¶ It cannot be said that Lord Chesterfield lacks a meritocratic bias.

I have known many a woman, with an exact shape, and a symmetrical assemblage of beautiful features, please nobody; while others, with very moderate shapes and features, have charmed everybody. Why? because Venus will not charm so much, without her attendant Graces, as they will without her.

¶ In Moby-Dick, two execrable chapters, stuffed to the “ridge-pole” with dead metaphors. For example, the head of the right whale is compared to a violoncello. How fatuously accidental! It would be impossible to write less musically than this:

But now, forget all about blinds and whisters for a moment, and, standing in the Right Whale’s mouth, look around you afresh. Seeing all those colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand pipes?

This is bad for the same reason that French puns are unfunny. Anything can be seen to resemble almost anything else, which makes the spinning of comparisons a convenient opportunity for name dropping. To be reminded of a pipe organ by the right whale’s baleen is not enough — we must have the famous organ at Haarlem — devoid though it be of marine implication.

¶ When Reverend Eager, in A Room With a View, declares that the Church of Sta Croce in Florence was “built by faith in the full fervour of medievalism,” Mr Emerson demurs. “No! … That simply means the workmen weren’t paid properly.” I thought of this when Don Quixote explained to Sancho why he could not offer him the salary that Teresa Panza urged her husband to fix.

Look, Sancho, I certainly should have specified a salary for you if I had found in any of the histories of the knights errant an example that would have revealed to me and shown me, by means of the smallest sign, what wages were for a month, or a year, but I have read all or most of their histories, and I do not recall reading that any knight errant ever specified a fixed salary for his squire. I only know that all of them served without pay, and when they least expected it, if things had gone well for their masters, they found themselves rewarded with an insula or something comparable…

¶ In Squillions, Churchill writes to George VI,

Since our conversation at luncheon today, I ahve examined, in consultation with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the details of the case brought against Mr Noël Coward. The Chancellor and Sir Richard Hopkins contend that it was one of substance and that the conferment of a Knighthood upon Mr Coward so soon afterwards would give rise to unfavourable comment.

Coward would have to wait until 1970.

¶ For some reason, the egotism of Lord Chesterfield’s ambitions for his son hits me like a slap in the letter of 29 October 1748.

My anxiety for your success increases in proportion as the time approaches of your taking your part upon the great stage of the world. (more…)

¶ In Moby-Dick, “The Monkey-Rope,” another one of Melville’s joculo-Shakespearean entertainments.

“There is some sneaking Temperance Society movement about this business,” he suddenly added, no approaching Starbuck, who had just come from forward. “Will you look at that kannakin sir: smell of it, if you please.” Then watching the mate’s countenance, he added: “The steward, Mr Starbuck, had the face to offer that calomel and jalap to Queequeg, there, this instant off the whale. Is the steward an apothecary, sir? and may I ask whether this is the sort of bellows by which he blows back the breath into a half-drowned dman?”

Not to mention the flogged-to-death Siamese-twins image.

¶ In Don Quixote, Sancho continues to dream about governing ínsulas. The bachelor, Don Sansón, encourages Don Quixote to appear in the Zaragoza lists, where “he could win fame vanquishing all the Aragonese knights, which would be the same as vanquishing all the knights in the world.”

¶ In Squillions, a whispering campaign at the Admiralty aims to shut down Noël Coward’s production of In Which We Serve, the patriotic re-telling of, among other adventures, Lord Mountbatten’s misadventures in Crete; but the interference halts abruptly with a letter from “Bertie” to “Dickie.”

¶ The second part of Don Quixote is indeed a great deal more amusing than the first, largely because it redeems the one-damned-thing-after-another quality of what goes before. Quixote and Don Sansón, a student at Salamanca who has read the account of the knight errant’s adventures in the First Part — the publication of which, when “the blood of the enemies he had slain was not yet dry on the  blade of his sword,” our hero has no difficulty attributing to enchanters — talk about the book’s reception among the reading public.

“Now I say,” said Don Quixote, “that the author of my history was no wise man but an ignorant gossip-monger who, without rhyme or reason, began to write, not caring how it turned out, just like Orbaneja, the painter of Ubeda, who, when asked what he was painting, replied ‘Whatever comes out.’

(This was indeed my judgment of the narrative of the First Part.)

Pderhaps he painted a rooster in such a fashion and so unrealistically that he had to write beside it, in capital letters, ‘This is a rooster.’ And that must be how my history is: a commentary will be necessary in order to understand it.”

“Not at all,” responded Sansón, “because it is so clear that there is nothing in it to cause difficulty: children look at it, youths read it, men understand it, the old celebrate it, and, in short, it is so popular and widely read and so well known by every kind of person that as soon as people see a skinny old nag they say: ‘There goes Rocinante.’ And those who have been fondest of reading it are the pages. There is no lord’s antechamber where one does not find a copy of Don Quixote: as soon as it is put down it is picked up again; some rush at it, and others ask for it. In short, this history is the most enjoyable and least harmful entertainment ever seen, because nowhere in it can one find even the semblance of an untruthful word or a less than Catholic thought.”

But what one could find it was a massive critique of aristocratical foolishness. Might this explain why the first translation into any language was Thomas Sheltons, of 1612, into English?

¶ In Moby-Dick, a flurry of short chapters about whale butchering, culminating in “The Sphynx,” in which Ahab addresses the head of the decapitated leviathan. His poetical and rather awful gush is interrupted by the sighting of another ship.

“Aye? Well, now, that’s cheering,” cried Ahab, suddenly erecting himself, while whole thunder-clouds swept aside from his brow. “That lively cry upon this deadly calm might almost convert a better man — where away?”

The ship is another whaler, the Jeroboam. Although the captain and crew are healthy, the ship has been commandeered by a madman on board who calls himself Gabriel. Gabriel has convinced the “ignorant” crew that he is indeed archangelic, and the state of things aboard the Jeroboam might best be characterized as ongoing but non-violent mutiny. A boat from the Jeroboam pitches alongside the Pequod. Gabriel is among the oarsman; Stubb has heard his story from the Town-Ho. For the first time since beginning the book, I am thrilled and terrified by the scene that Melville conjures. Difficult as it is to shout over high seas, Captain Mayhew is continually interrupted by the lunatic.

“Think, think of thy whale-boat stoven and sunk! Beware of the horrible tail!”

“I tell thee again, Gabriel, that — ” But again the boat tore ahead as though borne by fiends. Nothing was said for some moments, while a succession of riotous waves rolled by, which by one of those occasional caprices of the sea were tumbling, not heaving it. Meantime, the hoisted sperm whale’s head jogged about very violently, and Gabriel was seen eyeing it with rather more apprehensiveness than his archangel nature seemed to warrant.

The raving madman, the roiling sea, and the invocation of Moby-Dick left me queasy and ill at ease.  

Regular readers will have noted the scarcity of Morning Reads since the New Year. It is a matter of late nights, I’m afraid; it has never been so difficult to get to bed at a decent hour. Two o’clock in the morning menaces as the new eleven at night. One of these days, the “Morning” descriptor may become altogether notional.

¶ If there’s one thing that Lord Chesterfield and I disagree about, it’s laughter.

Loud laughter is the mirth of the mob, who are only pleased with silly things; for true wit or good sense never excited a laugh, since the creation of the world. A man of parts and fashion is therefore only seen to smile, but never heard to laugh.

¶ In Moby-Dick, a horrible chapter, “Stubb’s Supper.” Between complaining about his overcooked slice of whale meat and ordering the black cook to “preach” to the sharks feeding on the capture’s carcass, Stubb lurches with deranged, operatic swagger.

“Cook, give me cutlets for supper to-morrow night in the mid-watch. D’ye hear? away you sail, then — Halloa! stop! make a bow before you go. — Avast heaving, again! Whale-balls for breakfast — don’t forget!

¶ The second part of Don Quixote really is a second beginning. The priest and the barber visit Don Quixote in his chamber, where he is recovering from all the mishaps of the first part. The three men have an amiable and reasonable discussion, and all seems well until our hero firmly makes it quietly clear that he has not given up on being a knight errant or stopped believing in the historical existence of such figures of Felixmarte of Hyrcania. At no point, however, is he held up to ridicule. The barber’s tale of the mad canon of Seville is a far more engaging challenge to Don Quixote’s delusions than another tumble in the dust.

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward is surprisingly disapproving of Margaret Rutherford’s highly popular performance as Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit.

The great disappointment is Margaret Rutherford, whom the audience love, because the part is so good, but who is actually very, very bad indeed. She is indistinct, fussy and, beyond her personality, has no technical knowledge or resources at all. She merely fumbles and gasps and drops things and throws many of my best lines down the drain. She is despair to Fay, Cecil and Kay and mortification to me because I thought she would be marvellous. I need hardly say that she got a magnificent notice.

I doubt very much that I’ll be saying anything like this sort of thing of Angela Lansbury, when I see the revival in a few weeks.

¶ On a whim, I read through to the end of Part I of Don Quixote this morning. Busy evenings and late hours left me wanting to spend time with just one book, and only four chapters remained. I was curious to see what Cervanted originally intended as an ending to his mocking epic.

Although I’ve been very amused by Don Quixote, and keenly interested in its dramatic foreshadowings of the comic opera of the Eighteenth Century, I have never once felt the rustle of greatness in its pages, and I’m far more sympathetic than I was, before opening the book, to the generations of Spanish readers who failed to recognize it as their national classic. Cervantes appears to have two fundamentally incompatible objectives in mind. He wants to entertain his readers with comic situations, but he also wants his entertainment to embody a critical analysis of popular literary forms. In one of today’s chapters, the canon and the priest engage in a leisurely discussion of the current theatre scene that betrays Cervantes as a very inexpert ventriloquist. Not for the first time, the narrative forgets about its hero (caged, at the moment) and gives way to the language of the treatise.

It would not be a sufficient excuse to say that the principal intention of well-olrdered states in allowing the public performance of plays is to entertain the common folk with some honest recreation and distract them from the hurtful humors born in idleness, and since this can be achieved with any play, good or bad, there is no reason to impose laws or to oblige those who write and act in them to make plays as they ought to be because, as I have said …

Far more troublesome than the story’s shambolic structure is its failure to bring Quixote himself alive, at least for me. This, again, seems to be the result of conflicting conceptions of his character.

The canon looked at him, marveling at the strangeness of his profound madness and at how he displayed a very find intelligence when he spoke and responded to questions, his feet slipping from the stirrups, as has been said many times before, only when the subject was chivalry.

I myself don’t marvel, but I do squint and scratch my head. In the end, I’m comforted by Jane Smiley’s claim, in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, that the “second volume is vastly more literary than the first.”

¶ In Moby-Dick, a sperm whale “smokes his last pipe,” before being killed by Stubb. In the following chapter, Melville makes recommendations for improving the harpooning process. I could hardly put the book down, so I read it all over again, and, this time, I had a faintly clearer idea of the events transpiring. Does blood really seethe and bubble when it pours into the ocean? Sounds like claptrap to me.

¶ Not much happens in Don Quixote, but it’s far more amusing. The canon from Toledo denounces the faults of chivalric romances in a tirade that all but clicks with castanets.

Fuero de esto, son en el estil duros; en las hazañas, increíbles; en los amores, lascivos; en las cortesías, malmirados; largos en las batallas, necios en las razones, disparatados en los viajes, y, finalmente, ajenos de todo discreto artificio y por esto dignos de ser desterrados de la república cristiana, como a gente inútil.

That the canon takes it all back a page later only adds to the fun.

¶ In another densely rich letter, Lord Chesterfield writes about good Latin, just warfare, and, not inaptly, letters. The just-warfare issue comes up when Chesterfield objects to a line in Philip Stanhope’s Latin essay that advocates the use of poisons in dealing with intractable enemies. Then he enlarges on the importance of relying on one’s own good sense to tell right from wrong.

Pray let no quibbles of Lawyers, no refinements of Casuists, break into the plain notions of right and wrong; which every man’s right reason, and plain common sense, suggest to him. To do as you would be done by, is the plain, sure and undisputed rule of morality and justice. Stick to that; and be convinced, that whatever breaks into it, in any degree, however speciously it may be turned, and however puzzling it may be to answer it, is, notwithstanding, false in itself, unjust, and criminal.

(How nice it would be to have Chesterfield’s excoriation of the Bush régime.)

It’s bracing to read, a few paragraphs later, Chesterfield’s opinion of Bishop Berkeley’s skepticism. For us, Berkeley is a philosopher from the early Enlightenment. Chesterfield makes him a contemporary.

His arguments are, strictly speaking, unanswerable; but yet I am so far from being convinced by them, that I am determined to go on to eat and drink, and walk and ride, in order to keep that matter, which I so mistakenly imagine my body at present to consist of, in as good plight as possible.

Chesterfield’s exhortation about letter-writing is more than a little heart-breaking for me. How many times have I conveyed similar sentiments to correspondents:

When you write to me, suppose yourself conversing freely with me, by the fireside. In that case, you would naturally mention the incidents of the day; as where you had been, whom you had seen, what you thought of them, etc. Do this in your letters: acquaint me sometimes with your studies, sometimes with your diversions; tell me of any new persons and characters that you meet with in company, and add your own observations upon them; in short, let me see more of You in your letters.

This is hard enough for friends, but impossible, I should think, for most children. In any case, Chesterfield makes the amateur writer’s besetting mistake: unlike the professional, who preens himself upon the distinctiveness bestowed by his skills with a pen, the amateur completely forgets how hard it is to learn to write well, and supposes that inertia alone explains his friends’ “laconic” communications.

¶ In Moby-Dick, a lecture on rope, for which I am none the wiser.

… but as most seamen are beginning to learn, tar in general by no means adds to the rope’s durability or strenggth, however much it may give in compactness or gloss.

Good to know.

¶ Cervantes makes me laugh out loud. When Don Quixote instructs him to prepare to resume his campaign to restore the Queen of Micomicón to her throne, Sancho shrugs and gurgles something about “wickedness in the village.” Pressed to explain, he blurts out,

“It’s just that I’m absolutely certain and positive that this lady who says she’s the queen of the great kingdom of Micomicón is no more a queen than my mother, because if she was who she says she is, she wouldn’t go around hugging and kissing one of the men here at the inn, beyind ever door and every chance she gets.”

Dorotea turned bright red at Sancho’s words, because it was true that her husband, Don Fernando, had, on occasion, taken with his lips part of the prize his love had won, which Sancho had witnessed, and such boldness had seemed to him more appropriate to a courtesan than to the queen of so great a kingdom…

Again, a heuristic about opera. The kings and queens, heroes and damsels in opera do not behave altogether like ladies and gentlemen, and we wouldn’t be able to sit through operas if they did. An early audience for opera would have had to learn not to react to hugs and kisses as Sancho does, by mistaking the figures on the stage for strumpets and libertines (except where indicated).

¶ In Squillions, Coward tours Australia; his letters home are enthusiastic both about Australians, who are neither “common nor social,” and about his own efforts at raising war spirit (and filling war coffers). To Duff Cooper, he writes,

When I have done that, this particular job will be finished and some other plans will have to be made. If it really turns out to have been successful, perhaps you would help over this. As I told you in my last letter, I have been naturally upset about some of the dirty cracks in the English press about my activities, and I would like in the Spring to come back and deal with some of this.

But “this” had already dealt with him, as he would discover when he got home.

¶ In La Rochefoucauld, a much less blasphemous expression of the idea that “God helps those who help themselves.”

Il n’y a point d’accidents si malheureux dont les habiles gens ne tirent quelque avantage, ni de si heureux que les imprudents ne puissent tourner à leur préjudice.

There are no events so adverse that clever people can’t draw some advantage from them, nor any so propitious that fools cannot put them to their own disadvantage.

¶ Lord Chesterfield’s letter of 5 September 1748 is not only full of pithy adages — “Pleasing in company is the only way of being pleased in it yourself” — but adorned, if that is the word, with the finest, most choice misogyny, eloquently but concisely put. It is positively pattern:

As women are a considerable, or at least a pretty numerous part of company; and as their suffrages go a great way towards establishing a man’s character in the fashionable part of the world (which is of great importance to the forture and figure he proposes to make in it), it is necessary to please them. I will therefore, let you into certain Arcana, that will be very useful for you to know, but which you must, with the utmost care, conceal; and never seem to know. Women, then, are only children of a larger growth…

When someone incredulous young person wants to know what the world was like when the word “people” implied a company of men only, one need only recommend Chesterfield’s momentary treatise.

¶ In Moby-Dick, There is a lovely paragraph in Melville’s quietly spooked chapter on the sighting of a great squid.

But one transparent morning, when a stillness almost preternatural spread over the sea, however unattended with any stagnant calm; when the long burnished sun-glade on the waters seemed a golden finger laid across them, enjoining some secresy; when the slippered waves whispered together as they softly ran on; in this profound hush of the visible sphere a strange spectre was seen by Daggoo from the mainmast-head.

¶ Chapter XLV of Don Quixote ends with a fantastic tirade from Quixote himself, as he demands to be unhanded by officers seeking to arrest him for having “liberated” the galley slaves. It is cheeky of Cervantes to put this catalogue of privileged, aristocratical exemptions in the mouth of a lunatic.

Ah, vile rabble, your low and base intelligence does not deserve to have heaven communicate to you the great truth of knight errantry, or allow you to understand the sin and ignorance into which you have fallen you when you do not reverence the shadow, let alone the actual presence, of any knight errant. Come, you brotherhood of thieves, you highway robbers sanctioned by the Holy Brotherhood, come and tell me who was the fool who signed an arrest warrant against such a knight as I? Who was the dolt who did not know that knights errant are exempt from all jurisdictional authority, or was unaware that their law is their sword, their edicts their courage, their statutes their will? Who was the imbecile, I say, who did not know that there is no patent of nobility with as many privileges and immunities as those acquired by a knight errant on the day he is dubbed a knight and dedicates himself to the rigorous practice of chivalry? What knight errant ever paid a tax, a duty, a queen’s levy, a tribute, a tariff, or a toll? What tailor ever received payment from him for the clothes he sewed? What castellan welcomed him to his castle and then asked him to pay the cost? What king has not sat him at his table? What damsel has not loved him and given herself over to his will and desire? And, finally, what kight errant ever was, or will be in the world who doe snot have the courage to single-handedly deliver four hundred blows to four hundred brotherhoods if they presume to oppose him?

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward goes to the movies, and then writes to Lornie about it.

I only spent one night in Hollywood but I utilized it by sitting in a projection room and seeing the film they have made of Bitter Sweet. No human tongue could ever describe what Mr Victor Saville, Miss Jeanette MacDonald and Mr Nelson Eddy have done to it between them. It is, on all counts, far and away the worst picture I have ever seen. MacDonald and Eddy sing relentlessly from beginning to end looking like a rawhide suit case and a rocking horse respectively. Sari never gets old or even middle aged. “Zigeuner” is a rip snorting production number with millions of Hungarian dancers. There is no Manon at all. Miss M elects to sing “Ladies of the Town” and both Manon’s songs, she also dances a Can-Can! There is a lot of delightful comedy and the dialogue is much improved, at one point, in old Vienna, she offers Carl a cocktail! Lord Shayne was wrong, Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy are very definitely the worng age for Vienna. It is the vulgarest, dullest vilest muck up that I have ever seen in my life. It is in technicolour and Miss M’s hair gets redder and redder until you want to scream. Oh dear, money or no money, I wish we’d hung on to that veto.

¶ Even in the days of La Rochefoucauld (praised by Chesterfield in another important passage of today’s letter), it was true that you can’t get a job unless you already have a job.

Pour s’établir dans le monde, on fait tout ce que l’on peut pour y paraître établi.

¶ Lord Chesterfield advises his son, “Wrongs are often forgiven, but contempt never is.”

¶ In Moby-Dick, three didactic chapters on whales in art, sculpture, astronomy, &c, with vigorous protestation of their general inaccuracy. Chapter 57, the last of these, is redeemed by the use of the words “dentistical” and “amphitheatrical.” Not.

¶ In Don Quixote, the protracted scene at the inn, with its two interpolated “exemplary novels”, has been going on for about eleven chapters. Now, the long-lost narrator of the second novel, Ruy, is abashed by the arrival of his brother and niece at the inn. The niece, of course, is a great, one might say, heroic, beauty.

He held the hand of a maiden, approximately sixteen years old, who wore a traveling costume and was so elegant, beautiful, and charming that everyone marveled at the sight of her, and if they had not already seen Dorotea and Luscinda and Zoraida at the inn, they would would have thought that beauty comparable to hers would be difficult to find.

And then we have the recognition scene, with its streaming tears and incredulous embraces; it’s as though Cervantes were writing a manual on the composition of comic operas.

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward is detached to Hollywood by Bill Stephenson, but for what purpose, I can’t begin to say. Barry Day’s cavalier manner with chronology makes the going impenetrable as well as dull. In letters, Coward keeps referring to a “shindig” in the House of Commons.

I want you to do the following: first of all, send me a copy of Hansard with a verbatim account of the debate in it, then check up through dear herrings on the histories of the gentlemen saying those unpleasant things about me. There will come a day when the pen will prove to be a great deal mightier than the sword.

Or the seat in the House, presumably. All too presumably.

¶ Nothing much today, just the two longish chapters of the second of the “exemplary” novels — about the abduction of Zoraida. At least to my ears, Cervantes does not tell a story as well as Boccaccio. Further complicating things, of course, is Cervantes’ desire to interpolate a few details of his own captivity — and even to wangle a cameo appearance.

…a Spanish soldier named something de Saavedra, who did things that will be remembered by those people for many years, and all to gain his liberety; yet his master never beat him , or ordered anyone else to beat him, or said an unkind word to him; for the most minor of all the things he did we were afraid he would be impaled, and more than once he feared the same thing; if I had the time, I would tell you something of what that soldier did, which would entertain and amaze you much more than this recounting of my history.

I’m relieved that Cervantes Saavedra doesn’t put that boast to the test.

In a New Yorker review in 1961, John Updike wrote,

Some novels might be fairly described as ruined parodies. The little dolls whittled in fun escape the author’s derision and take on life. Joseph Adnres and Northanger Abbey are examples. Don Quixote is the towering instance. Cervantes masterpiece lives not because it succeeds at parody but because it immensely fails.

It must be that I am not so sophisticated. I adore successful parodies, but books like Northanger Abbey awkward and vaguely embarrassing, like the appeals for charitable donations that actors sometimes make directly after their curtain calls. It’s not the giving money that I mind, but the little spiel that is felt to be necessary to inspire it, and that invariably jars with the sparkling or glittering show that has just come to an end.

And so we resume the Morning Read. In future, the “season” will begin with the new year, and not in the autumn. (That gives me even more time to wade through the watery deserts of Moby-Dick. A mixed blessing.)

¶ Lord Chesterfield’s letter of 10 May 1748 is yet another keeper. In it, the noble lord warns his son away from “commonplace observations.” In our world, these would concern baseball teams and women drivers, and they are just as annoying as the attacks on the clergy and against matrimony upon which Chesterfield heaps scorn.

These and many other commmonplace reflections upon nations or professions in general (which are at least as often false as true) are the poor refuge of people who have neither wit nor invention of their own, but endeavour to shine in company by second- hand finery. I always put these pert jackanapes out of countenance, by looking extremely grave, when they expect that I should laugh at their pleasantries; and by saying Well, and so; as if they had not done, and that the sting were still to come.This disconcerts them; as they have no resxources in themselves, and have but one set of jokes to live upon.

(Of course, you had better be a grandee of Chesterfield’s altitude before trying this one on your acquaintance.) Also important:

Falsehood and dissimulation are certainly to be found at courts; but where are they not to be found? Cottages have them, as well as courts; only with worse manners. A couple of neighbouring farmers in a village will contrive and practise as many tricks to overreach each other, at the next market, or to supplant each other in the favour of the squire, as any two courtiers can do to supplant each other in the favour of their prince.

And I can’t resist this sterling observation about scholars:

They are commonly twenty years old before they have spoken to anybody above their schoolmaster, and the fellows of their college. If they happen to have learning, it is only Greek and Latin, but not one word of modern history, or modern languages. Thus prepared, they go abroad, as they call it; but, in truth, they stay at home all that while; for being very awkward, confoundedly ashamed, and not speaking the languages, they go into no foreign company, at least none good; but dine and sup with one another only at the tavern.

¶ In Moby-Dick, I ran through two chapters with a common subject, viz ships meeting at sea. The first, “The Albatross,” is very short, curtailed as much by Ahab’s impatience for news of the White Whale as by any stylistic consideration; I should have suggested putting the chapter after the one that follows. “The Gam” describes how civilized whalers encounter one another. There are times when it seems that Melville can’t have read anything but the Bible and a heap of encyclopedia entries.

¶ Now, let me see. Who is “the captive” who commences the telling of the second “exemplary novel” in Don Quixote? It has been so long since I picked up the book that I don’t rightly recall. The naval Battle of Lepanto, in which Cervantes himself fought, is mentioned but not named. It is almost refreshing to hear of actual battles, fought by real soldiers without the help or hindrance of sorcerers.

¶ Barry Day’s Noël Coward: must we? If I had nothing else to do, I would pick apart the first part of Chapter 17, which to my ear is deaf to the tonal difference between matters of state and matters of state dinners. Several paragraphs after a thumbnail account of Dunkirk, and a glance at Roosevelt, “visibly moved by the epic adventures” in that evactuation — paragraph later, I say, we get an almost fatuous letter from Alexander Woollcott dated 4 January 1940, presented as if in temporal order.

¶ In “The Spirit-Spout,” the Pequod traverses the calm South Atlantic, where a ghostly silver spout, “like some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea,” teases the crew with the promise of prey, and passes the “Cape Tormentoso,” as Melville would rename the Cape of Good Hope. The chapter is a small masterpiece of uneasy beauty, notable for its varied impressions of unearthly quiet.

Close to our bows, strange forms in the water darted hither and thither before us; while thick in our rear flew the inscrutable sea-ravens. And every morning, perched on our stays, rows of these birds were seen; and in spite of our hootings, for a long time obstinately clung to the hemp, as htough they deemed our ship some drifting, uninhabited craft: a thing appointed to desolation, and therefore fit roosting-place for their homeless selves. And heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience; and the great mundane soul were in anguish and remorse for the long sin and suffering it had bred.

The hootings are silenced by their ineffectiveness.

Melville wraps all of this up with a picture, for once more grave than off-putting, of Ahab alone in his cabin, “the rain and half-melted sleet of the storm from which he had some time before emerged, still slowly dripping from the unremoved hat and coat.”

¶ Don Quixote discourses lovingly on the horrors of war, his anger spurred only by that most unchivalrous invention, artillery. It was modern artillery, of course, that put the old aristocratic cavalry out of business, setting its horsemen free to dream about the glories of hand-to-hand combat in the very romances that would drive our hero mad.

I grew up hearing the word “cavalry” as a synomym for the American military forces that subdued Native Americans in the old West. It had not occurred to me before today that the revival of medieval warfare made perfect sense when confronted by a Neolithic enemy.

¶ Now do we know who those dusky phantoms were, bobbing so gothically about the Pequod before her embarkation, latterly bumping so furtively within the hold. They’re Ahab’s own boat crew, enlisted at his own expense, and in contravention of the joint-owners’ ideas about a captain’s prudence. If what I’ve just written is incomprehensible, then I have captured the spirit of today’s reading.

More than an adventure story, Moby-Dick is a romance, stuffed with wishful dreams.

…but the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent — those insulated, immemorial, unalterable countries, which even in these modern days still preserve much of the ghostly aboriginalness of earth’s primal generations…

What utter balderdash! There are no such unchanging communities, especially in Asia, which has always hummed with commerce of every kind. Ishmael’s is the paedophilic dream of Western colonizers, always dreaming of yet-untouched lands.

¶ Chapter XXXVII of Don Quixote is the most convivial so far. There is no violence, but only a convivial dinner, after which our hero addresses his friends on the superiority of arms over letters — a venerable topic at the time.

Had I but world enough and time, I would study this chapter, in order to plumb its humanism. The effort made by Don Fernando, by the noble ladies, and, most of all, by Cervantes himself, to make a space in which Don Quixote can be comfortable and even honored is enormously heart-warming, and whatever need there might be to advance the story, the chapter is essentially a grand pause, a sigh of respect for the differences between men and women of good will.

Even so, as a man of his time, Cervantes cannot help marking a great distinction — an unbridgeable divide, really — between the gentlefolk and the peasants, among whom Sancho and the innkeeper figure as insensitive, unimaginative dolts (mentecato).

Slowly resuming the Morning Read, I confined myself to this season’s two principal books, Moby-Dick and Don Quixote this morning. Both of the day’s chapters pick up after exciting events. That I knew right away where I was with Don Quixote, but had completely forgotten the foggy squall in which Ishmael’s story nearly came to an end, gives some indication of my very different feelings about these books.

Creaky and improbable, Don Quixote is nevertheless always familiar, probably because it seems to have been well-known to everyone who wrote an opera in the Eighteenth Century.

When Cardenio heard the ay! that came from Dorotea when she fainted, he thought it had come from his Luscinda, and he rushed out of the room, terrified, and the first thing he saw was Don Fernando with his arms around Luscinda. Don Fernando also recognized Cardenio, and the three of them, Luscinda, Cardenio, and Dorotea, were left speechless with astonishment, barely knowing what had happened to them.

This is a moment for one of Mozart’s finely-tuned thunderclaps. So what if our hero makes no appearance in the chapter!

Melville’s sense of humor reminds me of long business dinners that I have sat through, laughing reluctantly at the would-be hilarities of ponderous humorists. “The Hyena” begins,

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own. … There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object

“Queequeg,” said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water; “Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?” Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand that such things did happen often.

It fails either for being not funny enough or for being funny at all; I can’t tell which.

We confine our attention today to the “epistolary novel” that takes up two-and-then-some chapters of Don Quixote, also known as the “Novela del curioso inpertinente,” or tale of the recklessly curious man. Because I was sure that I had read the story before, I was mad to find an earlier version; I remain unpersuaded that it might be Decameron, X, viii. As I continued reading Cervantes’s novella, however, the story became quite unfamiliar, and decidedly operatic. But I did note one thing: the happy ending of Boccaccio’s tale of switched husbands would probably have been intolerable in Golden Age Spain.

Boccaccio tells of two friends, one Greek and one Roman, from the time of Octavian (later Augustus), who are so close that, when Gisippus is betrothed to Sophronia, and his friend Titus actually falls in love with her, Gisippus hands her over, under cover of night, while continuing to be her daytime husband. This arrangement persists, with Sophronia none the wiser, until Titus is summoned back to Rome, and wants to take Sophronia with him. McWilliam’s note suggests that Boccaccio is indulging in over-the-top parody of rhetorical paeans to friendship; Titus’s arguments in defense of what he and Gisippus have done sound equally strange to his listeners and to us.

In Cervantes, Anselmo and Lotario are the friends. Anselmo’s delight in his new wife, Camila, takes a toxic turn when he becomes obsessed with testing her fidelity. He begs Lotario to try to seduce her. This is already very different from Boccaccio’s story in several important ways. First, and most objectionably, Anselmo continues to enjoy his marital rights. Second, Lotario, unlike Titus, is not interested in Camila until Anselmo begs his bizarre favor — which brings to mind, by the way, the shenanigans in Così fan tutte. The bulk of the tale is given over to the scrapes that Camila narrowly avoids once she has capitulated to Lotario. There is a wonderful scene involving a tapestry, behind which Anselmo hides, and overhears a carefully-rehearsed scene that is designed to put him off the scent. Of course, it all comes to grief in the end. Anselmo dies of wretchedness; Lotario is killed in the wars; and Camila withers away in a convent. “Éste fue el fin que tuvieron todos, nacido de un tan desatinado principio.”

Cervantes does not simply drop this novella — ostensibly discovered among some papers at the inn to which Quixote and his friends repair on the way to slay the giant who menaces the kingdom of Micomicón — into his principal narrative. He interrupts the story right before what turns out to be the dénouement.

Only a little more of the novel remained to be read when a distraught Sancho Panza rushed out of the garret where Don Quixote slept, shouting:

“Come, Señores, come quickly and help my master, who’s involved in the fiercest, most awful battle my eyes have ever seen!”

Sleepwalking, it seems, Quixote has mistaken some hanging wineskins for his giant, and, slashing at them wildly, has all but flooded to the garret. Dorotea calms everyone down, and the licentiate priest finishes reading the novella. The juxtaposition of sordid adultery and grotesque buffoonery must be intended to warn readers against taking potential opera plots as seriously as Quixote takes his knightly romances.

¶ In La Rochefoucauld, some sound advice that, for a change, is neither cynical nor depressing.

La félicité est dans le goût et non pas dans les choses; et c’est par avoir ce qu’on aime qu’on est heureux, et non par avoir ce que les autres trouvent aimable.

Happiness is rooted in taste, not in things; and having things that we like is what makes us happy, not having things that others like.

From this I draw the consoling thought that, while youth may be wasted on the young, who are so easily driven to distraction by wanting whatever it is that their friends want, happiness is not, because it is altogether unknown to them.

¶ Lord Chesterfield writes about history, perhaps too modestly suggesting that the “great man” school of thought ought rather to be re-imagined as one of the “highly placed ordinary man.”

Were most historical events traced up to their true causes, I fear we should not find them much more noble, nor disinterested, than Luther’s disappointed avarice; and therefore I look with some contempt upon those refining and sagacious historians, who ascribe all, even the most common events, to some deep political cause; whereas mankind is made up of inconsistencies, and no man acts invariably up to his predominant character.

About the impossibility of truly objective historical accounting, Chesterfield offers this pithy mot:

A man who has been concerned in a transaction, will not write it fairly; and a man who has not, cannot.

¶ In Moby-Dick, the Pequod encounters a school of whales, but perhaps too closely. Throughout the terrifying encounter, Ishmael never rues the day that he came aboard.

A short rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole crew were half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together; and the whale, merely grazed by the iron, escaped.

¶ Finishing the Squillions chapter on the Phoney War, which saw Coward, for the most part, in a smart apartment in the Place Vendôme maintaining a ready alert to receive such crumbs of useful intelligence that might come his way in the beau monde. On the evidence, versifying seems to have offered some relief for anxious but idle minds. We’re told that Coward delighted in re-reading these ditties in later years. One of them, “With All Best Wishes For a Merry Christmas 1939,” is strong and bitter, with iron remininiscences of tolling bells, about what we now call “organized religion.” The last six lines:

Now as our day of rejoicing begins
(Never mind Poland — Abandon the Finns)
Lift up your voices “Long Live Christianity!”
(Cruelty, sadism, blood and insanity)
So that the Word across carnage is hurled
God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world!

There is also this elegant passage from a letter to Jack Wilson, who wanted Coward to come to New York and get back into the theatre:

You can tell them for me that my life is unheroic in the extreme. I have a comfortable flat and a comfortable office (when the heat’s on). Compared with what many English actors are doing, who have far more to lose than I, I am on velvet. I fully realize that several thousand miles of ocean between America and Europe make it difficult for people over there to understand what we are feeling over here. I am sure they occasionally read the press notices of this particular production, but we all know how unreliable critics can be. This play hasn’t been very well directed so far and the first act, according to many, is too long and rather dull. I am afraid however that I cannot walk out on it. Please give them my love, show them this letter; thank them for thinking so well of my talent and reproach them, affectionately, for thinking so poorly of my character.

For today’s Morning Read, I thought I would finish off AN Wilson’s After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World. This is a very rich book, and if I were teaching history at the graduate level I would use it as the text for a discussion seminar, to keep doctoral candidates from getting lost in their theses. Every one of the thirty-seven chapters makes at least three or four controversial statements — or, rather, statements that were deemed controversial while they still conflicted with official propaganda. Example: the United States deployed nuclear weapons against Japan in order to shorten World War II.

Of course the overwhelming view of those who actually knew about the atomic bomb, and its effects upon human lives, was that its use was an obscenity. Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Szilard were all utterly opposed. It took tremendous lies, of a Goebbelesque scale of magnitude, to persuade two or three generations that instead of being acts of gratuitous mass murder, the bombardments of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were almost benign — first, because they avoided the supposed deaths of half a million American troops (the estimated numbers of casualties had America conquered Japan by an invasion of infantry — a pretext utterly ruled out by the brevity of the time lapse between the dropping of the two weapons); and second, because it was better the weapon should be in the hands of Good Guys rather than truly wicked people such as Hitler or Stalin. Both these views, enlivened with a dash of Bible Christianity, helped to put the President’s mind at rest as he meditated upon it all in his diary.

After the Victorians does not believe in Good Guys, only Better and Worse ones; and there is no guarantee that being a Better Guy today will rule out being much, much Worse tomorrow. (Note to anti-“relativists”: Mr Wilson is gifted with an abiding sense of right and wrong, but he understands the difficulty of knowing one from the other in the heat of crisis. If the book were boiled down to his account of Churchill’s career, it would become more complex than it is.) And because After the Victorian necessarily charts the decline of that fairly recent invention, the British Empire, and covers two world wars as well, the UK is only the principal among many players. The book features not one but two chapters devoted to the “Special Relationship” between Britain and the United States.

After the Victorians, however, quickly turned out to be a bad choice for the Morning Reads. The point of the Morning Read is to familiarize myself, somewhat remedially, with books that I haven’t read. These books are either classics — last year, I read the Aeneid, which I rather despised, and Decameron, which I loved (and which helped me to grasp, for the first time, the fundamentally humanist bent of this blog) — or collections (poems, letters). The encounter is not intended to be very serious, but rather to replicate, as far as possible, the wide range of the college survey course. “So that’s what Moby-Dick is like (and no wonder I avoided it!).” Mr Wilson’s book is utterly incompatible with the speed-dating aspect of the Morning Reads — and certainly with the speed-writing notes that I scribble down afterward.

At the same time, After the Victorians is a difficult book to read alone. As a history, it is not even a secondary source of information. The reader who actually learns things from the book is at a disadvantage to the reader who can attend, instead, to the author’s handling of his material, which is sharp and provocative. My idea of heaven would be a book club that met to discuss one chapter every two or three weeks. We would be in no hurry to finish.

An abbreviated read today, as I spent most of the morning trying to find the source, in the Decameron, of the “exemplary novel” of the curioso impertinente that takes up today’s and the next two chapters of Don Quixote. Can it be X, viii, the tale of Titus, Gisippus, and Sophronia? My morning reads would be but poor skimmings if I did not from time to time drop everything to make connections between what I’m reading and what I’ve read.

¶ There I go, sounding like Melville. Chapter 45, “The Affidavit,” seems aimed at adventure-starved boys. Yes — believe it or not! — sperm whales can be so individually distinctive that they’re recognized on successive voyages, so much so that some of them are given nicknames! Timor Jack! Don Miguel! Morquan! One begins looking for the one with the red nose. Here we have, as a parenthesis of sorts, the brief but rich account of what a certain sailor did with his time in the three years between harpooning the same whale twice:

… happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage to Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and penetrated far into the interior, where he traveled for a period of nearly two years, often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers, poisonous miasmas, with all the other common perils incident to wandering in the heart of unknown regions.

To someone like myself, for whom home life is far more adventurous than I should like it to be (“Notice: hot water will be turned off tomorrow between 10 AM and 4 PM”), Moby-Dick is a vast duney desert, and phrases like “poisonous miasmas” are the oases that sustain me.