¶ This morning’s chapter of After the Edwardians, “Revolutions, dispenses with Russia and the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in short order, the better to move on to the scientific upheavals that, gathering force as the Nineteenth Century ended, climaxed with the theoretical bang of Einstein’s celebrated theories of relativity on the eve of the Great War. (The audible bang would conclude the next war.)

It was a very long time before the implications of such ideas reached the public imagination, and could be adapted, with such terrifying consequence, for military or political purpose. But by the end of the First World War, scientists who had been away to fight returned to their laboratories to discover that they were quite literally in a different universe.

Wilson gets in a quick but not very sly poke at E M Forster, whose novels “had their unaccountable mid-twentieth-century vogue.” (more…)

¶ In After the Edwardians, A N Wilson considers the Great War as an expression of the lust for destruction that colored the thinking of the Vorticists and the Futurists. He quotes the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, killed at Neuville Saint Vaast in 1915, aged 23:

The war is a great remedy.

In the individual it kills arrogance, self-esteem, pride. It takes away from the masses numbers upon numbers of unimportant units, whose economic activities become noxious as the recent trade crises have shown us.

When artists are misanthropes, a state of emergency cannot be far off. (more…)

Part of the wicked fun of Ed Park’s Personal Days is finding out the significance of the crow on the keypad.

¶ A N Wilson looks at World War I from an Asian perspective in today’s chapter — by which he means the importance, to English leaders at the time, of blunting German access to the vicinity of India. The infamous Gallipoli campaign, from the sponsorship of which it was long thought that Churchill would never recover, appears not to have been a bad idea, but a muddled one. At chapter’s end, an intriguing appreciation of T E Lawrence.

Many read Seven Pillars of Wisdom as fraudulent historical text, without realizing that it is intended to be read, as Malory, Homer or the Bible are intended to be read, as a mythological compendium whose stories interpret, as they describe, the world. …

One of the reasons Seven Pillars has such an hypnotic effect on the reader is precisely its lack of realism.

(more…)

¶ From After the Edwardians, I learn that nobody referred to the Titanic as “unsinkable” (without the qualifier “practically,” that is) until after she sank. We must also not overlook the Duchess of Cambridge’s capsule history of the Nineteenth Century:

Alas! All the dearest countries that my heart loved best have been stolen (I can’t give it another name)… Hanover, which is the cradle of our English family, Hesse is mine and Nassau was my dear own mother’s; so you may judge of my feelings at the moment; that is the moment of Germany becoming one nation.

The Duchess was Queen Mary’s grandmother. (more…)

The combination of my overindulgence and the Book Review’s undercommitment made this week’s task an unusually unpleasant slog, but I got through it at last.

I appear to have celebrated the beginning of the new season with a bibulous lunch, yesterday, shoving real work aside on the very day, after a long weekend, when I ought to have made a point of taking it up. I had thoughts of beginning with Rochefoucauld or Chesterfield, but it is all I can do to continue with the books that I’ve already started reading. (more…)

In case you’re not interested in reading about this nonpareil memoir by Miranda Seymour, you can jump to the happy ending: she owns the joint now, and will be happy to rent Thrumpton Hall to you — for weddings, meetings, or even a short family visit.

When I picked up Dostoevsky’s Demons, in the recent, highly-regarded translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, my attitude was one of distant curiosity. I was going to re-read a celebrated Nineteenth-Century novel in the context of Nineteenth-Century novels.

This attitude persisted throughout the first part of the novel, a sequence of vaguely ridiculous and embarrassing scenes pocked with opaque, inconsequent backchat. Then I turned the page, and began the first of the two chapters entitled “Night,” and everything changed. I was as if gripped by a great gothic. 

The affable but uncertain Nikolai Vsevolodovich is alone in his  study. “The sides and corners of this big room remained in shadow. His look was pensive and concentrated, not altogether at ease; his face was tired and had grown somewhat thin.” Presently Pyotr Stepanovich appears. We don’t yet know which one of these men is the ultimate string-puller, which one more committed to the nameless society that appears to be committed to the violent overthrow of Russian affairs. When Pyotr Stepanovich leaves, he is supposed to pay a visit to Nikolai Vsevolodovich’s formidable mother, Varvara Petrovna, but he doesn’t. The son falls asleep in his chair.

Soon her became totally oblivious. Varvara Petrovna, who had worn herself out with cares during those days, could not restrain herself, and after Pyotr Stepanovich, who had promised to stop and see her, left without keeping his promise, she herself ventured to visit Nicolas, though it was not her appointed time. She kept imagining: what if he were finally to say something definite? Softly, as before, she knocked on the door and, again receiving no reply, opened it herself. Seeing Nicolas sitting there somehow too motionlessly, she cautiously approached the sofa, her heart pounding. She was as if struck that he had fallen asleep so quickly and that he could sleep like that, sitting so straight and so motionlessly; even his breathing was almost imperceptible. His face was pale and stern, but as if quite frozen, motionless; his eyebrows were slightly knitted and frowning; he decidedly resembled an inanimate wax figure. She stood over him for three minutes or so, scarcely breathing, and was suddenly overcome with fear; she went out on tiptoe, paused in the doorway, hastily made a cross over him, and withdrew unnoticed, with a new heavy feeling, and a new anguish.

He slept for a long time, more than an hour, still in the same torpor; not a muscle in his face moved, not the slightest movement appeared in his whole body; his eyebrows remained as sternly knitted. If Varvara Petrovna had stayed another three minutes, she would certainly have been unable to bear the oppressive feeling of this lethargic motionlessness and would have wakened him. But suddenly he opened his eyes himself and, still without stirring, sat for another ten minutes as if peering persistently and curiously at some startling object in the corner of the room, though there was nothing there either new or unusual.

And this is just the beginning of the dark and stormy night.

¶ You may have noticed that Melville’s name never comes up when the great funny writers of the past are spoken of. It’s not, perhaps, from want of trying on the writer’s part.

However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, from let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

The language of the Standard Version — or whatever version of Scripture in which New Englanders marinated themselves — doesn’t appear to have been cut out for capers. (more…)

A pattern seems to be developing. I begin the Morning Read with Moby-Dick. Then I put Melville down and pick up Cervantes, looking forward to the breath of sanity. (more…)

Since writing about Joseph O’Neill’s first novel, I’ve had a chance to discuss it with the author (this is the life!), and nothing that he told me in our brief exchange prompted me to alter my remarks.

Mr O’Neill did agree with me that the dust jacket, designed by Chip Kidd way back when, when only designers knew who Chip Kidd was, and the author photograph by Nigel Parry, ditto (mutatis mutandis), is probably rather valuable.

¶ In Moby-Dick, a long evening at the Spouter Inn, culminating in one of the most peculiar meetings in literature: pretending to be asleep, Ishmael watches Queequeg disrobe and, in the process, reveal his startling tattoos. Something of a noble savage, Queequeg is quick to purge his space of the interloping Ishmael, but quick, too, to stand down when pacified by the landlord. (more…)

A memorable issue. Only one Maybe, but lots of Noes.

¶ In Moby-Dick, it is a “matter of concernment” for Ishmael to find cheap lodgings in New Bedford. The simple thing would be to sign on with a whaler from that port, but Ishmael prefers significance to simplicity, and is determined to wait for the Nantucket packet so that he can sail from “the Tyre of this Carthage.”

Excuse me, but is this the fabled New World? Or did I miss a stop? Chapter 2 is so loaded with classical and Biblical allusions — not to mention a bogus “black letter” writer of whose work Ishmael claims to have the only copy (a ridiculous pretension in the Gutenberg Age) — that Ishmael seems almost as demented by his reading as Don Quixote. (more…)

Today, we resume the Morning Read in a fashion appropriate to the season: late. We confess, in fact, that we almost forgot all about it. We were nagged by the question that there was something that we were supposed to remember, but it was not until we glanced at the by now hypnotically familiar pile of books on the footstool that we remembered. Ah! Don Quixote. Moby-Dick.

Having avoided reading both of these books for so many years — not just gotten out of having to read them but actually kept them at a distance — I’m not surprised by the appeal of tackling them both together. Salt and pepper, what? (more…)

What happens when you mix the stodgy, speculative popular-academic history of some hitherto dark corner of pop culture and its antecedents, on the one hand, and the prosy excitements of the old-fashioned dime novel on the other? The James Boys, that’s what. You knew that William and Henry were the older brothers of Jesse and Frank, right?

With a muted thunderclap, Walter Kirn’s review (in today’s issue of The New York Times Book Review) of James Wood’s new book (How Fiction Works) announces the terms of engagement between two literary camps that, until recently, have not had to recognize one another in public. So far, they’ve been able to get away with snubbing — ignoring — one another. Only recently have they taken to showing up at the same parties, or at least on the same coffee tables.

Surely no two of this country’s periodicals have shared a readership for longer than The New Yorker and the Book Review; but until this decade their differences were blurry, kept politely out of focus. Now, perhaps goaded by the frightening challenges that big-time media face in the age of the Blogosphere, the parties are slipping off their gloves. Mr Kirn’s piece crystallizes a long-settling distinction: where The New Yorker (Mr Wood’s outlet) argues for coherence, the Book Review (and, arguably, the newspaper behind it) plumps for fashion. That these alliances — the glossy, Condé-Nast-owned magazine’s with the long view and the long-lasting; the only-lately Painted Lady’s with what Mr Kirn so wonderfully calls “a mess, a mystery or a miracle” — are exactly the opposite of what might have been expected adds exactly the Jovial note that was wanted. (more…)

Aside from a great cover story (reviewing Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic, this week’s Book Review is unusually poor. Two pretty stinky books, by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Olen Butler, find themselves together under “No.” Even famous writers have to write good books to merit coverage.

I don’t know what it is, but NYRB’s series of reprinted novels hits me with all the authority of a magisterial curriculum: you must be prepared to defend to the death your decision not to read these books.

Notwithstanding all the intimidation, I’m glad to have read Howard Sturgis’s Belchamber.