A rare find

The Storm, by Frances Sarah Moore (1951)

To surf the gigantic universe of book review blogs is to wonder at the news and opinions of people who read more than I do. ("Loved it loved it LOVED IT!") To saunter about bookstores and libraries is to gape at the stacks of new fiction. All the fresh stiff books are so impressively thick and gorgeously produced, their jacket paintings, lettering, and design absolute works of art. But I open them to meet repeated disappointment.

When it comes to reading perhaps I should allow that my standards might be downright petty. I'm annoyed, for instance, by the gimmick of the novel written in the present tense ("It's daylight. Blood drips down her arm ....") Why use a square wheel for five hundred solid pages when the round one -- the past tense -- has served so well? I'm annoyed by the gimmick of the novel written in bad English, because the narrator is a plucky servant or other uneducated character. Mark Twain could do this; you and I cannot, much. I'm annoyed when a novel, set in the seventeenth century, uses politically correct 21st-century American terms for today's approved grievance groups ("the Romany [gypsy] woman"). I'm annoyed by pointless, laughable vulgarity, and mind you I do read basic, porn-heavy romance novels with good cheer, so it's not a question of prudery. A year or so ago, I came across one very beautiful and interesting-looking new novel, set in Renaissance Florence, which opened with a description of the dead body of a nun, shockingly discovered to be tattooed with a giant snake which curled around her form until its head and tongue reached her private parts. That, my friends, shrieks "lack of talent" on the part of the writer. Anyone with something valuable to say need not begin quite so. Needless to add I didn't buy the book, nor look for it at the library.

Because bookstores with their fresh thick beautiful stacks so uniformly disappoint, I turn to the library for books like the one in the photo above: unadorned, unknown, old. I look for books published before all fiction came out of university writing programs, and before nearly all publishing houses -- it seems -- mass-hired editors who like and expect to promote fiction from university writing programs. This last claim about the weight of university training in the modern market comes from an article I read online just in the last month, which struck me as very pat but which I regret I can't find again. (I hope you'll trust me on this.) The author declared that 13 of the 15 most recent recipients of some prestigious prize or other, or honorees on some bestseller list or other, had all come out of university creative writing departments. We the readers' fond image of the "lone visionary" scribbling private truths was long since passé, this commentator explained.

It shows. So much modern fiction, when it is not being annoying through its gimmickry or its political correctness or its silly vulgarity, has the feel of being competently assembled rather than written. Perhaps that comes from young people being taught, en masse, how to write: not in the necessary sense of being taught grammar, but in the sense of being taught how to "create conflict" or "write compelling dialogue." And the dream of the six-figure movie deal surely hangs over a lot of modern output. So many chapters seem to be framed visually rather than written out by a mind which is trying to describe the visual through graceful language (there's a difference). So much action is painstakingly plodded through as if to make a future set director's instructions perfectly clear. Scene after scene ends with wooden Excitement. "Professor. You've got to get down here. Now." And, cut.

So I turn to old books, when I can find them. The quest is getting difficult even in the library. My local one assiduously purges, eliminating what has not circulated enough and donating it all to the Book Sale room, which does a whopping business at the monthly Friends of the Library extravaganzas. The purging in turn makes space for more of today's fiction which, by the way, you will still be able to spot fifty years from now even if it is all bereft of its opulent jacketing, and looks as humbly intriguing as The Storm. A lot of it will have titles like The Curious Case of the Tree that was Blue, Jumping on Silk Trampolines with Boys Who Paint, or The Secret Life of my Nephew's Glasses. A lot of it will struggle to reach sophomoric (literally, university level) moral conclusions -- and that is especially true of the painfully serious books brooding over academia's approved topics, race, class, and gender. My favorite was a tremblingly meaningful final pronouncement from a best seller of ten years ago, viz., that the Civil War was "fought to decide how we're going to feel about each other." Really. News to the soldiers, I'll bet.

To be fair, if my tastes are so very exalted and I like such old books, I could simply turn only to the profoundest classics, which the library does for the moment keep on its shelves. But a diet of just Dickens and Shakespeare and Conrad, even if anybody could remotely follow it, needs some leavening. Besides, I'm curious. Dickens and Shakespeare and Conrad were once the latest thing. Have they no descendants among us at all? I like to hunt old books to find that out, or to find out at least what good or even yeoman talent was still accomplishing forty and more years ago, before today's gatekeepers took up their stations with such -- well, finality, it seems. It's hard to believe splendid imaginative ability really vanished from the English speaking world around 1975.

Now, enter The Storm. It's a plain-Jane little novel, written in plain-Jane prose and printed in a rather large typeface too, about a young couple who meet and become serious despite both bearing cynical views on marriage. It opens, startlingly, with a view of a bad marriage between an elderly rural minister and his wife -- in 1951. Where did Frances Sarah Moore get the idea? We imagine everybody before us was so innocent, so conformist, so unwilling to explore darkness. And it closes, satisfyingly, with the writer's attempt at honest summings-up on large human topics, as she sees them, not as she and her classmates have been taught to see them. There is a difference, evident in the feeling of truth and private effort that is missing from the final pages of modern fiction.

There is also something very important in The Storm, which I delight to find and which almost never appears in modern books, university-bred as they are. It's the natural, unexplained reference to classic literature, to the fact that bits of Western knowledge were once ingrained in almost every Western person and therefore a normal part of fictional characters' backgrounds, too. Here Julia is speaking with her married lover (in 1951!):

"I love you, Julia. I don't want to hurt you. I am afraid I am taking advantage of you."
"Of my youth?" she jeered. "I am old, Father William."
He smiled a little at Alice's misquoted Young Man.

That's it. The only reason I recognize this is because I saw the Disney movie Alice in Wonderland about a million times when my children were younger, and I think it fairly faithfully mirrors the book. Tweedledum and Tweedledee sing " 'You are old, Father William,' the Young Man said" -- and from there you can walk the reference back, and see why Frances Sarah Moore has someone "smile a little at Alice's misquoted Young Man."

Even though The Storm is a completely ordinary book, this small point is a far more worthy and even exciting indication of a forgotten, sincere ability quietly at work, than all the pasteboard details shoveled into a new novel, whose bulk nevertheless bores with its drab language and its human emptiness. My own favorite, historical fiction, seems especially impoverished. So, a medieval child might wear a necklace made of hedgehog's teeth? That's good research -- and good research is lavishly praised on the backs of book jackets -- no one could make that up. I'm glad to know it. And right on page 1, too. Someone's been told to capture the reader's attention right away. But beyond the hedgehog's teeth, what is it about this particular subject of this huge novel, this king's mistress, what is it about retelling her life that has fulfilled this writer's need to express the truths he knows? When Frances Sarah Moore writes about the elderly couple salvaging their marriage, or about what it means for a life's work to be obscure or not, valuable or not, I sense that she has sat alone, maybe in a room resounding with the din of a driving ice storm just like the one she describes, and has thought out some important things to her own satisfaction, which she then tenders respectfully to the reader. Any reader. Even sixty years on. Today's vetted writers have not done that, nor would it occur to them to try. They've been trained to dazzle, with competent arrangements and striking anecdotes, people trained to be dazzled by them. It's all so remarkably dull.   

Now the clever reader might point at me and say, "It's all sour grapes. Nobody wanted your novel and you've never done the digging needed to write a paying historical or romantic sizzler, so you're mad."

Maybe. It's true that I find nothing particularly feeding to the soul in making up fiction. I admire those who do it well, and I even admire the energy of those who do it poorly. Maybe some of us are born diarists, for what that's worth. (Maybe we can flatter ourselves that, as Marcus Aurelius instructed, we "write for the gods.") But I'm also still a would-be consumer of modern books, and in that humble role I'm still confused by the vast sunlit desert wastes before me. Where is the talent? And you wonderful bloggers who devour a dozen books a month, exulting how you "loved it loved it LOVED it." What exactly are you loving?
   

How to Do !t by Elsa Maxwell

How to Do !t -- the cute exclamation point is not a typo -- is subtitled OR The Lively Art of Entertaining, and as you plow delightedly through the first several chapters, you may think that this is the most unique and truly interesting, entertaining, book you've read in years. Carrying on, you may find it turns a bit repetitive, but that is partly because few people anymore need our author's detailed advice on good party-giving. Most of us socialize only with our own families, and so are puzzled by any idea of artificiality in company, or of making an effort because you are supping with strangers. Did you know, for example, it used to be a rule at dinner that you talked to the person on your left, and then at the change of courses, to the person on your right? This was to ensure that everybody got talked to at some length. Families needn't bother with that. And when was the last time anyone ever enjoyed the bizarreness of a scavenger hunt? Our authoress invented them, but also lived long enough to notice how many parties were becoming television-watching appointments.

And who was our authoress? She was Elsa Maxwell. She occupied a strange position among the jet set from the end of World War I to her death in 1963. There had been great political hostesses before her time, wives of powerful men living in great, gaslit capitals, giving balls and receptions where political things incidentally got done, where wheels were greased and egos (literally) fed. And there may be women today who still give A-list parties for small groups of the rich and famous, but who remain obscure themselves.

Elsa was different in seemingly having no power, yet rising to such prominence that nation states came to her when they wanted to do little things like create a postwar tourism industry. See: Greece, and the two-week Yacht Party, 1955. She rose to such fame that the general public could break into warm and excited applause when she appeared on game shows. (You can surf YouTube for an old clip of Elsa sailing, be-gloved and all, on to the set of What's My Line. Her affected, squawky Munchkin voice is startlingly annoying.) She rose to such fame that she could introduce How to Do !t with this story, whose emotional ring she fully expected her public to understand:

Of all the parties I have given, there is one that stands out in my memory as perhaps the most rewardng of all. Certainly it was the smallest. I had a guest list of one! Yet never have I known a happier fulfillment in my role as hostess than I did on that evening when I entertained a girl I had never seen before, and may never see agian.

Her name, let's say, was Alice. Alice was young, a widow, and having a heavy time of it making ends meet in the Brooklyn flat she shared with a friend. One day I received a letter from her. She knew, she said, how mcuh I love music, that I went often to concerts and the opera. She had read in my column about the places I dined and the people I met. "Oh, once, just once," she wrote, "to spend and eveing as you do!"

So I invited her to do just that.

I booked seats at Carnegie Hall for a concert Toscanini was to condeuct. Before the concert we dined at El Morocco and Alice had the time of her young life watching the parade of Hollywood and Broadway and society that came and went. People stopped at our table to chat: Walter Winchell, Leonard Lyons, a former governor of Pennsylvania; and when, as we were about to leave for our conceert, Alice came face to face with Betty Grable I nearly had to assist my little friend into our taxi.

I don't think two people ever had a better time ....

Most of Elsa's parties were not tete a tetes. She hosted must-see (and must-be-seen-at) occasions for diplomats, movie stars, prima donnas, writers, and aristocrats; somehow this dumpy native of Keokuk, Iowa leaped, in 1919, from being an odd-jobs girl in a traveling Shakespeare troupe to hosting an "exquisite" dinner for Britain's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour at the Ritz in Paris. Her career was made then. Her parties do sound as if they were great fun. At an early success, she writes, "cabinet ministers had the time of their sedate lives blowing feathers off an outstretched sheet."

You and I may have no need to host an affair like that, although it does sound more fun than watching television. In fact How to Do !t's introduction, written by one Simon Doonan, warns us that of course no one would dream of consulting the book for advice on entertaining anymore. We are meant only to use it as a microscope through which to view the "psychological case history" of Elsa, name dropper extraordinaire and all around "attention junkie."

On the contrary. I found the book most enjoyable for Elsa's plain, hearty prose and her knowledge of human nature, gleaned at forty years' worth of parties. That it all happens to add up to party giving advice is simply, we might say, gravy. Pretend she is looking over your shoulder with a clipboard, and consider:

• Making a guest list? Mix interests, she says, and mix age groups. Who could be more intriguing than an elderly soul who has seen the world? Yet what old soul could fail to be fascinated by the young Marlon Brando? (Who indeed?) 
•  Watch out for the shy. "A little of the lion lurks in every mouse, and there is nothing like alcohol to bring it out." 
•  Watch out for wolves -- even if they tend to be only as wolflike as a woman permits them to be. "No really attractive man will be guilty of wolfishness. No really attractive man needs to be. It is always the creepy little fellow with the look of having spent his early years hoping vainly to make the team who fancies himself a Lothario... just be sure you stop it."
• You've got an inebriated guest? Tell him he's had enough, bluntly, but accept your own responsibility for a "too-liberal pouring of liquor." It's your party. 
•  There's been a horrible spill? Of course you must prepare for the evening in perfect detail, but "accidents will happen, and if you're going to worry about something being spilled on the now pristine carpet, or a cigarette burn on a burnished tabletop, then you shouldn't entertain." 
•  Your teenagers want to "have the gang in"? By all means. Just cover everything up. "Plaster aluminum foil over precious wood surfaces. It will save the furniture, save your nerves, and look festive besides." 
•  And suppose, incredibly, it rains on your garden fete. Be "clever" about it. Accept your guests' help in bringing things in and getting dinner. People are drawn together by mild emergencies and a "common adventure." Everyone will sit down to eat far faster and in a far gayer mood if they are allowed to help in the fuss, than they will if you keep them standing around watching you cope frantically amid the thunder and lightning, assuring them it's all right.

And what of that killer of parties, the Bore? This problem brings out Elsa at her best:

My method of protecting others from bores is, at a large party, to seat them all together at one table. This not only serves the initial purpose of isolating them -- it has a really electrifying effect on the bores themselves. Bores, like other dumb creatures of the field, instinctively recognize their own kind. They don't know why, they just do. A bore therefore, put with a group of other bores, looks about him, correctly sizes up his companions, and -- since, as I have said, it will never enter his head that he is one of them -- will instantly decide that it is up to him to make the best of a bad situation by injecting a little life into things. Now when you have, say, ten people sitting together, each privately self-sworn to show the others what a rollicking good fellow he is, you are very soon going to have a rollicking good party going. I have found to my astonishment and delight that the bore table at my parties invariably turns out to be the merriest of all. Bursts of wild laughter erupt from them, their tongues seem never to be still, you find yourself craning your neck to hear what is causing all that gaiety. 

Presiding over splendid, fun evenings and making partygoers happy was an art, and one that Miss Maxwell is proud to think she can trace back from ancien regime France to Renaissance Italy to the hetaerae of classical Greece to ancient Egypt's Queen Hatshepsut, whose hieroglyphs call her, among other titles, "renewer of hearts." At this remove we could be rather cruel about it, agree for her part Elsa was a gossip columnist first, and say that generally her guest lists amounted to a roster of mid-twentieth century Eurotrash, who attended her soirees for God knows what reasons. Her "cooking party" in Hollywood was an affair, surely, that Clark Gable's publicist told him to go to and wear a toque at. (But why?) And because she was a professional, she did things that no modern hostess entertaining family would do, barring some catastrophic extenuating circumstance. She threw out party-crashers and sometimes even Bores, and claims to have controlled drunken women by going up behind them and "giving their pearls a twist."

Not fun. Being a guest at an Elsa Maxwell bash must have been a terrifying experience sometimes; you must have had to keep a sharp eye out. In the end not many people came to her funeral, despite the thousands of dear friends and "darlings" whom she had worked hard to amuse around the world for nearly two generations. Modern day commentators, here and here, seem to gloat a little bit over this. I think some of them regard it as cosmic retribution for her having said bad words about homosexuality, despite enjoying a lifelong lesbian relationship herself. But judging the turnout at somebody else's funeral strikes me as a bit of hubris in itself. When it comes to that we can all only hope for the best.

As for her legacy, I think it must lie not in ballrooms or yachts or scavenger hunts, or the farm at Auribeau "not far from Cannes" where she spent summers with "Dickie" Gordon, but in her writing. A minor legacy, perhaps, but still a private hour with Elsa and a little something to eat and drink -- a little party of two, a la Alice -- is fun.   

Glory Road by Bruce Catton

Is it permissible to scribble brief notes about a book I haven't quite finished yet, but that is overdue at the library? A few things strike me:

I doubt there can ever again be American historians of the Civil War working at the same level as men like Bruce Catton or his Southern counterpart, Shelby Foote. They were both of exactly the right generation to have grown up with boyhood memories of actual veterans' stories, told by old men in small towns at the turn of the twentieth century, and to be able to publish in the 1950s, just when the centennial of the war was coming. I am sure all this permeated their scholarship and it brought still more alive, for them and for us their readers, the regimental histories and enlisted men's diaries from which they drew so much detail. The deer bounding out of the forest just before the battle of Chancellorsville commenced, late on a spring evening; horses, wagons, cannon, and mules trampled and sunk in feet of mud on the pointless winter march to Falmouth.

Fredericksburg: thousands of Union soldiers lined up in the town and marched as ordered across a short rise of ground to the stone wall before Marye's Heights, where they were slaughtered by Confederate artillery and rifle fire. It all happened on a day in mid-December, 1862. It is very strange to see it, in the imagination, as a slowly unfolding tableau, and to think that all these men were "his majesty the Baby of some twenty years back," as Tom Wolfe described the pilots involved in the space program's early disasters in The Right Stuff. Thousands of mothers on that day in 1862 could not see the tableau, could not rush forward from kitchen and laundry and pull their very special baby out of the marching mass. They could only hear about it later.

One of the themes of the book: no matter what advantages a nation may have in war, industrial or financial or what have you, it can still lose if it can't match the enemy's passion. This is why the North came close to losing and why no one at the time could relax and assure himself "the South never really had a chance." Yes, the South did. Their soldiers, in Catton's words, were "men of passion."

The bulk of the book is what I think historians call "order-of-battle analysis." Terrain, logistics, strategy, weather, the building of pontoon bridges and the "unlimbering" of guns. The most dull sort of history to read, for most people including me; and yet, it is what the men went through from one day to the next, and it is why battles were won or lost. Anyway this is Catton's strength, once he gets down to it. The opening chapter, in which he introduces half a dozen characters via their tangled relationships with one another and loads it all up with trivial anecdote, reads like something the editor made him do to appease the reader who doesn't like order-of-battle analysis.    

Finally: extraordinary that American men went into woods and farms and mowed one another down, en masse, with cannon and rifle fire only a hundred and fifty years ago. And Gettysburg is yet to come.

Digging into my old Book Lover's Journal

I think pre-formatted, blank page book review journals may have been more in vogue ten or twelve years ago than they are now. Is it the kind of thing worth dipping into, or will what you see just make you cringe?

July 1997 (I distinctly remember I wrote this while sitting in the backyard on a hot day. Four toddlers played in a wading pool while the baby slept nearby.)

Desiree by Annemarie Selinko (pub. 1953)

Novel of Desiree Clary, affianced to Napoleon before he became famous and found Josephine. Desiree marries Bernadotte (relation to Count assassinated in Cairo, '47 -- Israeli independence?) -- and becomes Queen of Sweden.

Surprisingly good, considering length and laborious detail. Well-arranged, astonishing research; first intro to the Vasas of Sweden. Learned more about Napoleon here than in any book yet. (Prob. not saying much.)

My understanding of the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte was hazy.

November 1997

Louis XIV: A Royal Life by Olivier Bernier (pub. 1987)

Good. Interesting analysis of 17th vs. 20th century politics and war, and expectations of both. "Freedom" in the 17th century meant the right to state protection of the weak and the poor.

Well now. That's pertinent.

The Weapon Shops of Isher by A.E. van Vogt

The release of Star Trek this spring, and my own reconnection with the old Star Trek TV show from the 1960s, prompted me lately to wander the stacks of the local public library, browsing for science fiction books. I almost never read them otherwise. Correction: I never read them. Growing up, my older brother owned bookshelves of the genre, but I could never build an appreciation for it. I recall trying, and abandoning the effort in disgust when the opening page of some classic story had the protagonist stepping over a Raggedy Ann doll in the street, and tumbling therewith into another dimension. "That's what's cool about it," my brother said. I only harrumphed.

It's all curious, because this year, not only has Star Trek resurfaced and great fun it is too, but a science fiction master, Robert Heinlein, has been quoted by people who are watching President Obama take on the powers of a dictator amid the orgasmic baying of a lapdog press and the silence of an apparently disbelieving (at best) public; one of the many dangers to democracy, Heinlein said years ago, arises not just from ignorance or apathy but from a simple money problem. When a bare majority of the population decides to vote itself goodies out of its neighbors' taxed wealth, forever, when once 51 percent of a country can learn to do that and call it fair and like it, the future looks bleak. And, my goodness, thanks to my brother's library, I had already heard of this wise Robert Heinlein.

It's curious, too, that The Weapon Shops of Isher by A. E. van Vogt should happen to concern grand political themes like dictatorship, an imperial cult, government theft of private property, the suppression of dissent, and gun ownership. Being science fiction, it also includes time travel, and invisibility suits, and doorknobs that reach out to, and weapons that jump into, the right people's hands.

The tale is extremely painstakingly thought out. Roughly, it gathers together three or four plots -- politics, liberty, love -- with four main characters, all interconnected. It starts in 1951, somewhere in America. A weird new shopfront suddenly appears on some Main Street, taking the place of a store already there. Its blinking neon sign reads "Fine weapons. The right to buy weapons is the right to be free." A journalist investigates, enters the shop, and is never seen again.

This journalist, McAllister, is catapulted seven thousand years into the future, into an empire of Isher run by the young, lovely, adored, and more or less vicious Empress Innelda. Among her subjects she counts the fractured Clark family, whose father Fara and son Cayle don't get along. Cayle meets the dark and fetching Lucy, who is a weapon shop employee and who was McAllister's first contact when the shop materialized in the wrong time. As the plot develops, we learn that things everywhere and everytime are out of whack because the Empress is trying to launch one final attack against the shops, which represent the only thing in the empire that she does not control. (Cayle's father is all for it. Squashing evil and insurrection, and rebellious sons, and so on.) Doing this requires the harnessing and disguising of fantastic amounts of energy -- buildings shimmer in and out of existence across time and space -- and it was only McAllister's stumbling into one of the targeted shops that revealed to their fraternity of owners the scope and the kinks of the terrible plan.

Author van Vogt keeps his science going at a good clip, or at any rate he describes men walking on mid-air floors, and viewing real-time graphs charting the movement of giant buildings swinging on wild energy fulcrums through "quadrillions" of years of space time, in such a way that the reader can root for him and think, well at least he's not just saying "it's so." He also takes care to describe a completely corrupt future world. Isher is gangland Las Vegas and Chicago, and every day is potentially the St. Valentine's Day massacre. Every day is also a play day for the masses, who gamble themselves into mental oblivion in gigantic department store/casinos, or graduate to patronize seamy "Houses of Illusion" where all sensual desires are gratified through fantasy. The planets outside Earth are penal mining colonies with populations in the tens of millions.

The weapon shops at the center of the story, with their defiant slogan "the right to buy weapons is the right to be free," stand as the Empress' target, but as the story unfolds we learn that they are practically inviolable. They are run by one man, Robert Hedrock, who plays the admittedly serious game of defending them with a trump card no one else has or guesses he has. What's more interesting about them, though, is that they function as a kind of religion or even an underground government. Undergirding their existence, and their ad slogan, is a philosophy which the weapon shop men say in italics: "People always have the government they want." Given that, no other political fact matters or is even of much interest -- as long as the people can also arm themselves. "Thousands of years ago," the weapon shops' founders invented guns that could only be used in defense and only for their owners. Physical defense always being possible, the weapon shops say nothing and do nothing to interfere in any way in anyone's life. They agitate for nothing politically, they neither support nor decry any group. By their existence, they prove that while people may choose to fool away their time and energies by the millions, still the power of the state remains ultimately nil.

Maybe. This story inspired me to think anew about the Second Amendment. In 1789 the states insisted on a Bill of Rights being attached to the Constitution before they would consider ratifying it, and number two, no less, on the list of absolute rights desired was the right of the common man to own a gun. In places where it certainly seems "people do not have the government they want," in Iran, in North Korea, the people also do not have guns. And yet, earlier this week in Houston, the federal government's agents went door to door confiscating guns. And what good is a gun when the gun-owning citizen cannot keep it without (presumably, logically) committing the sin and crime of attempted murder or murder to do so -- which the gun-confiscating state will then punish with jail time?

Van Vogt solves the problem with his nearly sentient, defensive future guns. And yet, what is the point even of them when the bulk of the population doesn't want them? (Or do they?)

It's a wild story, and points up afresh, as I unburden myself of my criticisms, the quote that I happened to have come across recently, that criticism is always easier than craft. So it is, and far be it from me to criticize the man (the woman? who is A.E.?) who thought all this out. I respect the depth of the material. This science fiction is not all space ships and warp speeds, even though that's fun too. I even credit him with a remarkable case of clairvoyance. The Weapon Shops of Isher is a part of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher in 1959. Fifty years ago, Van Vogt describes his heroine searching for information, seven thousand years hence:

"First she pressed the machine-file activator, pecking out the key word illusion. The file screen remained blank. She clicked off the word house. No response."

What else is Lucy doing, but Googling? And how cool is that?

Madame du Barry by Stanley Loomis

Madame du Barry was the last of a long line of official royal mistresses of the French kings. She followed Madame de Pompadour into the affections and the lit of King Louis XV, and lived splendidly with him at Versailles for the last six years of his life, from 1768 to his death in 1774. The monarch was succeeded by his grandson, the unfortunate King Louis XVI, who for a variety of reasons not least of which was marriage to Marie Antoinette, seems to have kept no mistresses of his own.

When Louis XV and Madame du Barry met, he was in his late fifties and she was in her early twenties. The circumstances of their meeting, the role she played, the whole course of her life, all was so extraordinarily alien to us and our world that it seems one can't really write a review of a biography of her. One must muddle along and almost rewrite the biography, not because it wasn't good enough but simply to get all the information straight.

The position of royal mistress at Versailles was virtually a ministerial one. Exactly as in the Tudor court of sixteenth century England, powerful or merely grasping or merely needy people scouted out beautiful women to place before the king's eye, hoping that a new and grateful "Favorite" would be able to persuade him to grant favors, lands, incomes, religious sanctions, best of all official government posts, among the faction to whom she owed her elevation. (In Madame du Barry's case, this was one Jean du Barry, called "the Roue," a provincial comte who was making a living in Paris by schooling and then essentially selling pretty girls to wealthy men.) A difference between Tudor England and eighteenth-century France was that Henry VIII would never find himself seriously baited with a woman who was not herself of some genuinely powerful landed family; Louis XV, in contrast, met Madame du Barry because the palace of Versailles was open to the public. One spring day, because her patron, the Roue, had a kind of small-claims-court issue to pursue with the royal bureaucracy, she arrived, and his Majesty saw her in the crowd.

She was breathtakingly beautiful, voluptuous, ash-blond, large-eyed, and it seems sweet- natured and gentle, too. (It's a pity really that she should have been portrayed in Sofia Coppola's film Marie Antoinette as a belching gypsy.) Within a few months, she was ensconced in that vipers' nest of a palace, where every faction faced a counter-faction fighting to the death for position and power, and the personal really was political. She lived in a blazing whirl of jewels, glorious dresses, fabulously appointed private chateaux, gambling parties, hate and gossip. And like all previous "Favorites," her position ultimately depended on the health of the king. As long as he lived in sin, his Catholic Majesty could not hear Mass or take Communion. Yet, he could not die without having returned to the forgiveness and sacraments of the church, and he could not return to them unless he first dismissed the Favorite forever. In those days of sudden mortal illness, La Dubarry, like all her predecessors, never knew when a royal "indisposition" might become a "maladie," and spell the end of her "Left-handed" reign. When the time came, etiquette required that she leave instantly, without goodbyes.

It happened in the spring of 1774. The king died after a horrific two week siege of smallpox, professional bleeding, and finally it seems gangrene. Madame du Barry lived most of the next two years in a local exile, put under house arrest in a convent because the new king and especially his queen, Marie Antoinette, took a high moral line about the former Favorite's purpose at the former court. Once forgiven and released, however, she next entered into what was perhaps the happiest part of her life. King Louis XV's settlements on her had been generous and she still owned a fortune in jewels as well as her lovely and famous home of Louveciennes, not far from Versailles. She had many friends, a busy and elegant social life such as only the eighteenth century French aristocracy ever enjoyed, and a long and happy love affair with the handsome and noble duc de Brissac.

Then came the Revolution. A few years into the turmoil, Madame du Barry's house was broken into, and almost all her jewelry stolen. Her lawyer made the mistake of circulating a kind of "reward" poster throughout Paris, inventorying the hoard in great detail. The virtuous revolutionaries who wanted everyone to be equal got a new look therefore at "the woman DuBarry's" lifestyle. And when the jewels turned up in London she made the mistake -- if it was a mistake -- of traveling there not once but four times in the next few years, ostensibly to recover her property and settle lawsuits about it. While there, she happened to make large donations to exiled French aristocrats and churchmen allied with the foreign powers ready to surround and destroy republican France. Most of the stolen jewelry seems never to have been found.

On her fourth return home, she found her house confiscated. The last months of her life were spent battling a mysterious figure, an Englishman named George Greive who had turned up at Louveciennes and its local village, and had set about agitating the populace and Madame's own servants against her. In those days when revolutionary violence had become the norm and its scythe had in turn put government into the hands of less and less experienced men, anybody could bring death to a neighbor by publishing any article in any broadsheet accusing him of "aristocratic tendencies" -- or simply by calling him an aristocrat. Greive pursued Madame du Barry with "wolfish ferocity." She evaded him for a while by carefully defending her legal rights under the new legal systems of the country, but when in September of 1793 the government was captured by the Jacobin party -- the left-est of the left -- she found herself doomed. Greive asked for her arrest on grounds of aristocratic leanings, and the Committee of General Safety agreed. In her letters written from prison, she hints that Greive raped her when he took her into custody.

She was tried and condemned to death, along with her bankers, in December of 1793. Her shrieks of terror and her struggles on the guillotine have often stood in marked contrast to the " 'icy disdain' " (more likely the shocked stupor, the author thinks) of other victims. But in her very last hours Madame du Barry had tried to save herself by telling her jailers the locations of buried treasure at her chateau, in exchange for her life. She believed she had succeeded in the bribe, up until the executioner came to her cell to cut off her hair and bind her arms. "The merciful drug of resignation did not have time to paralyze her senses," Loomis writes. "Neither emotionally nor physically did she go to the guillotine a dying woman." She was fifty.

It's an excellent book filled with what must be some of Loomis' best prose. The passage describing "the last of the great Versailles receptions," on the occasion of the wedding of the Dauphin to Marie Antoinette in 1770, is especially beautiful. Historians of the ancien regime are always at pains, and usually at a loss, to fully convince us of the incomprehensible sophistication of this civilization. " 'Of their kind they were perfect,' " -- he quotes Taine -- " 'there was not a gown, not a turn of the head, not a voice or turn of phrase which was not a masterpiece of worldy culture and the distilled quintessence of everything exquisite which the social art has ever elaborated.' "

The very fact that we need to have this explained to us -- good grief, they were people, how otherworldly can they have been? -- probably shows how divorced we are from any real understanding of it. For me it finally comes through, faintly, in excerpts from Madame du Barry's letters. She writes to her friends with a calm simplicity on all sorts of occasions, each word a simple pulse beat of meaning, whether she is announcing a party or saying "I love you." She writes to her lover's daughter, with whom she is of course on good terms: "No one has felt more than I the great loss which you have just suffered. I hope you will understand the reason for my delay in mingling my own tears with yours. The fear of adding to your grief prevents me from speaking to you of it. Mine is complete ...."

This was a few days after the duc de Brissac had been murdered outside her chateau by a mob, his body mutilated and partly eaten, and his head thrown through a window into her living room where it rolled to her feet. " 'One does not die of grief,' " she wrote, simply, a little later.

In the end, I am surprised by one thing, and that is the last two paragraphs of Loomis' book. After writing a lyrical and sympathetic biography, he nevertheless regretfully but officially condemns Madame du Barry on behalf of his modern reader. She slept with the king for money, he says, and also she was unforgivably rich when others were poor.

True. But that is not the same thing as hurting other people. Even the king was a widower when she met him. It's a tricky thing to judge whether it was criminal of her to, perhaps, aid the enemies of her country, when her country had transformed politically and legally into something entirely new and continually free-forming. And fantastically, officially violent. It was the cusp of a new world; which explains why an upcoming monarch of France's future would be "king of the French," not king of France. Loomis does not explore this in his last two paragraphs. He only acknowledges: in the end, "she was kind."

More importantly, since we live now under a deep-dyed leftist President whose disciples are legion, who also hates bankers and wants everyone to be equal, I can't help but read La Du Barry's story with a certain funny chill. A new and free-forming government is not particularly a good thing. Under the veneer of any civilization, human beings are all alike. But surely it can't happen here.

Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana

Attorney Paul "Polly" Biegler knows from day one that his client, army Lieutenant Lawrence Manion, has shot and killed hotel owner Barney Quill hardly an hour after Quill raped and beat Manion's wife. There is no mystery about that, and Biegler is not a detective. The mystery in Anatomy of a Murder lies, for the reader, in watching Biegler defend his client in court, and try to convince a jury to come to the verdict that must be one of the most difficult to persuade a jury to accept: not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.

As the plot unfolds, Biegler and an avuncular old lawyer friend do some digging around the crime scene, and interview interested parties who may or may not know more than they are ready to admit about the dead man's drinking habits and his gun collection, and about the lieutenant's behavior and state of mind on the fatal night. But most of the book is a courtroom drama, one that may perhaps get a little wordy for readers plunging into that genre for the first time. The two lawyers, Biegler and his nemesis, the nearly Satanic and ferociously talented prosecutor "little" Claude Dancer, orate with an elegance (and a lung capacity) that is hard to credit as realistic, unless we know from experience that lawyers really do talk this way, or unless we understand that everybody in the 1950s had longer attention spans and better vocabulary than we do now.

The greatest interest of the book lies in its almost loving depiction of the Anglo-American legal tradition in action. The law might be considered the most important character in the book. Author Robert Traver acknowledges ordinary people's occasional mystification before the law; an uncomfortable witness on the stand complains about " 'smart lawyer's tricks,' " and early on, someone quotes the character in Dickens who blurts out " 'The law is a ass.' "

But as we watch Paul Biegler defend a client whose violent deed is unquestioned and whose truthfulness he sometimes suspects, we remember the discussions he had with his avuncular friend. For all its confusions and imperfections, law is the only alternative to constant violence as any society's governor. And Anglo-American law, which insists life and death questions shall be decided by a jury of ordinary people and not by kings or judges only, at least helps guarantee that the outcome of a trial will not be a foregone conclusion. A trial is not pretty, however. It's a dog fight, as Biegler admits, couched and controlled in fine old medieval English words, but ultimately a "savage and primal" human battle for survival.

At the end, the reader is firmly in the jury's shoes. We have received the judge's instructions and we know what we must do, according to the law, depending on what we think of all the truths we have heard. We have a hugely difficult decision to make.

Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana

More than fifty years after its first publication, the title Auntie Mame might only conjure up memories of Rosalind Russell on screen, exclaiming to some meek soul that "life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving to death!" Indeed they are, at least compared to the wonderful Mame Dennis.

In the novel the narrator, a suburban family man, reflects on how his own remarkable relative could pretty much devour alive the pallid Unforgettable Character that he has been reading about in a magazine. This charming and difficult spinster aunt, he notes, did all the things his spinster aunt did – took in her orphaned nephew, educated him, struggled with financial problems, later entertained and vetted his college girlfriends – only with nowhere near her spice and aplomb. What makes the difference between the two? What makes Auntie Mame nowhere near being a "poor sucker starving to death" at the banquet?

Despite the book’s being often laugh-out-loud funny ("I know the most divine new school ... all classes are held in the nude under ultraviolet ray. Not a repression left after the first semester"), its theme is, really, the well-lived life. Mame Dennis has some advantages over the magazine-aunt, and over the rest of us, in living well. She is a very wealthy Manhattanite throughout most of the story. But when the Depression hits and takes most of her money as it took most of everybody else’s, she is thrown back on resources that are not financial. She is thrown back on herself, and she still knows how to live well.

In Mame we meet a hard drinking woman, an irreligious woman (except for her curiosity about the East’s "exquisite mysteries"), a woman slightly silly and (as the narrator admits) often, amid the social whirl, slightly lonely. But she is also loving, brave, compassionate, well-read, curious – and foul-mouthed, stagey, overbearing, and above all sharp as a tack. She lies abed after a party, poring over newspaper maps of Rommel’s campaigns in Africa. She reads all of Edith Wharton straight through, and can lecture pleasantly on Tudor architecture. She has elegant friends who edit fashion magazines and are "authorities on Rimbaud;" she has friends who are pushcart vendors. What Mame cannot abide is counterfeit, and her ability to spot it and name it is what makes her life well-lived even though she is only a comic heroine, and even though sometimes she is broke. Hateful people and fake things, joylessness, are what set her off. A rich, lovely girl who is rude to a waitress is, for Mame, counterfeit. So is a syrupy daiquiri masquerading as a drink, when straight Scotch is perfectly available ....

We may not share all Mame’s little tastes, but she is an Auntie to whom it is always delightful to return for a refresher course in living. She has the last word: " ‘Enjoy yourselves, darlings!’ "