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.

¶ Matins: Musing on the Times’ ten best books of 2008 — of which I’ve read only one.

¶ Sext: Lance Arthur has decided to come out of the closet — as an atheist. This means more than just writing about his lack of faith in his (latest) blog, Just Write.

 ¶ Nones: And we thought it was just us… Every now and then, somebody writes about the fact that almost all advertised watches are set at (roughly) 10:10. The other day, it was Andrew Adam Newman, at the Times. (For Timex, it’s 10:09:36; at Rolex, it’s 10:10:31.) Now Kathleen and I scan the ads for watches that are set at odd times. (via kottke.org)

 ¶ Vespers: Two new biographies of Samuel Johnson occasion one of Adam Gopnik’s invaluable essays.

The worst of literary faults for him is, exactly, tediousness. “We read Milton for instruction, retire harassed and over-burdened, and look elsewhere for recreation; we desert our master and seek for companions.” (His firmest statement on art was that it should be “harmless pleasure.” He knew it would shock in its Philistinism, but he stood by it.) Johnson was certainly “serious” about literature, but he thought that writing was serious as conversation is serious, an occasion for wit and argument, not as sex and sermons are serious, a repository of fears and hungers.

(more…)

When I started reviewing the reviews in the Book Review, in 2005, its contents did not appear online until the publication date. Unaware that this policy had changed, I read most of this week’s reviews thinking that they were leftovers from last week’s edition, which I missed in print, being on vacation.

Which is another way of saying that I wasn’t paying attention last weekend. That’s what vacations are for, isn’t it? And yet I feel curiously guilty. What about last week’s Book Review?

From the beginning of the third and final part of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland:

But nobody here holds on to such notions for very long. The rain soon becomes emblematic. The double-deckers lose their elephants’ charm. London is what it is. In spite of a fresh emphasis on architecture and an endless influx of can-do Polish plumbers, in spite, too, of the Manhattanish importance lately attached to coffee and sushi and farmers’ markets, in spite even of the disturbance of 7/7 — a frightening but not a disorienting occurrence, it turns out — Londoners remain in the business of rowing their boats gently down the stream. Unchanged, accordingly, is the general down-the-hatch, who-are-we-fooling lightheartedness that’s aimed at shrinking the significance of our attainments and our doom, and contributes, I’ve speculated, to the bizarrely premature crystallization of lives here, where men and women past the age of forty, in some cases even the age of thirty, may easily be regarded as over the hill and entitled to an essentially retrospective idea of themselves; whereas in New York selfhood’s hill always seemed to lie ahead and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks: that you might have no climbing boots on hand was beside the point. As to what this point actually was, I can only say that it involved wistfulness. An example: one lunchtime, Cardozo, mulling over popping the question to his Worcestershire girlfriend, points out a beautiful woman in the street. “I’ll no longer be able to go up to her and ask her out,” he says, sounding dazed. Plainly the logical response is to inquire of Cardozo exactly when was the last time (a) he asked out a girl on the street, and (b) she said yes, and (c) he and she went on to greater things; and in this way bring home to him that he’s being a dummy. I say no such thing, however. We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one’s life?

I’ve copied out the first couple of sentences for the sake of coherence; the nugget of the passage begins with “As to what this point actually was…” And it’s the last line that sticks and sticks.

The last line sticks so well (the second time around, at least) that it impresses me as the key line in all of Netherland: a novel, I now see, of wistfulness. That’s slight-sounding, I know. Surely wistfulness is one of the more disposable states of mind. Or it was, until Joseph O’Neill argued, in the way of literary argument, that much of life simply doesn’t make any sense without an idea of wistfulness, without a sense of its pervasiveness. At first, I thought that the wistfulness was a masculine thing, but that’s just the accident of Cardozo’s sentimental randiness.

Why is wistfulness a “respectable, serious condition”? My sense is that the novel answers the question, but I reserve defense of the proposition for a later date. I suspect that it has something to do with the sheer fecundity of the cornucopia beneath which privileged men and women of the West live, trying to preserve a durable identity from its ceaseless onslaught of novelty, opportunity and possibility — trying to live, in other words, with difficult facts: that they will know most of the people whom they encounter in life, necessarily, for a little while only, and no more; that yesterday’s vital preoccupations have become today’s alien recollections.

Over the weekend, I re-read Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. One of the great books of the year (at the very least), Netherland was too big and beautiful a fish to catch with only one reading, and for months I despaired of finding the time to sit down quietly and read it again. Then I remembered: St Croix at Thanksgiving! And in the event the confluence of heavenly weather and even more heavenly prose has been a pleasure the likes of which I haven’t had since I re-read Emma, for the sixth time, in Maine, in 1996.

What follows is a sketch of the opening paragraphs of the Portico page to come. If you haven’t read Netherland already, don’t wait to run out and get a copy!

(more…)

I’ve made it a point, this vacation, to get up early in the morning and head to breakfast. It’s very simple: I want to be tired when it’s time to go to bed, without having had a lot of wine to drink. So I’ve been getting up before seven, or shortly thereafter, and climbing the hill in hopes of snagging a table with a view like the one above, which I enjoyed for several hours this morning. On my way out of the room, Kathleen promised to join me, “in a while.” It’s true that, when I finally called the room to see how she was doing, she answered immediately and was obviously awake. She crested the hill about fifteen minutes later.

Between finishing my own breakfast and Kathleen’s arrival, I finished reading Diane Johnson’s Lulu in Marrakech, a novel as important as any that she has written and particularly important reading right now, when Americans are thinking about getting their groove back in the world. It’s largely about the waste of American intelligence — particularly the intelligence of women. I didn’t have much left to read; I’d had to put the novel down in the middle of the 42nd chapter — out of 45 — shortly after eleven last night. (See? My plan is working.) Then I got out my notebook.

I do not plan to write up Lulu while on vacation, but I do intend to take notes that are good enough to allow me to write it up later without feeling that I have to reread it. This is something that I ought to have gotten into the habit of doing a long time ago. In the summer of 2007, I read about ten books without either taking notes or writing them up promptly, and now they’re as good as unread. (I’m particularly distressed about Vikram Chandra’s amazing Sacred Games — which I wouldn’t mind re-reading if re-reading weren’t so very, very expensive in terms of time.) This summer, four books slipped by, two of them novels of the first rank: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Rachel Kushner’s Telex From Cuba. In fairness, it wasn’t just poor note-taking skills that held me back. The power of both novels seemed to derive from something concealed beneath their smoothly engaging surfaces. Both were exciting, but the excitement struck me as a kind of sleight-of-hand. I brought both with me to St Croix, and I hope to start re-reading them tomorrow or Monday. In addition to taking notes as I read, I’ll try hard to summarize my immediate impressions right afterward.

Yes, it’s obviously the thing to do, and I point out my not having done it as a sort of incidental indictment: there are things that I don’t do very well, usually for the reason that, until I began keeping Portico, I didn’t need to do them at all. Oh, I ought to have mastered these skills when I was in school, but — school! As I’ve aged, I’ve grown less thick-headed. When I was young, I could not learn a thing that I wasn’t ready to learn: a vicious circle if there ever was one. Like the people who say, “What do I need a computer for? I get along perfectly well without one!”

As I say, the waste of American intelligence. It’s got to be something in the water.

Talk about a book that needs no review! If George, Being George is anything like the oral biographies that George Plimpton produced, it will be impossible to put down. The sense of gossip becoming myth right before your eyes is electrifying. Graydon Carter is the exactly-right reviewer.

Also of interest is David Orr’s thoughtful essay on the career of Ted Hughes, as reflected in his very readable Letters.

¶ Lucky George.

A not-too-bad issue. Maybe it seems that way because I’m no longer classifying reviews. No more colors; no more Yeses and Maybes and Noes. Already I’m wondering why I went to the bother. Clearly there was something I had to work my way through on some sort of learning curve, but what?

This book is about a year old, but it’s never too late for a good, fun read, and, besides, nobody recommended it to me. Random excerpt:

When I was growing up, Mother told me that in her day, Texas sororities lumped potential pledges into two categories: “Some girls are flowers,” Mother repeated, with a cruel, cold Darwinian shrug, “and others are pots.” She’d given this to me like a coat, so I could smugly wrap myself in the comfort of being a flower at Beckendorf Junior High, while my classmates perforated me for being a fairy.”

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.

It is difficult not to hope that there will be a third book, to follow Home and, before it, Gilead. The two that we have are remarkable books about America, stirring meditations on sin and grace in a promised land.

It took a nerve to think that I might have something to say about Home.

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.

Not only better than most, this week’s issue is also shorter!

Cute picture of Nathaniel Snerpus,* no?

*Be patient with the commercial announcement.

¶ What bogs down Moby-Dick for me — and what made it so popular seventy-odd years ago, I expect — is the fearlessness with which Melville wades into metaphysical speculation. No vicarage teas here! Just manly abstractions — which I, unfortunately, find altogether gaseous. I had to read the following four times just to see what mighty point Melville was laboring to make.

For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the white whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab’s case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnabulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

The renown of this charmless book surprises me — unless, as is often the case among self-consciously “serious” men, that charmlessness is the charm. (more…)

¶ In Moby-Dick, Melville/Ishmael attempts to explain the horror of “whiteness,” and fails utterly. Despite two footnotes, endless anecdotes, and an appeal to the subtlety of the imagination, the only thing that Melville can put any weight on is “the instinct of the knowledge of demonism in the world.” This assertion appears in a description of equine fearfulness that must bring a smiling, if not smirking, recollection of Plato’s Meno to mind. In connection with shudders about the white shark, he traces a connection, which my Larousse Étymologie dismisses as “fantaisiste,” between requin (shark) and requiem. (It would seem that Melville at least picked this up from some French armchair etymologists.) Chapter 42 is stuffed with the most garrulous nonsense, all pedantry and no horror. (more…)

Medici Money is the kind of book that didn’t exist when I went to school. Histories in those days were either ponderous or pop. Monographs were too scholarly for lay readers. Some things, I’m happy to say, have changed for the better.

Tim Parks has his own approach to Renaissance government and finance, and he sees Renaissance art as — contemporaneously, not for us — so much whiting on the sepulchre. He also explains how things worked, when fast minds had to do without fast technology. His wrong-end-of-the-telescope view could not be handier. Don’t miss it!

¶ To say that Lord Chesterfield advises against laughter is severe understatement.

Having mentioned laughing, I must particularly warn you against it: and I could heartily wish that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh while you live. … In my mind there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter. True wit, or sense, never yet made anybody laugh; they are above it: they show the mind, and give a cheerfulness to the countenance. … I am neither of a melancholy nor a cyunical disposition, and am as willing and as apt to be pleased as anybody; butr I am sure that since I have had the full use of my reason, nobody has ever heard me laugh.

Hopelessly Irish, perhaps, I must confess that nothing draws laughter out of me more surely or inevitably than wit and sense. One might as well never weep. (more…)

Jules Feiffer’s drawing shows how I feel before I have my weekly look at the Book Review. “Do I have to?”