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.

Pagans and Christians by Robin Lane Fox

I think three months -- or was it four? -- to slog through a 681-page book on antiquity's epochal change from paganism to Christianity, which has sat on my shelves for twenty years and whose author may have long since died for all I know, is all right, isn't it? And did I say that right?

Robin Lane Fox's aims in Pagans and Christians are staggeringly ambitious, and are set out right there on the dust jacket for all to see and cope with, or flee as the case may be. I salute whatever book designer it was who composed this summary and squeezed it below a large illustration, but above the (large-print) title and (small-print) author's name. The summary announces sternly, RELIGION AND THE RELIGIOUS LIFE FROM THE SECOND TO THE FOURTH CENTURY A.D., WHEN THE GODS OF OLYMPUS LOST THEIR DOMINION AND CHRISTIANITY, WITH THE CONVERSION OF CONSTANTINE, TRIUMPHED IN THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD.

Oh, that.

I write in some exasperation only because the author annoyed me just a tad, on page 662, as I finished the book this morning. In one paragraph on this page it seemed to me that he negated two major theses for his entire book, and took his reader right back to the standard arguments for this epochal change, encapsulations of which you could probably find on Wikipedia this minute: that ancient paganism died because pagans were tired of its hopelessness, tired of not knowing whether to fear or not fear their goofy little statue-gods.

But that was just one paragraph, on page 662. Perhaps I missed some nuance in the previous 661 pages which would have proved to me that it all fit right in and that Mr. Fox had not thereby contradicted himself wholesale at all.

If I am confused I can't blame his writing style, which is excellent throughout. It is plain, elegant, respectful of the reader's intelligence, but blessedly un-academic. I find it curious, though, that after six hundred-odd pages of it, interspersed with lots of deeply careful tracings and retracings of this source or that, this letter, that inscription, this translation of that reference only known in Eusebius until a fragment of a papyri turned up in Egypt in 1980 -- dear me, you shouldn't dismiss with mimicry historians' tremendous hard work, but sometimes it just seems you have to -- I find it curious that what he ends up saying is simply that Christianity "triumphed" because, after a while, more people liked Christianity than liked paganism.

Of course that's not the only reason for the collapse of the old gods' dominion. I would say the fundamental story Mr. Fox is telling in the book is that, circa 300 A.D., an ageless pagan religious worldview in which communities of people from time to time sought the help or knowledge or mercy of the gods through the interpretation of dreams, or through civic celebrations and attendance at professionally staffed (but still genuinely eerie or "uncanny") oracles, gave way to a new Christian worldview in which individuals, possibly saved for heaven by Christ's sacrifice but also uniquely commanded to moral behavior, suddenly admitted the authority of a holy scripture into their private lives. Sin therefore as a daily worry, including sin in thought, and eternal life as a daily hope, were new. When enough people adopted this worldview, contributed money to it, lived by it, and caused it to shape society -- in other words, when "Christian business became public business" -- it rose to govern not only private lives, but the formerly pagan Roman state.

In Fox's telling, pagans seem to have adopted Christianity piecemeal, for a variety of reasons some of which remain mysterious. One of his major themes is "overachievement." Especially in its very early days when Christ's second coming was believed to be imminent and the faithful postponed baptism until they had reached an absolutely perfect sinless state worthy of it, the new religion held up standards of interior moral scrutiny and vivid spiritual achievement that appealed, and will always appeal, to certain personality types. (Christianity also eventually introduced to the world, he thinks, a commensurate phenomenon, the slacker majority.) The "years of instruction and preparation" for that baptism also appealed, making people feel "they were exploring a deep mystery, step by step." Christian belief in the power of the holy Spirit as a link between God and man, "the source of man's knowledge of himself, a power of conscience which pagan teaching had not recognized," was also new and led, for believers, to a "new and immediate miracle: a potential change in human nature itself" (pp. 314-316).

Persecution and martyrdom, when they happened, could impress witnesses, and sometimes prompted more conversions. After the passing of a few centuries, pagans in the ancient world, still very much the multitude -- the vitality of pagan worship and culture throughout this period is another major theme -- nevertheless noticed that Christians took care of their sick, widowed, orphaned, and elderly in organized ways that pagans did not necessarily do. They noticed also that Christians, along with Jews, held to indubitably higher standards on what we might tactfully call social issues. They "vigorously attacked" infanticide, the exposure of children, and abortion and, when they attained real power, they outlawed violent gladitorial shows.

What did early Christianity lack? After all, many pagans were never interested in it. Many witnesses of martyrdom did not watch in respectful awe, but blanched at what seemed Christians' grotesque zeal, and tried to reason eager victims out of their immolatory frenzy by pointing out the lovely earth and lovely weather, and asking whether it wasn't good to be alive, even if it did mean paying lip service to some Olympian formula for a minute. And Christianity stubbed its toe against a number of empirical problems. The decades and centuries passed, and Christ did not return, nor did the world end. Hope of eternal life with Jesus ("the wholly new idea of man's Redemption") was a beautiful thing, but the actual resurrection of the body seemed to most people a demonstrably foolish idea. Open any grave and see what's left of the human body after a little while -- and besides, if everybody comes back, how is all our property to be divided? Christian refusal to participate in "Romanity" (merely saying prayers for the safety of the Emperor, for instance), their concern to police each other's beliefs -- as the Church grew, "heresy" grew -- and what seemed their sterile glorification of celibacy, virginity, and chaste widowhood all struck pagans as hard and atheistical refutations of the human project. A project which could be summed up, I suppose, in the word civilian.

Civilian, in the sense of being civil? Not exactly. But the word isn't chosen at random. Very early in Pagans and Christians, Fox explains that the word pagan is an ancient Christian slang term, applied in the sense of "civilian," non-combatant, to people who were not yet soldiers in the army of Christ, enlisted to fight Satan.

The book closes with Christianity's triumph under the Emperor Constantine, who converted and then really made things happen. Lone, powerful men can do that. Among other acts he built churches, ended persecutions, and decreed that any party in any lawsuit could appeal to that new authority figure, the Christian bishop, for judgment -- and the bishop's decision then bound any other judge (p. 667). With the passage of time, Constantine gained to his side the most powerful argument of all, that the sky had not fallen with Christianity's usurping of the ancient gods' powers, and therefore they obviously had none and perhaps never did. "The lack of divine reprisals," it seemed, "did show that the 'anger' of the gods was no match for Christ" (p. 672). And in time, Fox argues, Christian worship fell into the patterns familiar to pagan life, patterns which he seems to think are natural to the human mind: long-dead saints began to "appear" to believers, as protecting gods did to Homer's heroes, and artists began to paint and make mosaics of Jesus' face, whose true lineaments no one knew.

The book is so rich in scholarship that anyone could pick out a different handful of themes and write a completely different review which would still be an accurate summation and yet not do the author justice. I'm sure I've overlooked topics or arguments which anyone else would consider major. Monasticism, the role of the wealthy urban religious patron, confession and confessors; and I've overlooked the little anecdotes from the modern day that Fox sprinkles throughout the book, and that help prove his point that "the transition from paganism to Christianity is where the ancient world still touches ours." He was writing in the 1980s, when Yugoslavia was on the brink of falling apart -- not that anyone knew it -- and little girls in Medjugorje were seeing visions exactly as had the martyrs of two millenia before, and the Homeric heroes of two millenia before that. What did they see, and why? "No generation," he says in his preface, "can afford to ignore whether Christianity is true and, if it is not, why it has spread and persisted."

For a Christian reader, this last statement will exemplify a great flaw in the book. Obviously the author is not a believing Christian, and so is cut off from simple truths. He nowhere quotes "For God so loved the world ...." For my part, I found the ending puzzling. He seems to try very hard, and to want to, but to actually tie nothing up. When it grew strong enough, yes, the Christian church eventually stamped out Mediterranean paganism. After Constantine made them safe, individual Christians could pull down pagan shrines without fear of reprisals, and the church could and did torture into silence the staff at pagan oracles. The official Christian view became that paganism had at best only prophesied the coming of Christ and Christianity, and had done nothing else on a day to day basis for the people living by it. By about the year 500 A.D., the pagan story was over.

Fair enough, and fairly clear. But Fox concludes with a short ramble concerning the Sibyl, prophecy, a church built over a Sibylline oracle at Rome, and then a vague worried hint that if Christianity in turn collapses, all religious experience must cease. Why? (This is a pretty large claim with which to end a book.) Because "yet 'not to everyone do the gods appear ...' " So ... some human beings will always receive some kind of epiphany, -- yet not?

At this point, one is tempted to take a break, turn to a google search, and see just for curiosity's sake whether the old fellow is still alive. Why, my goodness, yes he is! And who am I calling old? Just in his sixties. And even got a cameo in a movie he consulted for. Well, well. I must rearrange my ideas, and stop picturing a white-haired soul in a Bath chair, lap robe, and slippers, sitting by a fire in Oxford and scribbling notes in Latin. And no mistake: it's a great, great book.

Dancers in Mourning by Margery Allingham

Boring, cold, confusing, voiceless. Either the author is out of her depth, or I am. "He had honestly forgotten whether a horror is a greater shock than an anti-climax." Say what? And the detective is burdened with a tragic on-site love affair, philosophically correctly described, but unfelt. No go.

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.

Plutarch: The Life of Alexander

The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans is one of those gigantic classics that you fear to approach. Who is this author, and what is he about? His book was the foundation of upper-class education from at least the Renaissance forward, it seems; I have elusive memories of reading that this queen or that, this general or that one, found his ambitions stirred by an adolescence spent with a solitary burning candle and, simply, the Lives.

Yet to turn to more modern appreciations is to learn that, according to our correct worldview and our standards of scholarship, Plutarch had this fault or that, or was secretly laboring under this agenda or another. My Modern Library reprint of the standard 1864 (!) edition warns, loftily as up-to-date scholarship always does, "in reading Plutarch, the following points should be remembered ...." "Not a historian, etc. ... not interested in politics ... careless about numbers ... passion for anecdote ... unsatisfactory and imperfect." I daresay the queens and generals who found inspiration in him simply lit the candle, sat down, and began reading, skipping any Renaissance introductions that warned them what to think.

Plutarch beats his modern critics to the punch anyway, giving them the authority to tell us what they tell us in their prefaces, in the opening paragraph of the Life of Alexander. "It must be borne in mind," he says, "that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men." (His redactor and reviser of 1864, Arthur Hugh Clough, agrees: Plutarch is a moralist, not a historian.)

Very well. The moral tale that Plutarch tells through episodes in the life of the great king, one of the three or four greatest figures in Western history, seems to be one of the youthful, civilized prince wrestling with the corruptions and jealousies stirred up during his spectacular march of conquest against a once-dreaded and still oppressively powerful foe, Persia. Persia was the rich, the decadent, the hateful barbarian east. Alexander of Macedon -- Macedon being, to good Greeks, the rude barbarian north -- lived one hundred and fifty years after Greece's glory days, when Athenians and Spartans and all together fought off Persia's terrifying embrace in battles at Salamis, Thermopylae, and Marathon (think 300). Judging from Plutarch's story, however, there does not seem to have been any immediately pressing reason why Alexander, at the head of a Greek and Macedonian army circa 330 BC, should have ventured forth just now to invade the haunts of long-dead Xerxes. No reason outside the personal, which seems to have suited as the political.

So we begin with Alexander's lineage and birth ("on the sixth of Hecatombaeon, the month the Macedonians call Lous, on the same day that the temple of Diana at Ephesus was burnt"), and his parents' domestic problems. Rumor had it that early on his father Philip, king of Macedon, espied his wife, Alexander's mother Olympia, sleeping beside a huge serpent. This "abated his passion for her." This was a world in which weird things happened and the young grew up fast. Alexander was taming the wild horse Bucephalus, receiving ambassadors, and flinging wine cups at grown men at wedding banquets -- his father married a new wife while Olympia was still around -- when still in his teens.

At twenty, he became king upon his father's murder. The empire that Philip had conquered for Macedon, from the country of barbarian tribes on the Danube to the once-free cities of Greece, saw the chance and revolted. And Alexander, in bringing them all to heel, began the military career that ended only with his death in distant Babylon little more than ten years later.

He moved north first, to give the king of the Triballians "an entire overthrow," and then he moved south and sacked Thebes, killing six thousand and selling a further 30,000 citizens into slavery ("in aftertime he often repented of his severity to the Thebans"). Upon this, Athens and "the Grecians" thought better of any further remonstrances with the young warlord, and agreed instead to join him in his war against the Persians. He ventured east, with an army of at most 43,000 "foot" and three or four thousand "horse," not considered much with which to face great Darius, descendant of Xerxes, king of kings.

The battles between the two civilizations raged at various points in modern day Turkey and Syria. Alexander captured Darius' family, and treated them well. In mid-campaign he felt free enough to venture down the Phoenician coast to Gaza and then into Egypt, where he ordered the founding of the city of Alexandria after dreaming that a Homer-quoting old man told him he should. Returning to the business of battling Persia, he marched east again, rejected a peace offer from Darius, and finally fought things out at Gaugamela. Plutarch records that the Persian forces came down from the Euphrates a million strong. They lost, Darius once again escaping, but only briefly, with his life.

Alexander was now king of Asia. Ancient Persian cities with mellifluous-sounding names, Babylon, Susa, Ecbatana, were his. Plutarch writes of the king gazing at a statue of Xerxes, toppled in the chaos of occupation, and asking himself whether it should be left in the dust as punishment for that monarch having once invaded Greece, or put back "in consideration of the greatness of thy mind and other virtues." He left it.

But then he and his soldiers got rich, proud, and bored. Much of the rest of the Life is a tale of court intrigue, drink, traitorous ambition, and increasingly harsh and unreasonable punishments handed down from an increasingly godlike throne. All those good rough-limbed Macedonians resented witnessing Alexander's gradual adoption of barbarian eastern clothes, and resented also his promotion of young Persian men to high responsibility. At his nadir the king speared a friend to death during a drunken quarrel, and then nearly committed suicide on the spot. There was little remedy for the emotional mess except further marches, always further east, always more activity and more war.

He marched against Parthia, against the Scythians, and finally turned his eyes toward India. When he determined to cross the Ganges, his men refused to follow him any farther. He raged, sulked, and then accepted fate. Now he became a tourist; he traveled only very slowly back west, disputing with captured Indian philosophers, taking months to sail down rivers and visit the ocean, and then proceeding back by land while his fleet hugged the Indian shore. He lost, Plutarch says, three-fourths of his 120,000 man army in India to disease, heat, and famine.

When he reached Persia, he became a kind of celebratory divine tourist. Now it was time to hold banquets for nine thousand guests at a time, to marry Darius' daughter -- although, like father like son, he already had a wife in the mysterious Roxana -- and as usual to break up fights between Macedonian troops and the Persian "dancing boys" who worshiped him as a god. Warned by an augur not to go to Babylon, he went, and there contracted a fever and died after ten days' illness. Plutarch's spinning down of the story is abrupt, professorial, cool. Roxana killed the other wife and threw her body down a well.

The reader is left with the impression that after all Alexander's gigantic, violent life, there would not have been much else for him to do but die young. We can look at him on his deathbed, rather godlike ourselves, and say okay, you're done. Enough killing. But as moderns, we're also unconsciously trained to feel a certain disdain for the personality types who conquer empires from horseback, and inflame the breasts of men reading by candlelight a thousand or two thousand years later. In reality, he was a man you or I would not have dared make eye contact with. One of his own subordinates, later a king of Macedon himself, once had so frightening an interview with him that years later he suffered a panic attack on unexpectedly seeing Alexander's statue.

So it's not the case that his death somehow represents a career exhaustion that he could not have remedied. If Alexander had lived, and kept moving west and homeward, he might have transformed the Mediterranean world even more than he did anyway by the example of his life and by the physical fact of the empire he created being subsequently in the hands of his three best generals and their dynasties. Imagine him living long enough to shape a Mediterranean world in which, who knows? -- there might have been no Rome. It was possible. Who would need a Rome, when there was still an Alexander centuries beforehand, still making really big decisions?

Plutarch doesn't give grand pronouncements or summations of this Life, moralist though he may be. We read of Alexander's physical courage and his military ability for ourselves, just as we read that flattery made him lawless and bad advice made him cruel. Nowhere, in fact, does the author ever call him "the Great." When the story is done, it's done. Next up, at the bottom of the page: The Life of Caesar. "After Sylla became master of Rome, he wished to make Caesar put away his wife, Cornelia ...."

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.

Beeton's Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton

When modern Western women complain about long-standing sexism in society, I sometimes want to lift a dubious eyebrow, and then glance meaningfully at something like Isabella Beeton's Book of Household Management, published in London -- apparently by the family firm, S.O. Beeton -- in 1861. A sexist society, a woman trapped in a sexist society, does not just vomit out an achievement like this.

I glance at it meaningfully, that is, assuming I've found it. My local library has a facsimile edition of the book, printed in 1969. It is just about two inches thick, its pages closely printed with Victorian-looking type, and all bound in that wonderful, rock-hard, plain reinforced library binding that sets an antique book-collector's pulse a-quiver. My, what have we here?

What we have is a massive "modern" cookbook, whose recipes include exact amounts for ingredients, plus estimates of the time and expense required for each dish. There are many illustrations, both color drawings and woodcuts. There are explanations of all foods and where they come from; Mrs. Beeton, I think, was still heir to a scholarly tradition which insisted that anyone demanding the public's notice in a book lay out for it the most fundamental proofs of intent to attack the book's subject with absolute thoroughness and understanding. "The exercise or diversion of pursuing four-footed beasts of game is called hunting...." Well, yes, it is. This, mind you, only comes on page 508, after all the chapters on soups, fish, and meat, and before the chapters on vegetables, puddings, breads, and bills of fare. Before all that, she started her book with chapters on the role of the mistress of the home ("the treatment of servants is of the highest possible moment"), and she concludes it with information on the duties of these servants, on the upkeep of the stables, on child rearing, on when to summon the doctor, and at last on "legal memoranda."

It is all a breathtaking accomplishment. One wonders if, like Shakespeare, there was anything this woman did not know. She is, for example, the first author I have happened to come across, who has made me understand what poaching was -- not poaching in the sense of cooking an egg, but in the sense of killing someone else's wild game illegally. Poachers, it seems, were the drug dealers of previous eras. They supplied something which the wealthy wanted, and which could only be bought, because all wild game lived perforce on noblemen's estates and therefore was construed to belong to them as the gift of the sovereign from whom they technically held their lands. If you were not a good friend of the Duke of Soandso, to be invited to his country house for a haunch of venison brought down by his people, then you had to buy the product. From somebody. The law's penalties for poaching were "very severe," Mrs. Beeton acknowledges. And they "will never" work. With hard-headed sense she writes that the wealthy but socially unconnected will have their game, and thus must continue to encourage poaching, "which, to a very large extent, must continue to render all game laws nugatory as to their intended effect upon the rustic population."

One of the delights of an old cookbook is the information provided about basic, almost medieval- style food preparation and preservation techniques which we no longer have to bother about. The human race probably took a long time learning this, learning how to eat safely: perhaps it is just as well that it is written down somewhere, for what will become of us if the good people at the sausage-making and jelly-making corporations should forget why they do what they do? Mrs. Beeton knows how to smoke and pickle meat, how to take the cream off milk -- it must be put in a shallow pan, because cream cannot rise through a great depth of milk -- how to gut a freshly killed suckling pig, how to dry cherries.

She also seems to know everything about every other household task, event, or problem which may arise. She knows the duties of a maid-of-all-work (they started their careers at age thirteen), how to iron a lady's fine clothes, under what circumstances the cook should also help make beds, and how to pay "calls." Is it a condolence call? A visit of friendship? A morning call? And be warned, you young people. An introduction at a ball does not count as a proper introduction. No gentleman, afterwards, has the right to address a lady. "She is, consequently, free, next morning, to pass her partner at a ball of the previous evening without the slightest recognition." Probably a most wise rule.

Mrs. Beeton has also been deep inside the nursery and has seen things, in this era before modern medicine, that most of us have, again, been spared. Of course she knows the trouble that young mothers have with their early experiences of breast-feeding -- keep the nipples dry afterward, and get a breast pump for the excess -- and she is adamant against the practice of bringing the baby into the parents' bed. It is an invitation to accidental smothering. But she has also seen babies die, of the mysterious causes that seem to have killed so many in their first hours, causes that responded to no treatments whatever. "Sometimes, however, all these means will fail in effecting an utterance from the child, which will lie, with livid lips and a flaccid body, every few minutes opening its mouth with a short gasping pant, and then subsiding into a state of pulseless inaction, lingering probably some hours, till the spasmodic pantings growing further apart, it ceases to exist."

But the bulk of Household Management is its recipes. Are any of them worth following today? Although a calf's head complete with palate, eye, tongue, and brains, will surely never be brought to a table again, I think quite a few of the less gothic recipes are worthwhile. What is daunting about her book is the amount of food she expects to be served at any and every meal. This is the age of servants, we must remember. A "plain family dinner" for November, for example, is fried soles and melted butter, roast leg of pork with apple sauce and vegetables, and macaroni with parmesan cheese (this whole menu constitutes item number 2110 -- Mrs. Beeton has the book arranged brilliantly thus, with every new paragraph, recipe, or piece of advice numbered. Number 2152, for example, specifies "Beverages not to be forgotten at a picnic." Don't bother with water, you can get that anywhere.)

Anyway I don't know if I am equal to dishing out all that one plain family night soon, but many of her individual recipes are simple and worthwhile because in this era before refrigeration, convenience, and waste, she made great use of leftovers and of single, seasonal ingredients. Her baked tomatoes under butter and bread crumbs sound very good (No. 1158). So does her leftover beef stewed with gravy and three bunches of celery (No. 667). Some of her recipes are painstakingly professional, like No. 1350, a casserole of rice which is baked with pieces of bread in it, to hold open places which will then be stuffed with meat "ragout" when the bread is removed. Some of her recipes show an imagination -- or a use of seasonal, cheap ingredients -- that I have never seen before (No. 1397, "A pretty dish of apples and rice"). And then as you flip along happily through the book, you'll come across things like the addendum to item No. 1627, in which the authoress describes what sounds like lactose intolerance. Or the addendum to No. 451, (about pickles) in which she says that really the mark of a thrifty and accomplished mistress, as opposed to the lady "to whom these desirable epithets may not honestly be applied," lies in her arrangement and labeling of the things in her store closet. It is such a saving of time and trouble to be able to lay one's hands instantly on what is wanted.

True enough, though nowadays we flatter ourselves that liberated women have more important things to do. I wonder. Until our own era produces another Mrs. Beeton, I think I'll flip happily through her massive tome, and go on wondering.