I'd Do It Again!

Our book today is the greatest American political memoir ever written, by the greatest American politician who ever lived: of course I refer to James Michael Curley and his 1957 memoir I'd Do It Again.

Curley will be more of a myth than a reality to most 21st century Americans, and there's just a faint possibility that he would have liked that state of affairs. He was born 1874 in Roxbury to a poor family of Irish immigrants, and through dint of his oratorical skills and his predilection for high-purposed violence, he embarked on a political career like Boston had never seen and would never see again. He was four times mayor of Boston, he was governor of Massachusetts, he was a representative in Congress, and he was immensely popular with the people of Boston despite the fact that he never saw a kickback or pile of sluch-money he didn't like and was under one federal indictment or another for most of his adult life.

When that life - what he called 'tumultuous years' - was almost over, he was convinced in 1957 to write an account of it, in large part because the previous year Edwin O'Connor had won fame and fortune with his novel The Last Hurrah, which was as clearly based on Curley's life and career as it could be without actually owing the man royalties. I'd Do It Again became a regional and then something of a national bestseller, and although its sales numbers never approached those of The Last Hurrah, it's every bit as entertaining a book - maybe a bit more so, in fact, since Frank Skeffington, the hero of O'Connor's book, is a frail old man, whereas the frail old man Curley wrote a book that's blazingly, wondrously young in its every page and paragraph. If The Last Hurrah is one of the most eloquent, funny, tender eulogies ever written, I'd Do It Again is an Irish pub-song sung so boisterously it makes the Dropkick Murphys sound like Donnie and Marie.

When Curley writes of fighting in the 1890s to get his name printed at the top of the ballot for office ("since many illiterate voters were apt to put a cross beside the first name they saw"), he's not using euphemism - he and his "score of brawny friends" barricaded the entrance to the filing office on Milk Street and fought off assaults from rival candidates (and their own brawny friends) all through the night to make sure Curley's name topped the ballot. At the end of every such anecdote, Curley always offers a Catholic school nod toward the advance of civilization: "Years later the law was changed, and ballot position was determined by lot" - but he makes it clear he wouldn't change his raucous past for all the tea in China.

There are a thousand stories in I'd Do It Again, and every one of them is a winner. Curley is always the hero, but there's almost always a twinkle of self-mockery in these tales, as when he recounts leaving his heavy fur coat in the car while he gave a speech in front of St. Augustine's Church on Dorchester Street in South Boston:

'It is therefore fitting that one of the closing rallies of this campaign be held here in the shadow of this sacred edifice dedicated to the greatest religion the world has ever known. This entire campaign, in fact, reminds me of that passage in The Lord's Prayer which reads:  "Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us ...'"

As I intoned these words, I saw a bum lifting my coat out of the open car. Lowering my voice, I turned to one of my lieutenants and said, "Get that son-of-a-bitch who's trying to run off with my coat." I then continued with the concluding passage of the inspiring prayer, saying, "'and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.'"

The coat was recovered, and the culprit got the bum's rush.

A who's-who of the great political figures of the early 20th century parades through these pages, including President Taft (who was once so entranced by the Curley oratory that he turned down lunch to keep listening - surely one of the least believable of all Curley's whoppers) and President Franklin Roosevelt, who's always something of a comic book adversary for our hero (in 1957, unlike today, it was still permissible for a politician to dislike FDR in his memoirs), including the time FDR tried to give him quite literally the worst job in the world: US ambassador to Poland - in 1933. Curley turns him down, despite the fact that he was "devoted to the fine people of Poland - particularly to those Polish people in Massachusetts who had always so intelligently voted for Curley ..."

The big, sad point of The Last Hurrah is that Frank Skeffington's brand of politics was disappearing forever. I'd Do It Again is not so sentimental on the subject - Curley fought his battles cheerfully (and bore up resolutely under more tragedy in his personal life than any three or four people usually have), and he wrote a cheerful book about them. It's for later historians to wrangle the question of whether or not Curley's style of government-by-graft was more of an evil than a good in American political history. But I'd Do It Again certainly gives the impression that it was a simpler style - more direct, more personal, and perhaps ultimately more conscientious just for those reasons.

Curley could have written a very different book - a darker, angrier one - but if he had, some of that simplicity would have been lost. As it is, say what you want about the man, his memoir makes it possible to believe what one Boston newspaper man wrote about him all those long decades ago: "He never forgot a promise, and he always helped the poor and unfortunate."

Inauguration Storms in the Penny Press!

It's naturally a bit daunting to open the legendary Open Letters PO box and find the waxy, inhuman features of talentless android/congenital idiot Justin Bieber emptily smirking back at me.

But Vanity Fair, which sports a cover photo of this most noxious Canadian import of them all, is too good a magazine to fling away in horror, so I braved not only the photo but the accompanying article (lack of talent? Confirmed. Android status? Confirmed. Congenital Idiocy? Screams from the rooftops) - pitying the poor slob of an interviewer who had to try to make something out of this soap bubble for 2000 words (she tries her level best to make things interesting to anybody but a hyperventilating 12-year-old girl, but although I pride myself on being hyperventilating 12-year-old girl, my interest flagged). It was worth it, I told myself, to get to the good stuff.

The issue had a great deal of good stuff, as it always does, but how could I not give top honors to Todd Purdum's luminously happy account of the "tidal wave of glamour, promise, and high spirits that descended on the capital for the 1961 inauguration of the youngest president ever elected, John F. Kennedy"? I'd most likely have enjoyed this piece more than anything in the issue even if it had been poorly done - but that's thankfully not the case here: Purdum keeps a very nice narrative flow going, and he has a great eye for anecdotes.

There are anecdotes in endless supply, about those heady two days in Washington (wags among you will ask if I was there, despite my oft-repeated assertion that I am, in fact, a 28-year-old stone-cold super-hottie, but in point of fact I wasn't present for the occasion), about everything from the cavalcade of stars who showed up to ham in the spotlight (Harry Belafonte, Jimmy Durante, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Milton Berle, Gene Kelly, Ella Fitzgerald, Ethel Merman, the mighty Mahalia Jackson, and many more) to the unexpected and almost-crippling snowstorm that hit the capital at the exact same time.

Washington very famously paralyzes in inclement weather, and this storm ended up stranding entertainers, dignitaries, and well-wishers in all kinds of awkward combinations. Comedian Bill Dana remembered being stuck in a station wagon with a royally ticked off Ethel Merman: "I learned a lot of swearwords I didn't know existed from the lovely mouth of Ethel Merman." And the new White House social secretary, Letitia Baldridge, was stuck for two hours in a car with a Secret Service agent and a reporter, until they finally convinced a shop owner to open up and sell them some scotch. "We had our own little gala," she remembered, "We got out of the car at one point and danced in the snow."

It couldn't help but strike a chord in me, of course, especially since Purdum interviews Russell Baker, who was covering the event for the New York Times and shared an anecdote about Times columnist Arthur Krock, who was also caught in the storm that night. Krock started off his career 52 years earlier, covering the Taft administration, and that set the bells ringing right there - since of course President Kennedy wasn't the first 20th century president to have Mother Nature attend his inauguration.

The same thing happened to President Taft on March 4th, 1909, when a stinging, sleety, bitterly cold snowstorm struck Washington just in time to make a mess of all the preparations for the big day - most of which had featured outdoor events. Suddenly, seats under hastily-improvised canopies were selling for the moon, and spectators who'd counted on hearing a bit of that rolling, adenoidal Taft oratory were stuck with hearing about it from the relatively small crowd who could fit into the Senate chamber. The new president's wife accompanied him from the ceremony in an open-topped horse-drawn buggy, and that was just one more thing that made Taft's security detail nervous. His detail was larger than any previous president, not only because of President McKinley's recent assassination but also because candidate Taft had received some nasty letters from lunatics who, believe it or not, disliked the fact that he was a Unitarian (the president-elect was never shown the worst of these letters - a sound procedure that remains in effect today).

Even in the black-and-white photos of the day, you can see the tension in those men, walking at even intervals alongside the presidential carriage, many of them with coats draped over their arms despite the cold - in order to conceal the pistols they had at the ready. The poor sap who insisted on being closest to the new President (you can partially make out his less-than-fashionable beaten-up brown derby at Taft's right elbow if you try, and there are probably closer-up photos out there somewhere - and he was one sufferer among many that day in any case) got his shoes full of ice-cold slush for his troubles, but the day went off without a nefarious turn of any kind.

Ditto JFK's - all motorized, thank God - and Purdum does a wonderful job of capturing the excitement and fun of the time. Here's hoping he's working on a book about it all, before many more of the eyewitnesses die off.

Ruth Cavin

You did the good work. Rest in peace.

For the pleasures of the many
May be ofttimes traced to one.
As the hand that plants an acorn
Shelters armies from the sun.

J.M.Roberts' History of the World!

Our book today is surely a great big book on which everyone can agree: J.M. Roberts' 1150-page 1976 masterpiece now called The Penguin History of the World. This volume has gone through many incarnations and many editions, but it remains what it's always been: one of the most erudite, readable, and downright useful thousand-page books ever written. There's an informal yardstick I use in determining such things, and it takes the form of a single question: how often do I find a copy of the book (often in the tattered condition that connotes frequent consultation) located squarely in the small, separate company of those books we really use, the ones we go back and back to for the simple reason that when we have questions, they provide the right answers?

I have found the Roberts book in many, many such small select companies of books - and indeed, it's in my own. People who've used it understand this perfectly - other world histories are more visually sumptuous (DK's takes the prize, of course), and many dress out at even greater length, and some - fewer than you might think - are actually almost as insightful (Clive Ponting's unconventional World History: A New Perspective from 2000 - at a thoroughly respectable 920 pages - is a good example of this kind of rare exception, extremely thoughtful and at times eloquently written, although even in that case, there's something missing - Roberts' subtlety and bone-dry humor, perhaps), but even in the most prestigiously competitive bracket, Roberts stands out. It holds a special place in my own reading heart, and I know for a fact it's worked the same magic on many other readers - some of whom got their copies from me, but many, many others of whom must have come across the book on their own and been won over without any brow-beating from yours truly!

I think a bit part of the book's appeal is the way it somehow manages to combine 'accessible' with 'magisterial.' Roberts paints on the broadest canvas any historian can, and although his Index is many hundreds of names long, this book is necessarily more summary than detail. But unlike with so many other comprehensive overviews, Roberts' summarizing never feels hurried or elusive - reading the book is like listening to the most collected, poised history professor imaginable has he broadens and narrows his focus according to his subject matter.

But for me, the signal genius of Roberts' book is his sheer presence throughout it. He wrote this behemoth well before the advent of the Internet, which has both fragmented and consolidated all historical information to an extent and on a scale not only unimagined by the serried ranks of all previous printed books but utterly unattainable by them. And that process will only continue, and it should - but assemblages of mere fact, no matter how immense, have inherent limitations, and the assembling of facts has of course never been the primary job of the historian, as both Herodotus and Thucydides understood perfectly well at the dawn of the discipline. The best historians must have an easy command of all the relevant facts, yes, but he must also think about those facts. The facts themselves are now more easily and quickly available than any printed history book could ever make them (if I reference Torquemada or Mithridates or Palladio - and if that mention sparks a reader's interest, the very first thing that reader will do is go to Google or Wikipedia or half a dozen other websites and quickly learn - absorb, even - an overview and a great number of facts about those individuals ... something that would have been either flat-out impossible to do, in Leland, Georgia at 11:30 p.m., or only spottily possible before the Internet) - which, far from invalidating the craft of history, makes first-rate historians more important than ever.

Roberts fills that role on every page of his book. That's what makes it such captivating reading - it's actually a persistent problem with this book: you tell people that a thousand-page world history is captivating reading, and they naturally don't believe you!

Take for example the section where Roberts summarizes the many shortcomings of fourth-century Athenian society - its exclusion of women, half-castes, and slaves from social franchise, its cultural high-handedness, etc. Roberts discusses these limitations as forthrightly as any other modern historian you might read - but he's also right there to tell us what he thinks of it all, and whether you agree with him or not, you can't fault the clear tenor of that thought:

It is against that background that the errors, vanities and misjudgements of Athenian politics must be seen. We do not cease to treasure the great achievements of British political culture because of the shallowness and corruptness of much of twentieth-century democracy. Athens may be judged, like any political system, but its working at its best; under the leadership of Pericles it was outstanding. It left behind the myth of the individual's responsibility for his own political fate. We need myths in politics and have net to find a better.

The epigrammatic pith of that quote is also one of the unending bounties of this book, since equally good, sharp stuff can be found on the first page:

Historical inertia is easily under-rated. This is not just a matter of what we can see. Ruins and beefeaters are picturesque, but for the most part less important than much mental and institutional history lost to sight in the welter of day-to-day events.

... and on the last:

Only two general truths emerge from the study of history. One is that things tend to change much more, and more quickly, than one might think. The other is that they tend to change much less, and much more slowly, than one might think. The past hangs around longer and is more difficult to keep peacefully buried, even by strenuous efforts, than we believe.

I've read almost every world history ever written in English in the modern age - I've poured lovingly over Walter Raleigh's great book (another of those volumes that really ought to be a Penguin Classic but still somehow isn't), tsk-tsk'd at H. G. Wells', and been bored spitless by a couple-dozen 20th century volumes - but I've never found any example of that kind of work that felt like a companion in the sense I've described often here at Stevereads ... until this fantastic tome appeared and kept getting reprinted and repackaged until it finally caught my attention. Like everybody, I have a sentimental soft spot for a certain world history, and Roberts isn't it, but his book is that sentimental favorite for two generations of demanding readers, and rightfully so. The events of 9/11 put that last-page assertion of his to a terrifying acid-test (when you read the line in those earlier volumes about "the many reminders given us in the Middle East that the wars of the Ottoman succession which began long ago in the eighteenth century in south-east Europe are still unfinished," you get a chill), and subsequent editions have a new concluding chapter which really ought to be printed separately as a pamphlet on the power and wisdom of the historian's craft.

But no matter which edition you happen upon in your local used bookshop, snap it up immediately - and clear some reading time.

Katherine Powers!

Allow me to add my quick and completely enthusiastic 'Hear, hear!' to the interview my fellow book-blogger Eric Forbes just conducted with the mighty Katherine Powers (it's located here, and if you don't already have Eric's blog bookmarked, by all means do that while you're there).

Powers writes a bi-weekly book column called "A Reading Life" for the dear old Boston Globe, and in that column readers will always find three things: her formidable intelligence, her deep reading experience, and best of all, her utterly unpredictable eclecticism. She can open a column with a review of a new collection of Sumerian mythology and end up recommending her four favorite books on natural history, and the chain of causation will enchantingly sensible, link by link (the first of you who can parse the chain linking my examples will win ... wait for it ... a free book!). That eclecticism is the key to both the charm of her column and its longevity, and oddly enough, roamers who come to her words from the wilds of the Internet will find them very familiar. By using her own readerly sensibilities as her pole-star, she allows the focus of "A Reading Life" to wander all over her aesthetic landscape. In this sense, she's been book-blogging longer than any of us.

Let's take this last Sunday's column as a quick example, shall we? Her large subject is the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, and just as I am myself, she's getting her share of galley copies of new and upcoming books commemorating that event. It's certainly a fruitful subject - it's certainly possible to argue that the King James has had a deeper and more pervasive impact on Western culture than any other book with the possible exception of On the Origin of Species, and on Western literature there is no rival that's even close. So you'd think quite a few of the books written specifically to celebrate the event would rise to the occasion.

Not so the two unfortunate new volumes she uses to open her discussion. "The entire book is written in this bland, annual-report flavored style, made all the more ludicrous by the majesty and grace of its purloined subject," she writes about one of them, and the other she characterizes as "an obeisance to the strange god of calculation." Hee.

In most other book columns appearing in great metropolitan newspapers, these condemnations (this is one of the most cheering aspects of Powers' column for me, and it's an aspect of book-writing I sometimes fear our non-Irish practitioners too often forget: book critics don't only praise - they also smite the wicked. Powers is a first-rate smiter when the mood strikes her)(like most veteran readers, she intensely dislikes having her time wasted, I suspect) would be followed by a longer notice of a new book she actually liked.

But not so a book-blog, which is what Powers has secretly been writing all these years! On the best book-blogs, the readers are blissfully in the hands of the blogger's reading acumen, not slaves to the New Release lists. Powers no sooner finishes politely stomping on the two new books before her than she pulls a quintessential blogging move by saying "but here's something on the subject that you really should read" - and then doing the written equivalent of jumping up and finding that one perfect book on her jam-packed shelves and proceeding to sing its praises even though it's not new and isn't the basis for a Robert Pattinson movie.

The book she picks this time is Adam Nicolson's entirely worthy God's Secretaries, about the diverse collection of men who were commissioned by King James I to do the epochal translation that James knew perfectly well was the main thing for which he'd be remembered. And in just the span of four paragraphs, she not only does the book justice but serves up a mighty effective recommendation in the process.

Which is exactly what we want from our best book-bloggers!

The Order of Wolves!

Our book today is Richard Fiennes' wonderfully informative 1976 volume The Order of Wolves, a kind of follow-up to his equally-authoritative 1968 book The Natural History of Dogs, which I read with keen interest while surrounded by sleeping dogs. Even though I currently only have two dogs, it's still easy to feel surrounded when one of them is an, um, rubenesque basset hound, and so it was that I read The Order of Wolves also surrounded by sleeping dogs.

Fiennes covers every aspect of wolves in the world, from the emergence of their most distant ancestor the creodonts, somewhere around 60 million years ago (the creodonts also gave rise to a whole slew of other furry critters, from raccoons and bears to ... echh ... cats) to their establishment in roughly the form we know them today, around 30 million years ago, from their hunting methods to the methods used to hunt them, from their interactions with other members of their species (Fiennes stops short of calling this a culture, but then, most people do) to the vast literature of their interaction with mankind. He admits that few other animals have such a rich history of false impressions (when it comes to humans) than the wolf, and his book calmly and methodically sets out to correct that.

The task necessarily requires a certain amount of big-picture thinking, and Fiennes tries to make this as painless as possible:

At the border of any habitat favourable to a particular life form, there is always a 'tension zone' where different habitats merge. These form the outer limits, where the 'ecotypes' change, but there is inevitably some overlap where the species from the one habitat compete with those from the other... In such areas, species tend to change their ways of life to compete with the demands of the shifting habitat boundaries. Wolves are so resilient, and can survive on such a wide variety of foods, that when their way of life has been threatened they adapt themselves to altered conditions with an unusual degree of success. At the end of the Ice Age wolves survived in forested and mountainous areas in the face of persecution by man. The forests replaced the tundra with such great rapidity - a matter of a few hundred years - that no other large predator emerged to challenge his dominance.

The slight but appreciable tone of advocacy you might detect in that passage runs through the whole of this book. In Fiennes view, wolves have always been far more sinned against than sinning when it comes to their dealings with man. This may not seem so revelatory a stance in 2011, but forty years ago Barry Lopez's Of Wolves and Men and Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf had barely begun the work of changing the public's mind. Fiction is always stronger, and well into the 1980s the wolf was still being portrayed in novels as a harbinger of destruction. If even ten percent of the millions of people who read Anne Rice's rip-snorting The Vampire Lestat (in which young, headstrong, and still-living Lestat fights off a ravening wolf-pack in one of the book's arresting opening scenes), you can see the size of the job conservationists had in front of them.

At many points throughout his book, Fiennes takes pains to point out that the wolf is not what its press releases would have wary hikers believe:

What we have learned for certain is what the wolf is not: he is not a voracious, ravening predator, who roams the plains and snowscapes in great packs, licking blood-stained lips, tearing down every living thing he can get hold of, and devouring innocent travellers.

Quite coincidentally, Fiennes' book is yet another of those oversized heavily illustrated hardcovers I seem to be mentioning quite often so far this year. There are fascinating black-and-white and color photos on every page - shots of wolves moving through the snowy forests and tundra that are their new favorite hunting-grounds, shots of wolves playing (something they crucially do not only in puppyhood but all through their lives - I've seen adult wolves in the wild play dog-stupid games for an hour at a stretch), and shots of all the wide array of facial and body posture expressions that underscore the main characteristic wolves share in common with humans: they are inveterate and consummate communicators with each other - it's one of the key secrets of their success as a species, and it couldn't be achieved without considerable intelligence:

The brain of the wolf is small by human standards, but nevertheless, if it is compared to the brains of herbivorous animals, it will be seen that the cerebral hemispheres are prolonged at the back so as to cover most of the cerebellum. Wolves are undoubtedly extremely intelligent, and this is probably correlated with the large cerebrum.

The Order of Wolves tries its best to take us inside the world of its subject - not an easy thing to do when that subject orients itself to the world utilizing enormously different primary senses from those of humans. We are so familiar with the fact of these animals' existence that we tend to forget the gap between their senses and our own (the same thing is true in spades about dogs, the full range of whose senses would flat-out astonish even most of the humans who live with them every day). Wolves share with dogs a millennia-old propensity to encourage that forgetting - they require comparatively very little conditioning to become entirely friendly with humans, and that friendliness is always based on accommodation. No cat has ever accommodated a human owner in the history of the world, so it's easier for cats to retain an aura of the mysterious. Dogs - and wolves - are every bit as strange and different from the humans who for good or ill define their existence, but since they're happy to fawn and goof around, the strangeness isn't stressed.

Fiennes revels in it; to him, the magnificent other-ness of wolves is their quintessential charm. Even when he's describing the mechanics of their hunting techniques, he's an obviously avid fan:

Prey animals are followed against the wind, not because the scent carries better but because they are heard better. This may, at first, surprise us from our knowledge of our own hunting dogs, one group of which hunts by sight (in the greyhound group), the other hunting by scent like foxhounds. Yet, fancy a dog lying by the fireside apparently asleep. Suddenly he stirs and cocks his ears. The family has head nothing, but the faithful dog has heard the sounds of his master's car. More, he has distinguished that one care from all the other traffic on the road. So with wolves ...

Despite passages like this one, the ultimate message you take from The Order of Wolves is how different they are from their dog cousins. These are the dogs who didn't come in from the cold, who refused to be changed by human fire and will. Fiennes knows his subject backwards and forwards, and he's too much the scientist to indulge in more than the occasional touch of poetic insight. But nevertheless, he clearly shares the same opinion that so many wolf-experts can't help but have: that in trading their wildness for security, does somehow debased their common heritage with wolves.

No matter where you stand on such an opinion, it seems pretty clear that some are more debased than others ...

Byron: The Last Journey

Our book today is Harold Nicolson's quietly stunning 1924 work Byron: The Last Journey, chronicling that strangest of strange biographical stories, the decision Lord Byron made in 1823 to pack up from Italy and go to Greece, to Missolonghi, in order to throw his support, his money, and if need be his physical valor into the cause of Greek independence. It's in every way an exaggerated, outsized story, as crammed with doomed heroism and tattered romanticism as Byron could make it - even if we read an account of it with all the names taken out, we'd know we were reading, somehow, the last adventure of the author of "Childe Harold." Indeed, I sometimes think the foremost tragedy of Byron's pathetic mission to Greece is that he himself didn't live to record it in the beautiful-silly verse of which he was the greatest master since Ariosto.

The story Nicolson tells will be familiar in its bare outlines to anybody who's ever taken a college poetry class. After years of self-imposed exile in Italy, Byron was finally restless enough to extract himself from his vari0us enervating routines and move himself and a limited entourage to Greece, where he hoped his advocacy would lend prestige to the cause of independence - and where he very quickly became frustrated, bored, and then dead.

To his credit, Nicolson tells the story as if it weren't so familiar to his readers - it's this freshness that makes the book so eminently readable, and its a strong force in most of Nicolson's two dozen or so books. He was a hack in the best sense of the word, a literary taxi for hire, someone who would undertake the requisite research and turn out a damn readable book on virtually any subject if a publisher promised money for the job. Such writers are a dime a dozen in this age of Wiki-experts, but at the time this book was written, such a lack of scholarly provenance could tell against an author with the august critics in the TLS and other such tribunals. There's nothing a dabbler hates worse than being called a dabbler.

I think that's why Nicolson is at pains all throughout his book to emphasize that some point he's about to make derives from an original document he has in his possession - a bill of sale, a private notation of an autopsy report, or even a treasured volume:

I have in my possession the actual copy of Moore's "Life of Byron" which belonged to John Cam Hobhouse, the most intimate and the most truthful of all Byron's friends. In the wide margins of these two quarto volumes Hobhouse has pencilled a running commentary - approving, at moments, of Moore's flashy conclusions, supplementing them at moments from his own store of reminiscences, but in general contradicting them with the conviction, and sometimes with the asperity, of more intimate and exclusive knowledge. "Admirable," he has scribbled against certain paragraphs; "excellent but too fanciful," he comments at another place; "very possible," he annotates occasionally, or again, "This is the very man." Such confirmatory rubrics are, however, the exception; in most cases and invariably when Moore has allowed himself the luxury of a too romantic representation, Hobhouse's comments are trenchant and negative: "Most unlikely," he pencils; "I do not believe it;" "This is a lie;" "My dear T. M., you know nothing whatsoever of the true facts;" "Oh, no, Mr. Moore!" And sometimes merely "Oh, no!"

The tour through stalwart Hobhouse's comments is of course hugely entertaining, but that "I have in my possession" crops up throughout the book and speaks of a certain insecurity, as though Nicolson knows he's trespassing on well-trod scholarly ground and needs some stronger passport than his own interest (or the aforementioned promise of pay), when really his best safe conduct is his own marvellous ability to breathe life into his subjects. He stresses that he's got an invaluable primary document right in front of him, but as fascinating as that document is, it's outdone by his own summaries:

He knew that his friend was irresponsible and kind; that he was humourous and childish; that he was infinitely muddle-headed and unspeakably perverse; that he was irritable sometimes, and generally lazy, and a little mad perhaps, but then so sincere, affectionate, gentle; and of course appallingly weak; but then "always so very funny." Hobhouse could never quite get over how very funny Byron was. "Of all the peculiarities of B.," he has scribbled at the end of Moore's biography, "his laugh is that of which I have the most distinct recollection."

Naturally, any account of Byron's last weeks must include a few hatchet-swipes at the deeply divisive figure of Edward Trelawny, the hard-drinking companion who was so distrusted by so many of Byron's friends, with the notable exception of Mary Shelley:

"Trelawny," records Mrs. Shelley in her diary five days subsequently, "is extravagant - partly natural, and partly, perhaps, put on, but it suits him well; and if his abrupt but not unpolished manners be assumed, they are nevertheless in unison with his Moorish face, (for he looks Oriental, yet not Asiatic), his dark hair, his Herculean form; and then there is an air of extreme good nature which pervades his whole countenance, especially when he smiles, which assures me that his heart is good."

Is she - who knew the man - allowed to have her say? Well, not quite:

In this Mrs. Shelley was mistaken: Trelawny had no heart at all; all that he possessed was a capacity, an excessive capacity, for egotistic enthusiasms. Besides, Trelawny was a liar and a cad.

Hee.

But whether Nicolson's (and every other Byron biographer's) dislike of Trelawny springs in any part from jealousy (some time soon I'll have to do a post on the man - he's had some very enjoyable biographies/diatribes written about him in the last two centuries), the fact remains that the characterization, however biased, is magnificently vivid, as are the characterizations of everybody in this book. None more so than the star attraction himself, who Nicolson often approaches with a decidedly novelistic flair that only a very strong writer can pull off:

Byron for his part shared none of these illusions. To him the future loomed more nebulous and less convincing. Subjective and sceptical, he was solaced by none of the confident convictions of his assistant. He did not believe very much in the Crown and Anchor: he had known them all too intimately. He did not believe unduly in the immediate perfectibility of Hellenic character: here again his experience militated against his credulity. He believed least of all in the efficiency of Lord Byron: his irradicable and realistic modesty precluded so seductive a fallacy. For him it was just a wet afternoon like any other; perhaps it would clear by four o'clock, and he could have his ride after all; meanwhile he might fence with Gamba; no, Gamba was in disgrace for the moment, because he had muddled the accounts at Cephallonia, and bought all those yards of red cloth that no one wanted. He drummed again upon the streaming window. It was such a bore being thirty-six.

I came across a pretty paperback reprint of this book just recently (a friend very kindly made sure I saw it) and soaked it up all the more greedily for the fact that I'd just lamented to another friend that I feared I'd finally read all the biographies of Byron. I'd missed this one, and the discovery made an already sweet reading experience all the sweeter. I wouldn't recommend it as anybody's first Byron book, but if you've already got a biography of the man under your belt, find yourself a copy - you'll be well pleased!

Pomes, Proems, and Porkers in the Penny Press!

In the waning months of 2010, I got quite a few comments from the Silent Majority asking me whatever became of regular In the Penny Press updates. And it's true: I neglected writing about my vast magazine-reading, mainly because the year's impending end had me thinking more and more about all the books I still wanted to write about.

 

But as the American magazine industry is forever reminding us these days, despite the Internet and the decline of literacy, magazine-reading is as healthy as its been in decades. And I certainly contribute my share to that! I read every issue of National Geographic, Esquire, GQ, Vanity Fair, Men's Journal, Outside, The American Scholar, Royalty, Majesty, Natural History, Harper's, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, New York, Rolling Stone, Asimov's, the TLS, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Publisher's Weekly, The Romantic Times Book Club, The Boston Review, and the New York Review of Books, and I usually find something noteworthy about every single issue of every single one of those ... so it's a tad laggardly if I stop blogging about them here. If Stevereads is the autobiography of my reading, scanting on magazines would be like skipping a chapter.

 

Hence, I started off the year with a Penny Post entry, and I'll keep it up - starting now, with a very strong little pod of titles consumed at my usual table at my little hole-in-the-wall Chinese food place in Chinatown (not the same hole-in-the-wall place that served me for a whopping 30 years - it closed! - but a newer, even smaller place that's unknown both to stupid American customers and, I suspect, to the Boston Board of Health... I get a HUGE plate of food for a pittance, and I'm left alone to read in sweet peace for as long as I want, because the staff is wonderful and also because there are never any other customers). The opening dish, as it were, was The New Yorker, which featured, among other things, a poem I rather liked and which I include here in place of my late, apparently unlamented 'Poetry Class' feature:

 

In the little house filled with dogs and resilient plants

She left only a glass and a blank sheet of paper.

The stadium up the road like a siren called with silent applause

To climb up, climb beyond the seats and the grass

Where a team of young girls kicked a white ball.

Maybe she knew they were there, maybe she was calling back

A line a male poet committed to the page a decade ago,

About time made simple by the loss of detail.

Maybe she then cast out every detail but the unencumbered air

To keep it simple. And then fluttered away from us.

That's called "Air" by Daniel Halpern, and I like it quite a bit.

 

Amazingly, I also liked the beginning of this issue's short story - and the reason it's amazing is because the story, called "The Years of My Birth," is by the dreaded Louise Erdrich, whose work I've hated since the Great Depression. And keep in mind, I still hate her work - this story is slightly less wretched than her usual blather, it's true, but it still falls apart almost completely on both a plot and an execution level. But the opening is, against all odds, first-rate:

 

The nurse had wrapped my brother in a blue flannel blanket and was just about to hand him to his mother when she whispered, "Oh, God, there's another one," and out I slid, half dead. I then proceeded to die in earnest, going from slightly pink to a dull gray-blue, at which point the nurse tried to scoop me into a bed warmed by lights. She was stopped by the doctor, who pointed out my head and legs. Stepping between me and the mother, the doctor addressed her.

 

"Mrs. Lasher, I have something important to say. Your other child has a congenital deformity and may die. Shall we use extraordinary means to salvage it?"

 

She looked at the doctor with utter incomprehension at first, then cried, "No!"

 

While the doctor's back was turned, the nurse cleared my mouth with her finger, shook me upside down, and swaddled me tightly in another blanket, pink. I took a blazing breath.

 

"Nurse," the doctor said.

 

"Too late," she answered.

Any story that begins with that kind of crackle just naturally compels you to keep reading - which I unfortunately did, but still.

 

(The issue also features a droll, enjoyable essay by Joan Acocella about the popularity of the Stieg Larsson novels. She makes a few good stabs, but ultimately she can't figure it out either)

 

And as enjoyable as I find practically every issue of The New Yorker, I turned with special eagerness - I always do - to my own metier,  book-criticism. And boy, what a great double-barrelled blast of book-criticism you get when you read The London Review of Books and the TLS back-to-back! In the London Review this time around there's an absolutely howlingly great take-down of George W. Bush's Decision Points, which is sly and vicious and fleet-footed and would be sufficient to induce authorly catatonia, if the former president ever actually read it. Which seems, all in all, unlikely. The piece is by Eliot Weinberger, and surely its most glorious paragraph is this one:

 

This is a chronicle of the Bush Era with no colour-coded Terror Alerts; no Freedom Fries; no Halliburton; no Healthy Forests Initiative (which opened up wilderness areas to logging); no Clear Skies Act (which reduced air pollution standards); no New Freedom Initiative (which proposed testing all Americans, beginning with schoolchildren, for mental illness)l no pamphlets sold by the National Parks Service explaining that the Grand Canyon was created by the Flood; no research by the National Institutes of Health on whether prayer can cure cancer ('imperative' because poor people have limited access to healthcare); no cover-up of the death of football star Pat Tillman by 'friendly fire' in Afghanistan; no 'Total Information Awareness' from the Information Awareness Office; no Project for the New American Century; no invented heroic rescue of Private Jessica Lynch; no Fox News; no hundreds of millions spent on 'abstinence education'.

Hee. Of course, many of the items on that list are very nearly as fraudulent in their glancing mention here as their omission from Bush's book is (Open Letters' own Greg Waldmann, taking the less fun but more measured tone here, no doubt renders things more correctly, even at the cost of pyrotechnics), but the spittle flying off the piece was hugely enjoyable just the same.

 

(And while we're on the subject of OLM-echoes, Peter Campbell turns in a piece in this same issue in which he takes in the Thomas Lawrence exhibit now at the National Portrait Gallery and appreciates Lawrence's work as much as I did here. He writes: "There are some tremendous pictures among the things gathered here. Pictures of 'real genius'? Well, 'genius' is not an easy word, but certainly vivid, appealing and, sometimes, as in the case of the military or of fashionable ladies, necessarily tawdry")

 

If I had to pick one highlight of the issue, however, it would be the utterly sui generis meditation on wild boars (and Paul Celan? I still haven't figured that part out yet) by the great novelist Lawrence Norfolk (whose greatest novel, In the Shape of a Boar, almost certainly generated this piece by accident years ago), including this little gem: "In the late 1980s, two young boars attacked an F16 fighter plane attempting to land at Jacksonville International Airport in Florida, causing its destruciton." (The anecdote is no more true than some of Weinberger's slung-around accusations, but it's just as much fun)

 

And the riches on hand in the TLS were, if anything, greater - starting with a wonderful extended explanation for the dismayingly phoned-in little squib I took Adam Hirsch to task for in the Book Review here. In this issue of the TLS, he delivers a long and gloriously intelligent review of a thoroughly unworthy subject, the letters of Saul Bellow, and the piece is every bit as smart as his Book Review piece was vapid, every bit as detailed as his Book Review piece was vague. Virtually every paragraph of this spectacular review sparkles with nerve and insight:

 

The soul makes the flesh, which is why it can't survive the flesh. And this insight is guaranteed, for Bellow, by the very vividness with which the physical world appeals to him - an intensity so powerful that he could not believe it was merely subjective. This very early intuition is what led Bellow to his late enthusiasm for Rudolf Steiner, whose books are so dreadfully written that only a deep spiritual aspiration could have led a reader of Bellow's sensitivity to tolerate them.

I find I can forgive any number of fatuous essays on the Role of the Book-Critic Today if the essayist in question is still capable of knocking reviews like this one out of the ballpark. If a tongue-lashing from Stevereads was all it took to get Kirsch back in line, I'm happy to serve.

 

And speaking of tongue-lashings! Some of you may have noticed the pan I gave to Ron Chernow's new hagiography of George Washington, so of course I read Mark Spencer's review of the same book with great interest. Alas, he decides mostly to praise the thing despite the fact that its manifold deficiencies are in full display on every page. This is as close as Spencer comes to invective: "Convincing us to trade in our "frosty respect for Washington" for a "visceral appreciation of this foremost American" sometimes leads Chernow beyond the evidence of the historical record."

 

Needless to say, I disagree with such a positively Jeevesian level of restraint. Maybe Spencer would profit from a tongue-lashing ...

Comics! A Clash of Titans!

There's something primordially satisfying about superheroes fighting other superheroes - it's always far more compelling than superheroes fighting anybody else. I don't know why that is, but I've been enjoying it for eons just the same. And some superhero fights are just undeniably more enjoyable than others - and that part I do indeed understand: it's all about iconic value. If you take two superheroes with no iconic value and have them fight, absolutely nobody is going to care who wins (well, fanboys will care, but since nobody cares about them, we're in the clear). Daredevil verus Power Man? A mere statistical blip. Captain America versus Wolverine? A classic waiting to happen (and I do mean waiting! despite the fact that these two should make a riveting rumble-epic - two perfect fighting machines, neither of whom gets tired, one armed with an unbreakable defensive weapon and one armed with unbreakable offensive weapons - they've never had a satisfying fight, despite having had a very satisfying Mike Zeck fight cover. Go figure).

And the greater the iconic value, the greater the power of the imagery involved, the better the fight - or so it used to be. In terms of power-specifics, no fight in the DC universe should be more enjoyable than Superman versus Wonder Woman, but although just such a fight was done very well a few years ago, DC can actually field an even more iconic confrontation: Superman versus Batman. Despite the fact that Batman has no super-powers and should therefore lose in about a tenth of a second, the staggering iconic weight of comics' two most recognizable figures carries the day - as was perfectly illustrated (literally, in this case) at the climax of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns, when a grizzled old Batman fights a stronger-than-ever Superman - and comics readers everywhere held their breath (it's my hope that we'll someday see a live-action special effects extravaganza version of that very scene - with Bruce Willis playing Batman, of course).

It's trickier over at Marvel, since their most iconic character, Spider-Man, is also something so rare he has almost no parallel in comics: a totally non-aggressive hero. It just doesn't feel right to have him showing up in the books of other characters, throwing punches at them - he's a sweet-faced good-natured young guy who'd rather talk and joke than establish a alpha-male dominance. It's true that Wolverine has quite a bit of iconic value nowadays too, and there were satisfying moments to that storyline a few years ago where he felt compelled to take on the entire Marvel lineup of heroes one by one.

But for me, the real Marvel kicker has always been Thor versus the Hulk. Not just because of the power involved, although it was always neat wondering what would happen if Marvel's two most powerful characters duked it out (that's the one thing that stopped fights between the Hulk and the Thing from being equally compelling - no matter how well-done the confrontation was, the reader always knew the Thing was going to lose), but also because the nature of the iconic value here was completely polarized: Thor was an intelligent, refined, quasi-Shakespeare-spouting god from a shining city, and the Hulk was a near-bestial pea-eyed creature of incoherent rage. That always added a zest to their rare confrontations.

Or at least, as mentioned, it used to. Nowadays, their confrontations aren't rare anymore, and writers who were children in the 1970s are now comic creator's united in one solid belief: that Thor is some ponce who's totally dependent on his magic hammer to last even five seconds against the super-cool Hulk. Sigh.

A perfect case in point came out to comic stores this week: the third issue of "Earth's Mightiest Heroes: The Avengers," the comics-companion to the new cartoon series on Disney. Don't get me wrong: the issue is really well done, written with deceptive wit by Chris Yost and drawn with nifty vigor by Scott Wegener. In it, two celestial bad guys - the Stranger and the Collector - place a wager on who would win in a fight, Thor or the Hulk (most Marvel super-villains are in fact just this kind of barely-disguised fanboy). They brainwash Thor into attacking the Hulk, and the show is on.

Wegener does something that's by now very familiar in such fights: he gives Thor a great opening out of the gate specifically because he knows Thor's going to get his Asgardian ass handed to him in short order - and that's just what happens here. Thor gets in precisely one good shot and then spends the rest of the abortive fight getting punched around by the Hulk. The Stranger and the Collector (I forget who bet on whom, but it doesn't matter - they're both windbags) keep commenting on how Thor, despite his power, is probably going to lose because, as the decades-old Marvel tagline goes, "the madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets." And if you fight an opponent who keeps getting stronger the more angry he gets, and you aren't similarly blessed, you're certainly going to lose eventually.



So Thor blasts the Hulk with a lightning-bolt smack from his mystic hammer (no explanation as to why it doesn't seem to hurt the Hulk - writers hardly ever bother to explain that, although I'd really like to know), and then the Hulk starts knocking him around until the fight is interrupted by Thor coming to his senses. Inconclusive, you might say, and hardly unprecedented for being so. A few years ago, in issue #5 of Mark Millar's epic first run on "Ultimates," we get the same thing. In that story line, Thor is a seedy hippie with an enormous glowing hammer and the Hulk is a snarling gray-skinned cannibal with an attitude problem. Millar's approach to this retooled Avengers fiddles with virtually every established tenet of that super-group - but he leaves the familiar Thor-Hulk rope-a-dope untouched: his Thor is given an impressive initial success against the Hulk specifically because it's going to count for nothing - the Hulk's going to shrug it off and knock Thor into the middle of next Tuesday. Millar's Thor arrives on the scene in an impressive burst of lightning and smugly enumerates to the fallen Hulk specifically what damage has been done to his body ("you've got three broken ribs, a punctured lung, a shattered spine, an enlarged gall bladder," etc.) - then the Hulk swats him across midtown Manhattan like last year's graffiti. Sigh.

It all prompts me to recall the good old days, when 'equal' meant 'equal' and when, at Marvel anyway, house policy forbade iconic fights from having clear-cut winners. I specifically recall, of course, the halcyon summer of 1973 when Marvel ran its very first cross-title storyline, a six-issue event dreamed up by Roy Thomas and written by Steve Englehart, in which the company's two most powerful super-teams at the time, the Avengers and the Defenders, were tricked into fighting each other. The plot involved Loki and Dormammu and a quest to assemble some sort of mystic do-hickey and enslave all of reality, but like most fans at the time, I didn't care about the plot - I just loved the prospect of seeing so many superheroes square off against each other.

And square off they did! Some of the match-ups were interesting, and quite a few were absurd (and at least one turned out to be awkward, in light of Marvel's later continuity: Captain America fought the Sub-Mariner, and neither acted like they knew each other or had been comrades during WWII - mainly because it would be a couple more years before Roy Thomas himself thought up the Invaders, the super-team to which Cap and the Sub-Mariner belonged, so in 1973 it didn't exist yet) - the Silver Surfer fought the Vision, the sad-sack Swordsman fought the Valkyrie, Iron Man fought Hawkeye, Doctor Strange fought Mantis and the Black Panther (he just puts them to sleep, rather than turn them both into caterpillars), but all of that was mere prelude to the climax of the whole event: Defenders #10 - Thor versus the Hulk.

Oh, I can't tell you how I lived for that issue! How my beagles and I trooped dutifully to the corner variety store to see if that longed-for delivery had come (this was in the days before the Internet, when corner stores allowed dogs inside and nobody had posted shipping schedules for comics). These two characters had only fought once before, in a maddeningly off-scene two-panel encounter years ago in the Avengers, nine long years before, but this issue promised a full-length showdown.

I wasn't disappointed: with Englehart writing and the underappreciated Sal Buscema drawing, Thor and the Hulk square off in L.A. and duke it out for seven glorious pages ... it had everything any fan could ever hope for - except a winner. Instead, after he's had them trade blows for a while, Englehart has his two characters lock up in a straining match, each trying to move the other without success, until finally their two teams show up and convince them to stand down.

Defenders #10 was blissful for me, but looking back on my callow younger days, I realize that instead of being pleased I should have fired off an angry letter to Roy Thomas, taking him to task for placating mindless Hulk-fans with what amounted to a stalemate. Of course, back in 1973, I didn't have access to the Good Book that now rules my life, the Holy Text that I now consult for guidance on every one of life's most important questions.

I refer, of course, to the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, expanded edition.

In that mighty tome, the facts are clearly laid out. Thor has 'class 100' strength, meaning he can lift (press) over 100 tons. The Hulk, the Handbook notes, also has 'class 100' strength - but only when he's enraged. In his 'normal' state, he can only lift (press) about 70 tons. In other words, he needs to get mad and stay mad to approach Thor's level of strength. And even when he's there, he's only there - where Thor is too. The Handbook is silent on how much more than 100 tons Thor can lift - it's possible that the Hulk would be significantly weaker than Thor even after he himself reached the 100-ton range. If I were to write that irate letter to Roy Thomas today (much as it grieves me to say so, I don't believe he's a reader of Stevereads), the point I'd make would be very simple: if, when the fight starts, the Hulk is only two-thirds as strong as Thor, the fight would never last long enough for the Hulk to win. Added to which Thor's vast centuries of combat experience fighting monsters just like the Hulk - there's just no way things would result in a stalemate, let alone a loss for Thor.

And yet lose he does, time and again. Even if we don't talk about the recent animated movie that features a Hulk-beating-Thor sequence so long and detailed it practically qualifies as S&M porn, there are still plenty of comic book fights between the two in which the Hulk wasn't even inconvenienced - just take the nancy-boy's croquet mallet away from him and slap him around like a Girl Scout until you get bored.

The moral of the story? Everything was better in 1973.

Alexander and His Nature!

Our books today are two slam-bang fantastic biographies of Alexander the Great: Peter Green's masterful 1970 volume Alexander the Great and Mary Renault's more emotional, empathetic 1975 volume The Nature of Alexander. Both books do a superb job of assembling and presenting the known facts of Alexander's life and times (they remain the two best works on the subject ever written in English, by my reckoning), and they quite unconsciously form very illuminating counter-points to each other. Unlike many historical subjects, Alexander can bear this kind of multiplicity of interpretation - not only are the accounts of his life less than we would like, but those facts were hospitable to legend even while Alexander was alive - indeed, even while he was still a boy. Then as now, there's a very pleasing sense that none of these accounts might be right - or that all of them might be right at the same time.

Green, the intense classical scholar, treats his sources with rigor and his subject with a cold kind of equanimity:

I have tried, insofar as the evidence would allow it, to strip away the accreted myth, and discover the historical Alexander of flesh and blood - no easy task. His true genius was as a field-commander: perhaps, taken all in all, the most incomparable general the world has ever seen. His business was war and conquest. It is idle to palliate this central truth, to pretend that he dreamed, in some mysterious fashion, of wading through rivers of blood and violence to achieve the Brotherhood of Man. He spent his life, with legendary success, in the pursuit of personal glory; and until very recent times this was regarded as a wholly laudable aim.

Whereas Renault, a novelist who wrote two great fictional works about Alexander, is far more impressionistic, far more willing to extrapolate the personal, lived reality of her subject, as when she imagines his death-scene:

Ever ready to die in war, he must long have been prepared to die in pain, and resolved it should not diminish him. The exhaustion must have shortened his last hours, but it is unlikely at this stage he could have recovered. The necessary suffering he accepted in return for what had been essential to him all his life: to be equal to his legend; to be beloved; and to require it extravagantly, regardless of expense. Whether sustained by pride, by philosophy, by belief in the immortality of his fame or of his soul, he met his end with not less dignity, fortitude and consideration for others than Socrates himself. And he, till he drank the quick painless hemlock, was a healthy man with a long, fulfilled life behind him; Alexander carried it through with a great design in ruins, and in the distress of a mortal sickness.

Our two editions in question today - the Praeger version of Green's book and the big Pantheon hardcover of Renault's - were part of a very welcome trend in the 1970s toward larger, profusely illustrated nonfiction books. Green's photo editor and Renault's have ransacked the ancient and modern worlds, providing slightly differing versions of virtually every image even remotely associated with Alexander (mercifully, both these books being from the '70s, neither one features the sight of Colin Farrell in eye-liner). I like this approach much more than the current crop of hardcover works of history with their marooned little sheaf of photos stuck in the middle. Both these books are visually fascinating, which is always a welcome bonus.

But the true draw is the prose, of course, in both cases - sharp, intelligent prose from both authors, but employed to very different ends. Green wants us to shed the accretion of myth and soft track-lighting that has accompanied Alexander for two thousand years. He never misses an opportunity to cut the diminutive conqueror down to size:

Like most personally austere leaders, he had an ill-disguised contempt for humanity in the mass, and seems to have felt he could manipulate his troops as he pleased simply by indulging their grosser appetites.

Whereas Renault, being more than a little in love with her subject, wants her readers to love him too and is willing to defend him even sometimes against the weight of fact, as in her characteristic aside about his wanton sack of the great palace at Persepolis:

This action is know today by people who know virtually nothing else about him (and who remain more impressed by this outrage to an empty building than by the living holocausts of Coventry and Dresden); fit retribution, if he deserved it, for a man who cared intensely about his good name.

I just the other day re-read both these books back-to-back, and I came away all the more impressed with each of them despite their enormous philosophical differences. Both are readily available in scads of editions (although I happen to think these two are the prettiest), and each in their own way would have pleased Alexander's erratic egotism, although he'd have been shocked by how much both must necessarily indulge in conjecture. He had a horror of being unknown to the future, and reading how different these two intelligent, well-researched treatments of his story are, you suddenly realize just how fragile that story is.

The Oxford Book of Friendship!

Our book today is 1991's Oxford Book of Friendship edited by D. J. Enright and David Rawlinson, a book that clocks in at only about 360 pages and yet is chock-full of great stuff on that most elusive and yet universal feature of human life and certainly human literature: friendship.

To put it mildly, I've made something of a study of the subject in my own life. I was lucky enough to spend most of my childhood with the best friends imaginable, but the luck was double-edged, because those friends were dogs, and it took me a long time to realize that the reason I wasn't finding friendships among humans that were anywhere near as strong as those I found everywhere with dogs was tragically simple: dogs are better at friendship than humans are, in just the same way that, say, humans are better at language than dogs are. "I want to know as I am known," scripture cries out, and of course that's been the driving personal dynamic of humans since they first achieved their current level of murderous sentience. The enormous conceptualizing capacity of the human brain comes with a huge price: the isolation of being the smartest, creepiest, most deceitful species on the planet, or in the planet's history.

Which makes mankind's search for simple friendship all the more moving, I guess - it certainly makes that search an all the more natural candidate for artistic treatment, and for the well-placed quip. Enright & Rawlinson's great book (yet another in a long line of great Oxford Books) is broken into many different aspects of friendship - "Among Men," "Among Women," "Youth and Age," "Animals," etc. - and each section is full of quotes and excerpts from a very pleasingly wide variety of authors. Here's a sampling:

It should be a part of our private ritual to devote a quarter of an hour every day to the enumeration of the good qualities of our friends. When we are not active, we fall back idly upon defects, even of those whom we most love.  (some jasper named Mark Rutherford)

Oscar Wilde said of me 'An excellent man: he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.' And that's quite true: they don't like me; but they are my friends, and some of them love me. If you value a man's regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper - and despise it. I had rather you remembered one thing I said for three days than liked me (only) for 300,000,000,000,000,000 years. (George Bernard Shaw, to Ellen Terry)

A man who has few friends, or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth), cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by a stroke or two of fate - a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped paper, a woman's bright eyes - he may be left, in a month, destitute of all. (Robert Louis Stevenson, in Virginibus Puerisque)

George wondered if this was what being old meant: everything you wanted to say required a context. If you gave the full context, people thought you a rambling old fool. If you didn't give the context, people thought you a laconic old fool. The very old needed interpreters just as the very young did. When the old lost their companions, their friends, they also lost their interpreters: they lost love, but they also lost the full power of speech. (Julian Barnes, writing out his ass as usual)

Love is like the wild rose-briar,

Friendship is like the holly-tree -

The holly is dark when the rose-briar blooms

But which will bloom most constantly?

The wild rose-briar is sweet in spring,

Its summer blossoms scent the air;

Yet wait till winter comes again

And who will call the wild-briar fair?

Then scorn the silly rose-wreath now

And deck thee with the holly's sheen,

That when December blights thy brow

He still may leave thy garland green.

(Emily Bronte's "Love and Friendship," from 1839)

And we could hardly close on the subject of friendship without this last poem, even though Enright and Rawlinson choose not to include it in their anthology:

When some proud son of man returns to earth,
Unknown to glory, but upheld by birth,
The sculptor's art exhausts the pomp of woe
And storied urns record who rest below:
When all is done, upon the tomb is seen,
Not what he was, but what he should have been:
But the poor dog, in life the firmest friend,
The first to welcome, foremost to defend,
Whose honest heart is still his master's own,
Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,
Unhonour'd falls, unnoticed all his worth--
Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth:
While Man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,
And claims himself a sole exclusive Heaven.
Oh Man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,
Debased by slavery, or corrupt by power,
Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust,
Degraded mass of animated dust!
Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,
Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit!
By nature vile, ennobled but by name,
Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.
Ye! who perchance behold this simple urn,
Pass on--it honours none you wish to mourn:
To mark a Friend's remains these stones arise;
I never knew but one,--and here he lies.

That's of course Lord Byron, writing an epitaph for a beloved dog. He's being hyperbolic (I mentioned it was Byron, yes?), but not much more so than, say, Kipling or Burns would be. And it's hard to think systematically about the phenomenon of friendship without thinking of dogs - at least for me. The rest of you need not worry, though: you'll find this wonderful anthology for the most part very comfortingly human-oriented.

Comics! A Grand Old Time!

As the new year begins, the dust settles in the company continuities of both Marvel and DC, and the editors of their super-hero comics evidently decide (or were ordered by their masters, now newly sensitized to the lure of Hollywood money?) to put away the dark backdrops of the past few years and embrace a somewhat simpler, somewhat brighter outlook.

Of course this will appeal to me, although I'm the first to admit some good stories came out of all that darkness. At DC, there were several back-to-back 'dark' events - most recently the "Darkest Night" mini-series that started with lots of superheroes getting violently killed but ended with lots of superheroes getting brought back to life. And at Marvel, the storyline in which villainous Norman Osborn gained political ascendancy in America and drove all the heroes into hiding (or into maximum security prison cells) led to some fantastic comics; I griped about it at the time, but the fact is, having evil win a big round led to a lot of great stories and great moments - and of course the ultimate pay-off, the story in which Osborn finally gets his comeuppance.

Both those story-arcs are over now (well, "Blackest Night" continues to limp forward as "Brightest Day," but although it's better than it seems, its ultimate worth remains to be seen - right now, its main purpose seems to be to re-introduce DC readers to the 'classic' Aquaman and invent a supporting cast of friends and enemies for him, perhaps as prelude to giving him a comic of his own again), and both companies are free to return to straight-up superhero stories, which is fine by me. A major beneficiary at Marvel is Spider-Man, whose comic is at a high point it hasn't reached in years.

But like I said, I'm also a beneficiary! For instance, I'm back in time 50 years, back to getting Adventure Comics and Superboy every month. True, things have changed - the Legion of Super-Heroes I'm reading in Adventure Comics is now a group of adults, not perky teens, but writer Paul Levitz and artist Geraldo Borges are making it all great anyway (and DC's got another Legion title for stories from the group's youth, so I really can't complain); and the Superboy I'm reading about isn't Clark Kent when he was a teenager, it's Connor Kent, a dreamy hunk-clone of Superman (with a little of Lex Luthor spliced in - yes, this Superboy has two daddies) - but I confess, despite the weird artwork (everybody has such eeensy-weeensy facial features)(but alas, Humberto Ramos can't draw everything), this title is growing on me.

And DC is at least partially acknowledging their bright new day with a series of  covers designed to highlight the iconic nature of their characters, which is neat. Superboy's cover features him flying straight at the reader, followed by his faithful companion Krypto the super-dog, and the cover of Adventure features the Legion logo (which bears a very encouraging resemblance to the logo of a certain literary magazine...) and five grim, anorexic stick-figures who, I guess, are supposed to represent several of the sexy women of the Legion. I mostly concentrated on that wonderful logo.

Over at Marvel, there's considerably more darkness to overcome. It's not just the year-long power-grab of Norman Osborn - that power-grab was only made possible by the events of Marvel's 'Civil War,' in which Tony Stark/Iron Man spearheaded a government initiative to register every super-hero, pay them a government wage, and dictate what they do with their super-powers. Captain America died at the climax of that story, which is about as dark as dark gets, and eventually Osborn chased Tony Stark from power and took over himself - so once the 'big three' of Marvel's super-team the Avengers, Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man - were reunited, you'd expect lots of hard feelings all around.

Writer Brian Michael Bendis obviously decided the big three needed a private adventure in which they could heal their fractured relationship, and in the five-part mini-series "Avengers Prime" he cooked up a doozy, an epic story in which our heroes are suddenly transported to the mystic realm formerly occupied by Asgard, a mystic realm now in chaos and being taken over by Hela, the goddess of death. Our heroes are separated, and much sound and fury ensues, and eventually they come together and face off against the forces of Hela - artist Alan Davis has never done better work than in this series, and in this final issue he presents us with a truly wonderful two-page spread of what death's army might look like if it were run through a Wagner-filter:



I admit, I pay much more attention to visuals than to writing in comics, but even so, this issue also has a perfect little moment of character-work. It comes at the end, when an abashed Tony Stark is trying to apologize to Captain America for everything - the superhero registration business, the 'Civil War,' all of it: "All of those things ... all the things I said, and did ...I'm ... I'm so, so sorry. I know that's not enough, but I hope you will allow me the chance to earn your friendship  back. I don't deserve it ... I just hope you let me. I'm not half as good at ... at anything as I am when I'm doing it next to you." It's trite, but somehow it works - a line that effectively summarizes Bendis' entire writing career.

And if the events of the "Civil War" cast a dark shadow on the future of Marvel Comics, that's nothing compared to the events that sprang from the mini-series "House of M" (which I praised here despite the objections of Kevin the Noted Comic Book Snob!), in which the tormented hero Scarlet Witch used her reality-altering powers to wipe out nine-tenths of all the mutants in the Marvel Universe. In her agony to make everything simpler, she speaks three fateful words, "No more mutants" - and suddenly the Marvel continuity contains just a handful of mutants struggling to survive as a species. That was years ago, and again, many very good stories have come out of that premise - but there was always going to come some kind of reckoning, and it's looking like Marvel's fantastic mini-series "Children's Crusade" will be that reckoning.

The series is written with acute sensitivity by Allan Heinberg and drawn with eye-popping virtuosity by the great Jim Cheung (in a perfect Steve-world, he would be drawing the teenaged-Legion every month, but I'll take what I can get), and it tells the story of what would happen if two young heroes named Wiccan and Speed - a shy (and gay) sorcerer and a brash young super-speedster - became convinced that a) somehow the Scarlet Witch was their mother, and b) that she was alive somewhere and they should find her. This naturally aligns forces against them - mainly the Avengers, who don't want these kids to blunder into a cataclysm - and forces in their favor, mainly their fellow teen allies on the Young Avengers, but also joined by Quicksilver, the Scarlet Witch's brother, and Magneto, the father of Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch. Their search eventually takes them to Latveria and a confrontation with none other than Doctor Doom - a confrontation that prompts Cheung to give us a wonderful double-page spread of his own:



In this issue, part 4 of a 9-part story, this series finally comes into its own as the premiere slam-bang event of the entire Marvel line in 2011. The Scarlet Witch has no memory of the terrible things she did in her previous life - she believes she's simple Latverian gypsy girl Wanda Maximoff, and Heinberg has added the perfect Stan Lee-style twist: Doctor Doom, the monarch of Latveria, has fallen in love with her ("Given my history," he wryly tells Wiccan, "even I find it difficult to believe"). He thinks its sheer lunacy for Wiccan to want to revive her memories - and with them her devastating powers - but the decision might be taken out of his hands anyway, since shortly after Wiccan shows up to 'rescue' his 'mother,' both the Young Avengers (with Quicksilver and Magneto) show up and the Avengers, who are determined to prevent another 'House of M' style catastrophe.

This issue is full of great moments, but for my money, the best of them is the confrontation between Wolverine (who is, for reasons known only to the Marvel Accounting Department, now an Avenger) and poor befuddled Wanda. Wolverine has always had only one simple solution in mind for the whole problem of what the Scarlet Witch did to her fellow mutants: kill her before she can do anything worse - and in the longshot hope that her death will restore the reality she changed - and for one more reason: out of simple revenge for a nearly-successful genocide. Wiccan can't understand such a mentality:

"What is wrong with you? You're supposed to be one of the good guys."

"So was she. Until she slaughtered her friends and wiped out an entire species with three little words ... 'no more mutants,' right Wanda? Well, you got your wish, sweetheart. Thanks to you, there's only a few of us left. And now, thanks to me, there's about to be one less."

Needless to say, he's stopped from killing her, and the issue provides a cliffhanger ending, and the story keeps barreling along. I know I shouldn't be allowing myself to enjoy it as much as I am - probably issue #9 will take a year to ship - but I can't help it! If this series continues as it's going, it'll be the best thing Marvel's done in years. I'll keep you posted.

The Noble Revolt!

Our book today is John Adamson's 2007 tome The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I, another addition to our roster of very good very long books (it's so long that one rather wimpy soul, upon seeing it, kept mechanically blurting out “It's the longest book in the world!” over and over again)(but it's not). It's the natural follow-up to the Kevin Sharpe's equally-massive, equally fantastic 1994 tome The Personal Rule of Charles I (Sharpe's book is actually 100 pages longer, but don't tell that to the aforementioned wimpy soul); both are about that most problematic of English monarchs, Charles I, a man so punctilious that he'd refuse to eat a meal if the place-settings were even slightly wrong, and a man who brought that ironclad sense of entitlement especially to his rule – and at one of the worst possible moments in English history.

Charles I had the misfortune to believe completely in the indivisible divine right of kings at just the time when large numbers of his subjects were beginning to feel real power for themselves. His great noblemen and merchant princes had long since begun to bridle at his thoroughly medieval views of what was due him, and matters weren't helped by the fact that Charles himself was not a commanding presence – personally, he was far more fit to be a local deacon or perhaps an overweening schoolmaster than to be king; he was physically tiny, possessed of a shrill, high voice, and prone to mincing. Mentally, he was one of those sticklers-of-pointless-detail whose own friends often want to punch them in the face. Even his dogs preferred to take their food from someone less apt to make pointers on their chewing methods.

Little surprise, then, that Charles I tussled with his Parliament often, and the title of Sharpe's enormous book refers to the King's idea of a solution to that friction: his infamous period of 'personal rule,' where used sub rosa foreign loans to render himself free of Parliament's financial support and so rule without them. Such an approach for a mightier king in mightier times, but a great many of the men in Charles' Parliament not only wanted more of the power they'd begun to accrue to themselves, they wanted more of that power to be specifically over the King himself. Rudely, awkwardly, the idea of the figurehead monarch – an expression and relic of pomp, possessing little or no real power – was being born. The Stuarts were the last English kings to hold vast monarchical powers personally in their hands, and they naturally fought to keep it.

Adamson's enormous book chronicles that fight in a minutely detailed virtually day-by-day fashion, and his prose is throughout so clear and forceful that, believe it or not, the reader is swept along. Adamson is perfectly aware of the larger societal forces at play over his vast canvas, but he never forgets that his is an intensely personal story – people always come first in his accounts, and he's very talented at delineating them, as in the case of Thomas Wentworth, the much-maligned Earl of Strafford, when the anti-monarchy forces of Parliament were baying for his blood:

This outward confidence and good humour, a facade seemingly maintained with immense emotional and physical effort, had defined Strafford's public performance from the moment the treason accusations had first been made. Although granted the favour of legal counsel to assist with the preparation of his case, a privilege usually denied to those accused of treason, Strafford's command of law and factual detail was nevertheless formidable. Ignoring his physical infirmities (he had been suffering acutely from the stone since the previous spring), he brought the full force of his intelligence and his devastating powers of sarcasm to bear against his accusers. He mastered his brief and had a command of detail and a quickness of repartee that repeatedly confounded his slower-witted opponents. To cite but two examples: his retort to th chart that using soldiers to enforce decisions of the Irish Council amounted to 'levying war against the king' (a long-established treason) is characteristic of his style: 'These be wonderful wars if we have no more war than such as three or four men are able to raise. By the grace of God, we shall not sleep very unquietly.'

Historians who can make politics this interesting are rarer than you might think – Adamson is to be commended all the more that he maintains the great tension of his story (whose famous outcome even most historical neophytes already know), shifting from broad-view to the specific personal details he clearly enjoys so much:

with the two Houses locked in immovable stalemate, it was becoming clear that the struggle for supremacy within Parliament would be determined not inside, but outside the Palace of Westminster; above all, by what happened on London's streets. For those vying for power, violence and coercion had once again become an indispensable element of their political calculus.

When it came to control of the capital, Charles believed that he started with one pre-eminent advantage over his enemies: Sir Richard Gurney, the City's fussy, elderly, but devoutly royalist Lord Mayor …

And because The Noble Revolt is so long, the reader gets to experience not only the momentousness of this unprecedented struggle but all its peaks and valleys, all the moments when the whole contest seemed to teeter on the edge of mob violence, or sudden unexpected reconciliation. It's a prolonged, enormously complicated chess match between Charles I and the men in his three kingdoms who were gradually, almost unwillingly coming to realize that their efforts could have only one end result, and it certainly wasn't Charles living in comfortable exile somewhere near the Hague.

I admit it: I absolutely delight in massive histories like this one (and Sharpe's). I want a historian to do the gigantic amount of work necessary to make the past live again, the gigantic amount of work necessary to present the whole of their mammoth subject, not just the banner headlines. Adamson's 200 pages of end-notes amply demonstrate that he's just that kind of historian – they're practically worth the price of admission all by themselves. In them, we see the infinite care he took in his researches:

I use the term 'protege' in the relatively strict sense of someone who received the protection of a peer, whether formally a member of the nobleman's household or not. Thus, for example, Calybute Downinge was 'protected' by Warwick and allowed to reside for a time in his country seat, even though (so far as I have been able to establish) he was never formally one of the earl's household chaplains.

How I'd love to see volumes this vast on a whole shelf of vital historical subjects! Every time one surfaces (and two very promising examples are expected later in 2011), I dive into it with avid joy – not only because I'm an enthusiastic fan of historical writing, but also for the reason that started off this whole epic digression: I love losing myself in a good book.