Gotham Diary:
The Reading Life
2 June 2014
Kathleen and I spent most of yesterday out on the balcony, enjoying the perfect weather. Kathleen did a variety of things, but, aside from staring off into space — more precisely, the sky over Queens and Nassau Counties — all I did was read. When I gathered up the stack of books that I’d brought out to the balcony during the day, a glance at their spines made me wonder: What? Am I an undergraduate? I seemed to be reading for courses in literary translation (James’s Les Ambassadeurs; The Poem Itself, a 1989 collection of “modern” poems in their original French, German, Portuguese, Spanish or Italian, with transliterations in English designed more to illuminate the use of language than to render them as English verse), Mozart’s operas (Andrew Steptoe’s book about the Da Ponte collaboration, which I’ve owned since it came out, in 1988, but never cracked), and political thought (Between Past and Future, which I’m re-reading, and both The Prince and the Discourses by Machiavelli). I hadn’t let myself become tired of any of these books, but the reading level, so to speak, remained relatively high. It was gratifying to have been so comfortable spending hours at it.
It helped that I was in the mood for some hard work. On Saturday, I finished Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. Last Tuesday, I mentioned my surprised delight at this historical novel, set in London, mostly in 1875. I was only beginning the book then. Four days and nearly nine hundred pages later, having read nothing else, I was so immersed in the story that I half expected to blink and find myself walking along Chepstow Villas, complete with top hat. I was also exhausted by the novel’s strong moral and emotional riptides. Crimson Petal is something of a “sensation” novel, in the Wilkie Collins mold, with the important difference that it deals with its sensations with a frankness unthinkable in Victorian England. Literally unthinkable, I should say — not just impermissible. Another touch that betrays the literary sensibility of our times is the absence of clearly good and clearly wicked characters.
The problem with sensation novels is that you must never discuss them in front of people who haven’t read them, despite protests of Don’t worry! I’ll never read it! You can only hope that such protests will eventually be repudiated. So: zip it!
However….
I wonder what really became of Agnes? Did she get off that train and wander about London? Or did her tumor take its toll in the West Country?
William Rackham makes an interesting object lesson. Inclined always to feel put-upon, he is given to tiresomely self-pitying complaints about the needs and wants others whenever they interrupt his own. He is also the sort of man who gets lost in busyness, whether it is effortful or idle. He dreams of writing reviews for The Cornhill, but he could never sustain the thought or attention required, because he could never actually want to. The central character in the novel, a prostitute called Sugar, is the only person capable of inspiring his resolve, but as she grows in the course of her adventures, her interests shift, and she is no longer quite content to remain the power behind a throne. She also has the mad idea that she would make a fine live-in mistress. It’s too bad, because William is attractive only when he is attending to Sugar.
***
Because I want to look spruce for a night on the town (more about that later), I went out for a haircut this morning, and ran a few other errands. I stopped in two shops, hoping to find good old Miracle=Gro, the plant fertilizer, but no dice. Internet investigation, back at home, revealed that the Miracle-Gro belongs now to Scott, the lawn-care firm. I wonder if it is still any good! I also wonder if I ought to have bought a box from Amazon.
Amazon is certainly misbehaving in its greedy negotiations with Hachette, if only because it is punishing customers who want to buy Hachette books (Little, Brown, mostly) with needless delays and full prices. I wonder if Jeff Bezos has lost his mind, if this is the first of a string of ultimately self-destructive moves. I don’t prognosticate, however; what do I know? If there is an organized protest or boycott, I shall join it, and get books from some other source. What I really depend on Amazon for is books from Europe — of which I buy far too many. (Les Ambassadeurs is a recent acquisition.) I don’t need any new books.
***
In The Poem Itself, I discovered Miguel de Unamuno’s En un cementario de lugar castellano, said by its annotator, Juan Marichal, to be his most famous poem. An abandoned cemetery, marked only by a cross, lies alongside the road in a poor village in Castile. Its bleakness is mesmerizing, because Unamuno’s regard for the teachings of Christianity is so flat and unimpressed, as if to say, So what if it’s true? So what if there’s a heaven and a hell, and a Shepherd who assiduously counts His flock? So what? The dead lie in the graveyard, acorralados — corraled, but also, as Marichal points out, silenced.
In his book about the Da Ponte operas, Andrew Steptoe reminds us that Le nozze di Figaro was not the great success that everyone expected it to be, arguably because the composer and his librettist had shorn their production of all the alarming political speculations that dart through Beaumarchais’s play. Although there were many available German translations, the play itself could not be performed; it was expected that an operatic version, sung in Italian, would be confined to aristocratic circles. But those aristocrats wanted excitement, not an opera buffa — not on this occasion, anyway. They wanted scandal. “It was only after the glitter of the original attractions had faded that the music and humour of the work were more fully appreciated, and Le nozze di Figaro was judged on its own merits,” Steptoe writes. I’m not entirely persuaded. The opera must have been both difficult to perform and difficult to grasp. “Too many notes” — Joseph II’s legendary comment — is a good way of putting it. There is “too much” overlay of the sublime and the ridiculous; we take such deep but childish pleasure in seeing the Count being time and again outmaneuvered. Figaro, in 1786, was something new under the sun. Two years later, when it was revived in conjunction with the new (and rather poorly received) Don Giovanni, audiences knew what they were in for — and so did the musicians.
Daily Blague news update: Roman Roads.