Penguins on Parade: RLS in the South Seas!

Some Penguin Classics stand as reminders of what might have been. Necessarily, the entire shelf of Penguin Classics from ancient Greece and Rome serve this melancholy purpose – imagining the lost works of Sophocles, Euripides, Asinius Pollio, Livy, and the rest all here with us, neatly persevered inside those so-familiar black-spined paperbacks, knowing with that sweet assurance that they’d all have first-rate critical introductions and helpful notes and dorky cover-designs  – it’s almost as pleasant, in its way, as actually having the books would be (and there’s no final curtain here! If truck-sized statues can be unearthed in Egypt in 2010, so can meticulously-preserved Egyptian libraries – plenty of reedy, well-read Romans went there for the salubrious climate, and the Egyptians themselves were quite fond of literature, so you never know what might turn up).

That sweet, sad imagining can happen a lot closer to our own day, of course. Think of reedy, well-read Robert Louis Stevenson, who repaired in 1888 to the South Seas for their salubrious climate (and because the editor of McClure’s – a first-rate literary magazine at the time, run with easy generosity and unquenchable bonhomie by Sam McClure – offered to pay for the trip if he could have the literary gleanings that came from it) and there began to dream about writing not just an account of his travels – a type of literature at which he excelled and in which he’d already written one very good example and one immortal classic – but the book on the South Seas, a massive compendium of the languages, the topographies, the nature, the peoples, the customs, of course the superstitions, of that entire swath of the globe.

It’s the oddest thing about Stevenson as a writer, and it stands eternally to his credit: despite the fact that he had mastered the fine art of capturing the public taste with light, deceptive adventure stories, he was always yearning for new literary forms, for fresh and dangerous challenges. The books he dreamt of writing but never did form one of the most intriguing ghost-canons in all of literature, and in the South Seas, he dreamt big. Probably some of this ambition came from the fact that on some level he knew how sick he was (a frail constitution racked by consumption and tortured almost every hour of every day by tobacco – it’s highly doubtful that any single human being ever smoked more than Robert Louis Stevenson, and certainly no author ever did, even the ones who were famous for it)(although Scott Fitzgerald came close).

Somewhere along the course of the island-hopping that he did with his family – he traveled with his long-suffering mother and his drill sergeant wife, plus a ragged little entourage of servants and cooks – going from the Marquesas to Hiva Oa to Borabora, meeting priestesses and missionaries and drunken, comic kings, the decision sort of crept upon him that he would not, after all, be returning to wet and chilly London. He knew the decision would upset his friends back home – friends like Sidney Colvin at the British Museum , a devoted first-reader and confidante – but he could confess it readily enough to his more literary acquaintances. He wrote to Henry James:

I must tell you plainly – I can't tell Colvin – I do not think I shall come to England more than once, and then it’ll be to die. Health I enjoy in the tropics; even here [Sydney Australia], which they call sub or semi-tropical, I come only to catch cold.

This wasn’t quite true – Stevenson could always be the most maddening combination of gloomy and optimistic – he never ‘enjoyed’ much health in the tropics, despite intervals of activity and naked sea-bathing. He was almost always sick, sometimes incapacitated, and more than one doctor along the way warned him that his condition was precarious – he could develop a fatal hemorrhage at any moment. He grew more relaxed in the islands, not that precise and proper dress had ever been his forte. No less fastidious a South Seas visitor than Henry Adams could only remark in horror:

Imagine a man so thin and emaciated that he looked like a bundle of sticks in a bag, with a head and eyes morbidly intelligent and restless. He was costumed in very dirty striped cotton pyjamas, the baggy legs tucked into coarse knit woolen stockings, one of which was bright brown in color, the other a purplish dark tone.

But sick or no, distracted or no (his wife Fanny could be a handful, to put it mildly), he kept writing. His readers and financial sponsors back home expected it, and he was on fire to do it anyway. He wanted to capture the essence of the South Seas, to write a huge miscellany that would stand as a worthy substitute for actually being there – he wanted to cover every aspect of this hot, beautiful new world he was seeing and bring it all home to readers who would never see it:

No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and the task before me is to communicate to fireside travellers some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Caesars.

So he investigated every local custom, talked with every Western visitor and every native storyteller. We want our great writers to be more omnivorously curious than we are, we hope they will be – and Stevenson was. He always had been (the one thing his heterogeneous mass of books share in common is their underlying wide-eyed wonder at being in a world of infinite stories), but something about being in the South Seas, perhaps some presentiment that he really never would see England again, only increased his hunger – hence his dreams for the book he wanted to call simply, all-inclusively The South Seas, and hence, too, his frequent pauses to note mortuary rituals:

So in Samoa only the spirits of the unburied awake fear. During the late war many fell in the bush; their bodies, sometimes headless, were brought back by native pastors and interred; but this (I know not why)was insufficient, and the spirit still lingered on the theatre of death. When peace returned a singular scene was enacted in many places, and chiefly round the high gorges of Lotoannu, where the struggle was long centered and the loss had been severe. Kinswomen of the dead came carrying a mat or sheet and guided by survivors of the fight. The place of death was earnestly sought out; the sheet was spread upon the ground and the women, moved with pious anxiety, sat about and watched it. If any living thing alighted it was twice brushed away; upon the third coming it was known to be the spirit of the dead, was folded in, carried home and buried beside the body and the aitu rested.

As Stevenson writes at the beginning of In the South Seas (the truncated, domesticated, and not entirely successful version of the book that was eventually created by Fanny and Colvin), “for some while before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and the undertaker to expect.” His time-table was premature, but only a little: he had time for this one last adventure, and time enough to write a bit about it. It wasn’t the book he hoped for, but those of us who wish he’d written a thousand books will take this one as it is and count ourselves lucky.

United States!

Our book today is  Gore Vidal’s mammoth collection of essays, United States, which was published in 1993, won him the National Book Award, and will almost certainly stand as the greatest work of his long and varied career (I write ‘almost’ here out of superstitious reflex – Janus-faced rumors have abounded for years, after all: that the man is so far deteriorated mentally that he can no longer distinguish past from present or craft a coherent line of prose, and that the man has been steadily working on a book that will strike amazement, both hallowing and exploding the very notion of late style). His various scripts and stage plays are embarrassments of catty infighting; his novels are radically uneven in the way that can only come from a having a sense of literary entitlement to write novels in the first place. Each is a grand soiree of the season – any hint of a work ethic is entirely absent. So meticulous triumphs like Julian or Creation will give way to narcissistic cryptograms like Hollywood or The Golden Age (or the breathtakingly horrifying Live from Golgotha); Vidal has amassed a cadre of loyal fans over the decades, and in his novels he forces them to read the tea leaves of his creative moods, without seeming to care about their embarrassment, or his own.

But his essays – by turns dazzling and erudite and chatty and tossed off and so, so often brilliant – soar. Here the various lamentable trainings his early life gave Vidal (that true literary success was success in writing fiction, or that the 19^th century concept of writing theme-fiction was, gawd help us, still an artistically valid thing to do in a post-Fitzgerald world) are burnt and purged away. What remains is polished stone – it can take any weight, and it glitters when the light hits it just right.

The essays in United States span four decades, from 1952 to 1992, and Vidal divides them into three large categories: The State of the Art, in which he concentrates on writers and books, The State of the Union, in which he concentrates on how seldom the Kennedys took his advice, and The State of Being, in which he allows chit-chat to run gloriously, uncontrollably rampant. Each section has its appeals, and because each moves forward in time independently of the others, each has its perils as well, although all the perils can be summarized in one quick warning label: like Oedipus, Lear, and Elvis, Vidal started out gorgeous and (therefore?) grew to be quite mad.

Any re-reading of United States will involuntarily stumble across the madness, alas. The same old brass-notes are hit again and again – hidden conspiracies of the wealthy and powerful, secret cabals chortling over their unparalleled – and undetected – control over all aspects of American society, every missed taxi cab or miscalculated meal check a knowing wink from paymaster to plaything. The regular harping on such notes is the price we pay for admission to the genius – and the humor – of the rest, as soiling a price as it might be, especially since the sincerity of Vidal’s jeremiads is severely undercut by his painfully obvious longing to be invited into a cabal or two. Those invites never come (we never implored him, across party lines and unanimously, to be our President! He’s bigger than the rest of us, he’s let bygones be bygones, but you can tell this still bothers him), and out of bitterness he reacts like all autocrats – by calling for revolution:

True revolution can only take place when things fall apart in the wake of some catastrophe – a lost war, a collapsed economy. We seem headed for the second. If so, then let us pray that that somber, all-confirming Bastille known as the consumer society will fall, as the first American revolution begins. It is long overdue.

Vidal was a genius early and lauded as a genius early, so it’s perhaps not surprising that he so quickly grew to believe that he was the only sighted man in a country – a world – full of the blind. But as stylistic tics go, it’s pretty damn annoying, especially for those of his readers who might, perhaps, know a thing or two about history themselves. Here he is in 1983:

To understand Nixon’s career you would have to understand the United States in the twentieth century, and that is something that our educational, political, and media establishments are not about to help us do. After all: no myth, no nation.

This couldn’t come any closer to Vidal writing “I am the only person in the world who can understand Nixon’s career,” and if you swap out the subjects you find it repeated throughout United States, to irksome effect.

But it’s only one effect in a vast menagerie, so it’s easy to forgive! This is a huge book (an intensely satisfying 1300 pages) of endless delights, and it would be wrong to say Vidal’s overweening egotism – that sense of him and only him – wasn’t one of those delights, perhaps even the greatest of them all. As the pages fall like individual flakes of snow, you soon find yourself socked in talk, buried in badinage, shuttered in schadenfreude . When Vidal finds himself sitting across from a zeppelinesque Orson Welles, watching the great man’s face redden with laughter, and he asks himself – which is to say, he asks aloud in front of us – what he would do if Welles had a stroke right there, you know the answer will not be – could never be – “call a doctor.” Lucky for Welles, it never happens – it would be a hard, hard thing for the creator of Citizen Kane to choke to death on his shrimp scampi while an epigone struggles for the right epigram.



The spotlight never really wavers, even when (perhaps especially when) our author is trying to waver it. In a charming little 1985 piece he wrote for Architectural Digest (most of the really charming pieces in this book weren’t written for self-consciously literary venues, which may constitute Vidal’s ultimate pronouncement on those venues and their readers), “At Home in a Roman Street,” he tries with an utterly deliberate insincerity to present himself as somehow not epochal:

Literature? Two blocks to our north, back of the Pantheon, Thomas Mann lived and wrote Buddenbrooks. Nearby, George Eliot stayed at the Minerva Hotel. Ariosto lived in Pantheon Square; Stendhal was close to us. I myself have written at least a part of every one of my books from Washington, D.C., to Lincoln in this flat. The last chapters of Lincoln were composed on the dining room table.

Italo Calvino now lives at the north of the street, and we cher confrere one another when we meet. Then we move on. Yes, we are all growing old. But a baby’s being born to the wife of the hardware-store owner, while a half-dozen babies of a few years ago are now men and women. So – plenty more where we came from. That is the lesson of the street. Meanwhile, what time is it? Free the bejeweled ladies held captive! Daffodils, tulips, and mimosa! What time is it? The same.

The humor here is bruising – we cannot believe that ‘plenty more where we came from’ even if we want to. And given how thoroughly, how openly Vidal disbelieves it, we often very much do want to believe it – but it’s not possible. The sheer power of the achievement that is United States admits of no quibbling – the book has only one real equal in the 20^th century (and only because nobody in that benighted era succeeded in creating equivalent volumes for the two or three other giants whose periodic deadline-work still lies scattered over a thousand fields; indeed, given the parlous state of publishing today, these volumes might never get created), the collected essays of V.S. Pritchett, and in a 1979 appreciation, Vidal has the quick and entirely amiable good grace to acknowledge it (although not, of course, without hobby-horsing around):

The fact that America’s English departments are manned by the second-rate is no great thing. The second-rate must live, too. But in most civilized countries the second-rate are at least challenged by the first-rate. And score is kept in the literary journals. But as McDonald’s drives out good food, so these hacks of Academe drive out good prose. At ever level in our literary life they flourish. In fact, they have now taken to writing the sort of novels that other tenured hacks can review and teach. Entire issues of “literary journals” are written by them. Meanwhile, in the universities, they are increasing at a positively Malthusian rate; and an entire generation of schoolteachers and book chatterers now believes that an inability to master English is a sign of intellectual grace, and that a writer like Pritchett is not to be taken seriously because he eschews literary velleities for literary criticism.

But the extended, sonorous wonder of Pritchett’s collected literary essays is a decidedly high table affair, as elevated as it is elevating. In United States readers are treated (and there in the end no better word – for all its maddening mannerisms and in glowing conjunction with its gargantuan length, this book is one seemingly unending treat) to a much wider register – the backstairs and the kitchen are invited to mix in the merriment. The verbal portraits here are so vivid as to be actionable, as in this 1965 take on the deservedly forgotten fourth-rate novelist John Horne Burns:

In 1947 The Gallery by John Horne Burns was published, to great acclaim; the best book of the Second World War. That same year Burns and I met several times, each a war novelist and each properly wary of the other. Burns was then thirty-one with a receding hairline above a face striking in its asymmetry, one ear flat against the head, the other stuck out. He was a difficult man who drank too much, loved music, detested all other writers, and wanted to be great (he had written a number of novels before the war, but none was published). He was also certain that to be a good writer it was necessary to be homosexual. When I disagreed, he named half a dozen celebrated contemporaries. “A pleiad,” he roared delightedly, “of pederasts!”But what about Faulkner, I asked, and Hemingway. He was disdainful. Who said they were any good? And besides, hadn’t I heard how Hemingway once …

We can note the cat-like delicacy with which the author refrains from quite actually calling The Gallery the best book of the Second World War; we can see the significance always given to asymmetry by the flawlessly symmetrical; we can laugh out loud at Gore Vidal calling himself a war novelist; we can share a fraternal certitude that “a pleiad of pederasts” was never roared delightedly at any point in Western history … but the point is, we do all these things while in the full torrent of the narrative, as helplessly swept away as if we couldn’t tell a velleity from a strawberry daiquiri. That’s the prevailing power of United States: it’s the apotheosis of gossip.

In 1959 Vidal wrote, “All of us tend more or less consciously to arrange our personas in an attractive way,” and certainly United States stands as a vast monument to the author’s own such floral arrangements, perhaps the most psychopathically self-serving yet overwhelmingly entertaining example of such an arrangement since The Education of Henry Adams. And besides, haven’t you heard how Adams once …

20th Century Greats!

The question was recently raised (prompted, no doubt, by that damn Modern Library list! You know the one I mean, listing the best works of fiction and nonfiction written in the 20th century! The list that gave an unholy second life to Zuleika Dobson!): is by Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams really that good? Does it really deserve its ranking on that list - and many others - as the single greatest work of 20th century nonfiction?

That bagatelle term 'nonfiction' seems at first impossibly vague - surely all of human artistic endeavor apart from the piddling kingdoms of fiction and poetry can be considered nonfiction? But whether or not such infamous lists intend to invoke it, there is a category of nonfiction works in the 20th century that almost have to be called that and nothing else, so passionate are they in blurring the very outlines of what they are. We've talked about some of them here at Stevereads (Rats, Lice, and History, for instance, and Swampwalker's Journal); they're never quite an exact fit with the ostensible category to which they belong, and calling them by that category inevitably reduces them (the way referring to Shakespeare as "an Elizabethan playwright," though technically correct, would feel almost insulting).

A full list of the greatest of such works, if strictly construed, would not be long - and each item on it would be guaranteed to bristle with the ability to alter your reading landscape in the course of two or three afternoons of feverish reading.

That list would include Herbert Muller's 1952 The Uses of the Past, a weirdly detailed and ultimately uplifting quasi-history of the world's great civilizations; it would include Dale Van Every's incandescently angry 1966 indictment of the United States government's treatment of American Indians, Disinherited; it would include Italian Days, Barbara Grizzuti Harison's beautiful, gimlet-eyed 1989 meditation on Italy.

Even a short version of that list would have to include George Kennan's slim but fiercely memorable 1951 book American Diplomacy, 1900-1950; it would include the spry and funny A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) by Eric Newby; it would include Norman Dixon's scathing 1976 On the Psychology of Military Incompetence; it would include Carlo Ginzburg's powerfully subversive I Benandanti (the only English translation is titled The Night Battles).

There would have to be room on that list for Paul Colinvaux's slim 1979 masterpiece Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare, and Elias Canetti's disarmingly insightful 1960 Crowds and Power, and M.F.K. Fisher's elegant, eloquent 1954 compilation, The Art of Eating.

Our list would have to include all these books and more besides, but we started out today talking about the best, and despite the many and varied strengths of all the books listed above and all the titles that would appear on an unabridged version of that list, they aren't the best. The top slots for the 20th Century go elsewhere.



One of them of course goes to Rebecca West's epic, immensely absorbing 1941 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which is billed as a travelogue-history of Yugoslavia and is so in exactly the same way that 'Hamlet' is about a dysfunctional family. All the dark heartaches of the newborn century are shaped into the dark corridors and musty train compartments that make up West's masterpiece - readers will come out of it knowing quite a bit about Yugoslavia (and the entirety of Eastern Europe), yes, but their hearts will have been harrowed too.


A small rung above West's book would be T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his seductive and often overpowering liar's-memoir of the 1916 Arab Revolt against the Ottomans (the book has an impossibly convoluted textual history, but we can say 1922 and the Hell with it). Again, that technical description doesn't begin to convey the power and the epic strangeness of the book, which is brightly incantatory and reads like a cross between Winston Churchill and The Arabian Nights.



Next would come Adams. His initial 1907 private printing of The Education of Henry Adams was distributed to a small 40-something group of his friends and well-wishers, all of whom instantly recognized its strange, neurotic genius and towering literary virtuosity. Larger printings followed, of course, and the work took its place in the canon of indispensable American writings, but I worry sometimes that such an canonization leads inevitably to the kind of wariness Jeff felt. No book could deserve that wariness less: despite being a self-righteous prig and ranting coot, Adams managed to craft one of the single most inviting books ever written by an American. Virtually every page of The Education shimmers with apothegms, as in this passage describing Henry Cabot Lodge's Boston:

No doubt the Bostonian had always been noted for a certain chronic irritability - a sort of Bostonitis - which, in its primitive Puritan forms, seemed due to knowing too much of his neighbors, and thinking too much of himself. Many years earlier William M. Evarts had pointed out to Adams the impossibility of uniting New England behind a New England leader. The trait led to good ends - such as admiration of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington - but the virtue was exacting; for New England standards were various, scarcely reconcilable with each other, and constantly multiplying in number, until balance between them threatened to become impossible.

The Education of Henry Adams is very nearly the best of these odd-sortment 20th Century masterworks, but it isn't the best. That distinction goes to Virginia Woolf, whose 1928 essay A Room of One's Own is the single best piece of nonfiction the century produced. Its conceit is deceptively simple (Woolf milks this for all it's worth): the occasion of giving a talk to the female students of Cambridge on the topic of women and literature. In assessing this topic, Woolf comes quickly to her playfully shocking mundane conclusion: a woman must have money and a room of her own in order to write fiction.

But that's just the lure; the prize, the essay itself, is nothing less than the ur-text of protest against the world's oldest and most entrenched discrimination, against women from the dawn of time onwards. Twenty centuries of this most intimate oppression may have been cracked wide open by Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but in A Room of One's Own, that oppression is cut to glass shards by as big a brain and as stunning a command of prose as ever rose to the occasion, before or since. This slim book quivers with rage; its words and phrases are honed with rage; and although it transmutes in the end to a kind of torch-passing wisdom, it's likely that quiet, precise rage that readers will remember, as in this passage where Woolf confronts the patristic historical summaries of Professor Trevelyan:

'Yet even so,' Professor Trevelyan concludes, 'neither Shakespeare's women nor those of authentic 17th-century memoirs like the Verneys and the Hutchinsons, seem wanting in personality and character.' Certainly, if we consider it, Cleopatra must have had a way with her; Lady Macbeth, one would suppose, had a will of her own; Rosalind, one might conclude, was an attractive girl. Professor Trevelyan is speaking no more than the truth when he remarks that Shakespeare's women do not seem wanting in personality or character. Not being a historian, one might even go further and say that women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time - Clytemnestra, Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Phedre, Cressida, Rosalind, Desdemona, the Duchess of Malfi, among the dramatists; then among the prose writers: Millamant, Clarissa, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, Madame de Guermantes - the names flock to mind, nor do they recall women 'lacking in personality and character.' Indeed, if woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out, she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

You're all most heartily urged to go out and read a copy of The Education of Henry Adams, make no mistake. But read Woolf first.