Sick-bed comforts!

Sometimes, when you're not feeling all that good, only a certain type of old friend will serve. When you're walking around town or waiting at an airport or trying to pretend you're not at a poetry reading, your best old book-friends are just who you want to help you out - for me, these are my big guns, the unchanging voices I listen to over and over (I'll spare you all the list, especially since its names are fairly obvious by this point).

But when you're feeling sick, when you're laying on the couch swaddled in blankets and basset hounds, those very best book-friends feel wrong. You worry that in your present condition, you'd be wasting their time (yes, I know that makes no sense - book-people aren't very sensible). No, in such miserable circumstances, you reach for a different kind of friend entirely. Voices at once more casual and more comforting.

My list of such second-tier book-friends is very, very long, but this weekend I reached for five that will serve very well as a thumbnail for all the rest:

The Code of the Woosters - P.G. Wodehouse is, I suspect, on many and many such a list as this one, and deservedly so: absolutely nobody writes more cheering-up books than he does, and this 1938 classic is, in my opinion, his single best. I have the paperback with the J. C. Leyendecker cover, and this weekend I smiled again to read the adventures of hapless, good-hearted Bertie Wooster and his all-knowing valet Jeeves. The Code of the Woosters involves a vicious little dog, a disastrous flirtation with the M-word, a touchy French cook, and a ghastly little cow-creamer, but no matter how dire the circumstances seem to be, nothing serious is of course ever at stake, as you can tell from the caliber of curses Bertie's feisty Aunt Dahlia calls down upon her foe:

May green flies attack his roses. May his cook get tight on the night of the big dinner party. May all his hens get the staggers. May his cistern start leaking, and may white ants, if there are any in England, gnaw away the foundations of Totleigh Towers.

Strong stuff, as Bertie comments, and I trust I may not be misconstrued when I say the book is full of it.

The Daughter of Time - Naturally, when bedridden, there's nothing that answers quite so well as a murder mystery (I once had an old friend who used to contrive being bedridden, solely to stimulate this feeling); they feel so neat and controlled right when we ourselves are feeling anything but. And this 1951 staple of the genre is quite possibly the best murder mystery ever written, despite being so preposterous it ought to provoke appreciation only for giggles, not craft. It's the story of Inspector Grant, who's laid up in the hospital with a broken leg but can't stop investigating - so he turns his deductive powers to one of the greatest mysteries of British history: what happened to the Princes in the Tower? Did Richard III have his nephews killed so that he could seize the throne? Grant spends a great deal of time reading books of history, and it's a testament to Tey's narrative ability that she makes it all as exciting as a Glasgow car-chase:

He [Grant, of course - the book is very nearly a one-man show] reached for More's History of Richard III. It had as preface a short life of More which he had not bothered to read. Now he turned to it to find out how More could have been both Richard III's historian and Henry VIII's Chancellor. How old was More when Richard succeeded?

He was five.

When that dramatic council scene had taken place at the Tower, Thomas More had been five years old. He had been only eight when Richard died at Bosworth.

Everything in that history had been hearsay.

And if there was one word that a policeman loathed more than any other it was hearsay. Especially when applied to evidence.

Well, OK - that does prompt some giggling, but still - it never fails.

Probably understandably, most nonfiction won't work in circumstances like the ones we're talking about here, but the books of Stephen Jay Gould are happy exceptions - probably because they're largely composed of short columns he wrote for a smart popular audience during the heyday of Natural History magazine, so they're primed to entertain. The first of these volumes, 1977's Ever Since Darwin, has been one of my go-to sick-books for thirty years now, mostly for bright-eyed segments like this one on the growth of the human brain:

But what about our preoccupation with ourselves; does anything about the history of vertebrates indicate why one peculiar species should be so brainy? Here's a closing item for thought. The most ancient brain cast of a primate belongs to a 55-million-year-old creature named Tetonius homonculus. Jerison has calculated its encephalization quotient as 0.68. This is, to be sure, only two-thirds the size of an average living mammal of the same body weight, but it is by far the largest brain of its time (making the usual correction for body weight); in fact, it is more than three times as large as an average mammal of its period. Primates have been ahead right from the start; our large brain is only an exaggeration of a pattern set at the beginning of the age of mammals. But why did such a large brain evolve in a group of small, primitive tree-dwelling mammals, more similar to rats and shrews that to mammals conventionally judged as more advanced? And with this provocative query, I end, for we simply do not know the answer to one of the most important questions we can ask.

The King Must Die - This brawny 1958 historical novel by Mary Renault is now a staple of school reading assignments, so who knows but that it might not become immortal, but my affection for it dates to well before it achieved such deification - although really, like with Wodehouse, I'll reach for any Renault when I'm feeling under the weather. This novel tells the story of wily young teenager Theseus, recasting all his mythological adventures from Edith Hamilton into a authentic-feeling evocation of pre-historical Greece. Renault is a pleasingly subtle writer, and that subtlety is stamped on every page of this great book, including the end of a riveting scene where young Theseus hosts the slightly older king Pylas at an outdoor feast and incites the curiosity of his followers as the night winds down:

The fire crumbled; the ashes grew red and gray with a few sparks of gold; the dogs mumbled their bones full-bellied. As it grew quiet, we leaned and fell to whispering; I could seem more than one of my Minyans lying awake to watch if he would make love to me. We agreed together to press for war that autumn rather than wait for spring ... He laughed and promised. Then we slept; I on my face, because my back was sore. Next morning when we all set off home, he gave me his gold-rimmed cup as a guest gift. The Companions stared, and wondered if they had stayed awake long enough.

See the joy of the intellect at play there? See the winking hints, so entirely adult in a genre that produces so much pap for children? We're told a practical reason why Theseus sleeps face-down, but no other reasons are excluded; we're told his Companions wondered if they'd stayed awake long enough not to miss some lovemaking, but we're not told they didn't miss something - Renault assumes there are some things her readers might like to decide for themselves. It's entirely refreshing, especially when you're curled on a couch lost in effluvia.

Collected Sonnets - that state of being lost in effluvia is conducive to a bit of self-pity, and when you're feeling so inclined, nothing quite caps things off like somebody else's self-pity. And nobody strikes that old lachrymose note quite as beautifully as the great second-rate poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Her performances of these sonnets had to be seen to be believed, but even the unaided works drape down upon the reader like a fine shroud:

Not that it matters, not that my heart's cry

Is potent to deflect our common doom,

Or bind to truce in this ambiguous room

The planets of the atom as they ply;

But only to record that you and I,

Like thieves that scratch the jewels from a tomb,

Have gathered delicate love in hardy bloom

Close under Chaos, - I rise to testify.

This is my testament: that we are taken;

Our colours are as clouds before the wind;

Yet for a moment stood the foe forsaken,

Eyeing Love's favour to our helmets pinned;

Death is our master, - but his seat is shaken;

He rides victorious, - but his ranks are thinned.

See? "Our common doom"? I feel better already.

Savage Beauty

Our book today is Savage Beauty, Nancy Milford's best-selling 2001 biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and it's an author/subject pairing made in Heaven. Milford of course write Zelda, the definitive life of F. Scott Fitzgerald's needy, stupid mess of a wife - and when that book was new, more reviewers talked about how beautifully it was written than spared even a word for Zelda's own meager and deservedly-forgotten literary output. Indeed, Zelda is a beautifully wrought book - massive research lightly worn, massive legwork casually described, memorable turns of phrase on practically every page.

And unabashedly sympathetic, which isn't always the case with long biographies. That's understandable - after all, the biographer is spending large amount of every day cooped up with their subject, indelibly aware of every flaw and shortcoming. That tends to produce one of two reactions: either the biographer becomes a fact-piling sycophant, or the biographer starts to hate his subject. Few indeed are the biographers who can walk the line between those two reactions, let along walk it for long stretches of pages - and yet, so many biographies are published every year that a list of just such successes would be moderately long! I'll get to such a list in due time, but for now, I can heartily recommend Milford's other biography to all of you: Savage Beauty is a wonderful, wise, and heartfelt examination of one of America's first pop-star poets, as Milford is quick to point out:

Deep into the nineteenth century there had been literary gentlemen who filled lecture halls and athenaeums with their deft recitals of poems and sermons. But Millay was the first American figure to rival the personal adulation, frenzy even, of Byron, where the poet in his person was the romantic ideal. It was his life as much as his work that shocked and delighted his audiences. Edna Millay was the only American woman to draw such crowds to her. Her performing self made people feel they had seen the muse alive and just within reach. They laughed with her, and they were moved by her poetry. Passionate and charming, or easy and lofty, she not only brought them to their feet, she brought them to her. In the heart of the Depression her collection of sonnets Fatal Interview sold 35,000 copies within the first few weeks of its publication.

Milford takes us on a fascinatingly fact-and-figure-based tour of Millay's actual working life, tracking sales figures for each book, accounting for the exact sums of publisher advances and speaking fees. In her poetry performances ("readings" is so sedate as to be misleading), Millay often affected a vaguely ethereal pose, and Milford sometimes seems to be deliberately working against that, constantly nailing us down to tax returns and sales receipts. It's a mark of her talent that she makes it all so compulsively interesting.

She also gives us a complete picture of Millay's reception as a poet - it's fascinating to read all the excerpts included here from contemporary reviews - not all of which were kind, as in the case of Horace Gregory's 1935 review of Wine From These Grapes, in which he spends an inordinate amount of time dwelling on facts from Millay's biography. Such a technique is ubiquitous today, but at the time it was relatively rare in such worthy precincts as the New York Herald Tribune's Books section - and regardless of where it appears, it irritates Milford, who's firmly but not didactically on the side of her author:

This may have been the first time her life was being reviewed,her work taken to task for its reception and popularity; it would not be the last. Millay's poetry appealed to a larger public than most poets every hope to reach. Gregory reduced that appeal to immature girls - or, as they aged, to unhappy women. It was an attack disguised as a review.

I've read my copy of Savage Beauty many times, savoring not only Milford's sharp prose but also her able evocations of the surrounding times of Millay's life (not all first-rate biographies remember to do this), and again, I strongly recommend it to everybody. And of course no mention of the book would be complete without including one of Millay's poems! I'm rather fond of virtually all of them, so I'll pick one almost at random, but naturally, I recommend her Collected Sonnets over any damn biography ever written:

The doctor asked her what she wanted done
With him, that could not lie there many days.
And she was shocked to see how life goes on
Even after death, in irritating ways;
And mused how if he had not died at all
'Twould have been easier - then there need not be
The stiff disorder of a funeral
Everywhere, and the hideous industry,
And crowds of people calling her by name
An questioning her, she'd never seen before,
But only watching by his bed once more
And sitting silent if a knocking came ...
She said at length, feeling the doctor's eyes,
"I don't know what you do exactly when a person dies."