Wildly dull. So much so that I wonder at the awareness of the author. At some point, doesn't a writer step back from his work and think, "my God, this is going to bore people to death"? We all write dull things occasionally; editors help correct that propensity, usually. The wonder is that this got published even with an editor's help.
Not that the book isn't competently assembled, and the sentences grammatical and sometimes artful. The trouble is that the author is trying to tell a story without telling a story. He wants to recreate a real historical incident, about the well-meaning quack doctor Mesmer in 18th century Vienna whose name has entered our language in the term "mesmerize," without actually stooping to any kind of clarity about people, places, or events. The brief tale is told in chapters narrated as memoirs by the handful of main characters -- doctor, patient, patient's father. It seems that one of Mesmer's patients or subjects was a young woman surnamed Paradies, whose father was an official at the court of the Empress Maria Theresa and who was herself an accomplished pianist. She was blind, and at 18 her parents submitted her to Mesmer's care for a cure for this. Mesmer had strange ideas about fluids and "animal magnetism." ("I see it as a luminous sheath of weightless extension which binds the stars and our souls in one glowing substance ....") He believed he could help people suffering any variety of ills by massaging this fluid through their bodies, until they achieved some sort of "crisis," at which point his assistants, hale young men, would bear off the spasming patient to a padded room and close the door on the screams.
This would be terrific stuff in the hands of a good professional women's romance novelist, but O'Doherty, I fear, prefers to be an artiste. Instead of anything that might keep our attention, we get long pages on father Paradies, disappointed in his daughter's cure, wondering how he can pull strings at court to get Mesmer disgraced without seeming petty or scheming himself. Mozart wanders in, because the time frame is right -- although the brief note at the end of the book tells us that in fact Mozart and Mlle. P. actually met, and he wrote a concerto for her (B flat, K. 456). Marie Antoinette lurks on the sidelines, as do the scientists who went to the guillotine during the French Revolution, also because the time is right.
The best chapter is the one told from the point of view of Mlle. P. herself. The problem with Mesmer's cure of her is that it worked. She began to regain her sight, but the overload of new information that this brought her became a worse handicap than the blindness she had learned to cope with. There are very interesting pages here on what it must be like for a person to suddenly face a world in which he is expected to take in knowledge through his eyes. Mlle has no understanding of perspective; objects appear to her as in a Cubist painting, their angles and shadows ever-changing and meaningless. She has no experience associating words with the physical look of objects. To her, a "table" may as well be a "cat" -- she is in the midst of learning a foreign language on several levels, and so her mistakes under quizzing make her look like an imbecile. "To me the Danube looked like a white ribbon that I could reach out and pick up. It had no character of water that I could see."
Her own crisis comes when her new sight ruins her ability to play the piano, which is her meal ticket at the Empress' court and in life. Distracted by the visual chaos of sheet music and by the spectacle of her hands' gyrations, she regresses to such a point that her father removes her from Mesmer's house. Then the story winds down, but ever so slowly. Mesmer leaves Vienna for Paris, and Mlle P. carries on, offstage, playing and earning a living as a teacher. The well meaning quack, at eighty, suffers agonies of guilt for having erotic dreams about her. He massages his fluids.
So there is interesting matter here, but O'Doherty has chosen to spin it out as half a dozen very long winded and overthought diary entries graced by absolutely no conversation nor any other devices to move the reader forward through a story. You'll learn more, more enjoyably, from the jacket flap summary, which has to be about the last thing an author would want to hear about his novel.
Except the jacket flap also says the book is "thriller-like." As the modern vernacular puts it: um, no.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Queen Isabella by Alison Weir
Writing biographies of medieval queens has to be tricky. We know these women led interesting lives, sometimes hideously so. Yet if the author dutifully chronicles only the lady's life, he ends up telling us how she traveled from this manor to that, or gave that gift or this to some monastery, poor man, or relative. If, instead, he chronicles the grand events of the day, he ends up telling us of the activities of the lady's male family members, who were the ones most deeply involved in the action.
And how does the biographer handle the question of female authority, circa 1300? Were women monarchs uniquely incapable, or did all the talent in the world fail to protect them from the trouble caused by men who could not stomach female authority? Modern authors are anxious to cope with this question, with general questions of responsibility and guilt, but they are also anxious to obey our modern world's self-understanding that we are uniquely enlightened compared to all previous generations. We understand sex, sexism, class, classism, (good) judgment and (bad) judgmentalism. The biographer's woman subject must be held accountable for her deeds; but if she happens to be a queen vilified in previous histories, then the modern author is anxious also to be different and fresh, and find ways in which she is not guilty.
All of this is a tribute to Alison Weir, and the mammoth amount of work she has put into this biography of Isabella, "the She-wolf of France." Very much in the style of Tudor historian David Starkey, she has assembled every primary source in the universe and gone through them in chronological order, explaining month by month and sometimes day by day, for a lifetime lasting from 1295 to 1358, where the queen was and what she did, or what the people around her did. It's a brilliant approach -- are they taught to do this, in Oxford perhaps? -- but one trouble with it is that it doesn't tell a story. Another trouble with it is that, for long stretches while a queen didn't do much, we have to hear about the decor of her palaces and who built them and when. And when she arrived at what gate, and who greeted her. The one life event which modern biographers of queens tend to ignore is their experience of childbirth, which I for one would like to know more about. Of course the mechanics of that don't change much, but I'd like to know how anybody survived it then and how exactly the midwives and physicians cared for their patients.
Queen Isabella's story can be briefly summarized, which Weir does in a preliminary chapter. A daughter of the King of France, she was married off at the age of twelve (1308) to King Edward II, the son of England's mighty King Edward I. Edward made a habit of falling in love with, raising up and then toying with and essentially destroying male lovers, first Piers Gaveston and then Hugh Despenser. Edward not only fawned shockingly and physically over these favorites -- he gave Gaveston the little queen Isabella's wedding jewels, for a start -- he allotted them such power that they strutted as demi kings through exchequer, government, and other people's private property, dangerously outraging powerful barons and the commons alike. Piers Gaveston survived two exiles and two recalls to his master's side, but did not survive a third; Hugh Despenser might have taken heed and given the king a wide berth, however handsome and rich he was. He did not.
Youth, virtuous obedience, and childbearing kept Isabella too busy to raise any kind of standard of revolt until the 1320s. By this time, though Gaveston was long dead, the Despensers (there was a father and son) had become such tyrants that she feared for her own life at their hands. They had already stripped her of much of her income and separated her from her children, with the king's acquiescence if not worse. She fled to her homeland, France, formed an open liaison with the dashing exiled English traitor Roger Mortimer, and with him sailed back to England at the head of an army determined to overthrow the king and his minions.
They succeeded in this, the first more or less constitutional deposition of an English king. The Despensers suffered hanging, drawing, and quartering, as befitted traitors, with castration while bound to a fifty-foot high ladder thrown in for the younger man. (Isabella watched.) Edward II abdicated in favor of his son, was imprisoned and then he was either murdered grotesquely or he escaped to become a hermit in Italy. Alison Weir works hard to convince us of this latter possibility, but, amateur though I am, I doubt it. It all hinges on feckless Edward, who liked nothing better than to dig ditches and pitch hay with common men, quietly murdering a poor porter one night and then fleeing in the porter's clothes. That is the action of a hero, not an Edward II.
Isabella and Mortimer then spent a few, a very few years enjoying power as regents for the heir, Isabella's firstborn prince Edward. The lovers turned out to be just as rapacious and tyrannical as any previous favorites of the previous, useless king. As the young prince's eighteenth birthday and therefore his majority approached, he became so alarmed at what his mother and her lover might do to maintain their authority that he launched a coup on his own behalf. It was an actual one-night, one-chance cloak and dagger affair, complete with underground passageways into a castle and then -- the breaking up of a sinister meeting, and the seventeen year old boy standing with sword drawn outside his mother's rooms, ignoring her shrieks for mercy as Mortimer was dragged away. That's the action of a hero.
Mortimer was only beheaded. King Edward III claimed his crown (1330), and after a short spell out of the public eye, which she spent either recovering from a stillbirth or nervous collapse or both, Isabella lived the rest of her life in comfort, in this manor and that, as Queen Mother and grande dame. She entertained visitors. She enjoyed her grandchildren. She gossiped with other formidable ladies, visiting queens and duchesses, daughters and cousins and aunts who all could have told life stories almost as gamy as her own. Who says women are ignored by history? Oh, and yes -- the Black Death came, in 1348, when she was in her fifties. She survived.
What the reader gets from this book, I think, amid all the details of chronology and the speculation that ventures toward the Hollywoodesque (Edward II as Italian hermit secretly visiting his son in England in the 1330s -- really?) is finally a broad appreciation for a few medieval things. These people lived life at breakneck speed. They traveled perpetually, really pounded out the miles on horseback or in tubby little ships, and trusted everywhere to who knows what lodging and food. And fate. Weir says that Edward II visited four thousand places in England in his lifetime, partly of course because big, messy royal courts had to move about in the search for cleaner houses to live in for a while. Isabella crossed and recrossed the Channel nine times, once as the head of an invading army. A granddaughter died of the Black Death on the way to her own wedding. What did this do to a human being's memories, sense of home, perception of time? They married at thirteen or fourteen, which meant, for women like Isabella, abruptly assuming and relinquishing glamorous adult titles, wealth, and prestige. She was queen of England at twelve, supplanting all other women; when her son's beautiful teen wife Philippa in turn supplanted her, she was instantly a dowager at thirty-two. In another blink of an eye thirty years had passed, lover Mortimer was long gone, and she was enjoying the company of her last grandchild, the now forty-year-old Philippa's thirteenth.
And at every turn lay violent death. The modern world may shrug correctly at royal biographies, because they say nothing of the People, but it seems to me that the privileges medieval aristocracy enjoyed may have been more than counterbalanced by the daily risks they ran. Without law, which English society at this time was still struggling to create, people born into the lawmaking strata -- and none of them chose it -- learned quickly that the choice in life personally was often either to remain royal or die by evisceration. "Random aristocratic violence" sums up the middle ages, according to the historian Norman F. Cantor in Inventing the Middle Ages, and he praises, of all things, the Japanese movie Ran (Chaos) as clearly illustrating this.
One final medieval thing we can try to appreciate from a biography like this is the presence of religion in these people's lives, but that's a difficult mental leap to make. The modern world's ignorance of religion is the biggest handicap we have to either writing, reading, or thinking accurately about how human beings really lived in Europe seven hundred years ago. Daily worship, excited and happy plans to go on pilgrimage to shrines rather than "on vacation," the existence of the Catholic church as a governing body in daily life, the custom of leaving orders that one's body was to be buried apart from one's heart, so that two places of rest would allow for two places of eternal prayers commissioned for the soul -- all these and a hundred other commonplaces of medieval living stand so far outside our experience that in looking back at them we are really looking back at an alien planet. We do our best to understand them; Alison Weir consulted seven and a half pages (closely printed) full of primary source documents for us, into which I suppose we could also plunge if we chose. But it's not the same thing as understanding a world in which sun and moon and wind were the same, but all attitudes, every thought and every sentence, began with in the name of our Lord, amen.
Castle Rising, Norfolk, Isabella's main home after the accession of her son (1330); photo from castlerising.co.uk
For those who like trivia: Isabella makes an appearance in the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart, but the liberties taken with history are very extravagant. She is a gorgeous adult, and sleeps with the Scottish rebel William Wallace (Gibson) so that she can taunt her dying and paralyzed father in law, Edward I, that "a child ... not of your line ... grows in my womb." In a previous scene, the old king has already thrown Piers Gaveston out of a window to his death, to young Edward II's helpless horror. Great fun, but Wallace was executed -- drawing and quartering, of course -- in 1305, when Isabella was, by Alison Weir's reckoning, a child of nine in Paris. That's just for a start.
And how does the biographer handle the question of female authority, circa 1300? Were women monarchs uniquely incapable, or did all the talent in the world fail to protect them from the trouble caused by men who could not stomach female authority? Modern authors are anxious to cope with this question, with general questions of responsibility and guilt, but they are also anxious to obey our modern world's self-understanding that we are uniquely enlightened compared to all previous generations. We understand sex, sexism, class, classism, (good) judgment and (bad) judgmentalism. The biographer's woman subject must be held accountable for her deeds; but if she happens to be a queen vilified in previous histories, then the modern author is anxious also to be different and fresh, and find ways in which she is not guilty.
All of this is a tribute to Alison Weir, and the mammoth amount of work she has put into this biography of Isabella, "the She-wolf of France." Very much in the style of Tudor historian David Starkey, she has assembled every primary source in the universe and gone through them in chronological order, explaining month by month and sometimes day by day, for a lifetime lasting from 1295 to 1358, where the queen was and what she did, or what the people around her did. It's a brilliant approach -- are they taught to do this, in Oxford perhaps? -- but one trouble with it is that it doesn't tell a story. Another trouble with it is that, for long stretches while a queen didn't do much, we have to hear about the decor of her palaces and who built them and when. And when she arrived at what gate, and who greeted her. The one life event which modern biographers of queens tend to ignore is their experience of childbirth, which I for one would like to know more about. Of course the mechanics of that don't change much, but I'd like to know how anybody survived it then and how exactly the midwives and physicians cared for their patients.
Queen Isabella's story can be briefly summarized, which Weir does in a preliminary chapter. A daughter of the King of France, she was married off at the age of twelve (1308) to King Edward II, the son of England's mighty King Edward I. Edward made a habit of falling in love with, raising up and then toying with and essentially destroying male lovers, first Piers Gaveston and then Hugh Despenser. Edward not only fawned shockingly and physically over these favorites -- he gave Gaveston the little queen Isabella's wedding jewels, for a start -- he allotted them such power that they strutted as demi kings through exchequer, government, and other people's private property, dangerously outraging powerful barons and the commons alike. Piers Gaveston survived two exiles and two recalls to his master's side, but did not survive a third; Hugh Despenser might have taken heed and given the king a wide berth, however handsome and rich he was. He did not.
Youth, virtuous obedience, and childbearing kept Isabella too busy to raise any kind of standard of revolt until the 1320s. By this time, though Gaveston was long dead, the Despensers (there was a father and son) had become such tyrants that she feared for her own life at their hands. They had already stripped her of much of her income and separated her from her children, with the king's acquiescence if not worse. She fled to her homeland, France, formed an open liaison with the dashing exiled English traitor Roger Mortimer, and with him sailed back to England at the head of an army determined to overthrow the king and his minions.
They succeeded in this, the first more or less constitutional deposition of an English king. The Despensers suffered hanging, drawing, and quartering, as befitted traitors, with castration while bound to a fifty-foot high ladder thrown in for the younger man. (Isabella watched.) Edward II abdicated in favor of his son, was imprisoned and then he was either murdered grotesquely or he escaped to become a hermit in Italy. Alison Weir works hard to convince us of this latter possibility, but, amateur though I am, I doubt it. It all hinges on feckless Edward, who liked nothing better than to dig ditches and pitch hay with common men, quietly murdering a poor porter one night and then fleeing in the porter's clothes. That is the action of a hero, not an Edward II.
Isabella and Mortimer then spent a few, a very few years enjoying power as regents for the heir, Isabella's firstborn prince Edward. The lovers turned out to be just as rapacious and tyrannical as any previous favorites of the previous, useless king. As the young prince's eighteenth birthday and therefore his majority approached, he became so alarmed at what his mother and her lover might do to maintain their authority that he launched a coup on his own behalf. It was an actual one-night, one-chance cloak and dagger affair, complete with underground passageways into a castle and then -- the breaking up of a sinister meeting, and the seventeen year old boy standing with sword drawn outside his mother's rooms, ignoring her shrieks for mercy as Mortimer was dragged away. That's the action of a hero.
Mortimer was only beheaded. King Edward III claimed his crown (1330), and after a short spell out of the public eye, which she spent either recovering from a stillbirth or nervous collapse or both, Isabella lived the rest of her life in comfort, in this manor and that, as Queen Mother and grande dame. She entertained visitors. She enjoyed her grandchildren. She gossiped with other formidable ladies, visiting queens and duchesses, daughters and cousins and aunts who all could have told life stories almost as gamy as her own. Who says women are ignored by history? Oh, and yes -- the Black Death came, in 1348, when she was in her fifties. She survived.
What the reader gets from this book, I think, amid all the details of chronology and the speculation that ventures toward the Hollywoodesque (Edward II as Italian hermit secretly visiting his son in England in the 1330s -- really?) is finally a broad appreciation for a few medieval things. These people lived life at breakneck speed. They traveled perpetually, really pounded out the miles on horseback or in tubby little ships, and trusted everywhere to who knows what lodging and food. And fate. Weir says that Edward II visited four thousand places in England in his lifetime, partly of course because big, messy royal courts had to move about in the search for cleaner houses to live in for a while. Isabella crossed and recrossed the Channel nine times, once as the head of an invading army. A granddaughter died of the Black Death on the way to her own wedding. What did this do to a human being's memories, sense of home, perception of time? They married at thirteen or fourteen, which meant, for women like Isabella, abruptly assuming and relinquishing glamorous adult titles, wealth, and prestige. She was queen of England at twelve, supplanting all other women; when her son's beautiful teen wife Philippa in turn supplanted her, she was instantly a dowager at thirty-two. In another blink of an eye thirty years had passed, lover Mortimer was long gone, and she was enjoying the company of her last grandchild, the now forty-year-old Philippa's thirteenth.
And at every turn lay violent death. The modern world may shrug correctly at royal biographies, because they say nothing of the People, but it seems to me that the privileges medieval aristocracy enjoyed may have been more than counterbalanced by the daily risks they ran. Without law, which English society at this time was still struggling to create, people born into the lawmaking strata -- and none of them chose it -- learned quickly that the choice in life personally was often either to remain royal or die by evisceration. "Random aristocratic violence" sums up the middle ages, according to the historian Norman F. Cantor in Inventing the Middle Ages, and he praises, of all things, the Japanese movie Ran (Chaos) as clearly illustrating this.
One final medieval thing we can try to appreciate from a biography like this is the presence of religion in these people's lives, but that's a difficult mental leap to make. The modern world's ignorance of religion is the biggest handicap we have to either writing, reading, or thinking accurately about how human beings really lived in Europe seven hundred years ago. Daily worship, excited and happy plans to go on pilgrimage to shrines rather than "on vacation," the existence of the Catholic church as a governing body in daily life, the custom of leaving orders that one's body was to be buried apart from one's heart, so that two places of rest would allow for two places of eternal prayers commissioned for the soul -- all these and a hundred other commonplaces of medieval living stand so far outside our experience that in looking back at them we are really looking back at an alien planet. We do our best to understand them; Alison Weir consulted seven and a half pages (closely printed) full of primary source documents for us, into which I suppose we could also plunge if we chose. But it's not the same thing as understanding a world in which sun and moon and wind were the same, but all attitudes, every thought and every sentence, began with in the name of our Lord, amen.
Castle Rising, Norfolk, Isabella's main home after the accession of her son (1330); photo from castlerising.co.uk
For those who like trivia: Isabella makes an appearance in the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart, but the liberties taken with history are very extravagant. She is a gorgeous adult, and sleeps with the Scottish rebel William Wallace (Gibson) so that she can taunt her dying and paralyzed father in law, Edward I, that "a child ... not of your line ... grows in my womb." In a previous scene, the old king has already thrown Piers Gaveston out of a window to his death, to young Edward II's helpless horror. Great fun, but Wallace was executed -- drawing and quartering, of course -- in 1305, when Isabella was, by Alison Weir's reckoning, a child of nine in Paris. That's just for a start.
Friday, July 3, 2009
The Weapon Shops of Isher by A.E. van Vogt
The release of Star Trek this spring, and my own reconnection with the old Star Trek TV show from the 1960s, prompted me lately to wander the stacks of the local public library, browsing for science fiction books. I almost never read them otherwise. Correction: I never read them. Growing up, my older brother owned bookshelves of the genre, but I could never build an appreciation for it. I recall trying, and abandoning the effort in disgust when the opening page of some classic story had the protagonist stepping over a Raggedy Ann doll in the street, and tumbling therewith into another dimension. "That's what's cool about it," my brother said. I only harrumphed.
It's all curious, because this year, not only has Star Trek resurfaced and great fun it is too, but a science fiction master, Robert Heinlein, has been quoted by people who are watching President Obama take on the powers of a dictator amid the orgasmic baying of a lapdog press and the silence of an apparently disbelieving (at best) public; one of the many dangers to democracy, Heinlein said years ago, arises not just from ignorance or apathy but from a simple money problem. When a bare majority of the population decides to vote itself goodies out of its neighbors' taxed wealth, forever, when once 51 percent of a country can learn to do that and call it fair and like it, the future looks bleak. And, my goodness, thanks to my brother's library, I had already heard of this wise Robert Heinlein.
It's curious, too, that The Weapon Shops of Isher by A. E. van Vogt should happen to concern grand political themes like dictatorship, an imperial cult, government theft of private property, the suppression of dissent, and gun ownership. Being science fiction, it also includes time travel, and invisibility suits, and doorknobs that reach out to, and weapons that jump into, the right people's hands.
The tale is extremely painstakingly thought out. Roughly, it gathers together three or four plots -- politics, liberty, love -- with four main characters, all interconnected. It starts in 1951, somewhere in America. A weird new shopfront suddenly appears on some Main Street, taking the place of a store already there. Its blinking neon sign reads "Fine weapons. The right to buy weapons is the right to be free." A journalist investigates, enters the shop, and is never seen again.
This journalist, McAllister, is catapulted seven thousand years into the future, into an empire of Isher run by the young, lovely, adored, and more or less vicious Empress Innelda. Among her subjects she counts the fractured Clark family, whose father Fara and son Cayle don't get along. Cayle meets the dark and fetching Lucy, who is a weapon shop employee and who was McAllister's first contact when the shop materialized in the wrong time. As the plot develops, we learn that things everywhere and everytime are out of whack because the Empress is trying to launch one final attack against the shops, which represent the only thing in the empire that she does not control. (Cayle's father is all for it. Squashing evil and insurrection, and rebellious sons, and so on.) Doing this requires the harnessing and disguising of fantastic amounts of energy -- buildings shimmer in and out of existence across time and space -- and it was only McAllister's stumbling into one of the targeted shops that revealed to their fraternity of owners the scope and the kinks of the terrible plan.
Author van Vogt keeps his science going at a good clip, or at any rate he describes men walking on mid-air floors, and viewing real-time graphs charting the movement of giant buildings swinging on wild energy fulcrums through "quadrillions" of years of space time, in such a way that the reader can root for him and think, well at least he's not just saying "it's so." He also takes care to describe a completely corrupt future world. Isher is gangland Las Vegas and Chicago, and every day is potentially the St. Valentine's Day massacre. Every day is also a play day for the masses, who gamble themselves into mental oblivion in gigantic department store/casinos, or graduate to patronize seamy "Houses of Illusion" where all sensual desires are gratified through fantasy. The planets outside Earth are penal mining colonies with populations in the tens of millions.
The weapon shops at the center of the story, with their defiant slogan "the right to buy weapons is the right to be free," stand as the Empress' target, but as the story unfolds we learn that they are practically inviolable. They are run by one man, Robert Hedrock, who plays the admittedly serious game of defending them with a trump card no one else has or guesses he has. What's more interesting about them, though, is that they function as a kind of religion or even an underground government. Undergirding their existence, and their ad slogan, is a philosophy which the weapon shop men say in italics: "People always have the government they want." Given that, no other political fact matters or is even of much interest -- as long as the people can also arm themselves. "Thousands of years ago," the weapon shops' founders invented guns that could only be used in defense and only for their owners. Physical defense always being possible, the weapon shops say nothing and do nothing to interfere in any way in anyone's life. They agitate for nothing politically, they neither support nor decry any group. By their existence, they prove that while people may choose to fool away their time and energies by the millions, still the power of the state remains ultimately nil.
Maybe. This story inspired me to think anew about the Second Amendment. In 1789 the states insisted on a Bill of Rights being attached to the Constitution before they would consider ratifying it, and number two, no less, on the list of absolute rights desired was the right of the common man to own a gun. In places where it certainly seems "people do not have the government they want," in Iran, in North Korea, the people also do not have guns. And yet, earlier this week in Houston, the federal government's agents went door to door confiscating guns. And what good is a gun when the gun-owning citizen cannot keep it without (presumably, logically) committing the sin and crime of attempted murder or murder to do so -- which the gun-confiscating state will then punish with jail time?
Van Vogt solves the problem with his nearly sentient, defensive future guns. And yet, what is the point even of them when the bulk of the population doesn't want them? (Or do they?)
It's a wild story, and points up afresh, as I unburden myself of my criticisms, the quote that I happened to have come across recently, that criticism is always easier than craft. So it is, and far be it from me to criticize the man (the woman? who is A.E.?) who thought all this out. I respect the depth of the material. This science fiction is not all space ships and warp speeds, even though that's fun too. I even credit him with a remarkable case of clairvoyance. The Weapon Shops of Isher is a part of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher in 1959. Fifty years ago, Van Vogt describes his heroine searching for information, seven thousand years hence:
"First she pressed the machine-file activator, pecking out the key word illusion. The file screen remained blank. She clicked off the word house. No response."
What else is Lucy doing, but Googling? And how cool is that?
It's all curious, because this year, not only has Star Trek resurfaced and great fun it is too, but a science fiction master, Robert Heinlein, has been quoted by people who are watching President Obama take on the powers of a dictator amid the orgasmic baying of a lapdog press and the silence of an apparently disbelieving (at best) public; one of the many dangers to democracy, Heinlein said years ago, arises not just from ignorance or apathy but from a simple money problem. When a bare majority of the population decides to vote itself goodies out of its neighbors' taxed wealth, forever, when once 51 percent of a country can learn to do that and call it fair and like it, the future looks bleak. And, my goodness, thanks to my brother's library, I had already heard of this wise Robert Heinlein.
It's curious, too, that The Weapon Shops of Isher by A. E. van Vogt should happen to concern grand political themes like dictatorship, an imperial cult, government theft of private property, the suppression of dissent, and gun ownership. Being science fiction, it also includes time travel, and invisibility suits, and doorknobs that reach out to, and weapons that jump into, the right people's hands.
The tale is extremely painstakingly thought out. Roughly, it gathers together three or four plots -- politics, liberty, love -- with four main characters, all interconnected. It starts in 1951, somewhere in America. A weird new shopfront suddenly appears on some Main Street, taking the place of a store already there. Its blinking neon sign reads "Fine weapons. The right to buy weapons is the right to be free." A journalist investigates, enters the shop, and is never seen again.
This journalist, McAllister, is catapulted seven thousand years into the future, into an empire of Isher run by the young, lovely, adored, and more or less vicious Empress Innelda. Among her subjects she counts the fractured Clark family, whose father Fara and son Cayle don't get along. Cayle meets the dark and fetching Lucy, who is a weapon shop employee and who was McAllister's first contact when the shop materialized in the wrong time. As the plot develops, we learn that things everywhere and everytime are out of whack because the Empress is trying to launch one final attack against the shops, which represent the only thing in the empire that she does not control. (Cayle's father is all for it. Squashing evil and insurrection, and rebellious sons, and so on.) Doing this requires the harnessing and disguising of fantastic amounts of energy -- buildings shimmer in and out of existence across time and space -- and it was only McAllister's stumbling into one of the targeted shops that revealed to their fraternity of owners the scope and the kinks of the terrible plan.
Author van Vogt keeps his science going at a good clip, or at any rate he describes men walking on mid-air floors, and viewing real-time graphs charting the movement of giant buildings swinging on wild energy fulcrums through "quadrillions" of years of space time, in such a way that the reader can root for him and think, well at least he's not just saying "it's so." He also takes care to describe a completely corrupt future world. Isher is gangland Las Vegas and Chicago, and every day is potentially the St. Valentine's Day massacre. Every day is also a play day for the masses, who gamble themselves into mental oblivion in gigantic department store/casinos, or graduate to patronize seamy "Houses of Illusion" where all sensual desires are gratified through fantasy. The planets outside Earth are penal mining colonies with populations in the tens of millions.
The weapon shops at the center of the story, with their defiant slogan "the right to buy weapons is the right to be free," stand as the Empress' target, but as the story unfolds we learn that they are practically inviolable. They are run by one man, Robert Hedrock, who plays the admittedly serious game of defending them with a trump card no one else has or guesses he has. What's more interesting about them, though, is that they function as a kind of religion or even an underground government. Undergirding their existence, and their ad slogan, is a philosophy which the weapon shop men say in italics: "People always have the government they want." Given that, no other political fact matters or is even of much interest -- as long as the people can also arm themselves. "Thousands of years ago," the weapon shops' founders invented guns that could only be used in defense and only for their owners. Physical defense always being possible, the weapon shops say nothing and do nothing to interfere in any way in anyone's life. They agitate for nothing politically, they neither support nor decry any group. By their existence, they prove that while people may choose to fool away their time and energies by the millions, still the power of the state remains ultimately nil.
Maybe. This story inspired me to think anew about the Second Amendment. In 1789 the states insisted on a Bill of Rights being attached to the Constitution before they would consider ratifying it, and number two, no less, on the list of absolute rights desired was the right of the common man to own a gun. In places where it certainly seems "people do not have the government they want," in Iran, in North Korea, the people also do not have guns. And yet, earlier this week in Houston, the federal government's agents went door to door confiscating guns. And what good is a gun when the gun-owning citizen cannot keep it without (presumably, logically) committing the sin and crime of attempted murder or murder to do so -- which the gun-confiscating state will then punish with jail time?
Van Vogt solves the problem with his nearly sentient, defensive future guns. And yet, what is the point even of them when the bulk of the population doesn't want them? (Or do they?)
It's a wild story, and points up afresh, as I unburden myself of my criticisms, the quote that I happened to have come across recently, that criticism is always easier than craft. So it is, and far be it from me to criticize the man (the woman? who is A.E.?) who thought all this out. I respect the depth of the material. This science fiction is not all space ships and warp speeds, even though that's fun too. I even credit him with a remarkable case of clairvoyance. The Weapon Shops of Isher is a part of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher in 1959. Fifty years ago, Van Vogt describes his heroine searching for information, seven thousand years hence:
"First she pressed the machine-file activator, pecking out the key word illusion. The file screen remained blank. She clicked off the word house. No response."
What else is Lucy doing, but Googling? And how cool is that?
Sunday, June 21, 2009
The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Vol. 1 by Washington Irving
This opening volume of Irving's biography takes us from Columbus' birth to a climactic point during his second voyage to the New World, when, as the result of what can inadequately be described as overwork, Columbus collapsed and his crew "spread their sails to the east wind and bore him back, in a state of complete insensibility, to the harbor of Isabella" (a Caribbean port).
There are two volumes to go. That will make the reading sound like a chore, but it isn't; Washington Irving's prose is very pleasant, having a unique tone -- circa 1830 -- that stands refreshingly somewhere between the august rolling periods of the eighteenth century and the fussiness of the nineteenth. What the reader should know, however, is that Irving either really, really liked the subject, or else he had terrific sources of information, not one of which he wanted to neglect. This latter seems to have been the case. Irving's descriptions of his researches in his preface are absolutely worthy of any professional historian today. And why do we assume anyway that our professional standards must of course outrank those of previous eras?
Or perhaps people -- to continue the warning -- in previous eras simply had little else to do with leisure except read, and so they were willing to sit down to a painstakingly recollected three volume history of the life of anybody or anything. Columbus? Certainly, bring it on. What I hint at here, with all due respect to Irving and previous readers, is that by golly as you read along you are going to visit with the hero every coast he saw, and study every cubic foot of shoal water, and measure every day's weather and greet every native chief (cacique) he did. Do not look for summation, except concerning the kinds of topics we moderns slaver over: what about that illegitimate son?
Columbus' achievement is so gigantic that as we rock along with Irving's pleasant prose, we find it startling to understand that the first voyage only took seven months all told. He and the three famous ships left Palos -- there are suburbs in Chicago named Palos, who knew? -- in August of 1492. Columbus returned in the Nina, first briefly to Portugal and then back to Palos, in March 1493. To the residents of the little town, the sudden appearance of that ship in the river one quiet March morning must have seemed like an apparition from another universe. In a sense, it was. The Admiral was back -- but how, and from where? Why only one vessel, and who was left alive? Church bells pealed all day, and "all business was suspended" amid the "hurry and tumult."
The Pinta, commanded by Columbus' mysterious right hand man, Pinzon, returned that same evening. And there lies a tale to set any Hollywood director's imagination racing, surely. There was something wrong about Pinzon, and the Pinta. The Pinta disappeared from Columbus' side twice during those seven months, the second time on the journey home. (The Santa Maria ran aground and was wrecked in the New World.) Where did it go, and why? Pinzon's explanations, the first time, seem to have followed rather dubious terrible-storm-we-thought-you-were-dead-sir lines. The second time, as he sailed into Palos to hear the bells still clanging and to see the Nina already there, explanations were pointless. The first man back got the glory and, so to speak, the end-of-year bonus. Like Columbus, Pinzon had made a first landfall before turning his ship toward Palos, and from Bayonne had already dispatched a letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, announcing his arrival and his discoveries; now he slunk home and lived long enough to receive their answering missive "of a reproachful tenor," forbidding him to come to court. He died a few days later, of illness and chagrin. But "let no one indulge in hard censures over the grave of Pinzon!" Irving warns. "His merits and services are entitled to the highest praise; his errors should be regarded with indulgence."
Columbus' plan to reach the fabulous Orient by sailing west was very much like plans for space travel today. It wasn't that people in the fifteenth century believed it could not be done, certainly not that they believed the earth was flat and the ships would fall off, although perhaps some true bumpkins might have reasoned so. The terror was that no one knew what lay out there in that howling wilderness of water. Did the sun boil the sea in the southern latitudes? What monsters awaited? How far did Ocean extend? How could anyone come back? Even the best educated men were hampered by one colossal mistake, handed down to them from Ptolemy. They believed that the circumference of the earth was a good 7000 miles less than it was. Columbus acted as if he had a presentiment of this, for he kept two logs on the journey west. For his private log he recorded distances accurately. For the log the crew could look at, he wrote down figures hundreds of leagues short of what they had actually traveled. Even so, as the ships pounded west before beautiful winds day after day and week after week, no one could know, as today no astronaut can know -- where are we, and when does all this space end?
It ended of course, after seven weeks of sailing, in the islands of the Caribbean, which to the end of his life Columbus believed was the fringe of Asia or at least the outer edge of "Cipangu," Japan. His guiding text was Marco Polo. In exploring islands today called by familiar names like Cuba (with its fine bay, Guantanamo), Jamaica, and "Hayti," Columbus met new peoples with whom he had somehow to communicate two prime desires, one, to know if there was gold nearby, and two, to know where and how to reach the Great Khan. The natives, no fools despite having every reason to believe these fantastic white men had indeed descended from heaven, continually pointed the newcomers onward in both quests. Cipangu, whatever it meant amid garbled misunderstandings and signs and gestures, was always south and west -- always away from here.
The desire for gold, incidentally, seems not to have been entirely a function of Western greed. The native Indians did wear small gold ornaments, which they were happy to trade for anything that came from the heavenly men's hands, hawk's bells especially. It was the presence of gold, and pearls and gems, that would have reassured the Spaniards that they had reached their goal: the glorious wealth of Asia. This was also why they were forever literally sniffing the island winds for the smell of spices.
In later volumes, Irving tells us, we will retrace the story of the tragedy that Columbus' landfall eventually brought the native tribes. Trouble began quickly with the second voyage, which the Admiral undertook in September 1493, only a year and a month after setting out on his first. On the second trip, a larger cohort of men had greater scope for human mischief. The Spaniards had greater contact this time with the fierce Caribs, free-ranging warriors and cannibals who held most of the humbler islanders in thrall. And there were problems with women. Columbus seems to have held things together, on both voyages, by the strength of his personality and sheer crippling hard work; the Santa Maria only ran aground on the first voyage because he personally dared to allow himself a little bit of sleep on a calm night. With that the whole crew nodded off, including the man at the wheel. And now, with more men to control, Columbus found that these Spanish grandees considered themselves above such nonsense as, for example, work. For their part they began to realize that he was after all an Italian, a foreigner. What right had he to lord it over them? And if they stood before a burnt-out Spanish settlement, sure that a cacique whom the Admiral trusted was in fact a murdering heathen scoundrel, well -- what did he plan to do about it?
And all the while Columbus kept on searching, searching, always tacking south and west, south and west, looking for evidence that these jungle shores were in fact the suburbs of teeming Cathay. He returned from his fourth voyage, I believe, actually under arrest and in chains. Irving's first volume does not take us that far. But early in this book he says:
There are two volumes to go. That will make the reading sound like a chore, but it isn't; Washington Irving's prose is very pleasant, having a unique tone -- circa 1830 -- that stands refreshingly somewhere between the august rolling periods of the eighteenth century and the fussiness of the nineteenth. What the reader should know, however, is that Irving either really, really liked the subject, or else he had terrific sources of information, not one of which he wanted to neglect. This latter seems to have been the case. Irving's descriptions of his researches in his preface are absolutely worthy of any professional historian today. And why do we assume anyway that our professional standards must of course outrank those of previous eras?
Or perhaps people -- to continue the warning -- in previous eras simply had little else to do with leisure except read, and so they were willing to sit down to a painstakingly recollected three volume history of the life of anybody or anything. Columbus? Certainly, bring it on. What I hint at here, with all due respect to Irving and previous readers, is that by golly as you read along you are going to visit with the hero every coast he saw, and study every cubic foot of shoal water, and measure every day's weather and greet every native chief (cacique) he did. Do not look for summation, except concerning the kinds of topics we moderns slaver over: what about that illegitimate son?
Columbus' achievement is so gigantic that as we rock along with Irving's pleasant prose, we find it startling to understand that the first voyage only took seven months all told. He and the three famous ships left Palos -- there are suburbs in Chicago named Palos, who knew? -- in August of 1492. Columbus returned in the Nina, first briefly to Portugal and then back to Palos, in March 1493. To the residents of the little town, the sudden appearance of that ship in the river one quiet March morning must have seemed like an apparition from another universe. In a sense, it was. The Admiral was back -- but how, and from where? Why only one vessel, and who was left alive? Church bells pealed all day, and "all business was suspended" amid the "hurry and tumult."
The Pinta, commanded by Columbus' mysterious right hand man, Pinzon, returned that same evening. And there lies a tale to set any Hollywood director's imagination racing, surely. There was something wrong about Pinzon, and the Pinta. The Pinta disappeared from Columbus' side twice during those seven months, the second time on the journey home. (The Santa Maria ran aground and was wrecked in the New World.) Where did it go, and why? Pinzon's explanations, the first time, seem to have followed rather dubious terrible-storm-we-thought-you-were-dead-sir lines. The second time, as he sailed into Palos to hear the bells still clanging and to see the Nina already there, explanations were pointless. The first man back got the glory and, so to speak, the end-of-year bonus. Like Columbus, Pinzon had made a first landfall before turning his ship toward Palos, and from Bayonne had already dispatched a letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, announcing his arrival and his discoveries; now he slunk home and lived long enough to receive their answering missive "of a reproachful tenor," forbidding him to come to court. He died a few days later, of illness and chagrin. But "let no one indulge in hard censures over the grave of Pinzon!" Irving warns. "His merits and services are entitled to the highest praise; his errors should be regarded with indulgence."
Columbus' plan to reach the fabulous Orient by sailing west was very much like plans for space travel today. It wasn't that people in the fifteenth century believed it could not be done, certainly not that they believed the earth was flat and the ships would fall off, although perhaps some true bumpkins might have reasoned so. The terror was that no one knew what lay out there in that howling wilderness of water. Did the sun boil the sea in the southern latitudes? What monsters awaited? How far did Ocean extend? How could anyone come back? Even the best educated men were hampered by one colossal mistake, handed down to them from Ptolemy. They believed that the circumference of the earth was a good 7000 miles less than it was. Columbus acted as if he had a presentiment of this, for he kept two logs on the journey west. For his private log he recorded distances accurately. For the log the crew could look at, he wrote down figures hundreds of leagues short of what they had actually traveled. Even so, as the ships pounded west before beautiful winds day after day and week after week, no one could know, as today no astronaut can know -- where are we, and when does all this space end?
It ended of course, after seven weeks of sailing, in the islands of the Caribbean, which to the end of his life Columbus believed was the fringe of Asia or at least the outer edge of "Cipangu," Japan. His guiding text was Marco Polo. In exploring islands today called by familiar names like Cuba (with its fine bay, Guantanamo), Jamaica, and "Hayti," Columbus met new peoples with whom he had somehow to communicate two prime desires, one, to know if there was gold nearby, and two, to know where and how to reach the Great Khan. The natives, no fools despite having every reason to believe these fantastic white men had indeed descended from heaven, continually pointed the newcomers onward in both quests. Cipangu, whatever it meant amid garbled misunderstandings and signs and gestures, was always south and west -- always away from here.
The desire for gold, incidentally, seems not to have been entirely a function of Western greed. The native Indians did wear small gold ornaments, which they were happy to trade for anything that came from the heavenly men's hands, hawk's bells especially. It was the presence of gold, and pearls and gems, that would have reassured the Spaniards that they had reached their goal: the glorious wealth of Asia. This was also why they were forever literally sniffing the island winds for the smell of spices.
In later volumes, Irving tells us, we will retrace the story of the tragedy that Columbus' landfall eventually brought the native tribes. Trouble began quickly with the second voyage, which the Admiral undertook in September 1493, only a year and a month after setting out on his first. On the second trip, a larger cohort of men had greater scope for human mischief. The Spaniards had greater contact this time with the fierce Caribs, free-ranging warriors and cannibals who held most of the humbler islanders in thrall. And there were problems with women. Columbus seems to have held things together, on both voyages, by the strength of his personality and sheer crippling hard work; the Santa Maria only ran aground on the first voyage because he personally dared to allow himself a little bit of sleep on a calm night. With that the whole crew nodded off, including the man at the wheel. And now, with more men to control, Columbus found that these Spanish grandees considered themselves above such nonsense as, for example, work. For their part they began to realize that he was after all an Italian, a foreigner. What right had he to lord it over them? And if they stood before a burnt-out Spanish settlement, sure that a cacique whom the Admiral trusted was in fact a murdering heathen scoundrel, well -- what did he plan to do about it?
And all the while Columbus kept on searching, searching, always tacking south and west, south and west, looking for evidence that these jungle shores were in fact the suburbs of teeming Cathay. He returned from his fourth voyage, I believe, actually under arrest and in chains. Irving's first volume does not take us that far. But early in this book he says:
Let those who are disposed to faint under difficulties, in the prosecution of any great and worthy undertaking, remember that eighteen years elapsed after the time that Columbus conceived his enterprise, before he was enabled to carry it into effect; that the greater part of that time was passed in almost hopeless solicitation, amidst poverty, neglect, and taunting ridicule; that the prime of his life had wasted away in the struggle, and that when his perseverance was finally crowned with success, he was in his fifty-sixth year. His example should encourage the enterprising never to despair.
Monday, June 1, 2009
On Old Age by Cicero
This long letter comes in volume 9 of the Harvard Classics' Five foot shelf of books, first published in 1909. My local public library's own 1965 edition of the collection gets pride of place in an endcap by itself, facing the atrium with its indoor tree and fountain -- very classical -- but alas, somebody long ago absconded with Volume 2 (Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius) and volume 8 (Greek drama). Nobody has bothered absconding with Volume 21, I Promessi Sposi -- remember poor dried-up Cecil quoting it in A Room With a View? -- or Volume 23, Two Years Before the Mast.
Volume 9 includes the letters of Cicero, plus On Friendship and On Old Age, and the letters of Pliny the Younger, nephew of the naturalist Pliny the Elder who died in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. I skimmed these and liked Pliny's letters about his villa, especially. I followed along as carefully as I could, but lost track, after thirty, of the number of rooms he enjoyed and described. All were situated with regard to the summer sun and the winter winds, to enjoy the warmth of one and avoid the duress of the other; we forget that this was two thousand years ago, when there was no central heating or air conditioning -- no escape from sun except shade, no comfort against the cold except a brazier.
Anyway, when Cicero, circa 50 BC, wrote his friend Atticus on old age, he wrote in the guise of a great figure of Roman history, Marcus Cato (circa 150 BC), as if Cato were speaking to two friends "amazed at how well he carried his years." It would be as if you or I wrote an elegant treatise on some grave subject in the voice of someone living a hundred years ago -- Teddy Roosevelt? Geronimo? -- and sent it as a letter to a friend in the friend's honor. For the few opening paragraphs in which Cicero writes as himself, he hints that this letter or "book" is a kind of substitute for a deeper consolation which he isn't ready to give yet. "I have an idea," he says, "that you are at times stirred to the heart by the same circumstances as myself. To console you for these is a more serious matter, and must be put off to another time." What stirs both men? Towards the end of the treatise, "Cato" speaks of the death of his son; perhaps Cicero and his friend had that loss in common, too.
After a while, our understanding of who these men are and are pretending to be, and who they know, gets a little circular. We can double check Cato's identity by turning to Plutarch (circa 100 AD)-- translated by John Dryden (circa 1690)-- and there indeed he lives, devoting himself to farming and writing in old age, exactly as Cicero presents him. And here too, in On Old Age, is Cato's (or is it Cicero's?) knowledge of Cincinnatus (450 BC), humbly busy at his plow when called to defend Rome as dictator. If one's knowledge of antiquity is foggy, one must ask, is that where the story comes from? Then there is Cato/Cicero's knowledge of lots of other men. Are they famous, or footnotes to history only because they are here? We meet Ambivius Turpio, whose plays (or acting?) give such pleasure at the theater to old men as well as young, and we meet "Marcus Cethegus, whom Ennius justly called 'Persuasion's Marrow' -- with what enthusiasm did we see him exert himself in oratory even when quite old!" Yes of course, him. But then our Cato also seems to be the same personage whom Claudius hates in Robert Graves' novel I, Claudius (circa 1930). "My old bugbear, Cato," Claudius calls him, holding him responsible for nagging the Roman senate into a last needless war with Carthage, and for being just generally a killjoy. We grow confused, and really ought to turn simply back to Cicero's book.
Cicero/Cato speaks. The common horrors charged to old age, he says, are that it bars us from active employments, enfeebles the body, deprives us of physical pleasures, and is horrible in itself because it is the next step to death. To all of these, he has two basic answers. First, bad things can happen to the young as well as the old, enfeebling them, removing them from public life, and killing them, too. Second, most of the miseries of "a stupid old age" are traceable to character, not years in themselves. "Remember that my panegyric applies to an old age that has been established on foundations laid by youth." He offers many anecdotes of vigorous elderly men, though none of vigorous men struck down in old age precisely by old age's problems, and when he comes to inarguable things -- that young men are stronger -- he replies, like a good old Roman, that young men are therefore only stronger for vice and sensuality. The life of the mind, which is more important, is just as open to the old as to the young, if not more so. We should recall that this is the voice of Cato the Censor, famed for exhorting Romans to live simply.
Most striking is his attitude toward the nearness of death. Being more aware of death in old age than in youth is natural, he allows, but anyone can die at any time -- and yet, no man is so old but that he reasons he might live another year. And there are only two alternatives after death, neither of which is horrible when you think carefully about it. Either the dissolution is total, in which case our worries are over, or else the soul passes on to happiness and to a meeting with all sorts of interesting people in the next world. Cato particularly looks forward to meeting his dead son, Cato. "A third alternative cannot possibly be discovered." This remark reminds us that Cato/Cicero is writing before Christianity, to put it bluntly, opened up the third possibility, hell for unbelievers.
The most pleasant and encouraging parts of the book are those anecdotes of vigorous old age. "Gives us all hope," as Sybil Fawlty snorts in Fawlty Towers. I like especially the old man who refuses to dither about his mode of transportation when once he chooses it -- if he starts out walking, he doesn't then take to horseback, and vice versa, regardless of convenience or changing circumstance. (Then again, possibly this made Dad a pill to travel with.) And I like C. Gallus, "intent to the day of his death on mapping out the sky and the land. How often did the light surprise him while still working out a problem begun during the night! How often did night find him busy on what he had begun at dawn!"
I am sure most nights and most dawns found Marcus Tullius Cicero busy on something. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (1937, paperback 1986) gives him a massive entry of five double-columned, thickly printed pages, more than any other entry except "Athens" and "Rome." Orator, statesman, lawyer, and writer, the Companion credits him with developing Latin prose to such heights that he essentially invented the sentence structure of modern European languages. How odd to think, if this is true, that "subordinate clauses, balanced antitheses, the rhythm and cadence" we strive for are not our own achievements, but are merely patterned after a sensibility or a gift that Cicero had naturally in his mind.
He lived a terribly active life, throwing himself into the public arena with frightening men like Caesar, Mark Antony, and Augustus. He was murdered in his early sixties, with the "reluctant" approval of Augustus, and his head and hands cut off and displayed on the rostra in the Forum, where orators made speeches.
He lives: Cicero Ave (at 95th St., Oak Lawn, IL).
Volume 9 includes the letters of Cicero, plus On Friendship and On Old Age, and the letters of Pliny the Younger, nephew of the naturalist Pliny the Elder who died in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. I skimmed these and liked Pliny's letters about his villa, especially. I followed along as carefully as I could, but lost track, after thirty, of the number of rooms he enjoyed and described. All were situated with regard to the summer sun and the winter winds, to enjoy the warmth of one and avoid the duress of the other; we forget that this was two thousand years ago, when there was no central heating or air conditioning -- no escape from sun except shade, no comfort against the cold except a brazier.
Anyway, when Cicero, circa 50 BC, wrote his friend Atticus on old age, he wrote in the guise of a great figure of Roman history, Marcus Cato (circa 150 BC), as if Cato were speaking to two friends "amazed at how well he carried his years." It would be as if you or I wrote an elegant treatise on some grave subject in the voice of someone living a hundred years ago -- Teddy Roosevelt? Geronimo? -- and sent it as a letter to a friend in the friend's honor. For the few opening paragraphs in which Cicero writes as himself, he hints that this letter or "book" is a kind of substitute for a deeper consolation which he isn't ready to give yet. "I have an idea," he says, "that you are at times stirred to the heart by the same circumstances as myself. To console you for these is a more serious matter, and must be put off to another time." What stirs both men? Towards the end of the treatise, "Cato" speaks of the death of his son; perhaps Cicero and his friend had that loss in common, too.
After a while, our understanding of who these men are and are pretending to be, and who they know, gets a little circular. We can double check Cato's identity by turning to Plutarch (circa 100 AD)-- translated by John Dryden (circa 1690)-- and there indeed he lives, devoting himself to farming and writing in old age, exactly as Cicero presents him. And here too, in On Old Age, is Cato's (or is it Cicero's?) knowledge of Cincinnatus (450 BC), humbly busy at his plow when called to defend Rome as dictator. If one's knowledge of antiquity is foggy, one must ask, is that where the story comes from? Then there is Cato/Cicero's knowledge of lots of other men. Are they famous, or footnotes to history only because they are here? We meet Ambivius Turpio, whose plays (or acting?) give such pleasure at the theater to old men as well as young, and we meet "Marcus Cethegus, whom Ennius justly called 'Persuasion's Marrow' -- with what enthusiasm did we see him exert himself in oratory even when quite old!" Yes of course, him. But then our Cato also seems to be the same personage whom Claudius hates in Robert Graves' novel I, Claudius (circa 1930). "My old bugbear, Cato," Claudius calls him, holding him responsible for nagging the Roman senate into a last needless war with Carthage, and for being just generally a killjoy. We grow confused, and really ought to turn simply back to Cicero's book.
Cicero/Cato speaks. The common horrors charged to old age, he says, are that it bars us from active employments, enfeebles the body, deprives us of physical pleasures, and is horrible in itself because it is the next step to death. To all of these, he has two basic answers. First, bad things can happen to the young as well as the old, enfeebling them, removing them from public life, and killing them, too. Second, most of the miseries of "a stupid old age" are traceable to character, not years in themselves. "Remember that my panegyric applies to an old age that has been established on foundations laid by youth." He offers many anecdotes of vigorous elderly men, though none of vigorous men struck down in old age precisely by old age's problems, and when he comes to inarguable things -- that young men are stronger -- he replies, like a good old Roman, that young men are therefore only stronger for vice and sensuality. The life of the mind, which is more important, is just as open to the old as to the young, if not more so. We should recall that this is the voice of Cato the Censor, famed for exhorting Romans to live simply.
Most striking is his attitude toward the nearness of death. Being more aware of death in old age than in youth is natural, he allows, but anyone can die at any time -- and yet, no man is so old but that he reasons he might live another year. And there are only two alternatives after death, neither of which is horrible when you think carefully about it. Either the dissolution is total, in which case our worries are over, or else the soul passes on to happiness and to a meeting with all sorts of interesting people in the next world. Cato particularly looks forward to meeting his dead son, Cato. "A third alternative cannot possibly be discovered." This remark reminds us that Cato/Cicero is writing before Christianity, to put it bluntly, opened up the third possibility, hell for unbelievers.
The most pleasant and encouraging parts of the book are those anecdotes of vigorous old age. "Gives us all hope," as Sybil Fawlty snorts in Fawlty Towers. I like especially the old man who refuses to dither about his mode of transportation when once he chooses it -- if he starts out walking, he doesn't then take to horseback, and vice versa, regardless of convenience or changing circumstance. (Then again, possibly this made Dad a pill to travel with.) And I like C. Gallus, "intent to the day of his death on mapping out the sky and the land. How often did the light surprise him while still working out a problem begun during the night! How often did night find him busy on what he had begun at dawn!"
I am sure most nights and most dawns found Marcus Tullius Cicero busy on something. The Oxford Companion to Classical Literature (1937, paperback 1986) gives him a massive entry of five double-columned, thickly printed pages, more than any other entry except "Athens" and "Rome." Orator, statesman, lawyer, and writer, the Companion credits him with developing Latin prose to such heights that he essentially invented the sentence structure of modern European languages. How odd to think, if this is true, that "subordinate clauses, balanced antitheses, the rhythm and cadence" we strive for are not our own achievements, but are merely patterned after a sensibility or a gift that Cicero had naturally in his mind.
He lived a terribly active life, throwing himself into the public arena with frightening men like Caesar, Mark Antony, and Augustus. He was murdered in his early sixties, with the "reluctant" approval of Augustus, and his head and hands cut off and displayed on the rostra in the Forum, where orators made speeches.
He lives: Cicero Ave (at 95th St., Oak Lawn, IL).
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte; tr. by Jean Francois Alden by Mark Twain
Once, in a bookstore, I found a copy of the Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, and read on the back jacket flap the statement that Mark Twain considered this his best book. That's a surprise, and in the reading lists they assign and laud, it's clear college professors and other authorities don't agree with Twain's self-analysis. But I do believe I enjoyed this more than I ever enjoyed Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. Reading a master's work at one's own pace, untroubled by thesis deadlines, may help. Also, I like the middle ages.
It's a strange book, as well is should be since it's about a strange person. It may be the most serious and the most transparent in tone of any novel of Twain's I remember. You really do feel that a mournful fifteenth-century relic is speaking out of heartbreak, and only occasionally does the normally ebullient and joshing Mark Twain get a word in ("I still opened up with a small lie, of course, for habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time"). The language is very simple, simpler also than what I remember in Twain's other novels. It's as if the language must serve appropriately as a frame for Joan's own simple background, speech, and goodness. The book is a bit like another gospel, in which Joan's words, like Christ's, really ought to be set off in red type.
What the author wants to understand in these Personal Recollections, written from the point of view of Joan of Arc's page and secretary, Sieur Louis de Conte (whose initials match Samuel Langhorne Clemens') is what every historian and biographer has wanted to understand about her. We know who she was and what she did, and what was done to her. But why was she believed and obeyed, and then why was she destroyed?
It seems that, when this illiterate peasant girl came out of Domremy in the winter of 1429 to demand that she be allowed men-at-arms to go and fight the English occupying France -- she spoke of going "into" France, as if her birthplace had been outside it -- what stunned people was her ability to speak to her betters without fear. I can only assume that class differences were so enormous in those days that even the term is weakly inappropriate. When she faced lords and generals calmly, it was not just that a peasant was talking uppity. It was as if an animal was speaking. It was a miracle. In Twain's telling, she quickly became famous for being famous, like a speaking deer or calf from the pasture, and her career was underway.
For background, in 1429 France north of the Loire had endured English assault and occupation for ninety years, and France south of the Loire was a kind of medieval Vichy, a France in quotation marks. England's three great victories against French chivalry on French soil, Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, had each served as near death blows to the country. Before his death the French King Charles VI, who was insane, had actually signed over his throne by treaty to the English monarchy as a result of the defeat at Agincourt. His son the Dauphin, eventually to be Charles VII, not only thus had no throne to assume but worried about his legitimacy anyway. Justly so. Twain does not say, but Wikipedia does, that in fact Charles' own royal parents told him he was his mother's bastard by another father. He was on the point of fleeing the country.
Into this mess from out of nowhere stepped the beautiful young Maid, the speaking deer, claiming her divine Voices commanded her to do two things: to raise the siege of Orleans and so defeat the English in their current predatory project, and to escort the Dauphin to Rheims to be crowned and anointed by God King of France, and insane men's treaties be damned.
She did both things. Twain notices what must have been her fundamental role in all this, assuming that France and all its generals were not simply suddenly awash in a white light of revelation for upwards of two years because of her. She was a talisman. Famous for being famous, examined and vetted by the Church in an era when the supernatural and organized religion both bestrided Western national life, her presence at the head of the armies intoxicated men and really drove them to victories as nothing else had done, for ninety years. To serve in this way she did not need to be a natural military genius, freakishly come to earth in the body of a peasant girl, although these Recollections describe her as that, too. She had only to inspire, to command by divine instruction a simple and temporary change in French tactics: assault against occupied cities and forts, rather than the perpetual enduring of siege or, at most, wearily besieging the besiegers. Somehow she seems to have known at least this, what other generals -- MacArthur, for one -- have known. Defensive warfare is defeat.
But at some point during her brief career, maybe at the height of her triumphs -- standing in full armor at the altar of Rheims cathedral, watching her king being crowned -- it must have dawned on powerful men around her that after her work was done, this weird force of nature could never be released and left to her own devices again. Imagine the miracle of the speaking animal in some other lord's camp, on future battlefields, or dazzling other peasants, or serving as some duke's marriage prize. She had to be kept close, even while the French court undermined her victories by timidly backing away from attempting the great prize, the capture of English-occupied Paris, in favor of more treaties with enemies whom Joan had proven she could destroy. While the king dithered past the glory days of summer 1429, she stayed on, skirmishing here and there in the environs northwest of the capital. And who knows, for all her protestations that after Rheims her mission was done and she wanted to go home and tend her sheep, La Pucelle may have long since learned to thoroughly enjoy her extraordinary new life and been very loath to give it up. She must have had other aspects to her personality besides her "Voices."
In May of 1430 she was captured by the forces of the English-allied Duke of Burgundy, who kept her for the ransom he expected to be paid by a mortified and grateful Charles VII. It didn't come; the French were probably glad to be rid of her. Her English enemies offered the ransom instead, and legally the Duke was obliged to accept it. She was now a year from her death.
Her destruction was as strange, to modern eyes, as was her rise to power. For a year, French churchmen and lawyers in England's pay pursued the same two rough courses with her that, it so happens, a later generation of powerful men would pursue in the legal and physical destruction of another woman and another force of nature, Anne Boleyn. The cases are unrelated except that both times, authority wanted two things, an admission of guilt from the accused, which should have led to rehabilitation and mercy, -- and it wanted the death penalty. (The Tudor system was at least mercifully quick. Anne Boleyn was dead two and a half weeks after her arrest.)
What the French authorities harped on, sixty men looming over her in six consecutive trials during which Joan sat publicly in chains with no legal counsel, was her refusal to swear an oath to reveal everything about her career to the Church. In other words, the church wanted to officially pass judgment on her Voices, and to know exactly all they said to her. She insisted that these Voices, whom she identified as St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret, had specifically commanded her to keep a few things secret. She answered her accusers as well as possible but would not promise to disobey these divine orders.
Her consulting with her own private experience of God over the Church's understanding of it therefore made her, essentially, a Protestant. She was not tried as such and would not have understood herself as such, but it was her obedience to her private religious conscience that brought her to the stake. That, and of course the English monarchy's determination that she should die. In the last days of her life, she actually did submit to the churchmen's demands, having been brought out of her dungeon to see the stake and the pile of smoldering wood waiting for her amid excited crowds in the middle of Rouen's town square. She believed that upon signing a paper then (remember she was illiterate) and returning to women's dress, another thing authority harped on, she would be allowed to attend mass again and at least have women jailers. If Twain's Sieur de Conte is correct, back at the prison her English guards simply instantly stole her new women's clothing while she slept, and left a nineteen-year-old girl nothing to wear but her former, useful men's things. When she put them back on, she was considered to have relapsed into heresy. The punishment was death by burning, in Rouen on May 30, 1431.
A quarter of a century later, she was officially rehabilitated and declared a martyr by the French church. Twain's loyal Sieur shrewdly notices that this was after the English had been almost entirely driven out of France, and could only look back and spit that the pusillanimous king, Charles VII (called "the well-served"), had no better rights to his throne than those given him by a condemned witch and Satan worshipper long since properly burned as heretic. One way to wipe away that smear was to declare his benefactress Joan of Arc good again. Her aged mother had survived, to attend the opening of the rehabilitation trial at Notre Dame in Paris. Beatification followed many centuries later, in 1911, and then sainthood in 1920, although of course Mark Twain could not know that; I remember a college professor of mine saying that this last had everything to do with buttressing French morale after World War I.
She is such a strange figure that it's hard to know, to put it bluntly, what is the weirdest thing about Joan of Arc. Her youth? Her sex? Her humble origins? Her acceptance by men as a military commander, even if only a talisman show of one? (And she may have been a good one anyway.) What of the Voices? -- rye fungus poisoning, common in the European diet perhaps as far back as ancient Greece, and a possible source of hallucinations? God, truly? Why did the voices happen to speak French, the English wanted to know, and why were they mute when it came to warnings of what her persecutors in Rouen were up to, her Sieur wanted to know? And how can she have been a patriot before what textbooks call "the rise of the nation state"? And a French patriot to boot, who yet spoke of leaving Domremy to "come into" France? If so, then where was Domremy?
In the end, there is no doubt that a large part of her fascination for Twain and perhaps for many readers is that she is also a very Christlike figure. (She was "the most noble life that was ever born into this world save only One.") She seems to have been personally flawless and totally innocent, that is, for someone whose destiny was bizarrely military. She transfixed crowds, loved righteous battle, but after victories cradled dying Englishmen in her arms. That all her life is known from sworn testimony at a trial ("the only story of a human life which comes to us under oath," italics original) also conjures up images of patient silence before Pontius Pilate and a recording humanity too, albeit when her time came Joan was not silent. Her very character seems to have been miraculous. Even at the stake, while burning, she warned a man nearby who was holding a cross aloft for her to gaze at that he must move away, or he would be hurt. One wonders if, in another era, she could have easily served as the unwitting foundress of another church herself.
The Recollections are a very different piece of work from what we think of as the oeuvre of Mark Twain. His best book? Perhaps not, but perhaps he meant it was the one he most loved writing. To at least honor his taste in reading it, even for curiosity's sake, seems the right and really very pleasureable thing to do.
Birthplace of Joan of Arc, Domremy, France
It's a strange book, as well is should be since it's about a strange person. It may be the most serious and the most transparent in tone of any novel of Twain's I remember. You really do feel that a mournful fifteenth-century relic is speaking out of heartbreak, and only occasionally does the normally ebullient and joshing Mark Twain get a word in ("I still opened up with a small lie, of course, for habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time"). The language is very simple, simpler also than what I remember in Twain's other novels. It's as if the language must serve appropriately as a frame for Joan's own simple background, speech, and goodness. The book is a bit like another gospel, in which Joan's words, like Christ's, really ought to be set off in red type.
What the author wants to understand in these Personal Recollections, written from the point of view of Joan of Arc's page and secretary, Sieur Louis de Conte (whose initials match Samuel Langhorne Clemens') is what every historian and biographer has wanted to understand about her. We know who she was and what she did, and what was done to her. But why was she believed and obeyed, and then why was she destroyed?
It seems that, when this illiterate peasant girl came out of Domremy in the winter of 1429 to demand that she be allowed men-at-arms to go and fight the English occupying France -- she spoke of going "into" France, as if her birthplace had been outside it -- what stunned people was her ability to speak to her betters without fear. I can only assume that class differences were so enormous in those days that even the term is weakly inappropriate. When she faced lords and generals calmly, it was not just that a peasant was talking uppity. It was as if an animal was speaking. It was a miracle. In Twain's telling, she quickly became famous for being famous, like a speaking deer or calf from the pasture, and her career was underway.
For background, in 1429 France north of the Loire had endured English assault and occupation for ninety years, and France south of the Loire was a kind of medieval Vichy, a France in quotation marks. England's three great victories against French chivalry on French soil, Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, had each served as near death blows to the country. Before his death the French King Charles VI, who was insane, had actually signed over his throne by treaty to the English monarchy as a result of the defeat at Agincourt. His son the Dauphin, eventually to be Charles VII, not only thus had no throne to assume but worried about his legitimacy anyway. Justly so. Twain does not say, but Wikipedia does, that in fact Charles' own royal parents told him he was his mother's bastard by another father. He was on the point of fleeing the country.
Into this mess from out of nowhere stepped the beautiful young Maid, the speaking deer, claiming her divine Voices commanded her to do two things: to raise the siege of Orleans and so defeat the English in their current predatory project, and to escort the Dauphin to Rheims to be crowned and anointed by God King of France, and insane men's treaties be damned.
She did both things. Twain notices what must have been her fundamental role in all this, assuming that France and all its generals were not simply suddenly awash in a white light of revelation for upwards of two years because of her. She was a talisman. Famous for being famous, examined and vetted by the Church in an era when the supernatural and organized religion both bestrided Western national life, her presence at the head of the armies intoxicated men and really drove them to victories as nothing else had done, for ninety years. To serve in this way she did not need to be a natural military genius, freakishly come to earth in the body of a peasant girl, although these Recollections describe her as that, too. She had only to inspire, to command by divine instruction a simple and temporary change in French tactics: assault against occupied cities and forts, rather than the perpetual enduring of siege or, at most, wearily besieging the besiegers. Somehow she seems to have known at least this, what other generals -- MacArthur, for one -- have known. Defensive warfare is defeat.
But at some point during her brief career, maybe at the height of her triumphs -- standing in full armor at the altar of Rheims cathedral, watching her king being crowned -- it must have dawned on powerful men around her that after her work was done, this weird force of nature could never be released and left to her own devices again. Imagine the miracle of the speaking animal in some other lord's camp, on future battlefields, or dazzling other peasants, or serving as some duke's marriage prize. She had to be kept close, even while the French court undermined her victories by timidly backing away from attempting the great prize, the capture of English-occupied Paris, in favor of more treaties with enemies whom Joan had proven she could destroy. While the king dithered past the glory days of summer 1429, she stayed on, skirmishing here and there in the environs northwest of the capital. And who knows, for all her protestations that after Rheims her mission was done and she wanted to go home and tend her sheep, La Pucelle may have long since learned to thoroughly enjoy her extraordinary new life and been very loath to give it up. She must have had other aspects to her personality besides her "Voices."
In May of 1430 she was captured by the forces of the English-allied Duke of Burgundy, who kept her for the ransom he expected to be paid by a mortified and grateful Charles VII. It didn't come; the French were probably glad to be rid of her. Her English enemies offered the ransom instead, and legally the Duke was obliged to accept it. She was now a year from her death.
Her destruction was as strange, to modern eyes, as was her rise to power. For a year, French churchmen and lawyers in England's pay pursued the same two rough courses with her that, it so happens, a later generation of powerful men would pursue in the legal and physical destruction of another woman and another force of nature, Anne Boleyn. The cases are unrelated except that both times, authority wanted two things, an admission of guilt from the accused, which should have led to rehabilitation and mercy, -- and it wanted the death penalty. (The Tudor system was at least mercifully quick. Anne Boleyn was dead two and a half weeks after her arrest.)
What the French authorities harped on, sixty men looming over her in six consecutive trials during which Joan sat publicly in chains with no legal counsel, was her refusal to swear an oath to reveal everything about her career to the Church. In other words, the church wanted to officially pass judgment on her Voices, and to know exactly all they said to her. She insisted that these Voices, whom she identified as St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret, had specifically commanded her to keep a few things secret. She answered her accusers as well as possible but would not promise to disobey these divine orders.
Her consulting with her own private experience of God over the Church's understanding of it therefore made her, essentially, a Protestant. She was not tried as such and would not have understood herself as such, but it was her obedience to her private religious conscience that brought her to the stake. That, and of course the English monarchy's determination that she should die. In the last days of her life, she actually did submit to the churchmen's demands, having been brought out of her dungeon to see the stake and the pile of smoldering wood waiting for her amid excited crowds in the middle of Rouen's town square. She believed that upon signing a paper then (remember she was illiterate) and returning to women's dress, another thing authority harped on, she would be allowed to attend mass again and at least have women jailers. If Twain's Sieur de Conte is correct, back at the prison her English guards simply instantly stole her new women's clothing while she slept, and left a nineteen-year-old girl nothing to wear but her former, useful men's things. When she put them back on, she was considered to have relapsed into heresy. The punishment was death by burning, in Rouen on May 30, 1431.
A quarter of a century later, she was officially rehabilitated and declared a martyr by the French church. Twain's loyal Sieur shrewdly notices that this was after the English had been almost entirely driven out of France, and could only look back and spit that the pusillanimous king, Charles VII (called "the well-served"), had no better rights to his throne than those given him by a condemned witch and Satan worshipper long since properly burned as heretic. One way to wipe away that smear was to declare his benefactress Joan of Arc good again. Her aged mother had survived, to attend the opening of the rehabilitation trial at Notre Dame in Paris. Beatification followed many centuries later, in 1911, and then sainthood in 1920, although of course Mark Twain could not know that; I remember a college professor of mine saying that this last had everything to do with buttressing French morale after World War I.
She is such a strange figure that it's hard to know, to put it bluntly, what is the weirdest thing about Joan of Arc. Her youth? Her sex? Her humble origins? Her acceptance by men as a military commander, even if only a talisman show of one? (And she may have been a good one anyway.) What of the Voices? -- rye fungus poisoning, common in the European diet perhaps as far back as ancient Greece, and a possible source of hallucinations? God, truly? Why did the voices happen to speak French, the English wanted to know, and why were they mute when it came to warnings of what her persecutors in Rouen were up to, her Sieur wanted to know? And how can she have been a patriot before what textbooks call "the rise of the nation state"? And a French patriot to boot, who yet spoke of leaving Domremy to "come into" France? If so, then where was Domremy?
In the end, there is no doubt that a large part of her fascination for Twain and perhaps for many readers is that she is also a very Christlike figure. (She was "the most noble life that was ever born into this world save only One.") She seems to have been personally flawless and totally innocent, that is, for someone whose destiny was bizarrely military. She transfixed crowds, loved righteous battle, but after victories cradled dying Englishmen in her arms. That all her life is known from sworn testimony at a trial ("the only story of a human life which comes to us under oath," italics original) also conjures up images of patient silence before Pontius Pilate and a recording humanity too, albeit when her time came Joan was not silent. Her very character seems to have been miraculous. Even at the stake, while burning, she warned a man nearby who was holding a cross aloft for her to gaze at that he must move away, or he would be hurt. One wonders if, in another era, she could have easily served as the unwitting foundress of another church herself.
The Recollections are a very different piece of work from what we think of as the oeuvre of Mark Twain. His best book? Perhaps not, but perhaps he meant it was the one he most loved writing. To at least honor his taste in reading it, even for curiosity's sake, seems the right and really very pleasureable thing to do.
Birthplace of Joan of Arc, Domremy, France
Monday, April 20, 2009
The Kaiser: His Life and Times by Michael Balfour
The theme of this enormously dense book is Kaiser Wilhelm's personal responsibility for the outbreak of World War I, and consequently for its hideous aftermath, World War II, and the decline of Europe (John Keegan would say its "ruin") as a civilized world power.
It's a book that could only have been written in the 1960s, not in the sense that nobody before or after that decade could write enormously dense books about the Kaiser, but in the sense that by publication date (1964), enough time had passed to give the author some perspective, all the while events remained alive enough to encourage him to take his reader along on leisurely explorations of little details which later scholars probably summarize or ignore. There are details, for example, about how fast the train went carrying the body of Queen Victoria to her funeral site in 1901, the Kaiser her grandson, who hated being late, accompanying her ... possibly 92 miles per hour ....
I am not sure, also, if later books on the World Wars are quite so apt to begin, as this does and as William Manchester's The Arms of Krupp did, with serious and pained explorations of the, do we dare say, atrocious German character. It was 1964. Photographs and memories of the concentration camps were only twenty years in the past. Veterans of 1940-1945 were still young men barely into their forties; plenty of veterans of 1914-1918 were still hearty men in their late sixties or just nearing seventy. They had had their lives shaped and had set foot on a continent whose millions, across two generations, had had their lives destroyed by German decisions. When they sat down to read or to write about it, it seems they wanted answers to the question why. Why the Germans.
The passage of forty more years has laid most of those veterans in peaceful graves, and so has faded immediate memories and dulled that curiosity. I suspect political correctness has done the rest, frankly freezing any tendency to dare ask questions about national characteristics which sober men once asked -- even when they recognized that the Nazis were partial to those questions, too. Michael Balfour begins what one expects to be a simple biography of the Kaiser with a chapter on the huge topic "The Historical Background: 400 B.C. - A.D. 1880," and follows this with a second big chapter on "The Background to Anglo-German Relations." Anyone expecting a life story to begin with a discussion of a subject's parents or grandparents soon learns he is in the hands of a different type of scholar.
As he probes the Kaiser's moral responsibility, what Balfour studies in this book is the tragic conflation of three or four giant historical circumstances, centering on one people when that people was still burdened with the personal crapshoot of a hereditary monarchy. By the nineteenth century political liberalism and parliamentary democracy had evolved, most naturally and prominently in Britain. But "Germany" -- Bavaria, Hesse, Prussia, dozens of other small warmed-over medieval fiefdoms -- had only just united as a nation state, and Germany's people equated their country with the means that had unified it: a powerful military, a landed and splendid noble class, and a mystic, ancient German-ness outdazzling small things like individual rights, middle class urban living, and drab, democratic electioneering. By the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution and surging economic prosperity had arrived, most prominently in sea-girt, trading, colonizing Britain. But Germany was landlocked, and its economic life amounted to a long game of catch-up, mostly Balfour thinks because so much of its population was either absorbed in farming and the military, or lost to emigration ("800,000 left in the decade after unification alone," among them a set of my own great-grandparents, who departed in 1874.)
In the late nineteenth century, also, the nations of Europe still stood ready to contemplate war with one another in any combination at any time for any reason. It seems as if the middle ages had not died, and powerful men still ogled dragon-drawn maps and grinned over what dukedom could be had for what princess and why. Add to this that behemoth to the east, Russia, which considered itself the owner of the Balkans and yet made it policy to overleap central Europe ("we are Central Europe," the Kaiser said) and ally with France and Britain, too, for whatever reasons it liked. Add to this the Industrial Revolution's improvements in weaponry and transportation, and you have a sinister stage for the Kaiser to tread.
Then there is Wilhelm himself. The reader expecting to learn about his private life, his marriage, and the births of his children will not learn much. This is a man's book. Wilhelm grew up under the thumbs of his frantically English mother, Queen Victoria's eldest daughter Vicky, and -- not to sound comical -- of the frantically German Bismarck. German-ness and Englishness warred within him. He was intelligent but light-minded, and he had power, simply because he was born, at a time when a Germany suffering political and economic growing pains could pursue lethal plans because "the national mood" would not have it otherwise.
On June 28, 1914, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated. The killer was a Serbian subject of that empire. The assassination of an empire's heir really serves as an announcement that that empire is stupid and shouldn't exist. A simple way of putting it, but those of us who have never quite understood why the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's death mattered might perhaps understand that. Russia, would be owner of the Balkans, supported Serbia. Outraged Austria was Germany's ally, and so in that summer the clanking machineries of alliance and counter alliance, of monarchical and ministerial decision-making in Russia, France, Germany, Austria, Britain, all moved. Russia was the first to mobilize troops. In five weeks, the rest was done. One of the reasons why war had to be declared, Balfour says, was simply because pre-arranged railway timetables for getting German troops to the front --any front, for any reason -- required the pestering of Russian officials for explanations and replies that, outrageously, failed to come on time. When they didn't, the Kaiser, on August 1, 1914, signed the declaration of war which called into being all the others.
At the back of Norman Davies' huge book Europe, there is an appendix with the numbers of soldiers killed or dead of wounds by 1918: in round figures Russia lost 1.7 million, France 1.35 million, Britain 908,000, Italy 650,000; Germany lost 1.7 million, Austria-Hungary 1.2 million. It remains incomprehensible to see human deaths, and these the deaths of active young men only, expressed as fractions of a million.
The Kaiser signed the paper which started World War I, but how much was he responsible for everything leading up to it? Balfour concludes that "he was not fit for the outsize job destiny assigned him." True, but no one would have been. And, under the Kaiser's leadership (or lack of it), what was Germany's responsibility? More than once, Balfour says that it should be incumbent on nations, as it is on individuals, to realize they are not alone in the world and that their actions and ambitions will rub up against other peoples' and other nations,' and perhaps cause problems and suffering. Small actions, apparently trivial choices especially could be paramount in retrospect; in describing the Kaiser's birth to a young mother who suffered a horrific labor and delivery, Balfour asks whether history might have moved differently, if only the doctor attending had been a German committed to saving the baby rather than an Englishman committed to saving the mother (who lived to work the influence she did).
He does not quite say that the Great War proves nations should rise above happenstances, recognize their frightful moral interdependence, and trim the sails of their self-interest accordingly. As a historian and an adult he knows they don't and won't, especially not the most active and the most ambitious. On his last pages he writes, in fact, that there is no way of imagining how World War I could not have happened. "There are a number of things which one cannot imagine happening in a significantly different way unless one presupposes so many other alterations in the world as to turn the exercise into idle speculation." Germany was anxious for its "place in the sun." Britain was rich. Russia supported Serbia. Kaiser Wilhelm was born. And so on. " 'It happened because it happened,' " as Norman Davies quotes a later scholar in Europe.
Balfour ends with a quote that is true, if not terribly helpful. (What helps to understand World War I, and/or human nature? Scholars write huge books, and still don't know.) It also serves to illustrate a writing style that is really beautiful, and beautifully sustained, throughout all the enormous density:
It's a book that could only have been written in the 1960s, not in the sense that nobody before or after that decade could write enormously dense books about the Kaiser, but in the sense that by publication date (1964), enough time had passed to give the author some perspective, all the while events remained alive enough to encourage him to take his reader along on leisurely explorations of little details which later scholars probably summarize or ignore. There are details, for example, about how fast the train went carrying the body of Queen Victoria to her funeral site in 1901, the Kaiser her grandson, who hated being late, accompanying her ... possibly 92 miles per hour ....
I am not sure, also, if later books on the World Wars are quite so apt to begin, as this does and as William Manchester's The Arms of Krupp did, with serious and pained explorations of the, do we dare say, atrocious German character. It was 1964. Photographs and memories of the concentration camps were only twenty years in the past. Veterans of 1940-1945 were still young men barely into their forties; plenty of veterans of 1914-1918 were still hearty men in their late sixties or just nearing seventy. They had had their lives shaped and had set foot on a continent whose millions, across two generations, had had their lives destroyed by German decisions. When they sat down to read or to write about it, it seems they wanted answers to the question why. Why the Germans.
The passage of forty more years has laid most of those veterans in peaceful graves, and so has faded immediate memories and dulled that curiosity. I suspect political correctness has done the rest, frankly freezing any tendency to dare ask questions about national characteristics which sober men once asked -- even when they recognized that the Nazis were partial to those questions, too. Michael Balfour begins what one expects to be a simple biography of the Kaiser with a chapter on the huge topic "The Historical Background: 400 B.C. - A.D. 1880," and follows this with a second big chapter on "The Background to Anglo-German Relations." Anyone expecting a life story to begin with a discussion of a subject's parents or grandparents soon learns he is in the hands of a different type of scholar.
As he probes the Kaiser's moral responsibility, what Balfour studies in this book is the tragic conflation of three or four giant historical circumstances, centering on one people when that people was still burdened with the personal crapshoot of a hereditary monarchy. By the nineteenth century political liberalism and parliamentary democracy had evolved, most naturally and prominently in Britain. But "Germany" -- Bavaria, Hesse, Prussia, dozens of other small warmed-over medieval fiefdoms -- had only just united as a nation state, and Germany's people equated their country with the means that had unified it: a powerful military, a landed and splendid noble class, and a mystic, ancient German-ness outdazzling small things like individual rights, middle class urban living, and drab, democratic electioneering. By the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution and surging economic prosperity had arrived, most prominently in sea-girt, trading, colonizing Britain. But Germany was landlocked, and its economic life amounted to a long game of catch-up, mostly Balfour thinks because so much of its population was either absorbed in farming and the military, or lost to emigration ("800,000 left in the decade after unification alone," among them a set of my own great-grandparents, who departed in 1874.)
In the late nineteenth century, also, the nations of Europe still stood ready to contemplate war with one another in any combination at any time for any reason. It seems as if the middle ages had not died, and powerful men still ogled dragon-drawn maps and grinned over what dukedom could be had for what princess and why. Add to this that behemoth to the east, Russia, which considered itself the owner of the Balkans and yet made it policy to overleap central Europe ("we are Central Europe," the Kaiser said) and ally with France and Britain, too, for whatever reasons it liked. Add to this the Industrial Revolution's improvements in weaponry and transportation, and you have a sinister stage for the Kaiser to tread.
Then there is Wilhelm himself. The reader expecting to learn about his private life, his marriage, and the births of his children will not learn much. This is a man's book. Wilhelm grew up under the thumbs of his frantically English mother, Queen Victoria's eldest daughter Vicky, and -- not to sound comical -- of the frantically German Bismarck. German-ness and Englishness warred within him. He was intelligent but light-minded, and he had power, simply because he was born, at a time when a Germany suffering political and economic growing pains could pursue lethal plans because "the national mood" would not have it otherwise.
On June 28, 1914, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated. The killer was a Serbian subject of that empire. The assassination of an empire's heir really serves as an announcement that that empire is stupid and shouldn't exist. A simple way of putting it, but those of us who have never quite understood why the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's death mattered might perhaps understand that. Russia, would be owner of the Balkans, supported Serbia. Outraged Austria was Germany's ally, and so in that summer the clanking machineries of alliance and counter alliance, of monarchical and ministerial decision-making in Russia, France, Germany, Austria, Britain, all moved. Russia was the first to mobilize troops. In five weeks, the rest was done. One of the reasons why war had to be declared, Balfour says, was simply because pre-arranged railway timetables for getting German troops to the front --any front, for any reason -- required the pestering of Russian officials for explanations and replies that, outrageously, failed to come on time. When they didn't, the Kaiser, on August 1, 1914, signed the declaration of war which called into being all the others.
At the back of Norman Davies' huge book Europe, there is an appendix with the numbers of soldiers killed or dead of wounds by 1918: in round figures Russia lost 1.7 million, France 1.35 million, Britain 908,000, Italy 650,000; Germany lost 1.7 million, Austria-Hungary 1.2 million. It remains incomprehensible to see human deaths, and these the deaths of active young men only, expressed as fractions of a million.
The Kaiser signed the paper which started World War I, but how much was he responsible for everything leading up to it? Balfour concludes that "he was not fit for the outsize job destiny assigned him." True, but no one would have been. And, under the Kaiser's leadership (or lack of it), what was Germany's responsibility? More than once, Balfour says that it should be incumbent on nations, as it is on individuals, to realize they are not alone in the world and that their actions and ambitions will rub up against other peoples' and other nations,' and perhaps cause problems and suffering. Small actions, apparently trivial choices especially could be paramount in retrospect; in describing the Kaiser's birth to a young mother who suffered a horrific labor and delivery, Balfour asks whether history might have moved differently, if only the doctor attending had been a German committed to saving the baby rather than an Englishman committed to saving the mother (who lived to work the influence she did).
He does not quite say that the Great War proves nations should rise above happenstances, recognize their frightful moral interdependence, and trim the sails of their self-interest accordingly. As a historian and an adult he knows they don't and won't, especially not the most active and the most ambitious. On his last pages he writes, in fact, that there is no way of imagining how World War I could not have happened. "There are a number of things which one cannot imagine happening in a significantly different way unless one presupposes so many other alterations in the world as to turn the exercise into idle speculation." Germany was anxious for its "place in the sun." Britain was rich. Russia supported Serbia. Kaiser Wilhelm was born. And so on. " 'It happened because it happened,' " as Norman Davies quotes a later scholar in Europe.
Balfour ends with a quote that is true, if not terribly helpful. (What helps to understand World War I, and/or human nature? Scholars write huge books, and still don't know.) It also serves to illustrate a writing style that is really beautiful, and beautifully sustained, throughout all the enormous density:
We must always remember that it is our choices and decisions which will go to circumscribe the freedom of succeeding generations. Taken individually they may seem trivial, but taken together, and along with other people's, they add up to destiny.
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