Morning Read: The AmadÃs Effect
¶ In Moby-Dick, Stubb’s dream of Ahab’s kick — a lot of Shakespearean hoo-ha if you ask me. “But mum; he comes this way. Coming up: “Cetology,” which just may constitute the entirety of a Morning Read next week.
¶ You’ve got to love Cervantes. When the Ragged One, Cardenio, prefaces his tale with the warning that he won’t be able to finish it if he is interrupted, and Don Quixote actually remembers what happened with Sancho’s endless tale a few chapters earlier, you still know that our hero won’t be able to keep his mouth shut. In the middle of Cardenio’s tale, which flows along like something out of the Decameron, although at a more leisurely pace than Boccaccio would allow, the mention of AmadÃs of Gaul is all it takes to set Quixote yapping. “… but when I hear things having to do with chivalry and knights errant, I can no more not talk of them than the rays of the sun can fail to warm or those of the moon to dampen.” Cardenio, however, sinks into a fit, and the errant pastoral gives way to blows.
This may be the first chapter that I have thoroughly enjoyed. Cervantes had me with the following bit of Quixotic foolishness (which so astonishes the man to whom it is addressed that he cannot reply):
If your misfortune were one that had all doors closed to any sort of consolation, I intended to help you weep and lament to the best of my ability, for it is still a consolation in affliction to find someone who mourns with you.
¶ In Squillions, a long chapter about Coward and the Lunts, for whom he wrote, and with whom he scored a hit on the stage with, Design For Living. A rather naughty letter to Gladys Calthrop, complaining of a “Beauty Lover” houseguest, is signed, “Hasta la farting vista.”
¶ I ought not to have been surprised by A N Wilson’s chapter on the abdication of Edward VIII, but I was, rather, because like everyone else I’ve learned to regard the late Duke of Windsor as a crypto-Nazi who would have allied England to Hitler’s Reich. Wilson’s completely revisionist view makes for very bracing reading. He cogently asks why, if this were at all likely, Edward would have been supported by the likes of Churchill, Cooper, and Wedgwood, all of whom were by 1936 ardent foes of the Führer and his works.
Have you ever wondered how somebody who looked like Hitler could have commanded Germany? I have, always. But not until today have I heard of anyone else’s surprise. Wilson quotes the snobbish diarist, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen.
“… so sad, so utterly insignificant, so basically misbegotten is this countenance that only thirty years ago, in the darkest days of Wilhelmism, such a face of an official would have been impossible. Appearing in a chair of a minister, an apparition with a face like this would have been disobeyed as soon as its mouth spoke ann order — and not merely by the higher officials in the ministry: no, by the doorman, by the cleaning women!”
Wilson says that Reck understood “popular culture” to be at the root of the Nazis’ appeal, but he stops short of expressing a connection, implicit throughout this chapter, between the impact of popular culture and a tolerance for the thuggery and gangsterim that has blotted the reactionary countenance ever since World War I.