The Belles-Lettres Papers

Our book today is Charles Simmons' delicious little satire The Belles-Lettres Papers, in which he uses the eponymous fictitious literary review to skewer the book world in general and the world of book-reviewing in particular. Simmons is a former New York Times Book Review editor, and for a while in the late '80s when this book first appeared, the main cocktail-party game was trying to decipher which real-life literary figure corresponded to which satirical prop in the book (in which characters are given names like 'Buckram' 'Page' 'Overleaf' and 'Margin' specifically to signal their stand-in status), sort of like trying to find yourself in the Warhol Diaries, or Madonna's Sex (we here at Stevereads are on page 16 of both, coincidentally enough).

We can only hope that this parlor-game aspect of the book has permanently faded away, so that the many winning qualities of the book can stand in the spotlight they deserve. This is a short book and by all indicators an angry book, so it was in all likelihood written quickly, at white heat. But it sparkles with wit and malice all the same, in the grand tradition of white-heat satire and invective (see here the famous story of how quickly Erasmus' The Praise of Folly was written).

The story - such as it is - centers on Frank Page, who comes to work for the venerable literary review The Belle-Lettres Papers and quickly becomes acquainted with its wide variety of kooks and eccentrics. These kooks and eccentrics are drawn with such miniaturist skill that readers are tempted to do some sort of cross-referencing with Brendan Gill's Here at the New Yorker, and that's harmless enough, as long as those readers are also paying attention to the scintillating give-and-take of the writing and the dialogue, some of the latter of which is worthy of Neil Simon:

"For instance," [said Mr. Margin, Page's editor] "what do you think happens when two members of the staff disagree about a book?"

"Don't you leave that to the reviewer?" I said.

"Ah!" He was pleased by my question. "But which reviewer do I send it to, the hard reviewer or the soft reviewer, the John Simon or the Anthony Burgess?"

"I've seen soft reviews by John Simon," I said.

"Ah! But let's say this book is not by a dead European. Rather by a living American, moreover by an American who for years has been getting away with murder ..."

"Heller?" I said.

Mr. Margin blanched. "I was thinking more of ..."

"Styron?" I said.

He didn't blanch, but he did clear his throat. "Let's just say an overrated writer. In fact, you have illustrated my point. I say 'overrated writer,' but what do I mean but overrated in my opinion? So let's say there's another member of the staff who doesn't think the writer is overrated at all, and he thinks this new book is a masterpiece. Whom do we send it to, John Simon or Anthony Burgess?"

"John Simon," I said.

"All right, why?"

"He's good at masterpieces, real and fake."

"And Anthony Burgess?" Mr. Margin said.

"He's good at real masterpieces but not fake ones."

"How so?"

"He doesn't say they're fake, he just uses his fake voice."

Mr. Margin's eyes narrowed. "I can see you're a clever young man," he said.

Simmons can be as mean as he likes (and he's so good at it, readers will like it too), but lurking behind the various jaded shenanigans in The Belles-Lettres Papers (the book and the fictional review) is a bruised heart that still believes in the potential worth of criticism done right. This is something of a godsend for those of us currently engaged in book-criticism, since we'd otherwise hate to think of it as a duplicitous waste of time. Criticism can be done right, without cemented cynicism or pasty parochialism. Books can be judged on their merits, with candor and humor, under the abiding assumption that while the subjective experience of reading might not admit dissection, the objective result of writing can be scrutinized for fun and profit (although not material profit, as the old saying had it, the best way to make a small fortune in publishing is ... to start with a large fortune).

So when Simmons puts an entirely worthy work-premise into the pompous mouth of Mr. Margin for the purpose of mocking it, we can chuckle right along with the rest of the readers, but we also feel a little pang:

"We have an odd and, I might add, attractive gathering of tempers and temperaments at Belles Lettres. Our sensibilities range from the vigorously vulgar to the exquisite and even effete. I like to think we represent a critical construct of the American readership. So that when we say yes to a book we say yes within the confines of the book's intentions. We do not say no to mysteries, we say no to bad mysteries. We do not say yes to poetry, we say yes to good poetry. And if a book maintains an opinion, nay a bias, nay a prejudice, we try to state who we are and what we stand for, and then judge the book on the quality of its argument. What I'm saying is that at Belles Lettres we are interested in the how, the means, the process ... "

That may be purblind bombast when it's uttered (and the book's plot-explosions just get funnier and shriller as that bombast is shredded in every possible way), but it nevertheless has a grace to it. We like to think Simmons never lost the hope that a review organ could be run that way, although it's certainly to be wondered how much success such a doctrine would enjoy at the Times. And who knows? Human nature being what it is, maybe all literary reviews are destined to fail of such high ideals. Who knows what rough freelancer is even now slouching toward Bethlehem to write The Open Letters Papers?

In Flanders Fields

Our book today is Leon Wolff's 1959 classic of military history, In Flanders Fields, which concentrates on the 1917 debacle known as Passchendaele, in which 140,000 men lost their lives for no reason whatsoever other than the feeding of war itself. Wolff's subject is really two subjects, as anybody familiar with World War I will recall: the first part in the spring, the second in the summer and fall - the whole of which comprises the Third Battle of Ypres, or Passchendaele, in which a little over four miles of ground was gained by the Allies from the Imperial German army, only to be surrendered again in four month's time. A great military historian has referred to the First World War as one of the enduring "myths" of the 20th century, and in the sense that this is true, it's true largely because of such unbelievable epics of waste and frustration as Passchendaele.

Wolff is its great Bulfinch, and his book is a gruesomely readable masterpiece. All the usual characters of the drama - Haig, Foch, and the rest - are brought to gritty, immediate life by Wolff's narrative skill, but he really excels in painting on a larger canvas, as in this passage where he shows his readers the sickly after-phase of a major 'push':

As the fighting simmered down, the waste products of the battle, like the precipitate in a cloudy glass, moved rearward - the walking wounded and the stretcher-borne wounded ('very cheery indeed,' according to Haig's diary), soaked, bloody, haggard with pain; the shrouded dead; the vague and stumbling shell-shocked. One artillery lieutenant had been struck in the throat by a bit of shrapnel. As the blood gushed, he walked 100 yards to a dressing station near Zillebeke, gasped to a doctor, 'My God, I'm going to die!' and immediately did so. The stretcher-bearers worked all day and night, helped by German prisoners, who had also begun to filter back early in the day - surprisingly young boys and older, grimmer veterans - all with sunken eyes, sodden clothing, boots full of water that squished at every step.

Passchendaele was of course a colossal failure in its ostensible aim to punch a corridor through the German defenses in Flanders, and although Wolff devotes great care and attention to every aspect of his subject, his angry-yet-dispassionate post mortem in the chapter "War and Peace" is his sharpest sustained writing. Wolff himself was an American (and a veteran of the next world war), but the icily suppressed indignation in his summary would have heads nodding in London in 1919:

There has never been any argument about the worthlessness of the few miles of muddy ground captured. Nine thousand yards was the largest gain. The average was about four miles of terrain which was to have been occupied three or four days after the main attack started on 31 July. The Channel ports were out of sight and out of mind. Less than half the Ridge was in British hands - not even enough to make Passchendaele's heights defensible, and this by Haig's own admission. The northern end of the Messines-Passchendaele ridge, eastern wall of the Ypres bastion, was still in German hands. The line of the Yser, flooded from Ypres to Nieuport, had been captured, but by the enemy and if there had ever been any possibility of a turning movement, it had ended long ago.

Excluding the dubious achievement at Passchendaele, we find no gains of value on the flanks. To the south there had been small and meaningless advances around Gheluvelt. On the north, most divisions wound up crouching and drenched in or near the icy mud of Houthulst Forest, shelled night and day throughout 600 acres of broken tree stumps, wreckage and swamps - 'the acme of hideousness, a Calvary of misery.'





Of course, the added futility of disasters like Passchendaele arose from the fact that its principal lessons had been learned a full half-century earlier in the American Civil War, in which both sides were forced to realize one essential military truth: fixed and fortified artillery positions cannot be taken by ground assaults, no matter how large or determined those assaults are. As long as bullets outnumber bodies, trenches and barbed wire will win (at least until decisive air power is called in). Gettysburg should have been the final graveyard of battles like Third Ypres, but then, military lessons have a way of getting forgotten. How many invading armies throughout history, for instance, have assumed they'd be greeted as liberators by their victims, and yet how seldom has it actually happened that way?

But great military history always carries this dichotomy. On the one hand, it's often the most thrilling, best-written school of history available (readers seeking really good prose will have at least one shelf full of exemplary titles, starting with Arrian). But on the other hand, its subject is universally deplorable, the blowing up of peoples' houses, the flattening of fields, the slaughter of young men before they even have a chance to give themselves lung cancer. Reading about events like the 1917 Flanders campaign is indeed frustrating - but if you're going to do it (and you should), you can't do much better for an extended treatment than In Flanders Fields.

Fiction in the Atlantic! 2008!

In a famous recent editorial decision, the venerable Atlantic magazine stopped publishing a new short story every month. At the time, the usual blather was floated as justification, but even so, it was impossible not to read in the decision some kind of comment on the state of the American short story - either the supply of its validity or the reach of its commerce. Fans of the short story form had to look elsewhere; the Atlantic, in so many ways the founding home of the American short story, was no longer in the game.

But not quite. In a sop to the howls of outrage those fans did not, in fact, raise, the Atlantic sets aside one annual issue and therein presents a nosegay of short stories, a special 'Fiction Issue' that is likewise a bulls-eye for unavoidable inference: that this handful of stories aren't just the last few samples to come over the transom, that they are, at least in some way, the best of the best. If there was an implication that the state of story submissions at the magazine was too pitiful to warrant monthly publication, the same implication must regard the 'Fiction Issue' stories as the cream of the crop.

This issue's table of contents is about as stark an affair as the Atlantic has ever sported: no letters, no editorials, no book reviews, no feature articles - no nonfiction at all except for one pompous and self-serving little piece by novelist Anne Patchett (at the climax of which she says her most prized possession is a signed collection of Eudora Welty stories then relates how at one of her own book signings, she imparted words of wisdom to a little girl who'd waited for her signature; "I know better than anyone I am no Eudora Welty," she faux-humbly asserts, which tells us one thing only: she thinks she's better than Eudora Welty). Instead, there are eight short stories and nine poems. The poems were so uniformly wretched even I wasn't tempted to like any of them.

That leaves the stories. We'll take them in order of appearance, and we'll see what we can learn about the state of the art today, at least according to the Atlantic.

The first is "Nine" by Aryn Kyle. It's the story of little Tess (who's about to turn nine), her father, her absent mother, her father's tobacco-addict ballet dancer girlfriend, and the unending stream of lies Tess tells for no discernible reason to every single person in her life. Tess's father is concerned about the lies she tells:

"Some things are real and some things aren't," he says. "Part of getting older is learning to understand the difference. OK?" Tess's head feels heavy on top of her neck. Her brain is smooth and shiny like plastic. Her blood is ketchup. She could hold her own hand against a hot stove and not feel a thing. "OK," she says.

From which we're supposed to glean that Tess is unhappy. The reader is given no hint as to who thinks Tess' blood is ketchup - it sounds like something a kid might think, but, in a sloppy manner that's typical of the story as a whole, we're left to assume on our own. The bulk of the prose is likewise lazy. Take a for instance chosen at random:

When Miss Morris calls from school to say that Tess has said her father is dying of lung cancer, he laughs. He assures Miss Morris that he isn't even a smoker (well, hardly), that he is as right as rain.

Unbelievably, those italics aren't mine: the author herself has called attention to her use of a cliche, and that smarmy-cutesy "well, hardly" doesn't help matters. The climax of the story revolves around a little incident so trite and predictable the reader will at first suspect a practical joke has been played by the author, but no: that's all there is. Tess and her father start the story unhappy and uncommunicative, and they end it that way, and there's no indication whatsoever that Tess' ninth year will be any different from any other. Nothing changes in the story - except that the story itself went from 'unpublished' to 'published in the Atlantic's annual fiction issue.'

Kyle's biographical blurb says she's currently working on her first collection of short stories, in which "Nine" will no doubt appear. My friend John Cotter is currently shopping around his first short story collection, from which a story as flat and unyielding as "Nine" would have been culled before it was shown to even one potential publisher. The injustices of the print world can sometimes be quite bitter on the tongue.

Next is "Stand By Me," by Wendell Berry who, I'm assuming, is on hand to do the 'old publishing figure we couldn't refuse' duties usually reserved for John Updike (who, amazingly, is not represented in this issue). His piece isn't a short story in any functional sense of the term - I think 145 paragraphs go by before there's any dialog exchanged - instead, it's a fragmentary story-premise dashed off and sent to the magazine under the serene assumption that there are no circumstances under which it would be examined, much less rejected.

The story premise involves a bunch of simple country folk and the various roles grief and loss and loneliness play in their lives, but throughout the prose is muddied with repetitions and needless circumlocutions, until even the most avid Berry fan must be able to sense the master twiddling his thumbs, just doodling until the next real piece of prose comes to mind. Even the best bit manages to sound like an unsuccessful first draft for Our Town:

What gets you is the knowledge, that sometimes can fall on you in a clap, that the dead are gone absolutely from this world. As has been said around here over and over again, you are not going to see them here anymore, ever. Whatever was done or said before is done or said for good. Any questions you think you ought to've asked while you had a chance are never going to be answered. The dead know, and you don't.



After Berry comes "Patient, Female" by Julie Schumacher, who, we're told, directs the creative writing program at the University of Minnesota (as has been noted by various pundits, creative writing programs have sprouted like toadstools throughout the land). In the story, the female narrator spends her days working as a so-called "professional patient," giving doctors-in-training some hands-on experience in clinics (one of those picaresque "jobs" that are so odd they carry their own trenchant metaphors around with them like Marley's chains; creative writing types love those kinds of jobs because real life is, you know, so boring), and she spends her nights arguing with her ailing father, who, like Tess, lies a lot for no discernible reason.

The narrator is selfish without being interesting, bitter without being virtuous, and thus repellent without being in any way redeeming to read about. The hermeneutics of this piece mark it a mile off as being 'workshop fiction,' which, for the uninitiated, means it was never meant to make sense or engage the reader; no, it's meant for rarer atmospheres than those available to the Petey Punch-Clocks and Judy Lunch-Pails who might encounter this issue at the newsstand and actually try to read it. As in "Tess," nothing happens in "Patient, Female," nothing changes, and nobody learns anything. In case you didn't get enough of all three of those things in the other parts of your life.

Fortunately, our losing streak ends next, with a fast-paced, sweet, and moving short story by Carter Simms Benton called "The Second Coming of Gray Badger." This story concerns two young brothers who're racing a stolen horse in a string of fifth-rate matches in an attempt to raise enough prize money to bail their father out of jail. Walter is the thinker behind the scheme, and bantam-weight Oscar is the rider of the horse, and in no time they fall in with Edith the waitress, who's a good deal smarter than either of them and no fool about what they're doing. Her presence throws their plans a-kilter, of course, but it's Benton's spare, lovely prose that's the point:

"You talk to Dad again?" he [Oscar] asked. "He's happy," I said. "He's real proud of you. Said it's too bad you're a thief, though. You could have done something good." I lied about calling the jail. I had decided not to call Dad until we'd settled on what to do. My head was telling me some things, like what handcuffs felt like, and I felt mean about it. "Oh, I'm a thief and you're a horse trainer," Oscar wiped his lips and looked up at me. "He didn't say that." "We're all thieves," I said and looked at Edith. "You too." "Maybe if I got some money I would be." She answered sharply. "You-all are a couple of daddy's boys, anyway. Thieves don't call their daddy every day." "Took you about two days to start whining." Oscar had his shoulder square to Edith on his stool. "Let's play some pool so Miss Dodge City can have some fun." Edith smiled and got up. We followed her to a table in the middle of the bar. She racked the table for Nine-Ball, pushing hair behind her ears. At that point, I was sure she knew everything.

Benton won the Atlantic's Student Fiction contest a while back, and his biographical note says he's working on a novel, and those are two hopeful notes for the future of fiction, in my opinion.

The next story is "Carmen Elcira: A (Love) Story" by Cristina Henriquez, and if you think that parenthetical (love) is just about as annoying an orthographical trick as our author (who's been published extensively and is working on her first novel) can devise, hoo-boy, have you got another think coming! The plot is the love life of the title character, from her fiery first love Diego (you can tell the author likes the two of them together because she has them meet cute and supplies them with snappy patter) to sad-sack Joseph, with whom she settles for the spending of her life, with occasional regrets:

For the rest of her life, Carmen Elcira lived with Joseph in the house where she had grown up and where she would grow old. Every so often, because there are tender spots in every human heart that never disappear, no matter if the tenderness is caused by bruising or by love or if, as is often the case, the two are indistinguishable, she would wonder about Diego.

That bit about the bruises of the heart is pretty good and augurs good things for Henriquez' upcoming debut novel, but all its worth is subsumed by the freakish, MOLTENLY annoying fact that our author has chosen to refer to Carmen, whose name is Carmen Elcira Salazar, as "Carmen Elcira" every single time she's mentioned. No matter that the name "Carmen" is, thanks to Bizet, known to all; no matter that even other characters in the story point out how damn odd it is - doesn't matter! Carmen Elcira goes to market; Carmen Elcira falls in and out of love; Carmen Elcira thinks to herself, "Carmen Elcira, if you do this, you'll never be able to look at Carmen Elcira in the mirror again." It sinks the story and leaves not a bubble on the surface to mark its passing. By the time the tale is done, the poor reader has that name indelibly tattoo'd on his brain and can't wait to flee to the next story.

Luckily, that next story, "We are all Businessmen" by Mark Fabiano, is one of the strongest in the issue. Fabiano has had his fiction published in Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Long Story, and something called German Village After Dark (proof positive that Fabiano himself wrote his author-bio, and that he's possessed of a puckish sense of humor), and more to the point, he's spent time in Sri Lanka, which he captures beautifully in this tale of a good-natured hard-working Sri Lankan man Ranil who is working hard as the guide and entertainer for a crass, boorish visiting American named "Mr. Richard" whose firm, Ranil hopes, will provide a scholarship for his son Arjuna. Fabiano makes sure the reader knows that for all Ranil's hopes for his son, they both come from a place the story's harried Western readers will think sounds a lot like paradise:

But I don't like to live in towns. They are impure. The people are sad. Out here the sun ripens our crops, and welcomes the spirits of our ancestors. The shade of our trees comforts us, and it is known that the water from our well is cool and clear.

When Ranil and the boorish Mr. Richard arrived at a closed bank, "Mr. Richard swears. He says some bad things about the bank and my country: "Damned Lankans. Only good for fucking coconuts and bananas."

But what about our tea? I think. Our beaches? Our mountains? The gems? But I know it is in anger. He is from Christian and doesn't know about the Buddha and how to calm himself. When my boy has gone and become a rich engineer, and then sends for his parents, I will say, "What was listening to a few bad words then, for my son is now an important man?"

As all but small children will by now have guessed, things do not go well for Ranil's hopes. But such is Fabiano's understated skill that the reader will be kept tense and delighted right to the end, as predictable as that end is. And really, all colonial fiction is intensely predictable, which is hardly Fabiano's fault. He's a very, very talented young writer; the 21st century's A Passage to India may very well come from his pen.




The next story in this Fiction Issue is the most perplexing. It's called "Obituary," and it's by Jessica Murphy Moo (who has the greatest writer-name in the long history of all literature, so on that basis alone she deserves to enjoy a long career, at least until Finch Bronstein-Rasmussen hits her stride!) who, we're told, is the communications editor for the Seattle Opera, a post one would think would leave little spare time for pecking away at short stories, but then, some young people manage their time better than others.

The story is perplexing for a number of reasons. The main character, Gus, lives on his boat in a tony marina with his diabetic dog. He's a seedy old fellow (that's perplexing thing #1: Murphy Moo writes him perfectly, even though she herself is not, in fact, a seedy old fellow)(presumably) whose departure would please the marina association. The head of the association, an officious older woman Gus refers to as the Commodore, makes it plain to him:

"I have a proposition for you, and if you'll listen for a second, it might be of some interest. We know you have a lifetime deed, but as you well know, we'd like you to leave, and the board has decided that we're willing to pay you to do it." "You had a board meeting today? Already?" She raises an eyebrow above the frame of her sunglasses, as if daring him to question him further, and she continues. "You can tell us where you'd like to go. Any marina on the eastern seaboard, and we'll find a way to get you there. If you don't remember how to drive your boat, we can arrange for a refresher, maybe even a crew, if it comes to that."

This is perplexing thing #2: although copious allusions are made, we never really get the details of why the marina folk hate Gus so much (nor why the Commodore herself seems to have a softer streak toward him, something Gus himself comments on), nor why (#3) his straightlaced son Bradley (and his wife) hate him so much. Murphy Moo is content in this story merely to hint that Gus has been in his life what one genteel soul once referred to as "a real shitbag." Gus has lots of regrets about this general impression, but not enough of them to do anything about it, and that's perplexing thing #4.

But maybe all these perplexing things are just facets of the one central flaw with "Obituary": it's not a short story, it's a novel. Here's hoping Murphy Moo knows this herself, and that the first novel we're told she's working on will be called "Obituary" and will feature the rest of this entertaining story.

Alas, the final story in this Atlantic is anything but entertaining. It's an intensely boring little piece called "Amritsar" by Jess Row, an otherwise accomplished young writer who's here turned in a turgid misfire about India that couldn't be any less involving for Western readers if it were chipped out on stone in Sanskrit. Like Henriquez' story, it's almost certainly here to fill out some 'exotic' quotient - which is odd, because the issue's two best stories, by Benton and Fabiano, are clear examples of how to put stories in exotic locations and still make them work as entertainments.

But then, the editorial decisions that went into creating this Fiction Issue are impenetrable. There is no Editor's Note to talk about the selections, no piece reflecting on the process of picking these stories from what must have been many hundreds of candidates. Instead, the issue and its contents are offered up as a flat enigma, without comment or secondary material of any kind. This is interpretable either as some kind of oracular opacity or as a child's petulant bare-minimum approach to a chore he doesn't want to perform at all, but in either case, one thing is beyond argument: short fiction deserves better from the Atlantic.

Salammbo

Our book today is Gustave Flaubert's Carthaginian historical novel Salammbo, which intertwines the story of a naive and seductive priestess with a tale straight out of our old friend Polybius: the revolt of Carthage's heterogeneous mob of mercenaries against the army under the command of Hamilcar, just after the close of the First Punic War. Flaubert's novel appalled those of his friends who heard passages during its composition, and it called down a storm of factual criticism from authorities of every stripe after its publication on 24 November 1862 (readers of a certain age will recall that Robert Graves faced a similar storm upon the publication of I, Claudius - both he and Flaubert responded with lengthy, testy, source-citing defenses of their work, for all the world as though they'd written works of history).

Flaubert visited Carthaginian locations several times, and he claimed to have read over 200 books on the Punic War period, but since virtually everything Flaubert claimed was a bald-faced lie (if he mentioned in a letter to you that he'd been inspired to write by the stunning sunrise, you knew with 100 percent certainty that he'd slept in), we needn't worry too much about that - especially since Salammbo, despite what some of its critics have maintained, is the furthest thing in the world from a stuffy, over-researched book. In fact, it's unabashedly, relentlessly passionate, a tightly-controlled little whirlwind of historical fiction. Flaubert takes the basic facts of the events about which he writes - most of which are right there in Polybius - and imbues them with a miracle of life-breath, as in one of his signature battle scenes (with grudging apologies for our somewhat reluctant command of French):


Above and beyond the officers' commands, the trumpets' call and the screaming of the lyres, lead and clay pellets whistled through the air, tore swords out of men's hands or the brains out of their skulls. The wounded, crouching under their shields, held out their swords by resting the hilts against the ground, and others, in pools of their own blood, turned round to bite at enemy heels. The crowd was so compact, the dust so thick, the roar so loud, that nothing was clear; the cowards who offered to surrender were not even heard. When there were no weapons left to hold they wrestled bodily with each other; chests cracked against breast-plates and corpses hung with heads thrown back between stiffening arms.

Critics at first had no idea what to make of Salammbo, and although readers have always loved it, critics still find themselves a bit confused, calling it a flawed masterpiece and the like. And they tend to pounce on the almost psychedelic fervor with which Flaubert writes his battle scenes. But in our author's defense, there might have been something in the air. Only a couple of weeks after the publication of his book, the Battle of Fredericksburg took place in the American Civil War, and its carnage and confusion, as related by its greatest historian, wouldn't have seemed out of place in the Punic Wars:

The fighting was sheer murder. Coming out of the town, Burnside's men crashed into the stone wall and were broken. Division after division moved up the attack, marching out of the plain in faultless alignment, to be cut and broken and driven back by a storm of fire; for hour after hour they attacked, until all the plain was stained with the blue bodies that had been thrown on it, and not one armed Yankee ever reached even the foot of the hill. The plain was filled with smoke, shot through with unceasing flashes of fire, and the wild, rolling crash of battle went on and on through all the afternoon and there seemed to be no end to it. Burnside was east of the river, encased in the ignorance that besets headquarters, sending over order to carry on with the attack. His men obeyed every order, until whole divisions had been cut to pieces and the town and the sheltered banks by the river with clogged with men who had been knocked loose from their commands, but from first to last it was completely hopeless. Never, at any time, was there the remotest chance that this attack could succeed.

The ecstasies of religion - at least, as Flaubert conveys them - might creak here and there in Salammbo, but all the rest of it is entirely first-rate and worth your attention in the nearest halfway competent English translation.

The Viscount in Her Bedroom

Our book today is Gayle Callen's 2007 romance novel The Viscount in Her Bedroom, the third volume in her saga of the marital adventures of the high-spirited Shelby girls, Louisa, Meriel, and Victoria, as they seek to mend their family's fortunes - and find true love - in 1840's London and surrounding country houses.

When our story opens, kind, empathizing Louisa is growing bored and frustrated when she receives a message from the Dowager Viscountess Wade, offering her employment as companion to her grandson, Simon (the Viscount of the title), a dashing, sociable young man who's been blinded in a riding accident and retired from society. Louisa remembers young Viscount Wade vividly, and her generous heart is immediately struck by all the changes his affliction must have wrought in his life.

With quick, deft strokes, Callen thus sets her stage for the inevitable romance that will blossom between Viscount Wade (Callen calls him 'Lord' interchangeably, which is incorrect and therefore odd, since her entire series - The Duke in Disguise, The Lord Next Door, and this volume - is based on titles, which you'd think she'd have sorted out before she embarked on the task) and Louisa. Callen has a sure sense of the shifting vulnerabilities between the two ... shifts made all the more precarious by the burgeoning desire that tips even innocuous encounters into greater significance, as when Louisa offers a such a simple thing as guiding Simon by the arm:

She paused. "May I escort you?"

"I enjoy being displayed on the arm of a beautiful woman."

He felt her arm tighten in his, but all she did was laugh, that husky laugh that made him yearn to hear it in private.

She was patient and cautious as they walked, speaking softly of every obstacle in the way. He was the one who couldn't concentrate, with her soft breast pressed into his upper arm. He stumbled once when they reached the terrace, and she hugged his arm even tighter. He could have groaned.

Naturally, there are complications that crop up in the course of their true love, but they are swept away as the novel hums along. Callen's prose sparkles with her evident delight in the act of writing itself, and that makes her a wonderful companion. The romance genre, despite being far and away the best-selling school of fiction currently being published, is habitually looked upon with disdain by readers of more 'serious' types of fiction. But we here at Stevereads aren't 100 percent sure Jane Austen, were she alive today, would share that disdain.

In any case, we doubt she'd wring her hands worrying about the distinction, and Gayle Callen certainly doesn't; she has dancing, delightful stories to tell, and The Viscount in Her Bedroom is a very enjoyable example, worth your attention for an idle hour.

Knole & The Sackvilles

Our book today is Knole & The Sackvilles by Vita Sackville-West, first published in its present form in 1922, and it is a slim little treasure-trove of biographies. Dozens of Sackvilles, many Earls of Dorset and Lords Buckhurst stride across its pages, along with their attendant wives, children, servants, and hangers-on (and shadowed always by their various monarchs, from Elizabeth I to
George VI, when in 1947 Knole was turned over to the National Trust for safekeeping (and tourism). It is the great good fortune of this huge and remarkable crowd that out of their midst should come a writer as thrillingly talented as Sackville-West, Bloomsbury member, object of scandal, and venerated in her lifetime for virtually all of her writings except this, her odd, idiosyncratic masterpiece.

But that crowd of Sackvilles and Dorsets and Buckhursts was not the only beneficiary of Sackville-West's genius as a writer, nor even the main such. No, the best, most strongly-drawn and most sympathetic character in Knole & The Sackvilles is the great house of Knole itself, as big as four city blocks, as old as the Romans, and more steeped in story than any single mortal life could possibly be. Thousands of tourists visit it each year, chaperoned around carefully-managed segments of the house and grounds, and all but the most cynical are awestruck by tour's end, but to the shy, hyper-sensitive little Vita Sackville, it was home. Indeed, since she was the one who signed the National Trust papers in 1947, she may well have been the last person to call the place home.

The sheer elegaic beauty of her prose when she's describing the place is as strong and as wistful as anything Evelyn Waugh ever wrote about his fictional Brideshead, only the admixture of actual autobiography here gives the added punch of memory. As Sackville-West tells us, she was never frightened at Knole. "I loved it; and I took it for granted that Knole loved me."


This autobiographical note runs throughout the book and is an almost mystical thing; the author is the last voice of an era that could very naturally, very organically feel itself linked with all the preceding eras Knole had seen - eras of horse-powered travel and candlelit writing tables and tapestries and bed-hangings meant for warmth, not decoration. Her book glitters all over with tiny vignettes no later writer encamped at Knole would ever see:

A stone lobby under the oriel window divides the Green Court from the Stone Court. In summer the great oak doors of this second gate-house are left open, and it has sometimes happened that I have found a stag in the banqueting hall, puzzled but still dignified, strayed in from the park since no barrier checked him.

Such vignettes are priceless, but they do not make up the bulk of the book. Instead, Sackville-West spends most of her allotted space taking her readers on a biographical tour of the house's various great lords and royal advisers. In the process, she creates a series of portraits not just of people but of ages - in addition to everything else, this odd, gorgeously-written volume is an excellent, engaging history of England (albeit from a distinctly Kentish point of view) from the late Elizabethan to the late Georgian era.

This history includes some indelible accounts of figures the main movements of most such narratives might overlook, such as the 18th century Lady Betty Germain, frequent house guest at Knole, whose shock at receiving a scornful letter from Jonathan Swift about her host's self-serving nature is gently, sardonically mocked:

One wonders whether such suggestions troubled Lady Betty. Was it possible that her great-souled friend would not be Lord Steward and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and Lord Warden and Lord Lieutenant of Kent, did he not also happen to be Duke of Dorset? Was it possible that such people as the Sackvilles occasionally occupied positions due to their birth rather than to their intellect?

Another figure obscured by time, Lady Anne Clifford (mistress of Knole during the time of James I), is invoked with genuine sympathy and a trace of awe, no doubt provoked by this lady's unbending determination to fight off all legal claimants to the property that was rightfully hers:

In the end she got the better of them all, and the last picture of her left by the "Lives" is that of a triumphant and imperious old lady, retired to the stronghold of her northern castles, where her authority could stand "against sectaries, almost against Parliaments and armies themselves"; refusing to go to court "unless she might wear blinkers"; moving with feudal, with almost royal state between her many castles, from Appleby to Pendragon, from Pendragon to Brougham, from Brougham to Brough, from Brough to Skipton; building brew-houses, wash-houses, bake-houses; kitchens; stables; sending word to Cromwell that as fast as he should knock her castles about her ears she would surely put them up again; endowing almshouses; ruling over her almswomen and her tenants; receiving, like the patriarchal old despot she was, the generations of her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren.

But in the end, it's always Knole itself that brings out her most glowing prose. Just as two generations of television viewers will forever hear Jeremy Irons' resonant voice when they read the descriptions of Brideshead in Brideshead Revisited, so too does this prose deserve its great embodier, to fully convey its beauties to the listening ear. Imagine the mighty Eileen Atkins reading this as a voice-over to some mini-series as yet unborn:

It [Knole House] has a deep inward gaiety of some very old woman who has always been beautiful, who has had many lovers and seen many generations come and go, smiled wisely over their sorrows and their joys, and learnt an imperishable secret of tolerance and humour. It is, above all, an English house. It has the tone of England; it melts into the green of the garden turf, into the tawnier green of the park beyond, into the blue of the pale English sky; it settles down into its hollow amongst the cushioned tops of the trees; the brown-red of those roofs is the brown-red of humble farms and pointed oast-houses, such as stain over a wide landscape of England the quilt-like pattern of the fields.

Those of you who should find yourself in the beautiful country of Kent are urged to make time (during its open season, that is - 15 March to 2 November) to see at least that portion of Knole's beauty that is ever open to the public. Those of you who should find yourself in the good city of Boston are urged to make time to visit the great Museum of Fine Arts to see two of the tapestries that once hung at Knole. And those of you who can't easily get to either can still find their way to Powell's website and revel in this wonderful book.

comics in july!

Five different comics this time around, and the thrilling breath of rejuvenation running through each one of them! And the incredible thing is, four out of five of those comics were published by Marvel, a company whose recent creative decisions have been, shall we say, questionable (fascism rules? check! Spider-Man off in la-la land? check! Captain America effing dead? check!). We here at Stevereads once thought that, given the state of affairs at Marvel, the only way they could field a rejuvenatingly good issue would be to very consciously set it outside the pig's breakfast that is the company's current continuity. Put Spider-Man in some sort of mystical backwater where you can turn back the clock; put the Hulk on an alien world and follow his adventures there; put Thor (and Asgard) out in the American badlands as a declared neutral, etc.



So imagine our surprise to find that two out of these four Marvel titles take place smack-dab in the middle of the current muddled continuity! One of these is Marvel's flagship title, The Fantastic Four, now under the creative control of writer Mark Millar and artist Bryan Hitch; issue #558 is the start of a new storyline (not, curiously, the one trumpeted on the cover, "Starting This Issue: The Death of the Invisible Woman" - no hint of which is present in the issue itself), one which sees the villainous Doctor Doom falling prey to a group of mercenaries called the New Defenders (who, in the tiresome Millar fashion, are made to seem bad-ass by easily defeating our heroes in the initial set-to), forcing the FF to come to his defense. Hitch's pencils still seem a little rough (Andrew Currie is not his ideal inker), but Millar's got a good grasp of the non-stop action and underlying humanity that are the hallmarks of this particular team. We predict that if Millar stays with the title, this Doctor Doom storyline will turn out to be really, really good, and the eventual Galactus storyline will be epic. We shall see.



The other of these two issues is the latest She-Hulk, written by fanboy-favorite hack Peter David and drawn with interesting linear simplicity by Val Semeiks. The plot is fairly simple stuff - a giant on a rampage in a city, She-Hulk and guest star Hercules teaming up to beat the giant and save the day, etc. The rejuvenation here is something happening in more than one place in the Marvel universe these days: the revived and fantastic use of Hercules as a character. He's got his own comic, and he's appearing everywhere else, and this is a very welcome development - in Marvel comics, Hercules has always stood in the shadow of Thor, but in many ways he's more interesting and logical character to moonlight as a super-hero: after all, he's part human, whereas Thor is not. When you think about it, it's an inherently silly idea that a god of thunder would spend time having adventures alongside the Wasp and Hawkeye. But Hercules has a history of adventuring alongside superpowered mortals, so it's refreshing to see him showing up i so many places lately.

One of which, in this issue of She-Hulk, is her bed! After their adventure together, these two heroes decide to make merry in her RV, and one thing leads to another. Oddly, when it's time for him to write the inevitable morning-after scene, David doesn't screw it up. As she looks at the sleeping Hercules, She-Hulk thinks, "When all is said and done, he was one of the few who stood beside Bruce when it all went down. That meant a lot to me. He meant a lot to me. And well ... he's immortal. For all I've got going for me, that's something I'll never be. Except ... I was, for one brief moment in time, the lover of Hercules. So maybe that's a little bit of immortality for me. There's dumber reasons to have sex with a guy. I should know: I've used them all."


Far more typical is the aforementioned manuever of setting your story outside of the current Marvel continuity, which is what our next two Marvel issues do. Matt Fraction's new issue of his ongoing Thor mini-series is firmly mythological in its setting; here there is no hint of Thor the super-hero, just high epic fantasy - for which Fraction shows a surprisingly adept hand. The dialog of his gods, demons, and monsters bears no similarity to the 'thee's and 'thou's of Stan Lee's era, but it's extremely distinctive just the same.

The issue features two parts, the first drawn by Khari Evans in a competent enough manner reminiscent of Ron Frenz, and the second drawn to bring the walls down by Patrick Zircher. The first segment is entertaining enough - again, a loose adaptation of a story out of Norse mythology - but the second story! Hoo-boy! Here is everything a real Thor story should be (except that Thor, true to Norse mythology if not to Marvel continuity, is still a bit of a jerk): it's sweeping, epic, and full of fantastic stuff. The best part of it happens when the poor mortals of Earth, beset by legions of the undead, create the husk of a "blood colossus" to combat their enemies. They pray and pray to summon Thor, hoping his lightning will bring their blood colossus to life: "Mortals prayed and prepared as best they could. Shattered by the unending cruelty of an unjust punishment, they began to look toward the miraculous. Until finally the miraculous began to look back." Thor shows up, animates the colossus, and saves the day, but this all feels much more like some alternate title Marvel would have published in the mid-'70s.

Our plea here at Stevereads: Marvel should create a new title, call it "Tales of Asgard," and make Patrick Zircher illustrate it until Ragnarok, if not longer.



The other offset Marvel issue this time around takes a much surer path: a retold origin story. In this case, it's an installment in the ongoing, spottily-executed 'Mythos' title aimed at revisiting the origins of Marvel's characters. In this case, touchingly, it's Captain America's turn, here getting a splendid, moving treatment by writer Paul Jenkins and artist/painter Paolo Rivera. This is an origin story that's been told many times - skinny WWII army reject Steve Rogers is chosen to undergo experimental procedures and become America's "super-soldier," Captain America. The one difference in this retelling (inspired, no doubt, by the "Ultimate" version of Captain America featured in "The Ultimates") is that we're specifically told that the experiments give Captain America super-human abilities. But that's beside the point of the story, which is a wonderful story of a man out of time. That, plus the issue having the greatest cover of any Marvel comic published in 2008, makes this issue a large-lunged call to bring back their signature character, for Pete's sake.


And then there's the ongoing rejuvenation of The Legion of Super-Heroes over at DC Comics, all thanks to legendary writer Jim Shooter, who has kept his new run on this, his old stomping-grounds, positively sizzling with activity on many fronts, all the while packing in a disarming amount of characterization. Bit by bit, piece by piece, he's editing out the ridiculousness of the current Legion incarnation and weaving back in his own sure-footed grounding in character and action. His Legion is beset on all sides - physically by monsters continually adapting to their powers, politically from a suspicious United Planets eager to control the Legion. Each issue happens at breakneck speed, which is great (and something not one writer in ten can manage successfully), and we here at Stevereads confidently expect that the upcoming issues will feature some of the Legion basics Shooter hasn't got to yet - a possible Brainiac 5 meltdown, for instance, or the arrival on the scene of a genuine villain or two (the monsters in these issues are a good start, since there's got to be somebody pulling their strings). In the meantime, this is great stuff, especially for Legion fans.

All of the issue this time around were great stuff - something we doubt we'd be saying if we'd allowed the clerk at the Android's Dungeon to talk us into the latest issue of Trinity, or Final Crisis, or some such. A fate narrowly avoided, and as it is, we put aside our batch of comics smiling a contented smile.

The Rise of the Roman Empire

Our book today is The Rise of the Roman Empire (for want of a better title) by the first century b.c. historian Polybius, a Greek living among the best and brightest of his Roman conquerors.

Polybius was born sometime toward the end of the third century b. c. at Megalopolis, in primitive, untamed Arcadia, which belonged to the venerable Achaean League of states. His family was prominent, and he received an excellent though old-fashioned education in the old Arcadian way: hunting and drinking and boy-chasing, with very little emphasis placed on the pallid disciplines of the library and the lamp. We don't know at what point those disciplines began to exert their own pull of young Polybius' mind; it may have been around 182 b.c., when the young man was given the singular honor of bearing the ashes of Philopoemon (one of the greatest of all Achaeans) in funeral procession. Certainly at some point, probably shortly afterwards, Polybius wrote a massive biography of Philopoemon, now lost to us but very well known to ancient writers.

Epic composition wasn't his only accomplishment in those murky early years, however; by 170 b. c. Polybius had become prominent enough in the Achaean League to achieve the rank of commander of cavalry, and this was a problematic thing to have on your resume at the time, since the Romans had been at war with Macedon for a couple of years. When Macedon was defeated, in 168, the Romans swept through the whole of the Peloponnese with political retributions, including summoning about a thousand Achaeans into custody in Italy, including Polybius.

Most of these detainees - none of whom was ever given a trial or even much of a reason for their detainment, other than their nationality and being on the losing side - were given quarters of varying degrees of comfort in southern Etruria, but Polybius was luckier: for sixteen years, he was under the most genteel of house-arrests in custody of the family of Aemilius Paulus, the commander of the forces that had finally defeated Macedon. The great man's young son was Publius Scipio, with whom Polybius developed a friendship and working relationship, a mentorship of remarkable depth and flexibility. Scipio and brother Fabius suddenly found in their midst this man of immense experience and hard-won wisdom, and perhaps it's only natural they felt a bit of rivalry for his attention. In fact, Polybius could date his friendship with young Scipio to some surprising comments Scipio made to him after dinner one day, comments dealing directly with that rivalry, all of which Polybius himself relates to us:

One day when the three of them were leaving Fabius' house, Fabius happened to turn off toward the Forum, while Polybius and Scipio walked off in a different direction. As they were walking along, Scipio, blushing a little, asked Polybius in a hesitant voice, "Sir, why is it that when you're at a meal with my brother and me, you address all your comments to him, all your questions and conversation to him, not noticing me at all? It's starting to look as though you have the same opinion of me as everybody else: that I'm withdrawn and lazy, that I'm not a proper gung-ho Roman just because I don't plead cases in the law courts. 'His family doesn't need that kind of representative, people say, and it really irritates me."

Polybius was shocked by the young man's comments, for the boy was only eighteen years old. "By Jove, young Scipio," he replied, "what are you saying? You mustn't think such things - I don't do the things you say because I have a poor opinion of you, far from it. It's just that your brother is the older, and I assumed you shared the same thoughts and reactions. I'm amazed to hear different, and I'm delighted to learn that you're bothered by the possibility people might think you unworthy of your family - it shows you have spirit. I would be very, very happy to devote myself to helping you change that impression, helping you act and think in ways worthy of your ancestors."

Scipio might have been young, but he was no fool: he accepted gladly and used Polybius as a close advisor for the rest of the man's life, although always allowing him the freedom to travel, explore, and write on his own. Though thus deeply enmeshed in Roman affairs, Polybius never stopped caring about Greece and his beloved Achaean League - although their fractiousness and frequent lack of judgement predictably exasperated him. The great ancient travel-writer Pausanius records an inscription he saw in Lycosura: "Greece would never have suffered if she' listened to Polybius, and it was only through him that her suffering was relieved."

Polybius' subject is the rise of Rome to unparalleled power in the Mediterranean and beyond, a rise he follows through the epic events of the First Punic War and the Second Punic War, with liberal and lengthy digressions along the way for a wide variety of subjects (perhaps the most famous - and certainly the most excerpted - of which is his treatise on the Roman constitution, a treatise that cast a long shadow on the events of ensuing centuries, up to and most certainly including the American Revolution). His style is less fluid than that of Roman historian Livy (whose surviving works cover a great deal of the same subject matter), but his historical method - pursued at a time when the idea was still in its comparative infancy - is much more satisfyingly rigid.

There is no popular edition currently in print of all that survives in the single manuscript of Polybius, but the Penguin Classic (as is so often the case), translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert, will serve nicely as an introduction to the man and his work. That has been the bedrock task of the Penguin Classic series for lo, these many decades, and here as always they do their work admirably. Oxford World's Classics, so far as we know, never got around to Polybius, but you should!

In the Penny Press!

Well, it goes without saying - certainly here at Stevereads - that the most interesting, arresting thing in the Penny Press this time around is our very own letter, printed in the current issue of The Atlantic. As some of you will know, we issued a slight correction to the great literary critic B.R. Myers on the subject of the parables of Jesus. Myers, to his credit, has spunk enough to attempt a rebuttal, but his resorting to Mark is a surefire sign of desperation, as is his unconvincingly narrow construction of the passage he quotes. But still, we give him marks for determination and wish him well in his future endeavors!

Coming down from that height, we have Sam Anderson's fantastic piece in New York, "Raise High the Rafters," in which he maintains that the biggest challenge facing Barack Obama in the upcoming election will be curtailing his personal elegance to conform to the more lowbrow comfort zone of the general voting public, who, according to Anderson, dislike sophistication in any form. We here at Stevereads don't quite believe this, but we love how Anderson writes, as when he says "Style tells us, in a second, what substance couldn't do in a year," or when he describes the moment when his belief in Obama overcame his natural cynicism:

The speech that finally tipped my inner scale decisively toward belief was his least decorative: no refrain, little alliteration, no audience exploding at shouted catchphrases - just the man himself, standing there solemnly, neutralizing the hysteria of a potentially career-killing scandal with the naked power of grown-up thought. With his race speech, Obama chose the riskiest path in American politics: to be conspicuously thoughtful.


Of course, with high points must come low points, and over in The New Yorker, in a short story ironically titled "Deep-Holes," our low point this week is provided by a writer guaranteed to provide nothing else: yes, the issue features yet another endless damp lump of a short story by Alice Munro. This one is about some people doing some things, and it time and again offers up paragraphs like this:

While this was going on, Kent manages to slip behind her and finish up her champagne. Peter must have seen him do this, but for some peculiar reason he does not tell on him. Sally discovers what has happened some time later and Alex never knows about it at all, because he soon forgets there was anything in her glass and packs it neatly away with his own, while telling the boys about dolostone.

So one character does something, and none of the other characters see it or care, and the something never comes up again because nobody cares about it or knows about it (although Alex should, since he "soon" forgets there was anything in her glass, not immediately does, meaning there was an interval of indeterminate length in which somebody noticed and should have cared at least enough to mention it), and the purpose of the wooden, lifeless paragraph describing it is what, exactly? Or was the paragraph really describing anything? Might it not have been simple aimless typing? Let's pick another:

On the steps of the old bank building just beyond the subway entrance, several men were sitting or lounging or sleeping. It was no longer a bank, of course, though the bank's name was cut into the stone. She looked at the name rather than at the men, whose slouching or reclining postures were such a contrast to the old purpose of the building and the rush of the crowd coming out of the subway.

So these men were sitting on the steps of the old bank building, only it wasn't a bank anymore, and they weren't sitting but lounging, only they weren't lounging but sleeping (Munro probably means that some of the men were sitting, some were lounging, and others were sleeping, but her horrid sentence doesn't say that), and they were either slouching or reclining, but it doesn't matter anyway because the main character is paying attention to the building not the men, even though the men are all she describes or talks about?

Yeesh.

Fortunately, the same issue also provides a poem we here at Stevereads kinda-sorta like. It's by Charles Wright, and it's called, for reasons we can't make out at all, "Return of the Prodigal":

Now comes the summer, water clear, clouds heavy with weeping.
Tall grasses are silver-veined.
Little puddles of sunlight collect
in low places deep in the woods.
Lupine and paintbrush stoic in ditch weed,
larch rust a smear on the mountainside.
No light on the ridge line.
Zodiac pinwheels across the heavens,
bat-feint under Gemini.

Johh Donne and the Metaphysical Gesture

Our book today is John Donne and the Metaphysical Gesture by Judah Stampfer, and we found it - and loved it - solely due to the serendipitous magic that is the bargain lot of the Brattle Bookshop in Boston, Massachusetts.

We were in Boston checking on several pending real estate deals we've got going on scenic Beacon Hill (some guy named Tom Brady? Apparently some sort of disgraced local sports figure?), and whenever we're in Boston, we make a point of going to the Brattle, Boston's best used bookstore, with a good-sized selection of used books on all subjects and, more to the point, an entire adjacent lot full of bargain-carts - books of all descriptions for $1, $3, and $5 - a great majority of them titles you'd be asked to pay $8 (and up) for at any other used bookstore. Even confining yourself to just the $1 tables (as, to amuse ourselves, we almost always do), it's easy to accumulate an armload of great books - only to go inside and pay a pittance for the whole bunch.

The Brattle is always buying books and book collections, with the result that the bargain carts are always changing - and you can never tell what you'll find (i.e. it won't always be old textbooks, outdated electrical code books, and fourth-generation tattered paperbacks, like you'll almost exclusively find on the bargain-carts of other used bookstores). It was, for instance, on one of the $1 carts recently that we found our present book, which was written by Judah Stampfer in 1970, has scarcely ever been reprinted, and is currently out of print.


And which is fantastic! Stampfer writes so fluidly, so passionately about Donne and metaphysical poetry that the reader is completely hooked from the very first paragraph:

Metaphysical poetry eludes definition; yet many a group has oddly assorted characteristics. Quick speech, a bent for politics, and large blue eyes may characterize one family, starchy desserts and a need to be self-employed another. Not every designation requires a genus and a species. So we associate the truculent learnedness of the metaphysical poets, their sinewy music, strong lines, impassioned confrontations with large issues, distant conceits, colloquial speech, and a bent for religious experience.

John Donne wrote some of the most terrifyingly complex poetry in the English language, and he has baffled many a reader over the centuries. Stampfer reads him like he's never heard of the man before, eyes totally fresh for the wonder and the challenge of the verse, and he's such a good writer that he conveys that wonder straight to his readers. This is exactly what all literary criticism should do and what so little of it actually does. Stampfer's curiosity is as infectious as his reading is wide. Just listen to how good this stuff is:

An interest in words is necessarily paradoxical. Signs, not substantial things, they signal to the mind, the memory, the will. Who arranges nonsense syllables in iambic pentameter, or serves a menu as the main course for dinner? We do not trust them. Indeed, a man dwelling on words makes us uneasy. He is playing a game; a hurt is oozing out. Yet a child's language is its playground. We like the smack of talk, its knolls and fissures. Not every prattle calls for a diagnosis.

A poet is even more of a puzzle. Do his dense verbal textures, freighted with feeling, indicate more than a maladjustment? When does his fret of dissatisfaction become a hunger for the truth? Blake and Wordsworth regarded themselves as inspired craftsmen; but Tennyson and Browning hung between social engagement and withdrawal into words. Indeed, Browning dramatized a series of verbal eccentrics. And Arnold established so firm an equilibrium, we suspect he was doing penance. But for what? For writing poetry? Wasn't that activity innocent?

Stampfer knows perfectly well the perilous task he's undertaking in trying to plumb the depths of Donne's gorgeous, twisted poetry. He's likewise both aware and doubtful of the strictly biographical approach, as he beautifully states:

The personal drama of a reticent craftsman is not easily ferreted out. A lawyer develops his cases, a doctor his world of medicine; we catch an aura of subject matter, the pace of a career. But of a creative writer, whose words crackle in our intestines, we demand more. Grasping his endless smash-ups, abandoned children, a tearing of city air - all so cool, easy, and casual - we want some control of the mysterious stranger, before we allow a laying on of hands.

John Donne and the Metaphysical Gesture goes on and on like that, page after glorious page, and serves to underscore two things dramatically: first, the pitiless caprice of chance, that an intoxicating masterpiece like this should be long out of print when things like The Last Lecture ride the bestseller list for months on end, and second, the upliftingly egalitarian wonder of the Brattle bargain carts, which serve up such gemstones daily, for a dollar apiece, to the patient bookworm.

So then: when next in Boston, by all means make time for the Brattle Bookshop. And in the meantime, and thrill to that particular crackle in your intestines!

The Floating Book

Our book today is Michelle Lovric's lush and utterly confident first novel The Floating Book, which takes its readers to the very beginnings of print culture by taking them to 1468 Venice, where Wendelin von Speyer and his assistants Bruno Uguccione and Felice Feliciano have just set up the city's first printing press - which is revolutionary enough, but their choice of printing matter only increases the tension between themselves and the city's ruling councils: they've chosen a first edition of Catullus, whose Lesbia poems, some of you may recall from school, are raw and scandalous. As the inevitable controversy erupts, so too does an intense love triangle between Bruno, Felice, and a mysterious woman named Sosia.

Lovric interweaves this story with the story of Catullus himself (printed in a different font; as befits a book about the birth of Venetian printing, The Floating Book is gorgeously and variedly assembled), and it's impossible to judge which portions of the book are better: both 15th century Venice and 1st century b.c. Rome come marvelously alive through Lovric's talent. In the case of the former, tossed-off descriptions are brought home with one or two perfectly chosen adjectives:

The clouds had parted in front of them all the way back to Venice. By the time Lussietta and Wendelin set foot in Mestre, the warm rain had evaporated, leaving the streets shining with puddles dizzy as shaken mirrors.

And in the case of the latter, Catullus' tortured love for Clodia, his 'Lesbia,' is followed through all its painful stages, as is his terror that all the poems into which he's poured his heartache, all the work he's created in his short life, might one day amount to nothing:

I know all too well the way these things go. Ignominious destinies meet some of the best books ... after languishing overlong in the storerooms of the booksellers they're sold off by weight to the grocers and bakers to wrap pastries and spices or to line barrels in which cereals are stored, or theyre sent to the butchers where they're wadded around sanguineous cuts of veal and the lolling heads of tiny songbirds impaled on sticks. There are so many ways for a poet and his poems to lose their immortality - even while he's still alive! I walk past the butchers and bakers, whistling, but in my heart I dread to see my own work embrace their wares one day. Yesterday I saw one of Caelius's poems flapping like a tunic round a fine mackerel, and smiled for the first time in weeks.

Of course, to those modern-day readers familiar with Catullus' textual history, his worry in this passage is only the more ironic, for we have him today through the survival of only one manuscript - he came that close to being fish-wrapping and only fish-wrapping.

Lovric's book has everything in it for the reader tired of thin, jaded prose and flimsy plots. The old Venice and much older Rome it evokes are each perfectly rendered, and the storylines in each are very satisfyingly intertwined and counterbalanced. And as an added little bonus, each chapter is headed by an English rendering from Catullus. Since the book nowhere attributes them, we have to assume they're Lovric's own, and some of them are quite good:

You have forgotten.
But the Gods remember
and so does the Truth.
It's the truth that will make you sorry
one day
for everything you did, and everything you do.

We here at Stevereads whole-heartedly endorse The Floating Book; it's an extravagant example of historical fiction done right.

Looking for God in the Penny Press!

The New Yorker's current double-length extravaganza is being billed as its "Summer Fiction Issue, so naturally there's barely a word in it about fiction (unless you count a "new" short story by Nabokov, but surely "dentistry" would be a better term, as far as actually reading it goes?). Instead, a large chunk of the issue seems dedicated to matters of faith and doubt (the issue's highlight is a two-page piece by George Saunders called "Hypocrites" that's worth the cost of the whole damn thing).

The piece that caught our attention was "Holiday in Hellmouth" by the redoubtable James Wood, an omnibus review of various books that deal with the iniquities of the world and the problems faith has confronting them. Wood stays in book-reviewer mode for nine-tenths of his very deep, very thoughtful essay, but near its end a more passionate, personal note starts sounding more prominently:


Heaven, one of the tenderest verses in the Bible has it, is where God will wipe away all the tears from our faces. In her novel Gilead, Marilynne Robinson adds, in a line just as tender, if a little sterner, "It takes nothing from the loveliness of the verse to say that is exactly what will be required." Robinson, herself a devout Protestant, means that the immense surge of human suffering in the world will need, and deserves, a great deal of heavenly love and repair; it is as close as her novel comes to righteous complaint. But one could also say, more skeptically, that Christianity needs the concept of Heaven simply to make sense of all the world's suffering - that, theologically speaking, Heaven is "exactly what will be required." In the end, Heaven, it seems, is the only tenable response to the problem of evil. It is where God's mysterious plan will be revealed; it is where the poor and the downtrodden, the sick and the tortured, will be healed; it is where everything we went through on earth will suddenly seem "worth it."

This personal note of doubt achieves almost anguished undertones at the close of the piece, when Wood chooses to end with a series of implored open-ended questions that will sound familiar to anybody out there who's struggled with personal religious beliefs:

If God supposedly wipes away all tears from our faces in Heaven, why does he not do it now? Why does God not now establish paradise on earth, as the Jehovah's Witnesses believe he will do? And what is the purpose of these eighty years of not having the tears wiped from our faces?

As some of you may know, we here at Stevereads detest the Church. We hate its hypocrisy, we deplore its smugness, and we've fought our whole life to pry open the whalebone corsets it puts around any of its faithful who dare to think for themselves, to create, or to question. And you all know how we'd answer Wood's questions, since they all have the same answer: there's nobody out there, no magical Neverland where phantom selves get transported at the moment of death, no mystical father-figure carefully measuring everything we do.

But we're nothing if not fair here at Stevereads, and so we showed Wood's article to Father Terry O'Brien of Boston for a different viewpoint, and we'll now turn the podium over to him. As always, your thoughts are welcome:

God is all-powerful, and for that reason alone He tends to get blamed for everything. I read the article our host showed me, and there's implied blame on every page of it. The problem with blame, I think, is that it assumes a greater degree of involvement with the world than God exercises - or rather, I should say a greater degree of interactivity, for God is very involved in our lives; He may not be "carefully measuring" as our host says, but He believes in each and every one of us, and if we clear our heart of clutter, we can feel that belief and take strength from it. I believe this is what praying is: quieting our inner chaos long enough to feel God's loving presence and maybe even lean on it a little. That presence is what awakened my own faith, it's what drew me to my service, and it's been my rock during all the very worst times of my life.

But God's support isn't interactive. He doesn't make earthquakes happen; plate tectonics do. He doesn't cause floods; tidal currents and earthquakes at sea do. He doesn't cause cancer; rogue cells do. It's true He created the superstructure of the world in which those things happen, and of the universe in which that world exists (something more and more physicists are declining to debate, I think), but He no more continues to prompt each manifestation of those things than you or I individually decide to grow our hair or toenails. He created the world and everything in it, but He hasn't directly interacted with His creation since the Flood. He saved one family (and representatives of all his wild creatures) and then destroyed all the rest of His creation; but after He did that, He decided never to do it again. In other words, He changed.

That's essential, I think: God changed, and it's in that very aspect that we all were made in His image, for in all of creation, only mankind can change. I know our host will disagree with this, but this is one case where his activist zeal has got the better of his insight (to say nothing of his theology). I shouldn't say animals can't change - obviously, they can be traumatized, they can grow stronger or faster, and they can mourn. But those experiences don't change their selves, unless to break them. If a horse develops bone cancer and goes through operations and chemotherapy for months, that horse may recover, but whether he does or not, he'll still be the same horse. His 'personality' will not have changed, nor will his emotional makeup. But if a man goes through the same experience, his self may change drastically. He may become more giving, more honest, more loving - I've seen it happen. A young child stricken with some disease or burned badly often changes in like manner: the bravery and grace that may lie dormant in most of his playmates becomes so clear as to be blinding.

Take the example of a young woman I know. Some years ago, she fell into debt and drug addiction. She did nothing to help herself, and her friends and family turned away from her. She reached rock bottom, and there she found strengths within herself she hadn't guessed she had. With a lot of hard work (and yes, with prayer, but she did the work all on her own), she reclaimed her life, and her friends and loved ones, astounded at the finding of this lost lamb, in turn examined their own hearts. That young woman is now a source of strength to others, and her friends and loved ones will never be so quick to turn away from helping someone in need.

I'm not saying God gave that man cancer to make him more loving. Rogue cells (or other factors, but you take my point) caused the cancer. I'm not saying that child was stricken by God in order to make him shine with light. Tragedies happen in the world, even to the very young. And I'm not saying God caused that young woman's drug problem or hardened the hearts of her family (although I know He has a rep for that!). People make bad choices every day, and sometimes they correct them, with or without their family's help.

What I'm saying is, none of those things could happen in Heaven. Heaven is our relief from all of that, and for all I know God really is ready to wipe the tears from our eyes when we get there. But James Wood (and Marilynne Robinson) is wrong when he implies we're all somehow owed that gesture by God. God didn't create the suffering and evil of the world - much of it is the accidental by-product of the world being the world, and much more of it is the product of mankind itself. God wants mankind to be perfect, as He is perfect. He believes in that potential, for everybody. Whether or not we achieve it is entirely up to us. And I feel one thing very strongly: when the tear-wiping is over, the questions will begin: when tragedy happened to you, did you rise to meet it? Did you make sure it changed you for the better? When tragedy struck someone you love, did you go to their aid, or count yourself lucky that it wasn't you? When you looked upon the evils of the world, did you fight them, ignore them, or worsen them? How did you let your one and only stay on this world change you, and how did you change the world while you were in it?

I've always believed the central question about Heaven is this: will God be happy to see you?

We are here in this harsh world to make it better, to make as much of it better as we can, and to make ourselves better in the process. None of that would matter if God just reached in and helped us every time it was hard, or even impossible, to do. I'm sorry James Wood seems not to see that, but he should trust me that it's true. After all, I wear the collar: it's my job to help explain God to those who are having a hard time seeing Him. If I'm ever having trouble writing a magazine article, I'll hope Wood returns the favor!

June at Open Letters Monthly!

Let the celebrations commence - June heralds yet another issue of Open Letters Monthly, and this one is just exploding with juicy content!

The issue kicks off with a long poem by Jesse Ball, author of the critically-acclaimed novel Samedi the Deafness, but that's just a sample of the wonders that await you! Greg Waldmann writes on Israel's problematic anniversary; Sam Sacks does thorough - and thoroughly absorbing - roundup of critical reactions to controversial memoirist James Frey's debut novel; John Cotter muses on the book-length werewolf novel Sharp Teeth; our talent stable of freelancers share their thoughts and insights on subject as varied as Muhammed Ali, Etgar Keret, animal cognition, Goth werewolves, scientific experiments, and the prose of Margot Livesey. I'm also on hand, nattering on in the background about one damn thing after another.

And the Open Letters Quiz goes down swinging!

All that and much more is just a mouse-click away - so pop on over to that link and have yourself a fun hour reading!