Alistair Cooke's America!

Our book today is Alistair Cooke's America, here in the oversized and profusely illustrated 1973 Knopf paperback, harking back to the several great oversized paperbacks we looked at once from the Great Explainers – and it harks back in other ways as well, especially since Cooke's name is not nearly so well-known as it was three or four decades ago. Back then, he was our most happy choice of in-house foreign correspondent, the best kind of well-spoken immigrant observer: the kind who had almost entirely good things to say about the United States (in a counterbalancing move, the country gave up Gore Vidal). Cooke was a Bill Moyers-style TV soft-news correspondent, and he hosted Masterpiece Theatre for roughly seventy years.

In other words, he was a prototypical talking head, and in the 1970s he hosted and narrated a TV documentary series on America. This book is the companion volume to that series, and like so many similar companion volumes, it actually holds up much better against the ravages of time than the series itself does. On film, there are awkward pauses, poor choice of settings, and lamentable bygone fashions (nothing even remotely as ridiculous as flip-flops or 'skinny' clothing, but still hideous enough), but when the series' scripts were converted into prose and printed with many very interesting illustrations, something of real value was produced.

You'll no doubt have noticed non-committal words like 'hosted,' 'narrated,' and 'converted,' and I'm afraid your suspicions will be well-founded: I'm very advisedly avoiding calling Cooke this book's author. The term conjures images of silver-haired elderly popularizing statesmen like Isaac Asimov, David Attenborough, or indeed Cooke himself sitting in the wing-chair of their gentleman's club, pad of paper on their lap, stack of reference books piled on the side table, and the valet under strict instructions not to interrupt them until tea time. It would be unfair to real hacks to imply that Cooke was one of their number – no, the vast amount of raw material in the ground underneath a book like America was assembled by others, edited by others, shortened and sharpened by others. The great anecdotes and examples were chosen by others.

So what does somebody like Cooke provide, you might ask? Typically two things: a shaping point to the whole enterprise, and a light finishing polish to the prose. It's one thing to know that the eighteenth century Russian empire was interested in cornering the New World sea otter trade, for instance, but it's quite another to have the item Britished up in classic Cooke style:

But it was dreadfully obvious to the King of Spain that the Russians were intending to set up an empire in Upper California. In simple fact, the Russians wanted nothing more than the sea otter himself, a plump and comical beast, a Disney version of Colonel Blimp, who has the round brown face of a well-fed cat swims on his back, his belly protruding, his whiskers bristling, his paws calmly folded across his chest.

All perfectly charming (unless of course you were ever unlucky enough to actually encounter one of those comical beasts in open water; when last I checked, Colonel Blimp wasn't six feet of solid muscle, bone-cracking teeth, and bad temper), and you can hear Cooke's mellow, irresistible voice saying it, which is one of the time-sensitive payoffs of books like this one.

And even though Cooke became a citizen of the U.S., he can't resist pontificating on that Continental Divide between his two homes, the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence's tag-line about monarch's deriving their powers from the consent of the governed gets him all worked up:

Let us forget for the moment (what we make a habit of forgetting today) the implication that there may be unjust powers – responding to the injustice of life itself – in which the governed have no say. But the idea that if you felt you were being unjustly governed, you – you being the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker – had some “right” to resist or overthrow the government: this was a firebrand that was to blow up France and the German republic and imperial Russia and eventually the whole idea of empire. We have come to accept this right, and, looking back over revolutions from the Peasants' Revolt to the latest South American coup, we can make one fairly certain generalization about the cause of revolutions: when the people in power can neither keep the consent of the governed nor keep down the dissent of the governed, then there will be a blowup.

It's a formula that worked so well for so long on the evening TV news: having an avuncular figure like Walter Cronkite intone these fairly ordinary observations somehow makes them more comfortable. Alistair Cooke's America is a very comfortable book, following our congenial host as he ambles through the whole course of America's first 200 years, pausing here and there to clarify or amplify something that strikes his fancy, like this bit about the vast system of political patronage that characterized 19th century America (and has, alas, degenerated in the 21st into mere cronyism):

In exchange for your vote, a quid pro quo so elementary that it was only rarely hinted at, he would do his damnedest to get you a job, he would fish your son out of trouble, he would hound the landlord to repair the stove or the bathtub. You had a daughter dramatically plain – he would go to work on the marriage broker. In bad times he brought up coal and food. He knew when the baby was coming and he got the doctor. These were not casual good deeds. They were the daily grind of a system as subtle and firm as the lineaments of city geography that dictated it.

And where does Cooke end up, in this epic journey of his? Does he see hope in America's future, despite what he refers to as “a developing moral numbness to vulgarity, violence, and the assault on the simplest human decencies”? Well, it's perhaps predictable that he falls back on an English historian:

I myself think I recognize here several of the symptoms that Edward Gibbon maintained were the signs of the decline of Rome, and which arose not from external enemies but from inside the country itself. A mounting love of show and luxury. A widening gap between the very rich and the very poor. An obsession with sex. Freakishness in the arts masquerading as originality, and enthusiasm pretending to creativeness. These symptoms are shared by western Europe, though they seem to be milder there only because America has a livelier tradition of self-criticism.

That was in the early 1970s, before some of you were born. But I'll bet it sounds familiar just the same. Maybe even comforting.

Silence and Violence in the Penny Press!

 

Our regularly scheduled installments of In the Penny Press have been drastically thrown off by the catastrophic technical problems that have beset Stevereads all through this horrible, horrible spring and summer, and the main problem with such an imbalance is that it can only grow greater with every passing day. As the great Seinfeld character Newman said when asked why the U.S. Postal Service spawns so many psychos, “The mail Never Stops ...”

An full and accurate catching-up therefore won't be possible, but I thought I'd re-establish things with a couple of quick notes about some more or less current issues.

 

Like the latest Vanity Fair, for instance, which boasts not only a creepy photo of Angelina Jolie on the cover but also a creepy photo of Bradley Cooper on the inside (Cooper has got to be the creepiest-looking extremely handsome Hollywood star since Tony Perkins, and probably for the same reason: he never blinks). In other thought-provoking photos, this issue features a curious little juxtaposition: there's a very expensive two-page spread for the new Pillars of the Earth mini-series on cable TV, which bespeaks a flush and active publicity department. But then a few pages later, there's one of those little sidebar-interviews the magazine uses to spotlight up-and-coming young stars; this one features Eddie Redmayne, the pouty-mouthed British starling who's the only thing Pillars of the Earth has in the way of male cutie-patooties (now that Rufus Sewell has ripened into respectability) and who's lately been the toast of New York for his performance in “Red,” in which he manages to hold his own against the full-gale force of Alfred Molina in scenery-chewing mode. So what does young Eddie have to say for himself? Nothing. The space is given over to the usual hyperventilating prose, but no interview – not even a single quote. Young Eddie agreed to do the photo shoot in Brooklyn, showed up dressed in his best Bohemian casual, and then said not one word worth James Wolcott's taking down. Which bespeaks a publicity department of an entirely different description.

 



Much deeper contradictions lurk in the centerpiece of the latest Harper's, in which Dan Baum writes a gripping, very engaging piece on the gamut of his feelings about buying, registering, training for, and carrying a loaded handgun. This is Harper's, and its demographic slant is fairly predictable, so Baum's piece is window-dressed with quite a bit of moral ambivalence. Moral ambivalence on the subject of so-called 'gun control' always irks me, I'll admit, since the very idea of an armed populace is insane and entirely unsanctioned by the U.S. Constitution, but it bothers me even more when the writer doing the hand-wringing is such a bald-faced hypocrite as Baum is. He spends a great deal of his article agonizing over just how he feels about carrying a loaded weapon bought and designed to kill human beings, but one of his concluding paragraphs gives the game away for anybody who still needed a clue:

I will draw my gun from its holster if I reasonably believe myself or another person to be in imminent danger of death or grievous bodily injury. I will fire two bullets into the center of the attacker's chest. My 125-grain hollowpoints will not only carve permanent cavities through his body, they'll also send out pressure waves that might rupture his solid organs – his liver, spleen, and kidneys. If he's going to die, he'll likely die on the spot or within a day. I will be sure to have my hands empty and raised by the time the police show up, because they'll be scared and liable to shoot anyone holding a gun. The only way to win a gunfight, goes the saying, is not to be there when it happens. I can expect the police to arrest, handcuff, and jail me. I'm I'm not charged, or I'm acquitted, the attacker or his family will probably sue me. I used hollowpoints, I will say on the stand, because they deliver more energy to the target and are therefore more likely to stop the attack – and the shooting – quickly. Also, being more likely to stay in the attacker's body or embed themselves in walls without passing through, hollowpoints are less dangerous to bystanders, which is why police use them. I didn't cock the revolver, yell “Freeze,” or shoot to wound, because if I'd had the time to think about doing any of that I'd have had time to run away. But the poor guy only had a knife, the plaintiff's lawyer might say, to which I'll respond that a man with a knife can close twenty-one feet in a second and a half – less time than it takes to draw and fire. Then it will up to a jury to decide my fate. The gun carrier's ethic holds that it's better to be tried by twelve than carried by six.

 

As usual when dealing with gun nuts, there's so much wrong with this paragraph, this seedy little justification, that you hardly know where to start picking it apart. With the jailhouse-lawyerese of 'grievous bodily harm,' when Baum neither knows what that means in a courtroom nor is qualified in any way to determine it in the field? How the 'The situation left me no choice' tone is utterly contradicted by the 8-year-old's relish in those 'permanent' cavities? The patronization of excusing the panic of the police on grounds that they'll be scared, whereas the narrator certainly isn't at all (“I will fire two bullets into the center of the attacker's chest ...”)? The smarmy two-faced concern of using hollowpoints because they'll stop the shooting quickly, when the fastest way to do that would be not to start shooting in the first place? Or that unbelievable business of pleading to the jury that if he'd had time to warn – or wound – his attacker, he'd have had time to run … painting for us a scenario in which the poor SOB had time for one and only one course of action: to shoot his 'target' dead (two shots, mind you – there simply isn't time for only one)? We're told that a man with a knife can close the distance of twenty-one feet in less time than it takes to draw and fire – which means the poor SOB has no choice but to open fire while the 'attacker' is still fifty, sixty, maybe even a hundred feet away. Maybe even across the street, but looking really menacing .. painting for us a scenario in which a jumpy citizen unempowered by law enforcement is carrying a lethal weapon that he admits he will only ever use Entirely without thinking. Lovely.

But it's that final line that bugs me the most, because it so stinks of gun-nut sloganeering. Yeah, man: better to be tried by twelve than carried by six. Yeah. Totally. Probably what the guy you shot and killed was thinking, while he was approaching you, yelling because you side-swiped his car, taking out a pen with which to jot down your insurance information. Bet he didn't like being carried by six at all, but hey, you're the victim here.

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: The Magnate's Marriage Demand!

Several of you in the Silent Majority have written in, sheepishly, with questions about Under the Covers with Paul Marron. You've wondered how he has all these marvelous adventures, and you've wondered how I manage to read … er, such books …. while also keeping up with all the latest about Ethelred the Unready. And perhaps more searchingly than anything else, you've wondered if Paul was always the book-cover godling he is today.

The answer to that last question is no! No, even book-cover godlings have to start out somewhere, and Paul's been at this a long time. Well, not long in human years, but certainly long in male-model years (the poor things can go from pupae to withered old 30-somethings in the course of a month's partying in the Meatpacking District). We're half-way to the year 2011, after all, and if you search diligently in the well-lit bins of your nearest Annie's Book Swap, you can find Paul covers from as long ago as 2007, when many of Paul's younger colleagues at International Male hadn't even been born yet, or were crawling across the carpet, trying their first pouts.

One such cover belongs to The Magnate's Marriage Demand, a 2007 Silhouette Desire romance from 2007 by Robyn Grady, on which Paul is somewhat imperiously handing a wedding ring to a distracted-looking young woman (perhaps she's distracted by the obvious contradiction embedded in the fact that she's fondling Paul's fingers with her right hand and fondling, well, her own naughty bits with her left hand – and all while wearing a crucifix!). Paul, we'll find, is often depicted doing things imperiously – probably because he's so physically stunning. We don't expect physically stunning people to be all humble and goofy – although a great number of them are.

Paul probably is, but not in this little book! Some of you may disdain industry machines like Silhouette Romances, reflexively considering them pre-fab pap in which the putative author has little or no say. It's true that these volumes are much of a type – they're all the same length (once upon a time they had to be, in order to fit just so many copies in the metal display-racks bookstores used), and they proceed in lock-step as far as their plots are concerned: feisty heroine who's helpless due to circumstances beyond her control, haughty hero hiding a hidden hurt, improbable life-turn that throws them together just long enough for them to find each other. And those of you inclined to thus dismiss these books will already have your minds made up – it will do me precious little good to point out that the 'serious' literary fiction with which you console yourself is almost certainly every bit as programmatic as a Silhouette Desire (if you don't think Netherland or Let the Great World Spin started out life as cash-grubbing Venn diagrams in the minds of their authors, you are, as one of Paul's fellow male models would say, denuding yourself). And even less good to point out that this has always been the case, and that the best way to measure a book is by gauging its spirit, not giving it points for more and more desperate 'originality' – a silly literary category currently given almost fetishistic emphasis.

Still, it's only fair to point out that there's precious little spirit in The Magnate's Marriage Demand (and even less fetish, alas – there's nothing wrong with Paul in this book that couldn't be solved with about fifty feet of clothesline); Robyn Grady keeps things popping along, but in the Silhouette line you have to do that – praising it would be the equivalent of praising German conscripts during WWI who climbed out of their trenches and charged the enemy, only at their officers' gunpoint.

The plot of The Magnate's Marriage Demand hinges entirely on a quick phone-call. Tamara Kendle's been having a rough time – a fire, a failed business – when her dear friend the business tycoon Marc De Luca takes pity on her and invites her in for a nice meal, a good bottle of wine, and a little discreet impregnating. Marc is ecstatic, feeling young again, and he burbles plans to raise the child in splendor (with lots of siblings), to marry Tamara, to live happily ever after.

Alas, there will be no Tamara for Marc (sorry – I had to); he's almost immediately killed in a motor cycle accident, leaving Tamara pregnant with a De Luca baby nobody knows about. Only somebody does know about it – Armand De Luca, Marc's handsome, ruthless brother, who shows up at the funeral and smolders his way through the tasteful service until he can get Tamara alone and tell her that his brother phoned him with the happy news mere moments before he became roadkill. Armand is Paul (as you can see from the cover), and he's not taking her aside to merely to comisserate – he has an audacious proposal: he wants to marry her and raise his brother's baby as his own!

Even from the first few pages of The Magnate's Marriage Demand, it's pretty clear that Tamara's doctors wouldn't advise her having anything to do with him:

At the sound of that rich, honey-over-gravel voice, Tamara's heart jumped to her throat. Hair lashing her cheeks, she wheeled around to face the room's only exit and the masculine silhouette filling it. Palm pushed to the pounding beneath the bodice of her black dress, she swallowed and recovered her power of speech ...

Her heartbeat stuttered, not only at his words, but also his gaze, probing, analyzing, as if he were hunting out her most precious secret ...

His announcement winded her like a blow to the stomach. Her knees threatened to buckle as questions pummeled her brain...

Her throat closed around a lump as her head prickled hot and cold...

Just when you're starting to wonder if Paul is a superhottie or a supervirus, Grady's plot starts chugging along. Turns out Paul needs to marry and produce an heir on a fairly tight schedule or, according to the terms of his late father's will, the company he once shared with Marc will go into trusteeship for an indefinite period of time. He coldly points out to Tamara that a huge percentage of supposed love-match marriages end in divorce, whereas only a small fraction of arranged marriages do, but it's clear Paul spends all of his time on the outside of romance novels – if he spent any time reading them, he'd know that such a line never yet won a maiden's heart (outside of Jaipur, that is). Fireworks ensue.

And even if Paul and Tamara can somehow find a way to love each other (it sounds like she'll need EMTs standing by every minute, but this is a romance novel, so we can kind of expect she'll prevail), there's the added element of drama that Grady milks for all it's worth: the baby, after all, is not Armand's natural issue. If anybody were to find that out, the whole plan would come a cropper – especially if the somebody who found it out had been steeping in bitterness against the De Luca family for decades. Not the hardest villain in the world to spot, but then, that's not the point.

The point is that even somebody with Paul's murky eyes and chiseled cheekbones had to start somewhere – in his case, in the business tycoon boardrooms of Australia, causing heart palpitations, in the bygone days of 2007. We'll check in with another one of his earliest adventures next time.

The Unauthorized Version!

Our book today is Robin Lane Fox's mighty, encyclopedic 1991 volume The Unauthorized Version, one of the most essential works of Biblical exegesis ever written and a walloping amount of good old-fashioned literary fun.

Fox has an almost unbeatable track record. His Pagans and Christians is an enduring work of scholarship, and his biography of Alexander the Great became the 20^th century standard almost from the moment of its publication (Scarisbrick's Henry VIII volume did the same thing – a not entirely healthy procedure, but a toughly adhesive one just the same). The chief attraction in all Fox's prose can be summed up the way an old friend of mine used to do it: “He thinks on the page.”

As many of you will know, I have a sweet-tooth for biblical exegesis (I've even indulged in it here on Stevereads from time to time) – not biblical deconstruction, mind you, not in the sense of attacking the basis of anybody's faith – but biblical humanism, based on the assumption that whatever else the sacred texts of the Bible might be, they're also texts, able to be studied like any other written documents. Centuries ago, when humanism was in its perilous infancy, several of its most eloquent defenders pointed out the logical fallacies of objecting to such claims: if the Bible's various books are divinely inspired, they should be able to withstand a little textual scrutiny – and if despite their divine inspiration their human transmission has interpolated errors into their contents, well, then the divine inspiration isn't to blame, is it? Either way, humanists (at their best) argued, studying written texts cannot imperil true faith.

This is certainly the ethos behind The Unauthorized Version. Even though Fox wrote it as an atheist, he kept and open mind and heart (as he put it, he believes in the Bible, but not in God) – he's not out to attack anyone's faith, but even two minutes of studying biblical textual history is long enough to stumble into problems with the way most Jews and Christians today use and think about their sacred text. I see these people every day on the subway, complacently opening their Bibles with the exact thought in their mind that they're opening one book, written by one mind, moving toward one point.

It's an attractive thought, but as Fox amply demonstrates in The Unauthorized Version, it's a wildly inaccurate and inevitably self-deceitful way to deal with what Fox calls the “splendid incoherence” of the work as it's come down to us. That work can inspire many things, but complacent textual faith isn't – shouldn't be – one of them. As Fox puts it with doomed bluntness:

the prospects for one consistent and coherent construction out of this variety were precisely zero.

 

The main attraction of his book (which is so full of attractions it can literally be re-read every single year with new wonder, new discoveries … the acumen and sheer research necessary to have written it seem more impressive to me with every passing year) is the patient, open-minded, meticulous way Fox detonates that one coherent construction. In every text of the Bible, in every long-cherished received tradition of Judaism and Christianity, in every specific example, our author dives until he reaches the bottom, then presents us with a clear picture in sparkling, often very funny prose:

Historians are not so pedestrian that they cannot see how truth can be found even in an unintended fiction. A story may be wonderful evidence for what the narrator and his audience believed and assumed: it may help to hold their view of reality together. The beliefs may concern a god or an independent Satan (a late arrival on the biblical scene): they may be odd until we unravel them, like the curious story of Jacob in Genesis 30 who strips off the bark of fresh twigs, puts them in the water trough of his sheep and is somehow thought to have made them conceive speckled lambs as a result (it is not even that he had an speckled rams to father them: Laban had taken the speckled rams away). For centuries, scholars could still understand this story, as we have recently been reminded: it turned on the widespread belief that a mother's conception was influenced by whatever she looked at during sexual intercourse. In the water troughs, the stripped twigs looked dark and mottled; Jacob's ewes gazed on them and conceived mottled 'Jacob's flock', just as horse-breeders believed that a mare would conceive a fine foal if she saw her handsome stallion in a mirror while being mounted (in 1726 a woman amazed London society by claiming that she had given birth to rabbits after looking at a rabbit, but it emerged that she was wrong). Behind Genesis 30, which is story, not history, lies a widespread belief about conception and the facts of life. As late as 1950 there were commentators who claimed that it was true (which is another story and also part of history). It was left to Augustine to wonder why the ewes did not conceive twigs.

That emphasis on stories vs history is typical of Fox and a recurring note in The Unauthorized Version, which tries at every turn to strip away the accumulation of repetition and tradition that has filled up the holy books that comprise the Bible. In one delightful passage remarking on the fact that his contemporaries wondered if Jesus was King Solomon come back to life, Fox muses on how shocking Solomon would have found it, to come forward in time and see what the traditions of Judaism had done to his story:

Suppose that King Solomon had come back instead: he would never have credited it. Here were his descendants, venerating texts which he was supposed to have written and wondering whether or not they polluted people's hands: he had never composed a word of them. One of them said that he had 'uttered three thousand proverbs and his songs were a thousand and five': it was amazing to be thought so clever. There were even people who thought that he had written the Song of Songs: it would have looked to him like a collection of straightforward love poetry (his Egyptian wife had known plenty of bits like it). Why ever had people fallen for this book of the law in which Moses seemed to speak: why had they dreamed up a covenant with God or a future life? He and his friends had managed very well without any of them.

 

And yet, Fox allows, they weren't wrong to 'fall' for it, if it brought order and even comfort to their lives – the error happens when those same people, having been comforted, turn around and start to make untenable historical claims about the texts that gave the comfort. That's what historians like Fox can't tolerate – although The Unauthorized Version is in no way an intolerant book (you'll have to look to more modern pundits for the smallness of that). It's instead a fair and even loving one – but wry and unsparing too, and enormously worth your time regardless of your 'faith status.' Humanists everywhere should rejoice in it.

Penguins on Parade: The Tain!

Some Penguins feel so right when they finally happen that you wonder how you ever got along without them. A perfect example of this would be the 2008 Penguin Classic of Ciaran Carson's 2007 translation of the great Irish epic The Tain (the mightiest branch of the Ulster Cycle); Carson's version was pretty much immediately hailed as the best one ever made into English, and its enshrinement in the Penguin Classics series seems so perfect, almost so pre-ordained, that seeing it just makes the reader smile.

 It certainly makes this reader smile. The Tain is as odd and complicated and seemingly contradictory as the ancient people it represents, and like most fans of its bloody-minded, sarcastic world, I've read a bunch of translations over the decades. Ciaran Carson's is the only one of them that actually beats Thomas Kinsella's version for liveliness and readability – no small feat, since Kinsella's book is also brilliant.

 This is of course the story of Queen Medb of Connacht, whose burning desire to steal the fabled Brown Bull of Cuailnge leads to a full-fledged war-party invading Ulster, which is defended by the lone teen-dream hero Cu Chulainn, who regularly protests that he's a peaceful young man, that he has no wish to kill anybody – and yet who racks up a body-count far surpassing that of Achilles and almost entering Samson-territory. Cu Chulainn has vaguely supernatural strength, and he's certainly cunning, and when the battle-rage overtakes him, he's a virtual avatar of destruction:

 In that great Massacre on Muirthemne Plain Cu Chulainn slew seven score and ten kings as well as innumerable dogs and horses, women and children, not to mention underlings and rabble; and not one man in three escaped without a staved head, or a broken leg, or a burst eye, or without being scarred for life in some other way. And Cu Chulainn came away from that encounter without so much as a scrape or scratch on himself, or his man, or his horses.

 

But those are the fun bits – any translator of the Tain must also deal with the, shall we say, Homeric bits of cataloging that you'll find in virtually all epic literature. Carson bends to this thankless task with unflagging energy, not that even he can make much of stuff like this:

 No body-count was made of the common soldiery, so we have no way of knowing how many died in total. Only their leaders were accounted for. These are the names of their chiefs and commanders: two Cruaids, two Calads, two Cirs, two Ciars, two Ecells, three Croms, three Cauraths, three Combirges, four Feochars, four Furachars, four Casses, four Fotas, five other Cauraths, five Cermans, five Cobthachs, six Saxans, six Dachs, six Daires, seven Rochaids, seven Ronans, seven Rurthechs, eight Rochlads, eight Rochtads, nine other Daires, nine Damachs, ten Fiacs, ten Fiachas and ten Fedelmids.

 

But oh! The joyous volume he makes of the whole thing combined! The Tain is a rapturous, uproarious mixture of prose and fevered poetry, of high, subtle thinking and graphic, staggering violence (Cu Chulainn has a special weapon, for instance, whose effect on its victims would have to wait a thousand years to be matched by poor laggard reality) – it's not everybody's cup of tea, in other words. It's fitting that Penguin Classics should finally serve it up in a beautiful little edition, and it's a perfect fit that they should find Carson's translation and give it the immortality it deserves. If you're interested in trying this particular epic, this is the place to do it.

The Lively Art of Entertaining!

Our book today – the last in this latest, incredibly protracted, almost Egyptianly cursed string of Nine Lives – is from way back in 1957 (surely the Duchess of Newcastle was still alive and kicking?): it's The Lively Art of Entertaining by the incomparable Elsa Maxwell, the most famous daughter of the lovely little town of Keokuk, Iowa.

Entertaining here means parties, which were marvelous multi-voiced instruments for Maxwell, massively complex instruments which she conducted with the consummate skill of a symphony maestro or the lighting-master for the Super Bowl. She knew as well as anybody how evanescent they are – genuine masterpieces of planning, work, and improvisation are forgotten in a season or two, and even once-in-a-lifetime constellations more often than not lack their Pindar or Plato to get the details right (and they'd require one – good party-scenes are devilishly difficult to write; they've defeated some of the best writers in history, whose dullest chapters are usually party-chapters). But that didn't matter to Maxwell – she'd found her one great skill, and good fortune had provided her with the perfect time, place, and means to give it expression. And in typical fashion, she imagined her own lineage, stretching all the way back to Queen Hatshepsut:

Externals change, but the human heart does not. It's an old truth and one we all rediscover from time to time in our lives, yet never have I been made so vividly aware of it as when I stumbled on the records left by this ancient queen and realized fully for the first time how ageless and honored is the heredity of entertaining. Four thousand years ago, could not Hatshepsut have chose to reward the achievements of her travelers merely with titles and lands, the customary royal perquisites? She could have; no doubt she did. But she didn't stop there. She added to her thanks the most heart-warming gesture of gratitude a woman can make: she gave a party.

Well yes she did, and that tone – preening, yet oddly approachable – permeates this book. Maxwell maintained she wrote it mostly for women, for her fellow hostesses in venues large and small, and the heartwarming thing to say here would be that in reality, she wrote it for everybody who's ever tried to reach out to another person. But no – she really wrote the book for herself, to be about herself, because in every good party, regardless of what the lady herself tells you, the hostess is the focal point, the only irreplaceable person. Maxwell loved talking more than almost any human being who's ever lived, and her favorite subject was herself. This isn't necessarily bad – somebody once said of her that she deserved a Puccini opera (she replied “Yes, but do I live happily ever after or knife myself?”), and he was right – but it does shape all the anecdotes in The Lively Art of Entertaining. They start off innocently enough:

If it was difficult in those free-and-easy days to persuade people to put on fancy dress, it has now become next to impossible. Even so, I still do what I can to dress up my parties. For example, when I gave a ball recently to honor Stavros Niarchos I decided that, since it was he who made my cruise to the Greek islands possible, I must pay him a fitting tribute. So I asked all the women to wear a headdress or tiara, synonyms of elegance, and to my amazement two thirds of them actually showed up in tiaras.

But then they get the Maxwell touch:

Mine, incidentally, would have been at home at Niki de Gunzburg's Bal des Valses, as it had belonged to Empress Elizabeth of Austria. Harry Winston, the jeweler, lent it to me, and it was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen – all diamond roses, exquisitely entwined. With it, at Mr. Winston's suggestion, I also wore the Portuguese diamond which one of the Kings of Portugal had sent into Brazil, and which finally reached New York. This was a single diamond of great purity and weight, valued, I believe, in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. So with these two adornments I had, for the first and, no doubt, last time in my life, roughly a million dollars on my person.

The Lively Art of Entertaining (when Rizzoli re-issued the book in 2005, they retitled it How To
Do It, and it's doubtful Maxwell would have approved; she wouldn't have minded the risque, but she would have sniffed at the crudity) doubles as a field guide to all the various types of guests regular hostesses are likely to encounter during the course of their adventures. The drunks are here, and the tee-totallers, the carpers and the gadabouts, the dreaded bore (her advice: seat them all together – never sacrifice a good guest to their terrors), and one other category, perhaps inspired by a poor soul whose wife insisted he accompany her:

Worst of the offending guests, because his offensiveness is negative and therefore difficult to define, is the show-me guest – he who arrives at your party, seats himself, folds his arms, presses his lips together, and deliberately defies you to amuse him. He is there, his attitude says plainly, only to see if you can do it. To him I show no quarter. When I give a party, I always have someone stationed at the door – chiefly as a block to would-be crashers, but also to help out in situations such as this. Also when I give a party I always have a few of the latest books sent in. With these for props, I am ready for the show-me. I first send word to the door to have his (sometimes her, but rarely) coat ready. Then I beckon sweetly to the offender, and when he has followed me out of the party room I say to him, nicely but very firmly, “Darling, you are not happy here. Because you are not happy, I am not happy. So I think a good book and bed will be just the thing for you now.” Before he can recover from his astonishment, his coat is put on, his hat or stick or gloves handed him, the book placed under his arm, and he finds himself on the way out, still not quite grasping what has happened to him. Brutal, yes. But so is he, and I recommend the treatment the next time you want to manage a discreet eviction.

If our hostess could be hoodwinked, it would be a fairly easy way to cadge a new book – but we must not think our hostess could be hoodwinked, not on these elegant battlefields she knew better than anybody. Whether it was a string of barges floating up and down Venice's Grand Canal or a pig-calling contest in an Upper West Side dining room, there was no fete Maxwell couldn't accomplish, and this charming, glowing book is her best shot at having anybody remember it all. It's one of our most entertaining entertaining memoirs, from the real Hostess with the Mostess.

All Said and Done!

Our book today – after a barrage of technical problems the likes of which neither Stevereads nor all of collected human civilization has ever seen (an ongoing barrage, self-replicating and constantly adapting in positively Borg-like fashion) – is All Said and Done, one in a long string of memoirs by that premiere Gallic gasbag, Simone De Beauvoir.

All Said and Done (Tout Compte Fait), in the English translation by Patrick O'Brian, go figure, is an account – to use the loosest possible shading of that word (i.e. the Frenchest shading) – of the years 1962-1972, when De Beauvoir's glory days were long behind her and she was famous mainly for still being the original Simon De Beauvoir despite all the second-rate imitators who'd sprung up along the Rue De Rivoli since the late 1950s.

De Beauvoir was a feminist, a Marxist, and French – ordinarily a skull-and-crossbones complete set of strikes in my book, but like most intellectual women of the mid 20^th century, her mediocre ideas and overweening self-importance are saved in the only way they could be: by sheer writing talent. It's true that in All Said and Done things get off to a very rocky start by intentionally invoking the Dark Prince, the very Frenchest of all French writers:

Every morning, even before I open my eyes, I know I am in my bedroom and my bed. But if I go to sleep after lunch in the room where I work, sometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement – why am I myself? What astonishes me, just as it astonishes a child when he becomes aware of his own identity, is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this about?

Even if you resist your sudden craving for a madeleine, there's much more to come along these lines. The problem with almost all existentialist, Marxist, or French writing, to say nothing of existentialist Marxist French writing, is its complacent, unrelenting egotism. Even writers who have active, working brains – and De Beauvoir was certainly one of those – fall into this trap and are never seen again for all their posturing. Naturally enough, the problem is compounded by old age, that most solipsistic phase of life, when even a touch of renown can give a person delusions of godhood. By the time she wrote All Said and Done, De Beauvoir had been so long venerated (in certain circles!) that she had come to believe every single thing she thought or said was inherently interesting simply by virtue of the fact that she was the one thinking or saying it. Take this passage, in the middle of a long discussion about her reading habits:

I rarely turn to old books that I have never read. The very fact of my having neglected them so far diminishes my opinion of them – why should I find them interesting all at once? I know nothing about Paul-Louis Courier's works: they are within hand's reach, but I feel no urge to tackle them. In any case when I am in Paris I have no time to step into a world that for years I have never cared about and that is in no way connected with me. Sometimes when I am on holiday I do make up my mind to take the plunge. The stimulus is particularly strong when I am getting myself ready to see a foreign country that I want to know well. When I went to Japan I delighted in the admirable English translation of the Tale of Genji and I went through Tanizaki's books. But when I am on holiday I may also read French authors I either do not know well or have forgotten.

The sheer volume of self-regard on display there is deafening. It's not that she doesn't describe well some quintessential reader habits (who hasn't read up on the literature of a foreign land when visiting that land's present-day incarnation? An utterly useless thing to do, yet everybody does it), but she describes them as interesting only to the extent that they're true of her: other people, let alone other authors, aren't even in the picture as viable separate entities. And look at that horrifying Colonel Blimp 'rationale' for continuing to ignore authors she's always ignored! Like so much else of what she wrote, all that kind of clap-trap does is provide a faux-intellectual underpinning for every kind of lazy, pretentious posturing known to man.

But for every passage like that in All Said and Done, there's a passage that brims with the natural charm, the sharp descriptive eye, and the humane spirit that glows in virtually all the best French writing – and that glows in De Beauvoir's writing whenever she stops droning long enough to let it shine, as in this description of a 1962 trip to Khrushchev's Russia:

How gay Moscow was, under the snow and the blue sky! The branches of the trees and their delicate twigs were powdered with a sparkling whiteness. Many people went about on skis, and where the streets sloped down they glided happily along. The passers-by, carefully wrapped up, were all loaded with parcels; and in their brilliantly-coloured quilted coats the children looked as though they were going to a fancy-dress party. In the squares stood tall snowy Christmas trees. All the streets had a holiday look – an air of festivity. Simonov and his wife invited us to a Christmas Eve party in the foyer of a theatre near Mayakovksy Square. It was minus twenty degrees centigrade. When we got there, fat young women were arriving; they hurried to the cloakroom, shed their fur coats, boots, and thick wool skirts, and re-appeared, slim and elegant, in light evening dresses and slippers.

Even if I hadn't told you the translator was Patrick O'Brian, you might have been able to guess it from passages like that, and enough of them together add an extra element of surreality to the book, quite apart from its own merits – which are many, despite my admonitory tone! This book is well worth reading, as is De Beauvoir's novel The Mandarins – and her shaggy-dog magnum opus The Second Sex, if you're in need of some quick, easy laughs.

The Duchess of Newcastle's Memoir!

Our book today is the sprightly, weirdly honest wish-it-were-longer memoir of Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, who’s near the top of a list of those oddball historical personages I’m always surprised to find isn’t better known. Better known in this case would be a distinct improvement over totally un-known, which is the current state of affairs with this remarkable woman, who in her own day was a trailblazer noteworthy even in an age of trailblazers.

It isn’t just that she was brought up by her loving mother in a family atmosphere of trust, support, and encouragement – although that was still a rarity in 17^th century England; and it isn’t just that she intended to cut a dash in her life quite independent of the men around her – although she did indeed do that, designing her own unique style of clothes, fashioning her own unique style of speech, and cultivating her own unique brand of personality entirely separate from her powerful, equally vibrant older brothers or her easy-going husband, William Cavendish, the Duke of Newcastle; and it isn’t just that she was impatient of the second-class restrictions put on women in all walks of life – although she was, even going so far as to be the first woman to attend a proceeding of the Royal Society. No, the superlative that concerns us today regarding Margaret Cavendish is bookish, as she would have liked it to be: she poured herself into an endless stream of books, at a time when even the most educated women dared not parade that fact.

She was born Margaret Lucas in 1623 to a wealthy royalist Essex family, and she was writing scenes, monologues, and fantasies from the moment she could first make her letters (a moment postponed perhaps a bit by the rather lax emphasis her delightful mother put on drilling children in their lessons against their will – her mother’s first question in virtually any situation was “Well, what would you like to do?”). When Civil War broke out in 1642, young Margaret volunteered her services as a lady in waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria, and two years later she went with the queen into continental exile, where she met William Cavendish and fell in love.

He fell in love with her as well, although not for her looks – despite what worshipful portraits might want to sell you, Margaret Cavendish was a short, homely woman with a pug nose, an underbite, and stringy brown hair – but rather for her leaping, darting, restless mind, and for a fact that most men are too stupid to prize: life with her was never boring.

As soon as Charles II was restored to his throne, the couple returned, reclaimed the bulk of Newcastle’s seized estates, and promptly retired to the countryside of Nottinghamshire to write and read and talk with each other. Margaret disliked the superficial frenzy of the court, and she and her husband very much liked the quiet, invigorating routine they developed. During her time in exile, Margaret had already begun publishing works of wildly varying natures under her own name, gaining just exactly the mixture of cheering fans and serial deriders such public figures have always had. Her Poems and Fancies and Philosophical Fancies were fresh, effusive, often silly, ultimately invigorating – and provocative, because she readily admitted she was no scholar (although she resented the inevitable speculation that her husband guided her hand while she wrote – there’s a hot denial of that innuendo in virtually all of her works).

That’s the trail she blazed that interests us today: she was the first woman in modern times – indeed, one of the first writers of either gender in modern times – to make herself not just the narrator of her various intellectual investigations but also the subject of them; she dramatized her own process of perpetual inquiry, never for a moment doubting that it was of intrinsic interest to her readers. For some reason, it’s hugely gratifying to see how often, how happily, she makes reference in her various works to “my readers.” There’s a particular quiet pride that comes with being able to say that, and surely for most of her life Margaret was the only woman in England who would say it (needless to say, if she were alive today she would be blogging to beat the world).  Even the redoubtable Aphra Behn only followed in her wake.

All her works contain threads of fascination (not nearly enough such fascination, if you listen to her most illustrious critic, Virginia Woolf – or too many threads), but perhaps the most fascinating thing of all is her brief memoir, in which she openly divulges all kinds of personal quirks and habits of her own and, in the what has since become the grand tradition of memoir writing (although you could make a case that it started here), she lies her face off on virtually every page. It’s an indelibly charming work, as precipitate and immediate as anything Pepys ever wrote.

Typical of the woman and typical of the time, she spends a good portion of the memoir’s scanty page-count defending its very existence against anticipated charges of willful flightiness:

I desire all my readers and acquaintances to believe, though my words run stumbling out of my mouth, and my pen draws roughly on my paper, yet my thoughts move regular in my brain for the several tracks or paths that contemplation hath made on my brain, which paths or tracks are the several ways my thoughts move in are much smoother than the tongue in my mouth, from whence words flow, or the paper on which my pen writes: for I have not spoke so much as I have writ, nor writ so much as I have thought …

A good line, but the book scarcely bares it out – those acquaintances of hers would not have recognized a Margaret who placed any control on what she spoke, writ, or thought. Her sentences often mirror the endless cascade of talk she could be in person, sometimes rambling for entire pages without a single breath of a period:

As for my breeding, it was according to my birth, and the nature of my sex; for my birth was not lost in my breeding, for as my sisters was or had been bred, so was I in plenty or rather with superfluity; likewise we were bred virtuously, modestly, civilly, honourably, and on honest principles: as for plenty, we had not only for necessity, conveniency, and decency, but for delight and pleasure to a superfluity; ‘tis true we did not riot, but we lived orderly; for riot even in the kings’ courts and princes’ palaces, brings ruin without content or pleasure, when order in less fortunes shall live more plentifully and deliciously then princes, that live in a hurlieburlie, as I may term it, in which they are seldom well served, for disorder obstructs; besides, it doth disgust life, distract the appetites, and yield no true relish to the sences; for pleasure, delight, peace, and felicitie, live in method and temperance.

She could pause and be quiet when it suited her; the memoir’s sweetest, softest notes are sounded when she’s remembering her mother:

Her beauty was beyond the ruin of time… one might think death was enamoured with her ,for he imbraced her in a sleep, and so gently, as if he were afraid to hurt her …

But this is definitely the Margaret Show, and her protestations are everywhere, for the gullible to believe:

… whatsoever I was addicted to, either in fashion of cloths, contemplation of thoughts, actions of life, they were lawful, honest, honourable, and modest, of which I can avouch to the world with a great confidence, because it is a pure truth.

Modesty seldom entered into things with her, but one part of this is most certainly pure truth: her dialogue was conducted with the world. And the world listened – often hooting in derision, but listening just the same, and buying her books as fast as she could issue and re-issue them. Penguin Classics used to make a slim volume of those books, but it didn’t include the memoir; some enterprising publisher ought to craft a tiny, gorgeous (and fully annotated, of course) edition of just that one remarkable work, so people could bring the Duchess everywhere they go.

Act One!

Our book today is Moss Hart’s boisterous, utterly unforgettable 1959 autobiography, Act One, not only one of the best American memoirs but one of the best theatrical memoirs ever written. Hart fell in love with the theater as a boy, reading back issues of Theatre Magazine and dreaming of that world before he ever saw it, and the book opens with the story of his Bronx employer sending the yearning, dreaming 12-year-old Hart on an errand to Broadway, where his dour, unimaginative parents had previously forbidden him to go. He steps off the subway into a world of wonder, and he’s forever convinced that he’s found his home. As he sardonically puts it, he’s caught a sickness:

There is no point whatever in writing or reading a book of theatrical reminiscences if either the writer or the reader is to be hampered by incredulity, an aversion to melodrama, or even the somewhat foolish glow of the incorrigibly stage-struck. Like it or not, the credulous eye and the quixotic heart are part and parcel of the theatre. The theatre is not so much a profession as a disease, and my first look at Broadway was the beginning of a lifelong infection.

It’s not a sickness for which he wants a cure (except in his darkest moments, and Act One does have them – like most theater folk, Hart was prone to mood swings), and the book chronicles his unceasing efforts to move his life (and the living quarters of his family) closer and closer to the world of his dreams. He gets work as an errand boy and starts hammering out plays, learns the practicalities of his craft in the Borscht Belt circuit far from New York lights, and eventually makes writes and directs his way back to the glorious, petty, heartbreaking, wonderfully human world of New York theater. It could be a catty world too, naturally, and Hart wouldn’t have it any other way:

The most exhilarating theatrical discussions are usually those denigrating success, and I am certain that in al the little restaurants and bars that dot the theatrical district of today, just such groups are stirring their coffee and pouring their spleen into the hides and reputations of the successful. It is a game as ageless and fascinating as the theatre itself, and each time one of the mighty falls, the glad cry of “Bingo!” is joyfully voiced with all the resonance of a hallelujah chorus.

The stinging mention of those little bars and restaurants that dot the theatrical district will be the present-day reader’s surest tip that we’re dealing in ancient history here. When Hart was directing and writing such delightful war-horses as You Can’t Take It With You, The Man Who Came To Dinner, and My Fair Lady, Broadway was still a place that could not only inspire a 12-year-old Moss Hart but actually also nurture him; shows cost at most an hour’s pay, not a month’s mortgage, and errand-boys were kids with the fire to learn the craft, not Choate waiting-listers with resumes to fatten. In other words, Hart is clearly writing about pre-Cameron Makintosh Broadway.

There’s a lot of great theater in this book, understandably, from the gallery of great portraits of the legends Hart encountered (his long-time collaborator George Kaufman being a frustrating exception, as vague and elusive in these pages as he so often was in real life) to the hilariously self-aggrandizing final scene where an exultant Hart, with great notices and three runaway hits suddenly to his credit, takes a cab out to his family’s squalid one-bedroom apartment at dawn, wakes everybody up, and tells them they’re all leaving for a hotel in Manhattan in an hour with nothing but the clothes on their back – none of their grimy old furniture, none of their shabby old utensils, not even a toothbrush … they’ll make a totally clean start in the City with the money he’s bringing in. I doubt Brendan Behan could have improved the business (and as you’d expect, there’s quite a lot of great theater that’s left out, including all hint of Hart’s illicit second life as a clandestine and self-loathing gay man; during his heyday in Broadway, Hart spent a great deal of money and time with an astonishingly beautiful young actor named Gordon Merrick, who would go on to pen some of the most forthright gay novels ever written – there’s a Hart character in virtually every one of them, seldom, alas, written sympathetically).

And in addition to being an accidental hymn of praise to the Broadway Cameron Makintosh destroyed, Hart’s book also manages quite often to describe perfectly some aspects of theatrical life and stagecraft that will never change. There are long passages throughout Act One that would have had Shakespeare – or Sophocles – nodding fondly in recognition:

The initial performance, the raising of a curtain on a play before its very first audience, is for me at least the worst two hours of that play’s existence, whatever its subsequent fate may be. No one really knows anything much about a play until it meets its first audience; not its directors, its actors, its producers, and least of all its author. The scenes he has counting on most strongly, his favorite bits of fine writing – the delicately balanced emotional or comedic thrusts, the witty, ironic summing up, the wry third-act curtain with its caustic stinging last line that adroitly illuminates the theme – these are the things that are most likely to go down the drain first, sometimes with an audible thud. The big scene in the second act, or the touching speech that reflects all of the author’s personal philosophy – that cherished mosaic of words on which he has secretly based his hopes for the Pulitzer Prize or at the very least the Drama Critics Award – such things the audience invariably will sit silently but politely through, patiently waiting for the reappearance of that delightful minor character, who was tossed in only to highlight the speech, or for an echo of that delicious little scene which was written only as a transition to the big one.

Hart of course did win his Pulitzer, and many awards besides – but for all us bookish folk (and even those of us who came late to books after – ironically enough – the theater), his greatest achievement will always be this heartfelt, hammy marvel of a book.

New York Jew!

Our book today is Alfred Kazin’s chatty, superbly eloquent and altogether magnificent 1978 memoir New York Jew, which is, to my amazement, still in print at something like a reasonable price. This assuages my usual default of anger when it comes to incredible volumes like this, which are so often completely forgotten by the very reading public who need them most (we won’t talk about the fact that there are no Penguin paperbacks of Kazin’s work, nor any attention from the Library of America or such houses …).

Every time I re-read New York Jew, I’m freshly amazed at how vigorous it is, how encyclopedic. The Second World War is here, as is the Holocaust and the psychic shockwaves it sent through the whole world, including the humanist intelligentsia of which Kazin was already a paid-up member:

Late one Friday afternoon near the end of the war, I was waiting out in the rain in the entrance to a music store. A radio was playing into the street and, standing there, I heard the first Sabbath service from Belsen. In April a British detachment had stumbled on Belsen by accident, had come upon forty thousand sick, starving, and dying prisoners. Over ten thousand corpses were stacked in piles. Belsen was the first Nazi camp to be exposed to the world, and the London Times correspondent began his dispatch: “It is now my duty to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind.” Now I heard the liberated Jewish prisoners in Belsen say the Shema – “Here O Israel the Lord our God the Lord is One.” Weeping in the rain, I said it with them. For a moment I was home.

That home is also a recurrent theme in this book. As you could guess from the title, Kazin here grapples in wonderfully contradictory and human ways with what his own Jewishness and what it means to be Jewish in the hurtling, flinty America of the postwar generation. The well-worn words of the psalm can prompt a gorgeous aria that is complicated and yearning and irritated all at once:

If I forget thee! We never forgot anything; our holy book, our book of laws and commandments, was a history book, a recital that went back so far and was repeated so fondly that the history of this people seemed magical, unreal, improbable to everyone but themselves. How could one possibly justify the return to Eretz Israel by secular, rational, “normal” reasoning? How could one explain the inordinate zeal of the Socialist Prime Minister Ben-Gurion who said of the “ingathering” of so many “exiles,” “We are living in the days of the Messiah?” There was no justification for any of this except the divine wisdom to the Jews of their mad perpetuation. There was a sacredness that the Jews had made part of their existence, but often understood as little as others understood them. The God who first disclosed himself as fire was, as usual, an impassable barrier. He could not be encompassed in words. We were, above all, creatures of culture, idolaters of words. Words were our culture; culture had to do everything. God did not seem much connected with “culture.” Certainly nothing had so betrayed us as culture, humanism, the fine professions of European civilization.

And his own creative struggles are here as well, captured with clarity and appealing fictionalization. This is more than anything else a writer’s book, especially a New York writer’s book. The city bright avenues and endless weathers exercise Kazin at all times – he calls it warfare, but on every page it reads like love:

Those sleepless hours in the morning dark were difficult and beautiful. The harbor was all around me as I lay in bed listening to tugs hooting a block away. By dawn I would get up to find my painter’s skylight and great north windows awash with sea light. I had coffee with Bach as I struggled my way to the typewriter. I had started a loose unwieldy book about New York-at-large, based on my hypnotized walking of the city. Walking was my way of thinking, of escape into myself, of dreaming the details back. The book was all externals, buildings, loneliness, my daily battle with New York.

(The “loose unwieldy book” would of course end up being A Walker in the City, as odd and lyrical a masterpiece as American letters has ever produced)

But the main attraction of New York Jew – at least in this latest re-reading of mine (check with me in three or four years, and I’ll likely have an entirely different main attraction to crow about) – is the gallery of portraits that unfolds as the book goes on. Kazin excelled in describing people, and he lavishes his best gifts toward that aim in this book. Here he talks about Edmund Wilson’s red, fox-hunting squire’s face, and the nervous, not-quite-sincere self-deprecation of John F. Kennedy, and the febrile animation of Randall Jarrell, and the fact that Mary McCarthy got prettier when she talked about books. He half-jokingly laments the mandarin ways of some of his older colleagues in the glory days of The New Republic:

They had a conscious air; they were the voice of tradition. They came out of their studies with an air ironic, faintly burdened, as if determined to meet the world only halfway.

And he fondly remembers another colleague who came alive for audiences big and small:

He looked, he looked – how much he looked! He seemed as finished, as rounded-out as a character in a novel. I knew him as a performer in conversation, where he played many parts and imitated many other performers. He seemed to keep himself afloat by the comic fixity of his eye even as he grew more and more seductive.

Too often memoirs are mere datebook-jottings coagulated into a mass of unfeeling, unmoving verbiage (if any of you have ever contemplated reading David Rockefeller’s Memoirs, for instance, don’t bother: just stare at a cinder-block for two hours, and you’ll get the gist of it just fine), but oh! How glorious they can be when they seize their own dual nature – the weave of history through the wanderings of memory – for all it’s worth! A once-lionized American statesman once said that the best possible memoir was the one where the writer pens ‘that’s all I can remember’ and then immediately dies. I’m not sure Kazin would have disagreed, although I’m grateful he didn’t have the guts to try it out – after all, I look forward to talking about his other books here at Stevereads some day!

Two Park Street!

Our book today is Paul Brook’s utterly enchanting 1986 memoir Two Park Street, about some of the glorious times he had in his forty-plus years of association with the storied old Boston publishing house Houghton Mifflin. Brooks started in the business in the early 1930s, when it was still run in an inefficient, ramshackle, and thoroughly human way, and back then, nobody could have foreseen the immense and horrifying changes that would sweep over the whole industry by the close of the 20^th century. Those changes would leave nothing whatsoever intact of the publishing world Brooks entered, loved, and – as manager of Houghton Mifflin’s immensely influential trade division for decades – lead for so long. Books are still published in this country, on printed paper in English, but that’s all Brooks would recognize of the world he once loved as passionately as anybody.

He opens his wonderful book (it’s 150 tantalizing pages, and you wish it were five times as long) by describing a meeting the house’s executive committee had with Wall Street investors in 1967 shortly after Houghton Mifflin “went public” … a meeting at which those investors and analysts wanted to know what books the firm had coming out and what profit they expected to make – in actual dollars and cents – from each of them. Brooks had no answer, of course, and said something about how publishers must simply try to make the best cookies they could and let the fortunes take care of themselves. At the time, he was greeted with patronizing smiles and a free lunch. Today, saying such a thing to the stone-cold illiterate 23-year-old Bertelsmann power-suited executives (all wearing their sunglasses indoors, all with bright pink coke-nostrils), he would have been punched to the floor and beaten until he was dead, right there in the conference room.

Years ago, Ursula Le Guin wrote a wonderful essay for Harper’s on the state of book publishing, in which she urged big corporations to simply divest themselves of the troublesome ‘literary’ divisions of the publishing houses they’d acquired, since those divisions can’t reliably make money and the serious reading public is shrinking anyway. It was a funny plea with a twinkle in its eye, since Le Guin knew perfectly well she was pulling a Br'er Rabbit, scornfully advising corporations to do the one thing she and every serious reader prays nightly they’ll do: get out of the book business, let it go back to the “muddle” it once was, stop pauperizing publishing divisions by forcing them to pay 18 kazillion dollar advances to people like Stephen King or his anointed successor, so that the money can be “plowed” back into the finding and encouraging of waves of new writers, developing writers, struggling writers, or meritorious writers who’ve yet to find their audience.

Of course, Le Guin’s calls will go unheeded. As long as there’s any money to be made in publishing, by any methods at all, corporations will be interested – and as long as they’re interested, they’ll run things as corporations, with managers rewarded for being assholes, with every single activity or procedure graphed out along an continuum from ‘needs work’ to ‘totally unacceptable’ (in such a mind frame, nobody ever actually does anything well anymore), with allegedly fluent grown-ups using fad-phrases like “going forward” … and with ‘investors’ pushing for million-dollar paydays for a tiny handful of authors, as if making a parking-garage full of money was ever the reason why anybody worthwhile ever wrote a single word (with apologies to Johnson).

Brooks writes with unabashed, amber sentimentality about that now-lost “muddle.” Here are the ‘characters’ who went about their various rituals in Houghton Mifflin’s old offices at 2 Park Street in Boston (with conference room windows overlooking the Old Granary Burial Ground); here are actual human receptionists answering calls and chatting with customers and authors alike; here are the celebrated three-martini publisher lunches over which so much good business managed to get conducted; and here at Houghton Mifflin was the annual buying-trip to England, where many useful publishing contacts were made and much trans-oceanic dreaming was done.

Here also were the editors, a battered, valiant, monstrously overworked crew who tackled the vast piles of manuscripts that came to Houghton Mifflin every year. These editors had the enviable job of trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, and in my opinion this house had a better track record than virtually any other. How thrilling it is, to read Brooks give credit where it’s due to one of those editors, a wise and soft-spoken woman named Anne Barrett, who wrote this note in one of her editorial reports:

A rich book and a deadly serious one. I think it is wonderful, but it has its drawbacks. Who will read 423 pages about an unfinished journey undertaken by mythical creatures with confusing names? Probably no one, but I still say it is wonderful and – with my heart in my mouth – to publish. October, 1937.

The book was Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, and it and its sequels have done fairly for Houghton Mifflin ever since.

Brooks makes the point over and over in his chapters: back when publishing was an artistic endeavor rather than a financial investment, editors and writers enjoyed a relationship that’s largely vanished from the industry. They were friends and business colleagues, almost co-conspirators, and the results could range anywhere from the editor offering the author a night’s lodging and ending up with Thomas Wolfe sprawled all over their guest room for a month to perhaps even more sketchy incidents. Brooks relates the story of how he and his wife ‘volunteered’ to re-enact the canoe-journey Henry David Thoreau and his brother took on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, all to help one of the house’s authors research his biography of Thoreau:

From Billerica the Thoreau brothers turned off on the Middlesex Canal, but since it had long ago dried up, we had to portage around a formidable mill-race before paddling downstream to the center of Lowell and thence up the Merrimack River, with highways resounding from both banks most of the way. By nightfall we had reached our objective: Nashua, New Hampshire. But how to get home? At length we found a broken-down taxi that took us and our boat back to Lincoln by 2:00 a.m. Here we learned that someone had reported to the Concord police seeing a couple in a canoe depart but not return. Presumably they were about to drag the river. On receiving my report of our journey, Dr. Canby decided that this was sufficient research for his purposes. I mention it merely as one small example of routine service by editors to their authors.

Those authors included such legendary figures as the immensely likeable, down-to-earth Esther Forbes, the haughty-but-personable Anya Seton, the aforementioned larger-than-life Thomas Wolfe, the great trinity of Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger, and Benny DeVoto, the wildlife-guide guru Roger Tory Peterson, the great Rachel Carlson, and the bombastic Winston Churchill (Brooks also mentions a one-time publicity director for Houghton Mifflin, a writer – if such a term isn’t too generous – called Jack Leggett, about whom the less said the better), and the loving portraits Brooks draws of dealing with each of them leaves the reader with the distinct impression that we have wandered into dwarfish times here in the 21^st century, when the point of the exercise anymore isn’t to write a great book or even a good one – or indeed any kind of book at all. The point for all the sad young literary men these days is to write the Future Source-Material for the Screenplay, and to get paid $15 million dollars to do it. Caring about the quality or craft of that Future Source-Material is just wasting time that could be spent talking about yourself in faux-humble terms at a podium at the 92^nd Street Y. And caring about your subject matter? Please. Either make it lyingly autobiographical or make it about vampires – who cares? The point is selling it as soon as it’s done, selling it for more money than the last fifty generations of your family have seen collectively – for more money than you or anybody else in the world could possibly need. Yeah, that’s the writer’s dream.

Brooks wouldn’t recognize this landscape, nor would he want to. It’s a stump-studded wasteland populated by mindlessly avaricious Future Source-Material Generators whose goal is not to provide coming generations with immortal prose but to provide their little daughters with horses who can be given pretentious names. If some equivalent of Brooks’ Houghton Mifflin were to approach one of these Future Source-Material Generators and say, “We can pay you $15 million for your three-book series about sexy androids who fall in love with clumsy high school girls, but it will mean we’ll have to close our lists to all other fiction authors until your series is done in 2021; if you take the money, you’ll be the only fiction author we can afford for that period – we’ll be publishing you and crossword puzzle books and nothing else,” the Future Source-Material Generator would not only take the money, they would punch Brooks to the floor and beat him until he was dead.

But at least we have gemlike little books like  Two Park Street, to remind us that it wasn’t always so.

Sir John Vanbrugh!

Our book today is Kerry Downes’ big, thorough 1987 biography of that hustling, bustling Restoration polymath, John Vanbrugh.

Vanbrugh was one of those masterful thinkers they don’t seem to make anymore – a relic from a time before specialization was expected of every intellect. He was a soldier, a diplomat, a wine merchant, a book dealer, and two more things, the two that most deeply mark his life and legacy: he was a playwright, and he was an architect. The typical easy English major dichotomies – “so-and-so-wrote works of art that will outlast the greatest monuments of his age” – fall to pieces when dealing with somebody like Vanbrugh, since in addition to his works of art, he also built some of the greatest monuments of his age, and they’re with us still. It’s as if Hawksmoor had taken time out to write the sonnets of Shakespeare, or Christopher Wren had put aside his architectural notebooks just long enough to dash off Handel’s Water Music.

The plays – The Confederacy, The Relapse, The Provok’d Wife and many others – stand at the pinnacle of Restoration stagecraft for their wit, their intricacy, and their sheer animal force (Vanbrugh counted both Dryden and Pepys among his fans, although not at the same time). And the monuments – Seaton Delaval, Castle Howard, Blenheim Palace – are as gorgeous as they are inexorable in sweep and odd delicacy of design. The man himself lived through one of the most tumultuous periods in English history – the Dutch wars, the Plague, the Great Fire, the sudden-feeling shift from old-style monarchy to a land ruled by Parliament – and he lept into its currents with more energy than later ages would find it convenient to summon.

It’s amazing to me that figures like Jack Vanbrugh aren’t revisited frequently by biographers. The material is so enviably rich and voluminous, whereas the would-be writer on Shakespeare or Jane Austen has just the same old small stack of index cards with which to conjure. And yet: Wren has had only two full-dress popular biographies in English in the last century, and Hawksmoor and poor Vanbrugh have had only one apiece – and they were both written by the same guy, Kerry Downes. Not that I’m characterizing this as a misfortune for Vanbrugh: Downes is an incredibly thorough and thoroughly entertaining biographer, and his enormous book , Sir John Vanbrugh, would likely stand unchallenged as the definitive work on its subject even if it had any challengers. Downes is unabashedly old-fashioned in his approach: he likes his subject. “Some critics have found something particularly unfortunate or even unbecoming in Vanbrugh’s blank verse,” he tells us at one point, “but in literature as in architecture his is the kind of genius which no aesthetic theory dependant on a rigid system of categories will accommodate with fairness.” I’d hope a biographer of mine would strike just that kind of note!

And as noted, in addition to sympathy, Downes has one further strength for his thankless job: he’s a heck of a story-teller. A life like Vanbrugh’s makes that somewhat easy (anecdotes like the time he and Congreve and Lord Halifax dropped their britches on a particularly hot day and ‘sopped their arses’ in the fountain at Hampton Court are not hard to come by), but much still depends on the writer’s verve, seen, for instance, here in Downes’ description of the harrowing ‘Great Storm’ that swept through the south of England on 26 and 27 November of 1703:

A great wind came from the south-west, accompanied by thunderstorms. Orchards were destroyed, many thousands of oak trees were felled in the New Forest and the Forest of Dean, their roots often raising huge mounds of earth as they were wrenched out of the ground. Many of the surviving trees in agricultural areas were festooned with the remains of haystacks caught up in the whirlwind. Church spires were blown down, and in the City pinnacles were taken off some of the new churches and the roof works of the still unfinished St Paul’s were damaged. Houses lost their roofs or were even blown down, and the sheet-lead roofs of churches were rolled up by the gale. Falls of soot were everywhere, and at Wells the Bishop and his wife were killed as they lay in bed when a chimney stack collapsed on them. In the Channel many ships were sunk or damaged and sailors drowned. London was filled with rubbish of all kinds, while the center of Bristol was clogged with wrecked ships raised from the port basin by the combined forces of high wind and high tide. Congreve wrote to a friend that at Whitehall some of the big sash-windows, only recently installed in the Banqueting House, were sucked out and blown away.

Downes’ book is full of line-drawings of Vanbrugh’s various surviving blueprints and sketches, and it’s generously supplied with photos of his surviving architectural masterpieces (which yet have their own second life in film, Blenheim most recently starring in Kenneth Branagh’s wretched “Hamlet” and Castle Howard, of course, doing magnificent stand-in duty for Brideshead in “Brideshead Revisited”) – and best of all, Downes himself is there at every crucial juncture, always with a spirited opinion or an inspired interpretation (his reconstruction of the years Vanbrugh spent captive in France – including a stint in the Bastille – are particularly strong). So all in all, if a great figure in history is going to be ignored by the panty-waist popularity-hound ‘lite’ biographers of today, Vanbrugh is at least lucky he got such a marvelous volume before his fame went silent.

Blue Remembered Hills!

Our book today is Blue Remembered Hills, Rosemary Sutcliff’s 1983 childhood memoir about growing up in England shortly before and during World War II, and even that brief description raises two possible strikes against it in the minds of many readers. First strike, it’s by a “children’s author” and so might be strident or unpleasantly didactic. Second strike, it’s a childhood memoir, and so might be prey to saccharine myth-making.

These apprehensions increase when the reader learns that in childhood Sutcliffe was diagnosed with a rare form of juvenile arthritis – one immediately fears the appearance (let alone repeated use) of the word ‘plucky.’

But readers should cast aside such worries – and readers who are actually familiar with Sutcliff’s books won’t have worried in the first place. This is a flat-out fantastic author who never put pen to paper without rigorously exercising the result into something eminently worth reading. Her “children’s” books are for any reader childlike enough to favor clear, strong prose, well-drawn characters, and rousing, memorable plots.  And Blue Remembered Hills is nothing less than enchanting.

Sutcliff’s physical affliction, and the fact her father, a life-long naval man, was usually away from home, threw her into great dependence on her mother, by far the most remarkable character in this book. She’s a kind, strong-willed woman, and she and her daughter are often at loggerheads in the book (and there are consequences of outright, unreasonable defiance: this was back when parents were still allowed to slap their children if their children staged screaming, stomping, crying, manipulative fake-hysterics in public). And yet the book is over-brimming with daughterly affection – Mrs. Sutcliff could scarcely have dreamt of a more touching partial biography, even once she knew she had a writer for a daughter.

It being a childhood memoir and thus intimately concerned with loss, Blue Remembered Hills has quite a few other touching parts, and all of them are rendered with the same lyrical prose line and lack of sanctimony that characterizes her novels. One story about a stint in convalescent care seems to float and ramble – until the final two-tap punch is expertly delivered:

As before, there was a spell in the nursing-home for me, to shut off one chapter from the next, or maybe to make a kind of bridge between them. It was a big nursing-home in Hampstead. I don’t remember a thing about the treatment I underwent there; I only know that I was there for six weeks, and that during that time two things happened. One day, one of the nurses, in their free time and bless their kind young hearts, took me to see Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House; and one night there were strange noises and much coming and going in the eight-bed ward, and I was scared and could not sleep, and the woman in the next bed told me stories and talked to me softly all night long, so that I should not know that at the far end of the ward an older woman was dying and dying hard.

And even that most shopworn of childhood traumas, the death of a beloved pet, is rescued by dint of the author’s sheer craft. Here it isn’t the final coda but instead a great little juxtaposition, one perfect little ‘childlike’ line inserted quietly amidst all the practical, physical (and lovely) description:

The boy from a nearby farm who occasionally did some gardening for us, our veteran of the leeks and white alyssum having long since retired, dug him a grave alongside [earlier dog] Don’s, just outside the gate into the wood, and we put his collar on, that he might not run stray and nameless among the stars, and wrapped him in his blanket, like Sir John Moore, and put his beloved blue rubber ball in with him. And when the boy had shovelled back the earth and gone away, and we were left standing over the new grave, my mother read bits of the Burial Service over him, and pushed little wild daffodil bulbs from the bank into the soft earth, ready for the spring. It was Hallowe’en, with a cold grey mist dripping from among the trees. And all the while we both cried with quite desolation, the tears trickling down our noses, for Mike who had come to us at six weeks old and been a part of us ever since.

The reader gets the impression that the Sutcliffs were a family fond of a nicely-done anecdote or quip, and all of them are here, carefully preserved, in Blue Remembered Hills, which covers the years from the author’s childhood until the start of her publishing career. That start comes when an early manuscript is bought (for the princely sum of 50 pounds), and there’s much family pride on the occasion, with a perfect quip to hint at the greater fame to come:

My father made no attempt to be humble at all. If he had not been such a quiet man, I would have said that he crowed.

In old age, he invented a joke. ‘Once, Rosemary Sutcliff used to be my daughter; but I’m Rosemary Sutcliff’s father now.’

Several of Rosemary Sutcliff’s novels have recently been given spiffy re-issues in the United States, and her ‘profile’ is about to get an added boost, since Eagle of the Ninth is about to be released as a big-budget movie staring that prime slab of beef, Channing Tatum. Even given the extra attention, it’s unlikely Blue Remembered Hills will be re-issued, but it’s well worth reading just the same. It  will touch your heart, and as Rosemary Sutcliff herself would have said, there’s nothing wrong with that, from time to time.

Mountbatten!

Our book today is Philip Ziegler’s massive 1985 biography of Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Battenberg, better known to history as ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten. Ziegler’s book is superb, but even so, that ‘better known to history’ line is trembly: Mountbatten might very well be the greatest unknown man of the 20^th century.

Friends of mine who’ve seen the Mountbatten books on my shelves (I have four biographies of the man – including one very good one that remains unpublished – and several books in which he features as a key player, such as Collins & Lapierre’s Freedom at Midnight, previously reviewed here at Stevereads) have all wondered at the weirdly obscure people whose biographies occupy so much of my time. Usually, I don’t protest, since there’s an element of truth in the comment. But the truth is relative as well: in 1950, casual observers of my bookshelves (same books, different dogs) would have noticed far fewer obscure names – but the books would be the same. The reason is obvious: the observers have changed, or rather, their schooling has. In 1950, every single active reader looking at my shelves would have recognized the names of Cellini, Fremont, or Gaskell. Today, with active readers under the age of 60, I’m lucky if Custer gets an ‘ah, yes.’ Schools don’t teach history anymore, and schools have never properly taught biography. It’s a shame, but we can make up for lost time right here!

And the irony is, Mountbatten has the excuse of neither antiquity nor obscurity to warrant his neglect: he was one of the architects of the world we now inhabit, and his life was of the larger-than-life variety that the public ought to eat up. Queen Victoria was his great-grandmother (he knocked off her spectacles at his christening), his nephew Philip married Queen Elizabeth II, and he was college chums with the future Kings Edward VIII and George VI. During World War Two he helped plan the epic combined-force ventures that eventually retook Fortress Europe from Hitler, and in the years afterward, he was the Supreme Commander of the British forces in Southeast Asia and the last British Viceroy of India (before it calved Pakistan and gained its independence). And for the last four decades of his long and vigorous life, he was the driving, unifying force – the living game-plan, as it were – behind the very idea of the modern British monarchy, largely through his very close advisory relationship with Prince Charles (look at any random public shot of the Royals during those years and you’re likely to see him, sitting or standing right behind Charles in a disconcerting imitation of Edgar Bergen). He was still vigorously going strong when an IRA bomb planted on his fishing yacht detonated directly under his feet, killing him instantly. Regarding roughly 100 men and 10 women, we can honestly say: “the 20^th century would have been very different, had they not been alive,” and Mountbatten is certainly one of those people.

So why the neglect, especially considering the fact that Ziegler’s biography is utterly engrossing, as jauntily readable as the best kind of fiction (it’s an ‘official’ life, but the royal family, perhaps knowing how lucky they were to have a writer of Ziegler’s caliber interested in the job, wisely put no restrictions on him – as a result, there are many passages that would have infuriated Mountbatten, but none, I think, that would have moved him to call a lawyer)?

Oddly enough, I think it may have to do with the subject’s weird brand of humility. That’s not a word anybody who knew him would have associated even distantly with Mountbatten, and in its more pietistic meanings it definitely doesn’t apply. He was tall, extremely handsome, bottomlessly tough despite nagging health problems, and thoroughly entitled in the most literal sense of the word (the Battenberg line of the royal family changed their name to Mountbatten during the anti-German hysteria of World War One, at the same time the Saxe-Coburgs became the Windsors). As Ziegler points out time and again, Mountbatten was childishly vain and apt to preening – hardly humble in the normal sense of the word.

But he had a way of disappearing into the enormous, historical tasks that he took on as a matter of course; he was a team-builder, a consensus-former, and once he had a goal in mind, the goal became more important than his individual part in achieving it. The ruthlessly egalitarian 21^st century will be loath to admit it, but these are royal traits, when royalty is at its best (and the overwhelming implication about Mountbatten – made in whispers even in the halls of Windsor – was that he made a far more impressive king than either of his college chums, even though he was never crowned).

Ziegler is an old hand at chronicling royalty; he uses the same techniques here, shifting from grand to simple, from wry to sympathetic as the occasion warrants. When summarizing the Japanese attack on the desperate, outgunned British outpost of Arakan in 1944, he hits his notes quickly and surely: “’Hold on, and you will make history,’ was Mountbatten’s message. They held on, and they did.”

When detailing his subject’s typically merciless sense of humor (a Windsor trait, alas), he assumes the more relaxed gait of a raconteur:

He relished the royal tours in Britannia above all; the jokes and informality when the ship was at sea, the grandeur and consequence of the state occasions. He had always been a devotee of funny stories and used to bandy them over the table with George VI, each provoking the other to fresh excesses. When the King died, Princess Margaret inherited his mantle. She shared with Mountbatten a passion for perverted proverbs, such as that inspired by a team of pelota players who all tried to get out at the same time through the revolving doors of the hotel in which they were staying. Their impatience was very properly punished when the door collapsed on top of them and killed them all. Moral: never put all your Basques in one exit. One of the royal tours was believed by Mountbatten to have given rise to another of these monstrosities. A tribal chief had two thrones which had last been used in the days of King George V. As his grass hut was rather small, he had them pulled on ropes into the roof. Unfortunately, when the time came to use them again, the ropes broke and the thrones crashed down on top of the chief. As he died, the moral no doubt flashed through is mind: people in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones.

All the portraits in this magnificent book are as perfectly rendered as that of its star. The glamour of 1920s Hollywood, the high-strung sensibilities of Edward VIII, who became the forlorn Duke of Windsor, the bombast of Winston Churchill, the no-nonsense force of old Queen Mary (she gets the best quotes for the first quarter of the book and dominates its events even after she’s, as Ziegler puts it, “safely dead”), the grubby purity of Gandhi, most of all the driven, passionate, and illusion-free pillar that was Mountbatten’s wife Edwina … all are given three-dimensional life in the course of a rolling, fast narrative you don’t want to end.

Those 21^st century friends who see this book on my shelves and wonder openly at the weirdly obscure folk I read about really ought to read it; Ziegler wrote for them, and Mountbatten certainly hoped his life would fascinate people long after he stopped living it. Of course, it would help if it were readily, easily in print, but in this day and age of electronic marvels, that matters less and less: everything is obtainable. And if you’re stumped and still really interested, of course I’ll send you a copy. All part of the service, here at Stevereads.