tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323025212024-03-19T00:21:41.680-07:00stevereadsWhat I read and whyUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger912125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-3995304946374009462011-11-30T12:27:00.000-08:002023-08-19T12:45:24.729-07:00Andrew Marvell!<br /><br />Our book today - the last in our batch of what turned out to be mostly very superannuated musty old biographies cleared out of church basements in Iowa (ah, the wonders of <em>Stevereads</em>) - is <em>Andrew Marvell</em>, a slim, sparkling 1929 volume by the great Vita Sackville-West. It was supposed to be the first volume in a new series called, somewhat unfortunately, "The Poets on the Poets," although I'm not sure the series ever really took off, poets being so notoriously awful about deadlines. The first curiosity of the thing today is the governing identification of Sackville-West as a poet at all: it would have been routine in her own day, but to the very limited extent she's known to the common reader today, it's as a <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2011/09/all-passion-spent/">novelist</a> or even a <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2008/06/knole-the-sackvilles/">biographer of her ancestral home</a>, not as a poet.<br /><br />Still, 90 years ago she was well enough known to kick off this "The Poets on the Poets" series (as far as I know, it petered out almost immediately), and she chose to write a very slim volume on Marvell by concentrating almost exclusively on reading through his poems rather than retailing the facts of his life and times. She states up front that she won't be indulging in more than a scraping of biography, intent instead on concentrating on the poems. In a brochure for next summer's series of seminars at the National Humanities Center, we're told: "Scholarship over the last fifteen years has made it plain that Andrew Marvell's poetry cannot be adequately studied apart from his life" - and it's safe to say Sackville-West knew that even in her own day (one of her cited sources, a life of Marvell by the great Edwardian critic Augustine Birrell, specifically makes that same National Humanities Center claim). Her pose of aesthetic purity - just the poems, not the tawdry life - is just that: a pose, an old and trusty trick to let a freelancer off the hook of doing a load of extra research. And at least she's eloquent about it:<br /><blockquote>The apparent facts of a man's life are rarely absolute, even to himself; he draws the strokes, one by one, and is surprised at the final design of the picture. What hope is there, then, for the reconstruction of the biographer? It is no reconstruction that he can hope for, but merely interpretation - a rather more well-intentioned form of fiction.</blockquote><br />The reader - if this thin volume had any readers anymore, which I doubt - can more readily tolerate such stuff because a) it speeds us to Sackville-West's thoughts on the poetry, and b) she doesn't really ignore biography anyway - some of her comments are almost admonishing in their personal tone:<br /><blockquote>Two strange reflections her suggest themselves. The first, that Marvell should never have published any of these poems - did he not know how good they were? The second - which appears almost to grow out of the first - that so true a poet should have abandoned the writing of poetry and turned, as the old lady said, to writing sense instead. From first to last, it was certainly a cavalier way of treating so pretty a muse. Marvell's muse, indeed, if her spirit survives, has much to complain of. Not only did Marvell himself behave towards her with the utmost ingratitude and nonchalance, but posterity for well over a century did very little better.</blockquote><br />Like many critics before her, Sackville-West locates the bulk of Marvell's first-rate poetry early in his life, during the usurpation of Oliver Cromwell, dismissing most of the later work and implying that most work of <em>all</em> poets should be likewise dismissed:<br /><blockquote>Poets vary, but most are more prolific than they should be; less fastidious than they might be, that is to say, in the chosen residue of their work that they expose to the judgment of the world. (Yes fecundity in itself is often a measure of a poet's greatness, provided the quality maintain a sufficient, even though intermittent, standard; and no poet, as experience proves, can be expected to act as his own editor. Wordsworth and Tennyson, not to mention Swinburne, were their own worst enemies.) Time and posterity, fortunately, act as sieves, and in the end it is often for a few pages of print, at most, that a poet is remembered; a few moments distilled out of all the years of his life.</blockquote><br />It's hard not to read a note of personal experience into lines like those, but then, <em>Andrew Marvell</em> is a very personal essay, an informal and somewhat unstructured reflection of one writer on another - with perhaps more attendant ironies than Sackville-West herself ever saw. She tsk-tsks at how long it took the literary world to realize the worth of Marvell's work - and her own work is waiting for exactly that kind of realization. And we won't even hold our breath for poor Birrell.<br /><br />(One last thing: my own much-battered copy of this particular book didn't come from a church basement in Iowa - it was a gift from an old friend, who formally bestowed it on me only after he noticed that I'd pinched it from his shelves without his knowledge)<br /><br /> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com86tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-77032942205456915182011-11-28T14:45:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:29.386-08:00Coke of Norfolk and His Friends!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives6.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4156" title="nine lives" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives6-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a><br/><br/>Our book today is a hefty two-volume life of the 1st Earl of Leicester (of Holkham, that is), Thomas <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/coke-2-vol.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4193" title="coke 2 vol" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/coke-2-vol-172x300.jpg" alt="" width="172" height="300" /></a>William Coke by that unsinkable Edwardian chronicler of the better sort, A.M.W. Stirling. She wrote these two volumes from 1908 to 1912, taking full advantage of her first-name familiarity (in this case, she was the great-granddaughter of her subject) with the top tiers of England's landed gentry, to whom <em>Coke of Norfolk and His Friends</em> is essentially one enormous love-letter. Anna Marie Wilhemina Stirling was fond of country houses and gossip and pearls, a living concordance of stereotypes who was nonetheless an entirely real and surprisingly wonderful person. She wrote earnest letters, sought through drafty country house archives, questioned old servants and farm hands all around Norwich, and in the end she produced these two fat volumes about a man described without embarrassment as "the indefatigable and disinterested friend of mankind."<br/><br/>Coke was a hale, outspoken kinsman of a tight-fisted earl whose wastrel son is viewed with a fishy eye by Stirling, who's not that much keener on the vain, vapid young woman who became that lecherous lord's bride:<br/><blockquote>Alas for the misguided Duchess! Lady Mary went to the altar playing the part of a weeping reluctant bride, but apparently forgot to pronounce her refusal to marry the man she professed to loathe, and so passed from imaginary into actual persecution. Still with the airs of a tragedy queen, she prepared to submit to the hated caresses of her husband; but Lord Coke promptly informed her that she had little to fear from his affection, and leaving her upon her wedding day, openly rejoined his boon companions, whom he regaled with a graphic description of the incident, making exceedingly merry over the airs of the deserted lady.</blockquote><br/>As Stirling puts it (without the slightest shred of first-hand experience), "Married life begun under such conditions was not likely to be harmonious."<br/><br/>In rapid succession, both old kinsman and young cousin died, and then Coke's mild-mannered father followed them, leaving Thomas William in possession of vast properties. Coke himself led the normal life of the Georgian landed gentry. He rode to hounds, he fowled, he tramped <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/thomas-william-coke-in-fancy-dress.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4192" title="thomas william coke in fancy dress" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/thomas-william-coke-in-fancy-dress-216x300.jpg" alt="" width="216" height="300" /></a>every inch of his family estates, and while he was still a strapping, handsome young man he did the Grand Tour in high style, bringing along valets, dogs, friends, and a stack of promissory notes for every major banking concern along the way. He's entirely forgotten today, but Americans once knew his name because he was an early and ardent champion in Parliament in favor of American Indpendence and stridently against the bottomless pit of expense represented by the Crown continuously pouring money and manpower into suppressing the American colonies. When Coke lost his seat in Parliament in 1784, he returned to his beautiful estates and to the magnificent splendor of Holkham Hall with its towering marble columns and enormous paintings on every inch of wall space (when young Princess Victoria stayed at Holkham shortly before she became queen, she found herself 'quite overwhelmed' by the ostentation of her rooms). Like many of the landed plutocrats of his day, Coke was an avid agriculturalist, constantly conferring with his tenants, constantly fiddling with ways to improve both his livestock and his land:<br/><blockquote>He also, like his ancestors, devoted his thought to reclaiming land from the sea. Laboriously, and at enormous cost, he reclaimed seven hundred acres which had previously been covered by the ocean, and began to prepare them for cultivation. Within two years, corn was growing upon soil which had been shingle swept by daily tides.</blockquote><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/coke-of-norfolk-brattle-nov-2011.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4195" title="coke of norfolk - brattle nov 2011" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/coke-of-norfolk-brattle-nov-2011-177x300.jpg" alt="" width="177" height="300" /></a>Stirling is careful to balance her long account; another chronicler of Coke would probably be tempted to slight his rural life in favor of the hurly-burly of his long stints in Parliament and the various excitements he had there (or else in favor of the more lurid aspects of his later life - in his old age he married a much, much younger woman and embarrassed everybody by immediately beginning to father children with her), but that rural life was the main focus and joy of Coke's life - and it was the world Stirling herself knew most closely. She's certainly aware of how transitory it all is - her volumes are full of mentions of how rapidly the world is changing, how increasingly ubiquitous rail travel is annihilating some old traditions and prompting people to forget what was so special about others. For instance, Holkham hosted many annual gala events, none more fun than "the Clippings," a great sheep-shearing festival that could rival just about any other social event - including, in 1821, the upcoming coronation of King George IV, which was briefly upstaged by the forty-third "Clippings" (which was attended by, among many others, the Dukes of Bedford and Norfolk). Stirling does a typically energetic job describing what she saw as a better, vanishing world:<br/><blockquote>In days when locomotion was slow and expensive, to many this gathering was the one occasion on which they met friends whom otherwise they would have been destined never to see. The greetings which were eagerly exchanged, the excitement of expected or unexpected encounters, the task of discovering and watching the celebrated men who were present, the vast hum of conversation,the whirling wheels and clattering hoofs which momentarily heralded fresh arrivals, the interest of recognising these new-comers thus ceaselessly appearing to swell the crowd - all formed a scene which the genial spirit of good-fellowship that had always constituted the keynote of the meeting was never lost sight of.</blockquote><br/>Late in his life, in 1837, Coke, called by many "the greatest commoner in England," got the kind of letter most of us will never find in the morning post:<br/><blockquote>My dear Mr. Coke,<br/><br/>I am very much obliged to you for your letters upon the electioneering prospects in the County of Norfolk; but I have now another matter to write to you upon, and which I have some satisfaction in referring to you. It is unnecessary for me to go into any details of the circumstances which have hitherto prevented that which has been eagerly desired by the Whigs and expected by the whole Country, namely, your elevation to the Peerage. I have now the pleasure of acquainting you that I have Her Majesty's commands to offer you an Earldom and to accompany the offer by every expression of Her Majesty's personal regard and esteem.<br/><br/>If this is agreeable to you, you have nothing to do but to send me back by return of post the titles which you are desirous of taking, and I can only add for myself that, if you accept this honour, it will be to me a source of great pride and satisfaction that it should have been conferred by my advice and under my administration. I beg to be remembered to Lady Anne.<br/><br/>Yours ever faithfully, Melbourne</blockquote><br/>And so, once again, an earldom of Leicester was created (this one specified as "of Holkham," so as not to confuse it with the <em>other</em> surviving earldom of Leicester), and Stirling is quick to advise us of its historical provenance:<br/><blockquote>Thus, after having been offered a peerage seven times, Coke was at length created Earl of Leicester. It was a curious coincidence that the first peerage created by Queen Elizabeth was an Earl of Leicester, whose nephew was Sir Philip Sydney, while the first commoner raised to the peerage by Queen Victoria was an Earl of Leicester, whose nephew by marriage was Lord De L'Isle, the representative of Sir Philip Sydney.</blockquote><br/>The sheer sparkling energy of that snooty clarification never deserts our author, not in close to a thousand pages of highly detailed and copiously footnoted prose. She follows her hero right to his peaceful grave, and she illustrates her book with some stunning old photographs of Holkham Hall and its environs. This is a grand, sweeping biography of a friendly man who was the center of all the world's attention while he was alive. These two volumes - heaven knows where you'd find your own - bring that man to life again in all his laughter and gaffes and generosity, and that's an amazing feat, even if it appears no longer to be grounds to keep a book in print, or reprint it.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/the-hall-at-holkham.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4196" title="the hall at holkham" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/the-hall-at-holkham-300x239.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="239" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-45458141358800628212011-11-25T08:49:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:29.793-08:00Charles Lamb and the Lloyds!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives8.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4182" title="nine lives" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives8-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a><br/><br/>Our book today is a little thing from 1898, <em>Charles Lamb and the Lloyds</em> by E. V. Lucas, and it illustrates how little has ever been needed in order to justify the appearance of a new book. In this case, a cache of letters discovered in 1894, letters between members of the prosperous Lloyd banking family (the imperious father, brother Charles the fourth-rate poet, sister Priscilla who married Christopher Wordsworth, Robert Lloyd the nonentity brother) and such luminaries as Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. The Lloyds were intellectually undistinguished - when Coleridge took on young Charles as a student in 1796, he very quickly went from writing the boy's father about a communion of like-minded intellects to writing the boy's father apologizing that he wouldn't really have the time to instruct the boy in anything (and laying out very clearly the terms of his room and board). Coleridge demurred only partly because he was afraid of the enormous outlay of energy it takes to shepherd a young man to intellectual awareness (although that fear alone is usually what stops would-be preceptors in their tracks); the rest of it was the result of his up-close estimation of Charles: underneath the languid 'Romantic' pose of philosophical questing, there wasn't a whole lot going on ("no birdsong in the hedgerow," as one contemporary put it).<br/><br/>Still, Lucas didn't require much to justify writing about Lamb. Not only was Lamb a special favorite <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/charles-lamb-and-the-lloyds-brookline-nov-2011.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4184" title="charles lamb and the lloyds - brookline - nov 2011" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/charles-lamb-and-the-lloyds-brookline-nov-2011-196x300.jpg" alt="" width="196" height="300" /></a>subject for him (his biography of the man is still eminently readable), but also: Lucas didn't require much to justify writing about <em>anything</em>. He wrote a book review of every book he read, new or old (his friends were forever commenting on the compulsion, but he claimed it kept him in fluid form), and he sold book and theater criticism to paying journals by the yard. The appearance of a new group of letters, no matter how inconsequential in the larger scholastic picture, was guaranteed to prompt him to write something new about it for the presses.<br/><br/>Luckily, he's a delightful companion on the page, as this little volume proves over and over. He <em>has</em> to be, since the only alternative is to watch almost all the leading lights of the age desperately try and fail to strike more than a passing flash from the flinty commonality of the Lloyd mind. Seventeen of these new letters are between Charles Lamb and Robert Lloyd, when the former was twenty-three and the latter nineteen, in the autumn of 1798. Lamb -<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2008/11/young-charles-lamb/"> that most patient of souls</a> - did everything he could to encourage the boy, even when circumstances with Lamb's tragic sister were bringing him nothing but trouble:<br/><blockquote>My Dear Robert, I am a good deal occupied with a calamity near home, but not so much as to prevent me thinking about you with the warmest affection - you are among my dearest friends. I know you will feel very deeply when you hear that my poor sister is unwell again; one of her old disorders, but I trust it will hold no longer than her former illnesses have done. Do not imagine, Robert, that I sink under this misfortune, I have been season'd to such events, and I think I could bear anything tolerably well. My own health is left me, and my good spirits, and I have some duties to perform - these duties shall be <em>my object</em>. I wish, Robert, <em>you</em> could find an object. I know the painfulness of vacuity, all its achings and inexplicable longings. I wish to God I could recommend any plan to you. Stock your mind well with religious knowledge; discipline it to wait with patience for duties that may be your lot in life; prepare yourself not to expect too much out of yourself; <em>read</em> and <em>think</em>. That is all commonplace advice, I know. I think, too, that it is easy to give advice which in like circumstances we might not follow ourselves. You must depend upon yourself - there will come a time when you will wonder you were not more content.</blockquote><br/>Indeed, the main joy of this volume lies not in anything the Lloyds themselves have to say but rather in Lamb's sparse but characteristically wonderful contributions.<br/><blockquote>Let them talk of lakes and mountains and romantic dales - all that fantastic stuff; give me a ramble by night, in the winter nights of London - the Lamps lit - the pavements of the motley Strand crowded with to and fro passengers - the shops all brilliant, and stuff with obliging customers and obliged tradesmem - give me the old bookstalls of London - a walk in the bright Piazzas of Covent Garden. I defy a man to be dull in such places - perfect Mahometan paradises upon earth!</blockquote><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/charles-lloyd.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4186" title="charles lloyd" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/charles-lloyd-236x300.jpg" alt="" width="236" height="300" /></a>Lamb was never really one to attack a man's dreams - indeed, his congeniality shines through these pages just as it lives in every chapter of Lucas' biography - so there's a good deal of very tactful restraint in his dealings with young Charles Lloyd ("I don't know if you quite comprehend my low Urban Taste," Lamb tells him at one point, uttering the early Romantic version of "It's not you, it's me"). And not just the younger Lloyd, either! The book's most schadenfreudy chapter - fit to make just about anybody laugh out loud - details some of what happened when Charles' father decided to have published some of his translations of Homer, complete with the rhymes of Pope but lacking the actual talent of Pope. Even Lamb's tact had its limits - and Lucas' too.<br/><br/><em>Charles Lamb and the Lloyds</em> will never be reprinted - its entire life now is to be a quick, inconsequential footnote in any soup-to-nuts biography of Charles Lamb and his literary circle. But in trifles we sometimes find fascinating details too small for inclusion in bigger, more ambitious works. Those works - biographies of Lamb, Coleridge, or Wordsworth - might tell us, for instance, that the latter two poets probably detested young Charles Lloyd's bumbling literary pretensions, but they would hardly pause to make a case for the defense (even though Lamb himself certainly always would have). And Lucas? Well, he tells us "Hypersensitive natures are apt to misconstrue ..." So maybe his tact is equal to the task after all.<br/><br/> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-90764506558511255002011-11-25T08:48:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:29.686-08:00Comics: yet another X-Men #1!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/uncanny-x-men-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4177" title="uncanny x-men 1" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/uncanny-x-men-1-195x300.jpg" alt="" width="195" height="300" /></a>Deafened still by the ongoing kettle-drum of DC Comics' "New 52" media phenomenon, I almost missed Marvel Comics' recent re-launch of "Uncanny X-Men" with a new first issue. And I might have given the whole thing a miss in any case, except the artwork is by one of my favorite working comics artists, Carlos Pacheco.<br/><br/>This issue is written by Kieron Gillen and takes off right where a recent mini-series left off: Cyclops and most of the few remaining mutants left on Earth (in the wake of the still-seminal events in <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2008/02/house-of-m/">"House of M"</a>) are gathered together in Utopia, their city/stronghold in the bay off the coast of San Francisco. Cyclops is determined that mutants will no longer be the meek targets of non-mutant aggression, but he's equally sure that the way to turn that aggression around is for his core team (for some mysterious reason perhaps known only to Gillen, he dubs this his "extinction team") to function more as a standard save-the-world superhero team, ala the Fantastic Four or the Avengers. It's an interesting idea - mutants using PR to sway public opinion (to my recollection, it hasn't been used since the launch of the original "X-Factor," many moons ago) - and Gillon bungles it right from the start.<br/><br/>If it's any consolation, he bungles it in the exact same way DC has bungled all but a couple of its own much more headline-grabbing first issues this summer (winter on the calendar, but I'm in shorts with the ceiling <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/x-men.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4179" title="x-men" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/x-men-233x300.jpg" alt="" width="233" height="300" /></a>fan going in Boston, so as far as I'm concerned, it's summer until it's actually cold): he picks up a game in mid-play, tweaks it here and there in ways that may or may not be good ideas ("extinction team"?), but never pauses for even a moment to give new readers any reason to care about any of it. First issues are - at least theoretically - about providing a 'jumping on' point for those new readers, and yet in the many wide open spaces so helpfully provided by Pacheco's artwork, Gillon never bothers to explain anything, never bothers to catch us up on anything. In short, he makes the same mistake that's been plaguing the various X-books for decades now: he assumes every single reader is chapter-and-verse familiar with every jot and tittle of the X-catechism. The X-Man Colossus is intermittently possessed by the spirit of the old X-Men villain Juggernaut? Prince Namor the Sub-Mariner wears a modified X-Man costume and for some unaccountable reason takes orders from the team leader's girlfriend? Magneto too? It would have taken five minutes to write dialogue and monologue-boxes that grounded new readers on all of this, but Gillon doesn't do that. Instead, he assumes the worst thing you can assume about the opening of any drama: that his audience is already interested.<br/><br/>The result is as insular as most of what's been going on at DC lately, a first issue devoid of drama, meaningful only to the insider crowd, full of 'payoff' moments comprehensible only to a thousand people on the planet. I bought it for Carlos Pacheco's artwork (which didn't disappoint), but if his past is any indicator, he won't be around more than a few issues. Let's hope Kieron bothers to ground his story in that time.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-988162579384691522011-11-24T15:41:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:29.470-08:00William Hickling Prescott!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives7.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4160" title="nine lives" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives7-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a><br/><br/>Our book today is Roger Wolcott's gigantic 1925 volume <em>The Correspondence of William Hickling Prescott, 1833-1847, </em>featuring not only heaping piles of letters and notes by the great Boston historian but also a great deal of exposition, scene-setting, and explanatory footnoting - easily enough to constitute a life-and-times, despite the book's unassuming title.<br/><br/>The fact that there's so much Prescott correspondence to assemble is a testament not only to the man's die-hard Yankee work ethic but also to the long-suffering forbearance of his friends and associates - Prescott maintained the typical 19th Century voluminous flow of letters<em>, </em>but he was never able to simply sit at his writing desk and dash off a quick three pages. Instead, he was a member in good standing of that odd literary sub-set: historians who persevere despite near-crippling ailments.<br/><br/>In Prescott's case, there was no gradual decline: the fateful change happened in a moment - a moment neither he nor anybody else present would ever forget. During a raucous and very hard-fought food-fight with some of his fellow students at Harvard in 1812, Prescott was hit hard directly on his open left eye by a knot-tough little crust of bread. The pain and impact stunned him, and for the rest of his life, that eye was very nearly useless. According to the legend that sprang up around that day, the accident changed Prescott from a feckless boy to a conscientious adult, but even if that weren't true, when illness threatened his other eye three years later, the near chance of total blindness galvanized him as nothing else would have. He came from a wealthy family and wasn't expected to do much beyond the socializing he loved (and the production of some heirs to the line, which he loved perhaps less)<em>, </em>especially since his eyes were crippled and often painful. But he decided to become a historian. He chose Spain as his subject and attacked the task with a will.<br/><br/>Wolcott's impressive volume here reprints a vast chunk of his correspondence from his working years, and it's fascinating to become reacquainted with all the routine impediments that were once a part of active scholarship. Prescott is forever importuning correspondents to hunt down certain obscure volumes for his research, constantly hectoring foreign friends to ransack their local libraries for works of possible interest to his researches. When such treasures are found, he's always obliged to shell out money for scriveners, hordes of scriveners, to make copies of the material - after which needs to find reliable couriers to get the material all the way to his library at Beacon Street in Boston (or his wonderful seaside house, Fitful Head, at Nahant)<em>. </em>After publication, there are all sorts of new problems: international copyright is in its infancy, for example, and friends are needed in foreign countries to watch over the work at every stage. The world scholars take for granted in 2011 - a world of computerized libraries, searchable databases, scanning and photocopying - would have seemed to William Prescott to be the very secular image of paradise.<br/><br/>Likewise our ophthalmology departments. The horrible state of Prescott's eyes forced him to live big <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/correspondence-of-william-prescott.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4164" title="correspondence of william prescott" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/correspondence-of-william-prescott-212x300.jpg" alt="" width="212" height="300" /></a>stretches of his life in darkened rooms, the tedium broken only by his sister reading to him (she often had to lay down on the floor and read by the light coming in at the foot of the closed door, and she never once complained about it). Even at its strongest, his good eye became painfully fatigued after more than an hour or two of reading a day. He had a zestfully powerful mind and a prodigious recall, luckily, and for much of his correspondence he used a device called a noctograph - a writing-slate with horizontal wire guide-lines designed to align handwriting the writer himself couldn't see ... essentially, a means of writing legibly in the dark. The noctograph gave Prescott a palpable (though illusory - he still needed copyists) sense of independence, and it was besides an oddly elegant-looking thing (it was a prized possession of Wolcott's for years).<br/><br/>The noctograph, helpful friends, many an unstinting amanuensis, and boundless amounts of self-discipline: through a combination of all these things, Prescott got his work done (needless to say, he would have been less than charitable to all those poor 21st century writers and would-be writers who moan over how <em>hard</em> it is to generate prose, despite having youth, perfect vision, ample leisure, and 24-hour access to the greatest research library in the history of the world). His <em>History of Ferdinand and Isabella</em> appeared in Boston bookstores on Christmas Day 1837 and promptly sold like griddle-cakes. There followed his <em>The Conquest of Mexico</em>, <em>The Conquest of Peru</em>, and he was working on his monumental work on Philip II when he died in 1859. His books set research standards on much the same level as Gibbon's - so high as to be virtually unimpeachable even in later, more politically correct ages. And his literary ability was nothing short of mesmerizing - whenever I find a young reader willing to tackle such obscure old volumes, they're always surprised to find such <em>life</em> in the pages (I get the same reaction about Francis Parkman as well, of course). They tend to have the same reactions as did priggish old Charles Sumner, who wrote about it to Prescott in 1843:<br/><blockquote>I hardly know how to express on paper the delight and instruction with which I have read your work. Since I first devoured the Waverley Novels, I have read nothing by which I have been so entirely <em>entraine</em>; sitting at my desk for hours, then trimming my lamp and still sitting on, and finally with the book under my arm adjourning home, where I read on until after midnight. The introduction was interesting and instructive, exciting thought and requiring attention, at the same time that it was clear and copious. Perhaps this will afford to enlightened minds a field of interest of a higher character than the other portions of the work; but these cannot fail to charm everybody.</blockquote><br/>Prescott's ability to make the past come alive is vividly on display in these letters, naturally. In 1840 he writes to a correspondent about his famous grandfather Colonel William Prescott, who fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill:<br/><blockquote>The moral courage demanded for the opening of the war of the Revolution was of a much higher order than what is required for an ordinary conflict, where the memory of the brave if he falls is covered with glory; but an unsuccessful rebellion brings only ignominy, and in case of capture an ignominious death. Yet strange to say historians have hardly touched on these circumstances. It is so true however that my grandfather even expressed his own determination before going on the field not to fall alive into the enemy's hands. It happened, singularly enough, that my wife's grandfather was a commander of a British ship of war, lying in an arm of the sea and firing on Bunker Hill, which my own ancestor was defending. The swords of the two belligerents are now peacefully crossed over my book cases, and there tell me silently, but not ineloquently, the tale of other years.</blockquote><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/william-hickling-prescott.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4165" title="william hickling prescott" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/william-hickling-prescott-207x300.jpg" alt="" width="207" height="300" /></a>He adds a note that might make Bostonians smile: "A granite obelisk to be two hundred and twenty feet high is now erecting on the battleground, and it will be completed in a couple of years, probably ..."<br/><br/>Wolcott does a wonderful job mixing business with pleasure. For every two letters detailing text-corrections or making manuscript-requests, there's one of a purely chatty nature, catching up on the activities of friends, like the quick aside to Fanny Calderon de la Barca in 1841:<br/><blockquote>Summer divides friends as far asunder as politics or religion, or any other good cause for quarreling. Mrs. Ritchie is staying at Roxbury with her children. Her <em>caro sposo</em> has gone to France again. He usually touches at home on his peregrinations. <em>Le pauvre homme</em>, where is his home? His boys are in Germany at school. The Ticknors are at a place called Woods Hole, near Martha's Vineyard, where I propose to pass next week with them. The Appletons you know are in England ...</blockquote><br/>(Fanny wrote a little book of her own - a travel memoir, if memory serves - and the chivalrous Prescott tirelessly pushed its interests with every literary person he knew ... poor Charles Dickens got the worst of it, and in this instance he bore up magnanimously under the pressure)<br/><br/>And in addition to the personal and the professional, there was also the political, since despite the isolating nature of his eye-problems, Prescott was very much a man of the world. His letters are peppered with invaluable asides on the events of the day, and they often prove Prescott as shrewd a judge of the present as he was of the past. He certainly sizes up his commander-in-chief in 1846 rather tellingly:<br/><blockquote>We don't comprehend here the politics of President Polk. It is probable he doesn't perfectly comprehend them himself. He seems to be playing at fast and loose, and I rather think that it will prove a loosing game with him. HE stands on two crutches. the South and the West, but they will not walk the same way it seems. The South dreads a war with England as much as the North, though in the North there may be a warmer feeling of sympathy for our fatherland.</blockquote><br/>Prescott married a timid wife whose greatest delight was to help him with his work (and he genially adored her, starting several letters with variations on "My dear Wife, It is after ten and I am as tired as a cat. But I don't like to go to bed without telling you where and how I am ..."), and he was surrounded by friends and friendly rivals in the all-things-Spanish vogue that was then sweeping England and the United States. Prescott corresponded with Washington Irving while that gentleman was researching his big biography of Columbus, and of course Prescott kept up close contact with his fellow Boston Atheneum patron George Ticknor, who was also engaged in a massive, life-long work about Spain (his was a huge study of Spanish, Portuguese, and Castilian literature, a marvel of easy-going erudition that's now entirely forgotten) - indeed, the quasi-rivalry between the two of them is the basis for an entertaining novella called <em>Ticknor</em> that you should read if you can find it.<br/><br/>Needless to add, you should read Prescott too. I'd direct you to the pertinent Library of America volumes, but although there exist many volumes for such artistically negligible figurines as Saul Bellow and Philip K. Dick, there don't appear to be any for poor squinting Prescott, one of the greatest historians America has ever produced. There was a Modern Library volume from years ago, but I believe it only contained <em>The Conquest of Mexico</em>. No, the best volume to find is even older still: Irwin Blacker's fantastic 1963 Viking Portable edition, a compression of (what Blacker, that irrepressible man, called "the essence of") all four histories he called <em>The Rise and Decline of the Spanish Empire</em>. If you can read that abridgement and not come out of it hungry to read more Prescott, there's something medically - even spiritually - wrong with you.<br/><br/> <br/><br/> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-40526294173917827502011-11-24T15:40:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:29.562-08:00Geographica: Tigers!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nat-geo.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4169" title="nat geo" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nat-geo-199x300.jpg" alt="" width="199" height="300" /></a>By now it should hardly need saying that every issue of <em>National Geographic</em> is wonder-park of astonishment (or words, you know, to that effect). It's a continuous source of confusion to me why every thinking person I know isn't a lifelong subscriber, doesn't eagerly await each new issue and put everything on hold to pore over it like I do. Of course, that very same abundance makes a regular feature like Geographica feel almost redundant, since virtually every issue of <em>National Geographic</em> is so bursting with fascination that it feels nearly misleading to point out any one thing. My only justification is that some things strike me more than others in my reading of each issue. And in this current issue, <em>Stevereads</em> recidivists might be expecting the talking-point to be Adam Nicolson's wonderful, fast-paced overview of the King James Bible - its history, its 'reception' as a text, etc. And it was indeed a joy - as was the photo taken by Jeffrey Chua de Guzman on the sea-bed off the coast of Manilla: he spotted something moving and saw a broken soda bottle (it's standing upright in the photo - my inner Suspicious Aloysius wonders if the photographer didn't find it on its side and stand it up himself, for dramatic effect) - with an octopus <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/jeffrey-chua-de-guzman.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4171" title="jeffrey chua de guzman" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/jeffrey-chua-de-guzman-217x300.jpg" alt="" width="217" height="300" /></a>leisurely canted inside.<br/><br/>But for me, this time around, the highlight was Caroline Alexander's tough but hopeful article "A Cry for the Tiger," in which she writes about both the plight of the world's wild tigers and (in the magazine's long tradition) the fight to save them. The article opens with an incredibly enheartening sight: a trip-wire camera's midnight shot of a tiger walking by in the forests of northern Sumatra, a magnificent creature caught for one instant in the middle of its invisible life. But then the very next image is discouraging: four hopeless little felons apprehended outside Chandrapur trying to sell a tiger skin (pretty discouraging too the shot in this article of a terrified puppy being used as live bait in a tiger-trap). I lived for a while in Chandrapur many years ago, and I saw tiger-articles - pelts, claws, teeth, tails - in the bazaar all the time ... it was immediately saddening to know it still goes on, even in today's far more eco-conscious atmosphere.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/tiger-in-sumatra.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4172" title="tiger in sumatra" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/tiger-in-sumatra-162x300.jpg" alt="" width="162" height="300" /></a>Sill, at least Alexander's prose is an unmixed joy. Her article bogs in statistics or exposition, and her narrative is always sharp with awe:<br/><blockquote>Consider the tiger, how he is formed. With claws up to four inches long and retractable, like a domestic cat's, and carnassial teeth that shatter bone. While able to achieve bursts above 35 miles an hour, the tiger is built for strength, not sustained speed. Short, powerful legs propel his trademark lethal lunge and fabled leaps. Recently, a tiger was captured on video jumping - flying - from flat ground to 13 feet in the air to attack a ranger riding an elephant. The eye of the tiger is backlit by a membrane that reflects light through the retina, the secret of his famous night vision and glowing night eyes. The roar of the tiger - <em>Aaaaauuuuunnnn! - </em>can carry more than a mile.</blockquote><br/>The perfect accompaniment to the article: a pull-out poster with a beautiful Fernando Baptista illustration of a lion on one side and a gallery of incredible Vincent Musi photos of the world's big cats on the other.<br/><br/>Of course it will come as little surprise to any of you that I find these animals extra disturbing - pretty tough for a confirmed dog-person not to find the idea of a 600-pound <em>cat</em> with linoleum-knives for claws disturbing. But the article left me tensely hoping there's a future for these magnificent animals. <em>National Geographic</em> does that to you: it broadens your reactions to everything in the world.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-18475272447671044432011-11-22T23:48:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:29.292-08:00Anne McCaffrey<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/anne-mccaffrey.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-4152" title="anne-mccaffrey" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/anne-mccaffrey.jpg" alt="" width="284" height="300" /></a><br/><br/>A generation of fantasy readers soared on the wings of her dragons. Rest in Peace.<br/><br/> <br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Dragonflight.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4153" title="Dragonflight" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Dragonflight-300x195.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="195" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-69527745039649060572011-11-21T15:00:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:29.204-08:00Emma, Lady Hamilton!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives5.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4146" title="nine lives" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives5-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a><br/><br/>Our book today is <em>Emma, Lady Hamilton</em>, a big fat 1905 volume by steadfast biographer Walter Sichel, who spends an eager amount of time at the outset of the book carefully detailing for his readers just why they should opt for <em>his</em> book on Lady Hamilton as opposed to any of the others. He stresses both the new content (letter caches, mainly) of his book and also his vigorous new interpretations of old content, all with a sharp commercial eye toward making his product stand out.<br/><br/>It seems an odd anxiety, from the viewpoint of 2011. Amy Lyon, who changed her name to Emma Hart and then became Lady Emma when she married the elderly and ultimately mysterious Sir William Hamilton, became famous all over the Western world not only as a sexual provocateur (her hair and clothing styles were lamentably imitated by beefy matrons from Venice to Vladivostok) but as the open mistress of England's famous naval hero Horatio Nelson. Despite the fact that Nelson was short, pock-marked, balding, dumpy, one-armed, rheumatoid, and gap-toothed, an entire long generation of Victorian young men desperately wanted to be like him - most especially in two respects: they wanted to be the victor at the Battle of the Nile, and they wanted the love of Emma Hamilton. Even in 1905, therefore, her name could still sell books and generate cutthroat competition between rival biographers.<br/><br/>Mainly this was because Emma Hamilton represents the <em>beau ideal</em> of the mistress. She was vivacious but not annoying, smart but not educated, a good enough singer and dancer but not so good that the singing and dancing commanded attention on their own, and she was beautiful: long eye-lashes, a gorgeous smooth voice, and breasts out to here. And added to this was one extra, crucial point: <em>her husband didn't mind</em>. A floundering little pansy like Nelson would have been reduced to a puddle of tears if Sir William had called him out to meet with pistols at dawn - but instead, Sir William <em>admired</em> him. It's the ultimate guilt-free fantasy.<br/><br/>Sichel realizes all this and goes at it with a true professional's gusto. This requires the production of vast job-lots of what is referred to, in technical literary terms, as <em>drivel</em>:<br/><blockquote>It has been well said that apologies only try to excuse what they fail to explain, and any apology for the bond which ever afterwards united them would be idle. Yet a few reflections should be borne nervously in mind. The firm tie that bound them, they themselves felt eternally binding; no passing whim had fastened it, nor any madness of a moment. They had plighted a real troth which neither of them ever either broke or repented. Both found and lost themselves in each other. Their love was no sacrifice to lower instincts; it was a true link of hearts.</blockquote><br/>Luckily for his readers, Sichel is every bit as energetic a guide even when he's <em>not</em> talking about body parts<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/emma-lady-hamilton-brookline-nov-2011.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4149" title="emma lady hamilton - brookline - nov 2011" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/emma-lady-hamilton-brookline-nov-2011-195x300.jpg" alt="" width="195" height="300" /></a> linking up, as when he sets the scene in 1798:<br/><blockquote>Nelson was in chase of Buonaparte's fleet.<br/><br/>Napoleon's Egyptian expedition was, perhaps, the greatest wonder in a course rife with them. He was not yet thirty; he had been victorious by land, and had dictated terms at the gates of Vienna. In Italy, like Tarquin, he had knocked off the tallest heads first. Debt and jealousy hampered him at home. It was the gambler's <em>first</em> throw, that rarest audacity. For years his far-sightedness had fastened on the Mediterranean; and now that Spain was friends with France, he divined the moment for crushing Britain. But even then his schemes were far vaster than his contemporaries could comprehend. His plan was to obtain Eastern Empire, to reduce Syria, and, after recasting sheikhdoms in the dominion of the Phraraohs, possibly after subduing India, to dash back and conquer England.</blockquote><br/>Biographies of Lady Hamilton (who fell quickly into squalor and desperation after Nelson died his famous hero's death) aren't nearly so numerous as they were in Walter Sichel's day, and they're necessarily a bit more strained than any note he ever struck. Professional historians of our self-righteous modern era find it worrying to celebrate a woman whose main claim to fame was her sexual pliability - it lets the side down. Feminists can't claim Emma because she slept her way to fame and fortune and lost both when she lost her lovers, but neither can they excoriate her, because we have enough of her letters to know she was a genuinely kind-hearted little ignoramus. Once the last generation to hero-worship Lord Nelson finally died off, the kind of popular interest that could animate a long, baroque work like <em>Emma, Lady Hamilton</em> died off as well.<br/><br/>But if you should feel a bit of that interest, this is the book to satisfy it. If a biographer is going to spend 500 pages writing about another man's mistress, the least he can do is embarrass himself for our amusement.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-57288782128212184762011-11-21T01:27:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:29.119-08:00Meanwhile, in the Penny Press ...<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/gq.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4141" title="gq" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/gq-215x300.jpg" alt="" width="215" height="300" /></a><br/><br/>It looks like Santa isn't too fond of the ultra-photogenic Tommy Hilfiger crowd, if we can judge by the steaming pile of you-know-what he left under their Christmas tree this year:<br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/christmas-mourning.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4142" title="christmas mourning" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/christmas-mourning-205x300.jpg" alt="" width="205" height="300" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-54449771132614832522011-11-20T15:46:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:29.037-08:00Bess of Hardwick and Her Circle!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives4.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4134" title="nine lives" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives4-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a><br/><br/>Our book today is from 1910: <em>Bess of Hardwick and Her Circle</em> by Mrs. Matilda Carbury - I beg your pardon, Mrs. Stepney Rawson, a bustling literary lady from the beautiful Berkshire countryside who ingratiated herself to various book-column editors in Edwardian London to look kindly upon her various and numerous productions - some of which needed all the friends they could get. In a later generation, the author of such works as <em>Journeyman Love</em>, <em>The Apprentice</em>, and <em>The Stairway of Honour</em> would inevitably turn out to be a sham persona concocted by Bertie Wooster (and given ample form by the unfailing Jeeves)(and a generation after <em>that</em>, she'd take the form of Miss Amelia Nettleship and rob poor Rumpole of his sleep), but in the early years of the 20th century, she was all too real, and her letters to prospective reviewers - smilingly imploring them to look kindly upon her poor efforts - have a decidedly Carburyesque tone to them that the reader might wish had been deliberate parody on her part.<br/><br/>Alas, no: Mrs. Rawson was nothing if not earnest, whether organizing the church theatricals and musicals of which she was so fond or writing the books for which she was known and somewhat celebrated in her own time, though she's entirely forgotten in our own. <em>Sic transit gloria Mudie's.</em><br/><br/>Her best-selling book was a frothy piece of fiction called <em>A Lady of the Regency</em>, for which she managed to obtain quite a few favorable (though often somewhat grudgingly so) reviews. Romance novel fans might note it now for one main reason: it was one of the earliest of the archly formulaic Regency novels that would later account for such staggering swaths of the Western world's book-production (if you took away Regencies, whodunits, and westerns, the total number of books every published would drop by half). Nearly a decade after the success of that novel, Mrs. Rawson finally realized a long-held ambition to write a big, serious work of biography, a serious "exploration" (as she put it) of history.<br/><br/>She chose as her topic that most fascinating of Elizabethans, Elizabeth Hardwick, "Bess of Hardwick," the <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/bess-of-hardwick-and-her-circle.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4135" title="bess of hardwick and her circle" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/bess-of-hardwick-and-her-circle-168x300.jpg" alt="" width="168" height="300" /></a>feisty, pretty daughter of a prosperous Nottinghamshire squire who took unusual care that all his children were well-schooled in letters and literature. The crucial formative fact that her parents took her seriously as a person gave Bess a steel rod for a personality, and she'd no sooner hit puberty than she was helping her mother (and her mentor, Anne Gainsford, a beautiful beaker of pure poison who'd warrant a biography of her own if any reader could be found to stomach it) find her a likely husband. The first of these, a handsome local heir, coughed himself into an early grave before he could even deflower Bess, which infuriated her. An intense amount of lobbying and odds-handicapping followed, the fruit of which was a marriage much higher up the food chain: fifty-something Sir William Cavendish, a very prosperous courtier and landowner who'd already lost two wives to the childbearing bed. With Sir William, Bess became Lady Cavendish, she became a mother many times over (Sir William was a vigorous man), and almost accidentally, she fell in love with her husband.<br/><br/>Who died ten years later and left Bess on the marriage-market once again. She waited a decent two years and then married an even wealthier landowner, Sir William St. Loe, who (mincing, beady-eyed) was the exact opposite of Sir William Cavendish in all ways but one: he also quickly came under the spell of his new wife, taking her opinions exactly as he would those of a man, watching in wonder as she whipped his various estates into shape (many of the letters we have in Bess of Hardwick's hand are hot-tempered instructions to wayward stewards - even now, their words snap: they can't have been pleasant to receive), trying to keep up with her in the banquet hall and bedroom. Sir William was only human: he died after about five years in the whirlwind. He was also immeasurably grateful for the ride: he left Bess everything, making her a stupendously wealthy woman.<br/><br/>Her next and last husband was her worst: George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury - an even wealthier landowner than her previous two husbands, an intimate friend of the Queen, one of the great powers in the realm, and the mother of all humorless pricks (actually, considering the remorseless slab of beef his son Gilbert turned out to be, probably more accurate to call him the <em>father</em> of all humorless pricks). Through George Talbot, Bess finally had access not only to vast wealth and land but to the electrified cables of actual <em>power</em>, and the proximity worked its customary dark magic on her. She conceived dangerous ambitions - not for herself but for her daughter Elizabeth, whom she pushed into a marriage with Charles Stuart, the brother of the second husband of Mary Queen of Scots (who was later quartered on the Talbots for large chunks of her house arrest in England, a discreet form of punishment meted out by an unforgetting Queen). Such a marriage was of course treason without the Queen's consent, and when Elizabeth I found out, Bess was ordered to report to London and explain herself. But she was ambitious, not crazy: she stayed on her impregnable country estates and waited for the Queen to calm down. And the Fates remembered her insolence: she was to have a grievously tempestuous relationship with Elizabeth's stunning daughter, Arabella Stuart.<br/><br/>Naturally, all this is catnip for Mrs. Rawson - how could it be otherwise, when she'd spent her entire literary apprenticeship as a novelist trying in vain to cook up plots half so enthralling? She goes at her subject in <em>Bess of Hardwick and Her Circle</em> with the same zeal she used in writing her novels - the <em>exact</em> same zeal, so this big, enjoyable book is full of 'my lady's and 'my good lord's and even a couple of brief dramatic scenes complete with stage-directions, which our author breathlessly defends:<br/><blockquote>The orthodox may be affronted at two brief incursions into fiction ... Let them skip these judiciously, magisterially. For my own part, I needed consolation at times for certain hard and bitter facts of history. Therefore, since the way was sometimes long, and the wind, in my imagination, very cold - as it whistled in and out of the ruins of those manors and castles, where the Scots Queen and her married gaolers dwelt, or as it drove the snow across the splendid facade of Hardwick (to say nothing of the draughts of the sombre, public research libraries) - I first drew my Countess down from her picture-frame to marshal her household, and then lured her child and her child's lover after to gladden your road and mine.</blockquote><br/>Well, how can you argue with <em>that</em>?<br/><br/>The 'orthodox' will find a great deal to object to in these pages other than amateur theatricals, but no matter: the romantic at heart, the dreamer, and especially anyone who's ever visited Hardwick Hall will very likely love this florid, heartfelt book. Certainly much better biographies of Bess of Hardwick have been written (<a href="http://www.lovellbiographies.com/">Mary S. Lovell</a>'s is not to be missed), but none more passionate. If you can find a library that still stocks it, borrow a copy without delay! Mine came from this one, but they're no longer in business, unfortunately:<br/><br/> <br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/mudies-label.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4137" title="mudies label" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/mudies-label-300x152.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="152" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-40832371775896996152011-11-19T14:24:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:28.946-08:00Great Paragraphs and Otherwise in the Penny Press!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/magazinesinabunch-300x23014.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-4125" title="magazinesinabunch-300x2301" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/magazinesinabunch-300x23014.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="230" /></a><br/><br/>When historians finally settle the dust of the last decade, it wouldn't surprise me if the most toxic legacy of the George W. Bush interregnum isn't an essentially unpayable 50 trillion dollar debt-chasm, or the entirely justified hatred of the rest of the world, or even the new knowledge that literally any imbecile can become President if he owns enough Supreme Court justices but rather something far simpler and far worse: the death of error. Bush famously disdained knowledge and expertise - he governed with his 'gut,' and the first and most important implication of doing anything with your 'gut' is that it's not susceptible to error. That's what the whole euphemism means: I'm consulting my heart, my instincts, my soul - because those things can't be fooled by statistics cooked up by Ivy League homosexuals. In fact, those things can't be fooled at all, because they come right from God. Aside from James T. Kirk, when's the last time you heard anybody say that something they believed with their 'gut' later turned out to be wrong?<br/><br/>It's a vile, preschooler's stance, and it's pervaded every inch of American society. It's especially prevalent among public figures, of course, and it always looks the same: Person X makes a stunning, jaw-dropping comment, listeners of every type express not only outrage but also scruple, pointing out factual errors and citing numerous irrefutable proofs, Person X acknowledges the outrage, acknowledges the irrefutable proofs - <em>and then maintains that their original statement was right.</em> A prominent radio personality says no Germans died in the concentration camps of World War II, a public figure says the American Revolution was fought over the issue of gun control, a Presidential candidate says he never said the country needs an electrified border-fence with Mexico ... within seconds, a) 4,744 historians step forward and say that quite a few Germans died in concentration camps, b) 10, 655 historians - and over a million grade school children - step forward and say that Paul Revere didn't ride from street to street saying "The British are coming for our guns! The British are coming for our guns!" and c) 16 news networks <em>instantly produce film</em> showing the candidate advocating an electrified border-fence <em>just the previous day</em>. And in all three cases - and so many more - Person X takes in the correction, blinks a couple of times, and then does a quick mental calculation: I spoke from the 'gut,' my 'gut' can't be wrong, so all these facty-things must be wrong, and the people saying them are just pinheads. Facts have become just slightly less flexible versions of opinions, rather than things that can precipitate correction.<br/><br/>Sadly, this toxic legacy has seeped even into the world of professional letters. Just recently we've seen <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nyrb1.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4128" title="nyrb" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nyrb1-300x205.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="205" /></a>Taylor Branch compare college athletes to slaves, have the manifest holes in that comparison pointed out to him - and then stand by the comparison anyway. And in the latest <em>New York Review of Books</em>, it happens again.<br/><br/>Some of you may recall the original incident, because I wrote about it <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2011/10/insults-large-and-small-in-the-penny-press/">here</a>. In a review of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel <em>The Stranger's Child</em>, Daniel Mendelsohn inserts a damning little footnote about something he thinks Hollinghurst is saying through the use of some of his characters:<br/><blockquote>I may as well mention here, not without dismay, another lapse into an old British literary habit. Daphne's marital history seems intended to suggest a descending arc: her second, untitled husband is a bisexual painter who is killed in World War II, and her third and final husband is a certain "Mr. Jacobs," a small-time manufacturer who did not, apparently, fight in the war. This seems to be a marker of the "plain old Sharon Feingold" sort. In this context it's worth mentioning that in the 1920s section of the book, the irritating photographer who plagues the Valances - he represents the distressingly crass "modern" world of publicity and celebrity - is called Jerry Goldblatt.</blockquote><br/>When I first read that, I wrote, not without dismay, that it was odious for a critic of Mendelsohn's calibre to stoop to making such insinuations of anti-Semitism. In the latest <em>NYRB</em>, my reaction is echoed by a reader named Galen Strawson, who writes:<br/><blockquote>I suppose this sort of prejudice - Mendelsohn's - will never end. But it requires a failure of ear, a narrowness of mind, an ignorance of the world, a capacity for unwarranted insult (the wearily regretful tone, the footnote as insinuation), that is in Mendelsohn's case surprising, and in any case squalid.</blockquote><br/>To which Mendelsohn responds by claiming that the 'old British literary habit' he was referring to was the habit of summoning the "Other-ness" of Jews, of treating them as "exotic" and "symbols of un-Britishness." Which is the most disingenuous thing I've read all week, and certainly the most pusillanimous thing I've ever read from this ordinarily bravely forthright critic. The 'old British literary habit' Mendelsohn refers to in his original footnote is <em>anti-Semitism</em>, plain and simple, not some lit-crit folderol about 'the Jew as Other.' He carefully doesn't <em>name</em> the habit in his original passage specifically because he wanted to preserve a little wiggle-room for himself should the comment draw criticism, and that's exactly how he's using it now. He goes on to write "I am a critic, and what I did was to offer a critical observation about a (small) aspect of the author's oeuvre" - which is about as truthful as referring to John Wilkes Booth's little bullet as "a (small) aspect of the Lincoln's theater-going experience."<br/><br/>And this is what I meant by the death of error. What Mendelsohn should have written - what he would have written before George W. Bush got into all our drinking water - was "I am a critic, and sometimes immersion in an author's work can prompt critics to see things that aren't there. This was one of those times, and I apologize to Alan Hollinghurst." But alas, the gut wants what the gut wants.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ny.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4129" title="ny" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ny-219x300.jpg" alt="" width="219" height="300" /></a>Fortunately, most of the rest of the <em>NYRB</em> was superb, including a great paragraph from Charles Baxter's review of the new novel by Haruki Murakami:<br/><blockquote>This idea, which used to be the province of science fiction and French critical theory, is now in the mainstream, and it has create a new mode of fiction - Jonathan Lethem's <em>Chronic City</em> is another recent example - that I would call "Unrealism." Unrealism reflects an entire generation's conviction that the world they have inherited is a crummy second-rate duplicate.</blockquote><br/>That's really fine stuff, and even it is overshadowed by something over in the latest <em>New York</em>, a quick review of the new Broadway revival of <em>Godspell</em> starring the douchebag Hunter Parrish. The piece is by Scott Brown (no relation, one hopes, to the startlingly evil Senator from Massachusetts), and its opening paragraph is just about as perfect as anything you'll find in Gershwin:<br/><blockquote>I suspect - and this is just one Pharisee's opinion - that it's possible to outgrow <em>Godspell</em>, that right of passage for drama nerds and nascent thrift-store enthusiasts everywhere, which is now glorying in its first Broadway revival. Embalmed in patchouli yet insistently, sometimes gratingly ageless, the show began in the early seventies as a downtownish affair, a (very) vaguely provocative American-tribal-love-rock Jesusical featuring ultracatchy pop songs by a young Stephen Schwartz, a loose New Testament story arc by the late John-Michael Tebelak, and a company of charming, vocally frowsy near amateurs. Four decades and innumerable high-school and church productions later, <em>Godspell</em> is less a show than a songbook, a vitiated transcript of Matthew, and a brief: Be relevant to today's youth. (Translation: pack in more pop-culture cutaway gags than a season of <em>Family Guy</em>.) In other words: Come to Gleesus, who's here playe by Hunter Parrish, the blond Adonis of <em>Weeds</em> and <em>Spring Awakening</em>. His voice is Christly gentle to the point of featheriness, his manner ranges from very charming to practically pamphleteering, and his delivery is straight-up Montessori. He's surrounded by apostles who were clearly called from a conservatory, not a drum circle, and most sport voices strong and smooth as industrially milled fiberglass. Theirs is a Beacon's Closet Golgotha. To fully appreciate their rapid-fire eagerness to connect, it helps to have the mind of a properly medicated Nickelodeon viewer.</blockquote><br/>Hee. Something like that will cure just about any A-holery conducted elsewhere in the Penny Press. Until next time, that is.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/hunter-parrish-douchebag1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4130" title="hunter parrish - douchebag" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/hunter-parrish-douchebag1-300x154.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="154" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com23tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-44259132252586736222011-11-17T12:15:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:28.861-08:00Lady Suffolk and Her Circle!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives3.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4118" title="nine lives" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives3-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a><br/><br/>Our book today is the 1924 volume <em>Lady Suffolk and Her Circle</em> by Lewis Melville, a wonderful and indefatigable hobby-historian who achieved his full writing powers in the all-too-brief Edwardian era and produced a shelf-full of great, meaty works of biography, letters, and history. Like everybody else, he wrote a book about <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/forever-nell/">Nell Gwyn</a> (although his had the benefit of deep familiarity with the world of the theater, since that was his day job), and his <em>Victorian Novelists</em> is - or rather was - a classic. His <em>Farmer George</em> was the first readable biography of King George I (and it's still the most readable, not that it has much competition), and his "Life and Letters"-style studies of William Beckford, John Gay, William Cobbett, Mary and Agnes Berry, Lawrence Sterne, and the Duke of Wharton were the fruits of enormous industry and taste and are in most cases any researcher's starting-point on their various subjects. He wrote a biography and two very genial studies of his beloved Thackeray, several subject-histories of the Regency period, and an odd and extremely endearing book called <em>Some Eccentrics and a Woman</em>.<br/><br/>All of these books are extremely good - none of them deserves to be out of print for all eternity - but <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/lady-suffolk-and-her-circle.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4119" title="lady suffolk and her circle" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/lady-suffolk-and-her-circle-197x300.jpg" alt="" width="197" height="300" /></a>perhaps the warmest and wittiest of them all is this big, stuffed "Life and Letters" study of Lady Suffolk and the bright, sharp-tongued courtiers, politicians, and poets who made up her circle. You'd expect the bright and lively Henrietta Hobart, daughter of a baronet, sister of the future first Earl of Buckinghamshire, to have such a circle of attendants and followers. But the future Lady Suffolk's circle was much larger than it would otherwise have been, because she was the long-time mistress of a stout, coarse, near-buffoonish ignoramus named George Lewis, who instead of becoming Elector of Hanover and drinking himself into an early grave became, through circumstances known (and regretted?) best to God, King of England as George II. Among common readers, the Hanoverian Georges are the least-known of all the rulers of England (except of course for George III, and even he is remembered mainly because he lost America and went insane - other details of his enormous reign are now completely forgotten), and with good reason - George II had an ill repute right from the start, with court gossip maintaining that he only ever truly hated three people: his father, his wife, and his son.<br/><br/>Still, he certainly didn't hate Henrietta Hobart - quite the opposite: he quickly came to depend on her enormously. Her social and political cache was enormous - possibly eclipsing his own (as has so often been the way with royal mistresses throughout the ages), as Melville writes:<br/><blockquote>The social interest, however, is abundant, and from the letters Lady Suffolk wrote and received the Court of George II, both as Prince of Wales and as King, can be reconstructed. Not to know Lady Suffolk, first at Leicester House and Richmond Lodge, then at St. James's and Hampton Court, and finally at Saville Row and Marble Hill, was to argue oneself unknown to political circles; and, therefore, in the correspondence all the notabilities of the day make their bow. Three Prime Ministers wrote to her, Pelham, Grenville, and Pitt. Lord Peterborough, who was really old enough to know better, made "gallant" love to her. Pope and Arbuthnot were devote to her; as were Lord Bathurst and Lord Chesterfield; while Gay and Swift sought her influence with the King.</blockquote><br/>[caption id="attachment_4121" align="alignleft" width="215" caption="the king and his lady love, by kitty shannon"]<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/the-king-and-his-lady-love-by-kitty-shannon.jpg"><img class="size-medium wp-image-4121" title="the king and his lady love, by kitty shannon" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/the-king-and-his-lady-love-by-kitty-shannon-215x300.jpg" alt="" width="215" height="300" /></a>[/caption]<br/><br/>She had a rival in George's actual queen, Caroline, who was also well known to dominate the King - to the extent that she came in for some public joking on the subject, as in the poem that circulated:<br/><blockquote>You may strut, dapper George, but 'twill all be in vain:<br/><br/>We know 'tis Queen Caroline, not you, that reign -<br/><br/>You govern no more than Don Philip of Spain.<br/><br/>Then if you would have us fall down and adore you,<br/><br/>Lock up your fat spouse, as your Dad did before you.</blockquote><br/>As Melville writes:<br/><blockquote>George read the pasquinade, and was furious. He showed it to Lord Scarborough, who admitted he had already seen it but, when the King asked who had shown it to him, he refused to say, telling his Majesty that he had passed his word of honour, even before reading it, not to mention from whom it came. "Had I been Lord Scarborough in this situation, and you King," said his Majesty wrathfully, "the man would have shot me, or I him, who should have dared to affront me, in the person of my master, by showing me such insolent nonsense." "I never told your Majesty that it was a man," said the Master of the Horse dryly.</blockquote><br/>On page after page of <em>Lady Suffolk and Her Circle</em>, there are juicy anecdotes like this one, and judicious historical insights, and the whole bustling, decadent, fascinating world of the Georgian England that thrived and strived and revelled an entire generation before what most people think of when they think of "Georgian" at all. And at the heart of this portrait is the lady herself, proud but sensible, sharply intelligent but oddly non-manipulative, very human and very, very funny. History has largely forgotten her as it has her royal lover, but in the pages of a book like this one, she lives again.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-18170031614805110562011-11-16T12:01:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:28.772-08:00Tricks of the Trade in the Penny Press!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/magazinesinabunch-300x23013.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-4110" title="magazinesinabunch-300x2301" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/magazinesinabunch-300x23013.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="230" /></a><br/><br/>It's a pleasure to watch practiced hands at work in the roller-derby world of professional letters, and this week in the Penny Press contained plenty of smiles in that department.<br/><br/>Those smiles came even in venues where a reader might expect nothing but sorrow - as in <em>The New Yorker</em>'s annual? semi-annual? Far too often "Food Issue," which always features vast barren tundras of bland food-oriented writing that could scarcely interest the grandmothers of the authors (who are invariably mentioned in the pieces, so there you go). "Food" issues, "Money" issues, and especially the dreaded "Fashion" issues of any otherwise-respectable magazine drive this particular reader to the brink of subscriber-despair - and drive me to hurriedly flip pages in search of the non-theme scraps that almost always manage to fall from the table.<br/><br/>In this case, there were two - but oh, they were tasty! First, there was Thomas Mallon's rumination on "the genre fiction's genre fiction," alternate-history novels. Mallon gives proper credit to Harry Turtledove's fantastic 1992 novel <em>Guns of the South</em> and make the very sharp observation about Don DeLillo's <em>Libra</em> that it "has always seemed more accomplished than satisfying." You know somebody's doing a good job covering a subject when you finish the article and just wish they'd kept writing - I'd have loved a wider sampling from Mallon. I assume he's read and loved L. Sprague DeCamp's 1939 classic <em>Lest Darkness Fall</em>, but what about three of my more recent favorites, Douglas Jones' <em>The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer</em> from 1976, Robert Skimin's 1988 <em>Gray Victory</em>, or J. N. Stroyar's massive <em>The Children's War</em> from 2001?<br/><br/>And the trick of the trade he employs in his article? He discusses Stephen King's rancidly narcissistic new <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/new-yorker2.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4112" title="new yorker" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/new-yorker2-205x300.jpg" alt="" width="205" height="300" /></a>JFK-assassination novel with actual adult intelligence and discrimination, rather than the opprobrium it deserves - because King mentions his own work favorably in the book. Sigh.<br/><br/>Right next to that article in the same <em>New Yorker</em> is a fantastic piece by Martin Amis (why is it, I wonder, that some of my least favorite modern novelists are some of my most favorite literary journalists?) about the aforementioned Don DeLillo's new book <em>The Angel Esmeralda</em>, and it brandishes its own trick of the trade right up front. When presented with a book that's a self-evident trifle, a writer of readable prose who's lucky enough to have a trusting editor has several options open to him - and my favorite of these (one I've been known to use myself!) is the one Amis employs here: <em>use</em> the book as a dog-and-pony show for some wonderfully indulgent stem-winding of your own (and get around to your actual review later on in the piece - or, if your Harold Bloom, not at all).<br/><br/>In Amis' case, this takes the form of a nifty little challenge:<br/><blockquote>When we say that we love a writer's work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. The vast presence of Joyce relies pretty well entirely on "Ulysses," with a little help from "Dubliners." You could jettison Kafka's three attempts at full-length fiction (unfinished by him, and unfinished by us) without muffling the impact of his seismic originality. George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central Anglophone novel. Every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems (and collaborated on a third). Milton consists of "Paradise Lost." Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, who usually eludes all mortal limitations, succumbs to this law. Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to read the comedies ("As You Like It" is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with "King John" or "Henry VI, Part III"?</blockquote><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/lrb.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4114" title="lrb" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/lrb-300x226.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="226" /></a>Hee. Wonderful stuff. I could read it for hours, whether I agree with it or not (needless to say, I don't in this case - "King John" has plenty of good stuff in it, and Amis shouldn't so readily admit his inability to find the worth in <em>Daniel Deronda). </em>In his tirade, Amis claims that even Jane Austen isn't immune from his theory - he speculates that the only two exceptions might be Homer and Harper Lee. And of course it prompted two natural questions: would Amis be brave enough to apply his theory to his own novels? Or, braver still, those of his father?<br/><br/>One of the oldest and most enjoyable tricks of the trade happens over in the latest <em>London Review of Books</em> (featuring the very first Peter Campbell cover-painting I've ever actually liked - and I'll never get another shot, since we're informed in this issue that the artist died in October): the letter-column rumble! In an earlier issue, Pankaj Mishra turned in a magisterial condemnation (a dismissal, really, at epic length) of Niall Ferguson's latest tome, <em>Civilisation: The West and the Rest</em>, coming as close as he legally could to calling it the steaming pile of smug racist jingoism it is. In the letters column of this latest issue, Ferguson writes an outraged, bombastic reply to that review, claiming he's been libelled and blimpishly demanding an apology. And Mishra, bless him, pens a response that's if anything more tart and damning than the original review.<br/><br/>Now Ferguson has been a show-boating very public historian for a decade or so (and he's done some very good work in that time, mind you), so I'm hoping he knows the tricks of the trade himself. The thing to do at this point is write another letter - letter-column slug-fests must be kept going at all costs, as far too few periodicals seem to realize anymore. The thing <em>not</em> to do is call his lawyers about a possible defamation suit. That's a trick of an entirely different trade.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/peter-campbells-last-lrb-cover-nov-2011.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4115" title="peter campbells last lrb cover - nov 2011" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/peter-campbells-last-lrb-cover-nov-2011-216x300.jpg" alt="" width="216" height="300" /></a><br/><br/><em></em><em><br/></em><br/><br/> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-68830490359948188742011-11-15T11:18:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:28.497-08:00Stevensoniana!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives2.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4080" title="nine lives" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives2-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a><br/><br/>Our book today is a jam-packed volume from 1903 called <em>Stevensoniana</em>, and it consists, as you might expect, of countless odd bits and pieces relating to the life and work of Robert Louis Stevenson. The bits and pieces are assembled by the legendary bookman John Hammerton (whose own book of bits and pieces, <em>Books and Myself</em>, is very much worth your time, if you can find a copy), who right up front offers his justifications:<br/><blockquote>By far the greater part of the work consists of matter, always interesting and often of high value, which might never have been brought together in one volume, and could have been consulted with great difficulty only, if at all. Perhaps, for this reason alone, 'Stevensoniana' carries its own excuse. The feeling uppermost in the mind of the editor while proceeding with the work of research and collation was one of surprise that a similar undertaking had not been essayed before, so rich and abundant was the material to engage any compiler.</blockquote><br/>Hammerton was perhaps so busy with his researching and collating that he didn't notice the dozen or so previous examples of Stevensoniana (memoirs, remembrances, tributes, etc) that had cropped up in Scotland and England in the decade since the writer's death, but no matter: this one is the best, the most comprehensive of them all. Those of you who've been reading <em>Stevereads</em> for any time (or who've been unlucky enough to be receiving the "audio version" for lot, these many years!) will know the esteem in which I hold RLS, the sheer joy I take in the huge variety of his literary output. Stevensoniana (like Johnsoniana, Kiplingiana, and Trollopiana!) of virtually any kind is guaranteed to win a smile from me, and a volume like this one - sitting unwanted on a Massachusetts library shelf for a decade, with nobody consulting its treasures until it was dropped from inventory and sold to me - instantly becomes a treasure. Attentive readers can glean many things from such a volume of miscellanies that they might not be shown in a more carefully gardened presentation, as in Charles Lowe's enthusiastic recollection of the rail-thin chain-smoking youth he met at Edinburgh University:<br/><blockquote>From that single hour's conversation with the embryo author of 'Treasure Island,' I certainly derived more intellectual and personal stimulus than ever was imparted to me by any six months' course of lectures within the walls of 'good King James's College.' He was so perfectly frank and ingenuous, so ebullient and open-hearted, so funny, so sparkling, so confiding, so vaulting in his literary ambitions, and withal so widely read and well-informed - notwithstanding his youth, for he could scarcely have been out of his teens then - that I could not help saying to myself that here was a young man who commended himself more to my approval and emulation than any other of my fellow-students ...</blockquote><br/>That 'so funny' points squarely at the more ephemeral glimpses that collections like this preserve. And in<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/stevensoniana-brookline-nov-2011.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4103" title="stevensoniana - brookline - nov 2011" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/stevensoniana-brookline-nov-2011-300x208.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="208" /></a> addition to such things, sometimes reading through this king of volume brings unforeseen patterns to the fore. This is W. E. Henley remembering the great author:<br/><blockquote>At bottom Stevenson was an excellent fellow. But he was of his essence what the French call <em>personnel</em>. He was, that is, incessantly and passionately interested in Stevenson. He could not be in the same room with a mirror but he must invite its confidences every time he passed it; to him there was nothing obvious in time and eternity, and the smallest of his discoveries, his most trivial apprehensions, were all by way of being revelations, and as revelations must be thrust upon the world; he was never so much in earnest, never so well pleased (this were he happy or wretched), never so irresistible, as when he wrote about himself.</blockquote><br/>And here's S. R. Crockett, writing with far greater skill but striking oddly similar notes:<br/><blockquote>But when he writes of himself, how supremely excellent is the reading. It is good even when he does it intentionally, as in 'Memories and Portraits.' It is better still when he sings it, as in his 'Child's Garden.' He is irresistible to every lonely child who reads and thrills, and reads again to find his past recovered fro him with effortless ease. It is a book never long out of my hands, for only in it and in my dreams, when I am touched with fever, do I grasp the long, long thoughts of a lonely child and a hill-wandering boy - thoughts I never told to any; yet which Mr. Stevenson tells over again to me as if he read them off a printed page.</blockquote><br/>All of it - all these tantalizing glimpses - are food for thought, all of it re-ponderable as the reader continues to love the writings of the man himself. The two are inextricably linked in fondess, as Clement Shorter points out in this volume: "Who could fail to love the man and his books?"Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-89925420637743148492011-11-14T14:13:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:28.583-08:00The Folds of Irony in the Penny Press!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/magazinesinabunch-300x23011.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-4087" title="magazinesinabunch-300x2301" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/magazinesinabunch-300x23011.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="230" /></a><br/><br/>Oh, the multiplicitous ironies in the latest batch of the Penny Press I consumed at my little hole-in-the-wall periodical-reading restaurant! Everywhere I turned, it was inescapable!<br/><br/>Take last week's <em>TLS </em>for example. Nicholas Thomas reviews the new biography of Captain Cook by Frank <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/tls.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4089" title="tls" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/tls-300x202.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="202" /></a>McLynn and finds it wanting. That verdict itself might not be so surprising - McLynn can often run <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/book-review-marcus-aurelius-life-frank-mclynn/">hot</a> and <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/review-of-heros-villians-inside-the-minds-of-the-greatest-warriors-in-history/">cold </a>even with the same reviewer - but the context in which it's delivered is positively riddled with irony, because in pillorying McLynn, Thomas (a specialist in South Pacific art and history and a very amiable guy) raises the spectre of that greatest of all Captain Cook biographers, John Beaglehole - only to pillory him too! We're told Beaglehole's book is "marred by an opinionated style" and actually has the temerity to draw conclusions about its illustrious subject:<br/><blockquote>Beaglehole's Cook is almost narrow-minded, an indefatigable, practical rationalist, remarkable for his clear grasp of geographic, navigational, or nautical problems, and his single-minded approach to solving them. He is great, in Beaglehole's mind, in part because he has none of the sentimental or philosophical frippery of the eighteenth century around him.</blockquote><br/>The irony here of course being that if Thomas finds a book like Beaglehole's - vast, authoritative, utterly absorbing, beautifully written - wanting, he undercuts any credibility he'd otherwise have in finding any other book about Cook wanting. We might listen to a critic who called the latest Boris Akunin novel a disgrace to the great Russian literary tradition, but we instantly stop listening if that same critic says <em>War and Peace</em> is also a disgrace to the great Russian literary tradition, and we don't just disbelieve him about Tolstoy - we associatedly disbelieve him about Akunin even if we haven't read him.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/harpers.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4090" title="harpers" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/harpers-216x300.jpg" alt="" width="216" height="300" /></a>A similar piercing irony crops up in the latest <em>Harper's</em>. That issue features a long and leapingly enthusiastic review of Christopher Hitchens' <em>Arguably</em> by Terry Eagleton, and the piece contains ironies of its own, mainly deriving from the fact that like every other 'review' of this big fat essay collection, it's really a boisterous stiff-upper-lip encomium - for a guy who isn't even dead yet. "He could tell you just who to talk to about Kurdish nationalism in the southeastern Turkish city of Batman, as well as what to order in the only decent restaurant there. He can give you the lowdown on everyone from Isaac Newton to Gore Vidal, Oscar Wilde to Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab..." Etc.... in every case, those 'can's are just itching to be 'could's - and it gets in the way of reviewers assessing the ample weak spots of this collection.<br/><br/>But the piece is part of a larger irony too. Hitchens has achieved most of his current notoriety for his brattish nose-tweaking to the concept of religion (particularly all the young people I know who adore him adore him for that reason), the sort of 'you adults are just DUMB to believe this stuff!' braying most of us got out of our systems in high school. But another essay in the same issue of <em>Harper's</em> could serve as good ammo for Hitchens' numerous droned-over debate opponents: Alan Lightman writes a piece about modern cosmology that contains a digression worth quoting in full:<br/><blockquote>... according to various calculations, if the values of some of the fundamental parameters of our universe were a little larger or a little smaller, life could not have arisen. For example, if the nuclear force were a few percentage points stronger than it actually is, then all the hydrogen atoms in the infant universe would have fused with other hydrogen atoms to make helium, and there would be no hydrogen left. No hydrogen means no water. Although we are far from certain about what conditions are necessary for life, most biologists believe that water is necessary. On the other hand, if the nuclear force were substantially weaker than what it actually is, then the complex atoms needed for biology could not hold together. As another example, if the relationship between the strengths of the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force were not close to what it is, then the cosmos would not harbor any stars that explode and spew out life-supporting chemical elements into space or any other stars that form planets. Both kinds of stars are require for the emergence of life. The strengths of the basic forces an certain other fundamental parameters in our universe appear to be "fine-tuned" to allow the existence of life. The recognition of this fine-tuning led British physicist Brandon Carter to articulate what he called the anthropic principle, which states that the universe must have the parameters it does because we are here to observe it.</blockquote><br/>Carter's principle forms the basis for a 1988 book called <em>The Anthropic Cosmological Principle</em> by John Barrow and Frank Tipler, one of the most persistently thought-provoking books of the 20th century, and it's ironic to fin that principle being elaborated cheek-by-jowl with more regurgitated Hitchens Got-baiting.<br/><br/>And there's irony to be found over in the latest <em>Atlantic</em>, in which Benjamin Schwarz reviews <em>Higher <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/atlantic.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4091" title="atlantic" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/atlantic-218x300.jpg" alt="" width="218" height="300" /></a>Gossip</em>, the new posthumous collection of literary journalism from the pen of John Updike. I'm no fan of Updike's book reviews - too bland, too timid, too falsely everyman - but as he always does, Schwarz actually makes me think about perhaps revisiting the guy's work. Certainly Schwarz ranks that work - a vast collection - highly:<br/><blockquote>This huge body of work, 4,314 pages in all, secured Updike a place among America's few great men of letters (since Edmund Wilson's death, only Gore Vidal and Updike can be added to the pantheon).</blockquote><br/>The irony of that outrageous parenthetical should be abundantly clear already, but just in case it isn't, here's a bit from the second half of Schwarz' book-column this month, on the fourth volume of the official history of the Bank of England:<br/><blockquote>Nevertheless, this book contains probably the most revealing record of a central bank's struggles in the modern era. (Others might bestow that crown on Allen H. Meltzer's magisterial an plainly written multivolume <em>A History of the Federal Reserve</em>, but that great work is more strictly a monetary history, and Meltzer doesn't treat the Fed's other duties, such as bank regulation, in the same rich detail as Capie does the actions of the Old Lady.)</blockquote><br/>Hee. So: the choicest irony of all - Schwarz is certainly leaving at least one name off his list of great 20th century men of letters. It could just be an old-fashioned modesty, but I'm guessing otherwise. I bet the idea never occurred to him.<br/><br/> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com40tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-28622418163994535452011-11-14T14:12:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:28.667-08:00An Additional, Deeper Irony in the Penny Press!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/magazinesinabunch-300x23012.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-4094" title="magazinesinabunch-300x2301" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/magazinesinabunch-300x23012.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="230" /></a><br/><br/>Perhaps the greatest irony in the week's Penny Press also cropped up in <em>The Atlantic</em>, where historian Taylor Branch responds to some of the many reader opinions generated by his recent article about college athletics. In that article, Branch outlines the enormous amounts of money colleges make off their 'amateur' players, who are technically student-athletes and who don't get paid. Certainly there are iniquities in that system, but Branch chose to underscore them in an untenable way: by reviving the old college-athletes-as-slaves argument and hammering on it.<br/><br/>Such a gambit raised a few hackles, most certainly including <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2011/09/shame-and-acclaim-in-the-penny-press/">my own</a>, and in this latest issue, Branch responds:<br/><blockquote>Let me respond to Steve Donoghue on the slavery analogy. He is one of many readers who find it extreme and inaccurate, but I stand by the comparison because I think it illuminates patterns of thought. My analogy was qualified, of course. College athletes are not literally slaves. However, they have in common the fact that immense wealth has been create from their skilled, diligent labor, in such a way that denies them the full rights of American citizenship.<br/><br/>... Anyone who wonders how slavery survived so long would do well to ponder the NCAA. It rests on fiat an inertia. People shy away from considering its basic justification, because there is none. Similarly, people once despised the abolitionists, not in defense of slavery in principle, but precisely because they were upset that the abolitionists were right.<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/atlantic1.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4096" title="atlantic" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/atlantic1-218x300.jpg" alt="" width="218" height="300" /></a><br/><br/> </blockquote><br/>My grandmother would have said "Stop digging before you bury yourself." First, you can't stand by a comparison that's flawed not at its fringes but at its heart, any more than you can qualify an analogy by vitiating its central tenet. College athletes aren't denied any "rights" as American citizens that all other college students aren't also denied; the "rights" to which Branch is alluding have been specifically abrogated by the athletes themselves, when they entered their colleges and Big Ten universities with their eyes wide open. Those athletes don't get nothing in exchange for their physical skills - and they get a whole hell of a lot more than the slaves in Branch's analogy did: not just food and shelter, but a free ride at their school (often to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars that non-ball-bouncing students actually have to <em>pay</em>) - a <em>degree</em> from Yale or Brown or Stanford. Yes, the schools exploit the popularity of college athletics to generate money off the 'diligent' work of these athletes, but the 'pattern of thought' illustrated is greed, not ownership. And there's plenty of greed to go around; as I pointed out in that earlier post, the entire superstructure about which Branch achieves such moral indignation is built on the greed of its student athletes and their parents. And their greed would be utterly unrecognizable to the slaves in Branch's analogy - they're hungry not to be free but to be multi-millionaires in four years or less. They know that they're not allowed to demand a multi-million salary while they're students - they voluntarily become students anyway, to play the long odds for those multi-millions the instant they graduate. There is no part of that reality which compares in any way with slavery, a system whose inhabitants entered into it involuntarily, with no hope of freedom, much less mind-staggering wealth. What Branch should have written this time around was "Look, the more I researched the iniquities and inequalities of college sports, the more hot under the collar I got, and in rage I wrote those slavery-comparison bits, but I see now I went too far."<br/><br/>And even such a backtrack wouldn't explain that second quoted paragraph! People despised abolitionists because they hated the fact that abolitionists were <em>right</em>? As with the slavery analogy, so too here: it's almost possible to forget that the writer of this nonsense is in fact one of the greatest historians America has ever produced, author of the incredible <em>America in the King Years</em> trilogy that should be required reading at every college and university in the country (this is, of course, the deeper irony). I know he must know this, but after reading that second quoted paragraph, I feel compelled to point it out anyway: Racists hated abolitionists because they thought those abolitionists were "<em>nigger-lovers"</em> - most certainly NOT because they secretly knew slavery was wrong. Slavery in America flourished because bigots actively used the Bible and majority tyranny to enforce it - not because of some self-loathing Freudian contortion.<br/><br/>I've almost never read such a statement from a working professional, and I can't account for it. We're all entitled to our occasional howlers, but yeesh - to put it mildly, William Lloyd Garrison would have been amazed to learn that the mobs screaming for his blood were actually <em>agreeing</em> with him ...<br/><br/> <br/><br/> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-50066447717333384252011-11-13T03:53:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:28.393-08:00That Great Lucifer!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4070" title="nine lives" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nine-lives1-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a><br/><br/>Our book today is Margaret Irwin's 1960 biography of Sir Walter Ralegh, <em>That Great Lucifer</em>, and it begins on an ominously testy note:<br/><blockquote>This is not a novel, or a fictional biography. There are no imaginary scenes or conversations in it; and Ralegh's own words are quoted continuously. But it is a portrait of him and some of his contemporaries rather than a comprehensive life; and it would be pretentious to add a bibliography. The sources are mostly evident from the text, or in my few footnotes.</blockquote><br/>The explanation comes from Irwin's own life story: she was a successful novelist. Starting in 1927 with <em>Knock Four Times,</em> continuing in 1928 with <em>Fire Down Below</em>, then in 1930 with her renowned <em>None So Pretty</em>, she carved out a faithful reading audience as a popular writer. And then, like so many such writers, she began to yearn for more. In her case it brought out her two best-known books, <em>Elizabeth, Captive Princess </em>and especially <em>Young Bess</em>, two high-spirited and very readable novels about Queen Elizabeth I (there was a third book in what then got called a trilogy, but it showed a bit of strain). But the El Dorado of every novelist is nonfiction (and it works in reverse - historians yearn for the dash of fiction), and late in her life Irwin produced this book, a defiantly factual little 'portrait' of the man considered by many - certainly including himself - to be the greatest Elizabethan of them all.<br/><br/>Like all such great Elizabethans, his greatness was of the deeply troubled, divisive variety. Ralegh came from minor Devonshire gentry, the type of people who could expect to be presented at court, but he gained his first fortune and renown by suppressing the Irish in Munster - and he was richly rewarded for it. He famously found the Irish a bit strange, and the feeling was mutual:<br/><blockquote>The peasants, as always in Ireland, were contemptuously, or at best tolerantly, amused by the strange whims of the high and mighty English chief who had a fancy to make them plant whole fields of a dull root with an Indian name, as if anyone in Ireland, however starving, would ever grow or eat anything so outlandish as his new-fangled 'potatoes.' Yet they took root there, both in the soil and in men's habits, far more quickly than in England; easier to grow than any crop, they saved the people from famine again and again; became the staple food of Ireland, and in time changed her economic history.<br/><br/>Still more outlandish were his fields of another Indian plant called tobacco, grown, not to eat, but to burn and puff through the mouth; and what profit could there ever be in that? No matter, he was an English lord, and as mad as they make them, but he paid for the work.</blockquote><br/>Manors, estates, tenants, and a comfortable income were his while he was still a young man, and unlike his <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/that-great-lucifer-brookline-nov-2011.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4075" title="that great lucifer - brookline - nov 2011" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/that-great-lucifer-brookline-nov-2011-199x300.jpg" alt="" width="199" height="300" /></a>Munster neighbor Edmund Spenser, he had the physical confidence and charisma to galvanize it all into a reputation for success that had little grounding in actual success. Ralegh was tall and well-formed, sharply well-spoken, and entirely willing to knock somebody down in the street if they offended him. He was a huckster, a project-starter, and he had the clear-eyed goal of filling both his own coffers and those of England - and in this he found the perfect monarch in Queen Elizabeth I, as Margaret Irwin knew better than anybody (you don't really come to <em>know</em> a historical figure until you try to capture them in fiction):<br/><blockquote> Elizabeth saw that England was learning to put principles above Princes. Righteous indignation, in this increasingly Puritan age, could from the highest motives drag England into Civil War. She forestalled it for forty years. She accepted the warning of the future, and ignored false encouragement from the past; forgot the example of her tyrannical father, and remembered instead that of her prudent grandfather who 'could not endure to see Trade sick.'</blockquote><br/>This is a delightful 'portrait,' all the lighter and more enjoyable for the author's feisty amateur status, and all the great figures of Elizabeth's day stride through these pages, shrewdly assessed:<br/><blockquote>Essex was not quite twenty, and young even for that; he was tall as Ralegh, and fair as Ralegh was dark, his bright hair and new-sprouting wisps of beard rather untidy and his dress careless, his hands delicate as a woman's, and his eyes those of a dreamy yet excitable boy. He stooped with his head thrust forward, and his portraits scarcely show the beauty which won a fame that was largely due to his extraordinary personal attraction. Eager, volatile, now gay, now moody; refreshingly, when not disconcertingly, impulsive, he charmed both men and women to spoil and forgive him, and to love him.</blockquote><br/>Unfortunately for Ralegh, he fell out with the aging Queen when he first impregnated and then married one of her closest friends, and although the relationship between courtier and monarch limped to a kind of recovery after that, things were never the same. And things changed drastically when Elizabeth died and her far less shrewd and far more insecure heir James came to the throne. The new boss had need of Ralegh's matchless enterprise as a voyage-maker, but Ralegh's bravery and confidence unnerved him. Unlike Shakespeare, this great Elizabethan couldn't adapt to being a great Jacobean, and Ralegh ended up in prison being treated snidely by the new men he might not have deigned to notice in his glory years:<br/><blockquote>To us today it sounds an intolerable impertinence to a much older man, so soon to die. But not to all of us; for a recent writer reproves, as harshly as any dogmatist divine of the seventeenth century, 'the essential frivolity of Ralegh's character ... giving a lightness and gaiety to his courage before death,' all the more reprehensible, apparently, because it 'deeply impressed contemporary opinion, and showed up James by contrast as a mean and grasping schemer.' But Ralegh can hardly be blamed because James suffered in contrast with him. It had indeed always been the deepest and worst complaint James held against Raleigh; all the more unforgivable because it must never be mentioned.</blockquote><br/>Of course, James had Ralegh beheaded. There was a fine scene on the scaffold, a fine quip for the audience, and there was a final minute of bravery greater than all the others (the axeman wasn't skilled). Margaret Irwin captures all this in the kind of sparkling, happy prose that's usually missing from more scholarly productions - and yet she sacrifices no accuracy on that score. Fifty year old biographies don't get reprinted the way fifty year old novels sometimes do, but I wish this one would.<br/><br/> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-15418751878539559682011-11-10T12:17:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:28.203-08:00Penguins on Parade: The Age of Bede!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/penguin.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-4030" title="penguin" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/penguin.gif" alt="" width="143" height="200" /></a><br/><br/>Some Penguin Classics, as we've noted, are actually Penguin Confections, editorial chimerae cobbled together from fugitive bits and pieces, rather than faithful translations of intact ancient works. This is by no means a criticism: such cobbled-together volumes can be utter delights - depending on the vision and brio of the editors and translators involved. I'll always take almost as sharp a delight in a good well-chosen "Age of Voltaire"-type volume as I will in well-translated single texts from the same period - there's a lot to be said for the joys of juxtaposition, expected and otherwise.<br/><br/>Such a volume is certainly Penguin's 1965 <em>The Age of Bede</em>, in the revised edition of 1998. Here editor D. H. Farmer assembles five ancient Church texts from England and Ireland in the sixth and seventh centuries, when Christianity faced its first major-scale crisis of centralization - Roman episcopal organization against the cellular satellites of the monasteries and monastic orders ... and when that crisis itself was located firmly on the spectrum of larger crises that we used to call the Dark Ages.<br/><br/>In the cold and collapsed West during those ages, monasteries were often islands of learning. They had artwork and libraries, they valued erudition (albeit of the straightened Christian variety), and their emissaries travelled dangerous roads in pursuit of books and educated conversation. No matter what a modern agnostic reader may think of Christianity as a belief system or literary subject, respect must be paid to the quarrelling, striving intellect so often found on these old bound pages. The life of the mind for a time survived in the West mainly in such vessels, pursuing such narratives.<br/><br/>Five such narratives are presented together in <em>The Age of Bede</em>: Eddius Stephanus' <em>Life of Wilfrid, </em>the anonymous <em>History of Abbot Ceolfrith</em>, one chunk of the boisterous, ongoing adventures of St. Brendan, <em>The Voyage of St. Brendan</em>, and two works by Bede himself: <em>The Life of Cuthbert</em>, and an excerpt from <em>The Lives of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow. </em>As you can tell from those titles, there's a great deal here of what you might expect: saints' lives, healed children, praise-songs at all hours of the day and night. But there are also innumerable moments of pure reading fun - for those readers patient and open-minded enough to reach them. Take this story from <em>The Life of Wilfrid</em>:<br/><blockquote>During the construction of the highest parts of the walls of the church, a young man, one of <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/age-bede-venerable-paperback-cover-art.jpg"><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-4035" title="age-bede-venerable-paperback-cover-art" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/age-bede-venerable-paperback-cover-art.jpg" alt="" width="167" height="254" /></a>the bishop's masons, lost his footing on a high pinnacle, fell headlong, and dashed himself on the stone pavement below. He broke his arms and legs; every joint was put out. There he lay gasping his last. The masons thought he was dead and at the bishop's command took him outside on a bier. Wilfrid had been praying and weeping but now hastily summoned all the workmen.<br/><br/>'Let us show how great our faith is by praying together with one accord that God may send back the soul into this lad's body and hear our prayers for his life, even as he heard the prayers of St. Paul.'<br/><br/>They knelt down and prayed that he who mocks at every good thing might have no victory to gloat over in this building. The bishop prayed after the manner of Elias an Eliseus and gave his blessing. The breath of life returned to the boy. The doctors bound up his arms and legs and he improved steadily day by day. He is still alive to give thanks to God and his name is Bothelm.</blockquote><br/>Notice all the interesting stuff that's going on here! Wilfrid is the man in charge of this whole epic undertaking, and as soon as he sees that the masons have given up the fallen boy for dead, he orders the body to be taken outside - away from the other workers, who were no doubt spooked (and perhaps seeing the Devil's hand in the boy's fall). Once outside, Wilfrid obviously sends the workmen away (since he has to call them back again) - he doesn't want a crowd milling around while this poor boy breathes his last. Then something happens - Wilfrid must have examined the boy and detected signs of life despite the grievous injuries. Instantly, he calls everybody back to gather around the body and holds a quick prayer meeting - and notice the angle he works in: that the boy's revival is linked to the pride of their ongoing building. That would be an unthinkable gamble if Wilfrid hadn't already been fairly certain the crowd would soon see the fluttering of eyelids and the gasping for air. And when that happens, the miracle is over - the God of infinite power Wilfrid invokes doesn't see fit to go the extra five feet and actually heal the boy's broken limbs. Poor young Bothelm (a very neat end-twist, revealing that the boy is still alive, a grown man now and still grateful) takes a horrible fall and is both badly stunned and badly injured. Canny Wilfrid uses the temporary nature of the former to distract his workers from the discouraging nature of the latter - a tense moment when a great deal could have gone wrong, saved by nimble thinking and a bit of con artistry!<br/><br/>Or this touching moment from Bede's account of the life of Ceolfrith, who'd been friend and mentor to him for all of Bede's life - Ceolfrith had taught him how to read and write, how to control himself, how to think, and the two had survived plague and plunder together. Now Ceolfrith, sensing that he was dying, organizes one last overland voyage to Rome, where he ostensibly plans to present the Pope with one of his ornate new Bibles. The brothers at Ceolfrith's abbey are not fooled - they know they'll never seen this man, their friend and rock, again in the living world, and they lose all composure. As usual, it's left to Ceolfrith himself to keep things from breaking down:<br/><blockquote>He bade them his last farewell, urging them to preserve mutual love and to correct offenders, as the Gospel enjoins. He offered his forgiveness and goodwill to any who might have offended and begged any whom he might have rebuked too severely to be reconciled to him and to pray for him. They arrived at the shore; once again he gave them all the kiss of peace amidst their tears. They fell to their knees and, after he had offered a prayer, he and his companions boarded the boat. The deacons of the church embarked with them, carrying the lighted candles and a golden cross. After crossing the river, he venerated the cross, mounted his horse and rode off, leaving behind him in his monasteries brethren to the number of around six hundred.</blockquote><br/><em>The Age of Bede</em> offers many dozens of such wonderful moments - some full of life and dialogue and implicit conflict (and, shall we say, questionable veracity, in the case of anything connected with <em>The Life of Brendan</em>), others far more quiet and inward-looking, but all alive with the same narrative energy and drama that would migrate to the secular world in a few centuries, once writing and learning had returned there. There are <em>people</em> in these old Church books, and their stories are every bit as fascinating now as they were when they were the only stories in the world.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-68968706507185327762011-11-09T11:11:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:28.306-08:00Full and Proper Credit in the Penny Press!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/magazinesinabunch-300x2301.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-4038" title="magazinesinabunch-300x2301" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/magazinesinabunch-300x2301.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="230" /></a><br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/vf.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4042" title="vf" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/vf-214x300.jpg" alt="" width="214" height="300" /></a>It's a bit unnerving, getting royally hacked off at Christopher Hitchens these days. The man's health is fragile, after all, and it hardly feels sporting to get riled up at somebody in such a position. So I read his latest piece of Kennedy-bashing in the new <em>Vanity Fair</em> with my fist knotted around a napkin, trying to maintain a caring, indulgent silence while he yet one more time slanders the dead. Nothing new in the slanders, either - while purporting to write about the newly-released (and hugely best-selling) book of interviews Jackie Kennedy did with Arthur Schlesinger fifty years ago, Hitchens bloatedly mentions that JFK, while maintaining a "stupefying consumption of uppers and downers," took credit for <em>Profiles in Courage</em> even though it's an "often exploded falsehood" that he wrote it, took credit for his inaugural address even though "it has been well established" that John Kenneth Galbraith and, God help us, Adlai Stevenson wrote it, and took credit for <em>While England Slept</em> even though "full and proper credit may not have been given to the book's chief author, the biddable journalist Arthur Krock." At first, reading all this envious garbage, I felt the blood boil ... but then, as I scrutinized the paragraphs, I realized the truth: Hitchens, no doubt maintaining a stupefying consumption of cancer medications, was clearly in no shape to write even two slanderous pages for <em>Vanity Fair</em>. Once I'd exploded this falsehood, it became pretty well established that the piece's chief author was obviously that biddable journalist,<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott"> James Wolcott</a>. I hope someday when Hitchens is no longer around to defend himself, Wolcott gets full and proper credit.<br/><br/>That issue of <em>Vanity Fair</em> had other irritants as well, including a half-page notice about the new Broadway <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/hunter-parrish-douchebag.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4041" title="hunter parrish, douchebag" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/hunter-parrish-douchebag-276x300.jpg" alt="" width="276" height="300" /></a>revival of <em>Godspell </em>starring the douchebag Hunter Parrish as Jesus Christ. The only way I could be pleased with such casting would be if opening night concluded with an actual crucifixion.<br/><br/>Fortunately, it's <em>Vanity Fair</em>, and that means it's not possible the an entire issue will disappoint. This one has a wonderful, nostalgic look at "The Invincible Mrs. Thatcher" by Charles Moore, a perfect in-depth prep for the upcoming "Iron Lady" movie.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/new-yorker1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4040" title="new yorker" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/new-yorker1-203x300.jpg" alt="" width="203" height="300" /></a>And over at <em>The New Yorker</em>, Louis Menand turns in a long, excellent review of John Lewis Gaddis' new biography of that arch architect of Soviet containment, George Kennan - by far the most comprehensive, readable, and intelligent review that book has so far received. And in the same issue, David Remnick is also in top form in a scathing "Talk of the Town" piece about the idiot Herman Cain that also manages to get in some good whacks at the frankly terrifying Mitten Romney:<br/><blockquote>The knowing people who know things in Washington generally believe that, once the electoral process begins in January, Romney will shed Cain, Perry, Bachmann, and the rest in rapid fashion. Perhaps. To look at Romney is to see plausibility. But a large portion of the Republican electorate seems determined to hop from one fantastically flawed alternative to the next rather than settle on him. A few may be loath to vote for a Mormon; others have ideological difference that make it hard to embrace him. It is Romney's spooky elasticity, his capacity to reverse himself utterly on one issue after another - health care, climate change, abortion, gun control, immigration, the 2009 stimulus, capital-gains taxes, stem-cell research, gay rights - that seems to bother voters most. They might rightly ask if there is even one thing that Mitt Romney believe in with greater conviction than his inevitability.</blockquote><br/>But it's <em>New York</em> that takes the prize this time around, not only for David Edelstein's masterful review of the new movie "J. Edgar" -<br/><blockquote>You might wonder: "Who is the gay, pinko, subversive director behind this Tommy-gun assault on our national security and masculinity?" Clint Eastwood, of course. <em>J. Edgar</em> is the latest chapter in Eastwood's never-ending project to deconstruct the macho, jingoist, homophobic, right-win archetype he once embodied - and prove himself an artist whose simplicity of style belies the most sophisticated understanding of the dual nature of the American character of any living filmmaker.</blockquote><br/>But pride of place rightly goes to this issue's cover story by Jesse Green, "What Do a Bunch of Old Jews <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/new-york.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4039" title="new york" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/new-york-224x300.jpg" alt="" width="224" height="300" /></a>Know About Living Forever?" The idea of the piece is interesting enough - studying extremely long-lived Ashkenazi Jews and what, if any, secrets of longevity their genes might hold - but the true reward here is Green's sheer, glowing writing. Even on a conceptual level, he hits nothing but home runs - including his decision to insert as many Jewish jokes as the piece will support:<br/><blockquote>"Oy," says Sophie.<br/><br/>"Oy vey," says Esther.<br/><br/>"Oy veyizmir," says Sadie.<br/><br/>"I thought we weren't going to talk about our children," says Mildred.</blockquote><br/>Or:<br/><blockquote>Klein brags to Cohen about his new hearing aid: "It's the best one made - I now understand everything!"<br/><br/>"What kind is it?" Cohen asks.<br/><br/>"3:15."</blockquote><br/>And the single best thing in this issue of <em>New York</em>? In the "Party Lines" page, Princess Charlene of Monaco is asked, "What do you think about how the royal family of Monaco is portrayed on 'Gossip Girl'?"<br/><br/>To which she responds, "What's 'Gossip Girl'?"<br/><br/>Hee. A little of that goes a long way toward easing my disappointment at learning that John F. Kennedy was a functionally illiterate gibbering pill-popper.<br/><br/> <br/><br/> Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-22383569500414792112011-11-07T16:37:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:28.089-08:00Under the Covers with Paul Marron: the Golden Age!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/paul-in-brown-underwear.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4017" title="paul-in-brown-underwear" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/paul-in-brown-underwear-199x300.jpg" alt="" width="199" height="300" /></a>When last we left our hero Paul Marron, he had overcome a disastrous fashion mis-step and gone back to his roots, as it were, to find renewal and new hope. Romance had rekindled in his supermodel heart, and the Romance world had begun to reciprocate, with a vengeance. Traditionally, Romance novel covers displayed the customary imaginative partition: there was a beautiful young woman in the process of being enraptured, and there was a handsome young man doing the enrapturing. During the puritanical 80s and 90s, book cover designers were chary of having their products look like actual snapshots from mid-coitus, so the positions these young couples tended to take were more athletic than functional (one - unintended? - side-effect was that often on those covers it looks like the handsome young man is rapturing the beautiful young woman ... er, Brokeback Mountain-style), but both sides of the Romance equation were accounted for. Women (and, presumably, one out of every ten men) reading these novels could either fantasize about being that ravished heroine, or they could fantasize about being ravished by that handsome young man.<br/><br/>Our boy Paulie changed all that. Cover designers were clearly overwhelmed by the sheer Kelvin-range of his cheeky smolder, the tectonic pout of his lips, the sexy swivel of his svelte shoulders. They discovered that when Paul Marron, sultry and perhaps a bit dishevelled, is glaring out at you from the cover of a Romance novel, he's actively fulfilling both fantasies at once - he balances the equation all by himself. Soon, dozens of Paul Marron covers were appearing every month in bookstores across the country, all sporting variously manipulated images of Paul - and <em>only</em> Paul. For the first time since the era of Fabio, a male model was judged sufficient to sell a Romance novel to women without any women on the cover. Who needs direct imaginative identification when you've got those intense Italian eyes lasering into you?<br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/dark-desires-after-dusk.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4018" title="dark desires after dusk" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/dark-desires-after-dusk-179x300.jpg" alt="" width="179" height="300" /></a><a href="http://kresleycole.com/">Kresley Cole </a>realized this early on, and the cover of her 2008 entry in her "Immortals After Dark" series shows it! There's our boy - in this case, masquerading as a full-fledged demon (complete with forehead-horns!) by the name of Cadeon Woede, who manages to become erotically fascinated by the mortal woman Holly Ashwin even as supernatural forces conspire to reveal that she's the chosen Vessel, so called because every 500 years a woman is fated to give birth to a child who'll change the otherworldly balance of power for good or evil (yep, the female lead is called a <em>vessel</em>, and it turns out super-macho para-military demons like Paul can only really tell if a woman is destined to be his by <em>sleeping</em> with her ... this isn't a fantasy novel aimed at Gloria Steinem's night-stand). He abducts poor Holly and, um, auditions her rather strenuously, and in the course of the book she discovers that she herself isn't what she seems ... yet another exponent of the disturbing <em>Twilight</em>-ethos in which a young woman can <em>only</em> achieve self-awareness through getting rogered good and proper by a man. Although at least in this case the man was a sturdy little super-model and not a mush-faced bent-chested little Gothling ...<br/><br/>We go from primal supernatural fantasy to primal supernatural fantasy by turning next to <a href="http://www.pamelapalmer.net/">Pamela Palmer</a>'s <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/desire-untamed.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4023" title="theb" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/desire-untamed-185x300.jpg" alt="" width="185" height="300" /></a>"Feral Warriors" novel <em>Desire Untamed</em>, which features a truly astounding cover-image of our hero in mid-crouch, buck-naked except for a lion-head arm-band. Palmer, wise woman that she is, clearly has a <em>thing</em> for Paul - he's appeared on a number of her book-covers, but never to more mesmerizing effect than here: caught in steamy red, muscles taut, eyes glowing, hair unabashedly Fabio-esque. In this book Paul goes by the name of Lyon, the leader of a band of Feral Warriors, the Therians, who are seeking a woman - a woman they call the <em>Radiant</em>, who's destined to renew their fading race (three guesses <em>how</em>)(sigh). Unbeknownst to her, that woman is ordinary every-day preschool teacher Kara MacAllister, who discovers in the course of the book that she herself isn't what she seems ... so yes, Palmer and Cole have essentially written the same book, with our boy Paul doing double-duty as both a sexy demon and an enormous house-cat. But the point is: look at that cover! In many ways, it's unlike any Romance cover seen before: not only is it explicitly erotic in ways that all that Brokeback Mountaineering couldn't hope to be, but it's explicitly <em>personal</em> - directed squarely at the reader in open invitation. It's instantly one of the very best Paul Marron covers of all time.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/rion.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4024" title="rion" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/rion-186x300.jpg" alt="" width="186" height="300" /></a>Urban fantasy gives way to science fiction in <a href="http://www.susankearney.com/">Susan Kearney</a>'s <em>Rion</em>, the second instalment in her "Pendragon Legacy" series. Here Paul goes by the name of, you guessed it, Rion, a half-breed space explorer from the planet Honor who kidnaps sexy human telepath Marisa Rourke because she unwittingly holds the key to the salvation of his ... OK, OK. So it's just possible there's a trade-off going on here. It's possible this astounding new level of Paul Marron covers comes at a price - not just to Gloria Steinem but to women everywhere, who are here reading adventure after adventure of female main characters who have no clue about their capabilities or even identities until those things are revealed to them, through sex, by a sultry Paul-avatar. And the Paul-avatar uses the (allegedly) affectionate adjective 'little' in conjunction with her name/title for the whole book. And the sex happens because she's been abducted and sprawled forcibly on the bed/chamber floor/forest sward/starship bridge. OK, OK, so this trend is pretty bad. But again: look at that cover! This one takes the Marron Gamble to new levels: there's <em>nothing</em> promised here except the promises implied by our hero's stunning <em>face.</em> That's a far cry from horny Brazilian millionaires.<br/><br/>We come right back down to Earth for <a href="http://www.stephanietyler.com/">Stephanie Tyler</a>'s <em>Hard to Hold</em>, in which Paul appears as <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/hard-to-hold.jpg"><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-4025" title="hard to hold" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/hard-to-hold.jpg" alt="" width="168" height="276" /></a>Lieutenant Jake Hansen, hard-bitten (and yet gorgeous!) Navy SEAL who's ordered to darkest Africa to spirit feisty, sexy Dr. Isabelle Markham out of harm's way. Since he's ordered to do this with or without her cooperation, we're talking about our fourth abduction in just this one entry, although at least nobody's expecting poor Isabelle to save an entire planet (or are they?). And the cover doesn't disappoint: there's our boy, steamily glancing off to his right, sweaty torso clad in a tight tank top, taut little chest sporting Special Op dog-tags, handsome face drawn to sharp, intense focus. Pre-Marron, such a cover would have been unthinkable - cover-editors would have said it lacked any kind of story-line. And they'd have been right: any other model couldn't manage to <em>convey</em> a story-line simply by pouting there. But this particular model has been forged, as we've seen, in countless adventures - he's known apocalyptic wastelands, English country villas, immortal vampire-queens, and more than a few tightly-bound perils, and he's emerged from them all with a cover-confidence never seen before in the Romance world.<br/><br/>Where will it take him, you wonder? Why, to a series of ever-more-satisfying climaxes, of course! We'll seize on one in our next thrilling chapter!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-83864663417308824092011-11-06T15:30:00.000-08:002011-12-02T20:02:28.003-08:00Allen Mandelbaum<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/allen-mandelbaum.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-4021" title="allen mandelbaum" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/allen-mandelbaum.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="250" /></a><br/><br/>Insightful critic, elegant raconteur, and the finest Englisher of Dante. Rest in Peace.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-45239449978151595172011-11-05T16:18:00.000-07:002011-12-02T20:02:27.874-08:00Sheer Virtuosity in the Penny Press!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/magazinesinabunch.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4006" title="magazinesinabunch" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/magazinesinabunch-300x230.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="230" /></a><br/><br/>Granted, the Penny Press might let me down from time to time - but the main reason I love it is on full display at the newsstand this week. Clever people writing prose on deadline can be (present company of course excepted) moved to write the damndest things, and if you root through a huge swath of periodicals every week the way I do, you're therefore of a certainty going to encounter your fair share of crapola. At which point, if you're an old fan of the Penny Press as I am, you'll do what comes naturally: you'll fire off a peppery letter to the editor, tear out and archive the pieces that move you favorably or otherwise (always only a small fraction of the whole - most deadline writers being alarmingly forgettable), and move on. After all - infamously - magazines like <em>The New Yorker</em> tend to <em>just keep coming</em>, so if you pause for even a moment, you'll be pulled to the dirt like an impala in the middle of a lion pride.<br/><br/>So you keep reading, hoping for the best. And the last two decades of the 20th century have spilled into the first two decades of the 21st an amazing inheritance: we live in an age of great literary journalists, people who routinely do fantastic work even though they're working on deadline for money.<br/><br/>Take last week's <em>New Yorker</em> - it featured a fantastic, sumptuously detailed review by Daniel Mendelsohn of <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/new-yorker.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-4007" title="new yorker" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/new-yorker-216x300.jpg" alt="" width="216" height="300" /></a>Stephen Mitchell's new translation of Homer's Iliad, complete with shrewd insights into both the poem's history and the art of translation in general. Or take <em>The New York Review of Books</em>, in which Gary Wills rounds off a fascinating little chunk of his smart new book <em>Verdi's Shakespeare</em> and makes a fine short essay out of it - an essay that's frustratingly short on Verdi but delightfully long on Shakespeare:<br/><br/>There are many signs of Shakespeare's crafting roles for particular boys. In three plays of the late 1590s, <em>A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, </em>and <em>As You Like It</em>, he had one boy who was short and dark and another who was tall and fair. The contrast was so striking that Shakespeare made his lines play on it. He began with particular boys' talents, and then wrote his scenes around them. He must have had a boy from Wales when he wrote <em>I Henry IV</em>, in which a woman speaks and sings in Welsh. One of the experienced boys, in <em>As You Like It</em>, was good enough for Shakespeare to create his second-longest woman's role for him - Rosalind (686 lines).<br/><br/>True, even the <em>NYRB</em> has its idiosyncracies (NO idea how long they're going to let Robert Darnton keep writing about his cockeyed and retrograde dream of a National Digital Library, for instance), but oh! they <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nyrb.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-4008" title="nyrb" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/nyrb-300x215.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="215" /></a>fade into the background when put alongside something as flat-out wonderful as Helen Vendler's Olympian review of the new <em>Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry</em>, edited by Rita Dove. Her review is titled "Are These the Poets to Remember?" - and her answer is a resounding 'no.' I myself dipped into the Penguin anthology with mixed feelings. Dove is a bad poet - a creation entirely of gender and demographics rather than even a shred of actual literary talent - but literature is full of great anthologies assembled by bad poets, so it's no confirmed impediment. But I was immediately struck by huge problems in the works selected, and Vendler puts it better than I could:<br/><blockquote>Multicultural inclusiveness prevails: some 175 poets are represented. No century in the evolution of poetry in English ever had 175 poets worth reading, so why are we being asked to sample so many poets of little or no lasting value? Antologists may now be extending a too general welcome. Selectivity has been condemned as "elitism," and a hundred flowers are invited to bloom. People who wouldn't be abl to take on the long-term commitment of a novel find a long-for release in writing a poem. And it seems rude to denigrate the heartfelt lines of people moved to verse. It is popular to say (and it is in part true) that in literary matters tastes differ, and that every critic can be wrong. But there is a certain objectivity bestowed by the mere passage of time, and its sifting of wheat from chaff. Which of Dove's 175 poets will have staying power, and which will seep back into the archives of sociology?</blockquote><br/>The issue had a larger-than-average amount of great stuff (the letter exchange in the back between Peter Singer and Herbert Terrace is alone almost worth the price of the thing - and will certainly lead to a second round), and reading it all and rejoicing in it all very handily compensates for tepid weeks and dunderheaded deadline stuff - which we all on occasion write, alas.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-44182426851166917282011-11-05T16:17:00.000-07:002011-12-02T20:02:27.630-08:00The Book of the Duchess!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/chaucer-reading.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4002" title="chaucer reading" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/chaucer-reading-300x221.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="221" /></a><br/><br/>Our book today is the sad, sweet, utterly remarkable performance that is Geoffrey Chaucer's debut poem, "The Book of the Duchess," and I confess, it came back to my thoughts mainly because of all that recent chatter about Katherine Swynford, Chaucer's sister-in-law. She was the long-time mistress of John of Gaunt while he was married to Blanche of Lancaster, and she stayed his mistress while he was married to Constance of Castile, and then she finally became his wife in 1396. John of Gaunt was an extremely handsome young man with lithe muscles and an absolutely ruttish sex-drive. Women found him irresistible - even if he'd been a village blacksmith instead of the most powerful son of one of England's greatest kings, he'd still have fired the dreams of every woman (and, presumably, some men) in the village. From his teens on, he exercised this particular <em>droit du seigneur</em> whenever he fancied - but in his cousin Blanche he found mettle of an entirely refreshing kind. He married her when she was just a snippet of a young girl, and within weeks the combination of his deflowering prowess and his legendary generosity caused her to blossom into an absolutely gorgeous little termagant, a goblet-hurler of the first rank. She was wilful, headstrong, impossible - and irresistible. And John of Gaunt loved her.<br/><br/>They were married for almost ten years, and she was still in her beautiful early 20s when she contracted the plague, lingered for a heart-rippingly horrifying week, and finally died on 12 September 1368.<br/><br/>This was a young person's world - John of Gaunt himself was well shy of 30 when all this happened to him, and when he fell into a grief as stark and powerful as all the other emotions he felt, it was another twenty-something who became involved: the courtier Geoffrey Chaucer, hitherto untried poet. We'll never really know what was going on in his mind when he wrote the surreal dreamscape that is "The Book of the Duchess," but like all the most vivid dreams friends have told me about, it feels both obscure and incredibly pointed. In it, the bookish narrator is in despair over a lack of sleep, to the point where he's almost finding a very un-Christian polytheism attractive, because then there'd be a god specifically for his problem:<br/><blockquote> Whan I had red this tale wel<br/><br/>And overlooked it everydel,<br/><br/>Me thoughte wonder if it were so,<br/><br/>For I had never herde speke er tho<br/><br/>Of no goddes that coude make<br/><br/>Men to slepe ne for to wake,<br/><br/>For I ne knewe never God but oon.</blockquote><br/>Flowing straight from his sleeplessness comes a dream in which a pretty little dog (in real life, the dog had a name - bestowed by her) leads our narrator to a grand hunt and a sorrowing young lord who talks about his lady love with an almost involuntary fervor:<br/><blockquote>Allas, myn herte is wonder wo<br/><br/>That I ne can decryven it!<br/><br/>Me lakketh bothe Englissh and wit<br/><br/>For to undo it at the fulle,<br/><br/>And eek my spirits be so dulle<br/><br/>So greet a thinge for to devyse.<br/><br/>I have no witte that can suffyse<br/><br/>To comprehende hir beautee;<br/><br/>But this moche dar I seyn, that she<br/><br/>Was whyte, rody, fressh, and lyvely hewed,<br/><br/>And every day hir beautee newed.<br/><br/>My lady, that is so fair and bright</blockquote><br/>The narrator is a bit dim-witted and eventually has to come right out and ask why his young companion seems so distraught. The answer he gets - and the rock-hard exchange that follows - is worthy of Shakespeare (or rather, Shakespeare is worthy of it):<br/><blockquote>"She is deed." "Nay!" "Yis, by my trouthe."<br/><br/>"Is that your los? By God, it is routhe."</blockquote><br/>The narrator quickly rouses from his dream, and maybe he wasn't so dim-witted after all: a powerful young man has been made to remember lovingly every great and trial-making detail of his lover, and then to admit baldly that she is dead. Who knows what kind-hearted purpose this might have served, in England 800 years ago?<br/><br/>The great poet and unjustly overlooked critic Bernard O'Donoghue has written that we do Chaucer a disservice when he arranged his Complete Works they way we always do, with a gigantic and problematic masterpiece like "The Canterbury Tales" placed first instead of last. It encourages readers to see glittering shorter works like "The Book of the Duchess" as addenda, almost not worth looking at. O'Donoghue is right as always, and I can further attest: you should read "The Book of the Duchess" on its own, in its own right, as a remarkably subtle psychological exercise that no other 25-year-old in the entire world of the 14th century could have written, an amazing performance that deserves a calm hour of your time.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-1581463084762053292011-11-02T17:11:00.000-07:002011-12-02T20:02:27.493-08:00Eight (more) Great Historical Novels!What better way to end the week than with yet another lavish, happy list of book-recommendations? Our sub-genre is once again that of my beloved historical novels, those perfect embodiments of Horace's famous split mission of delighting and entertaining, so let's get right down to brass tacks, shall we?<br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/when-knighthood-was-in-flower.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3978" title="when knighthood was in flower" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/when-knighthood-was-in-flower-196x300.jpg" alt="" width="196" height="300" /></a><em>When Knighthood was in Flower</em> by "Edwin Caskoden" (1898)<br/><br/>Charles Major wrote this book in 1898 under the pen-name Edwin Caskoden, and it sold like hotcakes. Month after month, year after year, customers would walk into bookstores from Boston to Boise and ask for "the knighthood book" - and long-suffering clerks knew exactly what they were talking about. Major was a hard-working Midwestern lawyer when the book first came out, but it was such a huge best-seller that he was soon able to retire to writing full-time - although none of his subsequent books managed to recapture the fire and fun of this, his debut. It's the story of the love that grows suddenly and unstoppably between Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII, and Charles Brandon, the King's best friend, and in its perfectly-tuned sunlit descriptions, it was the most irresistible piece of historical fiction to appear since Lew Wallace's <em>Ben-Hur</em>. Given the Tudor-mania that's recently been sweeping the reading public, I'm amazed nobody's reprinted this with a<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/sept08-tudor-chests/"> trendy cover</a>. If an enterprising publisher were to dig deep enough, they could find a glowing blurb from none other than Theodore Roosevelt<br/><br/><em>The Romance of Leonardo Da Vinci</em> by Dmitri Merezhkovsky (1902)<em><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/the-romance-of-leonardo-da-vinci.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-3991" title="the romance of leonardo da vinci" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/the-romance-of-leonardo-da-vinci-159x300.jpg" alt="" width="159" height="300" /></a><br/></em><br/><br/>The 1963 Washington Square Press edition of Merezhkovsky's monumental best-seller greatly expands the truncated version authorized by the Merezhkovsky in 1901. Despite its limitations (translators and audiences today would likely find them unacceptable), that 1901 translation done by Herbert Trench sold millions of copies around the world - month after month, year after year, customers would come into bookstores from Boston to Brest and ask for "The book about Leonardo" - and long-suffering book clerks knew there could be no other (despite the presence throughout the decades of some very good actual biographies of Leonardo). And with good reason: even in the 1963 translation by Morris Gurin and Helen Gourin (which improves on Trench but is still mighty damn creaky), the glow and pageant of the Renaissance lives again - and the central port of Leonardo is so perfectly researched and rendered that it's small wonder half the used bookstores in in the world accidentally shelve this thing under Biography.<br/><br/> <br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/the-devil-in-velvet.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3980" title="the devil in velvet" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/the-devil-in-velvet-183x300.jpg" alt="" width="183" height="300" /></a><em>The Devil in Velvet</em> by John Dickson Carr (1951)<br/><br/>Carr wrote dozens of novels, perhaps hundreds, under his own name and many others. He was a quintessential hack, churning out perfectly (and sometimes not so perfectly) plotted mystery yarns at a rate that makes Anthony Trollope look like a slug-a-bed. Carr never took days off from writing, never revised a single word he wrote (a word of his fiction, that is - like many hacks, he could be meticulous about his nonfiction)(his 1963 book <em>The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey</em> is very much worth your time), and never agonized over the woof and weave of his plots' deeper meanings. Instead, he just kept at it<em>, </em>even when afflicted with a stroke. In this tangled and immensely rewarding pot-boiler, Carr's intrepid Professor Fenton makes a deal with the Devil that sends him back in time to Restoration London in order to solve a murder. Carr takes great pleasure in summoning all the gaudy details of that <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/forever-nell/">oft-fictionalized</a> period<em>, </em>capping everything with his signature puzzles and sudden revelations<em>.</em><br/><br/><em>Ivanhoe</em> by Sir Walter Scott (1819) <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/old-signet-ivanhoe.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-3992" title="old signet ivanhoe" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/old-signet-ivanhoe-172x300.jpg" alt="" width="172" height="300" /></a><br/><br/>It's almost a sin to mention the words "historical fiction" without mentioning "Sir Walter Scott" in the same sentence. His book <em>Waverley</em>, first published anonymously in 1814, changed the genre of historical fiction completely - indeed, it would be fair to say it <em>created</em> what we now know as the historical novel. It and all Scott's subsequent novels (none more so than <em>Ivanhoe</em>) exerted an influence on virtually every literate person in the Western hemisphere, and the strength of that influence can never be fully mapped and has thus, to my mind, never been given its proper due. Partly this is due to the uncomfortable fact that Scott is an atrocious writer of English prose - this famous story of the virtuous Saxon knight Ivanhoe, the various villains of King John's court, the sweet young Jewess Rebecca, and Robin Hood himself is a great galloping inelegant thing, full of purple passages and cardboard characters. And yet, Scott wrote with that particular magic that's only vouchsafed to hacks, and his millions of readers over the centuries (long may their line continue!) have willingly surrendered to the spell.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/lord-of-the-two-lands.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3982" title="lord of the two lands" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/lord-of-the-two-lands-192x300.jpg" alt="" width="192" height="300" /></a><em>The Lord of the Two Lands</em> by Judith Tarr (1993)<br/><br/>Alexander the Great is a tough choice for a fantasy writer, because his life reads more grippingly - and less believably - than most fantasy novels. Tarr takes the story of the young man who conquered most of the Western world before he was thirty and weaves into it a second narrative, a sinuous story of ancient Egypt and the many temptations it could offer somebody of Alexander's messianic tendencies. The temple priests of Amon send Meriamon, the artistic, insightful daughter of the Pharaoh, to the sweeps of Persia to find this rumored phenomenon, this unbeatable Macedonian warlord and convince him to turn south and come to Egypt, where a godlike destiny beyond his imagination awaits. Tarr creates an Alexander to remember, but even more she creates an ancient Egypt steeped in magic and the pretense of magic - what results is like a turbo-charged variation on the theme of Marc Antony and Cleopatra - a meeting not only of religions but of living gods. A well-made new trade paperback of this wonderful book would be a good idea.<br/><br/><em>Katherine </em>by Anya Seton (1954)<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/katherine.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-3994" title="katherine" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/katherine-174x300.jpg" alt="" width="174" height="300" /></a><br/><br/>Publishers have recently been very good at keeping the great, under-appreciated Anya Seton in print, and it's understandable why: in her taut narrative tempos, effective but not cumbersome 'period' dialogue, and powerful female characters, she's an obvious precursor to that Attila the Hun of contemporary historical fiction, Philippa Gregory (a fact to which Gregory herself pays ample and becoming tribute). <em>Katherine</em> is easily Seton's best book, the gripping story of Katherine Swynford, the smart, sharp long-time mistress and later wife of John of Gaunt (and the sister-in-law of that rising man about court, Geoffrey Chaucer). Historians look at Katherine Swynford mainly as the <em>fons et origo</em> of the Wars of the Roses, but no reader of this novel can ever do that - for us, history's Katherine is forever Seton's Katherine, inquisitive, passionate, self-assured yet self-doubting, and thoroughly, three-dimensionally human. And unlike some of her later disciples in the genre, Seton manages to impart something of that complex humanity to almost all of her characters.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/dear-and-glorious-physician.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3984" title="dear and glorious physician" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/dear-and-glorious-physician-175x300.jpg" alt="" width="175" height="300" /></a><em>Dear and Glorious Physician </em>by Taylor Caldwell (1959)<br/><br/>This immensely popular historical novel about the life of Saint Luke was a best-seller for years, reprinted innumerable times, and month after month, year after year, in bookstores from Boston to Buenos Aires, customers would come in wanting "that Gospel book" - and long-suffering book clerks would know exactly what they meant. The author was prolific, and yet a great many of the novels are resoundingly good, and <em>Dear and Glorious Physician</em> (one of three of her books derived from the New Testament, the other two being <em>Great Lion of God</em> about Saint Paul and the vividly excellent <em>I, Judas</em> co-written with Jess Stearn) is one of her best. Her Lucanus is an early scientific sceptic, a rational young man who resists the Good News even while he's interviewing healed people and talking with Mary, the mother of Jesus. There's plenty of action and character here, but it's the lavishly detailed depiction of the grudging stages by which a deep-thinking man acquires an unthinking faith that's the most memorable thing about the book.<em><br/></em><br/><br/><em>My Lord John</em> by Georgette Heyer (1975)<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/my-lord-john.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-3995" title="my lord john" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/my-lord-john-182x300.jpg" alt="" width="182" height="300" /></a><br/><br/>At this point, need I say it? Month after month, year after year, in bookstores from Boston to Burundi, customers would come in looking for "her last book" and long-suffering book clerks would know exactly what they meant: <em>My Lord John</em>, the big, intensely ambitious historical novel by Georgette Heyer, published posthumously by her husband from the vast sea of notes and plot outlines and written drafts she left behind. Heyer was a monumental best-seller in her day, famous both for her fizzy murder mysteries (picture the novels of Agatha Christie, only well-written) and for her extremely lucrative Regency romances, which fell as the gentle rain from Heaven onto book shop front tables every Christmas and parted customers from their money as gently as a single raindrop. <em>My Lord John</em> - even in this truncated version (I often wonder if some enterprising Heyer archivist someday will give us a much, much longer version of this book - I'd clear my calendar to read it) - is a much weightier matter, the story of John, the nice-guy brother of King Henry V (and, coincidentally, the grandson of the aforementioned Katherine Swynford). The sweep and quiet swagger of this achievement will make just about any reader wish Heyer's public had been a bit less demanding for more of those damn Regencies, so that she might have had the time to do this epic justice.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/the-white-queen.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3989" title="the white queen" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/the-white-queen-184x300.jpg" alt="" width="184" height="300" /></a><em>The White Queen</em> by Philippa Gregory (2009)<br/><br/>I'm well aware that this surprisingly gripping novel of Elizabeth Woodville has been, um, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W9rsgtwpyo&feature=feedf">very enthusiastically reviewed elsewhere</a>, but I could hardly let this little round-up of historical fiction conclude without hauling in the very Philippa Gregory we've been hinting at and alluding to, now could I? Gregory of course made her name with <em>The Other Boleyn Girl</em> (bringing us full circle to those damn Tudors!) and its companion Tudor novels, but in this book and its mirror image <em>The Red Queen</em>, she explores the equally-fascinating (though far less popular) period of the aforementioned Wars of the Roses. The idiot ur-realityTV star Woodville is at the heart of that period, the wife of Edward IV and the mother of the famous Princes in the Tower, and <em>The White Queen</em> brandishes the same machinery that brought Gregory mega-success: short, fast chapters, naked first-person narration, and just the right seasoning of book club-friendly anachronisms. This book's portrayal of Richard III will, incidentally, both intrigue and in part infuriate any remaining adherents that wretched character might still have in this day and age.<br/><br/>And there you have it! Not only eight meaty historical novels to tempt you, but also, I can't help but notice as I look back on the list, a handy little illustration of that hoary old concept, the Wheel of Fortune: just look at how many of these authors are now entirely unknown despite once having their names on the lips of bookstore customers from Boston to Byzantium and back. Gregory had better salt something away for the proverbial rainy day.<em><br/></em><br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/the-happy-couple.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-3985" title="the happy couple" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/the-happy-couple-201x300.jpg" alt="" width="201" height="300" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32302521.post-2197227516360835092011-10-29T16:50:00.000-07:002011-12-02T20:02:27.382-08:00Comics! Legion Secret Origin #1!<a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/legion-symbol1.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-3970" title="legion symbol" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/legion-symbol1-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225" /></a><br/><br/>I know I mentioned concentrating on Marvel comics for a while in the deeply depressing aftermath of DC's "new 52" offensive (out of which I declare "Batman" and "Aquaman" the winners - which leaves 50 losers), but then last week DC came out with the first issue of a new 6-issue mini-series that either doesn't conform to its new continuity or does without caring - and either way, I'm fine with the results. It's <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/legion-secret-origin-1.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-3971" title="legion secret origin 1" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/legion-secret-origin-1-196x300.jpg" alt="" width="196" height="300" /></a>"Legion of Super-Heroes: Secret Origin," and it's written by one of the two greatest living Legion writers, Paul Levitz (hint as to the other one: he's really tall), and drawn by another Legion vet in good standing, Chris Batista, and it offers a long, leisurely look at "the real beginnings" of the Legion.<br/><br/>Naturally, when I read that, I clenched up a little. No comic book franchise in history has been ret-conned and re-imagined more often - and often more disastrously - than my beloved Legion, and to make matters worse, I've been fond of their 'traditional' origin story for a long, long time.<br/><br/>That origin story has been re-worked many times over the decades, but its core narrative always goes something like this: some time in the 30th century, RJ Brande, the galaxy's richest man, is a passenger on a spaceship. One of the other passengers, a teenage girl named Irma Ardeen from Saturn's moon Titan, is a highly proficient telepath, and she suddenly blurts out that two of the other passengers are intending to kill Brande. In immediate response, two other teenagers on the flight spring into action to defend the old man: Rokk Krinn from the planet Braal uses his race's magnetic abilities <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/the-legion.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3972" title="the legion" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/the-legion-300x254.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="254" /></a>to seize the would-be assassins' weapons, and Garth Ranzz of the planet Winath uses his electrical powers (acquired in a freak accident) to blast the assassins themselves. Brande is saved, and in that moment he sees something the galaxy needs: a new band of young heroes to inspire people, much like the legendary Justice League did a thousand years before. With his financial backing, the Legion of Super-Heroes is born and quickly begins recruiting super-powered teens from every planet in the United Federation and beyond. It's a goofy origin story, but as origin stories go, it's got a certain charming mixture of fate and serendipity.<br/><br/>The fate part comes from the underlying idea that the world - the galaxy - has waited a long time to get this <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/the-legion-3.jpg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-3973" title="the legion 3" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/the-legion-3-300x282.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="282" /></a>kind of unselfish heroism back. And the serendipity comes from the fact that all three of those heroic teens were on that spaceship for refreshingly utilitarian reasons: Irma Ardeen - now code-named Saturn Girl - to take up a Police posting, Rokk Krinn - now code-named Cosmic Boy - to escape the planetary depression afflicting his homeworld and find a job, and Garth Ranzz - now codenamed Lightning Lad - to find his long-lost brother. None of them is even dreaming of becoming any kind of superhero.<br/><br/>In this new mini-series, Levitz obviously intends to beef up that origin story and perhaps some of its many unanswered questions, like why the galaxy's richest man wouldn't have bodyguards (or for that matter a spaceship) of his own, or how the new Legion could suddenly acquire the approval of the United Federation to act in a peremptorily law-enforcement role, etc. In the course of just this single issue, we get a great many new and much-needed layers to the old Legion mythos - we meet captains and admirals of the UFP's star-fleets, we need the three members of Earth's shadowy security directorate, and we get glimpses of an RJ Brande who very much has a private agenda of his own. I was entertained and intrigued throughout, except for the very first instant,, since the issue sports the ugliest cover of any mainstream comic in the year 2011: in the background, Phantom Girl is for some reason falling down through a whole in the air, and in the foreground, there's a picture of a pouty Justin Bieber dressed like Cosmic Boy.<br/><br/>But one really, really bad cover can't spoil rich pickings like this - especially when the issue came with the single greatest promotional gimmick of all time: a Legion flight-ring! Now that I finally have one, my only remaining task is to pick a Legion code-name. Some of you may know the, er, code-name I've had for most of my life (it even already ends in 'boy'), but now that I actually have a flight-ring, I'm hoping to upscale to something snazzier. Perhaps Super-Buff Enormous Brain Lad? I'll keep you posted.<br/><br/><a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/legion-flight-ring.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-3974" title="legion flight ring" src="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/legion-flight-ring-300x224.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="224" /></a>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6