Poetry Class!

Well, our Nine Lives (of the Poets) is over for now, and so many of you have emailed me that I thought a brief coda was in order. This series got three times the emails most Stevereads posts do - just as the Nine Lives (of the Composers) did last summer, so it's safe to say you can count on seeing more. And several of you have written to, ahem, politely suggest directions that 'more' might take! For what it's worth, I am aware that what was originally intended to be a feature spanning the ages got stuck in the long sixteenth century and just sort of wallowed there ... a slight failing to which I claim only the custom of the country: if we can't indulge ourselves on our own book-blogs, what has Western Civilization achieved, finally? Nevetheless, the lack shall be rectified! Contrary to the impression given this time around, my awareness of poetry extends all the way to the 21st century - and includes both genders - and with any luck, more of that will be expressed next time.

For now, thank you for all the emails, and what better grace-note on which to end our poetry-fest than another instalment of Poetry Class, featuring a work so new the ink is hardly dry on the page! I liked it, so of course I'm hoping you do too:

Very similar, very simile -

a smile, a gesture,  a mark on the air

to wave hello, goodbye, to throw a kiss

across the rainbow distances. "The word love,"

writes syphilitic Paul Gauguin, in his journal in Tahiti,

"I'd like to kick whoever invented it in the teeth."

Gauguin the realist in paradise, painting

cinnamon women in native floral outlines

in real two-dimension, beautiful flat faces.

Then the counterargument: Plato's homely metaphor

of how, in our first life, we were whole,

male and female, but cut in half

by gods no less fearful than Gauguin,

the way we cut eggs in half with a hair,

the eggs hard-boiled, the hair the thread of a tailor.

When is a thing not like another thing,

like the split sweet heart of an apple?

We're so filled with absence,

or as Yeats, after Porphyry, puts it,

the "honey of generation," no wonder we stand

in the street at night, half or wholly drunk, shouting.

That's called "Verisimilitude" and it's by Stanley Plumly, and I found it in the new Atlantic.

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Donne!

Our book today - the final instalment in this latest, surprisingly popular "Nine Lives" segment - is John Carey's elegant, humorous, and joyously insightful 1981 book John Donne: Life, Mind and Art. Donne can be about as difficult and abstruse a poet as ever put quill-pen to paper, and one unfortunate result of this has been that most of the books written about him have been at least equally difficult and ever so much less rewardingly abstruse. Born in 1572 to a prosperous London merchant family, Donne was a full-blooded courtier and man of action before he was a Doctor of Divinity, and although he himself came to draw a too-neat distinction between those two halves of his life - begging friends of "Dr. Donne" to forget they ever knew "Jack Donne" - they blended exuberantly in his work, as Carey is quick to point out in his study. He's also quick to locate faith - whether the Catholic faith into which he was born or the Protestant faith to which he converted - at the heart of Donne's story:

The disadvantage of being a Catholic in Elizabethan England are difficult to generalize about. On the one hand, as the careers of Donne's father and stepfather suggest, it was possible, if you were sufficiently circumspect or well-connected, to prosper. On the other hand, you might end up having your intestines torn out.

... and also at the heart of his psychology, by describing the mental aftershocks of growing up on such a knife-edge:

Donne's fastidious withdrawal from the great mass of English people is reflected, too, in the style of his poems. Superior, difficult, designed for circulation among a few kindred spirits, they make no concessions to the barbarous clods and half-wits he had the ill luck to be living among.

But the deepest pleasure of Carey's book comes in the way he continually grapples with this most problematic and rewarding of English poets (who's the subject of one of the single most intellectually thrilling essays Open Letters has ever published, which you can read here). Page after page is filled with happy discoveries:

He handles holy things so as to cauterize himself. Elaborate blasphemies are also incorporated into the love poems, as if it were not merely Catholicism but Christianity that Donne had to cure himself of. When he proclaims that his love can be expressed only by negatives, or compares the naked woman in 'Going to Bed' with 'soules unbodied', he is ingeniously perverting what St. Thomas in the Summa Theologica had written about God's nature and the joys of the blessed.

Carey is also excellent in his poem-by-poem defense of the man's genius. Take for example his comments about 'A Hymne to Christ at the Authors last going into Germany' a poem Donne wrote about accompanying Lord Doncaster on an official embassy from James I to the German princes. After noting that some scholars have criticized Donne's veracity (he was travelling in splendor and relative ease, not roughing it in an open boat), Carey is appropriately tart: "... we have only to read the poem," he tells us, "to see that Donne's self-dramatizing urge has produced something so fraught with power that it would be absurd to demand, in its stead, a more realistic estimate of the risks involved." What's going on here is far deeper:

Donne does not so much falsify as master reality, taking one or two fragments as his stage set, and discarding the rest. All the actual circumstances of the embassy are obliterated. The rich coachloads, and the ambassador to whose suite Donne was a relatively minor appendage, vanish without a trace. We are left with Donne looming tragic and solitary above a vessel which seems on the point of disappearing as well. ... The struggle between the ambitious careerist and the lofty scorner of the world's rewards is, in this poem, quite naked.

As in so much of Donne's verse, no matter how clear the ultimate victory in such a struggle might be, there's a pausing, darker note of ambiguity pulling at the strings of its pattern:

In what torne ship soever I embarke,

That ship shall be my embleme of thy Arke;

What sea soever swallow me, that flood

Shall be to mee an embleme of thy blood;

Though thou with clouds of anger do disguise

Thy face; yet through that maske I know those eyes,

Which, though they turn away sometimes,

They never will despise.

Seale then this bill of my Divorce to All

On whom those fainter beames of love did fall;

Marry those loves, which in youth scattered bee

On Fame, Wit, Hopes (false mistresses) to thee.

Churches are best for Prayer, that have least light:

To see God only, I goe out of sight:

And to scape stormy dayes, I chuse

An everlasting light.

Many straightforward biographies of Donne have been written (some more effective than others, as I've had occasion to learn over and over again), but to my mind, the best kind of such work will be something like what Carey does here, an aesthetic study that grounds itself in life-details, rather than a life-study that occasionally indulges in aesthetic digressions. Carey's approach works best in the end because that's the kind of life John Donne chose for himself in the end. It's certainly the only kind of life of himself he'd have been interested in reading - and it'll interest you too, without fail, so find a copy (mine, as you can see, is already spoken for).

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Jonson!

Our book today is Marchette Chute's warm and winning 1960 biography Ben Jonson of Westminster (which she dedicates, the dear thing, to the New York Public Library). Chute did similar books on Chaucer and Shakespeare, but her Jonson book is my favorite - and I'd be willing to bet it was her favorite too. Sometimes you can just tell from the spirited tenor of the writing that an author is enjoying herself especially well.

Certainly Jonson's life lends itself to that kind of enjoyment. Here is a man in full: he's not a ghost like Shakespeare, nor is he merely a few fugitive mentions in his own verses like Pindar. We cannot suspect him of being a suave court fop like Sidney, and he certainly couldn't possibly have been the thwarted sad-sack we wonder if Spenser was. Instead, he's everything rolled together that they separately were not: family man, branded felon, industrious man-of-work, fierce entrepreneur, and indomitable survivor.

Chute is alive to all these different sides of her subject, and one of the many charms of her book is how that very liveliness of her narrative spills over to include virtually every larger-than-life character she encounters - and almost all of them draw into some kind of parallel with Jonson, whom she clearly likes more than the rest of them put together:

Among Jonson's many acquaintances in London was Sir Walter Raleigh. It was almost inevitable that the two men should know each other, since Raleigh was not only a scholar and an omnivorous reader but was currently engaged on a book of so monumental a nature that he welcomed the assistance of every man of letters who knew anything about the subject.

Raleigh, like Jonson, was incapable of admitting defeat. He was not in his fifties and had been a prisoner in the Tower since 1603 on a charge of conspiracy. But he refused to admit that his mind could be in prison, and it would seem quite reasonable to him to embark on a history of the world, beginning with the Creation and continuing down through the ages.

Her admiration isn't blind, however: she's perfectly willing to relate Jonson's bad moods, enormous errors in judgement, and even the rare occasional critical slip-up:

Donne was one of the few writers for whom Jonson had a profound admiration. He regretted the obscurity of Donne's style, which he feared would make him unreadable in future generations, and he deplored his experimentation with rhythm. But he considered him "the first poet in the world in some things" and in spite of Jonson's independence as a writer he paid Donne the complement of sending him hi own work for criticism.

And what of that most famous of Jonson's contemporaries, that demm'd elusive Bard of Avon? Chute, obviously a first-rank Shakespeare fan, finds a way to like them both almost equally:

Unlike Shakespeare, Jonson could not accept things as they were and settle down to write for ordinary people. His theoretical temperament demanded an audience consisting of select and dedicated spirits, and of course he never found them. Instead, he did most of his work for a stupid, self-indulgent and greedy Court, and searched earnestly for the great men he felt must be in it somewhere.

The Ben Jonson who emerges from these pages is a big, three-dimensional person, a warm, living man of infinite contradictions and the unfailing willingness to confront those contradictions in his own verses, which ring with more plains-spoken truth than almost any other poetry I know of, partly because the author has no qualms about his own mutability:

Let me be what I am, as Vergil cold,

As Horace fat, or as Anacreon old ....

Who shall forbid me then in rime to be

As light and active as the youngest he?

In these benighted days, Marchette Chute's trio of popular biographies may well be out of print, but even so, I urge you to find and read them all - especially since all three subjects have now had the Stevereads seal of approval!

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Shakespeare!

Our book today is Katherine Duncan-Jones' roistering, clear-eyed Ungentle Shakespeare from 2001, which does the seeming impossible: takes the vast world of Shakespeare scholarship and pseudo-biography and distils it into a terse and crackling-good book that actually leaves even the least-Bardophile reader wanting more.

To put it mildly, we've come a long way from our complaints about the lack of biographies for Edmund Spenser. Shakespeare's case is the exact opposite: far, far too much gets written about him every fifteen minutes, all over the world. Thousands of critical studies of his works, thousands of anthologies of his plays and poems, thousands of biographies - thousands of biographies! When Spenser can't get even a couple, and when Harington, Chapman, and even Ben Jonson have to go scrounging. Hell, more biographies have been written about Edward deVere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, than have been written about Christopher Marlowe - solely on the basis of some theory that de Vere might have been Shakespeare (such theories also exist about Marlowe, of course, and virtually every other person who was alive in the 16th century). The glut is enormous - and it shows no sign of ending.

That glut is made all the more ironic because we know so little about Shakespeare's life. Oh, it's been fashionable for at least 70 years to say we know lots about his life, more than we know about any other Elizabethan playwright except Jonson - I've read that many times in many contexts, and it always baffles me. Even if we didn't have the overwhelming curiosity about every detail of Shakespeare's life that's naturally generated by our love of his works, we'd still find all the huge gaps in our knowledge frustrating; but we do have that love, so we do have that curiosity, which makes the little we know all the more frustrating.

It forces his biographers to serial feats of supposition, and in this Duncan-Jones can't be any different. Her guesses and theories are lively and fascinating - for instance, she wonders if Shakespeare might not have been acquainted with Sir Fulke Greville of Beauchamps Court, the father of the best friend of the famous poet Sidney:

The first steps of Shakespeare's route towards 'a fellowship in a cry of players' may have been taken during his training in declamatory and acting skills at Stratford Grammar School. He would have had opportunities to display those skills to large audiences in Whitsuntide plays in Stratford in the early 1580s. As a result of such seasonal performances, he perhaps came to the notice of Sir Fulke Greville of Beauchamps Court, and for a couple of years served him in some capacity, probably as a player, possibly also as a clerk or secretary. Greville was very closely allied to the Dudleys, and his large retinue would be a natural source of recruitment for his powerful friend Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. As a member of Leicester's Men for some time between 1584 and 1586, Shakespeare would have quickly showed his versatility both in writing and performing.

But you can hear all the 'would have's and 'might have's even in so short a passage, and they're everywhere in Ungentle Shakespeare, as they must be in any life of the Bard. Take a passage like this:

A possible order of events is as follows: Southampton gave Shakespeare a good reward for Lucrece - probably between 5 and 10 pounds - in April or May 1594. Not only was Shakespeare more handsomely rewarded for Lucrece than for Venus, the poem also reflected closer relations between the poet and the stylish young nobleman - perhaps ... including sexual relations. It may have been in 1594-5, and for Southampton, a reluctant bridegroom who eventually had to pay a large fine for refusing to marry Burghley's grand-daughter Elizabeth Vere, that early versions of sonnets 1-17 were written, of which Burghley would thoroughly approve.

There's hardly a pair of lines in that whole stretch that aren't educated guesses. We don't know what Shakespeare was paid for the two poems he dedicated to Southampton, or even that he was paid at all. We don't know if they ever even met, much less rogered each other on the Earl's damask cushions. We don't know the dates involved with any certainty, nor do we know if Lord Burghley ever knew the sonnets existed, much less read them with approval (or even commissioned them as some kind of procreative encouragement for Southampton). Duncan-Jones is forced to speculate on all of it, and despite how good she is at speculation, we should remind ourselves that most Shakespeare scholars would give back every dime they've ever made off publishing speculation if they could just have a couple of pages from a Pepys-style journal Shakespeare might have kept, or two or three paragraphs of reminiscences from people who knew him.

Or maybe even some funeral notices, which you'd expect to see if the most famous and popular playwright of the era died in the fullness of his age. The fact that no such notices exist has certainly fired the 'alternate' theories of every Shakespeare-didn't-do-it theorist of the so-called Authorship Question (since one glaring possibility why Shakespeare received no death-notices is because none of his colleagues thought he'd done anything to deserve them, being only a semi-literate malt-hoarder from Stratford-on-Avon), Again, there's only so much Duncan-Jones can do with such a gap, and in the end she resorts to a dodge so old even Jonson was a little ashamed to use it:

The unhappy circumstances of Shakespeare's death may have been widely known among his London friends. We know nothing of what ceremonies attache to his funeral in Stratford on 25 April. They perhaps accorded wth instructions given orally or in writing to John Hall, or else may have conformed to Hall's own austerely Protestant inclinations. There is no reason to think that patrons or fellow poets assembled to attach their tributes to his hearse. It is striking that there was no immediate rush of elegies or epitaphs from his friends, colleagues or admirers. Even what may be the earliest poetical tribute, a sonnet by William Basse, seems to have been written some time later, to judge by its retrospective subtitle 'he died in April 1616.' It may have taken several years for recollections and rumours of the unpleasant details of Shakespeare's end to fade, to be replaced by a return to what, after all, was the best of him: his writings.

So the central irony of the continuing boom in Shakespeare lives is undimmed: we get more and more books, as numberless as sands on the strand, about a man who is - and almost certainly always will be - little more than a ghost, while all his colleagues in the great enterprise of Elizabethan literature peep about to find themselves dishonorable graves. Still, if you only want to read one Shakespeare biography, my recommendation would be this one. It's lively as hell, and he would have liked that - maybe.

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Marlowe!

Our book today is John Bakeless' wonderful 1937 classic, Christopher Marlowe: The Man in His Time which stands in my mind as the best biography ever written of this much-biographied young man.

Oddly much-biographied. Marlowe cut a huge swath through the London literary scene of his day, true, but by the standards of the Elizabethan writing-market, he produced very little work, and he died before he was thirty. The oblivion of footnotes seems the more likely fate for such a figure than the bright measure of fame posthumous fame he's enjoyed instead, and the discrepancy can only be chalked up to spicey rumor and innuendo. Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564 and got his B.A. from Corpus Christi, Cambridge, despite being often enough missing from college that he needed a written excuse from Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council to graduate - and that waiver has led to four centuries of speculation as to what he did to earn it: 'begging and pleading with any family connection who'd listen' has never been romantic enough, so Marlowe has been given a Batman-style second career as an espionage agent in the employ of the implacable Thomas Walsingham.

From 1587 to 1593, his plays - Tamburlaine 1 & 2, The Jew of Malta, Edward II, Doctor Faustus, and Dido - were produced and rapturously attended and idolized (a fact reflected in the pamphlets of the day and funnily sent up in the movie "Shakespeare in Love"). They gave to English letters and the English stage something almost thoroughly new, a "mighty line" that buried its own subtleties in a tidal wave of primary-color images and devastatingly powerful verse. Even now, in all of Western literature, there's no experience quite like reading Marlowe for any stretch of pages - the room starts to spin, and all things begin to seem possible.

Marlowe's posthumous reputation has benefited immeasurably from two things that have nothing to do with his work: the first is the portrait found at Corpus Christi College in 1953 and forever afterward taken to be the image of Marlowe as a handsome, proud, wastrel college student - it looks just exactly as we want Marlowe the literary rebel to look - and the second is the manner of his death, not only young but violent: stabbed in the forehead in May of 1593 by Ingram Frizer, one of the three men with whom he'd spent the day at an inn in Deptford. As Charles Nicoll demonstrates in his brilliant book The Reckoning, all three of the men in that room with Marlowe had connections with Thomas Walsingham and his equally enigmatic brother Francis, and inferences have been rife ever since that Marlowe's death was state-sanctioned, or even state-ordered. The fact that we'll almost certainly never know the truth of the matter only adds to the spice.

One of the many charms of this book is that Bakeless, despite being a Harvard-educated egghead, is also an unapologetically opinionated crank who has a fiercely-researched and often openly-irritated take on every aspect of his young subject's life and world. Spice doesn't deter him (although his book is something of a product of its time, in that Marlowe's fondness for tobacco gets a lot more attention than his fondness for teenage boys), nor does controversy, nor does the prospect of seeming like a crackpot. As a result, his irritated asides are often more entertaining than the subjects that inspired them, as with this little digression on the shoddy printing standards of today:

Our modern abomination of cheap wood-pulp paper was unknown in those happy days, and consequently the fugitive pamphlets in which Marlowe's plays and poems appeared, cheap as they were, had to be printed on good rag paper, which has endured the centuries unharmed. If cheaper paper had existed the early printers would undoubtedly have used it for little books like these, which were not in their day regarded as especially valuable. Practically all of Elizabethan literature would have crumbled into a fine yellow powder not later than the middle of the seventeenth century, the only exceptions being stray lyrics preserved in the manuscript commonplace books and the fortunate poets who, like Shakespeare, appeared in expensive printed folios. Without the good rag paper that went to make these queer old books, most of the great Elizabethan writers and all the lesser ones would have remained mere names. On such mechanical accidents do reputations in literature depend.

But Bakeless does have a big soft spot, and it's right where it should be: he's very partial to his chosen subject. He sees Marlowe's work - the whole spectrum of it - with a clarity that's often muddled or missing from later biographers, and he's perfectly willing to address the flaws of that work, but always in the context of the general genius of the man:

Of the gentleness of Shakespeare's humour - that humour which, seeing folly and being diverted with it, yet keeps a certain tenderness and tolerance for the fool - Marlowe had none whatever. Humour for Marlowe did not represent a saving sense of proportion. Humour could never enable this fiery spirit to laugh at the evils and injustices surrounding it. That is why those evils and injustices so galled and fretted this impassionate soul, drove it to wild, perilous freedom and forbidden speculation, to a philosophy of revolt against the state, against morals, against God himself.

Despite the brevity and murkiness of his life, Marlowe's going to keep generating books, and some very good ones have appeared since Bakeless (Park Honan's in particular stands out in my mind). The statistics-crawling exercise known as "Shakespearean studies" has yielded a few more likely instances where the Bard was paying sly tribute to the greatest of his contemporaries, and of course sociological studies proceed apace. And it's worth remembering that despite the brilliance of Bakeless' treatment of Marlowe's plays, we'd still be studying this young man even if those plays didn't survive, on the basis of his strengths as a poet alone, strengths that, after all, earned him his place in this series (Nine Lives of the Dramatists being reserved for another date, naturally). So it's fitting we close with one of those poems, a bit from one of his taut, dancing translations of Ovid:

Rude man, 'tis vain thy damsel to commend

To keeper's trust: their wits should them defend.

Who, without fear, is chaste, is chaste in sooth:

Who, because means want, doeth not, she doth.

Though thou her body guard, her mind is stained:

Nor, lest she will, can any be restrained.

Nor canst by watching keep her mind from sin;

All being shut out, th' adulterer is within.

Who may offend, sins least; power to do ill

The fainting seeds of naughtiness doth kill.

Forbear to kindle vice by prohibition,

Sooner shall kindness gain thy will's fruition.

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Sidney!

Our book today was written quite some time ago: it's Fulke Greville's biographical sketch of his friend Philip Sidney. As every English major in the Western world once knew, Sidney died while fighting Spanish forces in the Netherlands in 1586 ("thy need is yet greater than mine" he reportedly told a fellow wounded man, handing him his water canteen) at the age of 32. Fulke Greville, his devoted friend since childhood ("Fulke Greville is a good boy" the boy Sidney scrawled in one of his friend's schoolroom copy-books), probably wrote his The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney around 1611 or 1612. On 1 September 1628, Greville - Lord Brooke by then, and fairly wealthy from a lifetime spent at court - was stabbed in the back by his servant, Ralph Haywood (who then killed himself), allegedly because Haywood was irritated that Greville hadn't mentioned him in his will. In 1652, Greville's Life of Sidney was finally printed.

Unlike the case of poor Spenser, the ensuing centuries have seen many, many excellent biographies of Sidney - they could hardly resist such a tempting subject, now could they? Sidney was everything a young courtier should be - well-educated, widely-travelled, well-spoken, much-respected, only picturesquely reckless, personally brave, artistically gifted, and physically beautiful. His father, Henry Sidney, had been much the same - plain-spoken, handsome in his youth, non-ostentatiously honest and as sharp as a well-wrought weathervane. Henry Sidney did much that deserves censure while pursuing the Tudor oppression of Ireland, but it was also he who held the shivering, pain-wracked Edward VI in his arms in the last hour of his life and, his rough lips touching the boy's brow, whispered "Rest now, dearest one; fine to rest now" - greater comfort than which no servant has ever given a king. Henry's son Philip never got a chance to grow into the hale middle-aged statesman and writer he would have become - but he dazzled all the same, dazzled like the sun for the time he had.

Greville was as dazzled as the rest, and his portrait of Sidney - an intensely, almost joyfully strange little book, as passionate and distractible as its author - unapologetically displays that fact:

Indeed he was a true model of Worth; a man fit for Conquest, Plantation, Reformation, or what Action soever is greatest, and hardest among men: Withall, such a lover of Mankind, and Goodness, and that whosoever had any real parts, in him found comfort, participation, and protection to the uttermost of his power ...

Perhaps some readers will take these tones of outright worship, link them with that business of old Lord Brooke being stabbed to death in a fit of pique by a manservant, perhaps mix in the many happy, laughing, sweaty days when Greville would join Sidney and the other lusty courtiers of Elizabeth's court in elaborate jousts and contests and pantomimes, and derive a picture, a reality, that has familiar names and taxonomies here in the 21st century. In the Elizabethan Age, open and strenuous protestations of friendship between men was the highest fashion, so such a picture might be too presumptuous - or too easy. Safer just to say Greville was completely devoted to his handsome friend - and that he received in return the passionate reciprocation Sidney (the son, just like the father) gave to everybody he found worthy. Certainly Greville could never really believe in a world where Sidney was so abruptly taken away - like most of Sidney's friends, he more or less refused to live in that world. "For my own part," he writes, "I observed, honoured, and loved him so much; as with what caution soever I have passed through my days hitherto among the living, yet in him I challenge a kind of freedom even among the dead."

At one point while his brief biography is thumping along, Greville pauses for the most unaffectedly touching line in his whole book. He's relating some anecdote from long ago when he stops and admits, "Besides, I do ingenuously confess, that it delights me to keep company with him, even after death."

Although he himself assesses Sidney's work with a severity of judgement we might not expect of an acolyte (to be fair, Sidney himself set the example in this, referring but casually to the ultimate worth of any of his own works), Greville has nothing but offhand scorn for those uncomprehending readers - "our four-eyed Criticks" - who might come along later. And come along they did, in their legions! They annotated his works, wrote his many biographies - and annotated Greville's biography. Our particular version of that biography today is the 1906 edition by Nowell Smith, whose work is superb - and whose assessment of the four-eyed Critick who came before him, Dr. Grossart, thunders with Edwardian excess:

Lovers of literature, who happen to have scholarly instincts and training, can never speak of enthusiastic antiquaries like Dr. Grossart without compunction. On the one hand they admire the generous expenditure of time and money which Dr. Grossart gave to his many 'labours of love.' On the other hand they can only look aghast at on the mass of inaccurate statements and worthless judgements which swell the undigested bulk of his editions. The gratitude which they are anxious to feel as they enter into the fruits of his labour is thwarted by the double labour which they have to expend in correcting his mistakes and verifying the rest of his statements.

As mentioned, many, many worthy biographies have appeared since this one. In recent years, the scholarly volume by Alan Stewart and the lively one by Katherine Duncan-Jones stand out as equally good and pleasantly different from each other, for instance. But there's something about Greville's haphazard devotion and lovable garrulity that take the palm for charm even in their fallibility. There's devotion here, as might be expected of a man who ordered that his grave's inscription read: "Fulke Greville, servant to Queen Elizabeth, conceller to King James, friend to Sir Philip Sidney."

No real doubt which of those he considered the greatest honor.

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Spenser!

Our book today is most likely called Edmund Spenser: A Life, and, as the hilarious critic-speak malapropism goes, it fills a much-needed void. It's a fully-researched, lustrously energetic, beautifully crafted (deckle edge, dozens of spot illustrations, flourished margins), and unapologetically literate full-dress biography of Edmund Spenser (1552?-1599), the great Elizabethan poet.

There's ample material for such a biography. Spenser was born in London and educated first at the Merchant Taylor's School (where the grants of money he received instilled in him both an appreciation for simple kindness and an appreciation of the material dimensions of humanism that he'd carry with him - in one problematic way or another - for the rest of his life) and at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he made the acquaintance not only of several of his future employers but also of Gabriel Harvey, the scholar and litterateur who first fanned Spenser's own literary gifts to life. Harvey was a bit prone to pomposity and had only mediocre literary talents himself (neither of these things was forgivable by a scalding wit like Nashe, but they don't in themselves condemn a man, after all - he was an oddity even by the standards of his very odd time, and he richly deserves a rattling good biography of his own), but the field of literature is forever in his debt, for giving us Spenser. The two collaborated on a series of public letters about the state of English poetry, and Harvey is the guiding animus in Spenser's first major work, The Shepheardes Calendar, which was published in 1579 to an acclaim - a kind of acclaim - no previous work in English had ever received. Instantly it was seen that an epoch had begun.(To be fair, Spenser considerably helped that perception along by 'annotating' his own poem-sequence under the pseudonym E. K.) It had been two centuries since Chaucer, and in that time England had come into her own as a country and an identity and had begun to yearn, Augustan Rome-style, for its own literature, for the sense that its own literature was possible.

The Shepheardes Calendar is dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney. In all likelihood, Spenser had met the younger poet-courtier the year before while serving briefly in the household of Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, who was Sidney's uncle. In 1580, Spenser went to Ireland as Secretary to Lord Grey De Wilton, who'd been appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland, and it was in Ireland that Spenser was to spend most of his time and make most of his fortune, eventually becoming master of Kilcolman, an estate in County Cork. It was in Ireland that he would meet and marry the lovely Elizabeth Boyle (and it's Elizabeth Boyle he would celebrate in his gorgeous Amoretti and Epithalamion), and it was from Ireland that he would always look with longing toward the court of Elizabeth I in London.

It was to flatter (and guardedly, fashionably chastise) this court that Spenser crafted the first three books of his masterpiece, The Faerie Queene, an extended allegory and a heartfelt act of homage to Spenser's beloved Chaucer. Our big, beautiful biography would owe a good part of its length to the fact that it would have to grapple with The Faerie Queene, a work that's longer than War and Peace (and Spenser, like Chaucer with his own masterpiece, planned for it to be four times as long) and more easily misunderstood than the Bible. It's safe to say The Faerie Queene is the single greatest work of English literature absolutely nobody reads anymore, and our biographer would not only have to explain why that is but also correct it - no mean feat.

Spenser travelled to London in 1589 (in the company of his County Cork neighbor, Sir Walter Ralegh) to present those first three books of The Faerie Queene to their exemplar, Queen Elizabeth I, and although she was appreciative (measuredly so - she never had the temperament for extended allegories - ironically enough, considering the fact that she fashioned her entire life into one) and pledged Spenser a fairly decent pension, her chief councillor, Lord Burghley, disliked the poet and successfully scuppered his future at court. Spenser returned to Ireland, married, and kept writing. By 1596 he had a gigantic amount of new work done, including the next three books of The Faerie Queene and a bit of literary payback for Burghley in Mother Hubberds Tale. There was a great deal of verse besides this, and copious letters, and a pile of Irish documents (indeed, a vast amount of good work on Spenser awaits our biographer in Ireland alone) - our poet was a busy man, a contented man who was nevertheless convinced he was not as happy as he would have been living a different life, a glorious courtier's life like the one being enacted by his friend Sidney. Our biography will necessarily deal with the ugly sin of ambition.

In 1598 it all came crashing down. Tyrone's rebellion reached Spenser's castle, ransacked and burned it, and Spenser fled, eventually all the way to London, to the tender mercies of the court that had spurned him. Our present biography will perforce have much to say on the subject of the English occupation of Ireland and Spenser's place in that story. The poet's A View of the Present State of Ireland is by any reckoning a vile and provoking document (it was published posthumously), and our biographer will need to take account of it - the more arresting and original the account, the better.

Spenser died in London in 1599 - 'for lack of bread,' as Ben Jonson famously lied.  He was buried in Westminster Abbey (hard by Chaucer, fittingly enough), and his fellow poets tossed verses and pens into the grave before it was closed.

They hailed Spenser as "the Prince of Poets" (our biographer at the last minute will very wisely choose not to make that the title of the biography), and that praise only grew stronger in the following decades and centuries. Dryden ranked his pastorals among the finest of their kind ever written, and Pope echoed and amplified that verdict. In 1875 the great, much-missed James Russell Lowell wrote a typically learned and magisterial essay on Spenser, according him that highest of all Boston Brahmin compliments, being capable:

We can trace in Spenser's poems the gradual growth of his taste through experiment and failure to that assured self-confidence which indicates that he had at length found out the true bent of his genius , - that happiest of discoveries (and not so easy as it might seem) which puts a man in undisturbed possession of his own individuality.

"Before his time," Lowell writes, "the boundary between poetry and prose had not been clearly defined. His great merit lies not only in the ideal treatment with which he glorified common things and gilded them with a ray of enthusiasm, but far more in the ideal point of view which he first revealed to his countrymen." "His natural tendency," Lowell continues, "is to shun whatever is sharp and abrupt. He loves to prolong emotion, and lingers in his honeyed sensations like a bee in the translucent cup of a lily."

Our biographer would also be well advised to study the 1909 essay on Spenser by J. W. Mackail, who sets a stern warning early in the piece:

The fatal tendency of classicism is to see life through books, and to take it at second hand. Its natural instinct is to copy, and in doing so, to copy the inferior classics, who are more copiable, and then to go on copying itself.

Mackail strikes a generally elegiac tone throughout his essay:

Thus Spenser, like so many other great poets, represents the late splendour of a descending and fast disappearing tradition. The realm in which he was so great an innovator, so wide an explorer and conqueror, was even before his death passing into other hands.

But even so, Mackail is heartfelt in his praise, as discusses the Epithalamion: "For sustained beauty of execution, for melodiousness in which the most melodious of English poets excels even his own standard, for richness of ornament that stops just short of excess, and does not either blur the outline or clog the movement, it easily takes the first place, not only among Spenser's own lyrics, but among all English odes."

Edmund Spenser: A Life will draw on a vast array of sources, including many previously either unknown or underexamined; it will make such spirited and sharp-minded use of the vast corpus of Elizabethan literature that readers will feel as though they're sitting in the very taverns and ale houses, listening to a mighty new age shape its literary responses to itself. But the book won't owe its enormous general popularity and critical praise to its research, nor to its extensive bibliography, no - this book will be bought and read and talked about and treasured and revered and reprinted because it will have that perfect combination of acumen and dramatic assurance that so few biographies managed to achieve. It will go on the same shelf as Caro's The Power Broker or Bate's Samuel Johnson or Milford's Zelda or Bainton's Here I Stand - a great biography of its subject, yes, but also a great book in its own right.

Edmund Spenser: A Life hasn't been written yet. I've been waiting patiently for a very long time, and I'll continue waiting. Anybody out there who's game for giving it a try has my enthusiastic encouragement.

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Chaucer!

[caption id="attachment_2405" align="alignleft" width="225" caption="not my copy - a lovely image I found online"][/caption]

Our book today is John Gardner's 1977 The Life and Times of Chaucer, the savory, spirited foray into biography by an author I consider to be one of the 20th century's greatest American novelists. Gardner is currently languishing in obscurity (except for Grendel, one of the only novels he wrote that's short enough to appeal to high school students and their teachers, and also a book fortuitously positioned to complement any teaching of 'Beowulf'), and that's a shame - he's responsible for one of the strongest and most interesting bodies of work in contemporary letters. In addition to his novels - each one of which received lavish, even obsessive, amounts of care and attention before it was even sent to the author's little coterie of 'first readers' - and which all contain more erudition, allusions, and just plain fooling around than are ever likely to be fully annotated - he also wrote lots of nonfiction. He wrote copious book reviews on deadline for ready money, and although he used to comment that his reviews were all raw reactions, not really considered assessments, a reading of the pieces in question (not so easy a thing to do, considering that they've never been collected in a book) disproves such modesty. He wrote longer essays and 'think pieces' for the those journals willing to wait for them. He wrote two great, rabble-rousing books on the art and craft of writing books (he held the view - unfashionable when he wrote it forty years ago and utterly unspeakable now - that novels should do more than wallow in knee-jerk cynicism and trenchcoat pornography, that they should attempt to grapple with ideas and ideals, most of all that they should aspire). He wrote an epic poem, God bless him. And he wrote this life of his beloved Chaucer.

And it caused a brief, forgotten controversy. A thoughtful writer caught many echoes in The Life and Times of Chaucer - echoes of earlier lives of the poet, echoes of earlier histories of the period, and that thoughtful writer made some diplomatic comments about fast-looming deadlines and inattentive line-editing. Then a few months later a thoughtless writer took those echoes and ran with them - making accusations of full-blown plagiarism, stopping just short of demanding the author's head on a pike outside the Tower of London, preferably with his face turned away from the direction of Iowa City.

Since there was nothing substantial in the accusations, nothing substantial came of them - Gardner's life of Chaucer has been reprinted a few times since it first appeared, and perhaps the full details of the incident will come to light when the first full-length scholarly biography of the man is finally written (a major publisher doing a pretty reprint-set of all his works would certainly go a long way toward reviving interest in that long-dormant biography). And in the meantime, the work defends itself.

This was never going to be a customary scholarly biography, as Gardner himself confesses at every opportunity throughout the book. But neither is it an unanchored flight of fantasy - a lifetime of reading and teaching Chaucer tilled the ground for this text, and several intensive months of research put solid bones underneath its flesh.

But this is still a novelist writing biography, and it shows, wonderfully. At every stage of Chaucer's life and times, Gardner dutifully lays out the facts as we know them (in pre-Internet days, 20 well-chosen books in your study would give you all those facts; what you subsequently did with them was up to you) - but then he's always compelled to sniff around those facts for the stories at which they sometimes only hint. He has that compulsion in common with other novelists turned 'amateur' historians (Louis Auchincloss' book on the court of Queen Victoria comes to mind, as does Nancy Mitford's book on Frederick the Great), and many a professional, accredited historian has profited from imitating it. It's an impulse as old as Herodotus, and it does Gardner a lot of credit even when he's enlisting it in the causes of some very, very bad people. His novels are full of sympathy for seedy underdogs, and that misguided humanity creeps into his biography as well, as when he tries his best to like Edward III's lying, thieving, thoroughly evil son Prince Lionel, one of the worst oppressors of Ireland in that island's oft-oppressed history:

When Chaucer first knew him, Prince Lionel had not yet left for Ireland. He was a mother's boy, certainly, though not necessarily in an ugly sense. He had no overwhelming love of athletics, but he was proud of his older brother, the Black Prince (King Edward's family, even in times of disagreement, was close), and in many respects Prince Lionel aped his elder brother: the extravagant dress, the arrogance, the flirtations, Lionel was shy, more comfortable with his mother and her intellectual friends than with his heroic father - more sure of his ground when talking about poetry or painting than when talking about war. He was a depressive, an evader. He ate too much, drank too much, avoided responsibility by humor or deep glooms. What Chaucer thought of him is impossible to say, except for this: he was loyal to King Edward's family all his life, as they were, for the most part, to each other (as all the chronicles remark). Whether or not Chaucer liked Prince Lionel, the problem is that like Queen Philippa, he could easily excuse him.

Likewise he does his best to exercise a novelist's power of understanding (in all of 20th century American fiction, I don't think there's a more understanding writer than Gardner - he used to sit in his chair and work at just that faculty, until it was as sharp as a paring knife) when trying to explain the phenomenon of Alice Perrers, the buck-toothed, stringy-haired, monstrously selfish, utterly deplorable mistress who played Grima Wormtongue to Edward's Theoden for the last decade of his life. Gardner isn't so chivalrous that he can make himself ignore what a miserable blot on humanity she was, but he can't help himself - he can't let it go at that:

And in any case, her freedom was limited: she loved her husband, as royal mistresses seem frequently to have done; yet, as any medieval subject should have done, she returned the king's love and did everything in her power to make him happy. To Chaucer, in short, she was a study for art - a brilliantly entertaining wit, a good, gentle woman, a thief, a harlot; she was, as a child of the poet's own merchant class, an astonishing success, and at the same time a woman dissatisfied, as firmly locked out of the aristocracy as Chaucer was himself - a kind of pet, a failure. Chaucer watched, forgiving and fascinated, hands behind his back, prepared to trade lightning fast puns with Dame Alice, discuss biblical exegesis or astronomy or, if she liked, perform some recent poem for the dazzling company she'd assembled for King Edward's amusement.

And his book is balanced with equally great pen-portraits of good people too - of course most of all our good poet, who rose to prominence in Edward's court, conducted a busy life of official duties, and forced himself, in long sleepless hours late at night, to bequeath to posterity some of the finest, most enjoyable poetry in the English language. Like Horace (but unlike Shakespeare and Milton, the two titans who were to follow), Chaucer thinks it natural to give his readers plenty of himself the man mixed in with his verses - we read him and see him, pouring over his books by the late-night taper, hurrying to appointments with the mighty, slyly provoking the laughter of powerful ladies at court. This portrait of Chaucer - a portrait as far beyond scurrying accusations of factual plagiarism as Heaven is beyond the reach of a cathedral spire - is Gardner's great gift to his readers, and it culminates in his singing final paragraph, a little gem of prose I'm fond of quoting:

When he finished he handed the quill to Lewis. He could see the boy's features clearly now, could see everything clearly, his "whole soul in his eyes" - another line out of some old poem, he thought sadly, and then, ironically, more sadly yet, "Farewell my bok and my devocioun!" Then in panic he realized, but only for an instant, that he was dead, falling violently toward Christ.

I long for the day when I'll read those words in a nice hefty Library of America volume - perhaps one

[caption id="attachment_2407" align="alignright" width="300" caption="lucy reading my copy"][/caption]

big volume for nonfiction, one big volume for the longer, major novels (and that epic poem), and one big volume for Grendel and the two writing-books. Maybe one day I'll see that volume - after all, Philip Roth's juvenilia has got to run out eventually, right?

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Horace!

Our book today is Archibald Campbell's big fat dense opinionated 1924 volume Horace, which is, pound for pound, my favorite book on Quintus Horatius Flaccus, that most beloved and approachable of Roman poets. So approachable, in fact, that Campbell's book had to win its spot in my heart against some incredibly fierce competition: there have been thousands of good books written about Horace in the last three hundred years, arguing over every single possible aspect of the poet and his work - from the details of his life to the order of his poems to his influence on every poet who's come after him.  W. Y. Sellar, Gil Highet, D.R. Shackleton Bailey, Eduard Fraenkel ... the list of first-rate scholars, writers, and popularizers who've taken Horace as their subject is very long. Campbell himself is alive to this fact (he himself was writing in Sellar's shadow) and fills his donnishly chatty book with reasons why Horace would enjoy such an appeal:

He is certainly a great artist; the purest Roman literature can show us, Virgil having more of genius and inequality. Horace has indeed, as I have remarked already, a strictly limited array of themes; though all are good ones. He has even, if my analysis of his form is not most grossly out - he has even, in by far the greater portion of his maturest and most characteristic work, but one single type of poem! Yet not even by his own custom can his infinite variety be staled. It is what he does that tells, and he hardly ever does the same thing twice. His subjects he repeats innumerably, he almost never repeats himself. What the ancients cared about in poetry was two things: the soul of the poem, and its body; the structure, and the surface; the composition, and the style. His treatment is always unique, his language always individual. He takes over all the conventions that were available for him; but he used them for his own ends; they are but a medium for his meaning. He cannot be translated; metre and language are fused into his work; the effect cannot be extricated from them.

But many writers sing Horace's praises - the fact that Campbell does that isn't the only reason I go back to his book over and over. No, the rest of the reasons are harder to pin down. I like the fact, for instance, that he under-estimates Horace ("Horace's poetry is good for this age; but not sufficient"), as so many scholars tend to do - it makes both him and Horace seem more human; I like the fact that he seems to have discovered the semi-colon about ten minutes before his book went to the printers and over-uses it like a child running wild on Christmas morning; I like the fact that his book is unapologetically soup-to-nuts, giving us Horace's life and times, a complete overview of poetry's place in the ancient world (an excursus he actually tells readers they can skip if they like! Let's hope none of them did!), and a full explication of everything Horace wrote; and I like the old-world certainty with which Campbell assumes his readers already know their Horace. That last one is a pleasure rapidly vanishing from the world of classical studies, if it isn't entirely vanished already: the assumption of classical knowledge on the part of the reader. Writers who make such an assumption might occasionally paraphrase things in French, but they'll feel no obligation to translate anything older:

We see, then, that the standpoint vulgarly known as classical is that which Horace is opposing; and more explicit proof soon follows. Horace, too, in his turn, appeals to the Greeks; but he uses the appeal of antiquity in the right way. In language which ought never to be forgotten he tells his generation that the great classics were in their own day great innovators:

quod si tam Graecis novitas invisa fuisset

quam nobis, quid nunc esset vetus?

That is unanswerable.

The same is true for Campbell's anecdotes (believe it or not - and in the context of the rest of this entry, how on Earth could you? - he's actually quite a funny writer, happily willing to tweak the noses of snobs and dilettantes alike), which gain their maximum punch through the fact that our author doesn't feel the need to stop and annotate them:

There is not getting over the fact that, as Pindar pointed out, Typhon does not like music; and people who do not care for music are generally, I think, not fond of Horace's Odes.

I'm not sure there are 100 readers left in the world today who would smile, as I did, at that reference - who would nod upon seeing it and then keep reading. Probably not everybody in Horace's own reading public got such a reference, but the audience he had always in his mind while he wrote understood him perfectly - or so he hoped.

Campbell goes over every single line of Horace with minute and comprehensive attention, and that, too, is refreshing. Sometimes the raw work of scholarship happening right in front of you is the perfect anecdote for an afternoon spent re-writing textbooks for schoolchildren. As noted, other studies of Horace have come and gone since this one was published ninety years ago, but work and thought and spirit like this are evergreen, or should be.

Nine Lives (of the Poets): Pindar!

Our book today is Anne Pippin Burnett's 2008 entry in the great Bristol Classical Press "Ancients in Action" series, Pindar. As might be guessed, the book deals with the Theban poet Pindar, who achieved massive success in the first half of the 5th century BC. A great many books have been written about Pindar, and as Burnett points out, a great many verdicts about Pindar have been handed down by scholars, historians, and especially other poets. He's always been more discussed than known, due at least in part to how difficult it is to know him.

Part of the problem is that we know so little about him. In the centuries since his heyday, biographical accretions have crusted around his name, but very few actual facts have come down to us, and most of those can only be derived from his verses themselves (always a perilous attempt). We know he was a master of virtually every kind of public poetry in existence in his day. His fame eventually reached a point where commissions were coming in from all directions, from Thessaly and North Africa and Sicily and all of Greece. He wrote great choral odes for public occasions like temple dedications; he wrote virginal hymns designed for virtuoso solo vocals; he wrote laments, in which pure, non-bathetic sadness was wrought like fine-spun gold until the purity of it was almost unbearable; he wrote lover-songs, praise-works often done in multiple, mutually complexifying voices ... he had, in other words, a vast repertoire of work, much of it designed to encourage improvisation, much of it as polychromatic as jazz.

He also wrote hymns of praise for victorious athletes - for boys back from local or inter-city games, for men back from pan-Hellenic great games and festivals, for various rulers, celebrating their rules by holding a mirror to some corresponding physical glories. These would have been works for hire, as Burnett takes pains to make clear:

Every Pindaric ode was a bought product. Distinguished achievements were paid a 'wage' of praise, and he who made that praise likewise received a wage, as Pindar was more than willing to note. One group of singers suggested that their Muse's 'whispering songs, faces painted with silver', went out as prostitutes into the world where 'money makes the man' (Isthmian 2.6-11.) This was said in an ode made for an old acquaintance from Akragas ... who presumably delighted in the savoury metaphor, but the sense is generally applicable, for the victory performance was designed to provide a client with exactly the pleasures he wanted.

It's permissible to suspect that bought products may not have elicited the poet's highest and mightiest achievements; any study of Pindar must in part be a longing to have more of his work than we do. What were those other kinds of poetries like, when handled by this master from Thebes? Barring some miraculous discovery in some dusty basement of some Coptic monastery, we'll never know except in fragments - the vast majority of what we have from him, and about him, comes in the form of these bought products, these written remnants of an institutionalized kind of performance poetry that all subsequent ages have found very strange - alien, off-putting. These victory-odes, most of them, were intended to be performed as if they were extemporized - a group of the victor's young friends, maybe a little flushed with wine, bursting into vivid, rambling song in celebration of him. But how can spontaneity be so carefully planned, so metrically perfect? How can fraternal intimacy be achieved by a group of young hired singers, most of whom will never have clapped eyes on the victor before? It all requires a phenomenal amount of imaginative participation from the audience. Ancient Greek audiences were always willing to do that, but more phlegmatic modern ones seldom are. In a tradition started by Petrarch and so indelibly stamped by Wordsworth, Pindar can't help but seem incredibly odd.

Aristophanes and Horace politely disparaged him; Dryden and Tennyson grudgingly admitted that something poetic was going on in the victory odes but grumbled at the work necessary to unearth it; T. S. Eliot, in one of the 20th century's most noted instances of a pot calling a kettle black, called him "the prize wind-bag of all ages." We sense his consummate skill, but it's such a foreign skill we're often left, as Dryden put it, "at a gaze." It can lead to wayward interpretations, and throughout her slim book, Burnett does what she can to correct the ones she catches, as when she runs up against a common misreading of the 7th Nemean ode, in which an invocation of Achilles' lethal warrior-son Neoptolemus crops up at the conclusion of a victory-song to a young athlete named Sogenes:

Ignoring the magnificence of the hero's final resting place, critics of the present day see this episode as a deliberate outrage that Pindar has wrought, for one reason or another, upon his own victory song. Neoptolemos, they say, was the Greeks' first great war-criminal, guilty of sacrilegious cruelty at the fall of Troy, and justly punished for his atrocities by the god Apollo. Consequently he can have no function in the praise of young Sogenes, and must appear here because the poet is pursuing some misplaced purpose of his own. This view, however, while it honours the gossip of Hellenic scholars, forgets the perfect warrior and ideal son that Odysseus describes in the Odyssey (11.505-37). What is worse, it further ignores the dynamic of Pindar's actual song and also the fact that, to be preserved, the piece must have pleased Thearion, the host and father who set this performance before his friends for their entertainment.

We will likely never read anything close to the full range of this poet, and we're equally unlikely to come across any firmer biographical basis than we already have. What we have instead is perhaps more pure: the man's work, and dynamic examinations of that work by scholars like Burnett, who chooses to use a prose style that's direct and evocative:

A layer of the population not only admired, but also scrutinised itself through private rituals of this sort, saying, this is what we are - let us continue to be so! Such was the function of the traditional ode with its invocations, its lists of victory locations, its revival of ancestral achievements, its prayers, and its bits of gnomic wisdom sprinkled everywhere like salt.

There's gnomic wisdom aplenty in this book as well, as fine an introduction to this enigmatic poet as a modern reader can hope for. Granted, an almost totally unknown life is an off-kilter place to start a string of biographies, but there's an appeal, too, in taking a person on the strength of his work alone. We've been doing that with Homer even longer than we've been doing it with Pindar, and it hasn't hurt him any.

Kings, Princes, and Emperors in the Penny Press!

The mighty Colin Burrow could hardly fail to grab my attention in the latest London Review of Books, since the scamp chose to start his review of the new Yale edition of Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets with this choice little gem: "Most literary criticism is ephemeral, too good for wrapping up the chips but not worth binding, keeping, annotating or editing."

I tried to resist the urge to race over to Open Letters Monthly and reassure myself that it hasn't been quite as bad as all that for the last four years - instead, I plunged forward with Burrow's own exercise in the journalistic version of lit crit, his wonderful article, which has precisely one paragraph on that poor Yale volume and two glorious pages on Johnson's glorious book (which I'll get around to here on Stevereads one of these fine days, and which I urge all of you to take down from your shelves and re-read). Burrow is a mere stripling in years, but his prose uniformly sparkles with great, knowing lines like this one:

When Johnson has nothing to say in the literary-critical section of a life he will accuse and author of overusing triplets or Alexandrines, or of being merely pretty. He sometimes delivers the squelch complete, as when he says of the unfortunate George Granville: 'His little pieces are seldom either spritely or elegant, either keen or weighty. They are trifles written by idleness and published by vanity.'

I hooted with laughter and had to resist by sheer will-power the urge to rename this blog "The Squelch Complete."

A fairly good example of "The Squelch Complete" is delivered by the redoubtable Mary Beard over in the TLS (it's been a very good fortnight for Burrow's chips-wrappings), where she sinks her teeth into a new biography of the Roman emperor Elagabalus, a Cambridge University Press volume by Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado (names that beautiful just aren't fair, says a Donoghue of 100 generations of boring old Donoghue). It's always a joy to watch Beard at work, although perhaps Arrizabalaga y Prado isn't doing any jigs after this rather public spanking. An entire little universe of mythology has sprung up about Elagabalus in the seventeen or so centuries since he briefly rule the Empire - so much so that he seems far more comfortably the province of fiction than fact (Beard doesn't mention the entertaining 1966 novel about him called Child of the Sun, although I cheered when she alluded to Alfred Duggan's 1963 novel Family Favourites). Arrizabalaga y Prado attempts to cut away all that mythology and get at the boy himself, but apparently his methodology leaves something to be desired ('apparently' because Cambridge has been a bit laggardly in sending me a copy of the book, the caitiffs), since Beard ultimately concludes "... a sceptical historian who cannot sustain his scepticism is even worse than one who was gullible all along."

Scepticism might be the order of the day over in the new issue of Vanity Fair, although it's a corker of an issue just the same. Readers might be forgiven for being sceptical when cover-boy and rancid tobacco addict Robert Pattinson bemoans his fame to interviewer Nancy Jo Sales - except that he seems every bit as aware of the inanity as anybody else would be. "Yeah," he says, "but every time you read about someone famous talking about being famous, you're like, 'Shut the fuck up.'" Sales is a really good writer, but nevertheless, her piece provokes scepticism on many levels. She asserts more than once that Pattinson is a "thinking man," a 'thoughtful' person - but he comes across as just another pretty moron in a ridiculous hat; she portrays him as a sensitive fellow, but the whole time he's being interviewed, his dog is apparently fighting for his life just outside the door; and scepticism is just one of the many unsavoury responses provoked by that weird Annie Leibovitz cover.

Fortunately, the issue wasn't relying solely on this smelly kid's celebrity. There's a spirited, chatty look at the Middletons, who are soon to be the in-laws of the heir presumptive to the British monarchy, and there's a moving little excerpt from Christina Haag's surprisingly heartfelt new book about her time dating John F. Kennedy Jr. - the book, Come to the Edge, is a beautiful little testament to the weird draw the Kennedys could always exert on those they allowed to get close to them; it's pretty much exactly the kind of thing the family patriarchs - Jackie Onassis and Senator Ted Kennedy - would have privately frowned upon, but I'm glad for it just the same; and it certainly helps that Haag has such a vivid, entirely honest prose voice.

And quite apart from all these kinds of royalty - British, American, critical, literary, and vampiritic - VF also had a two-page ad I've seen in other magazines and like immensely .... an about magazines.  In this one, there's a picture of a wide-eyed tree-frog (who bears more than a passing resemblance to Pattison, now that I think about it) and a block of text that's as defiant as it is cheering:

Media continue to proliferate. Attention spans continue to shrink. And free content is available everywhere, from the Internet to the insides of elevators. Why then are 93% of American adults still so attached to magazines? Why do so many people, young and old, spend so much time with a medium that's paper and ink, a medium you actually have to pay for in order to read? In a word, engagement. Reading a magazine remains a uniquely intimate and immersive experience. Not only is magazine readership up, readers spend an average of 43 minutes per issue.

Any lover of books will take issue with that 'uniquely,' but still: I like reading such a battle-cry, because I'd hate to live in a world without magazines - and what would our too-infrequent In the Penny Press do without them?

Poetry Class!

You sleep with a dream of summer weather,

wake to the thrum of rain - roped down by rain.

Nothing out there but drop-heavy feathers of grass

and rainy air. The plastic table on the terrace

has shed three legs on its way to the garden fence.

The mountains have had the sense to disappear.

It's the Celtic temperament - wind, then torrents, then remorse.

Glory rising like a curtain over distant water.

Old stonehouse, having steered us through the dark,

docks in a pool of shadows all its own.

That widening crack in the gloom is like good luck.

Luck, which neither you nor tomorrow can depend on.

- Drench, by Anne Stevenson

Queen Catherine! (no, not that one)(no, not that one either)

Our two books today are historical novels dealing with the same figure: Catherine Parr, the staid, prudish hickory stick who was the last wife of Henry VIII. Readers who have a nodding familiarity with Tudor history will likely be more familiar with any of the five wives who preceded this one - there's the Rightful Queen, the Witch, the Mother of the Heir, the Dearest Sister, and the Slutty Girl - but by the time most people get to Catherine Parr, the whole point of keeping up with all the wives seems vitiated. What difference does it make what Catherine Parr was like, after all, if the whole gaudy show of it now moves to young Edward VI, and then on to Mary I, and then to Elizabeth I?

Blind spots like that are cat-nip to historical novelists. These writers correctly divine that often the most interesting things happen outside the bright spotlight of history - the key to effective historical fiction is to step just far enough outside that spotlight to let those interesting human details creep in but not so far outside that spotlight that you leave your readers groping around in the dark for something interesting. Set the entire story of Wolf Hall in the murky boyhood of Thomas Cromwell and you lose the background electricity of his interactions with the Tudor court. Set the climax to Gone with the Wind in the 1840s and you might have a pretty good book, but it wouldn't glow with the light of burning Southern plantations.

So writing about Catherine Parr can be tricky. Historian Carolly Erickson takes perhaps the safer route in her 2006 novel The Last Wife of Henry VIII by using as its setting the whole of that lady's life, the better to give us all the drama of that life's intersection with last dying embers of Henry VIII's insane personal life. Erickson's book is extremely good (a bit ironic that both she and fellow historian Alison Weir have done their best recent work in fiction), and the Catherine she gives us might be a bit stiff and a bit haughty, but she ends up being all the more real for it:

"Ah, so pale," said the sleek, moustachioed Duke of Najera as he took my hand to kiss. "I trust your majesty is not in poor health."

"I confess that I am in indifferent health, milord duke," was my response. ...

"May we hope that this indisposition betokens the arrival of an heir?" His tone was polite and his words formal, but the question was overly bold, even rude. He presumed too much. Just because he was the emissary of the Emperor Charles V, and charged with a very important mission to our court, he imagined that he could ask me bold questions and ignore the ordinary rules of courtesy.

"Milord, you forget yourself," said my friend and lady-in-waiting Kate Brandon, coming to my rescue. "The queen's health is a matter of state and cannot be talked of lightly."

A far riskier strategy is adopted by Susannah Dunn in her spectacularly good 2008 novel The Sixth Wife (not to be confused with the Jean Plaidy novel of the same title - and, um, about the same subject)(don't even get me started on the subject of incomprehensible choices in book-titles...): in that work, Katherine (so Dunn styles her) Parr is neither in power or the teller of her own story - the latter task falls to that same Kate Brandon, here given magnificent life and voice by Dunn as the novel's narrator. The book focuses on the stunning immediate aftermath of Henry VIII's death, when his still-young widow stunned the court and the whole country by quickly marrying Thomas Seymour, brother to the realm's new Lord Protector - and brother too to the mother of the realm's new king, young Edward. Thomas Seymour had a feckless, headlong quality about him that seemed drastically at odds with Parr's slightly beady-eyed calm; he seemed the very last person she might marry, let along marry impulsively. Again, catnip for historical novelists, most of whom (including Erickson) have assumed that the turn of events can only be explained if Seymour and Parr had been in love - and perhaps lovers - long before Henry took a liking to his prospective new queen.

Dunn (whose work I've praised before) skirts making such an easy, explicit explanation in favor of what is clearly one of her focal points as a novelist: the unpredictable, twisty ways of human emotions. Shortly after her Kate Parr reveals her marriage to Kate Brandon, the two of them go out riding, and when the former queen gallops away, Kate is left to wrestle with the whole mystery:

"He makes me laugh," Kate yelled of Thomas as she thundered away from me.

I didn't come back at her with, Yes, but my dog makes me laugh and I haven't married him, have I.

Nor, Yes, but I make you laugh.

People underestimated Kate in one respect: kind but serious, was a lot of people's opinion of her. Maybe it was as simple as that, it occurred to me as I trailed in her wake: maybe Thomas Seymour truly appreciates her.

Yes, but why marry him, and so soon?

Well, that was quite simple, too, in the end, it seemed. He'd asked her, she told me later. Marry me, he'd said: that's what she told me. Marry me, marry me, marry me: he'd said it a lot. So that it seemed less and less ridiculous, presumably. Why not? he said. I've been away for years and you've been - well, you haven't had an easy time of it for years, for your whole life, in fact, so ... and then that smile of his.

Dunn's book is the wiser book of the two emotionally, but it's a decidedly 20th century wisdom. Erickson's book is a more conventional historical novel (you'll find no 'milady's in Dunn's period fiction) but succumbs at times to the lure of the scenery. Many of the same characters come and go through these pages, and it's fun to see how differently the two authors portray them - including the young Princess Elizabeth, who's a monstrous enigma in Dunn and an enigmatic monster in Erickson. The exception seems to be Edward Seymour's wife Anne Stanhope, who's hated equally by both our authors - automatically making me wonder if somebody's out there right this moment penning a Tudor historical novel in which a thoroughly sympathetic Anne stars as the oft-misunderstood heroine. I'll keep an eye out at the Boston Public Library for The Lord Protector's Wife.

The Lure of the Pond!

Our book today is Wallace Kirkland's lovely 1969 meditation The Lure of the Pond, which is sparsely but beautifully illustrated by Eugene Karlin and tells the story - in a string of twenty self-contained, poetic chapters - of Kirkland's various encounters with a pond in Wisconsin;

A narrow, winding road led up through a forest of naked trees disrobed by frost, and out upon a clearing. The land sloped gently downward to an abandoned cabin under a large poplar tree. Beyond it was a pond, winter-locked in ice. The brilliant midday sunlight of early March sparkled on a fresh fall of snow. In the distance was a wide expanse of marsh in which were whitened trunks of trees long dead. The left bank of the pond was once a cultivated field. Sumac and wild blackberry bushes now covered it. Along the right side was a tangled growth of willow and swamp maple trees.

An opening paragraph like that one instills a feeling of sweet peace in the reader - not only because the scene described is itself peaceful, but because we can hear the author's quiet authority, and it's reassuring. Kirkland was a photographer for Life magazine for 25 years, and The Lure of the Pond is suffused with visual imagery. But there's also a tempered wisdom here that comes from sitting quietly and watching the life of a pond forget you're there and resume going about its business. We've explored something of the mystery and joy of ponds before here, and Kirkland's book joins a small shelf-collection of other such titles that are the next best thing to being there.

Of course, given his job, Kirkland has been everywhere, not just to the tangled bank of his own little pond. This book is also alive with the richness of those many travels:

Another morning on the path in the abandoned field I came upon a painted turtle laying eggs. I was reminded of a night on Key Marquesas, beyond Key West, where I had seen a giant hawksbill turtle laying hers. The moon was full, the sea a sheet of yellow glass. She came in on the rising tide, her enormous head breaking the surface a few yards out from shore, and the pent-up air in her lungs was expelled in one tremendous gasp. I crouched and watched her lumber up across the white sand. The moonlight shining on her sea-encrusted shell enveloped her in a phosphorescent aura. She was like an apparition from from another world.

It's late winter here in New England, which means, in the 21st century, that high summer is only about three weeks away (the seasons of Spring and Autumn having been officially abolished during the 'strip-mine our national parks' years of George W. Bush) - the three ponds to which I make regular pilgrimages will all soon be open for business again, bustling with the uncanny microcosm of all life that ponds always present to the patient observer. Kirkland's book elegantly captures that microcosm, even if he does begrudge us his own photos. Karlin's minimalistic line-drawings are plenty compensation enough.

Under the Covers with Paul Marron: Been Down So Long!

When last we left our hero Paul, he was clearly at a crossroads in his tempestuous life and career, and perhaps he was questioning some fundamentals (well, not those fundamentals - he's still a male model, after all!) ...on the barometer of personal indecision, 'space armor' is only a notch or two above 'turtleneck' when it comes to a shamelessly shirtless exhibitionist like our Paul. So when we left him wearing jumpsuits and fighting bug-eyed monsters, we had reason to fear the worst.

And surely those fears were realized by the cover of Anton Strout's 2008 novel Dead to Me, which features Paul once again bundled up against the cold, impersonal winds of his own imagined future: he's wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt under a thick woolen trenchcoat, and he's staring meaningfully off into the distance, and his grasping hands are dripping with bright viscous goo ...

Actually, the goo is ectoplasmic energy (note to you kids out there: it's doubtful that line will work with your parents ... better to stick to the time-tested 'it's mayonaisse' keeper), because in this book Paul is going by the name of Simon Canderous, a new member of New York City's Department of Extraordinary Affairs, which handles all the supernatural menaces the Big Apple's police and fire departments either don't know about or don't want to know about. Paul brings to this job his own supernatural ability, but in Strout's book, that ability isn't 'heating up a Speedo' but rather 'psychometry' - the ability to gain psychic impressions about the past of an object simply by touching it. All throughout the book, Paul is forever touching things and getting them to spill their contents all over him.

Tellingly, Paul is coming to his life of crime-fighting from a seedier past, as he relates:

I had worked hard to put my unscrupulous use of my powers behind me. Long before finding the D.E.A., I had been an impressionable, confused kid with burgeoning powers, working part time for any antique shop that would have me. Cutthroats swarmed that business like sharks being chummed, and there were plenty of sketchy opportunists more than willing to drag me into the world of big scores, petty cons, and fast money.

Has a familiar ring to it, doesn't it? A confessional ring, one might say. Paul uses his powers to confront the Sectarians, who are kind of an even-more-evil version of the Scientologists, and Strout keeps the proceedings popping along at such a snappy pace - and with such snappy dialogue - that readers of light fantasy will have a very entertaining time. He's picked just the right power for his sexy protagonist to have: it's both interesting and small-scale (it's clearly a forerunner - right down to the cover - of a whole sub-genre of hunky-hero light sci-fi/fantasy).

The ending of Dead to Me finds Paul at a costume party dressed as Zorro, with a tight satin blouse cross-stitched across his bulging chest; readers of this series might at that moment sense something, the faintest tingle of a resurgence ... after all, Paul could have dressed as Spongebob Squarepants, or Chewbacca. But no, he chose a revealing costume (which, inexplicably, isn't the book's cover image) - perhaps as a cry for help, or perhaps as the first distant hint that such help is no longer needed ... because when Paul walked away from the Department of Extraordinary Affairs after that first adventure (he'd return for three more, and they're all great fun and well worth some of your time), he left his identity crisis - and almost all of his clothes - behind him.

Luckily for all of us, however, he didn't leave extraordinary affairs behind him. He moved on to London, to a loud party in the apartment of prim-and-proper freelancer writer Isobel Jameson, who spots him from across a crowded room hears that essential question that is the start of every romance: "Who is that guy?" Brainy Isobel at first affects indifference, but you and I both know it's just plain impossible to be indifferent to our smoldering Paul, and as quick as you can say 'rock-hard deltoids' veteran romance author Anne Mather has the two of them tangling the sheets in night after night of torrid - and acrobatic - coupling:

As she touched him, Alejandro caught his breath, sucking air into lungs that suddenly seemed deprived of oxygen. "Cara," he protested thickly. "Cuidado! Have a care! I have only so much control."

Isobel's tongue circled her lips. "But you like me to touch you?" she questioned, and he gave a strangled laugh.

Readers of passages like that one (from The Brazilian Millionaire's Love-Child) might be forgiven for thinking that if our Paul ever really did lose his pouting mojo, he now firmly had it back again - except that shortly after he and Isobel give such repeated venting to their carnal desires, he up and leaves her ... with no forwarding address and his spawn growing in her womb! In the three years that follow, she grows into a smart, determined single mother and he goes and gets himself into a car accident that leaves him crippled and - worse, far, far worse - ugly. Sure, this also means, in romance-novel terms, that he's now worthy of her love, but so what? Who cares about worthy if you're ugly?

Fortunately, plane tickets to exotic destinations can take the ugly out of just about anybody, and the first thing our resourceful Paul does is hop a flight to faraway Sydney, Australia and assume a guise that's very familiar to him: the ruthless sexy businessman. In this case he's merciless tycoon Vinn Venadicci, hero of The Venadicci Marriage Vengeance, a bastard (in every sense of the word) who was born to a maid of the once-prosperous St. Clair family and is now in a position to save that family's finances - if only the family's representative, buxom young Gabriella St. Clair, can swallow her, um, pride long enough go to him for aid. Author Melanie Milburne, in page after page of spirited, more-intelligent-than-it-looks prose, has these two stubbornly avoiding the schmaltz waltz in favor of a tighter tango, sparked - of course - by mutual desire:

In the nanosecond before she spoke Gabby quickly drank in his image, her heart giving a little jerk inside her chest in spite of all her efforts to control it. Even when he was seated his height was intimidating, and the black raven's wing of his hair caught the light coming in from the windows, giving it a glossy sheen that made her fingers itch to reach out and touch it. His nose was crooked from one too many of the brawls he had been involved in during his youth, but - unlike many other high-profile businessmen, who would have sought surgical correction by now - Vinn wore his war wounds like a medal. Just like the scar that interrupted his left eyebrow, giving him a dangerous don't-mess-with-me look that was disturbingly attractive.

This flight of fantasy (needless to say, this Venadicci bravo's mincemeat face bears little resemblance to the sculpted perfection of Paul's puss) is followed by many others, and the book's conclusion is funny, diverting stuff - Milburne knows how to please (by random chance I've read a couple of her other books, and they're equally good), and more importantly, so does her Harlequin cover artist, who gives us a small taste of the Paul we've been missing: mough agape, topless, and ever so slightly exaggerated in the pecs department. He seems natural somehow, munching so amorally on poor rapturized Gabby - he looks like a predator in its natural element, which is hardly the way we've seen him lately.

But all that is about to change! Our Paul has indeed been through some kind of refining fire - he's been down so long, he can only go up! Our chronicle had faltered a bit, as our hero floundered and seemed destined to wander into a lackluster second-tier romance hero career with occasional moonlighting in galaxies far, far away. But sometimes, we need to hit rock bottom to know we can fall no further, and our Paul is done with that now! An unbroken string of triumphs lie ahead, all of them to be achieved by Paul finally believing in being Paul - to the fullest, every single photoshoot.

It's a heady ride, and it begins in our next thrilling chapter!