Den of Wolves!

Our book today is Den of Wolves, the first book in a new ancient Rome series by Luke Devenish called “Empress of Rome.” Den of Wolves came out in Britain two years ago when the success of HBO's “Rome” sparked a mini-revival of historical fiction set in Rome, and it's being released in the US in a nicely plump, well-designed trade paperback with a cover showing a sultry woman staring straight at the reader with a look of blank determination.

The woman might be doing stand-in duty for Livia Drusilla, the wife of Augustus, the mother of Tiberius, and one of the main characters of this volume, which spans events from Livia's childhood to AD 19 in the reign of her son Tiberius. Although the story is narrated by Iphicles, a slave, it's very much the story of the leading figures of Rome during its transition from Republic to Empire. Livia is just a girl when her father is girding himself to go off to the Senate and join the men who will assassinate Julius Caesar – and she's becoming an old woman when the book ends, having taken us through the story of the premature death of Tiberius' brother Drusus, the family life of his widow Antonia and her children, the rise of Tiberius in Roman politics, the birth and upbringing of his son Castor, the glory days of Germanicus and his haughty wife Agrippina and his creepy son Caligula, and of course the rise and rise of Octavian, who later took the name Augustus and shares some time with Livia in the spotlight of this first volume.

As that cast of characters and thumbnail of setting and action will indicate to those of you who read Roman historical fiction at all, Devenish has chosen for the first volume of his trilogy some extremely well-trod ground, and everybody will be able to identify the owner of the boots in question. Yes, this novel is full of the exact same people doing the exact same things for the exact same reasons as a certain other Roman historical novel – I, Claudius by Robert Graves. Considering the fame and fortune of Graves' book (and its less successfully-conceived sequel), Devenish has got to be given credit for approaching his subject at all, let alone diving into a series of books.

The signature feature of I, Claudius is Graves' picture of Livia as a great Moriarty-like figure at the heart of her webs of intrigue, moving relatives and strangers around Rome as though they were pieces on an invisible chess board. It's an ingenious reading of Tacitus and Suetonius, and it works in most readers' minds because they came to the book after the epic “Masterpiece Theatre” production in which the serpentine Sian Phillips performed a Livia for the ages. Taking on such material yourself, for a novel of your own, is ambitious almost to the point of effrontery.

Stylistically, there can be no comparison between the books. And even in terms of narration, Devenish takes a gamble by making his main character a slave – perhaps a bigger gamble than he realizes, since most people living in Western countries today have no real conception of how any slaves get treated, much less how slaves in the ancient world got treated. All through the first part of his book, he has the sassy, smarter-than-is-good-for-her Livia deliver barbed comments to her astonished servant:

Livia was still gazing at me, open in her mockery now and aiming it wholly at me.

 “Do you believe the Great Mother's prophecies to be true, Iphicles?”

 I was chilled that she could ever doubt my faith. “Of course I do, domina – I hard them with my own ears. I believe every word,” I replied.

 Livia laughed. “Well, I don't.”

 My shock increased tenfold and the six frightened and confused Tonsores tried to concentrate only on Livia's hair. To her they weren't even there. She was focused completely on me.

 “Domina,” I whispered, “they were the Great Mother's words ...”

 “All shit,” said Livia.

 I nearly fell back against the wall.

 “Well, maybe not all shit,” she went on. “One or two had some potential – the ones where I give birth to the kings. But not the other rubbish.”

 I was stunned by such blasphemy.

 “What's the matter?” Livia asked, enjoying the look on my face. “Have I shocked you, Iphicles?”

 “Yes, domina,” I said.

 “Then your attitude toward such things is ridiculously old-fashioned,” said Livia. “But what else should I expect from a slave? Gods are not to be feared and cringed at. They're to be respected, certainly, but only for the purposes of self-preservation. We shouldn't love the gods – that sort of mindless devotion would embarrass them – and we should never take everything they say for granted. We're not simple-minded fools and the gods know that.”

 I could only stare dumbly at her, the sacrilegious words beyond my comprehension.

The problem here is twofold: first, obviously, our narrator is an idiot (and our author is severely underconfident – how many times do we need to be told who's in this exchange of dialogue between two people?). But second and equally tough to resolve: no highborn Roman citizen would ever have dreamt of engaging in philosophical badinage with their personal slave, any more than a modern-day Anaheim stock-broker's wife would seek out the fifty-year-old Hispanic father of five who tends her garden and unburden herself of her latest religious epiphanies. Such scenes bid fair to ruin the credibility of the whole book. Graves chose as his narrator Claudius, a noble-born member of the Roman elite who is able to be a fly on the wall at all the great moments in his history by virtue of the fact that everybody thinks he's an fool. It's a fun old gambit, but it incontestably works better than poor credulous Iphicles listening at ajar doors.

About half-way through this first volume, Iphicles becomes the slave of Plancina, the squawky wife of Gnaeus Calpurnius Piso, and Devenish subtly shifts his narrative focus onto higher ground, often moving entirely to the unmoored third-person that should have been the book's voice from the start (individual narrators lend an inviting sheen of intimacy to a historical novel, so they're very tempting for writers who don't want to intimidate their audience … but the book is often better without them). Even so, there are problems, as in this exchange between Tiberius' son Castor and the mysterious young man Tiberious has brought back to Rome with him after long foreign campaigns:

“And what about your own father, Sejanus? Where is he?”

 Sejanus wouldn't give Castor the pleasure of seeing him looked shamed by this question. “I have no father,” he said.

 “You are a bastard, then?”

 “I'm alone. I don't know who my parents are or were. I don't know anything.”

 “I do,” said Castor. “You're a slave.”

 Sejanus didn't show the deep anger he felt. “I'm not a slave,” he said finally. “I was an apprentice to the Greek physician as a freeborn child. I'm Italian. My status has been recognised by your father. I'm free – I'm no-one's slave.”

 Castor had flaunted his supremacy and needed nothing more now. “My mistake,” he said. He could afford to be welcoming – or rather, he could afford to make a show of it. “Well be friends then, Sejanus? What do you say to that?”

 Sejanus said what he could only say. “I'd like that.”

 

It's a bad thing when reading pages of a historical novel makes you want to take out your corrective red pen, and Devenish provokes that reaction far, far too often. Not only is this passage needlessly convoluted (Sejanus follows up “I don't know anything” with a veritable fountain of stuff he knows), and not only is it heavy-handed (can even the least Rome-cognizant reader have any doubt, after reading this passage, that Sejanus is going to kill Castor at his earliest possible opportunity?), but it has that otherworldly-awful clunker of a line, “Sejanus said what he could only say,” when the correctly-phrased line, “Sejanus said the only thing he could,” is a mere synapse away.

Fortunately – even amazingly – passages like these don't scupper the book. Den of Wolves isn't I, Claudius; it's not even remotely trying to be literature (although the author rather touchingly expresses his admiration for the aforementioned Tacitus and Suetonius, I very much doubt they'd have returned the sentiment). But it's breezy and fast-paced and extremely inviting despite its author's obvious research. The acid test here will be Livia, and she passes it: we get a three-dimensional emotional accounting of how her life slowly changes her. And Devenish has benefited by being among the eighty gazillion people who've watched “Masterpiece Theatre”: many of his Livia's best lines read like they were written to be purred by Sian Phillips. The rest of “Empress of Rome” - featuring, as it must, the fall of Tiberius, the rise of Caligula, and the eventual emperorship of Claudius himself – can be honestly anticipated.

Unless the author decides to write his future historical novels set in other time-periods, that is. Perhaps a big, sprawling novel about a Southern belle on the eve of the American Civil War?

Feints and Jabs in the Penny Press!

 

Yet another banner issue of the TLS this time around (dated 6 August but only now reaching my benighted backwater of a PO box), and one with a couple of Open Letters echoes that involve yours truly.

The bigger of these kicks off the whole issue – someone named Caroline Blythe reviews two books on the great, bat-shit crazy Victorian polymath John Ruskin, and one of those books is Robert Hewison's big, beautifully-produced Yale University Press volume Ruskin on Venice, which I reviewed a little while ago.

I loved the book and consider it a masterpiece of Ruskin studies. Blythe pulls a standard book-reviewing sleight-of-hand, slapping the book's face left, right, left again, right again … and then calling it “important” or “impressive” or some such placid, portmanteau praise. It's hardly illuminating for a reader (to say nothing of gratifying for an author) to so obviously disparage a book and then backhandedly praise it. There's a figure of speech about eating one's cake and having it too …

The smaller of the echoes deals with Shakespeare's play Henry VIII, an odd, muscular little work I love more with every reading (and one I talked about here). Critics for over a century have maintained that one of the main reasons the play is 'odd' is because it's a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher. As I mention in my own piece about the play, I'm not convinced – but either way, I get the impression I'd like the new Globe Theatre (Bankside) production a lot more than TLS critic Michael Caines did.

 

But the highlight of this issue was neither of these (they're just neat because we've touched on them before, and that's always a fun, eerie experience – you see such a piece in the table of contents, you feel a micro-second's irresolution, then you say, “OK, go ahead. I've done my best at rendering this particular book – let's see how you do”) but instead a slam-bang review by Claire Harman of Michael Sherborne's new biography of H.G. Wells.

I've yet to read Sherborne's book (its UK publisher, Michael Owen, may take that as a rhetorical sharp elbow in the ribs), but I could read Harman on Wells until the cows come home. This is exactly the kind of full, flowing, opinionated review that a wag once said makes its own object irrelevant; Harman is even adept at aphorisms. “The idea that he [Wells] owed nothing to anyone, even his own subconscious, was one he nurtured carefully all his life” is very, very good (actual Wells biographers have wasted whole chapters deriving that simple truth), and when Harman comes to Wells' legendary prolific output, she promptly outdoes herself: “At a stroke, Wells had both invented and almost saturated a new genre.” Oh, that's good stuff.

And then there's the little dagger in the letters page – a fierce, intelligent missive from one Tarif Khalidi that gives no quarter whatsoever:

Having just read the review of Jeffrey Herf's Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World by Hans Kundani, I wondered: Do either author or reviewer have any proper knowledge of Arab history, society, culture, or language? How in particular does one “assess” the impact of Nazi propaganda on the Arab world without a knowledge of Arabic, openly admitted in the case of the author (and reviewer)? Sad to say, the Arab/Islamic world is currently the last region on earth where non-experts can freely claim scholarly authority. Sadder still is that the TLS encourages such shoddy scholarship by publishing reviews that merely echo tired and tiresome Israeli propaganda, then go on to claim that the book in question is “important” in the debate (sic) about that tendentious phrase, “Islamofascism”.

 

That's fairly damning (despite the obvious fact that “Islamofascism” is a term, not a phrase) – we'll see what kind of response it draws from the author or the reviewer. I think it's extremely unlikely both of them will just sit quietly at home in the Cotswolds while they're called frauds. I'll keep you posted.

A Pair of Covers in the Penny Press!

To celebrate the return at long last of Stevereads to its full technological capacity (such as it ever was), I thought I'd celebrate two recent New Yorker covers. One appeared at the of July, the other at the beginning of August, and both are serious contenders for the fat volume of Best New Yorker Covers Ever.



The first is by the always-reliable Adrian Tomine. It's called “Summer Getaway,” and even in the mangled form in which it reached me (for once, my dogs can't be blamed – it was just sinfully crowded in the old Post Office box that day), you can see the beautiful simplicity of it: that thoroughly urban little girl we all instantly love, looking longingly at the steel-and-glass skyline of Manhattan as her cluelessly happy parents drive her away from the city. No cartoonish pyrotechnics are needed here – the great little point couldn't be clearer, or more true.



The second is by Christoph Neimann, and it takes that simplicity even further. The piece is titled “Dropped Call,” showing us a shapely young beauty reclining poolside, looking down in alarm at her sinking cell phone. As with the Tomine cover, the genius here is the minimalism – that startled, upraised hand says more than most of the actual words in the issue.

The New Yorker can go months-long stretches without a memorable cover and sometimes a whole year without one as fantastic as these two, so I thought they deserved a moment's notice. We'll get back to the written word next time!

On the Water!

 

Our book today is H.M. van den Brink's 1998 novella Over het water, here in Paul Vincent's 2001 English translation On the Water. The book came out in America to modest sales and some good critical notices and then was heard no more – a better-than-average career for a short, impressionistic work of fiction (that must sound a very paltry return, for a work that no doubt took its author years of effort to produce, but such is the way of things in the 'contemporary literary fiction' world … books are expensive; audiences mostly can't be tempted away from the safe shallows they know they like, etc). Many thousands of books have similar careers – I read as many of them as I can and then sprint on, always trying to keep abreast of their endless numbers while still keeping an open mind (closing the reading mind, locking things into a rigid little set of 'qualifications' for what constitutes good reading, saying “it has to do this, and this, and it can't ever do that, or that,” is a natural temptation all voracious readers feel, but it's to be avoided at all costs – giving in to it, much less braying about giving in to it, makes a parody of a reader in about five seconds).

Inevitably, in all this hurly-burly, there emerges an odd but accurate yardstick: nagging recall. In addition to all the calipers used on a work at the time of reading – is the plot consistent, are the characters well-drawn, is the prose expert or interesting, etc. - there's one other that cannot be hurried or predicted: does the book stick in your mind, long after you've finished it and dozens or hundreds more besides?

I listen carefully for nagging recall, and I trust it. If I find myself periodically recalling some book from years ago, without an obvious present-day trigger, I know to find and revisit that book. The nagging recall is my brain's way of saying, “there was something in the book that you really liked, something you don't find nearly often enough – go back and enjoy it again.”

So I recently went back to On the Water, and I did indeed enjoy it again. On the surface it's a simple story in the Brideshead Revisited mode: an adult narrator in the midst of the Second World War returns to the location of an idyll from his youth and spends the bulk of the book reliving that idyll for us (it's curious that the implication of an unbridgeable gulf between two worlds is far more persistent in WWII fiction than WWI fiction, considering the fact that the latter war created far more real and permanent gulfs than the latter).

As with Brideshead and so many other such works, the idyll has a few simplistically homoerotic overtones to it: Anton, the narrator, stands at the riverbank in war-torn Holland and recalls a time just five or six years earlier when he had been an introverted boy brought out of himself by rowing sessions on the river, under the tutelage of the strident, enigmatic coach Mr. Schneiderhahn – and in the constant company of fellow crew member David, who (like Sebastian Flyte) comes from money and possesses an oddly compelling charisma.

Over the course of a summer and autumn, Anton and David are paired in their “impossibly narrow” craft, and the narrative quickly, deftly entwines them:

The only thing we heard was the all-penetraing rush of the rain and through it, in the foreground, the violent crack with which we hit the water and the deeper, rather hollow sound with which our blades left it perfectly in time. Or was it not the rain that was rushing around us, but my own blood, our own breathing? I couldn't hear David panting behind me. That must mean that our breath had the same cadence, that his heartbeat was in sync with mine. I imagined how the pointed, brass-covered bow of our boat was shooting through the water, dipping for an instant as we engaged our blades and then moving forwards in an upward diagonal, diving, accelerating.

 

This is the novella's strongest current, this subtle creation of an oddly impersonal intimacy between Anton and David. But it's almost equally good at evoking the giddy, almost masochistic galvanic charge that accompanies athletic competitions such as those in which the boys are soon competing:

You twist your hips carefully to keep the boat balanced, the boat turns with you and behind you you feel another pair of hips moving. All the strength suddenly flows out of you. In the middle of your limp body a hole has appeared where a moment ago your stomach was. You haven't slept and your bowels have emptied themselves twice or three times that morning until it hurt and now they're filled with nothing but sun and fear. You'd like only one thing: to get away from here. But not straight ahead, into the race. No, away, as in: disappear. If necessary into the pit of that stomach of yours filled with sun and fear. So even the sun can hold its breath. If you get out of this alive, if you reach the finish, it'll be the last time you do it, the very last time. What are you frightened of? Not the opposition, not of the other boats. The fear is about your own plan, the task of surpassing yourself, of reaching deeper and further than you think you can, in order to inflict pain on yourself. You're frightened to live.

 

Naturally, the aftertaste of On the Water is bittersweet – in this case sentimentally so; the adult Anton never allows his story to progress far enough for us to see any irrefutable ruin to the paradise he's described (indeed, unlike Charles Ryder, he hasn't yet lived long enough to experience such a ruin). The book has two parallel endings, one in the past (a rowing event just finished, the flush of victory or defeat, the promise of more such events, no hint – or perhaps only the hints embodied in Mr. Schneiderhahn, which remain unreadable to the boys), and one in the present:

Even tonight, while the skeleton of what was once the fortress of this club creaks and the last remaining doors of the hollow shed swing and slam on their hinges, even while the river has put on a cold, angry face with rolling waves and white crests of foam and fists of wind and water, water that now and then hits the planks like a whiplash, even now I perceive the river more as an ally than as a foe. Because that cold, angry face is mine too and, like mine, it is still in motion …

 

It's a quick reading experience (if memory serves, I read the whole thing during the afternoon nap of an elderly beagle), but it sticks with you. It hints at so much and excludes so little, and its beauties nag to be recalled. I like that process; I always wonder which of the books I'm reading lately will prompt it.

Keeping Up with the Tudors: The Other Tudors!

Our book today is The Other Tudors: Henry VIII's Mistresses and Bastards by Philippa Jones, a highly detailed and chatty volume originally published in the UK by New Holland and now enjoying a second life as an incredibly sturdy Metro Books remainder here in the U.S. (your local Barnes & Noble will have it in the Remainder section, not in History).

The typical line here is to go straight to poor Elizabeth Blount, who became Henry's mistress during one of the seething disagreements that characterized the second half of his marriage to Queen Catherine and bore him his only 'acknowledged' bastard, that epic idiot, that monument to mock, Henry Fitzroy. That boy was given lands and titles (not to mention that surname, which would be suicidal unless the king agreed to it) and even a kind of court of his own – it obviously pleased Henry to display him.

But Jones is far more assiduous than this, and she has filled her book with ill-begotten royal offspring – according to her, Henry had five sons and three daughters, almost all by the wives of other men. In addition to the normal tally (plus Fitzroy), there was Mary Boleyn, of course, “the other Boleyn girl,” and her son Henry Carey; there was Jane Pollard and her son Thomas Stukeley; there was Mary Berkeley and her son John Perrot; and there was Joanna Dingley and her daughter Etheldreda Malte. According to Jones, once Henry started fathering bastards, he quickly got good at it – instead of pregnant single ladies-in-waiting just hanging around until their due dates, he began to confine his more serious affairs to women already married to prosperous men, men who could then with a wink (and usually some lands or appointments to ease the humiliation) step in as the 'fathers' of all these royal by-blows.

The main strength of Jones' book is the digging she's done into the vast, tangled thicket of Tudor aristocracy. She's delved the family records and family alliances of hundreds of minor figures in the reign, and she's turned her findings into extremely readable prose throughout, as when she's giving us a thumbnail sketch of Mary Berkeley, the mother of that John Perrot some claim as the original for Spenser's Sir Satyrane:

John's mother's maiden name was Berkeley, and she had been one of Catherine of Aragon's ladies. Mary came from an old and illustrious family based at Berkeley Castle in Somerset. Her father was James Berkeley and her mother was Susan Fitzalan. The Berkeleys were one of the great families in the west of England. One of her cousins was married to the Earl of Ormonde, and her Berkeley great-grandfather had married the daughter of one of the Mowbray Dukes of Norfolk. One can assume that she was well-bred and possessed the talents that Henry found so attractive: she was a good musician, poetess, literate, lively, witty, and pretty.

 

Believe it or not, Jones quite easily makes 300 pages of this sort of thing entertaining – it's a helpful reminder that Henry's era was thickly populated with actual people, aside from him and his various wives (as some of you will remember, I touched on this very facet in one installment of “A Year with the Tudors”). The problem with the book is its overreaching, and you can see it right there in that excerpt. We don't know anything at all about Mary Berkeley's personality, much less that she was pretty and witty and a dab hand with the zither.  John Perrot was a big, beautiful braggart of exactly the type that pleased Henry VIII, and Henry showed that pleasure by laughing at Perrot's adult antics and in large part excusing them. There were rumors that Perrot was the king's bastard, and no doubt Henry knew of those rumors – and if he liked them, he would have done nothing to discourage them. This was a king who dreamed of being bluff and casual, and yet he was a chronic over-thinker who had a cancerous ulcer constantly suppurating on his leg. He was daily reminded of his own physical realities, so it's entirely natural that he would slyly enjoy the reputation of a begetter of bastards like John Perrot.

The problem is, there's no evidence. There's only what various individuals (courtiers at the time and writers ever since) can read back into the record by way of inference. Since John Perrot acted such the braggart, and since Henry smiled upon it, surely John Perrot was a royal bastard. The idea that such implications would only be made if they were flattering to the king – and that this, instead of their respective truths, might be the only reason they were made at all – never seems to cross Jones' mind. She never seems to attribute vanity or wishful thinking to Henry's character, or indeed any other aspect that isn't superlative (I lost count of how many times in this book Henry is called “magnificent” without any speck of irony). That an ailing king of niggardly virility would abet rumors of his own bastards in every county is pathetic but perfectly natural, and it's this royal fantasy that's on display here.

Which isn't to condemn the book, either in its particulars or its general heft. Those particulars are not definitively inclusive, but they're not definitively exclusive either – all of these alleged bastards could have been Henry's. There was certainly time, inclination, and opportunity in each case. The severe counter-argument – that if Henry's seed took so well, his legal wives would have been popping out heirs left, right, and center (instead of all those miscarriages and stillbirths) – is of course never examined here. But what Jones makes up for in credulity she definitely lacks in tedium: this is a lively, enjoyable book, regardless of where you stand on the merits of its subject.

And one one point Jones is indisputably correct: these were bastards who mattered. The alternate reality she paints is spot-on:

The question remains what would have happened if even one of Catherine of Aragon's sons had lived? Henry would have most probably remained married to her. Wolsey would have stayed as Cardinal, never quite achieving his ambition to be Pope, and the Roman Catholic Church would have continued in England. Anne Boleyn might have been a mistress, dearly beloved, but very easy to discard if he tired of her. Henry would have found a husband for Anne and most probably never set his sights on plain, quiet Jane Seymour. He would have carried on choosing his loves and likes, spending years with the same mistress whilst offering his occasional adoration to a range of charming, married ladies.

Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, might never have risen to such high status or, indeed, have ever been acknowledged. As Earl of Richmond he would have been a discreet if loveable ornament to his father's Court. Etheldreda would have been joined by Elizabeth as the bastard daughters of the King; Elizabeth too would have been fostered out to a suitable family and lived a shallow, blameless married life in the shadow of her half-brother Henry IX. Henry Carey would still have served; Thomas Stukeley would still have connived; John Perrot would still have blustered.

 

This is good, gamely stuff, and The Other Tudors has lots of it (you certainly get your money's worth for that remainder price-tag; this book, full of research and lively thinking, will cost you less than any of the trashy paperbacks on more prominent display in the same bookstore). And although Jones adopts a light, engaging tone throughout, there's a peculiar shadow hanging over the book's hypotheticals. Ordinarily, in any game of 'what if' there are better and worse roads not taken; we can imagine brighter and darker might-have-been futures for all our participants. But look at Jones' very likely extrapolation of what would have happened if, for instance, Catherine's first boy, little Henry, had lived. You'll spot at once the difference between this and most other such alternate futures.

In this one, every single person involved would have been happier than they were in real life. One of the darker Tudor legacies, I think.

How To Raise and Train a Basset Hound!

Our book today is How to Raise and Train a Basset Hound, and although it's fairly short (not quite as short as “You can't, so don't bother trying,” however), it's still an exhaustive primer on the deceitful power of words, and the essential honesty of images.

In fact, this is one of those rare instances in which we need not consult the text of the book at all. Merely reading the photo captions will be exercise enough in the narrative's duplicity. Take this one, for example:



“to jerk the lead when correction is necessary” implies there will be times when correction is not necessary, and yet the picture itself belies this implication. Look first at the epicene young man holding the leash, neatly dressed, expecting a pleasant walk, perhaps a not-so-casual meeting with that strapping lad from the lumber yard. Then look at the misshapen little lump at the end of the leash. In the very photo which is meant to illustrate the occasional need for mild correction during a walk, the puppy is stupidly, mulishly fighting the very concept of forward movement. Look at the angle of the tail; look at the entirely occluded face – this is a puppy that does not need (and will not need, its whole life long) merely occasional correction. This is a blockheaded creature that will whine every single day to go for a walk – and then fight that walk with every flabby muscle in its body.

Then there's this photo:



“Very sociable” indeed – and yet, the picture says otherwise! One of the three bassets in question is licking his chops, obviously having just been bribed with a treat off-camera in the vain hopes that the bribe would produce good behavior while on-camera; another of the bassets is in what we unfortunate owners refer to as 'the zone' – a state that superficially resembles happy tranquility but is in fact a sign of near-total failure to comprehend any external stimuli of any kind; but the third basset tells the truth the photo caption would fain hide – that basset is poised for murder, stubby little legs spread apart, ears back, eyes wild with dimwitted rage, head thrown back in an adenoidal howl of defiant hatred. That basset is not interested in the brotherhood of all living creatures, as the book would have you believe.

Or what about this revealing shot:



Serious business indeed! But what serious business? Not the lie of the photo-caption, that's for sure! The text would have you believe the dog in question is taking his training seriously and therefore looks solemn and attentive. But look at the photo itself! The front left leg is poised (if that can possibly be the word) slightly behind the front right; the (immense) haunches are lifted ever so slightly off the ground; the pendulous mouth is ajar; the vacant eyes are almost crossed in concentration – this little basset has been photographed the instant before he lunges maniacally at the hand floating directly before his face. He is not 'seriously' taking instruction – he's pausing for a nanosecond before savagely attacking the caring, loving owner who dares to offer guidance of any kind. The duplicity of the text knows no bounds.

Sometimes, however, in How to Raise and Train a Basset Hound, the gap between words and picture is so great that words can only hang their head in shame. I'll leave you with this image. See if you can reconcile anything in it to the words “without help”:

Notes for a Star Trek Bibliography: Fanzines!

Response from the Silent Majority was surprisingly favorable for my new ongoing regular feature (I love regular features! I'm only allowed just so many over at Open Letters, my overlords there being reactionary tween tyrants, but here at Stevereads I can have has many as I like!) on the long, strange literary history of Star Trek. Apparently, most of you have watched the show in one incarnation or other over the decades, and several of you have loved it dearly.

Favorable, yet nit-picky! In my very first chapter of this feature, I looked at James Blish's Spock Must Die! - I used it as a kind of starting point, noting the slim pickings that came before it: a moronic kids book and a vast sea of fanzines. My implication was that those primordial beginnings weren't worth the time to examine in detail, but I reckoned without the x-factor of curiosity! This makes sense: virtually none of you will have been around and involved in the production and reading of those early fanzines, and the only other place to come across them is deep in the bowels of a Star Trek convention, which is not a place sane and healthy people go. Curiosity would naturally prompt you all to wonder what those fanzines were like, back at the very dawn of Star Trek itself.

They were mostly awful. I was there from the very beginning, I read most of them, I may even have participated in some of them (back when I was declasse enough to use pseudonyms), and I'm telling you: they were mostly awful. Labors of love, every one of them – and like all labors of love, ugly and ill-conceived. “Labor of Love” is a recognized euphemism for 'ugly and ill-conceived,' for Pete's sake!

Still, several of you wrote (privately, of course! Don't know what I'd even do if a lively debate erupted in, oh I don't know, the Comments field) expressing curiosity over this sub-layer of forest flooring you've missed all these years, so I'm pausing from my look at Star Trek BOOKS for a brief posting on the Star Trek fanzines that came before everything. This is where the very earliest Star Trek fiction was born – this is where it underwent its first mitosis from Star Trek, the show, itself. And like all infants, it was loud, ungainly, and prone to soil itself.



One thing some of you younger readers must understand: we did all this without technology, using the equivalent of stone knives and bear skins. There were no personal computers then, no scanners, no Internet. There were gigantic mimeograph machines, and there were typewriters (some of them which were electric, so if you paused to think you got a row of mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm's – and you couldn't just 'delete' – you had to start again on a new sheet of paper), and there were heavy metal telephones connected to cords that came out of the wall, and these were the only tools available to the earliest Star Trek fiction pioneers. So the results look primitive by today's standards. Fan homages now take the form of unbelievably sophisticated pastiches done on video. Are there any privately circulated print-fanzines anymore? I don't know.

Fifty years ago, they sprouted like toadstools. From the very first, Star Trek created in its fans an urgent desire not just to watch but to contribute. The show seemed to belong to us, rather than to some studio that only let us watch it. Fanzines were born of that urge, and they started appearing soon after the original series started airing. One of the earliest, something called “Spockanalia” (you were warned), was already several issues old before the original three-season run was done.



And even in the midst of that fabled run, fans were doing what fans do best: complaining. Even back in 1968, one issue of “Spockanalia” could feature the following wail of disappointment from its editors:

There's a new season starting. Please [it was addressed directly to Gene Roddenberry, who did indeed read it]. Bring back your original standards. Write us another “Menagerie” and let the “Omega” [a reference to the episode “The Omega Glory”] be past. If we fans have any voice in the creation of STAR TREK, then we say, “Keep it the way it was. That is what we want.”

It's one of the little ironies of the fanzines that although they were all animated by that same geek-anthem of “keep it the way it was,” they all featured Star Trek scenarios that Roddenberry would never have countenanced in any incarnation of his show. Main characters are usually only caricatures of themselves; dialogue is clumsy and blockish, torture and degradation are frequent and gratuitous, and illicit romantic relationships are everywhere (the main variation being a homosexual pairing of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock – all because Roddenberry and his writers dared to show two grown men whose close friendship with each other actually meant something to each). At the same time the harried and hard-working editors of these fanzines were urging Roddenberry not to abandon his vision, they were publishing stories that threw that vision out the nearest airlock.

'Publishing' here is an extremely equivocal term. These things were hand-mimeographed, hand-stapled, hand-set, and hand-distributed. Some of the funky sci-fi bookshops in San Francisco and New York at the time might actually have one or two of them for sale, but they were novelty items only. You read one largely because you were in some way involved in producing one, otherwise you got one in the mail (late, and bent) if you paid your 75 cents postage.

And this provincial distribution reflected – and in many cases encouraged – a provincial tone in the contents. There were innumerable typos. There were execrable puns and in-jokes. There were inept doodles and insufferably earnest fan drawings. There were limericks. If somebody's sister-in-law's ex-boyfriend's brother so much as breathed on the galley sheets, he was solemnly thanked in the credits. Reading through one of those early fanzines was like having a lump of raw faith in your hands. Potent, but sloppy.

Potent, sloppy, and, as mentioned, mostly awful. Paragraphs like this one abound:

The U.S.S. Enterprise, an unbelievably massive and graceful island of life, appeared first as a small shape of credible proportions, then as a gigantic array of metal, lights, and plastics gleaming in the glare of a crimson sun. From that moment on, I became a part of the vessel's life. And, along with the regular personnel of the Enterprise, I became fascinated with one phase of Starship life in particular … a Vulcan-Terran humanoid known as Spock Xtmprsquzntwlfb. Mr. Spock (as he is referred to by his ship-mates …) is the logic-minded science-officer. Aboard the Enterprise he is second-in-command. Within Starfleet, he holds the rank of “Commander.”

(In the interests of painful accuracy, not one hyphen, capitalization, or quotation-mark of the above has been altered)

The 'phase' in question here, the character of Mr. Spock, is a perennial object of, well, fascination in the fanzines – as indeed he was on the original show. Fans seized on every conceivable detail of the character, from his green blood to his enhanced physical strength to his race's odd mating habits, even to the fact that in the episode “This Side of Paradise” he tells Leila Kalomi that she “couldn't pronounce” his real name – hence the alphabet-soup stand-in that fans (encouraged, it should be noted, by Roddenberry) concocted to serve as his 'last name' (fans concentrated so much on creating a last name made of English language letters in such a sequence as to be unsayable that they overlooked the far more explosive implication of the original question and answer: that Spock itself is simply a nonsense-word, that when this character's at home he's actually called something else entirely). The emphasis gets tiresome very quickly, but readers looking for a little relief will be sorry when they find it – characterizations of everybody else are ever so much worse. Kirk is the golden jock every nerd and geek (hence, every Star Trek fan) loves to hate in these earliest stories, and Dr. McCoy is most often portrayed as a ranting drunk. The secondary characters are almost always delineated by how similar/dissimilar they are to Mr. Spock, or else how deeply they lust after him (in the fanzines, as in all later Star Trek fiction, Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott is the least explored character of all – later on in this regular feature, when we get to Character Dossiers, we'll examine reasons for that).

The miracle of Star Trek is this: when the show was canceled, the fanzines didn't limp along and die out the way they would have with any other show. They kept going. They flourished. In the barren years between the last aired episode of the original series and the appearance of roughly regularized Star Trek novels, the fanzines were the lifeline through which Star Trek survived in print (meanwhile, an innovative and largely unprecedented deployment of network reruns of the original series was keeping the visuals alive and making new fans all over the Western hemisphere).

Even as the 'technology' of producing that lifeline improved (better mimeograph machines, better binding, even clunky, primitive dot-matrix printers), the lifeline itself was still mostly awful. Relatively successful later fanzines like “It Takes Time on Impulse” were still self-confessedly amateur productions (a poem at the beginning of one issue reads: “red's running out of ribbon/and I'm running out of words./red's going to be repaired/and I'm going to bed./typos there are,/apologies there aren't”)(“red” being a typewriter – we named our machines, back in 1985) full of clumsy, largely deplorable fiction and nonfiction. But these later fanzines had one key difference: they were all animated by hope. By that point, every Star Trek fan was feeling the first flickers of that hope – that somehow, in some way, their beloved show would return.

There were, against all odds, some good stories in those early fanzines (including a couple that became legends, like “Visit to a Strange Planet,” in which a transporter accident – that again! - lands the real Kirk, Spock, and McCoy on the set of Roddenberry's TV show – a story that spawned an entertaining sequel, as we'll see), and some good writers (Juanita Coulson deserves special mention for consistently hitting a level of professionalism – on the page and in the 'back room' – that so often eluded her colleagues) managed to show up amidst the dregs, but by and large there is no reason to return to the fanzines yellowing in attics or preserved in Mylar bags at conventions, any more than even the fondest yearning for the innocence of childhood would make strained beets appealing to an adult. But the fanzines are worth contemplating, mainly because they're remnants of a world that no longer exists, a world that will never exist again (now that the various entertainment conglomerates have learned that there's money in that there franchise): a world without Star Trek.

We have regular novels now, and we just had a very successful movie relaunch of the whole concept (a relaunch that's been curiously shy about kicking off its own line of books – another thing we'll examine in due time), and we have Fanfiction.net to handle the continuously swelling tide of fan writings that were once the sole province of fanzines. The ratio of crap to quality hasn't changed (the great science fiction writer Ted Sturgeon hinted that it was a physical constant, like absolute zero) – you still have to sift through a huge mountain of poorly written garbage to find the one or two gems worth reading. But at least you get to keep your 75 cents.

Alistair Cooke's America!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silence and Violence in the Penny Press!

 

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

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

 

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

 



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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Unauthorized Version!

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

Penguins on Parade: The Tain!

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

The Lively Art of Entertaining!

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

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

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

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

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

But then they get the Maxwell touch:

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

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

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

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

All Said and Done!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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