The Book of John!

Our book today is the Gospel of St. John (we’ll use the New International Version, just to keep everybody reading and happy!), and it comes to us today courtesy of the dozens of you who emailed me from the heart of the Silent Majority about a recent posting lambasting Beverly Lewis’ “Annie’s People” series in general and The Englisher in particular. Some of you accused me of hating all religious fiction, and the rest wondered if there were any religious fiction I actually like (no Amish themselves wrote to me, since they’re cramped and narrow enough to believe God doesn’t want them to have the Internet).

I should stress that the point I was trying to make in that posting about The Englisher wasn’t that religious fiction as a whole is insipid or limiting, but rather that I hate the examples of it that are. In The Englisher (and religious novels like it that I’ve read), religious belief is an extremely thwarting thing, a constraint that will inevitably force you to lop off living parts of yourself. Characters “successfully” deny their sexual orientation, they spend their whole lives married to people they don’t like, they voluntarily enter a kind of mental servitude based on readings of a text that’s 2000 years old … in short, they do what Annie does in The Englisher: they take the beautiful paintings they’ve created, wrap them up tight, and store them in the attic. Forever.

I confess, I don’t see the payoff of ‘faith’ like that. How on Earth do you ever know it’s good for you? You live your whole life, die, go to Heaven, and there, finally, God pats you on the back and says, “I instilled in you the talent to paint and the lifelong desire to do it, and you successfully forced yourself to resist that longing every day that you were alive – good job!”?

Probably “Annie’s People” bugged me because it so relentlessly ennobles one of the most backward and repressive back-alleys of Christian faith I’ve ever encountered (I’ve spent zero time around snake-handlers, so I might not know what I’m missing here), and it keeps doing it, in book after book. But it need hardly be said (except maybe to Richard Dawkins and his ilk) that Christianity has been the inspiration for many, many great expressions of art, including many wonderful books.

And the first of these is John. He’s not the first Gospel – the shorter, more telegraphic ‘synoptic’ gospels of Mark, Luke, and Matthew were almost certainly all composed first – but his is the first Christian novel, the first book in which the author is doing something more than simply reporting the ‘and then He did … and then He did …” happenings of Jesus’ ministry on Earth. John tells that story too, but he makes it his – and so he sweeps us along in a way no other gospel does.

Despite five hundred years of exuberantly intense scriptural study, we can’t say with certainty when John’s gospel was written, or by whom, or for whom. “Sometime in the first century” is about the best that can be managed, with guesses ranging across the reigns of five different Roman emperors. The neatest narrative is that Jesus took John and James, the sons of Zebedee, as his disciples while they were very young men and that John lived to be a very old man, writing his testimony sometime toward the end of his life using as his guides and prompts all the other written accounts that had cropped up in the intervening years but enhancing and improving them as he went along. This is almost certainly not what happened, but like I said, it has the most attractive simplicity.

However it came about, we can say two certain things about the Gospel of Saint John: first, it reads nothing like the other gospels, and second, although we might not know the who, the where, the how, or the when of it, we most certainly know the why: John wants to preach the Word made flesh. Not for him the mere bare-bones tallying of miracles and sayings – he crafts a long, complex, and at times maddening narrative in which Jesus cannot possibly be construed as some random wonder-worker but is instead the way and the life, the door to salvation, the son and avatar of the living God (the synoptic gospels contain this element as well – more so than is often given credit to them, I think – but John is the only one that raises it to an art).

Which makes reading his book one of the ur-strangest literary experiences anybody – and especially any Christian – can have. Coming to the text fresh, as it were, you notice one thing before anything else: Jesus here doesn’t come across as the meek and mild Lamb of God. He’s confrontational, peremptory, enigmatic … one might almost say rude (if one weren’t leery of offending his Dad). In other words, he seems far closer to the heroes and demigods of Greek mythology than to the wan and lissome figure who emerged from Renaissance hagiography. He’s decidedly not quite human, and time and again, John makes clear that his semi-divine status caused his own disciples to get a little jumpy. They loved him and believed in him (most of the time), but they’d also never seen anything like him before, and many of John’s anecdotes preserve that fact, like the classic story of the storm on the Sea of Galilee:

When the evening came, his disciples went down to the lake, where they got into a boat and set off across the lake for Capernaum. By now it was dark, and Jesus had not yet joined them. A strong wind was blowing and the waters grew rough. When they had rowed three or three and a half miles, they saw Jesus approaching the boat, walking on the water; and they were terrified. But he said to them, “It is I; don’t be afraid.” Then they were willing to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the shore where they were heading.

Readers will of course notice that it isn’t the storm or the rough waves that terrify the disciples – it’s the sight of a man walking on water and perhaps looking slightly transformed while he does it (or else, why the need to identify himself once he draws near?). Unlike the primary impression given by the other gospels, here is a Jesus who feels his own supernatural status immediately. He knows he only has a limited amount of mortal time, and he’s impatient with practically everybody for not straight away seeing what his words and signs (one of John’s favorite words) signify.

The Jewish priests and authorities form a Greek chorus of constantly grumbling throughout the book, constantly griping about the liberties Jesus takes in identifying himself with ancient prophecies. Who does this guy think he is, they’re constantly asking. Don’t we know his parents? Don’t we know where he comes from? John never misses and opportunity to paint a picture of the new confronting the old, and the resonances are made all the more thrilling in light of the subsequent 2000 years (of which John – and perhaps Jesus – could know nothing):

You have sent to John and he has testified to the truth. Not that I accept human testimony; but I mention it that you may be saved. John was a lamp that burned and gave light, and you chose for a time to enjoy his light.

I have testimony weightier than that of John. For the very work that the Father has given me to finish, and which I am doing, testifies that the Father has sent me. And the Father who sent me has himself testified concerning me. You have never heard his voice nor seen his form, nor does his word dwell in you, for you do not believe the one he sent. You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life. These are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

I do not accept praise from men, but I know you. I know that you do not have the love of God in your hearts. I have come in my Fathers’ name, and you do not accept me; but if someone else comes in his own name, you will accept him. How can you believe if you accept praise from one another yet make no effort to obtain the praise that comes from the only God?

But do not think that I accuse you before the Father. Your accuser is Moses, on whom your hopes are set. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote about me. But since you do not believe what he wrote, how are you going to believe what I say?

Passages like that one also underscore something else: there was simply no way the Jewish authorities of Jesus’ time could let him live. And John’s account of the Crucifixion and Death is a small masterwork of tragic storytelling – and the scene he presents to us with such effusive artistic joy, the scene where a grieving and heartbroken Mary Magdalene is the first to encounter the risen Jesus, is virtually Homeric in its clarity and power.

I think Matthew, Mark, and Luke actually benefit by being read together – but you owe it to yourself to read John apart. There’ve been many lovely little paperbacks over the years of this gospel alone (some of you will remember the playful – and now intensely collectible – series of little hand-sized paperbacks that Penguin, naturally, did of each book of the Bible, including John), and that’s how you should read it. And then you should write and tell me your impressions – privately, of course!

The World of the Porcupine!

Our book today is from 1966 – it’s David Costello’s The World of the Porcupine, part of Lippincott’s great old line of “Living World Books” covering nearly a dozen iconic and intriguing North American animals (should you be trolling online, Leonard Lee Rue’s volumes on the beaver and raccoon are particularly good as well, as is The World of the Great Horned Owl by Ronald Austing and John Holt). The subject of this particular volume, Erethizon dorsatum, had been an object of study for Costello for many years before he wrote his book – and object of study and sympathy.

Those of you who’ve never encountered a porcupine in the wild or in person might wonder why this critter would need a writer’s sympathy. After all, the porcupine is not a skunk (to the best of my knowledge, there is not “Living World Book” on the poor misunderstood skunk) – its quills might make it a figure of some concern to owners of over-curious dogs or cattle (using pliers to pluck thirty quills out of a howling beagle’s nose is not, trust me, a pleasant experience), but that concern is never the reflexive disgust many urban Americans feel for, say, the skunk or the bat. And porcupines aren’t endangered or especially popular in the black market meat trade. So why the need for sympathy?

Costello clearly feels it, just as clearly as he feels affection for his prickly charges. His descriptions throughout the book are delightfully personal and immediate, as when he discusses a fact about porcupines well known to anybody who’s ever been around them – the fact that they never shut up:

At times, even its voice leads to its undoing. Like a mumbling old man it sometimes announces its presence around camps at night and in the woods during the mating season. The porcupine does have a voice, and it has many variations and meanings. I have heard them murmuring beyond the shadow of my campfire from Yellowstone National Park south to Arizona and west to Oregon. Some of their sounds have been almost inaudible grunts. Others have been a pitiful whining, which by no means meant that the animal was in distress.

I have never heard a porcupine give the coo-coo-coo sound or the weak high yipping bark that others have described. But I have cuddled their babies in my hands and heard them murmur and grunt like an overfed puppy dog.

(That bit about cuddling is not exaggeration: I once knew someone in the Midwest who had, in addition to three house dogs, a 20-pound porcupine as a pet. The sedate creature would waddle from room to room, mumbling like it had lost its car keys, matter-of-factly hauling itself up onto its owner’s lap for a nap – in every way an adorable, completely adapted house pet)(I of course spent much more of my time with the aforementioned dogs – for what it’s worth, once they actually started talking to me instead of slurping my face, they had only one unanimous topic in mind: would I please, please help them to kill and eat that porcupine?)

So again one might wonder: why the need for sympathy? Why the special pleading tone throughout Costello’s book?

The reason stems from another well-known quality of the American porcupine (the larger and more aggressive African variety is an entirely different kettle of fish), a quality Costello is at some pains to declare a myth. He himself uses delightfully euphemistic phrases like “experts in the art of relaxation,” but his book is too accurate to avoid the imputations that legions of hunters, trappers, gamesmen, and amateur observers have put upon this species. It makes Costello defensive:

In spite of the porcupine’s quills and its deliberate actions, it is not the animal moron so often described in the hunting magazines and forestry literature. In fact, it is a rather sensitive creature which responds to patience, kindness, and firmness when handled by people.

Costello points out that captive porcupines have been observed solving intricate lock-and-key puzzles as fast or faster than cats or monkeys solved the same puzzles. He talks at length about their extensive vocal repertoire. He testifies to the agile wits of the creatures he’s owned himself. But time and again in his accounts, other people – people who don’t know each other, people with no reason to lie, will make nearly identical-sounding comments that almost always feature phrases like “dull, witless, and generally unaware of its surroundings …”

The World of the Porcupine will certainly have you rooting for these lovable butterballs who just happen to be covered in 30,000 razor-sharp and easily-detachable quills. You may even end up believing Costello about their misunderestimated cognitive abilities. Me, I’m not convinced. I observed that porcupine in the Midwest in close proximity with three dogs for several days, and I have to say: they came off looking like a trio of Rhodes scholars by comparison. I’m the biggest fan of Canis familiaris there is, but even I have to admit: any animal that can make three dopey farm-hounds look smart probably deserves its reputation for being the dimmest bulb in the chandelier.

Still, should you encounter it (or any of its shelf-mates) at a dusty flea market some day, don’t miss the book. It’s great fun, regardless of contested intelligence quotients.

The House on Nauset Marsh!

Our book today is Wyman Richardson’s 1947 collection, The House on Nauset Marsh, and some of you will no doubt recall I’ve praised it here before. But I’ve also many times referred to Stevereads as the autobiography of my reading, and I do quite a bit of re-reading. I try to exercise some nominal control over that re-reading – there are so many new books to examine, after all, and not just hot-off-the-presses new: even after all these years of steady patronage, the Boston Public Library is still full of old books that are wonderfully and enticingly new to me (and that’s just the one library – I’m told there are libraries in many, many American cities, although none so fair as mine). Re-reading isn’t sinful – I don’t quite know what it is, despite how much of it I do, but it isn’t mere sloth except in its most extreme cases – but it does take time away from new reading, so it ought to be controlled.

I don’t do a very good job controlling it, I admit. For instance, there are long trips of any kind; the horror that other people reserve for being trapped in the company of a boring person I feel for being trapped with a boring book. So if I’m facing a twenty-hour train ride to Iowa, or a four-hour bus ride to New York, or even a twenty-minute subway ride, I’m usually tempted to bring along a re-reading book, something whose pleasures I already know, something I know won’t disappoint. The dangers of taking along a new history of the Wilson administration or a new novel by the latest promising young thing are manifest, and they usually forestall me. And sometimes even in my sanctum sanctorum, propped up in bed, nestled snugly with dogs, nightstand piled with a dozen books, I’ll still opt for a re-read – sometimes nothing hits the spot like Boswell, or Vasari, or my dear Livy.

And sometimes nothing hits the spot like Cape Cod books done right. The hunger can be triggered by almost anything: the sight of a big pelagic sea gull wheeling over city rooftops, or the smell of the harbor sneaking up dockside streets, or even the turn of the season, since all my fondest memories of the Cape are inextricably bound up with its natural world.



Whatever triggers that hunger, when it happens, Richardson’s book is the best thing to satisfy it. This is a collection of sometimes whimsical, sometimes whimsically earnest little atmosphere-pieces he wrote (during quiet intervals from an active professional medical life, most of which took place in Boston and Cambridge) about the Farm House, his age-old Cape Cod getaway set on Nauset Marsh just over the land-ridge from the ocean. Richardson published these pieces intermittently in The Atlantic over the course of a few years, and each one would invariably generate sacks of mail – for one key reason: Richardson lightly, deftly mythologizes as he goes. By the time you’re fifty pages into The House on Nauset Marsh, you’re deep in the Hundred Acre Wood, transported to a Cape that’s far more serene and wild than it is today or has been for decades.

I have four different sets of great memories of the Cape, from four different times I came to know it. And the wonder of Richardson’s book is that it feels almost like an auxiliary set of such memories, even though I’ve never been to the Farm House (two of my Cape houses went by different names; the other two had no names at all) and have only explored Nauset Marsh briefly, not with the consummate long-time knowledge of Richardson and his family. It doesn’t matter: he’s so adept at evoking the peculiar magic of the place that you instantly feel it. When he describes a “jumble of waves,” for instance, can he be talking about anyplace in America other than Cape Cod’s Great Beach when an onshore wind is upon it, and sunlight is fracturing through a hundred clotted clouds:

And there before us is the great ocean. Today its color is a deep blue, except alongshore, where the shallow, sandy bottom gives it a greenish cast. The stiff northeast wind has caused a jumble of waves and plenty of white water. The horizon is sharp, except for the lumpiness of the sea, and, off to the southwest, a freighter, hull down, can just be made out. The breeze is cool, almost cold, and feels delightfully refreshing after our almost too warm walk through the woods. It carries with it a distinct aroma; it has body, and a tangy taste that reminds me of the quality of certain wines. Physical fatigue is dissipated, mental strain and stress retreat into the far background, and a sense of proportion and balance returns. Those affairs that you, and only you, could have dealt with do not now seem so important; perhaps, after all, someone else will do them better. It is a joy to be alive and, for the moment, this is all that matters.

And then there’s the getting there – you an either walk the Great Beach straight up along its bare sea-face, or you can trace its length along the marsh-side, with its innumerable pools and sloping dune-faces … an entirely different natural world, it feels like, and yet right over those dunes is the brawling ocean. I’ve done both many times, with friends and alone (and once, weirdly, both with the same person), and I couldn’t tell you which I prefer – unlike Richardson, who has a favorite way:

It is best to go down to the beach on the inside – that is, on the marsh side – just why I do not know. You may see various kinds of fowl on the way down, and surely many black ducks. Horned larks will fly past in loose flocks, uttering their curious thin little note (“Pippy birds,” we used to call them.) If you are lucky, you will see, on the top of a Coast Guard telephone pole, a snowy owl. As you approach fairly close, his neckless head appears to turn around and around, while his baleful brassy eye glares menacingly at you.

When you get to the Inlet Run, a deep pool that comes up to a sandy beach will tempt you, and you may take a swim – or more accurately, a dip – and dry off in the lee of a high dune, where the wind has undercut a “hen bank.”

The recurrent ‘you’ in all these descriptions is one of the keys to the magic of The House on Nauset Marsh: it includes you. This way you become part of its wonder – and also, ironically, part of its melancholy, since the Cape Cod world it so marvelously depicts – a world of uninterrupted woods, plentiful wildlife, ‘working’ cottages with wells and pumps and kerosene lanterns against the threat of storms, and most of all, the possibility of isolation – is as lost to the past as the great days of Coney Island. Houses like the Farm House are now called “unweatherized,” and if they’re allowed to remain in that deplorable condition, they’re kept by the wealthy as boutique curiosities, opened only for a few weeks during the summer, abandoned the rest of the time, and in any case as crowded around by other cottages as any street in Brooklyn.

That’s a sad development, but The House on Nauset Marsh is immune to it, in the spellbinding way that all great books are immune to change. Here, you can always return to the serenity of old Cape Cod, and as Richardson promises right at the start of his book, you’ll always be welcome:

You can go to Eastham, on outer Cape Cod, and live in the little old Farm House at the drop of a hat. The pump, the kerosene lamps, and the open fire are always ready without fear of frost or storm. You can drive up the lane, stop the car by the kitchen door, and unload your gear. You can look out the south windows over the nearby grassy hills, over the bright blue water of Nauset Marsh to the darker blue glimpses of the sea beyond the dunes, and draw a deep breath.

The Ides!

Our book today is Stephen Dando-Collins’ new work of history, The Ides: Caesar’s Murder and the War for Rome (John Wiley & Sons, 2010). When last we saw Dando-Collins anywhere in the vicinity of Open Letters, he was being good and properly mauled by angry young freelancer Ascanio Tedeschi, who read his previous book, Blood of the Caesars, with mounting incredulity and rage. At one point in his scathing attack, Tedeschi makes some passing comment to the effect that Dando-Collins had previously written fairly worthy histories – that it was only this particular one that was aneurysm-inducing. But Tedeschi didn’t dwell on those other histories; he was hot on the trail, slavering for the blood of an author who’d overstepped all bounds of believability. Editorial policy at OLM is to first check to see that a freelancer has all their rhetorical ducks in a row – and then to stand back, let them hammer away at their victims, and try not to get any of the viscera on the furniture.

But the fact is, Dando-Collins has written some interesting, worthy histories in his career (his accounts of various Roman legions are meticulously researched and quite interesting), and his latest, The Ides, is therefore a return to form. At no point does he hypothesize that, for instance, it was a stand-in for Caesar who was killed on that bloody Ides of March; at no point does he speculate that perhaps all of the assassins were illegitimate offspring of Caesar. In fact, The Ides contains very little speculation at all – it’s mostly just sturdy summarizing done almost exclusively from ancient sources, with a little modern historiography thrown in and quite a bit of intense scrutiny of timelines and possible motivations. Dando-Collins seems to invite ambivalence with the first of his endnotes, in which he enigmatically reminds us, “The noted British historian Sir Ronald Syme once said that if history is to be written at all, it must be written with the violent and complex reality of serious fiction” – but The Ides is almost entirely facts, and even the quasi-philosophical theorizing is fairly harmless:

Caesar opened historical floodgates, washing away the old democratic system. Modern scholars suggest that the republican ideal for which Brutus, Cassius, and Cicero gave their lives was an illusion, that one strongman or another would always rise to power within Rome’s republican system. Perhaps so. But after taking power, Sulla soon bowed to the system and retired, and Pompey was tamed by it. Only Caesar overthrew the system, and buried the ideal. And to this day many a patriot, misguided or not, still will give his or her life for an ideal.

The assassination of Julius Caesar on 15 March 44 B.C. took about ten minutes from start to finish, and Dando-Collins has a whole book to fill, so there’s quite a bit more of this ‘perhaps so, perhaps no’ type stuff, including the age-old school-debate topic of whether or not it was wrong for Brutus & Co. to kill him in the first place. The assassins said they were acting in defense of Rome, removing a man who’d become a monster – and Dando-Collins is ready to mostly agree with them:

There can be no escaping the fact that by any definition Caesar was a tyrant: he gained power in a bloody premeditated coup; employed brutal force; suppressed democracy; and, brooking no opposition, ruled through fear. Furthermore, he may have been a tyrant suffering from brain disease who had come to think of himself as immortal. However, at a distance of more than two thousand years, and without an accurate medical diagnosis, we can only speculate on the state of his mental health.

(That bit about Caesar’s mental health is the closest the author comes to an outlandish theory this time around; he wonders if in addition to – or perhaps even instead of – being epileptic, Caesar had some kind of brain imbalance that would account for several of his recorded behaviors)(That there was never a more completely, horrifyingly mentally balanced human being in the history of the world is patently clear from the ancient first-hand evidence, and no doubt Dando-Collins sees that, but as noted, he’s got a book to fill up)

And there are some good insights here, stuff that will entertain and intrigue the student new to these matters, including a little speculation on that other age-old question – what did the assassins really want:

The most striking thing about the more than sixty assassins is that inputting their lives on the line to join the conspiracy, none asked for anything; all were content simply to take the appointments that Caesar had laid out for the next five years. They merely wanted to be ride of Caesar, the man Cicero described as “odious.” Only a barely concealed hate of Caesar and a driving lust for his removal can explain why the assassins were blind to what would follow his death.

No, there’s nothing in The Ides to incite the anger of a passionate young freelancer. This is a sturdy, well-done recounting of a pivotal event in Roman history, and any reader not already familiar with this very familiar material could do a lot worse than to choose this book as their introduction to it. Just don’t tell Tedeschi.

Penguins on Parade: RLS in the South Seas!

Some Penguin Classics stand as reminders of what might have been. Necessarily, the entire shelf of Penguin Classics from ancient Greece and Rome serve this melancholy purpose – imagining the lost works of Sophocles, Euripides, Asinius Pollio, Livy, and the rest all here with us, neatly persevered inside those so-familiar black-spined paperbacks, knowing with that sweet assurance that they’d all have first-rate critical introductions and helpful notes and dorky cover-designs  – it’s almost as pleasant, in its way, as actually having the books would be (and there’s no final curtain here! If truck-sized statues can be unearthed in Egypt in 2010, so can meticulously-preserved Egyptian libraries – plenty of reedy, well-read Romans went there for the salubrious climate, and the Egyptians themselves were quite fond of literature, so you never know what might turn up).

That sweet, sad imagining can happen a lot closer to our own day, of course. Think of reedy, well-read Robert Louis Stevenson, who repaired in 1888 to the South Seas for their salubrious climate (and because the editor of McClure’s – a first-rate literary magazine at the time, run with easy generosity and unquenchable bonhomie by Sam McClure – offered to pay for the trip if he could have the literary gleanings that came from it) and there began to dream about writing not just an account of his travels – a type of literature at which he excelled and in which he’d already written one very good example and one immortal classic – but the book on the South Seas, a massive compendium of the languages, the topographies, the nature, the peoples, the customs, of course the superstitions, of that entire swath of the globe.

It’s the oddest thing about Stevenson as a writer, and it stands eternally to his credit: despite the fact that he had mastered the fine art of capturing the public taste with light, deceptive adventure stories, he was always yearning for new literary forms, for fresh and dangerous challenges. The books he dreamt of writing but never did form one of the most intriguing ghost-canons in all of literature, and in the South Seas, he dreamt big. Probably some of this ambition came from the fact that on some level he knew how sick he was (a frail constitution racked by consumption and tortured almost every hour of every day by tobacco – it’s highly doubtful that any single human being ever smoked more than Robert Louis Stevenson, and certainly no author ever did, even the ones who were famous for it)(although Scott Fitzgerald came close).

Somewhere along the course of the island-hopping that he did with his family – he traveled with his long-suffering mother and his drill sergeant wife, plus a ragged little entourage of servants and cooks – going from the Marquesas to Hiva Oa to Borabora, meeting priestesses and missionaries and drunken, comic kings, the decision sort of crept upon him that he would not, after all, be returning to wet and chilly London. He knew the decision would upset his friends back home – friends like Sidney Colvin at the British Museum , a devoted first-reader and confidante – but he could confess it readily enough to his more literary acquaintances. He wrote to Henry James:

I must tell you plainly – I can't tell Colvin – I do not think I shall come to England more than once, and then it’ll be to die. Health I enjoy in the tropics; even here [Sydney Australia], which they call sub or semi-tropical, I come only to catch cold.

This wasn’t quite true – Stevenson could always be the most maddening combination of gloomy and optimistic – he never ‘enjoyed’ much health in the tropics, despite intervals of activity and naked sea-bathing. He was almost always sick, sometimes incapacitated, and more than one doctor along the way warned him that his condition was precarious – he could develop a fatal hemorrhage at any moment. He grew more relaxed in the islands, not that precise and proper dress had ever been his forte. No less fastidious a South Seas visitor than Henry Adams could only remark in horror:

Imagine a man so thin and emaciated that he looked like a bundle of sticks in a bag, with a head and eyes morbidly intelligent and restless. He was costumed in very dirty striped cotton pyjamas, the baggy legs tucked into coarse knit woolen stockings, one of which was bright brown in color, the other a purplish dark tone.

But sick or no, distracted or no (his wife Fanny could be a handful, to put it mildly), he kept writing. His readers and financial sponsors back home expected it, and he was on fire to do it anyway. He wanted to capture the essence of the South Seas, to write a huge miscellany that would stand as a worthy substitute for actually being there – he wanted to cover every aspect of this hot, beautiful new world he was seeing and bring it all home to readers who would never see it:

No part of the world exerts the same attractive power upon the visitor, and the task before me is to communicate to fireside travellers some sense of its seduction, and to describe the life, at sea and ashore, of many hundred thousand persons, some of our own blood and language, all our contemporaries, and yet as remote in thought and habit as Rob Roy or Barbarossa, the Apostles or the Caesars.

So he investigated every local custom, talked with every Western visitor and every native storyteller. We want our great writers to be more omnivorously curious than we are, we hope they will be – and Stevenson was. He always had been (the one thing his heterogeneous mass of books share in common is their underlying wide-eyed wonder at being in a world of infinite stories), but something about being in the South Seas, perhaps some presentiment that he really never would see England again, only increased his hunger – hence his dreams for the book he wanted to call simply, all-inclusively The South Seas, and hence, too, his frequent pauses to note mortuary rituals:

So in Samoa only the spirits of the unburied awake fear. During the late war many fell in the bush; their bodies, sometimes headless, were brought back by native pastors and interred; but this (I know not why)was insufficient, and the spirit still lingered on the theatre of death. When peace returned a singular scene was enacted in many places, and chiefly round the high gorges of Lotoannu, where the struggle was long centered and the loss had been severe. Kinswomen of the dead came carrying a mat or sheet and guided by survivors of the fight. The place of death was earnestly sought out; the sheet was spread upon the ground and the women, moved with pious anxiety, sat about and watched it. If any living thing alighted it was twice brushed away; upon the third coming it was known to be the spirit of the dead, was folded in, carried home and buried beside the body and the aitu rested.

As Stevenson writes at the beginning of In the South Seas (the truncated, domesticated, and not entirely successful version of the book that was eventually created by Fanny and Colvin), “for some while before I set forth upon my voyage, I believed I was come to the afterpiece of life, and had only the nurse and the undertaker to expect.” His time-table was premature, but only a little: he had time for this one last adventure, and time enough to write a bit about it. It wasn’t the book he hoped for, but those of us who wish he’d written a thousand books will take this one as it is and count ourselves lucky.

Morris and Chastain!

Our books today are Black Magic Woman (Solaris, 2008) and Evil Ways (Solaris, 2009), the first two installments in the ongoing adventures of Quincey Morris and Libby Chastain, two paranormal investigators who face off against ‘black magic’ and the supernatural in all its myriad forms. This will sound like a well-worn premise – fans of The Dresden Files, for instance, will recognize it immediately (they’ll also recognize the book’s covers, which are done by Dresden Files vet Chris McGrath – not to begrudge McGrath any of the five dozen commissions he’s got going at any one point, but if sci-fi/fantasy publishers were occasionally to not use him, their authors might have less of an ‘interchangeable’ factor to fight against). TV shows like The X-Files and Supernatural and True Blood (and their venerable ancestors, including the great Night Stalker and the underrated Kindred) have worked their own magic in creating a genre where more or less ordinary people work side-by-side with the occult world.

In these books, Quincey Morris would be the ordinary person – although he’s anything but ordinary in the ordinary sense of the word, being tough as nails and very cool under pressure (in the wonderful set piece that opens Evil Ways, he takes on an entire clutch of vampires that have infested a small Texas hotel, and you get a visceral sense of how good Morris is in a tight corner – and a sly tip of the hat from Gustainis, whose conceit is that his Morris is a direct descendant of Bram Stoker’s ill-fated Dracula-hunting Quincey Morris). He’s joined by ‘white witch’ Libby Chastain, another distinctly idiosyncratic fictional creation who spends a good deal of her time explaining the difference between her kind of witch and the bad kind (for all the world like nobody in these books had ever seen The Wizard of Oz)(or Bewitched, for that matter):

“White magic derives its power from nature,” Libby told him. “From the four essential elements of earth, air, fire, and water, as well as from the sun and moon.”

“Is all that a fancy way of saying ‘from God?’” LaRue asked.

Libby thought for a moment. “Well, it can be – although some of us might use other terms, including ‘Goddess.’”

“And if you want to posit God as the source of white magic,” Morris said, “it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out where the other side comes from.”

“No, I suppose not,” LaRue said. He looked at Libby Chastain and asked, “Which is the stronger?”

There’s no easy answer to that question, of course (or these would be mighty short books), but you can see the snap and pace of Gustainis’ prose – that prose is the real secret behind these books; most supernatural thrillers (hell, most sci-fi and fantasy just in general) are flatly, horribly written and don’t care if you know it – they figure if they deliver their requisite cargo of blood, guts, and demons, they’ve done their job and should be allowed to collect their paycheck. In this they take their cue from mainstream thriller writers like James Patterson and his ilk, whose books are mere plot-skeletons, delivery devices for climaxes and cheesy one-liners, not really books at all.

Gustainis doesn’t got that route, and as a result, even his book’s throwaway scene-settings are often memorably good:

Not unlike Caesar’s Gaul, all American college towns are divided into three parts. There’s the campus itself, usually a sprawling mass of concrete and brick (except in New England, where its usually wood, ivy, and rot), the jungle (where the students tend to reside and recreate), and the town (where the permanent residents live – usually as far away from the campus and the jungle as they can get).

Another refreshing aspect of these books – let’s hope it stays strong as the series continues – is the depth and complexity given to the non-supernatural side of every investigation, specifically the efforts of the FBI’s behavioral sciences teams out of Quantico, usually headed by recurring character Agent Fenton (whose persistent, completely uncontrolled potty mouth is just about the only false note the author strikes in any of this – you simply won’t find an FBI field agent who talks that way around the general public, but it’s a small point). Gustainis signals at every turn that wants this side of his mostly-paranormal investigations to be both realistic and tautly gripping in its own right, and at one point he does this signaling in the manner most likely to grab the attention of police procedural buffs: he invokes God – i.e. Thomas Harris. Quincey Morris asks if Jack Crawford is still in charge of behavioral sciences for the FBI at Quantico.

He’s told Crawford died of a heart attack a while back. But the fight against crime – natural or otherwise – goes on, and if Will Graham and Clarice Starling aren’t available, Quincey Morris and Libby Chastain will do in a pinch.

The Englisher!

Our book today is The Englisher, the second volume in Beverly Lewis’ “Annie’s People” series set in Lancaster County and featuring the old order Amish who live there – which you’d think would make this a specialty-niche production to end all niche-productions. Most people in America have little or no idea who the Amish are, most of those who do would rather read insurance charts than fiction about them, and of course the Amish themselves have no use for such ‘modern’ things as books (unless the book is the Bible, of course, or perhaps a farmer’s almanac). You’d think if for some arcane reason Beverly Lewis (a pleasant-faced mother and grandmother who’s written over 70 books) was seized with the desire to write about the Amish, her book would sell only in certain tiny gift shops in Pennsylvania and Iowa.

And you’d be wrong. Hoo-boy, would you be wrong! On the contrary, Beverly Lewis is what’s known in publishing circles as a phenomenon: her books, all adorned with warm, pastel covers, form the nucleus of the ‘religious fiction’ section of every bookstore, Christian or Barnes & Noble, from Boothbay Harbor to Sausalito. Her earnest, leadenly-written tales of the trials and tribulations of one tiny, dying, ignorant, inbred sub-sub-sub-sect of Christianity routinely sell in the tens of thousands, which means any reader – even one who’d never actually read one of her books – must ask: what the Hell is going on here?

It’s not like she’s a secret firebrand of unconventionality. In every one of her books, the Amish are depicted with great affection and reverence, despite the fact that they’re in reality a hidebound, repressive, intensely stupid people. In the first two volumes of “Annie’s People,” for instance, we meet young, artistic, quietly charismatic Annie Zook, who’s made a promise to her father to abandon her painting and devote herself to her people, to worship and motherhood. Annie is fairly well-drawn as Lewis’ characters go (usually the closest you’ll get to character individuality is one person dropping the ‘g’s from some words whereas other people don’t)(when this happens, it’s never meant as a sign of ignorance – ignorance as a subject is given a wide berth in Lewis’ novels – necessary, when writing of a sect that hates the intellect, represses the imagination, and stops all schooling at grade eight),yet at no point in either of this book or its prequel is the promise itself called wrong-headed, much less sulfurously evil. Always the Amish are portrayed as a community where a simple, grassroots-style Christianity is very much alive – struggling constantly with the intrusions of ‘moderns’ all around it, but still hewing to the eternal patterns of the Good Book: simplicity, devotion, and some good old-fashioned sexual slavery, as when Esther ponders the foul mood her husband Zeke has been in lately:

How will our children soak up the love and acceptance of their heavenly Father if they don’t see it in Zeke?

She brooded during the meal, only glancing at her family twice before Zeke called out his desire for pie and more coffee. She leaped up, responding as she knew he wished her to.

About Esther, Lewis tells us: “Her greatest joy came both from the Lord and her children, in that order” – and if we’re tempted to laugh the Monty Python logical absurdity posed by that sentence, we should pause and remember that this woman is a millionaire many times over on the allure just that kind of writing has to countless thousands of ‘religious’ people buying books in this country. Like I said, it’s not a foolish thing to ask what those people are finding in these books that they aren’t even looking for in Trollope.

Lewis’ novels are mild, certainly. They contain no obscenities, hardly any violence, no multi-layered ideas, and every single character is always striving to feel really good about every single other character. (there are no cranks, in other words – no Irish need apply). Innumerable scenes set at kitchen tables are limned in the uniform light of nostalgia, and as we all know, nostalgia works just fine even on readers who’ve never sat around a wooden table peeling potatoes and talking about the menfolk. Characters – precocious young Annie included – are shown to live by much simpler time-tables and rules than those that govern our hectic world. Their joys and anticipations are much, much simpler:

With the warmer days came the anticipation of Good Friday’s fast day. The membership would contemplate the Ordnung prayerfully, and, if all were in one accord, they would rejoice by taking communion as a group, followed by their twice-yearly foot washing. Shortly after that would come the start of baptismal instruction. Annie found herself looking often at the calendar, counting the days till she and the other applicants would meet with the ministers. She knew she had to be certain of her resolve before making the commitment to study, a thought which kept her awake at night.

And I think that’s the key to the appeal of these books: they serve up, chapter after chapter, just exactly the kind of lie millions of brainless Christians want desperately to believe about themselves, their world, and their faith. These brainless Christians (as opposed to the smart Christians, constantly on their toes in a modern society that’s outright gunning for them, always agilely looking for ways to serve and learn as their Savior instructed – but needless to say, smart Christians make no appearance whatsoever in Beverly Lewis’ novels … they’re as unwelcome as blacks, gays, and Jews. Indeed, they’re beyond unwelcome – none of the characters in these book even imagine their existence, and our author never disturbs their mental isolation)(what I wouldn’t give to see a series of novels about smart Christians – but of course, such a series wouldn’t sell) take great comfort from the image of a place somewhere in the depths of Lancaster County where Christianity is practiced as it should be – simple deeds, simple faith, and the women leap to get their husbands more pie. Lewis supplies that world, shakes it a little for her mild dramas, then burnishes it to a gentle glow.

But it’s pernicious, because this is not pick-and-choose Amish: we get the whole package.  The "Englisher” of the title is Ben Martin (in their ignorant, clannish way, the Amish refer to anybody who isn’t Amish as English, like it was still the goddam 17th century), a sexy young thing who’s interested in Annie but not so much in twice-yearly foot-washing. And she’s interested in him – but again, it’s mild, it won’t last, it’ll certainly never supplant the repressive expectations of her people. Ben is of course a thoroughly gelded male character (in that he’s identical to every other male character in every other piece of “Christian fiction” ever written), but even so, the scene at what passes for this book’s climax, when he’s standing in the Zook attic and finds a carefully-wrapped painting by Annie that displays all the talent she’s mothballing for her faith, there’s a sentimental punch that will surprise even a seasoned reader.

A forlorn quest even to read a book like The Englisher, really: it was never meant to be enjoyed – or even understood – outside its target demographic of cowardly, sentimentalizing Christians. And no doubt Lewis’ legion of fans would say I’m exactly missing the point, that the best part of “Annie’s People” and all the other novels is that the Hollywood twist of the pretty young girl giving up her repressive faith in order to run away with the cute boy doesn't happen – that instead, people stay and grapple with faith and its demands.

Maybe so, but you can certainly have too much of a good thing. Glorifying a sect trapped in collective religious psychosis might be a bit far to go, in order to avoid Hollywood.

My, my! The Silent Majority has certainly spoken (silently … in private … sigh…)(it would KILL you people to leave comments? You used to do it all the time, when Stevereads was young and sexy!) – who knew you all harbored a love of really good biographies as deep as my own? Or is just that you like to hear me natter on about them? In any case, Nine Lives is now a permanent rotating feature here at Stevereads, and to honor the occasion, I thought I’d make the second installment longer and denser than the first! Hee.

And it’s not just my nattering, I know that – there’s an essential allure to the literary form of the biography, a simplicity that appeals to everybody: let’s follow this one individual story, this life, and see how it turns out. Every one of these subjects starts out equally naked and helpless (well, there are stories about Attila the Hun, but we’re not dealing with him yet! I know just the volume I want to praise, and of course I can’t find it anywhere), all fight through a clutch of the same illnesses, all are either afflicted or blessed by the random circumstances of their lives, and many – if not most – either make an affliction of their blessings or a blessing of their afflictions. There’s an elemental indentifiability in that, a human commonality that’s unbeatable as a dramatic premise. And of course the dramatic payoff is the personal-biographical version of the lottery, because the subjects of these lives take that commonality and then do something with it. They seek to cut a flash, to strike amazement, to reaffirm some virtue or slake some hunger. At some point, willingly or not, they leave the everyday world they share with us and step out onto a broader stage, and they seem to dare us to do likewise.

(Needless to say, biographies that don’t bother with that final step – life stories that just stay in the mundane what-happened-next stage – won’t be considered here; bad enough I have to see the now innumerable examples of I’m a fat/racist/junkie. Still. Now. Yeah. “memoirs” crowding bookstore shelves these days … I’m certainly not going to waste time eviscerating them, or the lazy reading public who find it somehow reassuring to read about losers and nonentities)

Certainly nobody’s life lays down that dare to do likewise as loudly as that of 19th century British novelist Anthony Trollope, who managed to find time in a very busy life to write four bookcases full of novels. In

Anthony Trollope by James Pope-Hennessey, 1973

veteran biographer Pope-Hennessey (we’ll get to his greatest work in the fullness of time here – hint: it’s another biography!) swiftly and adroitly tells the story of Trollope’s gradual, grinding rise to the pinnacle of literary fame and fortune, including the treasured attendance he made every Sunday afternoon at the Priory, the Regents Park residence of another, far more revered British novelist:

But to Anthony it was George Eliot herself he had come to see, and he grew to ‘love her very dearly’. Her particular cast of mind, her ponderous sibylline epigrams, even her lack of humour, stimulated and yet soothed him. His pronounced admiration for Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Felix Holt and Romola gratified her, and he is said to have relished ‘those qualities in her work that secured her the compliment of comparison with Shakespeare’. She, on her side, readily acknowledged the influence of his novels on the writing of Middlemarch. ‘I am not at all sure,’ she remarked thoughtfully to a dangerous literary gossip, Mrs Lynn Lynton, ‘that, but for Anthony Trollope, I should never have planned my studies on so extensive a scale for Middlemarch, or that I should, through all its episodes, have persevered with it to the close.’

The little gasp the reader gets there – no Middlemarch without The Vicar of Bullhampton? – is just delicious, one of the perfect little revelations all really good biographies have in store for their readers. The patterning out of connections we might have missed in less particular overviews, the chasing down of influences and deciding factors – all good biographers since the genre was born, or reborn (we’ll deal with the guy who birthed it, don’t you worry – and we’ll deal also with the guy who re-birthed it) live to do these things, as in

King David by Steven McKenzie, 2000

when the author reminds us of the importance of a wife’s cache in a story that too often overlooks it:

David and his band [of fellow outlaws] were good at what they did. They soon became a force to be reckoned with, both militarily and politically. The single most important step in David’s political rise was his removal of the Calebite chief whom the Bible calls Nabal. By marrying his widow Abigail, David appropriated not only his wealth but also his social and political position. This also significantly enhanced his power base. From there it was a short way to the throne of Judah. It is no accident that David was anointed king of Judah in the Calebite capital of Hebron, or that Abigail accompanied him there.

Sometimes the surprises come not so much from the research as from the biographer’s passionate insight. This is overwhelmingly the case in a book some of you will have known would be coming up here (and this won’t be the last time, either), a volume I’ve recommended to many, many a reader grown tongue-heavy on dry-as-dust biographies. Of course I refer to

The Personal History of Henry VIII by Francis Hackett, 1929

in which the author aggressively re-imagines virtually every aspect of the 16th century world his researches have brought before him, sparing a moment to pity poor Katheryn Howard for the whining, dangerous creature she’d married:

The world was betraying his mellow mood. In spite of his big expenses for defense, his ramparts at Dover, Portsmouth and Southhampton had just crumbled. In spite of his big efforts to become shapely, the banquets had undone the early rising, the fistula had closed alarmingly and “he is very stout and marvelously excessive in drinking and eating, so that people with credit say he is often of a different opinion in the morning than after dinner.” In spite of his dreams of making a son, Katheryn was not yet pregnant. It was an unkind world. He mirrored it by his own sourness. He spent Shrovetide “without recreation, even of music.” He stayed in Hampton Court “more a private family than a King’s train.” He abused his people, saying “he had an unhappy people to govern whom he would shortly make so por that they would not have the boldness nor the power to oppose him.” He abused his Privy Council that, “under pretence of serving him, were only temporizing for their own profit, but he knew the good servants from the flatterers, and, if God lent him health, he would take care that their projects should not succeed.” He abused, finally, those who had devised Cromwell’s death. “On light pretexts,” he violently asserted, “by false accusations, they made me put to death the most faithful servant I ever had!”

This was the fitful volcano that Katheryn had to live with.

or beautifully describing the nature of Henry’s contest to break away from his rightful Queen – the sheer enormity of what he was taking on in order to marry Anne Boleyn:

Like monsters on whose heaving backs two rival pagodas had been reared, this King and this Queen were to affront one another, freighted with toppling towers. But the battle of Henry’s conscientious scruples went beyond the normal. It became an edifice of figment erected tier on tier with the intention of supporting his cause and giving his arquebus the chance to sweep his enemy. Out of his love for Anne grew a divorce, which, to be valid, required an entirely new foreign policy, a new council, a new hierarchy, a new church establishment, a new chancellor, and, strangest of all, a new wife. And with these novelties the man himself evolved, if not a new nature, at least a nature alarmingly new in its assertion.

It’s striking, in reading biographies, how often unhappiness is a recurrent sub-theme. Henry was of course hugley unhappy for most of his life (and it wasn’t just that suppurating fistula – although that would do it for most people – no, his was a nature badly in need of the one thing his position could never tolerate: a best friend), and much of his unhappiness was of his own making. This is true also of another famous monarch of his era, who’s given her most magnificent, enduring tribute in

Mary Queen of Scots by Antonia Fraser, 1969

and Fraser’s long and immensely sympathetic account of that doomed queen’s troubled life (a book I’ve praised before, waaaaay back in 2006, in the tossed-off precursor-feeler to this very feature)(I like the new title better) is constantly, beguilingly betrayed by its sympathies. Fraser wants very little actual wrong to attach to the queen of whom she’s so obviously fond, and although she never stoops to suppressing evidence, she can’t suppress her own historian’s instincts for accuracy either. The result is an endlessly fascinating game of Emperor’s New Clothes:

Elizabeth’s refusal [to grant Mary a safe conduct to travel through Britain] gave Mary Stuart her first public opportunity of rising magnificently to a crisis. She now displayed for the first time that quality of cool courage, when in the public eye, which was to be a feature of her later career. It was courage which owed nothing to physical well-being. At the beginning of July Mary had a renewed attack of the tertian fever, and when Throckmorton saw her on 9 July he noted that it had ‘somewhat appaired her cheer’, although she herself dismissed it lightly and said that the worst was over. Now, when she received Throckmorton on 20 July at Saint-Germain, having heard the news of the denied passport, she was infinitely composed; in a series of speeches to the English ambassador of fine histrionic power, she showed herself to be not only brave, but also reasonable and even charitable towards the woman who had thus rejected her – as well as incidentally having an eloquent command of the language. Like an actress before an audience, the eighteen-year-old queen seemed to derive strength from the fact that the eyes of Europe were upon her.

You can see what I mean here – what Fraser goes out of her way to paint as rhetorical power and eloquence – even as courage – can just as easily be seen (and from her own account) as just the kind of vain foolhardiness that will land the Scottish queen in prison for years, and then send her to the block. Mary couldn’t control herself, so goes the age-old historical judgement against her – if she’d been able to do that, she’d have been able to control those around her and wrest from her life some kind of happy ending. It’s Fraser’s main gift to make us really want that happy ending for her main character, despite herself.

That phenomenon – characters in biographies being revealed in spite of their biographer’s all-but-explicit intentions – happens quite a bit in biographies, which always begin, after all (and often remain) a spirited dialogue between two individuals, writer and written about. It’s yet another allure biographies have for their readers, the nonfiction equivalent of fiction’s unreliable narrator. You think your guy’s a saint (or a monster), so why do I get the impression he was a monster (or a saint)? It’s never more obvious than in a sympathetic work about a historical figure everybody hated when he was alive. A perfect case in point is

Man of War: Sir Robert Holmes and the Restoration Navy by Richard Pollard, 1969.

‘The tides that erode or add to historical reputation,” Pollard tells us, “are as strong and persistent as those that reshape the coastline or redraw the channels of an estuary.” Which is certainly true, but nevertheless, some coastlines are friendlier than others, and Holmes in life was like the icy escarpments of Scapa Flow. If the great diarist Samuel Pepys, the great poet Andrew Marvell, and our old friend Edward Hyde the Earl of Clarendon all hate you – and they all hated Holmes passionately – you’ve got to be doing something wrong. But Pollard is having none of it – he insists his estuary is approachable, even when his own anecdotes tell any impartial reader (in this case not me, but maybe you) otherwise:

For the first fortnight [of the cruise along the African coast from Gabon] fresh gales carried them prosperously onward. But on September 12th the wind fell light. For ten days they made little way. ‘Very little wind’. ‘Calm all night’. The laconic entries leave much to the imagination. A day without wind is a long day in a sailing ship. On the 23rd the storm broke – but it was not the weather. The commanders of the Goulden Lyon, Brill, and Expedition came aboard the Jersey to complain that they were short of water and to propose an immediate alteration of course for the Barbadoes which they believed to be near at hand.

Holmes was furious, both at their incompetence in running short of water and at their slovenly navigation:

I chidd them very severely … I called for their Journalls, as alsoe all the Journalls of the officers that kept any board of all the shipps, and finding them all too much to the westward I told them I thought they were all mistaken. For that observing my pendulas I had on board, which I constantly attended, either they could not be true or … we must be much more to the Eastward …
The combination of personal and professional authority sweetened by a diplomatic appeal to reason carried the day.

Of course, some biographical subjects neither get nor deserve any sympathy from either their biographers or their readers, and certainly Hitler tops that list. In

The Last Days of Hitler by Hugh Trevor-Roper, 1947

the author in 1945 is instructed to make a full historical inquiry into the details of Hitler’s death, just as dozens of unsavory rumors are sprouting on the subject. He goes all over Germany, sifting records still warm from their compiler’s hands; he discovers the marriage certificate of Hitler and Eva Braun - and he discovers ironclad proof that Hitler shot himself and had his body cremated. The resulting work is slim in page-count (especially weighed against the countless Hitler-themed behemoths that would follow) but incredibly strong on insight, always grimly wonderful to read, despite its subject:

This conception of Hitler as a phoenix, rare in human centuries, a cosmic phenomenon exempt from ordinary laws, was not universally accepted inside Germany. It was not accepted by the generals, those hard-headed, unmystical, military engines. To them he was never more than a vulgarian of extraordinary power who fell short of their idea of genius. “When I was working with him,” says Halder, the ablest of that class, “I was always looking for signs of genius in him. I tried hard to be honest and impartial, and not to be blinded by my antipathy to the man. I never found genius in him, only the diabolical.” But one man accepted it completely, and his acceptance of it was the basis of its success. “At long intervals in human history,” he wrote, “it may occasionally happen that the practical politician and the political philosopher are one. The more intimate the union, the greater his political difficulties. Such a man does not labour to satisfy the demands that are obvious to every philistine; he reaches out towards ends that are comprehensible only to the few. Therefore his life is torn between hatred and love. The protest of the present generation, which does not understand him, wrestles with the recognition of posterity, for whom he also works.”

The author of that description is Hitler himself, and it is a self-portrait.

Still, in most cases biographers of sad subjects feel a sympathy for their charges that they want us to share, especially if their charges fall into that mysterious category of people who are miserable mostly for no reason. The American poet Delmore Schwartz was one of these, an extremely talented young man who cut quite a swath at Harvard, impressed all the right people, embarked on a freelance writing career that could only be called meteoric (reading about him reminds you how influential literary book-criticism was – and still is – when it’s well done; Schwartz’s reviews and author overviews were cathedrals of compressed wit and malice), and yet, as we learn in

Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet by James Atlas, 1977

Even the lavish praise of the publisher Salman Schocken failed to move him. “He thinks you’re the only creative Jewish writer in this country and would very much like to get you to do something for his house, no matter what,” Elliot Cohen, the editor of Commentary, wrote in February; but what Delmore found most significant about this offer was the question of “a permanent connection,” a phrase he underscored.

Such people are always cat people (I’ll resist the temptation to draw conclusions), and Schwartz was one too:

… he reserved his deepest affection [in the rooming house on Kirkland Street, while teaching at Harvard] for his cat, Riverrun – the first word in Finnegans Wake – with whom he carried on an elaborate relationship, feeding her expensive Portuguese sardines, worrying like a parent when she failed to come home, and coaxing her to sleep in his bed.

And the perfect antidote to them (although not to the book in question, mind you! Atlas’ volume is dourly gripping, despite how increasingly awful Schwartz was to everybody in his life as he grew older) is a great biography about a dog person – or even better, about a dog person’s dog! You’ll be expecting My Dog Tulip here, but no: the spot this time goes to a far more refined class of little bitch, and exuberant, opinionated pug who takes center stage in

Clara: The Early Years by Margo Kaufman , 1998



which is nothing less than the tale of her effortless triumphs over every obstacle in the way of her own pampered happiness – even if one such obstacle is her mysteriously demanding human owner:

Once Clara was vaccinated and immune from the myriad virulent dog viruses that could result in instant death, I put a piece of soiled newspaper in the yard and explained the situation: “If you want to go shopping in Beverly Hills, you’ve got to give up The New York Times and use the grass.”

Clara looked pensive, no doubt determining if Beverly Hills was worth such a sacrifice. Meanwhile, Sophie [the less-than-bright other pug] wool-gathered in the yard, shredding bougainvillea, scratching her back against the bark of the jacaranda tree, and chewing grass (which she invariably threw up the instant she came inside). “Dammit, Sophie, hurry up,” I begged.

Clara made a note: The Moron is annoying the Human.

She pranced over to a blooming mound of impatiens and squatted daintily. She received more praise than I’ve received in my entire writing career, and a sliver of Monterey Jack cheese.

Hee.

And we’ll close this installment of Nine Lives with yet another over-bred pampered show-dog, this time of the human variety. Many of you will be vaguely familiar with Lady Georgiana Spencer, who married William Cavendish, the fabulously wealthy and somewhat remote fifth duke of Devonshire and got her own star treatment in

Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire(here title The Duchess for the release of the quite good movie) by Amanda Foreman , 1998

because the timing of the book’s release tapped it into the collective British/sappy American zeitgeist over the death of Princess Diana and rocketed Georgiana to bestsellerdom. It would be unjust to raise the suspicion of opportunism, and it would be criminal to hint at rushed or shoddy material – quite the contrary: this is an extremely grounded, authoritative life (hard to see how Georgiana could have a better one – or merit it) about a woman who did indeed strike amazement in the kind of well-funded but unaligned adjacency with her noble husband that was described so well by Britain’s third-best novelist (hint: #2’s already been mentioned in this entry! #1, I trust, goes entirely without saying):

If Lady B can raise herself also, if she can make her own occasion – if she be handsome and can flirt, if she be impudent and can force her way, if she have a daring mind and can commit great expenditure, if she be clever and can make poetry, if she can in any way create a separate glory for herself, then, indeed, Sir Jacob with his blue nose may follow his own path, and all will be well. Sir Jacob’s blue nose opposite her will not be her summum bonum.

And yet for all its careful research, a great deal of the wit and titter – a great deal of the fun – of Foreman’s book comes Gibbon-style, in the numerous footnotes describing the peccadilloes of the day:

George, the eldest son of Lord Hervey, died unmarried. The second son, Augustus, who became the third Earl of Bristol, did so in a blaze of scandal. Many years before, he had secretly married Elizabeth Crudleigh, a rambunctious lady-in-waiting at court with ambition and a reputation to match. The alliance was short-lived and both of them agreed to maintain the pretence of there never having been a marriage. Elizabeth then married the Duke of Kingston, who knew nothing of her previous life, but after the Duke died her past was exposed in a court case over the will. The Countess-Duchess – as Horace Walpole called her – was tried for bigamy in the House of Lords in 1776 in front of 6,000 spectators. One of the many peeresses who crammed into the gallery during the lengthy trial was Georgiana. Because of her age and status, the Duchess of Kingston escaped branding on the hand, the usual punishment, and was allowed to retire abroad. Augustus was condemned for conniving in the deception, and his punishment was severe: the Lords insisted the original marriage was indissoluble, thus depriving him of legitimate heirs.

Almost like having the society papers right there in front of you, isn’t it?

So there you have it! Nine more lives to read about, ruminate upon, and, if need be, find at the library! Coming up in about a month: nine more!

The Engineer of Human Souls!

Our book today is Josef Skvorecky’s rollicking, hilarious, and ultimately extremely touching 1977 novel, The Engineer of Human Souls (in the original Czech – hold onto something now – Pribeh inzenyra lidskych dusi), and I’m taking refuge in it today for two reasons: first, it’s a genuinely great book, endless inventive and sad and funny, certainly Skvorecky’s masterpiece (although all his books are very, very good), and second, because it’s been my experience that if the subject of ‘great 20^th century novels’ comes up at a party or a bookstore or a convivial all-you-can-eat hostelry, any mention of Skvorecky will be met with blank stares. Even a recondite cinderblock like The Recognitions (which, don't mistake me, I also heartily recommend) will have at least one or two heads nodding, but Skvorecky? If people want to talk about great modern Czech writers, they’ll talk about Milan Kundera. You can just guess what I think about that.

It’s odd, because he has the just the kind of c.v. hip young litterateurs should love: born in 1924, enslaved by the Nazis while young, a patriotic Czech at a time when the Soviets were inclined to kill you for being that, a champion of freedom and a publisher of dissidents, by all accounts a mesmerizing teacher (though rather hard on his favorite students’ livers), and most of all, a tireless writer, always working at his craft.  You think comp lit. grads would gobble him up.

My guess as to why they don’t is because his books are big – they’re labyrinthine, super-garrulous, endlessly allusive (none more so than The Engingeer of Human Souls) – they disdain simplicity for simplicity’s sake, they are unafraid of taking foolish rhetorical stances they can in no way justify, and they can almost never resist a squirt of seltzer water in your face, even in the most serious circumstances. In other words, despite the fact that Skvorecky wrote them in a relatively comfortable exile in Canada, they’re pure Czech.

The Engineer of Human Souls concerns the young Czech writer and dissident Danny Smiricky, who has many misadventures with the occupying Nazis (all of which are described with the pitch-perfect precision of high comedy, a thing Wodehouse understood, and Joe Heller – an incredibly difficult and painstaking kind of art that has endured many hardships over the centuries, including having to hear And Then We Came To The End described as ‘high comedy’), including an scatterbrained sabotage attempt that’s derailed when Danny inadvertently blurts out “Sorry!” to his Nazi Obermeister Uippelt, thereby revealing the highly suspicious fact that he speaks English. Naturally, the Nazi officer has questions about this. Here’s a bit of the nervous interview that follows – just look at the incredibly subtle shiftings going on here from slapstick to tragedy (“Mr. Katz, now probably dead…”) and back:

Without even being aware of it I stood at strict attention. He stared at me like a blue-eyed suckling pig, but it wasn’t his usual geheime Staatspolizei squint.

“’Sorry’ ...,” he said ponderingly. “Warum haen Sei diesen Englischen Ausdruck benutzt?”

“I’m- I’m learning English,” I replied in German. “I said it without thinking.”

“Warum lernen Sie Englisch?”

Oh God! Why, indeed, did a citizen of the Protektorat learn English with the Reich waging a victorious war against the English-speaking world? Why not learn Italian? Or, if you like – given the way the Italians were conducting the war – why not learn Japanese?

“I – we used to take it in school. I haven’t been able to forget it …”

“Warum wollen Sie’s nicht vergessen?”

He had me cornered.

“I …I …”

“Na?”

Once more the words flew involuntarily out of my mouth. The source of this next evident untruth was my teacher at the time, Mr. Katz, now probably dead. “Once you know something, no one can take it away from you.”

Uippelt raised his eyebrows,set his prince-nez on his nose, and I lost my courage. Against my will, I began babbling like a quisling. “I mean – after the war we will – I mean, Germany will occupy England – and then we will need to know English – vielleicht …”

The little blue eyes blinked and Herr Obermeister leaned towards me over the blueprints. I expected an explosion in elegant, baroque German, but Uippelt merely said in a soft, confidential voice, “Bullshit.”

The book is organized almost entirely around other books, other authors – this is, among all its other virtues, one of the most sustained and stunningly enthusiastic hymns of praise to books and reading you’re ever likely to read (the chapters are titled “Poe,” “Hawthorne,” “Twain,” “Crane,” “Fitzgerald,” “Conrad,” and, wonderfully, “Lovecraft,” and some of the academic comedy here – as Danny must deal with his terminally stupid students – is among the finest such ever written). There are readings of the authors in question – and dozens of others – that you’ll remember forever, but the bookish never upstages the forward-surging tangle of the book’s two plots, nor the hedge-growth of subplots in which Danny teaches his students and falls in and out of love (there’s a scene on a train in which young Danny realizes a girl he grew up with has become a fervent Nazi that will quite simply break your heart)(but you’ll be laughing at something five pages later).

I think it’s this studied, lively busy-ness  that tends to keep The Engineer of Human Souls from being known at those parties and bookstores and all-you-can eat hostelries. Skvorecky can be wistful, melancholy, and sometimes very, very sad – but he is never solemn, and maybe that’s one sin too many in the current comp-lit hymnal. Danny hints at such a thing himself, after regaling his students with yet another story of the hapless Czech resistance fighters under the Nazis (this one involving, among other things, a series of events that cause a Nazi official to take a sip from a glass of what he thinks is champagne but which is in fact a more common yellow liquid altogether) and encountering their outright skepticism:

“You’re making this up,” says Irene. “it’s like a scene from a screwball comedy.”

“Svensson,” I say, “kindly remember this most banal of all truisms: the most incredible comedies are written by life.”

“My life is more like a railway timetable.”

“Just wait till time intervenes. The alchemy of time transforms everything into comedy. Everything.”

Naturally, I’m of precisely the wrong ethnic background to believe that myself, but Skvorecky did – or at least this wonderful book does. It would no doubt spare a rueful chuckle even for its own desuetude, although I don’t find that funny either. Somebody should hurry up and reprint this book – no need to commission a new translation: the snappy, cheerful one by Paul Wilson that I’ve been quoting from is quite good enough.

Winter's Tale!

Our book today is Mark Helprin’s luminous 1983 novel Winter’s Tale, certainly the author’s masterpiece and one of the only sustained examples of so-called ‘magical realism’ that didn’t strike me as lazy, condescending, or both. As most of you will already know (I’ve seldom met a well-read person who hasn’t read – and loved – this book), the skein of the story concerns innocent young barbarian Peter Lake, who leaves home to come to a towering, imposing New York City of a bygone era. There he finds/is found by an immense magical white horse named Athansor, and the two have adventures, but the cast of characters here is almost limitless, and in many ways the most memorable one is the city itself:

Manhattan, a high narrow kingdom as hopeful as any that ever was, burst upon him full force, a great and imperfect steel-tressed palace of a hundred million chambers, many-tiered gardens, pools, passages, and ramparts above its rivers. Built upon an island from which bridges stretched to other islands and to the mainland, the palace of a thousand tall towers was undefended. It took in nearly all who wished to enter, being so much larger than anything else that it could not ever be conquered but only visited by force. Newcomers, invaders, and the inhabitants themselves were so confused by its multiplicity, variety, vanity, size, brutality, and grace, that they lost sight of what it was. It was, for sure, one simple structure, busily divided, lovely and pleasing, an extraordinary hive of the imagination, the greatest house ever built.

For this reason, it occurred to me just the other day that Winter’s Tale would make a very satisfying re-read during a long-planned bus-ride to Manhattan. Bus and train are really the only ways to approach NYC; driving your own car, you’re too concerned about not getting killed to appreciate the experience, and flying is by its very nature anti-climactic. But when you approach slowly, over the course of four hours, you can watch the scenery gradually flatten out, as though in preparation for the immensity to come. You roll past the vast, faceless industries (reclamation plants, storage facilities for things and people) that exist only to support the daily workings of the thing you’re soon to encounter, and then, like a clockwork miracle, it appears: a city so huge it feels like a provocation just to approach it. In an unbeatable visual irony, you pass miles-wide and carefully-maintained cemeteries as you draw nearer, and your eyes can effortlessly shift from landscape that is quiet and determinedly horizontal to one that is intensely vertical and so raucous you can swear you hear it as you get nearer.

How nice, I thought, to re-read this quintessential hymn to New York City while driving into the heart of it. So I packed Winter’s Tale along with everything else.

Unfortunately, I also packed a monstrous pathogen, and after a mere 90 minutes of bus-ride (in the middle of a decidedly un-inspiring winterbound Connecticut landscape), my ears, nose, eyes, throat, and stomach erupted in a series of time-lapse geysers that left me trembling, weeping, sitting on the front step of the bus, begging the driver to let me off.

So my oh-so-neat English major’s idea of re-reading Winter’s Tale as I approached New York didn’t happen (looking back, I think the travel-gods were almost certainly punishing me specifically for being so insufferably artsy-fartsy), and, being of 100% Irish descent, I a) thoroughly destroyed that copy of the book and b) will never bring another copy  on a trip of any kind ever again, even at Mark Helprin’s specific behest. If innocent inanimate objects can’t be blamed for the misfortunes that befall us, say generations of Donoghues from Donegal, then what good are they?

Still, upon reflection (and after fifteen hours of sweated-through fever dreaming in which my fat basset hound did all the hippo’s dance routines from “Fantasia”), I see no reason to taint the book itself, nor to call for any of my loyal (and silent … sigh …) readers to shun it. “I have been to another world, and come back,” Winter’s Tale’s motto urges us, “Listen to me.” Readers have, and readers should. Not only is there wonder aplenty in this book, but there’s also a great deal of pitch-perfect humor (indeed, Helprin is so good at evoking the wonder that I think his humor is underestimated), as in the following little epiphany by the questionably sane Reverend Mootfowl, which ends with the perfect zinger:

“A bridge … is a very special thing. Haven’t you seen how delicate they are in relation to their size? They soar like birds; they extend and embody our finest efforts; and they utilize the curve of heaven. When a catenary of steel is hung over a river, believe me, God knows. Being a churchman, I would go so far as to say that that catenary, this marvelous graceful thing, this joy of physics, this perfect balance between rebellion and obedience, is God’s own signature on earth. I think it pleases Him to see them raised. I think that is why the city is so rich in events. The whole island, you see, is becoming a cathedral.”

“Does that leave out the Bronx?” someone asked.

“Yes,” Mootfowl replied.

Joyful little hoots pop up all through this book, and they fit so well with the solemnities that you can only stand in sheer awe of the work it must have required to write this book. In fact, Helprin could almost be writing about Winter’s Tale itself when he has a transformed and visionary Peter Lake proclaim:

“You see, it works. The balances are exact. The world is a perfect place, so perfect that even if there is nothing afterward, all this will have been enough.”

As we all know, ‘afterwards’ has included some less-than-stellar work and some gems (one of which, Freddy and Fredericka, I reviewed way, way back in 2006!) … but nothing shines quite as brightly as Winter’s Tale. If you’re one of the few who hasn’t read this book, hurry out today and do so. But mind the pathogens.

Travel the World with The Lifted Brow!

The latest installment of Australia’s great literary journal The Lifted Brow is now out – and sold out! Ronnie Scott, the journal’s weirdly youthful proprietor and mastermind, is currently working on a limited second run, so do your best to get on that list (or desperately Craigslist anybody you know in Australia, begging them to find you a copy).

There are two reasons why this issue sold like hotcakes: first, the days when The Lifted Brow may have been the best-kept secret on the international literary stage appear to be over. And second, this issue is so damn much fun – and when was the last time you could say that about The New Republic?

It’s a travel-themed little behemoth of an issue this time around. Travel, as the old saw goes, can broaden the mind. Unfortunately, in this day and age, it can also get you blown up, dysenteried, dengued, taken hostage, flight delayed, flayed, beheaded, or at the very least pauperized. In recognition of these dismaying facts (and in the spirit of the aforementioned fun), this issue brings the world to you: dozens of writers, including Justin Rice, Clancy Martin, Andrew Holder, the insufferable Reif Larsen, Douglas Coupland, Benjamin Kunkel, the moderately sufferable Adam Golaski, the late David Foster Wallace (and yours truly), each hones in on a different corner of the world and tries to convey something of its flavor, its culture, its commonality, or its strenuous irrelevance. The issue also features two CDs of vaguely world-themed music by lots of people I’ve never heard of (but it sure filled my room with strange and ultimately alluring sounds when I popped it into my computer!) – all in the service of The Lifted Brow’s obvious (though unstated, because that would be so stuffy) message, that literature should be collaborative, multi-genre, and invigorating, while we’re all young. To keep us all young. To make us all young.

So it’s an odd position I find myself in here: I’m unabashedly plugging a great literary production that’s almost completely unavailable specifically because of how great it is. Nevertheless, do your best. Go to the website, spring for a subscription (so this doesn’t happen to you again!), look around, sign up for yet another  reprint of this issue. It’s got lots of art, lots of good words, and lots of good music – it’s worth the bother.

Penguins on Parade: The Selected Poems of Dryden!

Some Penguin Classics abridge their subjects, for necessity’s sake. Take the 2001 edition of the selected poems of John Dryden, for instance. In confronting the text of England’s greatest poet, editors Steven N. Zwicker and David Bywaters were faced with an insuperable problem: Dryden wrote for a living, and he wrote a lot.

This wasn’t always the case. In his comparative youth, he had a mortal horror of work, of making art into work – the usual imbecility of the young and talented. As a result, he came to writing relatively late – but he made up for lost time! Once dawn finally broke, once he was convinced that he would only be alive this one time, that everything in the history of the world that would ever be written by John Dryden would have to be written by him in a paltry handful of years, he began filling his days and nights with writing, and although he often complained about it (deadlines, money, wretched printers, heedless audiences, etc – the writer’s complaints never change), that daily overwhelming brought him a joy so deep and complicated that it’s evident in virtually every line he wrote.

But, as noted, he wrote a  lot of lines. The collected edition assembled by Sir Walter Scott (no stranger to productivity) ran to 18 volumes, and the super-scholarly (not to say nit-picky) University of California Press rounds out at 20. Our editors put it succinctly:

He wrote about politics and religion, about trade and empire; he wrote for the theatre and for public occasions; he composed songs, fables, odes and panegyrics, brilliant satire and savage polemic; he translated from many languages and formulated an idiomatic, familiar and fluent prose style. Dryden virtually invented the commercial literary career …

Given all that, a Penguin Classic of Dryden’s complete verse would be something of a logistical impossibility, especially since he would have to include not only his translations of Horace and Persius, not only his ‘adaptations’ of Chaucer, but also all 12,000 lines of his 1697 edition of the works of Virgil (which our editors rightly call “a resounding and rehabilitating commercial and artistic success”), a monstrous magnum opus that plagued Dryden with doubts and elicited a premature apology for its defects:

What Virgil wrote in the vigor of his age, in plenty and at ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years: struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I write…

(Anyone who’s actually read the Dryden Virgil will know that it has very little in the way of defects, but then, Dryden was a worrier)



Even leaving out the longer translations, the tracts, the glorious plays, and most of the prose (our editors cannot bring themselves to exclude all the prose – they include a few choice specimens, even though the inclusions take precious space that could otherwise have been devoted to more verse), there’s still an overwhelming amount of immortal verse, so further selection is necessary – and for form’s sake, Dryden’s first published poem, “Upon the Death of Lord Hastings” (1649) has to be here, even though it’s … well, shall we say not good? Hastings died at age 20 of the smallpox, which gets a clinically accurate but poetically disastrous treatment:

Each little pimple had a tear in it
To wait the fault its rising did commit

And of course space must be made for Dryden’s hilarious and vicious satire "MacFlecknoe," in which he mercilessly sends up every single one of his literary rivals and quite a few literary innocent bystanders. It’s one of the most superb extended outpourings of pure bile ever written, and our editors are duly appreciative:

MacFlecknoe allowed Dryden to ridicule and crush his rivals, and without departing from the suave tones and manners of literary greatness. In the abuse of rivals, only Pope equals Dryden as a master of irony and mock-epic scorn.

Although readers might at times be hard pressed to detect suave manners in the poem itself, although they’ll have no trouble spotting the blood splatters, as when the aged bad poet Flecknoe is surveying the field of his literary descendants, intent on picking an heir. He’s drawn to Dryden’s chosen target Thomas Shadwell, who’s the main course of the poem:

Sh---- alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness, from his tender years.
Sh---- alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirmed in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Sh--- never deviates into sense.

Most of Dryden’s first-rate poems are here – there’s "Annus Mirabilis," "Astraea Redux," "Absalom and Achitophel," "The Medal," "To the Memory of Mr. Oldham," "The Hind and the Panther," and many others. And the end notes manage to be both brisk and compactly informative. In short, this Selected volume does exactly what it should: it gives the curious reader an inviting taste of this one supreme writer. It’s one of literature’s great crimes that Dryden’s work is today almost as little known as Shadwell’s – his verse never read except by unwilling undergraduates, his plays never performed despite how much fun they are, his essays never read even though they were the intellectual primer for every generation of subsequent critics. Maybe the right introductory volume – the one to catch the public imagination – hasn’t arrived yet. When it finally does, my money’s on it being a Penguin.