no lasting happiness this side of heaven is possible. Instead, Tolstoy's couples suffer irritations and minor jealousies, enjoy quiet pleasures as well as sweetly painful memories, and endure, as must we all, the eventual passage of one generation into the next. Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda on 'The Delighted States' • • •

by Michael Dirda June 15, 2008 Read Later

A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes By Adam Thirlwell Farrar Straus Giroux. 505 pp. $30 Adam Thirlwell -- a young British writer and author of a well-received novel called Politics -- may have written the most dazzlingly tedious book of the summer. Its lengthy subtitle, which harks back to those found in 18th-century tracts, vaguely suggests a kind of Shandean literary romp, though without ever quite saying what the book is about. In fact, the more than 500 pages of The Delighted States make up an extended meditation, with abundant quotation, on style in fiction, with particular attention to the nature of translation. Its chief examples are the usual masters of innovative narrative: Cervantes, Sterne, Diderot, Tolstoy, Flaubert, Joyce, Kafka, Nabokov and Bellow, along with the nearly as eminent, if not so well known, Machado de Assis, Italo Svevo, Bruno Schulz, Bohumil Hrabal, Witold Gombrowicz and Georges Perec. All these are unquestionably original and (generally) entertaining writers, and anyone who cares about the nature of the novel will want to read their books. But The Delighted States isn't concerned with the myriad pleasures of reading, or with plots or characters: It focuses resolutely on stylistic idiosyncrasies and breakthroughs. Practicing a kind of highly syncopated, freewheeling prose, Thirlwell riffs on Flaubert's pervasive irony, Tolstoy's use of homely details (sometimes in leitmotifs), Kafka's dream-like quality, Chekhov's conciseness and Nabokov's views on pattern and coincidence, as well as much else. He shows us, for example, how Diderot adapted and reworked some chapters of Tristram Shandy in writing Jacques the Fatalist and how Gertrude Stein echoes the

beginning of Flaubert's "A Simple Heart" (from Three Tales) in "Melanctha" (from Three Lives). Throughout, though, Thirlwell also delivers stark, draconian judgments about art, somewhat in the style of Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading but without Pound's wit, pizzazz and convincingness. More often than not, he just sounds smug and pretentious, like a kid who's always gotten straight A's in English class. So it's hardly a surprise that the word "I" recurs with such heart-sinking regularity throughout The Delighted States or that the author's tone might be described as egotistical jauntiness. Yet once you discount the book's gaudy packaging -- a plethora of one-sentence paragraphs, myriad sections and subsections, tricked-up indexes, smudgy author photos, reproductions of title pages in Russian or French -- you are left with a mass of confident generalizations or familiar truisms: "A style is a quality of vision; it is not limited by language. . . . Literary value resides in the gap between the draft and the work. . . . The only duty, for a novelist, or a poet, or a novelistpoet, is to be interesting." N.B.: It's the only duty for an essayist, too. Strangely enough, given his subject matter, Thirlwell's own prose is distinctly bland, despite its overbright talkiness. For instance, Thirlwell likes to build an argument or assert a point, then suddenly contradict himself (though oddly enough he deprecates Dostoevsky, whose Underground Man is the master of this technique). Worst of all, though, Thirlwell often comes across as twerpily arrogant. You can almost hear the "nyah, nyah" raspberry in remarks like these: "Unfortunately for Bellow, he had not read André Gide. Or if he had, he hadn't understood." "And this technique was noted a century later by Vladimir Nabokov, who did not notice the same thing in War and Peace." Sigh. Good thing there's a really sharp mind around who can set us straight. Thirlwell's most annoying tic, though, may be his complacent assertion that he "likes" a particular image or phrase, as if he were some panjandrum of literary criticism: "It is the word prospector that I like especially. . . . And I like the fact that this echoes a letter by Tolstoy. . . . There are many anecdotes like this. And I like them -- they make me warm to Chekhov more and more." What a surprise to warm to Chekhov, probably more widely beloved as a human being than any other writer of the 20th century. Despite Thirlwell's inflated sense of himself, he has obviously mastered his material: He's read his primary and secondary texts with attention and intelligence. He can neatly delaminate the layers of nuance in a sentence, show how small details give life to a scene, probe the multiple functions of digression and see the subtle connections among disparate authors. For the most part, Thirlwell takes a wholly aesthetic approach to fiction, arguing against using the novel to promote ethical ideas or political action. Most critics would agree that art is primarily a matter of form, combination and pattern, created by vivid specifics and repeated motifs. But great novels also take on great themes and so address politics, social issues, religion and even philosophy: Obvious examples include the work of George Eliot, Dostoevsky and Zola, Mann's The Magic Mountain, Ellison's Invisible Man. At least some of the impact of these works derives from their passionate exploration of the beliefs and convictions that govern men's lives. Flaubert might aspire to write a book about nothing, but most novelists actually do hope to say something in their books, whether about love, the world, morality or even existence itself. Appended to The Delighted States, for no compelling reason that I can see, is Thirlwell's translation of Nabokov's original French version of "Mademoiselle O," later reworked by the novelist into a

chapter of his memoir Speak, Memory. No doubt one should view this new Englishing of "Mademoiselle O" as some kind of example or test case, but of what I'm not entirely sure. That it's printed upside down, with its own title page, seems egregiously cutesy. I'm also puzzled as to why the title page of Maupassant's Mont-Oriol appears in the index, since that book isn't discussed anywhere in the text. Normally, I would eagerly applaud a young writer's enterprising attempt to recreate the critical essay, to spin out a set of variations on a theme in the history of fiction. But to bring off the looseygoosey manner of a book like The Delighted States requires more than a few appealing literary anecdotes: It needs considerable authorial charm, and this Thirlwell lacks. Instead, he proffers many thoughtful, if hardly soul-stirring, analyses of passages from classic authors and a slew of sloganizing generalizations, such as this gnomic description of Kafka's writing: "It is adagio, and massive, and very short." Well, Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States is flashy, and pompous, and very long. Nobody likes a showoff. · Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda May 18, 2008 Read Later

By Jim Steinmeyer Tarcher/Penguin. 332 pp. $24.95 THE BOOK OF THE DAMNED The Collected Works of Charles Fort Tarcher/Penguin. 1,125 pp. $18.95 Charles Fort (1874-1932) isn't remembered today for his humorous, slice-of-life stories set in turnof-the-century New York. He isn't remembered for his best friend's -- the great American novelist Theodore Dreiser's -- estimation of his genius as "simply stupendous." And he certainly isn't remembered for his novel The Outcast Manufacturers or his abortive memoir Many Parts. No, Charles Fort is remembered -- in some quarters revered -- because he created what biographer Jim Steinmeyer calls "a new kind of ghost story . . . in which it is the cold, hard data that haunts." For the last half of his adult life, this walrus-like, myopic amateur scholar spent his afternoons at the New York Public Library or the British Museum, combing through newspapers, magazines, medical reports and learned journals for news items that were . . . weird. Inexplicable. That revealed a lot more strangeness in the world than the received wisdom of science would acknowledge. How is it that fish, frogs, lizards, snakes, eels, insects, worms and blood have been known to fall from the sky? And not just once. Fort sought patterns of anomaly, repetitions of the supposedly impossible, and he wondered about them. His approach to these mysteries was itself an oddity, both reportorial and logical, but also humorous and playful. Could there be, he speculated,

a kind of "Super-Sargasso Sea" in the upper atmosphere where detritus floats around before falling to Earth? If so, how do things get up there in the first place? In four volumes -- The Book of the Damned (1919), New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931) and Wild Talents (1932) -- Fort suggested that our comfortable known world was neither comfortable nor known. "His accounts of mysterious airships," writes Steinmeyer, "formed the canon when, decades later, this phenomenon became a public obsession as Flying Saucers or UFOs. Charles Fort created the word 'teleportation,' inspired the term 'Bermuda Triangle,' and popularized accounts of spontaneous human combustion, visions of cities in the sky, the Mary Celeste[ghost ship] mystery." It was Fort who suspected that our world might be a kind of petting zoo for the amusement of aliens. Human beings, he notoriously concluded, were "property. . . . We belong to something." He also guessed that there might be some kind of invisible barrier around the Earth and that the Earth itself might actually be stationary, that the planets were much closer to us than we suspected, and that, in general, there were more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in anyone's philosophy. Fort's mature books were based on thousands of notes scribbled on small pieces of paper, which he painstakingly categorized and carefully filed in shoe boxes. Despite his often outrageous conjectures, he usually walked the tightrope of non-committed agnosticism. As he says near the beginning of Lo!: "I shall be accused of having assembled lies, yarns, hoaxes and superstitions. To some degree, I think so, myself. To some degree I do not. I offer the data." Indeed, he does. For instance, when discussing the mysterious hoof-like marks that appeared all over Devonshire one morning in 1855 (and that were made by some kind of biped), he quotes from contemporary accounts in Notes and Queries, the Times of London and the Illustrated London News. Despite an owlish antiquarian obsessiveness, Fort wrote with a kind of jazzy syncopation, riffing from one report or anecdote to the next, the whole held loosely together by his quizzical humor and personality. After describing several accounts of people who had gone out for a walk and suddenly found themselves 30 miles away without knowing how this had come about, he concludes with what seems a knowing wink: "If human beings ever have been teleported, and, if some mysterious appearances of human beings be considered otherwise unaccountable, an effect of the experience is effacement of memory." He also confessed that "a naive, little idea of mine is that so many ghosts in white garments have been reported, because persons, while asleep, have been teleported in their nightclothes."

PHOTOS Steinmeyer's engrossing biography dwells a little too long on Fort's childhood as the son of a welloff Albany merchant, but it makes up for this by briskly recounting the author's youthful adventures (riding the rails all over the East Coast, shipping out to England and South Africa) and describing his desperate years as a magazine short story writer, somewhat in the vein of O. Henry. Eventually, a family inheritance saved Fort (and his stolid, loyal wife) from near starvation and allowed him to embark on his life's true work.

Fort's two earliest excursions into paranormal reporting sound far more mystical and outré than his later writing. In X-- that was the intended title -- he speculated about a mysterious evolutionary force and postulated a race of beings on Mars. Dreiser, who read the manuscript, judged the book a masterpiece of daring thought and gorgeous prose, and he was appalled when Fort destroyed it. A subsequent volume, called Y, took up the possible existence of a hidden world at the North Pole. As evidence, Fort cited "blond Eskimos, warm climates near the North Pole, and Perry's peculiar explorations." Fort even speculated that Kaspar Hauser, the strange boy who appeared in Nuremberg in 1828, may have come from that other world. "Hauser exhibited odd traits like supernatural senses, but could barely communicate and did not recall any family. . . . He was killed under puzzling circumstances -- stabbed as he walked in the middle of a snowy park; no other footprints in the snow, no murder weapon." Eventually, Fort wired Dreiser that he had written Z, which later appeared as The Book of the Damned. Here Fort posited "intermediate existence," or what he sometimes referred to as "existence of the hyphen," explaining that our lives reveal "an attempt by the relative to be the absolute." Like Schrödinger's dead-and-alive cat, things could be positive-negative, real-unreal, soluble-insoluble. I don't quite get this, but as the years went by, Fort came to believe increasingly in a kind of monism, a mystical connectedness of all things. During his lifetime Fort's admirers ranged from the journalist Ben Hecht to the inventor R. Buckminster Fuller. His successors included Robert Ripley, who commercialized a whole range of oddities in his "Believe it or Not!" newspaper columns and, from my own childhood, Frank Edwards, whose book Stranger Than Science frightened more than one 12-year-old into sleepless nights. On a larger scale, Fort's legacy was initially preserved through the Fortean Society and its magazine, Fate, edited by the forgotten novelist Tiffany Thayer. Today, the standard-bearer is the British magazine Fortean Times. A recent issue dealt, in part, with statues that bleed. Jim Steinmeyer is best known as a historian of magic ( Hiding the Elephant) and as a creator of illusions for Doug Henning and David Copperfield, among others. His biography, drawing heavily at times from Damon Knight's pioneering life of Fort, balances neatly between skepticism and sympathy. Steinmeyer views Fort as a representative 1920s figure, but to me he seems in a slightly earlier mode: The antiquary with a hobby horse. Fort and his 40,000 slips of paper recall Marx researching economics in the British Library, H.W. Fowler compiling his picky Modern English Usage, the editors of the Variorum Shakespeare and the Oxford English Dictionary noting arcane interpretations and elaborate etymologies, J.G. Frazer tracing hanged gods and ancient ritual in The Golden Bough. In all his works Fort aimed to undermine the sanctimony and swagger of modern science -- but also to offer some diverting intellectual entertainment. Are his books, then, mere crackpot pseudoscience? To give a Fortean answer: Yes and no. Are they fun to read? Yes, just plain yes. · Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda May 11, 2008 Read Later

Translated from the French by Ryan Bloom Ivan R. Dee. 264 pp. $27.50 Many people who grew up in the 1950s and '60s worshipped Albert Camus as a literary god -albeit a god in a rumpled trenchcoat, with a Gauloise in his left hand. Even more than Jean-Paul Sartre, who was both ugly and often difficult to read, Camus epitomized the drop-dead coolness of what it meant to be a European intellectual. The Stranger, his classic short novel about an affectless young man who, "because of the sun," shoots and kills an Arab, was the very first book in French I read on my own. It was soon followed by the equally classic essay The Myth of Sisyphus, which thrilled generations of impressionable college students by announcing that the only important philosophical question was suicide. Mais, bien sur. Life, after all, was meaningless, though one could somehow still find happiness despite its inherent absurdity. For instance, one could be engagé, committed like Camus, who not only wrote as an artist but also lived as an activist (and easy-going amorist). During World War II he joined the Resistance and edited the underground newspaper Combat. He argued politics and art with Sartre and Charles de Gaulle. He devoted much of his energy to writing plays and working in the theater, but he also had many love affairs, at least two with actresses, as well as two marriages and two children. And then, in 1957, Camus won the Nobel Prize for literature at 43 (only Kipling was younger). Unexpectedly, he capped even this by dying three years later in a James Dean-like car accident. Is it any wonder that my friends and I swooned over everything from Camus's pen -- plays like "Caligula"; the lyrical essays about rebellion or summer in Algeria; and that last, great novel of guilt and responsibility, The Fall. Eventually, of course, a Camus backlash began to build up, with people arguing that this dreamboat existentialist was really just a Gallic Jack Kerouac -- one of those writers who appeal largely to moody, introspective adolescents. Could this be true? I wondered. Would the scales fall from my eyes during middle age? Would Camus turn out to be another god that failed? And so the years, as they will, gradually slipped by, and middle age stealthily crept up on me. The portly, sedentary Henry James was now my idea of a literary hero. But one day -- a decade or so back -- I wandered into a used bookstore and chanced upon two handsome volumes of Camus's notebooks, those covering the years 1935-42 and 1942-51. I hadn't read them when they first appeared in the 1960s. I bought the books and took them home. No scales fell. In fact, love revived. Camus's carnets were clearly distinguished additions to the great French tradition of Montaigne's essays, Pascal's pensées, Simone Weil's arguments with God and the world. Before long, I was copying Camus's reflections into my own commonplace book: "No one who lives in the sunlight makes a failure of his life. . . . The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread. . . . Delacroix is right; all these days that are not noted down are like days that didn't exist. . . . Nietzsche, with the most monotonous external life possible, proves that thought alone, carried on in solitude, is a frightening adventure. . . . People can think only in images. If you want to be a philosopher, write novels." Sigh. In my heart I was still a Parisian man of letters, scribbling away at the Café de Flore.

Having gobbled down those two earlier volumes of Camus's philosophical observations and bon mots, I was naturally eager to read the just published Notebooks 1951-1959, covering the final years of the writer's life. There's much to enjoy in these pages, even if they occasionally do feel a little slack and windy. As translator Ryan Bloom explains, Camus himself prepared the typescripts for the earlier notebooks, published in the 1960s, but that's not the case here. This final volume largely derives from the rough original manuscripts, right down to the occasional illegible word and tired thought. Camus's journeys to Italy and the Greek islands again celebrate the quality of Mediterranean light; he speculates repeatedly about death; and he works out a variety of scenes for possible future books (in particular, the stories of Exile and the Kingdom and the posthumous novel The First Man). Still, Camus the moralist and observer is definitely present, and he keeps us turning the pages: "Man of 1950: he fornicated and read the newspapers. . . . In the water, the turtle becomes a bird. . . . Only risk justifies thought. . . . It is not poverty or endless work that makes for the degradation of mankind, but the filthy servitude of the factory and the life of the suburbs. . . . She wore chaste dresses and yet her body burned. . . . Never speak of one's work. . . . Each time someone tells me that they admire the man in me, I have the impression of having lied all my life." Workbooks like these also provide us with a glimpse of Camus's reading. Nietzsche is a constant reference point -The Gay Science was in the writer's valise on the day he was killed -- and so are Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. But the Notebooks frequently record trenchant, somewhat Camusian remarks by others: "According to [Henry de] Montherlant, all true creators dream of a life without friends." "[Cesare] Pavese: 'We are idiots. The little bit of freedom that the government leaves us, we allow it to be gobbled up by women.' " "Ortega y Gasset. History: the eternal struggle between paralytics and epileptics." "[Astolphe de] Custine: 'The contradiction that exists between a burning soul and the uniformity of existence makes my life unbearable.' " Periodically, Camus reflects on his vocation and its personal costs, often envying men who work outside in the open air and sunshine. "I have only been happy and at peace in a trade, a job accomplished with other men whom I can like. I do not have a trade, but only a vocation. And my work is solitary. I must accept it and try only to be worthy of it, which is not the case at this moment. But I cannot protect myself from a feeling of melancholy in the presence of these men who are happy with what they do." Certainly Notebooks 1951-1959 is worth reading just to discover the curious sequence of thoughts set down for Oct. 17, 1957. This is the day when Camus, while dining with an American lover, is told the news from Sweden: "Nobel. Strange feeling of overwhelming pressure and melancholy. At 20 years old, poor and naked, I knew true glory. My mother." One can parse those phrases in several ways, but over the next weeks Camus suffers several "suffocation attacks" as well as mounting anxiety and depression. The writer himself recognizes that such tensions have long marked his inner self and left him full of self-doubt: "The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans. Here and there -- here and there only -- have I succeeded." Without the original French at hand, it is difficult to judge the quality of Ryan Bloom's translation. But his syntax -- in his introduction, afterword and useful footnotes -- can sometimes be a bit slipshod: "Although, if by most accounts, he tried not to openly expose his wife to his philandering,

he also did little to successfully conceal it." Even if you don't mind those split infinitives, there's no need for "Although." Similarly, Camus's American lover is described with odd coyness as a "woman he'd met in New York and formed intimate relations with." But these are cavils. It's simply a pure and bountiful good to have this book available in English. Even for those long past their college days, Albert Camus remains a god, immortal and forever young. · Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda May 4, 2008 Read Later

Knopf. 210 pp. $24.95 Being a wimp, I tend to shy away from novels about bloodthirsty maniacs, serial killers and human monsters of any sort. My heart just can't take the emotional beating. I pity the poor boob about to be eviscerated by the smiler with the knife; I shudder when the smooth-talking sociopath invites the lonely young woman up to see his butterfly collection; I suffer with the parents and friends of the murdered and sexually abused couple. So I was genuinely hesitant about opening Patrick McGrath's latest. Would I have to hide my eyes and peek through my fingers as I read? I knew that some of McGrath's books -- Spider and Asylum, in particular -- are modern classics of dark psycho-sexual suspense. But years ago I'd enjoyed his first novel, The Grotesque, and greatly admired its icily witty prose and black comedy. So eventually I got a grip on myself and started page one of Trauma: "My mother's first depressive illness occurred when I was seven years old, and I felt it was my fault. I felt I should have prevented it. This was about a year before my father left us. His name was Fred Weir. In those days he could be generous, amusing, an expansive man -- my brother, Walt, plays the role at times -- but there were signs, perceptible to me if not to others, when an explosion was imminent." No cannibalism in the opening -- I've always found that to be a good sign. More appropriately, I admired how artfully McGrath establishes his dysfunctional family -- depressed mother, overly sensitive kid, emotionally volatile father, ebullient role-playing brother. Needless to say, I kept on reading, wanting to know more. In fact, I read for four or five hours, all the way to the end. That hypnotic, reasonable and wistful voice of Dr. Charles Weir, psychiatrist, had me utterly in thrall. The man clearly aches with unhappiness -- and maybe with something more than just unhappiness. The first chapter ends with the funeral of Weir's mother: "In a compressed few hours I had encountered every person with whom I'd ever known intimacy save one, that being my mother, and she was dead. I was estranged from all of them except one, that being my daughter, who lived not with me but with her mother. I was approaching forty and I no longer regarded my life as possessing unlimited potential, or any at all. I felt my own isolation strongly, and while I was still sexually active the possibility of proper human intimacy seemed every day to recede further from me."

Weir, we soon learn, has had a difficult life. Whenever he'd try to help his weeping or battered mother, whether as a child or as a man, she'd turn on him for interfering, snap that he was "always trying to help people who don't want it." Yet "how can any man see his mother in pain and not do everything in his power to relieve that pain?" But then he always was exceptionally sensitive. By contrast, Weir's older brother has always been enviably at ease in his skin, the family favorite, successful with women, successful as a painter. "Anyone," their mother used to say, "can be a psychiatrist. It takes talent to be an artist." Most of Weir's story takes place in the 1970s, when Vietnam vets are flooding clinics, desperately in need of counseling and therapy. So our freshly minted psychiatrist specializes in treating war trauma, helping those who cannot live with the knowledge of what they witnessed or did. Weir is, moreover, deeply interested in the workings of memory: "The falsification of memory -- the adjustment, abbreviation, invention, even omission of experience -- is common to us all, it is the business of psychic life. . . . I know how very fickle the human mind is, and how malleable, when it has to accommodate belief, or deny the intolerable." Unfortunately, Weir bungles the treatment of one of his patients, his new wife's beloved brother Danny. The doctor blames himself for the consequences, can hardly bear going home to the resultant domestic grief and quickly grows convinced that Agnes will never forgive him. He decides to move out so that she can heal more quickly, and before long she remarries. Soon afterward the doctor's life begins to spiral downward, its only brightness being the Saturdays he spends with his daughter, Cassie. Until, that is, he meets the fragile, wounded and beautiful Nora Chiara. For a while hope revives: "She was with me because she wanted to be, and remembering how we were then, when it was all promise, with nothing to ruin it but folly, or fear, I see us as though from a camera attached to a track on the ceiling: a lean, lanky man with his hair cut short, en brosse, in a creased linen suit with one elbow propped on the candlelit table, his chin cupped in his fingers, the other arm thrown over the back of his chair, listening with a smile to this peachy woman gesticulating and smoking on the other side of the table."

PHOTOS Patrick McGrath (Riccardo De Luca/maxppp) Note that ominous phrase "how we were then." Throughout Trauma, McGrath shifts the narrative back and forth through time. The reader knows that something life-altering is going to happen, but for Weir it has clearly already happened. What is it? From what vantage point does Charlie Weir now look back on his past? Repeatedly, he hints at wisdom gained too late: "One of the rewards of maturity, I told myself, in a rare burst of complacency, is the ability to make a rapid decision on a matter of profound emotional significance and have confidence in its soundness. The folly in this line of thinking didn't become apparent until later." And so gradually, relentlessly, McGrath builds up an atmosphere of unease. After Nora starts to suffer nightmares of being chased in a tunnel, Weir grows convinced she needs therapy. It would

appear that brother Walt knows more about this mysterious young woman than he's letting on. Suddenly, Agnes re-enters her ex-husband's life, holding out the possibility of reconciliation. Meanwhile, Weir keeps having his own nightmares, usually the old dream of his father putting a gun to his head. "In the darkness," he tells us, "anxiety steals in like a wolf. Glimpsing weakness of spirit it circles for the kill." He later adds that "in the years I'd been treating trauma I'd learned this, that when ordinary anxiety becomes sufficiently acute it will rouse the dormant horror no matter how deeply repressed it is." Rousing dormant horror doesn't sound like a very happy prospect. Could Dr. Weir be more like his traumatized patients than he realizes? McGrath deepens the ambiguities and tensions down to the very last chapter of Trauma. Even then, some elements of the story's plot remain deliberately unresolved or enigmatic. And when the book is over, the reader is still left wondering about the precise tone, the actual implication, of its final sentences. Beautifully crafted and paced, Trauma can be viewed as either a superb psychological thriller or as a masterly evocation of modern alienation and despair -- assuming, of course, there is any difference. The contemporary novel of terror typically focuses on the breakdown of personality, the return of the repressed, the untimely mixing of memory and desire. Happily for us wimps, McGrath eschews splatter or gruesomeness, instead relating Charlie Weir's story in clear, quick-flowing prose, as if Dick Francis had rewritten Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier. (That last, you'll remember, is the novel that opens: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard.") Trauma is, in short, a terrific literary entertainment, one that will keep you on edge, worried and guessing for 200 pages. Still, I was just a teensy bit wrong about the cannibalism. · Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda April 27, 2008 Read Later

THE SEVERAL LIVES OF JOSEPH CONRAD By John Stape Pantheon. 369 pp. $30 Suppose you were asked to name the most studied classic of English fiction, that single work most often read in high school and college classrooms. What would you choose? My own guess would be Joseph Conrad's nightmare-vision of moral decay, Heart of Darkness. A hallucinatory account of a journey up the Congo River to a distant trading camp, a supposed "outpost of progress," this 1902 novella foretells the whole bloody history of the past century. It misses nothing: imperialism, racism and genocide, the squalid megalomania and corruption of those in power, our era's spiritual torpor, the exploitation of third-world peoples, the raping of nature and women, massacre justified as political expediency, rampant mendacity, the ethos of the concentration camp. "Exterminate all the brutes!" Even now, Mistah Kurtz's dying words and his final scream -- "The horror! the

horror!" -- continue to rip away the smiling mask of civilized values to show us what lies beneath, what lies ahead -- Paschendale, Auschwitz, AIDS, 9/11, mass starvation in Africa, the daily body count in the Middle East. In all his fiction Joseph Conrad's great theme is human nature in extremis, and perhaps only Dostoevsky plumbs more deeply into the ravaged souls of men. While Conrad's prose can be slack or overripe, and sometimes his syntax doesn't quite track, that voice on the page earns its grandeur and eloquence. It speaks with the melancholy authority of lived experience. In Lord Jim, he writes, "It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable, and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp." As John Stape reminds us in this brilliantly concise (and often witty) biography, Conrad's life was one of loneliness, steady work, reckless extravagance and recurrent suffering. Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (1857-1924) grew up a Pole when Poland no longer existed, his homeland having been absorbed into Russia and the Austrian empire. His parents died when he was young, and while still in his teens, the boy bid farewell to the landlocked world he knew to become a sailor. For nearly two decades he lived on ships and slept in seamen's hostels. Early on he began to serve on British merchant ships, where he must have learned most of his English. During his years as a seaman, a first or second mate and occasionally a captain, he traveled in the Caribbean and Central America, the Mediterranean, Australasia, the Far East and Africa. It was a hard life, sometimes made harder by the youthful sailor's taste for gambling and heedless overspending. Yet Conrad was hardly your typical roustabout sailor: He read Flaubert and Dickens in his bunk and was noted throughout his life for impeccable manners. Why he began to write, though, remains "an intractable mystery." When Almayer's Folly appeared in 1895, it was virtually the only thing he'd ever composed in English, aside from letters, an unpublished squib for the magazine Tit-Bits and perhaps the answers to examination questions to become a Master Mariner. A comparably fine novel, An Outcast of the Islands, followed a year later, by which time Conrad decided to definitely hang up his peacoat and settle down with pen and ink. No one could have predicted the astonishing run of masterpieces he would produce in the next decade: The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), "Youth" (1898), Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), Typhoon (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907). (Only his most famous short story, "The Secret Sharer," from 1912, is missing.) Many of these draw on their author's experiences at sea, but none is just a nautical adventure. What Conrad achieves is, in critic Ian Watt's phrase, "the revelation of moral essences." His is work of the utmost seriousness: "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel -- it is, before all, to make you see. That -- and no more, and it is everything." Just as this decade mirabilis was beginning, Conrad -- apparently eager to settle down -- married the solidly working-class Jessie George. It is hard to judge the couple's years together, though Conrad's fiction repeatedly turns on unfulfilling marriages and failed dreams. Because of an

accident, Jessie was to suffer most of her life from leg and knee pain. Over time she grew enormously fat, partly because she couldn't move around well. At the same time, Conrad repeatedly showed a homosocial fondness for younger men, often writers -- Stephen Crane, for instance, and later the largely forgotten Hugh Walpole and Richard Curle. Still, Conrad's real life was spent at his desk, at least when he wasn't suffering from crippling gout or even more crippling depression. Almost all his projects took far longer than he originally expected. Lord Jim started life as a short story before ending up a 130,000-word masterpiece of interlocking narratives, a tour de force of time shifts and brilliant set pieces. Like so much of Conrad, it probes the destructive power of dreams -- not that any of us can really escape the romance of illusions. "A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea." Up until the outbreak of World War I, Conrad offered the world magnificent works of art, and hardly anyone cared. But from Chance (1914) onward, he began to produce weak and uneven books -- with the arguable exception of Victory (1915) -- and suddenly earned great sums of money. Stape is quite forthright about this artistic decline: He tells us that The Arrow of Gold (1919) vies with The Rover (1923) for "worst novel ever written by a major writer." By the 1920s Conrad had essentially stopped writing. He had become what Yeats called a "smiling public man," visiting the United States in 1923, making the cover of Time magazine, overseeing a collected edition of his work and hoping for the Nobel Prize (which never came). He died at age 66 from a heart attack. The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad possesses three great strengths. First is Stape's authority as a Conrad scholar; he worked as an editor of the collected letters and now oversees the Penguin Classics editions of the novels and stories. Second, his biography is utterly without padding -- every precise sentence adds new information and moves the narrative briskly along. And third, the book offers lots of extra matter of real use, including photographs, maps, a family tree, a biographical who's who, a pronunciation guide for people and places in Conrad's life and an extensive bibliography. Stape has pressed into one volume all the basic factual information anyone is likely to want to know about Conrad's life. Still, while we learn about Conrad's partnership with Ford Madox Ford (whose name was then Hueffer) on such books as The Inheritors (1901) and Romance (1903) or about the writer's long-term relations with editor Edward Garnett and literary agent J.B Pinker, we are told only the barest minimum about the various works. Readers wanting an introduction to Conrad's artistry will need to go elsewhere, perhaps to Ian Watt's masterly Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, even though that study doesn't cover what some would argue are the author's most ambitious achievements, Nostromo, about political corruption in Latin America, and The Secret Agent, about an anarchist bomb plot. Of course, neither of these will ever match Heart of Darkness in popularity among readers and critics. The most recent update to the Norton Critical Edition of the novella reprints Conrad's text in 70 pages -- and then adds 400 pages of commentary and criticism. Yet even while that book enjoys a special status, John Stape reminds us that virtually everything Conrad wrote reveals the desperate loneliness and fragmentation of modern life. His influence can be seen on such contemporary novelists as J.G. Ballard and J. M. Coetzee, on V.S. Naipaul and

John le Carré. We still see through those steady, mariner's eyes and know -- all too well -- that "there are as many shipwrecks as there are men." · Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda April 20, 2008 Read Later

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY: THE POEM OF A LIFE By Mark Scroggins Shoemaker Hoard. 572 pp. $30 This splendid biography of poet Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978) performs three important functions: It acts as a memorial, an introduction and a prod. First, memorial: The Poem of a Life tells us about Louis -- pronounced Lewee -- Zukofsky's childhood in New York (Yiddish-speaking family, pants-presser father), his years at Columbia (where his classmates included Whittaker Chambers, Clifton Fadiman and Mortimer Adler) and his various jobs (substitute teacher, technical writer, professor at Brooklyn Polytechnic). From an early age, though, Zukofsky also wrote poetry and hardly into his 20s produced the playful and melodious "Poem beginning 'The.' " A loose parody-homage-extension of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," it shows the flair for puns and wordplay that marks much of its author's later work: "The/Voice of Jesus I. Rush singing/in the wilderness . . . For the Pater that was Greece/The siesta that was Rome." Before long, Zukofsky was corresponding with the great teacher of the modernists, Ezra Pound, who helped him publish his early poems and told him to look up William Carlos Williams. From the 1930s until about 1960, Zukofsky had virtually no audience outside of little magazines and chapbooks. This was not because of artistic purity or conviction: No trade publisher wanted to bring out his books. (Little wonder: Two months after publication, Barely and widely had sold only 26 copies.) After all, Zukofsky was in many ways the last of the real modernists, ambitious on a grand scale, producing appealing but still demanding short work, while giving his greatest efforts to a mammoth 24-section epic titled "A." Though full of verbal music, his poetry demanded attention, was neither personal nor accessible, invited -- or required -- multiple readings to fathom its sense. Nonetheless, by the late 1950s and early '60s Zukofsky found himself looked to as a model by some of the more experimental branches of American poetry: the Black Mountain school, headed by Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, the San Francisco poets (Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Spicer), and even the Beats (Allen Ginsberg). By the '70s, the critic Guy Davenport, was calling the author of "A" the greatest living American poet. Such acclaim arrived just in time: Zukofsky died suddenly in 1978 from complications following a perforated duodenal ulcer. The cause of death, remarked composer John Cage, was precisely the same as that which carried off James Joyce.

Mark Scroggins, who teaches at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, relates Zukofsky's life with speed, clarity and zest. But his book is also intended as an introduction to the poet, and so concentrates as much on the work as on its creator. "Interchapters," for instance, address major themes or look into the influence on Zukofsky of, say, Spinoza and Bach. Scroggins's approach to interpretation is scholarly yet down to earth, full of good sense and useful information. The first section of "A," he tells us, "presents the dilemma of the poet's task in an unsettled time -- how to navigate between the demands of an unjust, capitalistic society and the otherworldly perfection offered by art, represented here by Bach's St. Matthew Passion." In section 8, he points out, a description of the artistic imagination mirrors Marx's account of the labor process in Capital: What distinguishes any worker from the best of the bees Is that the worker builds a cell in his head before he constructs

The labor process ends in the creation of a thing, Which when the process began Already lived as the worker's image. Zukofsky frequently employs such "quotations," since he valued recurrence, repetition and allusion as a basic structural principle of art. But he also believed that "only objectified emotion endures." Shortly after his marriage, he drafted a poem of "pure erotic abandon": Drive, fast kisses, no need to see hands or eyelashes a mouth at her ear trees or leaves night or the days. A dazzling verbal engineer, Zukofsky twice replicated in "A" the pervasive rhyme sounds of Guido Calvalcanti's famously intricate love poem "Donna mi priegha." (Zukofsky's actual words reflect on the Marxist theory of value and Spinoza's understanding of love.) This ideal of translating the aural structure of a poem eventually led to the poet's notorious versions of Catullus. In these Zukofsky actually emulates the original Latin sounds in his English words but also keeps close to their

meaning. Here, for instance, are the opening lines of Catullus viii, Zukofsky in roman and Catullus in italics: Miss her, Catullus? don't be so inept to rail Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire, at what you see perish when perished is the case. Et quod vides perisse perditum ducas. Zukofsky's collaborator on this translation, as for much of his work, was his wife, Celia, a talented musician and composer. Her "L.Z. Masque" forms the last section of "A," and her score for a kind of opera of Shakespeare's "Pericles" makes up the second volume of "Bottom: on Shakespeare," that densely written, quotation-filled personal encyclopedia devoted to the proportion "love: reason :: eyes: mind." The Poem of a Life sports a striking cover photograph of its subject -- by that versatile and muchregretted man of letters Jonathan Williams (see p. 4 of this issue for a tribute to him) -- and shows the thin poet tightly buttoned up, all wool coat, thick glasses and cap. In truth, he looks a bit formidable, which seems appropriate, for not everyone will be drawn to the verbal music and allusive intricacies of Louis Zukofsky. But Mark Scroggins certainly makes us understand that the author of "A" is a major poet, and he prods us into wanting to read him. After all, the test of poetry, said Zukofsky, "is the range of pleasure it affords as sight, sound, and intellection. This is its purpose as art." · Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda April 6, 2008 Read Later

THE LIBRARY AT NIGHT by Alberto Manguel Yale Univ. 373 pp. $27.50 Book collectors might be presumed to be among the happiest of mortals. There, in the evening, they sit contentedly in soft easy chairs, beneath pools of warm lamplight, surrounded by their libraries -- row after serried row of beautiful or rare volumes, all the great works of scholarship and the human imagination. Sadly, this cozy vision is usually little more than a daydream, though not for Alberto Manguel. As The Library at Night indicates, he has managed to take every reader's castle in the air and put a foundation under it. From a psychological viewpoint, most bookmen and women are actually among the more unfortunate sufferers on the wheel of life -- for them there is no respite, no relief, from the insatiate ache of desire. Surrounded by plenty, they hunger for more. Collections are never

complete. Unsigned modern firsts really do need to become signed or inscribed. Any merely fine copy suddenly looks dingy when compared to one in mint condition. Moreover, as everyone can attest, the exhilaration of actual possession lasts but a twinkling. The newly acquired treasure is soon slipped onto a bookshelf or even, as the bookcases fill up, into a cardboard box stored in the basement or the attic or the American Self Storage in Kensington, Md. And once in a box, the book can never, ever be found when it's needed. Trust me. I know. So it's really very hard for a reader and book collector not to envy Alberto Manguel. This author of A History of Reading, this editor of such imaginative anthologies as Black Water (fantastic stories) and Dark Arrows (stories of revenge), this superb all-around literary essayist, can actually find any one of his 30,000 books. As he tells us in The Library at Night, they lie readily at hand on dark wood shelves, in a building constructed on the ruins of a former 15th-century barn, adjoining a one-time presbytery, on a hill south of the Loire. That's in France. Not too far from Paris. A long way from American Self-Storage in Kensington, Md. This in itself is a bitter pill. (Why him? Where did I go wrong?) Yet what's even harder to take is this: Manguel clearly reads and uses those books. His is truly a working collection, the engine for a serious international literary career, the ultimate source for such unusual compilations as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places, The Oxford Book of Canadian Ghost Stories and God's Spies: Stories in Defiance of Oppression. Surely, though, the man is your typical melancholy, dry-as-dust bibliophile? Nope. Not only does Manguel own wonderful books housed in an eat-your-heart-out library in an idyllic part of France, he seems, well, content. According to The Library at Night, he lives with someone he loves, writes during the morning, potters among his books throughout the day and evening, and, come nightfall, sips wine in the garden with visiting friends from around the world. Sigh. As a writer about books, Alberto Manguel might be likened to Robert Burton or Isaac D'Israeli, albeit with a more accessible style than that of either the eccentric scholiast of The Anatomy of Melancholy or the antiquarian compiler of Curiosities of Literature (and father of Benjamin Disraeli, who changed the spelling of his last name). Plus, he's a lot more sociable. One would, in fact, be hard put to find a more genial, cosmopolitan contemporary man of letters. Born in 1948, Manguel grew up in Argentina, passed some of his youth in Tahiti, and spent 20 years in Toronto as a force in the Canadian literary establishment -- before moving to Europe. Thus he writes in English, even a quite lyrical English, but is also comfortable in Spanish, French, German and Italian. (Probably Urdu, Pictish and Aramaic as well.) Most of all, like Burton and D'Israeli, he loves to read and read and read, and then to write about his reading and quote from it. The Library at Night-- a series of essays on what one might call the Platonic Idea of a library -- reveals some of its author's intellectual range and magpie learning. Manguel can cite ancient scholars from Alexandria, tell anecdotes about half-mad bibliomanes such as Aby Warburg (founder of the Warburg Library, devoted to "the afterlife of the ancient world") or Peter Kien (the doomed hero of Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé), describe the bookshelves in the blind Borges's apartment, analyze the architecture of Florence's Laurentian Library (designed by Michelangelo), outline the various methods for organizing and cataloging books, and discuss the sad history of censorship or the tattered and secret volumes shared by the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps. The man has clearly, as Samuel Johnson might say, turned over half a library to make his new book.

The individual chapters reveal its essentially meditative character: "The Library as Myth," "The Library as Order," "The Library as Space," "The Library as Identity," "The Library as Home" and so forth. Within each essay, Manguel tends to begin by revealing a few personal details of his reading life, which establishes a theme for more general observations about books and libraries. He then usually segues into an account of the career or obsessions of some exemplary book-person, meanwhile interspersing apposite quotations to underscore certain points, before bringing the essay to a quiet summing up. So here we learn (or learn again) about Melvil Dewey and his decimal system, Diderot and his Encyclopédie, Anthony Panizzi and the design of the British Museum Library, and Andrew Carnegie and his ambiguous philanthropy (he would generally pay for the buildings, which glorified his name, but not for the books inside them). In a brilliant final chapter Manguel slyly compares the literary tastes of two unusual booklovers: Frankenstein's Monster and Count Dracula. Still, setting apart the quotations themselves, The Library at Night is at its most appealing when touching on its engaging author's idiosyncrasies and puzzlements: "Why do I place García Márquez under 'G' and García Lorca under 'L'? Should the pseudonymous Jane Somers be grouped with her alter ego, Doris Lessing? In the case of books written by two or more writers, should the hierarchy of ABC dictate the book's position, or (as with Nordhoff and Hall) should the fact that the authors [of Mutiny on the Bounty] are always mentioned in a certain order override the system? Should a Japanese author be listed according to Western or Eastern nomenclature, Kenzaburo Oe under 'O' or Oe Kenzaburo under 'K'? Should the once-popular historian Hendrik van Loon go under 'V' or 'L'? Where should I keep the delightful Logan Pearsall Smith, author of my much-loved All Trivia? Alphabetical order sparks peculiar questions for which I can offer no sensible answer. Why are there more writers whose names (in English, for instance) begin with 'G' than 'N' or 'H'? Why are there more Gibsons than Nichols and more Grants than Hoggs? Why more Whites than Blacks, more Wrights than Wongs, more Scotts than Frenches?" The Library at Night is an elegant volume, in both its design and its text, though some of Manguel's quoted anecdotes and insights (especially those pertaining to the Internet, that source of speedy answers rather than considered wisdom) will probably be familiar to admirers of Nicholas Basbanes ( A Gentle Madness and its successors), Sven Birkerts ( The Gutenberg Elegies) and certain other bookish essayists. There are a few trivial mistakes, as well: For instance, the word "large" has been left out of Prospero's famous line: "My library was dukedom large enough." Manguel's footnoting is also somewhat cavalier, indicating titles but not page numbers. But these cavils hardly matter in light of so much munificence. Besides, I, for one, can certainly forgive anything of such a fan of detective stories and Robert Louis Stevenson. Alberto Manguel has brought out a richly enjoyable book, absolutely enthralling for anyone who loves to read and an inspiration for anybody who has ever dreamed of building a library of his or her own. · Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda March 16, 2008 Read Later

THINGS FALL APART by Chinua Achebe Anchor. 209 pp. Paperback, $10.95 This handsome trade paperback honors the 50th anniversary of Things Fall Apart, one of the most widely read and beloved novels of our time. It's a true modern classic -- translated into 50 languages, taught in high schools around the country, studied in college history and anthropology classes. What makes it so popular? First off, there's its plain, dignified English. Achebe portrays the Ibo (now Igbo) world of late 19thand early 20th-century Nigeria with honesty about its sometimes harsh character as well as respect for its traditions. His mostly declarative sentences -- leavened with occasional Ibo words and phrases -- eschew the emotional, preferring to describe rituals and practices rather than judge them. Only at the very end does he allow irony into his story, and that, appropriately enough, enters with the white missionaries who gradually undermine the indigenous culture. But for most of its narrative, the simple, noble diction of Things Fall Apart recalls that of the medieval Norse sagas, which memorialize a similar world of farmer-warriors ("There was a man named Thorkil Thorkilson . . .") The closest modern equivalent might be Hemingway describing a bullfight. The novel opens this way: "Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honor to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to Mbaino. He was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights." Note how Achebe conveys a mythic, timeless quality to his small postage-stamp of Africa. "From Umuofia to Mbaino" circumscribes the known world. Last names are unneeded. Fame is achieved in one-on-one competition. Ancient heroes, who almost seem to have been known by the village elders, once tested themselves against spirits. Later in the book, the emphasis on folktales, songs, proverbs and ritual impersonations of the gods further connects the people to their ancestors. Yet almost from the beginning Achebe hints that life is changing -- some people are questioning the established ways. Why should twins always be put to death? Achebe's plot is, for much of the novel, almost nonexistent. He describes roughly 10 years in the life of Okonkwo, his family and his village. Through a flashback we learn that Okonkwo's father was charmingly feckless, lazy and weak. So Okonkwo has made himself into a strong man, hardworking, hungry to acquire status, and violent. He beats his three wives (and even tries to shoot one), regards his sensitive eldest son with contempt, triumphs in battle against other villages (at special ceremonies he drinks from the skull of the first man he killed) and cannot endure the least display of what he regards as womanish softness. In the modern world most of these traits would be judged sexist or criminal, but it's almost impossible to withhold admiration, and sympathy, for Okonkwo. He conducts his life according to the absolutes of tribal law and the respected tenets of honor. He will not compromise, he will not equivocate. But he will suffer. And when the world alters, whether for better or ill, Okonkwo remains true to his code.

Things Fall Apart has long been revered for its imaginative re-creation of Ibo culture just before it collided with British colonialism. A review in the Times Literary Supplement spoke of the book as "penetrating tribal life from the inside." And yet it's important to realize that this isn't an anthropological document, but rather a work of literature, the imaginative creation of a sophisticated artist. There's nothing "primitive" about the author at all. Achebe was baptized Albert, the son of proselytizing converts to Christianity, and he received a privileged British-style education. He was working for the Nigerian Broadcasting Corporation when his book was published (in England). What's more, it was written in the language of the colonizers. (Achebe has argued that English is the lingua franca of Africa as well as the language of the world. A similar argument is made by the writers of India.) Perhaps only someone already distant from his native culture -- through religion, education and language -- could feel so strongly what had been lost. Not surprisingly, Achebe's second novel, No Longer at Ease (1960), takes up the alienation and confusions felt by Okonkwo's educated grandson. Near the end of Things Fall Apart Okonkwo lavishly celebrates his imminent return home after a long exile. One of the village elders where he has been living rises up to thank him: " 'If I say that we did not expect such a big feast I will be suggesting that we did not know how openhanded our son, Okonkwo, is. We all know him, and we expected a big feast. But it turned out to be even bigger than we expected. Thank you. May all you took out return again tenfold. It is good in these days when the younger generation consider themselves wiser than their sires to see a man doing things in the grand, old way. A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so. You may ask why I am saying all this. I say it because I fear for the younger generation, for you people.' He waved his arm where most of the young men sat. 'As for me, I have only a short while to live, and so have Uchendu and Unachukwu and Emefo. But I fear for you young people because you do not understand how strong is the bond of kinship. You do not know what it is to speak with one voice. And what is the result? An abominable religion has settled among you. A man can now leave his father and his brothers. He can curse the gods of his fathers and his ancestors, like a hunter's dog that suddenly goes mad and turns on his master. I fear for you; I fear for the clan.' He turned again to Okonkwo and said, 'Thank you for calling us together.' " Those words "an abominable religion" seem shocking in the context of a speech so lovely and sad. Yet that is the strength of Things Fall Apart. Achebe shows us not only the beauty but also the cruelty of Ibo life, which included the physical abuse of women and ritual murder. He also presents Christianity as a refuge for the downtrodden, the meek and the outcast, even while describing how the church and the British government gradually emasculate an entire culture. The local district commissioner, with a racism typical of the period, actually titles his book "The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger." While it is right that we honor a great work and its author, I can't help feeling slightly troubled by the overwhelming popularity of Things Fall Apart. I own a copy of the novel in a Heinemann paperback -- No. 1 in its "African Writers Series." There are 46 other titles listed (as of 1967), but who among us has read any of them -- apart from the other books by Chinua Achebe? Having studied Things Fall Apart in 10th grade does not mean we have done our duty to African literature.

We may have vaguely heard of Amos Tutuola's linguistic tour de force The Palm-Wine Drinkard, or bought a copy of Ben Okri's Booker Prize-winning The Famished Road. We are glad that Wole Soyinka won a Nobel Prize. But beyond these names, and a few others, for most Americans literary Africa remains what colonial Africa used to be: a dark continent. *

FOUNDING FAITH Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America By Steven Waldman Random House. 277 pp. $26 Founding Faith takes up two central questions about religion in early America. First, what did such Founding Fathers as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison usually believe? And second, how did it come about that the First Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that "Congress shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof"? The answers to these questions carry implications for our lives today, since at stake is the flash-point principle of the separation of church and state. In his opening chapters, Steven Waldman discusses the major faiths of early America -- Puritans, Baptists, Catholics and Quakers -- as each strives to consolidate its political ascendancy in, respectively, Massachusetts, Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Each also reveals its own particular fanaticisms, though the Salem witch trials gave New England's Puritans a lasting legacy of shame. Yet the Protestant hatred of Catholicism was even more widespread and virulent than the fear of sorcery. Not only was the Vatican theologically likened to the Whore of Babylon, it was also seen as a political danger. When King George III allowed Quebec to remain Catholic, many in the colonies believed this would eventually prompt an invasion by crusading Quebecois papists. Such fears and bigotry fed the fires of anti-English feeling. Religious fervor pervaded early American life, and church leaders, even more than today, wielded considerable political clout. Yet none of our history-book heroes of the Revolution could be viewed as anything but heterodox in his creed. Franklin, we learn, believed that God created the universe, then gave over its governing to various minor gods. (Waldman describes this as a form of deism, though it strikes me as vaguely Gnostic.) John Adams's "disdain for Calvinists was surpassed only by his contempt for Catholics," and he appears to have been equally disgusted with many facets of orthodox Christian theology. For instance, he refused to accept that one bite from an apple "damned the whole human Race, without any actual Crimes committed by any of them." Eventually, Adams joined a liberal Unitarian church, which emphasized Christ's teachings rather than his divinity. George Washington was raised as an Anglican but seldom went to Sunday service, refused to kneel and never took communion. In many ways, he was more active as a freemason than as a Christian. But he spoke up strongly for religious tolerance, even during the Revolution: "While we are contending for our liberty," he wrote, "we should be very cautious of violating the Rights of

Conscience in others, ever considering that God alone is the Judge of the Hearts of men, and to him only in this Case, they are answerable." Waldman describes Thomas Jefferson as a "pious infidel" and James Madison as a "radical pluralist." Jefferson viewed Jesus as a moral teacher and nothing more: He actually cut up a copy of the Gospels, removing all references to miracles and any claims that Jesus was more than human. Madison appears to have respected religion without being seriously attached to any sect in particular. But, like his fellow Virginians, he did feel strongly the need for tolerance, and it is to him that Waldman believes we owe our freedom of conscience. He helped frame the Constitution, which mentions neither Jesus nor God, and later the First Amendment. Madison hoped for a total prohibition against government interference with religion. He and many Baptists of the day firmly believed in keeping Caesar away from Christ. Once a church started taking money from the kings of this world, it inevitably grew soft, lax and corrupt. Alas, Madison couldn't pass the wording he wanted. Instead, "The First Amendment was a grand declaration that the federal government couldn't support or regulate religion -- but it was also a grand declaration that states absolutely could." The prohibition would be made applicable to state governments only through the passage of the post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment ("No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States"). Waldman takes pains to underscore the various interpretive ambiguities of the First Amendment's religious declaration -- parsed by jurists and preachers ever since -- as well as the impossibility of ever fully determining exactly what the authors intended. (He even suggests that the language was deliberately kept a little fuzzy.) As a result, we can't look to the framers of the Bill of Rights for an indisputable answer to just how separate church and state should be. What we can do, however, is "pick up the argument that they began and do as they instructed -- use our reason to determine our views." Much of the last third of Founding Faith discusses how our first four presidents dealt with religious issues while they were in office, then as they grew older and faced death. Waldman was a journalist at U.S. News & World Report and Newsweek and is currently the editor-in-chief of Beliefnet.com, an eye-popping Web site devoted to every aspect of "inspiration, spirituality, faith." While his book draws on the work of academic historians and other scholars, Waldman hopes to appeal to the general reader through a somewhat overbright and colloquial prose style. There is much talk of today's "culture warriors" and a clear desire to be snappy: Waldman calls Franklin "a religious freedom fighter with Puritan DNA." George Washington, we are told, "declared Masonic goals fully in sync with those of the new republic." The profound theological thinker Jonathan Edwards is dubbed the Billy Graham of his day. One can admire the wish to avoid gravitas without endorsing a fall into bathos. Happily, our Founding Fathers did establish a nation based on liberty of conscience, religious freedom and acceptance of difference. Perhaps Isaiah Berlin best enunciated what this means when he said that "decent respect for others and the toleration of dissent is better than pride and a sense of national mission; that liberty may be incompatible with, and better than, too much efficiency; that pluralism and untidiness are, to those who value freedom, better than the rigorous imposition of all-embracing systems, no matter how rational and disinterested."

To such liberal views, one might add those of the arch-conservative Adam Smith, who in The Theory of Moral Sentiments stressed that the glue holding society together is nothing less than the ability to sympathize and identify with other human beings. Ours is a diverse nation, of a thousand religions, and that in itself is a great good and a great safeguard. As James Madison once said, "multiplicity of sects . . . is the best and only security for religious liberty in any society. For where there is such a variety of sects, there cannot be a majority of any one sect to oppress and persecute the rest." * Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda March 2, 2008 Read Later

Nazi Literature in the Americas By Roberto Bolano Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews New Directions. 227 pp. $23.95 Let me admit, straight off, that any reviewer might feel hesitant before recommending a book called Nazi Literature in the Americas. At the checkout, the bookstore clerk will almost certainly look twice at the title -- and then avoid looking at you. Certainly, it would be politic to leave the dust jacket at home if you like to read on the subway; and even then, you might want to invest in one of those anonymous wrap-around opaque covers. When friends casually ask the title of the book you're carrying, you'll want to have an explanation prepared in advance. Why? Because Roberto Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas very much deserves reading: It is imaginative, full of a love for literature, and, unlikely as it may seem, exceptionally entertaining. The book purports to be a biographical dictionary gathering 30 brief accounts of poets, novelists and editors (all fictional) who espouse fascist or extremely right-wing political views. While several meet violent ends, most are simply deluded sentimentalists and frustrated litterateurs. They come from all the Latin American countries, but at least a half-dozen are citizens of these United States, including the fanatical preacher Rory Long, the poet and football player Jim O'Bannon, the science fiction writer J.M.S. Hill and the founder of the Aryan Brotherhood, Thomas R. Murchison, alias The Texan. Obviously, Bolano -- a supporter of Chilean President Salvador Allende and a onetime Trotskyite -is playing a tricky game, carefully balancing mockery and black humor against our natural sense of revulsion. Only occasionally does he remind us of the nightmarish horror of Hitler's Reich and Franco's Spain, or of the atrocities perpetrated by generalissimos and dictators. Bolano's real satirical point seems to be: Look! These imaginary right-wing zealots -- with their petty rivalries and ludicrous movements, their crazed manifestos and underground periodicals -- are fundamentally not very different from the real writers and publishers of the contemporary literary

scene. They want what all artists want: for the world to honor and reward their vision, their aesthetic integrity. The highly experimental poet Willy Schurholz "had what it takes to fail spectacularly," but ends up a cultural sensation when he traces the outlines of an ideal concentration camp in the desert. What an outraged establishment may call senseless violence, the more sympathetic regard as performance art. Even the most callous murderer in this book views himself as essentially a conceptual artist, working with the ephemeral material of human lives. Bolano's tone -- like that of Swift in "A Modest Proposal" -- is non-judgmental and scholarly throughout, no matter how ludicrous or horrible his characters' views and actions. Here is the opening of a short entry for Silvio Salv¿tico (Buenos Aires, 1901 -- Buenos Aires, 1994), a neat litany of one offensive item after another: "As a young man Salvatico advocated, among other things, the re-establishment of the Inquisition; corporal punishment in public; a permanent war against the Chileans, the Paraguayans, or the Bolivians as a kind of gymnastics for the nation; polygamy; the extermination of the Indians to prevent further contamination of the Argentinean race; curtailing the rights of any citizen with Jewish blood; a massive influx of migrants from the Scandinavian countries in order to effect a progressive lightening of the national skin color, darkened by years of promiscuity with the indigenous population; life-long writer's grants; the abolition of tax on artists' incomes; the creation of the largest air force in South America; the colonization of Antarctica; and the building of new cities in Patagonia. "He was a soccer player and a Futurist." Most of these brief lives run from two to six pages, though the account of "the infamous Ramirez Hoffman" -- airman, assassin and aesthete -- is almost a short story (and was later expanded into the short novel Distant Star). Along with his relatively full accounts of the fanatical elite, Bolano also includes a series of appendices, briefly describing some of the lesser cranks, listing various (imaginary) right-wing publishing houses, magazines and organizations -- The Wounded Eagle, Iron Heart, The Church of the True Martyrs of North America -- and providing a bibliography of the various authors' novels, memoirs and poetry collections. The titles alone show Bolano's sure touch for pastiche: Fields of Honor, The Storm and the Youths, The Fighting Years of an American Falangist in Europe, Warriors of the South, The Best Poems of Jim O'Bannon, Apocalypse in Force City, and -- my favorite -- Cower, Hounds! Such literary ingenuity from a Latin American author, if not the political edginess, inevitably recalls Jorge Luis Borges. Bolano, we know, revered the Argentine fabulist, and it seems pretty clear that the model for Nazi Literature in the Americas is that master's own portrait gallery of criminals and scoundrels, A Universal History of Infamy. Yet I suspect another influence too: the subgenre of science fiction called alternate history. At one point, Bolano casually mentions Norman Spinrad, who is best known for The Iron Dream, a devastating satire of the militaristic elements in the fiction of Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan) and Robert A. Heinlein. Spinrad depicts Adolf Hitler as a thwarted politician who becomes a pulp science fiction author and works out his Aryan daydreams in sword-and-sorcery novels like "Lord of the Swastika" -- the text of which Spinrad provides, with commentary. More than one fascist writer in Bolano's book composes what are essentially heroic

fantasies, (e.g. the Force-City chronicles of Gustavo Borda). The poet Pedro Gonzalez Carrera even sings the praises of men in armor, "Merovingians from another planet." One of the pleasures of Bolano lies in his subtle humor: He'll mention "an irreproachable style, worthy of Sholokhov" -- and expect the reader to recognize the sarcasm. Irma Carrasco's sonnets are described as "fearlessly probing the open wound of modernity. The solution, it now seemed to her, was to return to sixteenth-century Spain." Actual writers repeatedly interact with imaginary ones. Many leading figures of Latin American literature -- Adolfo Bioy Casares, Manuel Mujica Lainez, Ernesto Sabato and Osman Lins, among others -- are regularly vilified. Juan Mendiluce Thompson scornfully describes Borges's stories as "parodies of parodies," adding that his "lifeless characters were derived from worn-out traditions of English and French literature, clearly in decline, 'repeating the same old plots ad nauseam.' " The joke here, of course, is that Borges's stories are precisely these things. In a way. Bolano, who died in 2003 from liver disease at the age of 50, has been acclaimed as the most exciting Latin American writer since the great days of the Boom. Last year, his novel The Savage Detectives received extensive review coverage and was compared in importance to One Hundred Years of Solitude (an irony that might have amused Bolano, who couldn't stand Gabriel Garcia Marquez). That long novel recreates the literary and artistic scene in Mexico City during the 1970s and beyond, chronicling the youthful adventures of several young poets (modeled after the author and his friends). Its 400-page middle section is a kind of dossier made up of testimonies from 38 people -- a collage structure not dissimilar to that of Nazi Literature in the Americas. Next year Farrar Straus Giroux promises a translation of Bolano's magnum opus 2666, while New Directions will be publishing seven more of his earlier books. This is a lot of attention for a dead writer, born in Chile, long resident in Mexico and buried in Spain. But Roberto Bolano is worth discovering, worth reading--and even worth all the trouble of having to explain why it is that you are toting around a book called Nazi Literature in the Americas. * Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda Feb. 24, 2008 Read Later

ALFRED KAZIN A Biography By Richard M. Cook Yale Univ. 452 pp. $35 For more than 50 years Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) was one of the best known critics in America. In 1934, at the age of 19, he started reviewing for the New Republic (under the literary editorship of Malcolm Cowley). In 1942, at only 27, Kazin published a masterly study of American literature, On

Native Grounds. During the 1940s and '50s he contributed to Partisan Review, Commentary and the Reporter, as well as a host of other magazines. Just as important, throughout these years he steadily debated politics and literature with Philip Rahv, Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, Lionel Abel, Newton Arvin, Cleanth Brooks, R.P. Blackmur, Leslie Fiedler, Mark Van Doren, Harold Rosenberg, Allen Tate, Dwight Macdonald and Lionel Trilling. By the early 1960s he was, arguably, after Edmund Wilson, the country's leading man of letters. And yet. Look at the names in that paragraph. How many do you recognize? If you are under 50, perhaps a couple. How many have you actually read? Probably just one: Edmund Wilson. It is a sad truth that almost any poet or novelist has a shot at immortality, but a critic lives only as long as he keeps writing, keeps in the thick of the action. A decade after his (or her) death, a loyal publisher may bring out a "selected essays" that will prompt a few reminiscences and reconsiderations. After another decade, nothing. Kazin, however, is luckier than most. While he scratched out a living by writing book reviews, teaching at various colleges and universities, and snagging grants (four Guggenheims, numerous other fellowships and regular visits to the artist's retreat Yaddo), he also produced three wonderful works of autobiography, classics of the modern American experience: A Walker in the City (1951) describes his childhood and education in New York's impoverished Brownsville neighborhood; it remains one of the great documents of Jewish-American immigrant life. Starting Out in the Thirties (1965) recalls the ideological and literary battles of a decade racked by the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Hitler and the darkening shadow of Stalinism. Yet grim as they were, the 1930s were also as exhilarating as the 1960s, full of intellectual intensity and passion: Socialism would surely change the world. New York Jew (1978) strikes a more elegiac tone, as Kazin offers pen portraits of many of the leading figures of the postwar cultural scene. But now the young rebels and hotshots have grown old, become the mainstays of the establishment, even turned to the right. While Richard M. Cook's excellent biography of Kazin does describe the genesis, character and reception of such books as On Native Grounds (1942), Bright Book of Life (1973) and An American Procession (1984), it also reveals a lonely, envious, restless man, riven by deep feeling and severe contradiction. Alfred Kazin was, by turns, an opportunistic hustler who could win visiting professorships to prestigious colleges and then proceed to alienate his new colleagues with his condescension or contempt; a husband who cheated on three successive wives; a socially awkward Brownsville boy who instinctively bristled at the patrician smoothness of the despised Lionel Trilling; and a "private reader" who felt out of step as much with the New Criticism of the 1940s as with the literary theory of the 1970s. Nonetheless, he could also be a superb guide to American and English literature. In general, Kazin's critical style might be described as impressionistic. He tended to avoid "close argument" and "precise analysis," writes Cook, in preference to the "evocation of the 'feel' of the book." In an essay called "To Be a Critic," Kazin defended his subjective approach:

"What counts is that the critic should be really involved with a work; that we should follow the track of his curiosity into it just as long and as passionately as may be necessary. This follows from what I call being-at-home-with-a-text, from feeling in one's bones that one knows what the work is about, that one knows the tone of voice in which the writer speaks, that one is present, oneself all present, at every stage. Criticism exists, after all, because the critic has an intense and meaningful experience of a work. And if he doesn't, why pretend that he does? Why bother, if what one is doing is not intensely real to oneself?" Certainly, at his best, Kazin could make this approach work, even sing. Here he is summarizing the animating force behind the novelist Theodore Dreiser: "Where other novelists of his time saw the evils of capitalism in terms of political or economic causation, Dreiser saw only the hand of fate. Necessity was the sovereign principle. . . . The strong went forward as their instinct compelled them to; the weak perished or bore life as best they could. Courage was one man's fortune and weakness another man's incapacity." Surely, anyone who remembers Sister Carrie or The Financier will see the justness of this analysis -- and any reader will feel the almost lyrical excitement of its prose, of one mind seeing into another's. Whether intentionally or not, by underscoring Kazin's flaws and prejudices, Cook gradually invests this 20th-century critic with a troubled, endearing humanity. Like Saul Bellow's Augie March, the often prickly Kazin went at life "freestyle." He never felt really at home among the Partisan Review crowd, actively disliked many of its members (especially Irving Howe, with whom he was often linked), eventually quarreled with most of his friends (Saul Bellow, Hannah Arendt, Elie Wiesel). Despite the honors and celebrity, Kazin's life might even be called miserable much of the time: He was repeatedly frustrated at his inability to finish major books; out of sympathy with the triumphs of modernism, Beat writing, academic criticism and inward-turning experimental fiction; guiltily disappointed in himself as a father. In what may be Kazin's best single work of criticism -- his introduction to the Viking Portable William Blake (1946) -- he celebrates the unfettered, exuberant and sensual spirit that he admired, yearned for but could never quite sustain. At best, he discovered some of that longed-for rapture -- if only for a while -- in his love affairs, especially the very first, with a "lawless" beauty named Mary Lou Petersen. Though married, Kazin immediately realized "that everything could fall apart in the sight of a young girl with very wide cheekbones standing at an overcrowded party in Greenwich Village." That's human frailty talking -and any of us might recognize or even sympathize with the sentiment. But Kazin acted on his impulse, and the brief affair was transformative, an awakening, and its memory haunted him for years. Love, like a great work of art, asks you to change your life. "Making love to Petersen," he later wrote in New York Jew, was "one of the true privileges of the human condition." Corny? Maybe -- but not necessarily. While Kazin remained throughout much of his career a public advocate for 1930s-style hopefulness -- the one aspect of Edmund Wilson he didn't admire was the great man's pessimism -- he nonetheless poured out his own angst and spite and growing melancholy in his journals. While he consciously believed in human aspiration, moral passion and ideals, within the chambers of his heart he seems to have fought constantly against self-pity and the kind of loneliness we associate with the figures in the paintings of Edward Hopper -- or with Melville, Dickinson and many other 19th-

century American authors. And yet writers, the critic was convinced, couldn't wholly retreat from life into the self. He believed strongly that art needed to be grounded in the real, to be an attempt to grasp the complexities of a time, place or people. As Cook writes: "He believed what he believed: the novel works best when 'the individual and society are in constant and concrete relation with each other,' when it acknowledges its close kinship with history, and when it is not embarrassed to present life in all 'its beautiful and inexpressible materiality'." Cook has written an engrossing, even-handed biography, neatly balancing the public intellectual against the private man. Perhaps it will even encourage at least a few readers to seek out some of Kazin's criticism. Cook's own prose is brisk and engaging, though there are a good many typos in the printed text, including misspelled names (e.g., Eliot Freemont-Smith, for Fremont-Smith. And could Alfred Kazin really have traveled to England on the SS Hart Crane? Could there have actually been an ocean liner named after a poet who killed himself by jumping from a ship? This seems surreal enough that I hope it is, in fact, correct. As we say in journalism, some things are just too good to check. * Michael Dirda - Michael Dirda • • •

by Michael Dirda Feb. 17, 2008 Read Later

The Age of Shiva By Manil Suri Norton. 455 pp. $24.95 The Age of Shiva is a perplexing novel, though any sympathetic reader will recognize its obvious merits: a sure command of all the registers of prose, from the lush and poetic to the ironic and witty; an important historical theme -- the drama of Indian politics and Hindu-Muslim conflict between the mid-1950s and 1980; multiple perspectives on the tensions within Indian family life during this same period; an ingenious use of classic Hindu myths as a template for certain plot developments; and, not least, an unsettling account of the joys of motherhood. All these indicate a novelist of real scope and ambition. But Manil Suri's greatest triumph is Meera Sawhney herself. For more than 400 pages -- from adolescence to early middle age -- we are continually inside the consciousness of this likable and long-suffering, if not particularly intelligent, woman. Yet, astonishingly, there isn't the least sense of imaginative strain in Suri's depiction of her interior life. This is not a male author imagining a female character; this is Meera herself before us. Given so much that is impressive in The Age of Shiva, why, then, is the novel perplexing? The overall answer will seem completely shallow: The book simply isn't a page-turner. Not only does the

narrative move slowly, sometimes it grinds to a halt. Suri will linger far too long over a scene, describing with guide-book precision a sports competition, a Hindu wedding ceremony or religious ritual, an erotic encounter. His descriptions often go beyond local color to dogged, anthropological exactitude. We weary of the onslaught of foreign terms and alien practices. By burdening the reader with such laborious detail, The Age of Shiva loses any sense of urgency. The pace is leisurely, the action relentlessly domestic. Years go by, and nothing much happens. Meera, born to a well-to-do family, marries the poor but handsome Dev, after stealing him away from her older sister Roopa. She then goes to live with her new husband's clan in their crowded hovel and almost immediately realizes that she has made a terrible mistake. Meanwhile, Dev dreams of becoming a singing star. In due course, Meera's father cuts the young couple a deal so that they can take an apartment in Bombay. And on and on. Only Meera's brother-in-law Arya -- full of lust and anti-Muslim fervor -- provides a modicum of danger, of threat. Most of the time we just feel sorry for everybody. Much of the novel focuses on Meera's complex feelings, first for her sisters and parents, then for her husband and finally for her child, Ashvin. When she looks at her beloved son, Meera launches into soliloquies that are half dithyramb, half goo and suffused with obvious sexual innuendo. For instance, the novel opens this way: "Every time I touch you, every time I kiss you, every time I offer you my body, Ashvin. Do you know how tightly you shut your eyes as with your lips you search my skin? Do you know how you thrust your feet towards me, how you reach out your arms, how the sides of your chest strain against my palms? Are you aware of your fingers brushing against my breast, their tips trying to curl around something to hold on to, but slipping instead against my smooth flesh? "Ashvin. Do you notice the wetness emerge from my nipples and spill down the slopes of my chest? Is that your tongue that I feel, are you able to steal a taste or two?" This is, again, a mother and her baby son, and Meera's dreamy account of nursing goes on for another page and a half, all of it made slightly yucky by the erotic suggestiveness. No doubt, some women will testify to such a sexual component in their physical connection to an infant. Yet whatever the truthfulness of these feelings, and however much Meera's attitudes may be modeled after the relationship of Shiva's wife, Parvati, to her son Andhaka, such gushing, lyrical effusions embarrass and annoy. To my mind, the novel is also too earnest, made over-symbolic by just such analogies to Hindu myth and slightly burdened by info-dumps about Indian politics and Hindu-Muslim conflict. While Meera eventually reenacts aspects of the Parvati story, her friends and family repeatedly scrape up against momentous historical events -- the separation of Pakistan from India, the ambiguous reign of Indira Gandhi, periods of martial law and repeated riots in the streets. After the Partition, families like that of Meera's sister-in-law Sandhya endured harrowing death marches to refugee camps in Hindustan. Right-wing groups, like that to which Arya belongs, trained for civil war and spread racist hatred. Certainly, the interlacing of actual history with archetypal patterns is a central ambition of the modern novel and should be applauded. Nonetheless, Suri's book feels just slightly programmatic, its developments somewhat forced.

Not least, there's precious little fun for the reader in The Age of Shiva. Only Paji, Meera's father, reveals a dry wit and flair for irony that recall Mr. Bennet of Pride and Prejudice. (Both men regularly retreat to their libraries and are sadly disappointed in their daughters.) When we first meet Paji, he is recalling his early days in publishing, when his father's printing business was mainly devoted to religious calendars -- "garish pictures of Lakshmi and Ganesh (Guru Nanak for the Sikhs), at the bottom of which were stapled a year's worth of tear-off dates." He adds: "Imagine my horror -- I, who had always fancied myself an atheist -- suddenly surrounded by these divine elephants and goddesses and their dozens of arms all day. I was so depressed I could barely drag myself to the factory. I got my clothes caught in the machinery. I developed allergies to the smell of ink. Fortunately for me, the Partition came." Paji may be overbearing but he brightens the novel whenever he appears. Similarly, Dev's younger sister, Hema, is delightfully thoughtless and cruel, and her chatterbox ways bring a little vibrancy into a gray and gloomy household. Here she is on the day after Meera's wedding, finally sitting down to talk to her new sister-in-law: " 'Even Arya bhaiyya was upset. He said Babuji should never have agreed to the marriage. He called you' -- again, Hema giggled -- 'a tramp. He said your sister was trying to mesmerize his brother, was doing magic on him, and casting tantric spells. And when that didn't work, the family set you instead upon poor Dev bhaiyya.' Hema's eyes widened: 'Do you really know magic? Will you teach me your tricks?' " Suri's deftness with Paji and Hema makes clear that he can be sly and amusing. The critical and popular success of his first novel, The Death of Vishnu, further attests to his gifts. So it feels almost churlish to be disappointed in a book that is obviously the product of hard work and much thought: Its longueurs must be deliberate. I hope that my experience of Meera's story is an aberration, that others may not crave as much excitement in their fiction as I do, or will find what I judge tiresome to be rich with subtle Jamesian insight and historical understanding. Unquestionably, Manil Suri has written an ambitious and even admirable book. Still, I found myself unable to do more than pick up The Age of Shiva with dutiful resolve. Alas, this is not how one wants to read a novel. *