The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh

I have re-read with pleasure, in the course of a few hot summer nights, this classic book from my childhood and classic of modern children's literature. I always liked The Long Secret even better than its precursor and companion story, Harriet the Spy, because I could relate to Harriet's and her friends' summertime adventures more than I could to their school days in swanky Manhattan. Being (and remaining) a child of the suburbs, the very urban setting of that book always puzzled me. What kind of kids, I wondered, lived in apartment buildings, stopped at a local drugstore after school for an "egg cream," had full-time nannies, and attended weird stand-alone schools not a part of any comfortable and generically named district? Later on when I read other juvenile fiction also set in New York, I used to wonder what "P.S.," followed by a number, meant; later still, I wondered at the insularity of New York editors who think that all American children will understand that, and no explanations necessary.

The Long Secret spins out on slightly more familiar ground. In Water Mill, New York ("slow down and enjoy it" reads the motto on the welcome sign), we are far from the perplexing and gigantic city. There are forests and farm fields here, long gravel roads with real individual houses along them, and a town with a main street, a filling station, a post office, and a little grocery store where the kids buy cookies. We read of long bike rides, of the sun on hot handlebars, and of long days at the beach with nothing to do but swim, read, eat, and get back home in time for dinner.

Harriet's and her friends' escapades are certainly a bit implausible -- the essence of fiction, no? -- yet when I read them at twelve, I found them spot on. That a set of pubescents should "spy" on the adult goings-on at a country resort, concentrating particularly on the bar staff, plus meet an extraordinary family of Bible-thumping Southern evangelicals in the patent nostrum business headed by an obese single mother, all the while one of the pubescents endures a dreadful reunion with a long-lost Eurotrash mother of her own, seems a pretty outlandish set up even for a young adult novel. (Do we assume that kids want to read crazier plotlines than adults do? Perhaps.) Yet I drank it all in. I think it seemed right because the friendships among the main characters, Harriet, Beth Ellen, Janie, and the late-come Mississippian, Jessie Mae, are so right. These four friends are everything twelve-year-olds are: viperish, rude, self-absorbed, prickly and critical with each other most of the time, and yet capable of a sort of clodhoppy affection and of rudimentary adult manners troweled like plaster over the rough bricks of childhood. This scene, for example, struck me then, and still does, as emotionally perfect:

They were having a discussion about where to go.

"Let's go back and see Mama Jenkins. She said come back one day before they work and get lemonade, remember?" said Harriet, looking at Beth Ellen.

That seems a thousand years ago, thought Beth Ellen, but all she said was, "Let's go to the hotel."

" 'Let's go to the hotel, let's go to the hotel,' -- that's all you ever say," said Harriet.

"What hotel?" asked Janie. "Anyway, I thought people went to the beach out here. Isn't that what you come out here for?"

Harriet looked at Janie. Beth Ellen knew what was going through Harriet's mind: Janie was a guest and whatever she wanted they would have to do. She watched Harriet and her inner struggle.

"Yes. Let's go to the beach," said Harriet in a limp but friendly way.

"I couldn't care less," said Janie. "The sun gives you skin cancer anyway."

"Why don't we do all three?" said Harriet as though a light bulb had gone on in her head.

"Smashing," said Janie.

Beth Ellen felt a secret smile that she wouldn't let crawl out onto her face. She would see Bunny ...

The story's "secret" concerns the question who is leaving a series of bizarre red-crayoned notes all over Water Mill. Harriet, Beth Ellen, and briefly Janie are vacationing here, and witness the resultant small scale turmoil. Random people find random notes at their workplaces, in their homes, as they sit down to restaurant meals, in Harriet's case in the basket of her bicycle. Playing detective as she is, and planning to write a story based on the mystery, she's beyond thrilled when she finally gets one. (" 'It's HAPPENED.' ") The notes are faintly Biblical, scolding, and horoscope-like, " 'like some sort of nasty fortune cookie,' " as a minor but terrifically outre character, Mrs. Plumber, puts it. Beth Ellen's breathtakingly beautiful and awful mother, Zeeney Baines, gets the worst -- because truest -- of them all: IN SORROW THOU SHALT BRING FORTH CHILDREN.

If you've never had the pleasure when you were twelve, I won't go any further, for fear of spoiling things for you; only do please read this funny, un-syrupy, and need I emphasize lavishly plotted book. Even the asides cover just about everything in a preteen's head and experience, including the first independent thoughts about religion, the crush on the older man, the first menstruation, and those late night pajama-party conversations about God. Harriet starts this topic abruptly. " 'Listen, I want to ask you something, both of you. Do you believe in God?' "

Adulthood has given me just one little soupcon of delight more in this delightful book. Of course, I can see some scenes anew, as at the very beginning when Beth Ellen's grandmother is furious that the maid MOVED her perfume bottles. No, she's mad at more than that. But more fun is that, having spent some years reading Vogue and other materials, I understand the setting of The Long Secret. These are the Hamptons, whither all the celebrities retreat in summer when swanky Manhattan grows unbearable. Montauk, where Harriet's father buys lobsters for the clambake, is a real place, as is Mecox Bay, on the shores of which Harriet's and Beth Ellen's families have their respective houses. The Montauk highway and Water Mill are also real, although I hardly think, almost fifty years on, that Louise Fitzhugh's descriptions of the town as a truly hick wide spot in the road, whose locals roll their eyes at "the summer people" and whose woods still shelter the house of an elderly black sharecropping preacher, can now be accurate.

It never occurred to me when I first read both books that Harriet and her circle were very rich. That background, which Harriet at least suspected, neither drove nor interfered with the fun of either story. But it turns out that Fitzhugh knew whereof she wrote on this score, because besides being an adoptive New Yorker she was herself a trust fund baby and an owner of grand (Connecticut) properties. Doing enough perfunctory researches into her life to learn that much gives another soupcon, not of delight but of half-appalled fascination, to the re-reading of her work. If I had wanted to find out anything about her when I was twelve, I would have had to ask a librarian at the public library for help in unearthing details, painstakingly slowly, from sources like the once absolutely necessary Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. It would have required dogged work for us simply to find her obituary there -- for by the time I read her two finest, almost her only novels, she was already dead. To learn the fact of "her death in 1974" from the back of a book jacket meant nothing to a twelve-year-old in 1977; to google her, and learn in a moment that she died of a brain aneurism at 46, is rather choke-inducing now that I am 45. "MY GOD," Harriet would shout, "YOU'RE KIDDING." And then, her eyes narrowed to slits: "What is this?"

For more information:

Purple Socks: a Louise Fitzhugh tribute site

"Regarding Harriet: Louise Comes in From the Cold" by Karen Cook (originally published in the Village Voice Literary Supplement, April 11, 1995, reprinted at Purple Socks)

Louise Fitzhugh (wikipedia article)

Harriet the Spy (movie, 1996)

This Rough Magic by Mary Stewart

How often do you get a chance to read a novel set on the island of Corfu? If only libraries and bookstores, with all their so clever Dewey decimal systems and alphabetical orders, would arrange novels like this: all those set in Corfu, for example, or all those set in T'ang China, or all those that happen to have as a main character some extremely important person (now nearly forgotten) of a bygone age: Robert Grosseteste, say.

Mary Stewart's This Rough Magic (1964) is also a nice example of a certain kind of novel that I like to look for, that I'd like to see categorized officially somehow too, but whose characteristics I can't quite put my finger on: the mid-twentieth century women's novel which, in its depictions of men's and women's relations especially, throws off the safe comforting cloak of historical fiction, ignores what seems the careful prissiness of earlier, still-corseted decades, but hasn't yet descended to the monotonous, sentimental trauma memoirs that so many (women-governed) publishing firms and book clubs love now. I'm talking about novels of the 1950s and '60s in which, for one thing, the horrors of two world wars loom only a short time in the past; even though the plot line may have nothing to do with war, the characters tend to be sadder but wiser, about something. About everything. There will be no Aunt Jane in these novels, justly worried about chaperoning a man and woman on a buggy ride to the state fair. The smell of exhaust and the roar of an engine permeates the mid-century women's novel. Our heroine drives her own car, makes her own vacation plans, and talks frankly with sisters and friends about man, and in-laws, and bed. When she's distraught she doesn't whisper a corseted "profanity of no uncertain meaning" (Gone With The Wind), but rather says "Hell. Hell. Hell." And yet our heroine is literate, too. More modern (often women) novelists tend not only to be sub-literate, but to show a horrible inclination to that worst of (female) failings, the tendency to see everything as personal. I never joined another book discussion group again after having to read, in the long forgotten Ellen Foster (by Kaye Gibbons, the dernier cri in new fiction ten years ago), that the Civil War was "a war about how we should feel about each other."

Oh, really? Was it? The characters in This Rough Magic -- I dare say, the author of This Rough Magic -- are no such fools. As a matter of fact the finest scene comes toward the end, when the heroine, alone with the villain, gives him a dressing down and really psychologically nails what both sheer evil and interior twistedness are. She is aware that large chunks of life have nothing to do with how we all feel. And the author is -- should I say, because she is? -- literate. The plot of the novel actually hinges on what we would call a close reading of The Tempest, so close that every chapter opens with a pertinent quote from the play. The Tempest is set on Corfu. We learn why Prospero may have a lot in common with Corfu's patron saint, the similarly named Spiridion, and there's a great deal about Prospero drowning his books, and giving up the practice of "this rough magic," while the characters in the middle of a romantic suspense story also hunt for important documents hidden in undersea caves.

A few plot devices are a bit cheesy, to use the modern term. Let's just say they involve a friendly dolphin, and leave it at that. The romance is not terribly convincing. Once we figure out which man is good, the cheerful, good-looking blond or the dark brooding recluse, no further sparks fly. Our author's interest lies much more with the world-famous, elderly actor holed up in the castle, who serves as the source for all our information about The Tempest and who is also the link to the heroine's professional world (she's a struggling young actress, come to Corfu on holiday to visit her pregnant, rich sister and to forget her last flop).

If you have no head for inventing fiction (as I haven't), a book like This Rough Magic is at once awe inspiring and disappointing. I am awed to see the effort, the thought that has gone into planning this: no one described it all better than Jane Austen, in her famous "defense of the novel" paragraph from Northanger Abbey:

" 'Oh! it is only a novel!' " replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. 'It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda'; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."

Indeed, it is "only" that, and yet, I'm disappointed too in that I can see the cranking machinery behind the scenes. How do you make a novel? Remember, a novel has to be a certain size in the hand, a certain thickness in pages. Partly, you achieve that size and fill up those pages by figuring out the plot, but partly, you achieve it by describing in unneeded detail a variety of scenes chosen almost at random -- a car trip, a walk to the beach on this day but not that (so that you can witness the actions of this suspicious character but not that one), a long, long near-drowning the precise nautical details of which, after all, no first person narrator could ever plausibly have been expected to remember. In one of his many books, the centenarian colossus-scholar Jacques Barzun acknowledged that any artist eventually has to make some decisions which perhaps are random, if he wants to carry on and finish any work of art at all. And the finished work of art is of course different from what it might have been if the artist had made other decisions. Let's skip the drowning scene, she might have said to herself, and cut the car-trip scene from five pages to two. The reader doesn't need to know precisely when the villain shifted from this gear to that. And that finished, different work of art is not necessarily better. Not necessarily perfect, utterly the best it could have been.

Is it only the greatest artists who are able to tell when they have done that, when they have made all the best decisions -- and then are able to stop? Are they the ones who produce art you want to go back to? "An artist cannot do anything slovenly," Jane Austen wrote in one of her letters. Shall I go back and re read This Rough Magic, or anything more by Mary Stewart?

Possibly. Austen further wrote that all novelists' "productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world," and she was right about that. This Rough Magic is pleasurable -- how often do you read smart, mid-'60s novels set in Corfu? -- even if it does not provide the "heavy lifting" that Professor Barzun says is needed to keep the intellect fully in shape. Perhaps we had better move on to The Tempest, actually.



Image from alternativeef.

The Kaiser: His Life and Times by Michael Balfour

The theme of this enormously dense book is Kaiser Wilhelm's personal responsibility for the outbreak of World War I, and consequently for its hideous aftermath, World War II, and the decline of Europe (John Keegan would say its "ruin") as a civilized world power.

It's a book that could only have been written in the 1960s, not in the sense that nobody before or after that decade could write enormously dense books about the Kaiser, but in the sense that by publication date (1964), enough time had passed to give the author some perspective, all the while events remained alive enough to encourage him to take his reader along on leisurely explorations of little details which later scholars probably summarize or ignore. There are details, for example, about how fast the train went carrying the body of Queen Victoria to her funeral site in 1901, the Kaiser her grandson, who hated being late, accompanying her ... possibly 92 miles per hour ....

I am not sure, also, if later books on the World Wars are quite so apt to begin, as this does and as William Manchester's The Arms of Krupp did, with serious and pained explorations of the, do we dare say, atrocious German character. It was 1964. Photographs and memories of the concentration camps were only twenty years in the past. Veterans of 1940-1945 were still young men barely into their forties; plenty of veterans of 1914-1918 were still hearty men in their late sixties or just nearing seventy. They had had their lives shaped and had set foot on a continent whose millions, across two generations, had had their lives destroyed by German decisions. When they sat down to read or to write about it, it seems they wanted answers to the question why. Why the Germans.

The passage of forty more years has laid most of those veterans in peaceful graves, and so has faded immediate memories and dulled that curiosity. I suspect political correctness has done the rest, frankly freezing any tendency to dare ask questions about national characteristics which sober men once asked -- even when they recognized that the Nazis were partial to those questions, too. Michael Balfour begins what one expects to be a simple biography of the Kaiser with a chapter on the huge topic "The Historical Background: 400 B.C. - A.D. 1880," and follows this with a second big chapter on "The Background to Anglo-German Relations." Anyone expecting a life story to begin with a discussion of a subject's parents or grandparents soon learns he is in the hands of a different type of scholar.

As he probes the Kaiser's moral responsibility, what Balfour studies in this book is the tragic conflation of three or four giant historical circumstances, centering on one people when that people was still burdened with the personal crapshoot of a hereditary monarchy. By the nineteenth century political liberalism and parliamentary democracy had evolved, most naturally and prominently in Britain. But "Germany" -- Bavaria, Hesse, Prussia, dozens of other small warmed-over medieval fiefdoms -- had only just united as a nation state, and Germany's people equated their country with the means that had unified it: a powerful military, a landed and splendid noble class, and a mystic, ancient German-ness outdazzling small things like individual rights, middle class urban living, and drab, democratic electioneering. By the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution and surging economic prosperity had arrived, most prominently in sea-girt, trading, colonizing Britain. But Germany was landlocked, and its economic life amounted to a long game of catch-up, mostly Balfour thinks because so much of its population was either absorbed in farming and the military, or lost to emigration ("800,000 left in the decade after unification alone," among them a set of my own great-grandparents, who departed in 1874.)

In the late nineteenth century, also, the nations of Europe still stood ready to contemplate war with one another in any combination at any time for any reason. It seems as if the middle ages had not died, and powerful men still ogled dragon-drawn maps and grinned over what dukedom could be had for what princess and why. Add to this that behemoth to the east, Russia, which considered itself the owner of the Balkans and yet made it policy to overleap central Europe ("we are Central Europe," the Kaiser said) and ally with France and Britain, too, for whatever reasons it liked. Add to this the Industrial Revolution's improvements in weaponry and transportation, and you have a sinister stage for the Kaiser to tread.

Then there is Wilhelm himself. The reader expecting to learn about his private life, his marriage, and the births of his children will not learn much. This is a man's book. Wilhelm grew up under the thumbs of his frantically English mother, Queen Victoria's eldest daughter Vicky, and -- not to sound comical -- of the frantically German Bismarck. German-ness and Englishness warred within him. He was intelligent but light-minded, and he had power, simply because he was born, at a time when a Germany suffering political and economic growing pains could pursue lethal plans because "the national mood" would not have it otherwise.

On June 28, 1914, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated. The killer was a Serbian subject of that empire. The assassination of an empire's heir really serves as an announcement that that empire is stupid and shouldn't exist. A simple way of putting it, but those of us who have never quite understood why the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's death mattered might perhaps understand that. Russia, would be owner of the Balkans, supported Serbia. Outraged Austria was Germany's ally, and so in that summer the clanking machineries of alliance and counter alliance, of monarchical and ministerial decision-making in Russia, France, Germany, Austria, Britain, all moved. Russia was the first to mobilize troops. In five weeks, the rest was done. One of the reasons why war had to be declared, Balfour says, was simply because pre-arranged railway timetables for getting German troops to the front --any front, for any reason -- required the pestering of Russian officials for explanations and replies that, outrageously, failed to come on time. When they didn't, the Kaiser, on August 1, 1914, signed the declaration of war which called into being all the others.

At the back of Norman Davies' huge book Europe, there is an appendix with the numbers of soldiers killed or dead of wounds by 1918: in round figures Russia lost 1.7 million, France 1.35 million, Britain 908,000, Italy 650,000; Germany lost 1.7 million, Austria-Hungary 1.2 million. It remains incomprehensible to see human deaths, and these the deaths of active young men only, expressed as fractions of a million.

The Kaiser signed the paper which started World War I, but how much was he responsible for everything leading up to it? Balfour concludes that "he was not fit for the outsize job destiny assigned him." True, but no one would have been. And, under the Kaiser's leadership (or lack of it), what was Germany's responsibility? More than once, Balfour says that it should be incumbent on nations, as it is on individuals, to realize they are not alone in the world and that their actions and ambitions will rub up against other peoples' and other nations,' and perhaps cause problems and suffering. Small actions, apparently trivial choices especially could be paramount in retrospect; in describing the Kaiser's birth to a young mother who suffered a horrific labor and delivery, Balfour asks whether history might have moved differently, if only the doctor attending had been a German committed to saving the baby rather than an Englishman committed to saving the mother (who lived to work the influence she did).

He does not quite say that the Great War proves nations should rise above happenstances, recognize their frightful moral interdependence, and trim the sails of their self-interest accordingly. As a historian and an adult he knows they don't and won't, especially not the most active and the most ambitious. On his last pages he writes, in fact, that there is no way of imagining how World War I could not have happened. "There are a number of things which one cannot imagine happening in a significantly different way unless one presupposes so many other alterations in the world as to turn the exercise into idle speculation." Germany was anxious for its "place in the sun." Britain was rich. Russia supported Serbia. Kaiser Wilhelm was born. And so on. " 'It happened because it happened,' " as Norman Davies quotes a later scholar in Europe.

Balfour ends with a quote that is true, if not terribly helpful. (What helps to understand World War I, and/or human nature? Scholars write huge books, and still don't know.) It also serves to illustrate a writing style that is really beautiful, and beautifully sustained, throughout all the enormous density:

We must always remember that it is our choices and decisions which will go to circumscribe the freedom of succeeding generations. Taken individually they may seem trivial, but taken together, and along with other people's, they add up to destiny.

The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy

I had hopes of enjoying this book. As I flip through it now, it still looks interesting and erudite. I am glad to learn that dreams and visions were popular subjects of Florentine art, "where the great fresco cycles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries drew chiefly on the Golden Legend of Jacopo della Voragine and the life of Saint Francis." I am glad to know also that perspective in navigation and perspective in art are linked: "Toscanelli, who taught Brunelleschi, also advised Columbus and the king of Portugal. ... Many of the landscapes of the quattrocento, especially Baldovinetti's, have the character of aerial maps; the bare Tuscan hills ... are now shown furrowed by husbandry." Interesting. Maybe it would be best to flip through the book backward.

Read forward, properly, The Stones of Florence unfortunately becomes annoying in a hurry. The author begins with the obligatory chapter announcing what Florence is really like, circa 1963 -- hot, drab, and unwelcoming -- and insulting tourists essentially for not knowing what she knows. Why do intellectuals hate tourists? Is this a Western phenomenon, or do Japanese tourists, for example, also hate fellow Japanese tourists abroad, and write books about how dumb they look?

By page 49, I had reached this, after wading through a short discussion on the popularity of the classic Greek look in Renaissance sculpture -- "Naturally, in none of this statuary, which was once a la mode (nor in the graceful Cellini either), is there a grain of that local tender piety, religious or civic, that appears in its purest, most intense concentration in Donatello ...." And my brain now up and spoke of its own accord. Woman, it asked, who has told you all this? You are not a native Florentine, no more than the tourists. And what in blazes is "local tender piety"?

After that, I did a bit more skimming, forward, but then gave up. The book has no theme or story of any kind to tell, and the author herself seems to have no voice. If she was aiming for the cool detachment that the reviewers quoted on the back of the book praise her for, then I suggest she succeeded too well. She has many wonderful facts at her disposal, and I can vaguely tell that the chapters are meant to cover certain topics -- painting here, history there, at the end art restoration, and how wrong Ruskin was about the essential Giottos he thought he saw -- but reading the book only inspired me to ask that dread, necessary question which all writers should ask themselves, many times, and then forestall in others by the quality of their answering performance. So what? For me, and despite her obvious abilities, she had no answer.

A Crime of Passion by Stanley Loomis

Now this is history. Keep, for the moment, kings and battles and social movements. Give me a hideous murder among the very hautest of the haute monde of Paris, on the morning of August 18th, 1847, and give it to me in the word-painting of a professional type who seems to have vanished from today's bookshelves. Stanley Loomis begins: "Only forty years separated the reign of Louis-Philippe from the ancien regime. There were many men, therefore, ... who amid the plush-covered furniture, the tasselled hangings, and the wallpaper of the 1830s could recall the fragile futilities of that other age and in their mind's eye still see that simpler furniture upon which the shepherdesses of Trianon had once disposed themselves ...."

The story of the Praslin murder was laid out for me, first, in the great old movie All This and Heaven Too. Bette Davis' diction has never been more perfect than in that film; the little-known Barbara O'Neil earned an Oscar nomination as Madame la Duchesse, a role the polar opposite of her previous work as Scarlett O'Hara's saintly mother; Charles Boyer, as Monsieur le Duc, delivers one of those lines that you want to save up and use yourself in real life. Guilty and cagey, but pure in his love for a servant, he squints into the middle distance above his rigidly set jaw and hisses at a nosy fellow aristocrat, "You make me ashemed dhat I know you."

The movie was based on Rachel Field's 1938 novel of the same name. Stanley Loomis' book was published another generation after both, but follows the course of the film surprisingly closely. Someone -- novelist, filmmakers, historian, or all -- has done his homework.

The story is simply dreadfully unhappy at its core. The Duc and Duchesse de Choiseul-Praslin were married young, for love, and had many children. By middle age, however, things had gone hellishly wrong. The duchesse became suffocating in her worship and jealousy of her husband. He stopped sleeping with her. (The movie copes with this very adroitly. We forget that people had sex and liked it before the 1960s.) She wrote him endless letters. There was something wrong between her and the children -- ill-feeling, certainly, but the duchesse also wrote of "corruption." The family ran through a string of governesses before hiring their last, Mademoiselle Henriette Deluzy. Even before she arrived, the Duc and Duchesse had actually signed an agreement that the Duchesse would not go near her own children, and that the future governess, whoever she was, would have all authority over the brood.

Mademoiselle Deluzy proved loving, competent, "fascinating." Society quickly assumed she was the duc's mistress, and even if she was not, the fact that she accompanied the father and children on trips while Madame la Duchesse stayed home certainly looked bad.

Six years on, in midsummer of 1847, Madame initiated divorce proceedings against Monsieur. The situation in the household looked so scandalous that the duchesse would certainly have been given custody of the children, which in divorce cases "in that civilization run by men" was not normal. (A glance at Anna Karenina will explain why. It was assumed that a divorcing woman would set up a new home with a new man and her illegitimate new family, although this would not have been the duchesse's case. But the fictional Karenin -- all men -- feared for a legitimate son's education as an orphan in some hovel with a common-law stepfather.) In that same summer, Mademoiselle Deluzy was abruptly discharged.

A month later, the duc murdered the duchesse, with hideous violence, on an August dawn at their Paris mansion, 55 rue du Faubourg St. Honore. This is currently the address of the Elysee Palace, official residence of the President of France, a building that has stood on the spot since the early 1700s. Can one number stand for two buildings? Or does official business go on in the very rooms where Madame once ran shrieking and bloodied from door to door, fending off her husband's knife?

He swallowed arsenic later that afternoon after a round of police questioning, and died the following week. Mademoiselle Deluzy was imprisoned on suspicion of complicity for three months. No less a figure than Victor Hugo wrote about it in the daily papers. The mobs were inflamed. In November, the governess was released for lack of evidence.

She moved to the United States, became a teacher in an exclusive New York girls' school, and then married a member of the Field family, of transatlantic-cable laying (Cyrus) fame. And of literary fame: Rachel Field, novelist, was a great-niece by marriage of the Henry Field who married the notorious "Mademoiselle D." The novel has fun with the second half of her life. The new and exciting Mrs. Field stands out among her good neighbors in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She serves coffee on a tray before the fireplace. She helps a young girl curl her hair, to cheer her while she is sick in bed, and the young girl gawps at her and exclaims, " 'Why, you are frivolous!' "

And the movie has fun with politics, or so I once thought. When Bette Davis finishes telling her salivating young American pupils the story of the poor governess who longs only for calm and anonymity now, she says, " 'And so the people of France fought the Revolution of 1848. For the king of France and the Peers to let this wicked woman go was the last straw....' " I used to think that Hollywood was making this up, in order to give a soap opera a more serious tone. It seems Hollywood was not. A great Peer and intimate of the royal family conveniently escaping public trial for murder, albeit escaping through a painful death himself, does seem to have had something to do with what history books -- and Wikipedia -- call the Fall of the July Monarchy.

Loomis writes that there is one eternal mystery to the Praslin murder, and that is simply why he did it. It was both premeditated -- the duc bolted doors and windows, and fetched arsenic days in advance -- and wildly violent. A "crime of passion." Neither he nor Mademoiselle ever admitted adultery or planned murder, and while surviving letters overflow with intense emotions and good writing, none clarify motive. None define "corruption." One of Loomis' themes is that something mawkish in the Romantic era itself turned people's heads, especially among the Parisian aristocracy who had come far from their eighteenth-century forbears' "discipline and ceremony" and now had little to do but brood, read novels, and take opium. The duchesse's copy of Mrs. Armytage or Female Domination, new but bloodstained, lies still among her things in the Paris National Archives. Or it did, in 1967.

And Mrs. Field, having lived to a fairly decent old age, died and lies buried in a dignified spot in a cemetery in dignified Stockbridge. "Dear Great-Aunt Henriette, Although I never knew you in life, as a child I often cracked butternuts on your tombstone," Rachel Field introduces her novel. For my part, I intend to turn again to the excellently entertaining Stanley Loomis, whose Paris in the Terror stands on my bookshelves, and whose Madame du Barry: a Biography is on order for me at the local library.

The Master of Blacktower by Barbara Michaels

This is one of those tempting, plain, and slightly grubby tomes tucked in among its fellows, both the shiny-new and the well thumbed, on the local library's mystery shelves. Reinforced library binding, imprinted with a groovy, green-amber-brown Greek key design; pages as soft as velvet with age and use; no jacket, no blurbs, no summary. Chapter 1: "The Black Tower of Dunnoch. I saw it first at twilight ...."

I have a great respect for people who can sit down and think out a plot. As the years go on I grow more and more convinced within myself that I have no head for it. In this case, author Barbara Michaels has set herself the challenge of creating a romantic mystery in which, one, there is no murder or theft or kidnapping for anyone to solve, and two, the romantic hero plausibly and repeatedly rejects the heroine. The problem he is struggling with does prove to be, as Damaris realizes late, "so simple, and so deadly, that it took my breath away." But as mysteries go, Mr. Gavin Hamilton's problem is almost, almost intellectual and nothing more. The story is oddly bloodless, and yet coolly intriguing as a result. I read it over two nights (did I mention the large print?), and found it a very pleasant antidote to whatever dull thing was on the family TV. And by the way, there are no heavy-breathing sex scenes. This must be either because the book was written in 1966 before all that became the norm, or because Miss Michaels was an old-fashioned lady.

I say I have no head for plot construction. Perhaps I have always gone about it backwards. I envision Miss Michaels sitting at her desk in 1966, and reasoning out, first, how all the threads are going to come together and why. That must happen at some point in the creative process, but perhaps also there are other ways to compose plots, more naturally. Perhaps one can sit down "with a blank piece of paper and an idea," as the writers' manuals all advise, and simply start working, to find that in time, characters and events unfold as they will. Perhaps it is this method which enables prolific writers to write twenty and thirty novels in a lifetime. The biggest trouble I see with composing plots -- however it is done, and I am no one to speak because I've never had fiction published, no doubt for good reason -- is that they so often resemble each other. History and biography are always unique and are also real; essays, sketches, belles-lettres reflect a unique viewpoint real for that writer at that time. One fictional plot, on the other hand, seems so much like another.

The Master of Black Tower, for example, is Jane Eyre all over again, only much diluted. There are howling, cold, isolated north Britain locations. There is a dark, scarred, brooding, upper-class older man, and an eighteen-year-old, proud but orphaned governess type. There is an ominous mansion with a closed-off wing. We meet the flip and laughing local gentry woman, hard, blond, and well-dressed. We are shocked by revelations about the hero's past -- and present. We mourn the heroine's despair. There are good servants and bad servants. It is Jane Eyre even to the intervention of the supernatural towards the end, when Damaris, standing at a window and looking out at black night, seems to hear a call to go back.

All enjoyable, to be sure, but didn't Barbara Michaels as she typed busily away realize the resemblance? Would it have stifled her creativity if she had? It would stifle mine, but then perhaps I'm just a wimp when it comes to sitting down and working at fiction. I may be a wimp also when it comes to research. (This book seemed to show curiously little of that. Other authors routinely trowel in much more information on clothes and food alone, in a novel set in the mid-1800s.) I like research, but I ask myself -- if you have something valuable to say in fiction, even historical fiction, isn't endless research a kind of window dressing, pretty but in its details extraneous? Wimp, I am sure Miss Michaels would sniff.

I can heartily recommend The Master of Black Tower for a cozy winter afternoon, even as I eye Jane Eyre on my shelf and ask, what is the difference between competence -- a very noble thing -- and lush, extravagant, wildly gifted ability, not to say genius? There's a difference in vocabulary of course, in depth of character development and even in humor (" 'Am I hideous, Jane?' 'Very, sir. You always were, you know.' " ...' "Jane, leave me. Go and marry Rivers' "). There's a difference in the thickness of the book and in the size of the print. There is a difference in prolificity ...

...or so I hazarded a guess. My library copy of Black Tower lists Barbara Michaels as having written only one other book, called Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs. This was her first novel, then, and I was free to imagine her either sinking back into obscurity in 1966, or going on to become some sort of queen of romance. Indeed, she did the latter. The internet is wonderful. I typed her name in the search box. There she is, auburn haired at eighty, with her own website complete with FAQs, and sixty-six novels to her credit written under two other names at least, plus non-fiction.

God bless her. Charlotte Bronte wrote one. Probably not much researched. God bless the pair of them.

Agrippa's Daughter by Howard Fast

In order to begin to understand this story, it helps to have seen the television drama I, Claudius. That way, you can picture the actor who played Claudius' lifelong friend, the Jewish prince Herod Agrippa, and so you can at least place the heroine of this novel, Berenice, into a family, as Herod Agrippa's daughter.

The setting of this historical romance is therefore already unusual, as historical romances go. Not many take place in antiquity, and still fewer put Jewish characters, and the land of Israel, front and center. The climax of the novel deals with one of the most hideous events of the classical period or indeed Western history, the siege and destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans concluding in the year 70 A.D. (or C.E. if you prefer -- although I've always felt the use of B.C.E. and C.E. is a bit of an intellectual conceit. Granted not everyone wants to say Anno Domini, but what's "common" about the Common Era?).

Throughout this siege, as many as a million Jews were crammed into Jerusalem's few square miles, tragically fighting and murdering each other, starving, and still maintaining the ritual animal sacrifies twice a day inside the Temple, "while the most powerful legions in the world pounded at the gates" (this is not from the novel but from Abraham Leon Sachar's A History of the Jews). Tens of thousands died, thousands of survivors were sold into slavery. This was after the rest of the country, chafing under obnoxious foreign rule, had been subdued and more tens of thousands killed there. The Romans required a 50,000-man army and four years to do the job. The Jewish historian Josephus, who was on the spot in a most interesting way for part of this war, chronicled nightmarish stories of starving women, in Jerusalem's last days, eating their newborns.

(Is it any wonder that not many historical romances "go there"?) But before the Roman general and Emperor Vespasian's son, Titus, razes the ancient city and its Second Temple, we meet and follow the career of the beautiful, red-haired, green-eyed Berenice. She was a real historical figure, a client queen of Judea, or Chalcis, or Cilicia, or Alexandria, depending on whom she married, what liberties Howard Fast has taken with his tale, and depending on how one defines "queen" in an era when the whole Mediterranean world was a confused maelstrom of peoples, religions, and powers all being mixed up and sorted out by Rome. Fast has actually pumped even more complexity into Berenice's story. She was known, it seems, mostly for her scandalous love life -- ancient men writers chronicled her marriages and mentioned incest with her brother, also named Agrippa -- but Fast shunts the brother somewhat aside to give her instead a deep theological soul, and to thrust her into the company of all the political and theological parties blossoming in, or burdening, Jewish life at that time.

In a pit of existential despair after a number of sad adventures, she meets and marries a physician who is the head of the Sanhedrin and of the House of Hillel, a sort of family-run Bible study/farm/consciousness-raising school which would eventually emerge from the ruins of Israel with a moral survival plan for a people who, as of the year 70, would apparently have no more country, religion, God, or reason to exist. Life with Shimeon exposes her to the poor, ill, and enslaved, and to arguments with Shimeon's opposite numbers, spokesmen for real-life Jewish sects like the Zealots, the Sicarii, the House of Shammai (a bit like bad cops to the House of Hillel's good cops) and to the official Temple priesthood, the Sadduccees.

Because Berenice is always a queen, she also must deal with Roman governors and procurators, who can't decide what they want more, her beautiful self humbled before them, or the riches of the Temple filling their coffers at home in Italy. When the tragedy of the Jewish war falls upon the land of Israel and strips her husband from her, Berenice's fate is to fall in love afterward with Titus, who is responsible for the destruction. Though ten years younger than she is, he returns her passions, and this, too, appears to be a real-life incident. The queen actually went to Rome with Titus after the war, lived openly with him and might have married him except that Roman rage against the idea of an Empress from the most violent and impossible province of their world compelled him to stay his hand. He sent her away temporarily, to Gaul, in the novel; after he unexpectedly died, she disappeared from history and that is where Howard Fast also leaves her.

With apologies for the plot spoilers, -- this is no ordinary bodice ripper, obviously. A man's treatment of love, sex, and history in fiction is simply different from a woman's. No woman romance writer that I know of is capable of this insight about Biblical retribution, as early as page 37. The young Berenice is thinking:

She would come to understand that the "good" king is a thing that nature itself derides and deters -- even as it would be a derision to all the natural laws of things for water to flow uphill. Her own people, the Jews, had suffered a thousand years of kings, and if one was wicked, the most cursory reading of history turned up another more wicked. And since iniquity is always unstable and risky, justice appears to be done in the end. "Woe unto thee!" cried the prophets to their rulers, and time proved the logic of their predictions ....

The reader can't help but remember that this novel was published in 1964, only twenty years after the Shoah. It's just a historical romance, but the writer is concerned with suffering and with moral issues much beyond establishing the heroine's "spunk" or the glowering hero's development into a modern man who respects her in the morning. It may actually have a theme, which may be this:

In this, the Jews were apart from all the world -- in this defiance of all the tributes and implacabilities of fate; and possibly for this reason more than any other they were never tolerated, only hated or loved. ... The pagan lived in a world where defeat was accepted, where poverty and ignominy and slavery were accepted, where every turn and caprice of fate was accepted -- and where every opportunity for lust, conquest, thievery, or enrichment was also accepted. For this, the Jew despised him ....

Another reader dog-eared that page before I did, which makes me think it struck him, too.

Fast's writing is leisurely and lovely, especially in its descriptions of the scenery and climate of Israel. Sun-warmed stones, clear pools, shady farms, and sparkling morning air abound. He devotes himself to the character of a woman with a skill and sympathy that makes it startling and then irrelevant that he's a man. And what is pleasantly startling to the ignorant modern reader is the realization that, far from one mid-twentieth century author plucking one ancient queen from obscurity for whim's and creation's sake, in fact Berenice has been well-known to creative people for quite some time. Racine ... Corneille ... Mozart (La clemenza di Tito). There is even a constellation in the night sky called Berenice's Hair, but it seems this collection of stars honors the locks of another Berenice entirely, who lived two centuries earlier than our lady. But perhaps she could tell us almost as compelling, if not as horrible a story.

The Splendor of Greece by Robert Payne

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana

Robert Payne's The Splendor of Greece takes the armchair traveler back nearly fifty years to a time when writers of travel books came to their subjects with different intentions than their modern counterparts seem to do. Modern books recounting the adventures of an eager pilgrim in Paris, or romantic rural Spain or hidden and lovely Portugal, tend to focus on the private and the problematic. How I coped with a flat tire in this or that charming, dusty town; how my five-year-old learned to curse in patois while I grew fresh basil and got over my divorce.

Payne, a hugely prolific writer who seems to have had a penchant for seeing and describing the whole world (The Splendor of Persia, The White Rajahs of Sarawak, and Forever China are among his 110 titles), keeps to another tradition. In sixteen chapters, each set in a different part of Greece, he takes the reader on a tour of the most noteworthy parts of each stop, sketches some of its history and myth, adds perhaps some information about the archaeology done there, and then discusses -- sometimes over-rhapsodizes about, really -- its art and makes note of what its contemporary inhabitants are doing. With him we visit not only Athens, Crete, and the bigger islands of the Aegean like Rhodes, but smaller places which we feel slightly mortified at not knowing about before, because it turns out they were the sites of famed mythic tragedies (Mycenae, where Agamemnon's wife did not welcome him home from war happily), or divine communication (the island of Patmos, where St. John wrote the book of Revelation), or even the birthplace of Apollo (the island of Delos).

Payne's prose is the prose of a man who is going to pay attention to art and myth and history, to something other than himself, and yet who fully intends that we will see what he sees. Here he is on page one, describing the light in Greece: it "is a light that can be drunk and tasted, full of ripeness, light that filters through flesh and marble ... that fumes and glares, and seems to have a life of its own." The Splendor is a travel book with a thesis, in other words -- the book's subtitle is A Journey Into the Sunlight -- and the thesis is a simple one. Most Western ideas about freedom, beauty, and truth come from ancient Greece, and in the exhilaration of winning their liberty from the Persian empire in 480 BC, the Greeks knew this thesis to be true even as they shaped it. (Last year's movie 300 tells a part of this story.) Victory over Persia ushered in the classical age with all its art, its drama, learning, and science; human achievement became akin to holiness. As Payne tells it, "holiness must come again, for it has been too long from the earth."

Queen Christina by Georgina Masson

Queen Christina of Sweden was one of the extraordinary personalities of seventeenth century Europe. The daughter of the hero King Gustavus Adolphus, champion of Protestant freedom, she made up her mind apparently in her late teens not only to abdicate the throne of Sweden as soon as she decently could, but also to convert to Catholicism and live at Rome into the bargain. Everyone was agog.

What a disappointment, then, that Georgina Masson's biography of her (1969) should be so dull. Perhaps Miss Masson was too assiduous in the collecting of all possible information, and the putting it into perfect, and perfectly dry, order, to remember to write a story. Not a horse moved his hoof in a single royal procession in Stockholm, but Miss Masson chronicled it. But where is Christina?

The Queen's Jewellery by Sheila Young

There is no reason to look at a book of lavish photographs of jewelry except pure pleasure. This book, published by Taplinger in 1968, shows the Queen of England in her prime -- not that the present is not also her prime, she being quite the formidable lady -- as a smiling and apparently very happy matron in her early forties. And why should she not be happy, at least in all these photographs from ceremonial and festive occasions? All her jewelry is real.

Having offered only pleasure as the excuse to look at a book of royal gew-gaws, I can't seem to help looking for more excuses. It must be the result of living in a virtuous, republican age. The author, Sheila Young, in quaintly stilted but still striking, formidable-lady prose, also looks for reasons to write, read, and think about the Queen's jewels. "To be a Queen Regnant must be, for any woman sensitive to the pulse of history, an altogether transcendent experience," she begins, and then she goes on answering the question "why this book" by jotting down the need for monarchical splendor, the historical associations of this ruby or that, the human joy in exquisite craftsmanship, and so on. For the average woman, however, the pleasure and astonishment of the book all come down to one fact. All this lady's jewels are real.

One wonders how these women, the Queen, her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, all decided what and how much to wear. Simple occasions would have been simple to deck for. Just the pearls, two brooches, small pearl earrings and a small bracelet. All real. But then there were, and are, the great events. The opera; the state visit; God help them, the Coronation. It ought to have looked tacky, even on these occasions, to wear a tiara and triple strands of diamonds and a dozen-roped pearl choker and cabochon emerald drops and an Order sash with two be-ribboned brooches featuring portraits of male relations and earrings and bracelets and rings. In the late nineteenth century, "the most brilliant period of sheer extrovert craftsmanship," a great lady added a stomacher to the inventory. There do seem to have been a few lapses in judgement here and there: a coronation photo of Queen Alexandra, consort to the pleasure-loving King Edward VII, shows her so loaded with plate as to resemble somehow a be-gemmed steam locomotive.

But for the most part it all "works," to use a term the more articulate nineteenth century would not have sanctioned. What is striking in all these photos is not only how regal the Queen and her ancestors look -- "the qualities of her presence, her upbringing and the support of her family" account for it, Young says -- but also how harrassed and dowdy the women in the background look, even though they are often the same age and dressed approximately the same as any one of Her Majesties. Poor things. Maybe they are scared to death of being in the Presence. Maybe their jewels don't work.

I have several dream-favorites among the Queen's collection. The Russian fringed tiara, stick after stick of diamonds (meant to look like a peasant headdress, how droll!), is one. Another is the simple diamond collet necklace, all twenty-six stones fat enough to stand up and argue with Queen Victoria's fat throat. The triple-stranded diamond collet necklace is also something that I could be persuaded to take to a desert island.

Forty years have gone by since this book was published. Queen Elizabeth is now in her early eighties, and looks exactly like her grandmother, Queen Mary, whose half-jaunty, half-acid eye -- her face can outface her jewels, which is a great thing -- looks out so frequently from these pages. Grandmother seems to have been the source of many of the present queen's favorite pieces. (Small wonder. The Cullinan diamond, or the 62- and 92-carat bits of it called "Granny's chips," were among Queen Mary's personal possessions.) But a Queen Regnant's transcendent experiences must eventually include bequeathing her jewels to a new generation; in a sense they are not hers at all, and that must at times give her not a transcendent but a chilly feeling.

How odd, too, for the average woman reader of jewelry books and only occasional panter after royalty, to reflect that at one time Princess Diana was in line to wear all these things. Now who's next?

The Bull From the Sea by Mary Renault

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana

In her bestselling novels published in the 1950s and ‘60s, Mary Renault recaptured, in lilting and simple prose, the world of ancient Greece, re-telling the myths of gods and heroes and the histories of kings and queens. In The Bull From The Sea she writes in the voice of Theseus, the Athenian prince whose adventures included slaying the terrible half-man, half-bull Minotaur in Crete, capturing and marrying the Amazon queen Hippolyta, and building an empire famed for the justice of its laws and the peace enjoyed by its people.

There are so many versions of the Greek myths, and the characters in them have such convoluted relationships, that a novel like this, carefully researched and plotted, helps us to hear them anew as they must have sounded to ancient audiences listening to them sung around a hearth fire – as just vivid dramas about people. Theseus has a tangled family background to begin with. The fearsome Medea was his father’s mistress; the unbalanced Phaedre, who ended up lusting after his own son, was his second wife; the girl Ariadne, whom he abandoned after she helped him escape Crete, was Phaedre’s sister. Theseus' adventures, in Mary Renault’s hands, are not just tall tales, but spring from his own rational and human responses to pressing problems. He must defend his kingdom against ambitious men who would be glad to take it from him, he must marry a woman he doesn’t like to create needed alliances. Illness and palace gossip and religious conflict are all, also, a part of his and everyone’s life, and shadow everything he decides to do.

Renault is particularly strong where she interweaves, in the old myths, what modern scholarship knows about the history of this era. If we had to "place" The Bull From the Sea in history, we might put it circa 1200 B.C. Towards the end, Theseus meets the young Achilles, a hero of the Trojan war which may actually have been fought around that time. The historic truths looming behind the plot are, first, the religious clash between people (mostly women) who worship a very ancient Mother-and-Moon Goddess, and those (mostly men) who worship Zeus and find the Goddess cult emasculating and grotesque – which it probably was. The second truth is the movement of barbarian tribes, pushed by who knew what far-off turmoil "at the back of the north wind," down into the Mediterranean in search of land, plunder, and safety. It is the wars they cause that bring the story to a climax, and bring Theseus his greatest grief.

Renault creates a world of sunlit seas and fields, intense physical activity outdoors, and family bonds so casual – men "get" children on slave, queen, and war captive equally – that paradoxically, almost everybody is as familiar as family. Despite the sun it’s a bleak world, too. A man "is what he is"... but the gods decide all.

Tom Swift and his Triphibian Atomicar by Victor Appleton II

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana

It’s impossible to pass up a title like Tom Swift and his Triphibian Atomicar, especially when the first two lines alone make the book worth its 50 cent, castoff price: " ‘Tom, your new atomic sports car is absolutely dreamy!’ said Phyllis Newton. Eighteen-year-old Tom Swift Jr. grinned at the pretty, dark haired girl ...."

Tom Swift is the male counterpart of Nancy Drew, the fantastically accomplished, brave, upright youth, mature enough to be out of school and driving around having adventures, but young enough to still require fully adult mentors, and adult rescuers from danger when adventure turns rough. Like Nancy, he also has a strong, wise, moneyed father, another scientist and inventor whose Swift Enterprises is doing well enough to provide young Tom with a four-square-mile laboratory and production plant, where he creates atomic energy capsules and tests new, super-strength plastics. Early on, there is an atomic explosion in Tom’s lab, but he and his friend Bud clean it up right away, and then they relax over a pot of cocoa.

The storyline is gloriously wild. Someone wants to steal the secret of Tom’s new vehicle, and then his mother and sister are given two fabulous rubies which have something to do both with important advances in maser communications, and with a cursed ruby mine in the struggling young nation of "Kabulistan." Sinister men in turbans spy through windows, and a bomb goes off in an airport. Tom drives cars, pilots planes, and calmly deals with everyone from predatory business executives in "Shopton" to shady antique booksellers in Teheran and mounted Kurdish tribesmen in the highlands of central Asia. When he first shows off his atomicar for the press, he himself takes the controls after a reporter mocks the planned use of a robot-driver. ("Good heavens, boy!" his father bursts out later. "You might have been killed if the repelatron-force ray from your anticrash device hadn’t stopped that truck!") On weekends, Tom relaxes with his family’s business friends, strolling the artists’ colony in Taos, or hiking, swimming, and playing tennis in the Adirondacks. They all eat good meals, fried chicken and biscuits at home, sheep’s head and pomegranates abroad. Because of his previous inventions he has had contact with representatives of advanced civilizations in outer space, but they don’t make an appearance in this book.

To author Appleton’s credit, and apart from the credit he deserves for his research, he does keep his eye on two things throughout the story. He bothers to describe Tom’s experiments, albeit loosely – there’s talk of "hydraulic pressure gear," and valves and megacycles – and he bothers to include real violence, not gratuitously but because Tom gets involved with violent men. Only once does a mute thug aim a carbine at Tom’s friend, but when he does, he means business.

Tom Swift’s adventures must have been great fun for a boy to plunge into, say on a fine, free summer afternoon in 1962. They’re still quite a tour de force now.