Life in a Medieval Castle by Joseph and Frances Gies

About ten years ago, Commentary published an article on the demise of the secondary source intellectual. It was too bad, the author wrote, that standards in the publishing world had become not so much very professional, as so very professorial. Nowadays, anyone with a book to write on some topic or other, anyone who wanted a prayer of being taken seriously, had first to do what historians looking for a Ph.D. and tenure at a university do: go and unearth primary sources and write from original research, even though the resulting book might develop the same theme and reach the same conclusions as it would have done from the support of secondary sources only, bound and ready in good public libraries. Oh, and to have a prayer of being taken seriously, it was best to already have a Ph.D., before getting to work.

Indeed, it was too bad. Secondary source intellectuals, urbane and entertaining writers whose "Acknowledgements" used to be profuse in thanks to librarians and typists, had often produced delightful, unusual stuff which amused and educated the general reader. And they did, even if only for the satisfaction of their own muse, what I suppose could be called the Lord's work. (The muse's work?) Look at the flyleaf of an older book, and see the long variegated lists of topics "By the same author." A biography of Disraeli might precede a book on gardening and follow a personal travel journal or a history of Dutch art. The muses were wonderfully busy.

Life in a Medieval Castle is an example of the kind of secondary source history whose demise Commentary's author regretted. Its bibliography contains nothing like the Calendars of State Papers that all of today's "real" professionals consult. In it we also find those entrancing old references that the secondary source writer takes seriously, but that the professional today would either ignore or eagerly set aside to explore at some later time in order to write a new, original source monograph dissecting that source for its own sake. Who on earth, for instance, was Ella Armitage, and why did she write and publish Early Norman Castles in 1912? No matter. Joseph and Frances Gies found her worthwhile, and not as a specimen.

The Gieses were a married couple who concentrated on medieval history in their long and, let me say speedily, respected professional career. It may be that in all their other books they worked from original sources, and only relaxed a bit with this one. It's a good book, but is essentially a compilation of good, secondary source information lacking that new theme or major conclusion, exclamation point, with which a scrabbler-through of state papers would want to astonish the world. It's the kind of book that an advanced high school student or undergraduate would use if he needed information on "A Day in the Castle" (chapter VI), "The Villagers" (chapter VIII), or "The Castle at War" (chapter X).

Having said all this, let me assert that this deceptively brief book is packed with information, including long passages from other people's translations of primary medieval sources, that teaches the reader anew about the complexity and sophistication of the medieval world. Sometimes we are so anxious not to romanticize a glamorous-looking former time and place that we fail to do it justice -- we muddy it up with truthful assertions about its misery and filth and disease, forgetting that not everybody was miserable and sick all the time. The chapter on falconry alone raised my respect for this society and what it had the patience and passion to accomplish, merely for amusement. Then castles with stone walls twenty-four feet thick for a start, and the intricate workings of laws and rights governing village life and the common people's relation to authority, the hard labor of pre-industrial farming and the hard play of pagan-tinged holidays, -- all are recorded here and all combine to make the modern person feel he is skating along on the froth of life, held up by a web of blessed technology but completely ignorant of what survival, medieval-style, really meant. Electro-magnetic pulse attack, anyone? No, it's not the name of a rock group.

There are a few small surprises here. Little things, bits of information that we would think someone would have explained to us by now. (Perhaps this is why the Gieses are respected professionals.) The castle, the authors write, served a specific purpose. It was a private fortress sheltering a lord, his family and servants, and his small private army against larger outside forces during troublous times. Castles were first built by Byzantine Greeks campaigning in isolation in North Africa in the sixth century A.D. Adapted by the Muslim conquerors of medieval Spain and perfected by the barons and kings of northern Europe, the castle was the supremely powerful piece of medieval military technology as long as medieval conditions, military, economic, and social, obtained. It was nothing if not rural, nothing if not in command of rural life. Farm and village needed the castle's protection; the castle needed the farms' food and the villagers' labor and occasional service in war. When those conditions changed, when cities and merchants amassed more wealth in coin than the countryside could produce in kind and when centralized government took up the reins of power, the rural private fortress became obsolete. The introduction of gunpowder and cannon also helped batter it to pieces.

One more small surprise among all this professional information concerns the seemingly bizarre nature of European farming in the middle ages. I declare I will never understand this. Northern Europe is startlingly far north. Paris lies at about the same latitude as the Canadian-U.S. border, farther north than Lake Superior. The famed castles of Wales lie still farther north, at the same latitude as Newfoundland. Yet Chapter XI, "The Castle Year," describes an agricultural cycle by which crops were sown in "the winter," from late September to Christmas, and then different crops sown from Christmas to Easter, "the spring." Summer came after Easter week, and lasted till the first of August. The harvest, autumn, fell from August 1st to the end of September. Then a new agricultural year started with the winter planting.

I can certainly understand harvesting crops in September, and I understand that our American, continental climate is far harsher in general than Europe's, but I still stand in amazement at records showing that ground could be worked and seeds planted in December, January, or February. Yea verily, it almost sounds like evidence of global warming. If so, I would think the more of it, the better.

And where are today's equivalents of the Gieses, hardworking scholars who produced reliable, enjoyable secondary-source stuff for the erudition and enjoyment of the general reading public? Have they been driven out of the publishing world by gatekeepers competing for scarce dollars, and unwilling to offer the public, for those dollars, anything that seems unoriginal -- relaxed, unastonishing, unprofessorial? The author of Commentary's article compared the breed, if memory serves, to a butterfly, bright and lovely while it lived but evidently too fragile to survive. Too bad. The approved professionals nowadays sometimes seem all so uniformly moth-ish.

No Nudes is Good Nudes by P.G. Wodehouse

When I was younger and foolisher, I read quite a bit of P.G. Wodehouse, mostly the Jeeves and Drones Club stories, and then reached a point -- and this is the "foolisher" part -- at which I felt I had read enough of him. His stories can be laugh-out-loud funny, and his prose is exquisite, but he was, I determined, altogether very silly. In my earnestness I decided that one more convoluted plot about a happy twit and a predatoress, and their young love gone awry in the English countryside/Metropolis until an omniscient valet/butler saves the day, must prove unnecessary to a well-lived life. Farewell, P.G. So nice to have met you.

Then on a whim I picked a paperback copy of a collection called Blandings Castle and Elsewhere from my shelves last week (for, despite having banished P.G. from my to-do lists, I did keep a few of his books on hand as mementoes), and found myself falling anew under his spell. Under his s., as he would put it. This time, I met Lord Emsworth, foggy but genial seigneur of Blandings Castle and worshiper of its Empress, Shropshire's fattest and most prize-deserving pig.

There is something wonderful about Blandings. Wodehouse is truly wonderful anyway, but in Blandings he seems to collect the best of his best. The great Jeeves is not there, of course, but he is replaced by the butler Beach, who is his alter ego, only not as gleamingly perfect and therefore a tad more human. The young twits on the premises are not as completely twitty as they might be. (It's startling to find a young Wodehouse hero simply called John.) Galahad is there, the brother of Lord Emsworth, and in Galahad we have an Uncle who is not afraid of any broken-bottle-chewing Aunt, but rather gives as good as he gets to all -- aunts, sisters, countesses, and obnoxious local dukes in particular. Galahad is physical, which is refreshing in Wodehouse; he will blackmail obnoxious dukes if it is needful to bring young lovers together.

And it seems to be always summer at Blandings Castle. We are in the country there. Bertie Wooster and his flibbertigibbet friends are at home in London or New York, going to music halls and sauntering about the thronged streets wearing loud ties and looking for a good time. At Blandings, we are calm. The sky is blue, the air warm. We follow Lord Emsworth out to the sty, to check on the Empress, and then we come back and have a nice plain English dinner in the library, away from all those people who are getting engaged, or falling downstairs, or surreptitiously hanging faked paintings of reclining nudes in the picture gallery. Lord Emsworth -- Clarence -- is someone we want to see more of, even though he doesn't do much. Perhaps he is us, watching things and not taking much in.

It is possible to read Wodehouse and miss a great deal, especially if our attitude is oh -- it's just comedy. (Oh, is that all?) His plots are very involved, but they do repeat themes and situations, and quite a few jokes. The same quotations from Burns, Shakespeare, and the Bible will drop from several different mouths, throughout his books and across the decades. You know that no one in any plot is going to get seriously hurt, and you will not be asked to pass some excruciating interior moral judgment on any topical issue. He does, to be fair, have some rather crispish things to say about left-wing protesters in Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, circa 1975. But that's by the way.

All of the foregoing can lead you to skim along, absorbing and enjoying little on the grounds that a comic talent is a minor talent. But, read him carefully, watch him demand your respect, fall under his s., and see how much more you value him. I'm coming to the conclusion that even though he only wrote comedy, he probably had twice the average reader's brains. He was certainly consistent in the professionalism of those convoluted plots, and age did not blunt his abilities as far as I can see. He wrote No Nudes is Good Nudes when he was in his late eighties. I read it over the course of ten days -- with a brain in my head forty years younger than his was at the time -- and found that I could not keep the plot straight. It made me impatient. Once again, earnestness reared its ugly head. Silly ... convoluted ... it's just comedy anyway. As soon as I finished it, though, I turned back on a sort of firm whim to chapter one and read it through again, as straight through as I could (three nights).

And all fell in place. Every character's relationship to every other made sense, every plot development was fairly hinted from the beginning, even to the timing of that court case and to the vital slipperiness of those oak stairs. I gaped at the genius of the octogenarian P.G. Wodehouse.

Now, to be sure, there are some things in No Nudes that are there because it's comedy. There are things Dostoevsky or Tolstoy would not do. The forged painting really isn't necessary to the plot, except to introduce a certain character, and he really isn't necessary, except to be involved with the forged painting. That sort of thing. But what of it? It remains masterfully done. And it's laugh-out-loud funny. LOL f., as Wodehouse would say. Not only had he twice our brains, he was ahead of his time. He texted in fiction, before there was texting.

I now could kick myself for having given away as much of my Wodehouse collection as I recall doing. I must see more of Blandings, but not every title in the master's 70-novel, 300-short story, 18-play, 33-musical book oeuvre makes clear that This is a Blandings Tale. The Ice in the Bedroom? He Rather Enjoyed It? And there are swathes of his output I have never explored. Psmith. Mr. Mulliner. The golf stories.

My local library's "Plum" (Pelham Grenville W., or Plum) collection is sadly small, but it does include a copy of Sunset at Blandings, the book Wodehouse was working on when he died (in his sleep) at the age of 93. I'll save that one for later, I think. But I like to picture the great old author going happily to bed that night, with all his papers and manuscripts laid out on a table to be ready for the next day, and spinning out in his head the logic of the story. May we all deserve to pass beyond the veil in such a noble fashion. So much better than expiring all over the floor.

The Little Wax Doll by Norah Lofts

Originally appeared in The Times of Northwest Indiana

Norah Lofts was one of an impressive cohort of English women novelists who seemed to reach their prolific prime in the middle of the twentieth century, and who remain delightful, intelligent escape reading today. Mary Stewart was another, along with Angela Thirkell, Miss Read, and of course Agatha Christie. They were born early enough to be able to grace their writing with real information from a late-Victorian schooling, and yet they lived and created through the huge social changes of the 1950s and 60s, and so noticed things like hippies and the sudden ubiquity of four-letter words. Norah Lofts in particular had a talent for thinking up great titles for her novels, which tended to the historical romance genre. Silver Nutmeg and White Hell of Pity were just two of a few dozen.

Unfortunately, The Little Wax Doll is not one of Lofts' better efforts. Perhaps the rather dull title is a clue. The book is set in eastern England in the late 1950s, and concerns a Miss Deborah Mayfield, who returns from twenty years as a missionary in Africa to take up a teaching post in the small and beautiful village of Walwyk. Strange things go on, or rather, the villagers behave strangely. A girl shows up at school with welts on her back, and then defends her grandmother when Miss Mayfield says she suspects the old lady of having administered the beating. A boy and girl who like each other are kept apart by the boy's parents, with no explanation given. A boy becomes sick, and his parents' reactions range from hysteria to cool indifference -- and Miss Mayfield wants to know why.

There are possibilities in this novel, but the trouble is that the plot depends on the narrator (that is, the author), the characters, and the reader all taking witchcraft seriously. Since the author is clearly not sure whether she does -- this is after all "nineteen fifty-nine, the modern age," as Miss Mayfield is made to say -- we are left following the adventures of a protagonist who may be fighting true, supernatural evil, or who may just be stuck in the boondocks with a lot of elderly farmers having parties, naked, in the woods.

Still, one has to give Lofts credit for slogging through and producing yet another professional, well-woven story, including what she probably meant to be a startlingly eerie ending. At best, Miss Mayfield's situation makes the reader think about what it might have been like to live in places or times when "witchcraft" was a real terror, not so much for "victims" of it as for victims of accusations of it. Norah Lofts liked to spice her novels with the witchery theme from time to time, but in The Little Wax Doll, witchery is not the spice but the whole meal. It is the more indigestible for it.

Jewel of My Heart by Rosemary Rogers; Sweet Savage Love by Rosemary Rogers

Romance fiction is a billion-dollar-a-year plus industry; over one-quarter of all books sold in the United States are romance novels. Although the romance publishing market seems to be uniquely open to novice writers -- the one market left whose writers need not have a marketable persona themselves, so long as they produce -- there are strict guidelines for drafting a sample of the genre. A conflict-filled love affair between the two main characters must constitute the bulk of the book, and there must be an optimistic ending. I recall one whose epilogue had the hero humbly kissing the heroine's belly as she labored to bring forth their fifth child. They were married, of course.

I have treated myself to three romances lately, on the grounds that it's summer and one wants to relax and have fun. When I was growing up my sister's bookshelves held one or two by Rosemary Rogers, and so I went to the library on purpose to find Sweet Savage Love, first published in 1974. With it I also found Jewel of My Heart, one of Rogers' latest, just published in 2004 and dedicated to her granddaughter. So the queen of romance is still working, and more power to her for it. I think it must be great fun to have a grandma who writes romance novels, and dedicates them to you. On that same trip to the library I also found a romance that takes place in eighteenth-century Scotland, and features a heroine named Madison who has a difficult time with the lovemaking scenes because she has a huge sword cut on her back. I'm sorry I can't remember the title or the author.

It's easy to laugh at these books. They really are soft-core pornography for, presumably, mostly middle-aged women. Reading them, we all have the treat of looking back on ourselves as the young, tempestuous heroine, aroused unto dementia by the perfect but outrageously threatening man, and passing with him, safely and beautifully (because of course it turns out he's a true gentleman), from virginity to glorious satiety and then to marriage. Some of the sex scenes are excellently written, even if it is curious how often they include words like "assault," "insistent," "onslaught," "helpless," and even "raping."

And of course, speaking of formulae and guidelines, certain things about the characters, too, must be just so. The heroine must be young, seventeen is a good age, and she must be a virgin. She must be fiery and independent -- independent in spirit, not necessarily in income, which is what the word would have meant in those previous centuries which are the background to many of the stories. She and the hero must loathe each other at first. Generally he is older, a friend of extended family perhaps, and thinks she's a "chit." An older man is de rigueur because there is little to arouse a girl in a seventeen-year-old boy, and anyway a boy that age would have a different word for a girl who annoyed him. Besides, as the plot thickens the heroine for all her pluck will have to be rescued, preferably three times, from angry sugar plantation workers or Mexican bandits or French soldiers playing cards in the downstairs room, and a boy can't do that. That needs a man. He just shows up, furious and in danger himself because of her. It's all wonderful. Like God, you know he cares, and that he is watching.

Three rescues, nicely paced in the middle of the book, set off by two major sex scenes before and after (one when they hate each other, and one when they are aroused unto dementia by the memory of the first one), and the story is just about done. Some authors put in a heart-rending touch at the end, when the hero breaks down in some meltingly boyish way, because he thinks his beloved is leaving him after all. Rosemary Rogers is capable of creating a hero whose heart bursts with pride as he looks down his rifle sight aiming at the villain who is struggling to subdue the heroine who is herself fighting like a tigress, and getting in the way of the bullet, where some other woman beside her had crumpled up in a corner and begun weeping. All this, after he thought she had left him for good.

And so on. It is easy to laugh at these, and years ago my favorite author did. In Secret Lives E.F. Benson, creator of the immortal Mapp and Lucia novels, wrote of the adventures of the middle- aged authoress Susan Leg, aka "Rudolph da Vinci," living high in London (incognita) off the proceeds of her hideously popular novels, Apples of Sodom, Heart's Queen, and the like. Susan's gifts are gigantic -- a neighbor who sees haloes above everyone's head sees that hers is "corn-colored," and advises her to "do something, Leg, write, go on the films, something" -- and her romances as thrilling as possible. In fact, if they existed and we could read them they would probably be different from, and a bit weightier than, the romances overspilling bookstore shelves today. In Benson's hands, Susan Leg writes about other characters besides pure young American girls who are "smart, passionate, funny, and brave," use twenty-first century idiom in all eras (" 'this isn't about me' ") and give the hero as good as they get. Imagine today's audience desiring to read about "little puny men with great hearts, and plain women with golden ones," or about "the bishop of aristocratic birth who gave up his princely income to the poor and needy," and once beat up a navvy who had been beating his wife. ("Saying, 'Damn it, I can't stand it,' he took off his coat and gave the navvy what for.") No, no. We want the seventeen-year-old, ourselves, safely aroused unto ....

But what I find unsatisfying about these books from the get-go, for as sheer well-done stories they are probably several times more worthwhile than the mewling trauma memoirs earning all those mewling respectful reviews in the newspapers, is that they all stand cowering under the great sweeping anvil cloud that is Gone With The Wind. Rogers' Sweet Savage Love actually begins with a sixteen-year-old heroine, spoiled and pouting in the early years of the Civil War. And she has green eyes. Margaret Mitchell never had the bad taste to pair Rhett Butler with Scarlett O'Hara's mother -- in a shed in the rain, on page 26, "after her first cry of despair, completely satisfying" etc. -- but otherwise, these romances cannot seem to stop recreating the emotional story that Mitchell gave us more than seventy years ago. Fiery young heroine (Scarlett), dark, brooding older man with sardonic eyebrows (Rhett), blond, calm man whom the heroine thinks she loves (Ashley) but who is unworthy of her -- he's just plain weak, if he isn't also dissolute and evil. Yes, yes, we've been through all this before. In fact, Mitchell gave us the treat of breaking all the rules, evidently before they existed. Her heroine is a married mother at seventeen. Her wedding night to a teenaged schlub was a frightening disaster. When it is time for rescues the sardonic hero usually leaves her in the lurch, and in the end, far from the loving pair being united in joy down a rifle sight, he simply leaves her. "Didn't it ever occur to you that even the most deathless love could wear out?" Rhett asks. "Mine wore out." She is twenty-eight; he is forty-seven. Mitchell testified she wrote that chapter first and never gave a thought to Scarlett and Rhett's possible reunion.

In Gone With The Wind Margaret Mitchell has not written anything to render (insert great Author's name here __________) ridiculous, nor would she have thought she had, but I find that, in it, she has written something to make almost all subsequent American romance superfluous. Perhaps the emotional trio -- young heroine uncertain of where true love lies -- is just a plotline common to the human experience, and so she can't be given credit for inventing it. But the fact that she also wrote a story around these people, about history, about economic change and political problems, and paused to consider a friendship between two women as well, puts her home run (so to speak) far outside the ballpark where her imitators are still playing. And in 1936 she saw absolutely no need to insert the soft porn scenes. We do hear of one night when Rhett, drunk and enraged, "used [Scarlett] brutally through a wild mad night and she had gloried in it ... a real lady could never hold up her head after such a night" (how did she know?). But that is all. It is up to us to interpret "rapture," "the ecstasy of surrender," and "primitive" as we can. The word painting of Mitchell's professional descendants, all that flesh and fingertips, panting and assault, was for some reason in those days unthinkable.

So, when I do look at these romances, I tend to flip through them hunting for the sex scenes. Everybody claims they love the stories, editors insist you've got to give us a great story with believable characters, but I've already read Gone With The Wind so I know the story. The only difference is that now Scarlett and Rhett end up together. And they have flawless sex.

About ten years ago, Rachel Maines wrote a book called The Technology of Orgasm -- published by Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology, no less -- in which she recorded Victorian women's habit of going to spas and physicians' offices in order to be manipulated to orgasm for health reasons. (" 'Mama says I screamed merrily,' " one satisfied young lass reported.) The vibrator was invented, Maines says, precisely to save doctors time and trouble. But then, after the 1920s or so, this little cultural habit died out. Then came Gone With The Wind, and now we have the soft-core porn romance industry, churning out product at the rate of a billion dollars a year. I'm not sure women might not be better satisfied going to a spa, one of those really full-service, old fashioned ones.

The Cactus Throne: the Tragedy of Maximilian and Carlotta by Richard O'Connor

Originally published in the Times of Northwest Indiana

An early episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show has Rob giving Laura a huge, ornate necklace once belonging to the Empress Carlotta. Laura is appalled, but copes politely with Rob's awful taste. There is a kernel of history in this episode, which it seems the show's writers expected an early 1960s audience to grasp.

The Cactus Throne is an excellent introduction to that history. The Emperor Maximilian and the Empress Carlotta were, respectively, an Austrian prince and a Belgian princess, married young and shipped off to become the rulers of Mexico at the behest partly of the Mexican upper classes, but mostly of the French government, who hoped in this way to collect an outstanding debt owed by a disgraced Mexican regime to several powerful French banks. (The Mexican president, Miramon, who had signed off on the loan, had decamped to exile in Cuba.) All this was in the middle 1860s, while the United States was too busy fighting the Civil War to keep jumped-up European monarchs from settling south of the border. " 'I'm not exactly skeered,' " Abraham Lincoln said, " 'but I don't like the look of the thing.' "

Of course, the thing was absurd and impossible. Maximilian and Carlotta lasted a little more than two years on their throne. Mexico had another president at the time, Benito Juarez (Miramon's opposite number) who had been recognized by the United States and whose mass-supported guerrilla army was partly funded by American money. While the Emperor and Empress hosted receptions and handed out medals and ribbons in their palace in Mexico City, a French army harried Juarez' thousands as efficiently as it could, and French officials patrolled the ports, collecting import taxes to pay both the debt and the occupying troops. Cinco de Mayo, in fact, celebrates a Mexican victory over French troops won at about this time.

Maximilian saw himself as an enlightened liberal prince whom the Mexican people would soon come to love, and Carlotta seems to have seen herself simply as an Empress in a bejeweled cloud. But the Civil War ended, leaving the United States free to deal with Europeans to the south. Acute homesickness, the climate, marital problems, and the terror of living under siege among a hostile armed population took their toll on the couple. Maximilian's signing of the "Black Decree," an order condemning to death all Mexicans who helped "the bandit" Juarez, doomed him.

The French began to withdraw their army. Carlotta returned to Europe to rally support for the pointless adventure, but the two young rulers had already been hung out to dry. Carlotta went insane at twenty-six, and was locked up for the next sixty years in a Belgian castle. Maximilian, believing that a prince does not flee, stayed behind in Mexico and was captured and shot by Juarez' troops a year after his wife's departure. They were only two casualties among thousands who fell around the Cactus Throne.

Fear of Flying by Erica Jong

Fear of Flying was the deeply naughty, wink-wink book of the 1970s. Characters in television sitcoms who mentioned a fear of flying were advised to bring the book along on the plane, so as to escape their phobia. I finally borrowed the book from the library, thirty-five years after its publication, and found as I read it that quite a lot of it seemed familiar. We must have had a copy at home when I was growing up.

It is just about non-stop pornography, a kind of saltier Are You There God, It's Me Margaret for grown-ups. It is also, in a way, a blog before there were blogs. The narrator, Isadora Wing, is a twenty-nine-year-old poet and graduate student who writes endlessly about herself: her marriages, her feelings, her doubts, her fears, her mother, her constricted 1950s-era upbringing, how she wants to dig deep enough into herself to produce the best art she can, but also maybe get pregnant, but also be completely free and spontaneous with some new man, but also not hurt her husband Bennett, but also find true love, but also not be beholden to any man, but also not end up alone ... and so on. "I gotta be me," as the (surely contemporary) song has it. Above all, she doesn't want to be an oppressed bourgeois wife, another slave to men's definitions of womankind, and therefore unable to write poetry. As the novel opens, Isadora is on her way -- by plane -- to Vienna to attend a conference of psychoanalysts with her current husband. Psychoanalysis, a lifetime spent with "shrinks," looms very large throughout the book.


Jong keeps all this going because she is an excellent writer. The novel is almost plotless, but she can wring fascination and humor out of ramblings that essentially would do little credit to a twelve-year-old. At the conference, Isadora does meet and run off with Adrian Goodlove for a jaunt through Europe. Then, what a shock, he dumps her for his wife and children. But while they are together they simply have a lot of sex, or try to, and she tells him whole chapters' worth of details about the sex she has had in the past and why and where. Again and again, at points where another writer's prose would cope with a sunset or a wave-washed beach, and be called "beautiful," Jong copes with paragraphs-full of sexual puns -- and does it excellently.


Apart from plotlessness and really very unsensuous porn, the trouble with the book is that the characters are all so unpleasant, unhappy, wildly erudite, and humorless that it is hard to believe they are real human beings. Isadora's family's screaming fights, her own sexual adventures everywhere with anyone, her teenaged friends' brilliant locquaciousness about sex, her own locquaciousness with her first analyst (at 14, she reveals all -- about sex -- as coolly as a 30-year-old), her various husbands' ponderous pronouncements on literature, psychoanalysis, her state of mind, and sex, all eventually make the reader want to shout: for heaven's sake, not only is this unreal, but the basic need to work for a living, or raise a family, would have given all these characters a far greater challenge than anything they are enduring here. (It is strange that throughout her adventures, not only does Isadora's virtually fatherless family never interact except through horrible fights, but she herself never seems to have to worry about money.) Of course, work and a family are the bourgeois trap. The only mother of a large family in the book is shunted off to Lebanon to have her brood, and the only character holding a non-academic job, Isadora's first husband Brian, goes insane. The chapter on his breakdown is the best in the book.

The little scenes therefore, like Isadora's removing her diaphragm and then feeling her cervix for signs of pregnancy, become an icing on the cake of impossibility. Of course, it's all fiction; but Jong presents this fiction in an unmistakable "you-know-how-we-all-do-this" tone which beggars belief, and after a while beggars interest.


It would be useful to look back and see how Fear of Flying was reviewed when it first came out. There were so many shocking books and movies made in the late 1960s and 1970s, books and movies that seemed to throw off old shackles of decency (or oppression -- take your pick) and address topics that formerly were unacknowledged or at least not discussed in quite this way. Did Fear of Flying bust open doors, or merely follow through doors that had already been opened by somebody else? Isadora would fit perfectly into a Woody Allen movie, for one thing. Like Annie Hall, who is grateful for the strength to leave her room, Isadora cherishes the ability to write a letter as a triumph of emotional health.

So, did Erica Jong create one of the first women characters to bravely face thousands of years of patriarchy, or did she only help create a literature in which the caloric count of semen is considered noteworthy? I think I know my answer, but she entered the pantheon of feminist heroes such a long time ago that if I ever met her on the street, I'm sure I would find it hard to argue with deity.

The East India Company by Brian Gardner

Originally published in the Times of Northwest Indiana

The East India Company represents, in its 300 or so pages, the summarizing of a huge swath of history that the general reader would never have reason to know, unless he stumbled upon this book or one like it. For almost three centuries, however, from the time of the Company’s founding in the very last years of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign up until it was dissolved in the 1870s, its shareholders not only ventured into the spice trade and made a profit in good years – which was the original point of the venture – they also governed large parts of India, and sent their own armies, for better or for worse, into wildly exotic places like Kandahar and Kabul, to treat with local rulers.

When the Company sent its ships to India beginning in the 1600s, its employees met an unknown, fairy-tale world of steaming green jungles, heat, disease, fabulously rich potentates, and weird cruelties. Hindu widows were burned alive; a hidden religious sect called the Thugs waylaid and strangled travelers as part of their ritual. India’s Hindu population was governed in large part by their powerful Muslim conquerors, the Moghuls, but good-sized territories of the southern subcontinent remained independent fiefdoms fielding dangerous armies. To pursue trade meant the Company had to venture farther and farther from its first landing points, arranging treaties, greasing palms, and defending itself against shahs and khans who saw no good reason why Englishmen should suddenly appear unchallenged in Allahabad and beyond.

The French and the Russians saw no good reason for it either, nor did the Dutch, who had their own East India Company patrolling modern-day Indonesia. Enemies lay everywhere.
Men who survived to reach the top of the Company service did return to London with immense fortunes, sometimes, but many more died young and anonymous in India. By the 1830s, the entanglements of a commercial firm with this ethnic and religious maelstrom – imagine Microsoft governing Iraq, perhaps – required that the British Crown take things over.

Until reading this book, I had not realized that many of the topics and names that crop up either in biographies or in nice juicy historical novels set during this long period have, as their background, the existence of the East India Company. Robert Clive, the trial of Warren Hastings, the Black Hole of Calcutta, the early career of the young Duke of Wellington, the massacre (and later, retribution) at Cawnpore, even the existence of the famed Raffles Hotel (named for Company employee Sir Stamford Raffles, founder of Singapore) – all may be glanced upon in other books, but are subject headings in the Company’s long history. Brian Gardner’s book is a good overview of the major points. His prose style is not the most thrilling in the world, but I do think anything that shines a light on this great tract of fairly recent history, and then brightens up other, juicier reading, is very worthwhile.

Two Victorian Families by Betty Askwith

Originally published in the Times of Northwest Indiana

Thirty-six years ago, when Betty Askwith sat down to write about two prominent English families, they were perhaps fading from memory but not as obscure as they have become now. The Stracheys had produced Lytton Strachey, famous for his irreverent book Eminent Victorians; the Bensons, a family headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, were all literary, none more so than the younger son E.F. Benson, who wrote the exquisite social comedy novels known together as Mapp and Lucia. Askwith also chose these two families to represent the Victorian age because each functioned in a major sphere of English life, either in colonial government service or in the established church. She also seems to have chosen them because one family was happy and the other unhappy.

The Stracheys were a family of ten children, boisterously active and reveling in a full social life which included the legions of eccentric aunts and uncles whom, Askwith says, modern families of one or two children no longer know. The parents had met in India, and most of the older children spent their adult lives helping administer India when it was Britain’s colony. The Bensons were a family of six, quieter, more troubled, more serious. The father, a handsome Anglican churchman, chose his bride when she was twelve years old, in the sentimental I-shall-wait-for-you-to-grow-up fashion that Victorians found touching. Deep religious faith, which the Stracheys seem not to have had, was both a lifelong comfort and a torment to the Bensons. The Archbishop wrestled with theology while facing the death of a son, and his wife did the same as she faced her recurring passions for other women.

We think of the Victorians as staid and prudish, but as Askwith points out, we can be astonished at the depth of the "extraordinary and unconventional" relationships they had. Other things make us realize if nothing else how tough and how robust they were. Illness, bad teeth, and unmedicated childbirth were the norm. So was the sudden death of the young from infectious disease. A pleasure trip to see relatives in India took months to accomplish, and its comfort levels made it the equivalent of adventure travel today. Entertainment consisted of amateur theatricals and reading Dickens aloud. And by the way, both the Strachey and the Benson daughters went to college.

And the Victorians wrote letters. Endlessly. The Stracheys chronicled growing up, marrying, travel, and politics. The Bensons chronicled each other and their moods, until the last of them died in 1940. Perhaps the Victorians did a little too much letter-writing, for it could conceivably amount to a picking at wounds. But the habit provided the source for Betty Askwith’s sympathetic and intelligent book, and for that we can be grateful.

Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana

Master and Commander is the first of Patrick O’Brian’s series of sixteen Aubrey-Maturin novels, that is, novels set in the British Royal Navy of the late 1700s and early 1800s whose main characters are Captain Jack Aubrey and medical officer Dr. Stephen Maturin. Aubrey is the gallant, diamond-in-the-rough type, fearless and good, if somewhat less than whip-smart. Maturin is the scholar, the landlubber, the reader’s stand-in: nautical terms and rules of engagement are explained to him, and he in turn observes Captain Aubrey and the ship’s crew for us.

Since Patrick O’Brian has great respect for his readers’ abilities, this book will probably provoke one of two reactions right away. You might simply give up at all the technical sailing vocabulary, or you might decide to let the mizzenmast-and-fo’c’sle talk wash over you, and get on with the gist of the story. The story concerns the activities of the sloop Sophie, cruising the western Mediterranean in 1800 under orders to protect neutral shipping convoys and do what damage it can to French and Spanish interests in this era of the Napoleonic wars. There are half a dozen fiery battles, interspersed with emotional battles among Aubrey, Maturin, and the ship’s first officer Dillon, all of whom keep dangerous secrets from each other.

One of the marks of a really good historical novel is that it recreates attitudes and situations that we would never have thought of, precisely because times have changed. Captain Aubrey and Dr. Maturin both are devoted amateur musicians, who take time off whenever they can to hear concerts and play duets together. They use wonderful archaic words like "tumefaction" and "mammothrept." They also have unthinking religious prejudices which would horrify us, but which are truly not sinister given the characters’ fundamentally decent behavior throughout the book. Jack Aubrey "hates Papists," because he "heard that they are cruel." In truth he doesn’t hate anybody, but the author has given him a character trait appropriate to an 18th-century Englishman. Lovers of history will appreciate the glorious little trick by which O'Brian ties his fictional Jack into the life of the very real Samuel Johnson, via a girl -- also real -- named Queenie.

What the reader will take away from Master and Commander, above all, is an appreciation of the fantastic amount of work and knowledge that went into manning the sailing ships of two centuries ago. Sophie would be a mare’s nest of sails and ropes for a modern time-traveler, not to mention the confusion of loading, swabbing out, and firing cannons by hand, and of making a ship move by adjusting to the wind. (Only the North African Muslim pirate galleys had the luxury of oar power, propelled as they were by Christian slaves. Captain Aubrey encounters this authentic bit of the 18th century Mediterranean, too.) O’Brian further mesmerizes by pointing out that, while his characters are fictional, his whole story comes from primary sources. "The admirable men of those times," he says in a short preface, "are best celebrated in their own splendid actions."

A Gardener's Year by Katharine Twomey

Originally appeared in the Times of Northwest Indiana

A Gardener’s Year is one of those books that libraries tend to discard because it has not been checked out in twenty-four years. And it is one of those books that tends not to be checked out because, perhaps, the library patron browsing the gardening shelf takes it down to look at it and sees a collection of short, almost abrupt essays, not written by an expert, published by an obscure, long-gone press, and asks himself – "Why do I need to know what this lady did with her garden in Hot Springs, South Dakota, in 1973?"

We don’t need to know what she did, of course, but the book is a little triumph of charm. Katharine Twomey seems to have written at a time when an ordinary person – do we dare say, a busy housewife – could "contribute scores of articles on horticulture to newspapers throughout the Plains States" detailing little more than her own amateur experiences in, and ruminations about, her garden now, and her memories of gardens past.

These essays did not cost her much effort, which is not to say that they are not good. They are lovely, unhurried, highly personal; she assumes that she can hold people’s interest in simple stories of grasshopper invasions, of the hunt for flowers that will not bring on her husband’s hayfever, and of the depredations to the perennial bed caused by the family dog. Taste in reading matter is highly personal, and it may be that through all this she cannot hold many people’s interest, which is why my copy of A Gardener’s Year was last stamped DUE in May of 1984. I like these kinds of gentle, idiosyncratic essays. The writer is not trying to impress, she hasn’t a slew of professional citations to back up her work. She is simply one human being recording her ideas for the possible pleasure of another.

And all this is not to imply that the book is all sweetness and light and has no backbone whatever. The collection’s great strength is that it details the adventures of the distinctly amateur gardener. As Twomey points out early on, the respected garden writers of yesteryear were often well-to-do people, living in bosky climates, with a staff of servants to do their work. Miss Gertrude Jekyll, comfortable herself, designed gardens for the estates of wealthy Englishmen. She could plan "vistas" and experiment with her famed color schemes to her heart’s content. Katharine Twomey was much more like the rest of us. She lived in an ordinary house and coped with the ordinary problems of gardening around the garage beneath a vista of telephone wires. She also coped with the expense. "You see a lovely iris in a catalogue and you order one – yes, one," she writes.

Winter is the best time for reading gardening books, as Twomey points out, and her own book might prove more encouraging, come spring, than all the up-to-date and expert advice you can find.