Morning Read: Whiteness
¶ 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.
¶ Chapter XXXI of Don Quixote charms us with a bit of offstage comedy that brings to mind the scene in Tartuffe that Madame Pernelle punctuates with “Le pauvre homme!” When Sancho describes his (imaginary) meeting with Dulcinea, about whom the only thing he knows is that she is a peasant, Don Quixote twists every detail against its grain in order to create the portrait of a great and gracious lady. Only once does Quixote pass: on the point of Dulcinea’s stink. The chapter is almost entirely given over to dialogue and would work well on the stage. At the end, the poor peasant boy from Chapter IV reappears, only to run off after saying,
“For the love of God, Señor Knight Errant, if you ever run into me again, even if you see them chopping me to pieces, don’t help me and don’t come to my aid, but leave me alone with my misfortune; no matter how bad it is, it won’t be worse than what will happen to me when I’m helped by your grace, and may God curse you and all the knights errant ever born in this world.”
“…and it was necessary for the others to be very careful not to laugh so as not to mortify him [Quixote] further.”
¶ In Squillions, the demented nature of Barry Day’s narrative means that we don’t hear anything about the background of Bea Lillie, Lady Peel, arguably the one entertainer who could have more fun with Coward’s songs than Coward himself. Because she seems not to have written any letters, at least so far, there is no toehold for explaining her career. So she looms like a fog through which painstakingly-identified ocean liners steam — in other words, rather less definitely than war looms in these pages. We learn, if we had not figured it out already, that Coward was crazy about Hawaii.
¶ In After the Victorians, “The Special Relationship II,” in which Churchill loses control of the war to Roosevelt and Stalin, largely because Roosevelt is footing Churchill’s bills. AN Wilson is acute:
Churchill owed his very existence on this planet to the widespread aristocratic belief that when an Englishman was living beyond his means, the simplest solution to his liquidity problems was to marry an American. As an extravagant young subaltern in the 4th Hussars, he had shamelessly spent more than his income. When his army pay and his allowance ran out, he would write his American mother for more. The habit of mind remained with him, as did his optimistic belief that it would always be possible to increase income rather than reduce spending. His personal life had been conducted on that basis since his days as a young Victorian spendthrift, and it was the way he chose to conduct the war economy. His earliest statement as Prime Minister had looked forward to the moment when “the new world, with all its power and might steps forth to the liberation of the old.” He could have added, with all its dollars, just as when in his famous imprecation to the Americans he asked for the tools, he really meant “Give us the money and we’ll finish the job.” Not everyone in the US Treasury saw the exchange in wquite such one-sided terms.
It is very interesting reading, and more inappropriate than usual for this morning exercise.
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