Morning Read: I do not hint
¶ In La Rochefoucauld, variations on a theme: If we didn’t have faults, we wouldn’t take pleasure in noticing others’/If we weren’t proud, we wouldn’t complain about the pride of others. If such maxims still hold true in society, I’m unaware of it.
¶ Lord Chesterfield is rather chilly:
Let my experience supply your want of it, and clear your way, in the progress of your youth, of those thorns and briars which scratched and disfigured me in the course of mine. I do not, therefore, so much as hint to you, how absolutely dependent you are upon me; that you neither have, nor can have a shilling in the world but from me; and that, as I have no womanish weakness for your person, your merit must and will be the only measure of my kindness. I say, I do not hint these things to you, because I am convinced that you will act right, upon more noble and generous principles; I mean for the sake of doing right, and out of affection and gratitude to me.
This reminds me of a note from my father, typed by his secretary and received at Notre Dame: “You have come to the end of the road with your bookstore charge account.” But the damage was done: aside from an impecunious spell in Houston, where the then-new Public Library exerted an exotic appeal, I would really have to own books in order to read them. What would Chesterfield say? I have a good idea.
¶ Today, I decided to read several chapters of Moby-Dick, because reading about three chapters a week would run this round of the Morning Read well into next summer, and I am already as impatient to be done with Melville as I was with Virgil last year. It is all so gothic! Creepy Elijah, dropping hints like sawdust, quizzes Ishmael on the subject of — creak! — the as yet unseen Captain Ahab. Perhaps if I knew nothing of this novel I might be engaged by the following passage:
But nothing about that thing that happened to him off Cape Horn, long ago, when he lay like dead for three days and nights; nothing about that deadly skrimmage with the Spaniard afore the altar at Santa? — heard nothing about that, eh? Nothing about the silver calabash he spit into? And nothing about his losing his leg last voyage, according to the prophecy? Didn’t ye hear a word about them matters and something more, eh? No, I don’t think ye did; how could ye? Who knows it?
I beg for mercy.
¶ In Don Quixote, Cervantes waxes meta.
At this the bachelor rode off, and Don Quixote asked Sancho what had moved him to call him The Knight of the Sorrowful Face at that moment and at no other.
“I’ll tell you, responded Sancho. “I was looking at you for while in the light of the torch that unlucky man was carrying, and the truth is that your grace has the sorriest-looking face I’ve seen recently, and it must have been on account of your weariness after this battle, or the molars and teeth you’ve lost.”
“It is not that,” responded Don Quixote, “but rathter that the wise man whose task it will be to write the history of my deeds must have thought it would be a good idea if I took some appellative title as did the knights of the past: one was called The Knight of the Blazing Sword; another, The Knight of the Unicorn; yet another, The Knight of the Damsels; this one, The Knight of the Phoenix; that one, The Knight of the Griffon; the other, The Knight of Death; and by these names and insignias they were known all around the world. And so I say that the wise man I have already mentioned must have put on your tongue and in your thoughts the idea of calling me The Knight of the Sorrowful Face, which is what I plan to call myself from now on; and so that this name may be even more fitting, I resolve to have depicted on my shield, when there is time, a very sorrowful face.”
¶ In Squillions, the beginning of a long chapter devoted to Coward’s epistolary relationships to other writers. We begin with Barrie, move on through Maugham, and stop at Ferber. “Although Ferber’s novels were not to Noël’s personal taste…” — you’d never know that from his effusive letters of praise.
I tremble to think what an enormous amount of research you had to do to absorb all that detail and I am lost in admiration because not once, with all the detail, does the story and the narrative quality falter. There is no dullness anywhere in the whole long book; it moves along with speed and your particular brand of urgency from the first page to the last.”
This of Ice Palace, Ferber’s book about Alaska.
¶ In After the Edwardians, the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Followed by the no more lucrative BEE of 1925. After that, the stadium was sold off. I’d like to see the “unforgettable newsreel of Queen Mary riding” the amusement-park railway.