I am the Mummy Heb-Nefert!

Our book today is Eve Bunting’s superb 1997 childrens title I am the Mummy Heb-Nefert, with rich, glowing artwork by David Christiana. The book is told in a very loose, lovely verse, as a young girl from thousands of years ago relates the remarkable story of her life and afterlife:

I am the mummy Heb-Nefert,
Black as night,
Stretched as tight
As leather on a drum.
My arms are folded
On my hollow chest
Where once my live heart beat.
My ears are holes
That hear no sound.

Bunting unobtrusively weaves many authentic details of ancient Egyptian life into her story, always with the stress on how natural everything was to the people who were living it all. Young Heb-Nefert catches the eye of the Pharaoh’s brother – she dances for him, and they fall in love:

Handmaidens dressed me every day.
They kept my head so sweetly shaved,
Pumiced and polished till it shone.
They painted me with yellow dye,
Darkened the lashes of my eyes with kohl,
Shadowed my lids with blue,
The color of the evening sky.
My nails were hennaed red as jasper beads,
My flaxen wig was jewel woven.
And on the top
A cone of scented fat
Melted to liquid in the summer warmth
And smelled of flowers.

In bright colors, we’re given elegantly chosen scenes from their life together:

We sailed upon the Nile,
My lord and I,
The wildfowl rising from the reeds
Along the bank,
The ripples of the sacred river
Soft against our boat.
Sometimes we saw a hippopotamus,
Great jaws agape,
A crocodile.
But we were ever safe.

We’d wander in the gardens, he and I,
Beside the pleasure lake
Where lotus blossoms grew.
The servant girls would come
On soundless feet
And bring us fruit – grapes, dates, and figs –
The baskets balanced on their heads,
A cloth of linen spread
Beneath a canopy that kept us from the sun.
And we would feast
While harpists played.

Time eventually passes for the pair, and while still young, Heb-Nefert dies. She floats above herself and watches the complex process of her own mummification. And soon enough she watches her loved one approaching the afterlife as well – and their shared journey toward the incomprehensible:

My Noble One grew old
And also left that life
To lie at last beside me
In the night that followed night.
Time passed and time,
Dark time and years,
Till we were found,
Our bodies moved,
Placed in glass coffins
Under lights
In quiet rooms.
I rose above myself and watched
As people came,
They peered into the cases where we lay.

They spoke,
The words unknown to me
But understood as they were said.
“This was a person? This … and this?”

Heb-Nefert was no wise woman in her own time, no prophet or seer. Nevertheless, her words as she becomes aware of these awestruck museum gawkers are suffused with a serene wisdom that utterly, wonderfully preserves the weird, imperative dignity of the ancient Egyptians. The concluding line of I am the Mummy Heb-Nefert never fails to move me in its quiet, knowing way:

How foolish that they do not see
How all things change,
And so will they.
Three thousand years from now
They will be dust and bones.
I am the mummy Heb-Nefert,
Black as night,
Stretched as tight
As leather on a drum.

Once I was beautiful.

People of Note!

Our book today is People of Note, written (in highly questionable verse) in 1940 by Laurence McKinney and illustrated by the mighty Gluyas Williams, whose sly, understated genius could often be seen in the New Yorker of the time. U.S. classical music concert attendance today is a mere fraction of what it was in the 1940s, when a cute little $2 hardcover like this one could be published by a house like E. P. Dutton & Company with a reasonable hope of people actually buying it even though it’s a quite ephemeral piece of fun.

The major – and some decidedly minor – faces of the typical symphony orchestra are on display here, accompanied by McKinney’s unleashed doggerel. For instance, there’s the Conductor:

This Backward Man, this View Obstructor
Is known to us as the Conductor.
He beats the time with grace and vim
And sometimes they keep up with him.
But though they’re eloquent and snappy
Conductors always seem unhappy.
Their strange grimaces on the podium
Suggest bicarbonate of sodium
May be, perhaps, the proper diet
To keep their inner fires quiet.
They have to think up countless capers
To keep them in the daily papers
Which help them in financial strictures
Or fit them for the motion pictures.
Conductors worry all the while
That’s why they bow, but never smile.

Or the lowly viola player:

Viola, there’s a pretty sound
Suggesting violets, and ground
All blossoming in early spring
But, bless me, it is no such thing.
A head cold – listeners confess
Is what it sounds like more or less
And though this virtue may present
A sort of nasal armament
Violists spend the livelong day
In helping others on their way.
The fiddle’s friend, the cello’s pal –
He helps the English Horn’s morale
With envy eating out his heart
For just a tiny solo part.
No better phrase describes him than
The orchestra’s forgotten man.

And speaking of the English Horn:

The English Horn I must reveal
Has no connection with John Peel;
In fact Old John would find it meaner
To play on than a vacuum cleaner.
Its tone would make his horses skittish
For it is neither horn – nor British.
Some call it – to increase this tangle –
The Cor Anglais – or horn with angle –
Concerning which I’m glad to state
The English Horn is long and straight.
Its misery and constant dwelling
On tragedy has caused a swelling
Just where the doleful note emerges;
Imbued with melancholy surges
This makes an English Horn cadenza
Sound fearfully like influenza.

At least the English Horn player can’t see the audience’s reaction to his melancholy playing – unlike the upright Double Bass player:

The men who have the saddest faces
Are those who play the Double Basses
Though deep in misery their cup
They have to take it standing up,
And sawing on a clothesline string
They grunt and groan like anything.
The orchestra’s last-line defense
They also see the audience
And, spying in the distant offing,
They spot the man who does the coughing –
The school girl in expectant dither –
The wife who dragged her husband with her –
The novice groping in a maze –
The critic whittling out a phrase –
And those who sleep – and those who snore
Which makes them groan and grunt some more.

These and other strange folk are immortalized in verse in this little gem of a book, the perfect bon-bon for anybody you know who’s psychologically damaged enough to like classical music – or worse, to play it recreationally.

The Murderess!

Our book today is a slim, weird masterpiece of 20th century Greek literature, The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis, published in 1903 and translated into English by Peter Levi in 1983.

Translated into English, with the usual apologies. Translator apologies almost always bug me, and Levi’s is no exception; they almost always take as their premise that precise or even cognitively close translation isn’t really possible – that the best even a skilled translator can do is cobble together a series of more or less serviceable approximations … that everything, in other words, is lost in the translation.

Levi is fairly explicit about it all, in his Translator’s Preface to Papadiamantis’ jagged, admittedly idiosyncratic book. The particular twists and turns of Papadiamantis’ prose, Levi tells us, “… the realism and the exoticism, the narrative gift and the excessively romantic lyricism, make it impossible to disentangle his virtues from his vices as a writer. They are also extremely hard to render in modern English."

Needless to say, I never have any idea what to make of a translator who openly tells his readers that the one thing he wasn’t really able to do with his source text was translate it. Resorting to incomprehensible evasions like maintaining an author’s strengths can be indistinguishable from his weaknesses doesn’t help any, as does imputing blame to the very regionalism that is the reason for translating the work in the first place:

It has been impossible to produce accurately the texture of the original. I had trouble with proverbs and the names of herbs. Certain popular phrases exist in every language that have roots in an entire culture, and Papadiamantis uses more of them than most writers. Then at times he can be painfully slow and repetitive, or he can drag in by the hair some weighty phrase out of a literary journal. Nowadays a publisher’s editor would simply strike it out. It is not the task of a mere translator to underline such phrases.

Fortunately, Levi’s own work in translating this little book bears out a different tale, one in which his skills as a translator positively shine. Papadiamantis’ tale is that of an old woman named Hadoula, sometimes known as Frankojannou, who as the book opens has gone four days and nights without sleep at the side of a newborn granddaughter, a little baby born sick who’s done nothing but cry for days. Drifting in and out of aggravated patches of half-sleep, Frankojannou’s mind more or less snaps; she sticks two fingers in the baby’s mouth and holds them there until the infant is completely still. The child’s mother is asleep in the same room of the poor little hovel, and the tiny village’s doctor is away from town – his temporary substitute rather easily puts the death down to fever, but by that point old Hadoula’s mind has permanently altered. Whether she’s reacting to the grinding poverty and social nullity in which all the women of her world live, or whether she’s simply gone insane, we don’t know. But it isn’t long before she pushes two little girls down a well and cold-heartedly waits while they first struggle then float face-down.

Shortly after that, she’s seen nearby when another girl goes down a well, and the police begin to suspect she’s somehow involved. In the classic tradition of ancient Greek tragedy, Frankojannou has by this point become little more than a beast at bay, tormented by the same memories that exhilarate her, intent on fleeing into the mountains rather than be apprehended and put in prison:

As she went out, the lamenting voice of the infant, the tiny girl unjustly slain, moaned inside her. She stood in the doorway, peering carefully outside, right and let, up and down the road. Not a soul, not a shadow. She put wings to her feet. It was not the first time she had heard that sorrowful infant cry in the cavernous, echoing darkness of her soul. Now she thought she was escaping from danger and disaster, escaping from dungeon and prison, but prison and Hell were within her.

The bleakness of this story moves effortlessly from the hardscrabble streets and huts of the poor Greek villages that are its setting to the minds and memories of its characters as they gradually react to this horrific tragedy unfolding amidst them. And of course nobody’s reactions are more intense than the murderess’ own:

In her [Frankojannou’s] sleep she thought she was still young; her father and mother married her off in her dream as they had done in fact, and gave her ‘the blessing of the dear departed’ and the dowry, including her father’s plot, where she had dug and watered cabbages when she was little. And her father rewarded her for her hard work, and gave her ‘four heads’ out of the cabbages. Hadoula took the four plants happily into her hands, but when she looked, Oh horror! she saw they were four little dead human heads.

Despite his protestations, Levi does a wonderful job conveying all this. Papadiamantis is entirely unknown to the world outside Greece, and he represents a large gallery of such regional artists in similar positions. Such artists represent entire worlds, of course, and each one of them is worth exploring. I can recommend Papadiamantis as one of those destinations, and this book – his strongest and bleakest – is his best.

Diary of a Wombat!

Our book today is Jackie French’s 2002 classic kids book Diary of a Wombat, with utterly charming illustrations by Bruce Whatley.
The book tells the story of a fat little wombat somewhere in Australia who’s grown a bit bored with the life she records in her diary. A typical entry runs like this:

Monday

Morning: Slept.

Afternoon: Slept.

Evening: Ate grass. Scratched.

Night: Ate grass.

One day, she discovers he has new neighbors: humans! This delights her as a prospect for change, although there’s an obstacle in the way – the welcome mat:

Discovered flat, hairy creature invading my territory.

Fought major battle with flat, hairy creature.

Won battle. Neighbors should be pleased. Demanded a reward.

The reward in question is carrots, and the little wombat quickly comes to prefer them to boring old grass. She grows demanding, and soon her tastes have broadened to include oats as well. The long-suffering human family is not consulted in any of this; our wombat feels a serene self-confidence.



Eventually, she makes a comfortable hole for herself directly under the home of her new neighbors, so she’ll never be far away from carrots or oats.



We’ll just have to hope the whole thing isn’t an extended parable about the irritation of guests who overstay their welcome. I’m hoping instead it’s about the pleasures of serendipity. Otherwise, things could get pretty uncomfortable for the wombat in question.

Comics! Three Number Ones!

Comics this week included three first issues spanning two thousand years of super-heroics. First issues don’t mean as much these days as they once did, but I can’t help but get a little excited about them even so – they represent such potential to be squandered!

The first issue of DC’s new limited series “Legacies” takes us back to the very beginnings of that company’s super-hero scene: World War Two is about to break open, and gangsters are running the streets of America’s cities. Suddenly, ‘mystery men’ are appearing – The Crimson Avenger, the Atom, the Sandman … swathing themselves in mist, using their fists and guns to bring crime-waves to a halt. The artwork is done by Andy Kubert (with inks by his legendary father Joe), but that’s the only reason to check in with this first issue (apparently, different creative teams will handle different issues). For better or worse, the ‘dawn of superheroes’ story-bar was set incredibly high by “Marvels” - hell, even Marvel’s own “Marvels Project” hasn’t been able to equal that earlier classic, and despite having a much, much grander story to tell, “Legacies” doesn’t even come close. Yet, at least.



The first issues move into the present day with “Avengers” #1, a confused, over-talky jumble of an issue that was probably supposed to compensate for its glaring weaknesses by brandishing the fact that it’s written by fan favorite Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by fan favorite John Romita Jr. (although the JRJR cover is easily the worst he’s ever done in his entire career). It starts with Steve Rogers solemnly telling about thirty super-heroes that he needs them – they all have slightly different reactions, but that’s OK, because we don’t see most of them again in this issue. Instead, we cut to a dinner/reception where Steve Rogers is again christening a new Avengers team, but this one is much smaller, a core team that makes almost no tactical sense at all (there’s Spider-Man, Spider-Woman, Spider-Archer, Spider-Wolverine, Bucky … and, in case the team encounters any, you know, super-villains, Thor and Iron Man). This team is attacked in the middle of their first meeting by Kang the …

…. sorry, I nodded off. Yes, this new Avengers team is attacked in their first issue by Kang the Conqueror, in a gambit that seems insane even for Bendis. To put it mildly, Kang is over-used as a go-to Avengers bad guy (he was even the inaugural villain for the young Avengers, for pete’s sake). He tells our heroes that their ‘children’ will be responsible for unleashing an untold horror on the human race, and he enlists their help to come forward in time and prevent that from happening. This is obviously a job for the aforementioned Young Avengers, but that doesn’t seem to occur to Bendis, so we’re off to the races next issue. Fans of Bendis and JRJR will continue to buy the run – Bendis will be on it for about six issues, and if history is any guide, Romita penciled his last issue before this one even went on sale (this issue has a prose backup feature describing the origin of the Avengers …. It’s violently uninteresting, so we’ll skip it for now).



We jump forward thousands of years for our third first issue, a new #1 for the venerable Legion of Super-Heroes. The draw here isn’t the fairly good artwork by Yildiray Cinar (which certainly sounds like a Legion name – it’s not revealed in this issue what U.P. planet he’s from – my bet is Bismoll) but rather the return to Legion-scribing duties of Paul Levitz, who wrote some of the team’s greatest adventures about fifty years ago and is therefore presumed to have a solid grasp of what makes the Legion tick. There are two drawbacks to this theory: first, this Legion is composed of ragged-looking adults rather than the sexy teenagers Levitz last wrote about, and second, this series springs directly from a story-arc over in “Superman” a couple of years ago, which makes this issue feel just about as heavily c0ntinued as “Avengers” #1 did. Needless to say, good first issues shouldn’t feel heavily continued from something else – their whole point is to clear the clutter from the stage and start things fresh. Instead, the plot of this issue mostly revolves around the potential rehabilitation of the villain of that Superman mini-series, a xenophobic bigot code-named Earth-Man.

The issue was largely uninteresting despite two distinctly high-octane surprises, but DC’s background strategy here is certainly working on this long-time Legion fan: I’m perfectly willing to stick around and give Levitz the benefit of the doubt.

Still, for not one, not two, but three first issues to have this little oomph between them …

The Ink Drinker!

Our book today is Eric Sanvoisin’s 1996 The Ink-Drinker, a mini-hymn to the ultimate seductive power of reading. The young boy who narrates the story of one remarkable hot summer day dislikes books ; his father can’t get enough of them, calls them his little ‘bookies’ and has filled the family’s home with them (even in the bathroom).



The boy hates books, or so he thinks. He loves the sound of tearing paper, and he’s only helping out at his father’s bookshop to give himself something to do. He doesn’t browse the books – he’s mainly looking for shoplifters (even though his father tends to spot the real thieves as soon as they walk in the door).

It’s while he’s thus occupied that he spots a mysterious new customer with weird pale skin and an odd manner. The customer makes his way to a secluded corner of the shop, waits until he thinks nobody’s watching, then takes a straw out of his coat and proceeds to drink the ink from one of the books!

The boy is astonished and follows the strange man when he leaves the store, eventually ending up in a crypt in the cemetery, only to discover that the man is, of course, a vampire. The vampire brusquely tells the boy that he has liver problems and can’t drink blood anymore, but he’s found a surprisingly nutritious substitute in ink. When the boy asks why he doesn’t just by bottles of ink to satisfy his craving, the vampire somewhat testily responds that only ‘aged’ ink on pages provides true satisfaction, and he darkly hints that the boy will soon understand.



The next day, the boy wakes up with a new craving. He takes out a straw and proceeds to devour a book, finding himself totally absorbing the adventures of a ferocious pirate captain. In the perfect metaphorical world of this wonderfully whimsical kids book (with fittingly odd illustrations by Martin Matje), the boy has become an ink-drinker. Readers everywhere will understand.

Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age!

Our book today is Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age, a 1964 novel by Bohumil Hrabal translated into English in 1995 by Michael Henry Heim. Hrabal is of course a great master of wry comic prose, and Heim must be doing justice to the original Czech, because several lines and passages in Dancing Lessons are laugh-out-loud funny.

The setting – at least, as much of it as Hrabal troubles to create – is fairly nebulous: an old man, something of a dandy in his younger days, tells an endless stream of stories to a group of sunbathing young ladies. We never hear the ladies speak – the entire book is a monologue – and the stories are a luminous mush of memory, anecdote, and history. Their presentation is never anything less than engaging, but they emphatically make no sense. And to emphasize the style of geriatric storytelling that Hrabal means to both venerate and satirize, Dancing Lessons is one extremely long sentence, with one stunningly inappropriate vista opening directly onto another. More so than in most of Hrabal’s previous novels, sex is present here – our old narrator likes recalling his pleasures:

… one day I was walking along minding my own business when I noticed a Jewish beauty with a nose like train hook sitting on the border between two fields, waiting for the first Saturday star to come out, and because she had no panties on I had one eye glued to the spot where Goethe liked to look before he sat down to write his poems, and I went over and introduced myself and we immediately struck up an intimate conversation …

In addition to having a very digressive mind, the narrator has a very literary one – the little text abounds in references and allusions, all delivered with the author’s knowing, playful wink:

… and she said, Oh you young men with your one-track minds! the world is a beautiful place, don’t you think? not because it is but because I see it that way, the way Pushkin saw it in that movie, poor Pushkin, to die in a duel, and so young, his last poems gushing from the bullet hole in his head, I could tell from the picture that HE admired the European Renaissance too, he had fantastic muttonchops, you know, the whiskers our own Franz Joseph wore, and Strauss the composer …

This is a very short book, rendered all the shorter by the headlong rush of the prose, and although it can be pressed into service as some kind of lesson on the garrulity of unreliable narrators, what it really wants to do is entertain you for an hour by simulating the experience of listening to a charming old man who’s full of sheep-dip. Hrabal’s novelistic aims are often far simpler than he’s given credit, and nowhere is that more in evidence than this brisk little entertainment of a book.

Comics: Dark Reign Ends!

Comics this week feature the culmination of Marvel’s “Dark Reign” saga, and the issues we’ll be examining – Siege #4, Dark Avengers #16, and the double-sized Finale of New Avengers – gave me immense satisfaction not only in the usual ways, with interesting writing and some great artwork, but also in the sweetest of all possible ways: by playing right into my ‘I told you so’ factor.

As those of you who’ve been following four-color superhero comics (or merely those of you who’ve been following their highlights here at Stevereads) already know, the premise of “Dark Reign” is alluringly simple: what if evil won? Not just ‘won’ in terms of successfully robbing a bank, but ‘won’ in the sense of ‘set up shop and ran things’ – that was the idea behind installing ‘Green Goblin’ psychopathic killer Norman Osborn as head of the super-police force known as H.A.M.M.E.R. and having him create his own team of Avengers consisting of fellow super-villains in disguise. The real avengers were either dead or fugitives in hiding from Osborn and his troops, and the government had passed a Super-Hero Registration Act compelling all super-heroes to register with the government and play by federal rules.

Although of course initially I wasn’t a fan of this whole concept, I quickly came around. It produced some really good stories, and Marvel put some top-notch creative people in charge of keeping the whole thing going. I was so entertained I wasn’t sure I wanted to see the eventual heroes-return storyline I knew was coming.



The four-part mini-series Siege is that storyline, and I’d have read it no matter what, since it’s drawn by the great, the mighty Oliver Coipel. And it’s been thrilling – and notoriously violent. Osborn, apparently drunk with power (and egged on by Loki, the evil Norse god of mischief), decided to muster all his super villains and all his troops and invade the fabled city of Asgard, which at the time was floating about twenty feet above Braxton, Oklahoma. The invasion was led by Osborn’s leashed superman, the mentally unbalanced superhero Sentry, and in Siege’s most widely discussed panel, Coipel draws the Sentry ripping apart Ares, the Greek god of war, like an old T-shirt. The end of the previous issue had Norman Osborn flying into a Green Goblin-style spittle-flecking rant – on national TV – about how he was the only thing stopping the Sentry from going completely bonkers and annihilating all life on Earth. Osborn no sooner finishes saying this than we lay eyes on the Sentry floating above our heroes, only he’s swapped his heroic blue cape for a bunch of muscular red tentacles.

So this issue opens with a fight even our assembled heroes can’t really win – as Osborn puts it, the Sentry has become the ‘Angel of Death,’ and the life-sucking Void he has at his command quickly paralyzes his enemies. Help comes from the most unlikely source: Loki, who’s apparently sorry things have gone so far and tries to make them right again, by using his mystical abilities to infuse the fallen heroes with new vitality.

The Sentry senses this, attacks Loki, and proves that he hasn’t exactly got all the god-shredding out of his system.


Coipel gives us some great action panels – pride of place go to Thor and Iron Man – and eventually our heroes are victorious. The Void is vanquished, and its poor slob of a human host is killed (in a neat touch, Thor gives his body a suitably epic Viking incineration – in the sun, no less), and with any luck, that’ll be the last anybody ever hears of the Sentry, one of the dumbest ideas to come out of Marvel Comics since the Spider-clone.

The issue ends with Steve Rogers refusing to take up the mantle of Captain America but agreeing to fulfill some kind of leadership role in the upcoming ‘Heroic Age.’ There’s celebration in the air: the Registration Act has been ‘thrown out,’ the fugitive heroes can come out of hiding, and the villains who were running the show are either captured or in hiding themselves.



This ties into the double-sized finale of New Avengers, which shows our fugitive team – Luke Cage, Hawkeye as Ronin, Mockingbird, Spider-Man, Ms. Marvel, Bucky as Captain America – in one last covert adventure together, with Brian Michael Bendis putting in plenty of his snarky, chatty dialogue and Brian Hitch doing the artwork with the increasingly incoherent sloppiness that is coming to mark his current work. At the end of that issue, we’re told again that the good guys win- the Registration Act is dismissed, Osborn and his cronies are going to jail, the sun is shining again.



Switch scenes to Dark Avengers #16, written by Brian Michael Bendis and drawn by Mike Deodato (with more – a lot more – of that weird computerized inking and coloring he’s been fooling around with lately), which brings to an end the main storyline of a comic I never thought I’d like and ended up eagerly awaiting every month (and not only for Deodato’s beautiful artwork). This was the central book of “Dark Reign” – this was the fake Avengers team Osborn assembled and held together through force of will, and it made for compelling reading, month after month.

In this issue, it’s all over: the team is beaten and disbanded, war criminals, and Osborn himself is going to the prison to which he sent so many heroes during his quasi-legal reign of terror. And in his typically mind-gaming way, Bendis puts in Osborn’s mouth the perfectly-articulated rationale for everything he did, and you got to have it in its entirety:

I was right.

The world is a mess, and the world needed me to fix it. And I would have. I could have.

This world is a madhouse of mutants, terrorists, psychotics, aliens, and monsters. All of them chasing and crashing into each other every second of every day. People put on costumes and just decide, all by themselves, that they are the savior of the world. That it’s okay for them to go and do whatever the hell they want to whoever they want because they have a costume.

Well, I am telling you the world is going to end. One day soon, it’s going to actually explode. The wrong creature is going to slam into the wrong mutant and boom. That will be it. All of this – all of it will have been for nothing. All I wanted to do was stop it. All I wanted to do was fix the problems before they happened.

I KNOW the mutants of this world will rise up and kill us.

I KNOW that the Hulk will one day decide to destroy everything he sees.

I KNOW the Punisher will one day kill the wrong person and set off a chain of events that will lead to nuclear holocaust.

I know that these heroes will dive head first into something they do not understand and end up doing such insane damage to the world that humans can no longer live on it. Victor Von Doom will crush us under his foot in his last mad gasp of air. I know this is true. I know it.

And I could have stopped it. If not for the fact that you kept standing in my @#$@# way.

All of which sounds convincingly psychotic and creepy, and you’re ready to cheer the fact that the Green Goblin, the speaker of such creepy sentiments, is safely locked up.

The only problem is that Osborn isn’t the Marvel character who originated all those creepy sentiments, nor is he the Marvel character who organized them into a repressive, fascistic governmental policy.

That Marvel character would be Iron Man, the current darling of American movie theaters. The same Iron Man who helped to defeat the evil Sentry and who appears to be a founding member of whatever new Avengers team Steve Rogers is founding with the full blessing of the U.S. government. And that’s where the ‘I told you so’ factor comes in.

Because years ago, when this whole storyline started, when Iron Man and Reed Richards, responding to a super-hero accident in which many innocent lives were lost, decided to enunciate and then support the whole idea behind the Registration Act, I said this was one of those comic book ideas that sound great but probably shouldn’t be done because there’s literally no satisfying way to un-do them. Iron Man himself began hunting down his former allies among the superheroes. Iron Man beat up Captain America, and Reed Richards designed the massive gulag in which dissenters - good guys and bad guys – were locked up. And they both did it because they sincerely believed exactly those creepy sentiments Bendis puts in the mouth of the bad guy, Norman Osborn. Reading these comics this week, you’d assume the whole arc of “Dark Reign” was Osborn’s idea from the start – but the only reason Bendis would want you to assume that is because you have to forget the real causes of the whole story, because if you remember them, no Marvel ‘reset’ is ever possible, and no ‘Heroic Age’ can dawn.

The irony of quintessential ‘I told you so’ scenarios, of course, is that they bring no satisfaction. I knew that if Marvel ever wanted to bring their comics back to ‘normal,’ they’d have to do some major fudging with what had gone before, and I was right: that’s exactly what they did. This week, Iron Man and the others were victims of Norman Osborn’s mad paranoia about the dangers posed by unregulated super-powered beings. The good guys beat him, and now everything can go back to normal.

But normal in the Marvel Universe is still a place where whole city blocks in midtown Manhattan are blown up by warring super-folk, where somebody with powers really can put on a costume and decide who lives and who dies. In other words, we’re right back where we started two or three years ago.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you – at least, not much. The lineup of this new Avengers team strikes me as ridiculously opportunistic … there’s simply no reason to have Wolverine and Spider-Man on the Avengers other than to make Marvel money (kind of amazing that Deadpool didn’t get an invite), and that’s a little sad: one of the things I’ve always liked about the Avengers was that in addition to the headliners who had their own comics, we also got to see in action heroes like the Black Knight or the Vision who didn’t have books of their own. And I admit I’ll miss the subversive fun of Bendis’ Dark Avengers.

So: now we try out “The Heroic Age” and see what comes of it. All in all, Marvel pulled off quite an accomplishment in “Dark Reign” … they ought to commemorate it with a big hardcover slipcased volume of its best stories: the entire run of Dark Avengers, plus all the best related issues – most certainly including the death of the Punisher – and of course all four chapters of Siege. I’d buy it.

Annihilation

Our book today is Piotr Szewc’s novel Annihilation, first published by the author in 1987 and then again in a revised version in 1993 and translated from the Polish by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough (there’s a wedding I’d have attended). It’s a novella, really, only a hundred pages long, and it mostly concerns the things that happen in a small town in eastern Poland in the 1930s, the goings-on in Listopadowa Street as the sun rises on one ordinary day.

Rosenzweig’s tavern is open, having served the night shift of policemen and now accommodating the early risers like Attorney Danilowski in his smart clothes. Mr. Hershe Baum is opening his shop, the rising shutters surprising – as they do every time – the pigeons gathered in the street. The town’s professionally lonely lady, Kazimiera M, is already fussing with her hair, preparing for the heat and languor of the day. Annihilation follows these characters intermittently as they pass in front of the lens of its focus. Daylight defines them all; we are privy neither to their thoughts nor their living rooms.

In an amazing feat of narrative control, the actual plot of the book is kept resolutely offstage for the entire course of the thing. Like the opening chord of a Beethoven symphony, we get the book’s title – and then it’s left there, hanging over the book with a resolution that grows more terrifying the longer its ignored. This is not a book about what happens to Kazimiera M or Attorney Danilowski or the various patrons of Rosenzweig’s tavern; it’s a thorough, almost pointillist look at them, as they move about in the course of one ordinary day.

Although we don’t see their private lives, we occasionally see glimpse of their memories. Attorney Danilowski at one point recalls a boyhood day spent on the verge of a marsh:

Water-thyme entwines his fingers. Tiny snails hidden in thin shells are entangled in it. The shells are most often black, rarely light. Sometimes there may be one that’s yellow or mixed – striped or streaked. Water-thyme must be handled gently because it’s tangled up. Walek separates the plants from one another. A shell with a snail inside falls out, still slimy but quickly drying. The snail walks slowly on Walek’s palm, exploring the unknown territory. It may be thrown into the water. A barely audible splash and the revolving shell settles on the muddy bottom. The shell may settle with its opening up. If the opening is down, it may be possible to see the snail move on the slime or rest on an underwater leaf.

For Danilowski, the point of the memory is its sensory weight, but we as readers can’t help but come to a different point: how fleeting it all is, how the passage describes things of almost evanescent delicacy, one of them after another, an entire memory made of the smallest things imaginable. The book is a series of such moments, caught, held for a second, and then released.

Given this, it’s perhaps natural that the narration persistently returns to the idea of photography. And yet, there’s no comfort drawn from technology: the underlying note about photography is how much it leaves out:

Our photographs, our records. The first, the second, the next photograph. But how to record what happens in the instant? In an instant shorter than releasing the shutter? The movement of the goat’s tail, which right away will hang still, the beating wings of Mr. Baum’s pigeons, the watchman’s hand rising behind the brewery gate, the butterfly flashing over the trees … Are those the records of one moment’s events? Records or no records. Selected glimpses.

Szewc was born in 1961 in Zamosc, an eastern Polish town very much like the one in his book, and the Dalkey Archive hardcover edition of the book is decorated with an old archival photograph of the town on a sunny day perhaps very similar to the day Szewc tries to capture. Men and women go about their business, the clock in the tower strikes the hour, the sunlight and shadow play on the walls, cats wander lazily, a tavern opens for business, a man eats a hurried breakfast, another dreads the arrival of a letter, a third is nagged by the need to buy new shoes.

Such things are all we see of Listopadowa Street, but we know something none of its residents know, and Szewc knows we know it. Only when the book is almost over, when your hour has been gently beguiled with the familiar names and rhythms of this little town, does the cudgel of the book’s title strike you. This town, this street, these people, every single moment, all the innumerable unrecorded things that make a texture even photography can’t show, all if it is facing brutal extinction. Szewc envisions it all with a clarity that isn’t at all sentimental, with the withdrawing affection we feel for things that are doomed. He knows how much we’re not seeing, how much we can never see, and he knows what’s coming:

We should take another photograph – wait, not yet! Standing under the linden trees, let’s try to capture the moment when the heat billowing over the roofs will start to radiate its own light, a kind of luminosity known to those who have watched a bonfire of clouds. Before a thunderstorm, clouds glow with an unusual internal light which enlivens them with luminous colors and their various halftones: yellow, pink, blue, green, purple. Watching the air over a bonfire is like watching clouds that promise a thunderstorm, that are a few breaths away from the first drop of rain.

That special luminosity fills this sad, yearning book.

Green Eggs and Ham!

Our book today is one of the greatest coming-out stories ever written, Dr. Seuss’ 1960 mini-epic Green Eggs and Ham.

The familiar story opens with our stodgy, repressed hero sitting quietly at home reading when suddenly he’s interrupted by an alluring figure perched on the ass of a dog: “I am Sam,” the figure’s protest sign claims (in this book as in real life, the worst, the very worst sultry sirens are always named Sam), and when he returns an instant later, his new sign reiterates, “Sam I am.”

Although he’s always smiling and always stylish, Sam has a mission: he wants our stodgy reader to try some green eggs and ham. And he won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.

The stodgy reader is naturally averse to up-ending his entire settled worldview. He’s got his paper, he’s got his hat, he’s got his comfortable bourgeois existence, and whatever fugitive desires for green eggs and ham he might have experienced in his youth he’s long since buried under years of distractions.

On some level, Sam knows this. He realizes that the only way he’s ever going to get the stodgy reader to open himself up to green eggs and ham this late in the game is to shake things up – the more outrageous the setting of the green eggs and ham, the more trivial (and less threatening) the change will seem in itself.

“Would you like them in a house?” Sam seductively asks, offering domestic tranquility; “would you like them in a box?” he follows up, perhaps sensing that the stodgy reader has grown fond of his self-imposed social limits. “Would you like them with a mouse?” “Would you like them with a fox?” he suggests, covering both the familiar urban animal-type and the familiar suburban trickster.

His victim is adamant: “I do not like them, Sam I am! I do not like green eggs and ham!”

Sam breaks out the big guns: Freudian imagery. “Would you like them in the rain?” he asks, and the pages drip with thick translucent drops. “Would you like them on a train?” he asks, as the glistening, throbbing engine pushes forward. And inevitably, “Would you like them in the dark? Would you, could you, in the dark?”

“I would not, could not, in the dark,” his victim screams, but we can practically taste his desperation. He never expected to be soaking wet in a dark tunnel being so energetically propositioned by svelte little Sam I am, and now that it’s happening, he’s not 100 percent sure he doesn’t like it.

The pair, their engine, and their various hangers-on all propulsively spurt into a vast sloshing ocean, and while both the victim and wily Sam are totally submerged, Sam pleads, “Try them! Try them!” one last time, with a plaintive, come-hither gleam in his eye.
Finally, his victim gives in and eats of the forbidden green eggs and ham.

His eyes are opened:
So I will eat them in a box.
And I will eat them with a fox.
And I will eat them in a house.
And I will eat them with a mouse.
And I will eat them here and there.
Say! I will eat them ANYWHERE!

(Sam wisely refrains from saying, “Slow down, Nellie. Baby steps”)

“I do so like green eggs and ham,” the emancipated victim says, his lips and chin still greasy with the remnants of his feast. “Thank you, thank you, Sam I am.”

Sam just grins. Mission accomplished.

Nine Lives 9: Bach - P.D.Q. Bach!

Our book today, alas, is The Definitive Life of P. D. Q. Bach (1807 – 1742?) by the extremely estimable Professor Peter Schickele of the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, and it’s the only vaguely authoritative account of the life, career, and bar tabs of the last – and most certainly the least – of Johann Sebastian Bach’s twenty-odd children (none was odder, either). J.S. Bach developed a deep antipathy toward “the boy” (his initials are simply random letters, his father claiming he’d already used up all the ‘good’ names on his previous children) and a marked dislike of his career, even though he died while P.D.Q. was only eight. That death was commemorated in a print helpfully provided by the author, along with this description:

When P. D. Q. was eight years old, his father died. This picture of Johann Sebastian going up to heaven was done by an eyewitness to the event, who said that the sky was filled with “the most glorious music, as if God himself were playing upon the great Organ of the Cosmos, and really playing up a storm, too.” The following month a eulogy appeared in the official publication of the Guild of Church Musicians, The Organ Organ, expressing the “deeply felt” sentiments of” each and every” member of the guild: “That Sebastian Bach was the King of Instruments there can be no denying and we must all experience the pang of his passing. We must not, however, cease to strive for the lofty ideals that continued to inspire him as long as he was (as the expression is among organists) alive and kicking; life must, and no doubt will, go on. Although the world has lost a great musician, it has gained a vacancy: applications are now being accepted by the Leipzig Town Council.

P.D.Q .never received anything in the way of an education; indeed, even as a small baby, he was generally too lazy to cry, and that laziness stood him in good stead for the rest of his life. Even though the composer took several vows of abstinence from the craft of music (his first was at age three), he kept responding to the hog-calls of his Muse, and in between titanic drinking bouts, a body of work began to take shape. “Many great composers,” Professor Schickele reminds us, “were ignored during their own lifetime, but P. D. Q. Bach stands out as a monument to ignorance.”

That monument has several sections – including the Initial Plunge (“The period during which P. D. Q. Bach learned all that he ever learned about the craft of musical composition; it lasted about six days”), the Soused Period (exhibiting “excruciating je ne sais quoi”), and the Contrition Period (during which he was plagued with a hangover that lasted well after his death and is calculated to have a half-life of over one hundred and forty years) – have been carefully documented by Professor Schikele despite several professional obstacles. One of these obstacles has always been the institutional disdain shown by his colleagues, who’ve demonstrated “an enthusiastic lack of interest” (as he stiffly puts it at one point, “The often-expressed opinion of Dr. Olaf Johansen of the U. of S.N.D. that ‘P. D. Q. Bach’s scores, like children, should be seen and not heard,’ is not shared by the author”), a disdain, it must be noted, that was widely, indeed universally, felt in P. D. Q. Bach’s own day.



This antiphony most certainly included members of his own celebrated family. When P.D.Q. Bach applied for the position of Temporary Substitute Assistant Organist at St. Jezebel’s Cathedral in Haymarket, his own brother Johan Christian Bach wrote a long anti-recommendation which concludes, one might say, molto agitato:

… a person so unworthy of the name Bach that his very existence must be consider’d an Affront to Taste. I am convinc’d that allowing this person to exhibit his Skills, if such indeed they may be call’d, would be for the worthy recipients of this epistle not merely a Waste of Time, but in sooth an almost criminal Misuse of Time, so little of which is allotted to us here on this mortal Orb.

(Not that familial kindness ended up any better: Betty-Sue Bach, of the “Russian” Bachs, was one of the only members of the extended family to show any affection for the composer, and after his death she devoted her life to the publication of his works – for which she was burned at the stake in 1817)

P.D.Q.’s life consisted of more than drinking and eating (not much more, but still) – there are the corpi, which no serious musicologist must take into account. When we consider the “Concerto for Bassoon vs. Orchestra,” the opera “Iphigenia in Brooklyn” (S. 52, 162), the “Hansel and Gretel and Ted and Alice” (“an opera in one unnatural act”), the Schleptet (S. 0), the Missa Hilarious (for which the composer was excommunicated in 1787, the only person ever to have been excommunicated on purely aesthetic grounds, and the only individual ever to be declared a mortal sin), and the “Fanfare for the Common Cold (s. 98.7)” (“Nothing whatsoever is known about this piece, so the author would like to take this opportunity to tell an amusing story he heard the other day …”), we begin to perceive that our time could be better spent.

[caption id="attachment_1051" align="aligncenter" width="197" caption="the univeristy of southern north dakota at hoople, looking south across the campus"][/caption]

And yet, Professor Schickele goes on and on, as when he describes the inspiration behind the Grossest Fugue (S. 50 % off):

Fugues have the reputation of being dry and academic, primarily due to the fact (one suspects) that your average layperson has trouble keeping track of where the subject, or theme (or subject) is; P. D. Q. Bach, however, in what can only be described as a didactic coup, solves this problem in a novel manner that cannot fail to reach even the densest layperson: he simply instructs each performer to stand up whenever he or she is playing the whatchamacallit.

Because you’ll never go broke underestimating the taste of the public (a sentiment with which Professor Schickele, one suspects, was all too familiar), P. D. Q. Bach died a wealthy man. He was buried in a sumptuous mausoleum on the outskirts of Baden-Baden-Baden – only to be re-buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave at the request of the Bach family.

And that would have been safely the end of the story, had it not been for the, er, singular industry of Professor Schickele, who was, um, lucky enough to uncover virtually every one of P.D.Q. Bach’s extant works, thereby unleashing them on an entirely new world. It’s not exactly history repeating itself, but it sure is history getting mighty tedious, and Schikele brings up the staggering possibility of a modern-day counterpart to his counterpoint hero:

In an article entitled “P. D. Q. Bach: Can It Happen Here?” appearing in the August 1973 issue of The Musical Hindquarterly, Professor Paul Behrer argues that one of the reassuring reasons that a P. D. Q. Bach could not flourish in twentieth-century America is the existence now of quite stringent copyright laws, and certainly the lack of such laws in eighteenth-century Germany allowed that aspect of P. D. Q. Bach’s style that has been called “manic plagiarism” to become developed to a degree that would be beyond the bounds of possibility in this day and age. As a general rule, the original passages in P. D. Q.’s music are due to his inability to remember how the piece that he was stealing from went.

Improved copyright laws seem like a mighty flimsy protection, but we’ll have to hope. On the one hand, it’s easy to say “the world isn’t ready – or willing – for another P.D.Q. Bach.” On the other hand, the 20h century saw a “composer” “produce” a “work” that consists of the orchestra sitting in silence while the audience watches, and audiences paid (and continue paying) to “hear” it. If that’s in any way artistically superior to kazoos, bullhorns, and woopee cushions, I don’t see how. Perhaps I need an unknown twig from the Bach family tree to enlighten me.

Nine Lives 8: Verdi!

Our book today is Frank Walker’s grand 1962 work The Man Verdi, in which three things happen in quick succession: he discerns that despite the mountain of primary documentation available, Verdi the actual human being (hence his book’s title) usually manages to elude his biographers, he tells us he has set his biography on a slightly different course from all the others in confident expectation of finally capturing that great composer’s essence in words, and then he, like everybody else, fails completely. In Gamito’s 1872 bust, Verdi is looking down – not in shame or in repose, but in an explicit act of evasion which Gamito was perceptive enough to preserve. Many full-dress biographies have appeared since Walker’s (that by Andrew Porter and Jane Phillips-Matz is by far the best, although it lacks the personal, erudite zeal of Walker’s prose), and all of them have likewise failed in biography’s main objective.

It will likely always feel that way, despite a plethora of facts.

Verdi was born in 1813 to poor nearly illiterate parents in Busseto in Romagna, but he was lucky enough to come under the tutelage of Antonio Barezzi, who saw his potential and trained him as best he could. Verdi went to Milan for three years of desperate poverty before returning to Busseto, where he married and had two children, became the local choir master, and settled into what could easily have been a lifetime of provincial obscurity. But during his stay in Milan he had been surrounded by the music of Donizetti and deeply impressed with the theater of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, so even in Busseto he was busily composing operas. The great houses in Milan showed only lukewarm interest in these early works, but the composer persevered and began to garner attention and commissions.

In 1838 his daughter died. In 1839 his son died. In 1840 his wife died. He wrote the expected lamentations in his letters, but he never missed his commission deadlines, and he continued to attract attention – including from the great Donizetti, who recognized a kindred genius in Verdi’s compositions.

Those compositions continued to flow from his pen, and Walker takes us scrupulously through the genesis, completion, and reception of each. The roll call seems positively unearthly (especially when coming from a composer who could make un-ironic reference to his “unimaginable laziness”): L Lombardi, I Due Foscari, Macbeth (like all the Romantics, Verdi worshipped Shakespeare), Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, Simon Bocanegra, The Masked Ball, Otello, Falstaff, Aida … each a thing of such awe-inspiring beauty that it hardly seems possible they were written for money. And yet, as Walker impassively points out, this was the man who could write to a friend, “Who knows that I might not wake up one morning a millionaire! What a lovely word, with a full, lovely meaning! And how empty, in comparison, are words like ‘fame’ ‘glory’ ‘talent’ etc!”

Walker’s long book is a jam-packed compendium of letters, a torrent of them from every single person who touched on Verdi’s life in any way. His second wife Giuseppina wrote stacks and stacks of letters, as did all the various performers, backers, producers, and theater officials with whom Verdi dealt during the decades of his professional life. It’s a herculean amount of work, and Walker does it all with such lively, gossipy energy that the pages fly by. Of course Verdi himself helps with this – like almost every other Romantic composer, he spent far more time writing first-rate letters than he did writing first-rate music (it was the Internet of the day, after all). Walker uses these letters with extremely good care, and their subjects range from the deepest matter of art to the razor-sharp offhand observations the maestro seems to have made as easily as breathing:

We in Italy imagine that the English don’t love music; this is a mistake. It is said that the English know nothing but how to pay for the pleasure of hearing great artists, but that they don’t understand now anything; this is a mistake that the French have spread about and that the Italians have adopted because it’s a French idea. I say that no man pays for things he doesn’t like and which don’t give him pleasure. The English have never hissed a masterpiece. They have never received with indifference a Barber of Seville, as Rome has, or a William Tell, as Paris has, and they have never hissed an Otello, as Naples did on its first appearance.

Care is needed in the handling of any correspondence, but as Walker makes clear, the Verdi correspondence is a minefield of mis-matched dates, faulty attributions, and elaborate forgeries. No previous Verdi scholar writing in English had tackled the mess with anything like Walker’s industry and intelligence, and yet more than once in the book, the man himself questions whether or not the task he’s set himself might not be impossible:

The biographer seeks the truth. How shall he find it?
He is generally working long after the events he is describing. Although he may not be able to remember what he was doing himself on the Tuesday of the previous week, he has to convince his readers that he knows that happened between certain people, say, one hundred years earlier.

(Writing about some early letters Verdi wrote in 1844 to various Milanese ladies, Walker says, “The letters are written on Bath paper, the fashionable stationery of the day, and employ, rather clumsily, the language of gallantry. They offer infinite possibilities of misinterpretation.” The last is a great line that seems to apply to most of Verdi’s correspondence, but the reader of this particular book need have no fear)

When Verdi died in 1901, nearly half a million mourners filled the streets of Milan. The coffin looked as small as a matchbox, floated along its route on a sea of murmuring humanity. It unfolded like a pageant, and it had a pageant’s unreality. The same an be said for this biography, for all biographies of Verdi, and the reason is fairly clear – in fact, it’s a reason shared in common with all Shakespeare biographies, which would have pleased Verdi a great deal: no life of the man can possibly equal the life his works take on inside our hearts. To listen to the glories of Verdi is to wander around inside a vast cathedral of passionate voice, the like of which no other opera composer (not even my beloved Donizetti) can match. Every true opera fan has had a warm summer afternoon in which they were brought to the most cathartic tears of their life by listening to Verdi.

No mere biography can compete with that. Praise to Frank Walker for trying so hard.

Nine Lives 7: Johannes Brahms!

Our book today is a modern masterpiece, Jan Swafford’s 1997 biography of Johannes Brahms. Whole lexicons of praise have already been heaped on this book from all quarters, and justly so: it’s a virtually form-perfect example of all that biography should be. It’s thick enough to do its mighty subject justice (Brahms had an unstintingly high opinion of himself; he would almost certainly have wanted to add a few hundred pages to Swafford’s 600-page total), it’s thoroughly grounded in primary documents and sources, and it’s unapologetically opinionated.

Opinions are one of the main things I look for in a biographer, and it can be a dreary search – 20th century conventions of scholarship were heavily infected with the dry heaves of academia shortly after the Second World War, and suddenly you could hardly open a big-press biography without barking your shin on phrases like “documents make it seem likely,” or “tax returns strongly indicate.” Swafford knows his subject too well to hedge his rhetorical bets in such a way.

Brahms was born into dire poverty in 1833, and toward the end of his life he began exercising a strict and inexcusable regimen on his personal papers, destroying everything he felt future biographers need not see. The first composition we have from him was done when he was 18 – a work easily complex enough to make it likely that he wrote many, many such before it. Despite his carefully-cultivated bluff exterior, Brahms had deep sensitivities. He himself often referred to his strained and chaotic childhood and youth as dark forces shaping his adult life, and we can well believe him (the readiness with which he accepted his fame, for instance, is no doubt connected to the fact that when he was a young composer and sent some scores to Schumann for comment, they were returned unopened).

It’s tricky material to navigate – it’s a big, broad, immensely powerful life, a figure who knew perfectly well that he was last of the great composers in the old classical style. Following his subject through the mountains of documentation at his disposal can’t have been easy for Swafford – and it was certainly rendered no easier by the fact that any biographer of Brahms (just like any friend of his, while he was alive) must spend half his time sheepishly apologizing for the man’s boorish behavior.

Swafford handles it all with complete assurance. After one hour of reading this book’s fluid, knowing prose, you forget that you’ve ever read a Brahms biography by anybody else. Swafford is every bit as wry and knowing on the peripherals of Brahms’ life and times as he is on the main topics. Here’s a priceless aside on what happened when Bruckner was allowed to view the exhumed skeleton of Beethoven prior to its re-burial in Vienna’s Central Cemetery:

He had to be forcibly removed. Beethoven’s bones may be decorated to this day by a lens from Bruckner’s spectacles, which fell out during the ruckus. He pulled the same stunt at Schubert’s exhumation, refusing to release the skull until they allowed him to place it in the coffin himself.

(“Part of what Brahms and others could never quite get over,” Swafford helpfully informs us, “was that Bruckner the composer of epic symphonies behaved, much of the time, like a nincompoop”)

And of Brahms’ notorious contemporary the tone is equally informal:

As far as Brahms was concerned most of Wagner’s writings, which presaged similar tracts from generations of artists to come, were so much self-serving gobbledygook.

Brahms struck up a friendship with Liszt in 1853 (it would eventually darken, as so many of Brahms’ friendships did) and lived in Vienna for more than thirty years (he would die there in 1897), working steadily, turning out one impeccably finished masterpiece after another. More than one critic has remarked on the fact that we have no imperfect works by Brahms – each piece is finished in a way only J.S. Bach’s works ever feel finished. His mighty Violin Concerto is a triumph of forbidding complexity, and his Variations on a Theme of Paganini seems almost tauntingly to call for a Paganini of the keyboards to even attempt it.

This technical ferocity was an exponent of Brahms’ musical philosophy, which fascinates Swafford throughout his book:

There lies important and dangerous advice for Brahms’s heir in the art. Perfection before beauty, he said – perfection meaning unassailable in logic and craft, beautiful implying expressive. In preaching that ideal to a protégé Brahms exaggerated for effect; he knew nothing his perfect. But for good or ill his words echoed through the next generation of composers, some of whom did exalt thematic and harmonic logic over expressiveness (Schoenberg and his pupils Berg and Webern were accused of that, usually wrongly. It could be argued that in lesser hands Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, which owed much to Brahms in logic and spirit, did prove amenable to pedantic elevation of logic over expressiveness.)

But there was more to it than cold method, as our biographer knows perfectly well:

Lyricism and emotion draw listeners into his music before they come to grips with the complexities – the sheer difficulty of absorbing his constant protean variation, his tonal deflections, his experiments with conventional forms. The middle-class audience loved the beauty and warmth of his music, not the logic. Surely Brahms understood that. Even if he made considerable demands on his listeners, even if he never coddled them in his big pieces, he still never forgot their feelings or his own. He made sure the warmth stayed in his work. But he would never admit it.

That warmth remained in his work and continued to invite them in (not all listeners were equally spellbound: in the 1890s the wonderfully acerbic Boston music critic Philip Hale urged a sign to be posted in the town’s new Symphony Hall saying, “Exit – in case of Brahms”) all through the composer’s life. Swafford is simply wonderful in conveying that life in all its complexity, and we’re never less than happy to have him along as our guide. Brahms was deathly afraid of seasickness, and he hated the very idea of being out of sight of land – so the orbit of his travels was comparatively narrow in comparison to the size of his fame in later life. But he kept performing for the public, and another biographer might be tempted to haul out the stock phrases of blasé praise. Swafford takes a much sharper, more insightful approach, seeking always to humanize his great subject:

From now on (after the late 1860s), as a pianist, he mainly performed his own music. Practicing bored him to distraction, and as he never tired of saying, concerts meant little to him anyway. The applause he enjoyed more than he was prepared to admit. While he generally remained competent at plowing through his own music, including the very difficult concertos, his own subtlety of touch at the keyboard gradually deteriorated to what Clara [Schumann, his shrewdest critic] bewailed as “thump, bang, and scrabble.” Still, for all that, he toured. By the 1870s he was collecting handsome fees, and his concerts not only provided income but an important means of spreading his work. Even if Brahms was not the ideal performer of his own music, as either pianist or conductor, he came up with marvelous readings sometimes, and in any case audiences showed up in force to have a look at him. So he claimed to hate performing and performed all the time, just as he hated writing letters and wrote them constantly.

“Time always treated Brahms kindly,” Swafford at one point tells us. Undeniably true, but fate has also been kind, giving him a biographer like this. I can’t recommend this book strongly enough.

Nine Lives 6: Richard Wagner

Our book today is The Perfect Wagnerite by George Bernard Shaw. He wrote it quickly – he wrote everything quickly – in 1898 in order to express his enthusiasm for Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Nibelung’s Ring), and as usual, Shaw’s method of expression enthusiasm was to teach, to quip, and to provoke.

This presents us with a conundrum, which is also something Shaw would have loved. In my opinion, he’s one of the greatest critics who ever lived: smart, shrewd, funny, strong, flexible, and wonderfully pragmatic. His plays, despite the performances and festivals they garner, are often still underestimated for their power, but in his criticism – that surging, almost unreadably vast ocean of prose – there is a happy, almost unalloyed greatness that can scarcely be approached by any other author, much less equaled.

And thereby the conundrum: what do you as a reader do when one of the greatest critics of the last 400 years writes an enthusiastic, deeply intelligent, passionately argumentative book on a great big pile of garbage? Do you avoid it, because garbage smells bad and is unsightly, or do you read it, because truly great criticism is not to be missed in this life?

These are the questions any sensitive reader must bring to The Perfect Wagnerite, because in the brief course of that highly entertaining book, as Shaw describes the stage actions and plot lines of Der Ring’s four interminable parts, Das Rheingold, DieWalkure, Siegfried, and Gotterdamerung, he’s also sure to convey his enthusiasm for the whole work, but the whole work is garbage-and so, the conundrum.

Shaw spent many an unoffending afternoon and evening squirming in his chair as this adolescent nightmare of a stage monstrosity unfolded before him. He lived through two separate Wagner vogues in Great Britain and saw some truly innovative and, one supposes, impressive attempts on the part of stage managers, working in wood and cloth, to reproduce even in small part the long list of lunatic demands Wagner put in his stage instructions. Listen, for instance, to Shaw’s narration of the notorious conclusion to Die Gotterdammerung and then try to imagine how on Earth a London stage of 1870 could pull it off:

Finally she [Brynhild, obviously] flings a torch into the pyre, and rides her war-horse into the flames. The hall of the Gibichungs catches fire, as most halls would were a cremation attempted in the middle of the floor (I permit myself this gibe purposely to emphasize the excessive artificiality of the scene); but the Rhine overflows its banks to allow the three Rhine maidens to take the ring from Siegfried’s finger, incidentally extinguishing the conflagration as it does so. Hagen attempts to snatch the ring from the maidens, who promptly drown him; and in the distant heavens the gods and their castle are seen perishing in the fires of Loki as the curtain falls.

Lovely stuff. We can get the vicar’s wife to darn up some lovely orange flames. And while we’re at it, we’ll get the Royal Corps of Engineers to divert the Thames once a night, and matinees on Sundays.

Of course it’s not just that The Ring Cycle is garbage, nor is it really that virtually everything Wagner wrote is garbage (although one must search into the foothills of the 21st century to find a equally frightening Coldplay-esque divergence between a miniscule speck of talent and a mighty engine of popularity) – it’s that Wagner himself was garbage. Willfully ignorant, proudly rude, a seducer of other men’s wives, an arrogant traducer of other men’s prides, a debt-dodger, a liar, a cheat, a tone-deaf melodist, a fatuously self-deluded folklorist, an idiotically ham-handed dramatist, and a disgustingly outspoken racist and anti-Semite. We’re taught endlessly – and we’re taught true – that we must divorce the worth of the artist from the worth of the art (else who would ‘scape whipping?), but damn, Wagner makes it hard. It would be different (well, a bit different) if this vile scrap of human trash had produced truly wonderful music; we wouldn’t forgive, necessarily, but we’d be more inclined to overlook. But the music is of a piece with the man: loud, overbearing, coarse, and empty-headed.

And yet, Der Ring at least provoked this nifty little book by Shaw (almost all other books on Wagner, according him ‘great artist’ status but not, alas, being written by Shaw, are necessarily also garbage), and despite Wagner’s presence all throughout, it very often produces a smile – almost always when some fine point accidentally taps into the boiling sub-strata of Shaw’s ever-present all-purpose outrage. When that happens, rants occur, and they’re always fun:

The allegory here is happily not so glaringly obvious to the younger generation of our educated classes as it as forty years ago. In those days, any child who expressed a doubt as to the absolute truth of the Church’s teaching, even to the extent of asking why Joshua told the sun to stand still instead of telling the earth to cease turning, or of pointing out that a whale’s throat would hardly have been large enough to swallow Jonah, was unhesitatingly told that if it harboured such doubts it would spend all eternity after its death in horrible torments in a lake of burning brimstone. It is difficult to write or read this nowadays without laughing; yet no doubt millions of ignorant and credulous people are still teaching their children that. When Wagner himself was a little child, the fact that hell was a fiction devised for the intimidation and subjection of the masses, was a well-kept secret of the thinking and governing classes. At that time the fires of Loki were a very real terror to all, except persons of exceptional force of character and intrepidity of thought. Even thirty years after Wagner had printed the verses of The Ring for private circulation, we find him excusing himself from perfectly explicit denial of current superstitions, by reminding his readers that it would expose him to prosecution. In England, so many of our respectable voters are still groveling in a gloomy devil worship, of which the fires of Loki are the main bulwark, that no Government has yet had the conscience or the courage to repeal our monstrous laws against “blasphemy.”

You finish The Perfect Wagnerite with a thorough understanding of the Ring Cycle, which is quite an accomplishment on Shaw’s part and which is the smallest reason to recommend reading this great little book. Of course, if you finish the book with any desire to actually see the Ring Cycle, there’s something seriously wrong with you.

Nine Lives 5: Robert Schumann!

Our book today is Schumann, Eric Frederick Jensen’s 2001 entry in the “Master Musicians” series from Oxford University Press, and it has some fairly thankless work to do. The divide between an artist’s life and work is always pitiless to those poor ink-stained wretches who feel called upon to bridge it for the elucidation of others, but Schumann takes that problem to a more frightening level than most, because the divide in his case was so wide it forms a chasm (a poet might say that Schumann eventually fell headlong into that chasm at the end of his life, but thankfully, I’m no poet).

Of all the musicians of his era (he was born in 1801, the same year as Chopin – Liszt, Wagner, and Verdi would all be born within the next few years), he is biggest enigma and, despite the completely compulsive journal-keeping and letter-writing in which he indulged for the whole of his life, the least knowable. Jensen makes good and industrious use of his subject’s endless diaries and household books (what he bought, where he bought it, what he needs to buy, what he’s likely to be overcharged for it, etc.), and his account does all the things a standard musical-life is supposed to do. There are good solid analyses of the major musical works, brief and well-done potted descriptions of the musical and social institutions of the time, and a month-by-month account of the composer’s famous – and famously troubled – courtship with the celebrated pianist Clara Wieck.

At every turn, Jensen is ready with precise details of what took place, to whom, and where. And yet, Schumann isn’t there. Or rather, two Schumanns are – the Schumann of the life, and the Schumann of the music. And they’re so different it’s doubtful they’d even have recognized each other if they’d met on a crowded Dresden street.

The Schumann of the life was a solid, boring, plodding, workaday fellow, a lowbrow German who liked his endless cigars, his beer in the afternoon, his leisurely flip through a flimsy newspaper of entirely subservient political adherence. That Schumann became quite well known for the strong, steady stream of musical criticism he wrote for the Zeitshrift and other German periodicals. That Schumann could spend whole days worrying about money or fame, and purr like an engine when he had some (in 1849 he said “I am completely content with the recognition which has come my way in ever greater measure” – impossible even to imagine Chopin saying something similar, or Berlioz, or Liszt).

That Schumann was the predictable Teutonic catastrophe in his lovemaking, at one point writing to poor Clara, “I often think of you, not as a brother thinks of a sister, nor as a boyfriend thinks of a girlfriend, but as a pilgrim before a distant shrine.” And whenever that Schumann completed a work – especially the work of the late 1830s and 1840s, he unfailingly sent copies to every major German music critic, as faithful and insistent as a Hollywood publicity hack. And ‘hack’ is the word – his output during those 15 years equaled or surpassed what many other composers produce in a lifetime, and productivity at that level exacted its usual price: nine-tenths of those countless productions are stiff, formalistic, completely unoriginal (if there was major composer who recycled himself more often than Schumann, I don’t know who he is) and instantly forgettable.

Ironic, then, that so much of it was inspired by its own exact opposite: Jensen reports the famous encounter:

On the day before Easter Sunday 1830, [Schumann] traveled to Frankfurt to hear the violinist Niccolo Paganini. Paganini, without question the most flamboyant virtuoso of his day, was then at the height of his success. His technique dazzled and astounded those who heard him, including seasoned musicians. For Schumann, Paganini’s performance on 11 April was a revelation. Although disturbed by Paganini’s showmanship – the beginning of Schumann’s questioning of the role of virtuosity – he was enthralled by his artistry and musicianship. Paganini’s performance had a profound effect on him.

Unfortunately, some of the very same defects the worldly-life Schumann so often displayed have been picked up by his impressionable biographer, and so passages like that one abound in bloated redundancies. “Dazzled and astounded,” “artistry and showmanship,” “revelation” and “profound effect” … all jostling to tell an exciting story boringly.

Partly this is just Jensen’s writing – the prose of his book won’t remind you very strongly of any great musical life you might have read – but part of it also is his determination to do his full biographer’s duty by his subject. To this end he naturally – if regrettably – over-praises pretty much everything Schumann ever wrote. Great locust-clouds of compositions come flying at him, and he admires them all:

Given the many pieces Schumann sketched or contemplated writing (and taking into consideration the tribulations of his personal life), the actual number of pieces completed to his satisfaction during the years 1830 to 1833 is impressive: The Abegg Variations op. 1, Papillions op. 2, two sets of Paganini etudes (op. 3 and op. 10), the Intermezzi op. 4, the Allegro op. 8, the Toccata op. 7, and the Impromptus op. 5.

That the composer of some of these pieces might have been ham-handedly trying to ape the loonier Romantic excesses of his time seems not to be on Jensen’s mind, and even when he comes across hints of the other Schumann, the art-Schumann, he just beetles forward, neatly folding into his narrative some contradictions that might have given a more poetical biographer pause. The syncopation, the weird, rattling tonal constrasts, the hemiola of the Intermezzi, for instance, sidled cheek-to-cheek with so much bland recycling, bespeaks a mind at the brink of a chasm.

And even in such a buttoned down programmatic biography as this one, that other Schumann – the vaguely dangerous one, the strange one, the terminally sad one – peeks through all the time. Yes, he send fawning copies of all his work to music critics and chortled over his bank balance a little more often than was good for the Romantic public image, but as often as he did those things, he also did things like compose his Scenes from Goethe’s Faust, a work, as Jensen points out, that’s as flat-out weird today as it was 150 years ago:

Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s Faust is not an opera: there is no recognizable dramatic flow, and a staging of the work would make little sense. But neither is it an oratorio in the conventional manner. What Schumann produced were musical setting of excerpts from Faust,  settings that assume the listener’s familiarity with Goethe’s two Faust dramas.

(To make matters worse, the majority of its scenes are taken from Faust II, Goethe’s far less popular self-indulgently wandering extended coda to his world-famous Faust I).

At least as much as the fairly commonplace ‘domestic turmoil’ to which Jensen always alludes, the tension between those two different Schumanns took an enormous toll on the artist. He was always going through one neurasthenic complaint or another, and in 1844 he suffered a so-called nervous breakdown. There were suicide attempts, and another, far more serious breakdown in 1854, after which Schumann was confined to an asylum (Jensen is particularly good at evoking the horror of such incarcerations during this period) for the rest of his life.

I myself have a personal illustration of the divide between the two Schumanns. In 1986, I was lucky enough to hear the world’s greatest pianist give a wide-ranging concert of powerful works to a packed house. If that pianist had announced beforehand that his entire program would consist of Schumann, there would have been plenty of empty seats, and that’s part of the enduring mystery of Schumann that I’m trying to describe here. He’s there, in the canon, unhummable, incapable of being referenced or synopsized – a terror in large doses because we still don’t know what to think about him.

But after the riot of applause for that pianist had died down, he laid his enormous hands on the keyboard and slowly released the sweetest, most delicately melancholy little piece into the suddenly total silence. In an instant, the eyes of bored matrons became almost girlish with wistfulness; Brezhnev-faced businessmen wept openly; the melody twisted and gently flowed up and down aisles like strong fog, and none of us could remember where it has started, and even though it wasn’t really a happy sound, nobody wanted it to end. And it was Schumann, new and strange again despite everything fourteen decades could do.

“My entire life has been a twenty-year struggle between poetry and prose,” Schumann once wrote (to his mother, naturally – Germans!). Pity poor Jensen trying to mediate that struggle. He does a creditable job – we have yet to see a biographer who could do it perfectly.