Godfrey of Bouillon, Defender of the Holy Sepulchre by Tom Tozer

This was a new experience. I turned on my Kindle -- bless its heart -- and searched the keyword Godfrey, because I had just encountered a lengthy and rather turbid poem of G.K. Chesterton's which sang, in part,

... the voice that shook our palaces -- four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate!"

The Kindle store promptly found, and offered me the chance to buy, a title called Godfrey of Bouillon, Defender of the Holy Sepulcher, for $2.99. Published in 2005. Well, why not?

I am familiar with the once legitimately-published but now out-of-copyright books hosted at Project Gutenberg, but this was the first time I had bought anything sight unseen from Kindle, only. Was it a reprint of something just as old, or might it be a recent bestseller in a genre that I was ignorant of? 

Neither. The book is a self-published short novel, put out by a vanity press or POD (publish on demand) company -- in this case, PublishAmerica, whose reputation in the bookselling industry seems to be even worse than that of most such places. Red flag to prospective authors: PublishAmerica does not accept returns, from bookstores, of its unsold product. Why does this matter? Because Legitimate Press A would do so. Legitimate Press A invests time and money in a writer because it judges the writer's content is marketable; if it turns out that new author Miss Smith's book doesn't sell, Legitimate Press A does not stick its bookstore clients with stacks of it, but takes the rotten apple back like a good merchant, writes off the loss, and perhaps doesn't deal with Miss Smith again.

Not so PublishAmerica, which has given us Godfrey of Bouillon exactly as Mr. Tom Tozer gave it to them. Godfrey inspires this interest in the workings of the publishing world because the novel itself inspires almost none. Now, to be fair, I read it, I finished it. The prose is acceptable, some passages even rather nice. But as you skim along, without benefit of any information about the book at all, no dust jacket blurbs, no logrolling, no "advance praise," the realization slowly grows that this is an amateur.

The book is very short, for one thing, probably not more than 120 pages in a print version, if that. Short books can be good, and long novels can be bad, but any professional -- no matter how many rejection slips he has gathered -- knows that to be taken seriously he must make his manuscript, for better or worse, a certain length. As to the content, there are people and there are events in the story, but the events roll by as they were culled from popular histories of the Crusades, and the people are little more than names which the writer has learned from the same. There is the battle of Ascalon, there are Godfrey, Eustace, and Ida. No character develops in any way nor has any vital relationship with any other. If this manuscript had remotely got past the first desk in the slush pile at a New York publishing house, any editor (likely a woman) would have immediately insisted at the least on many more women, and much more romance. Our author, bless him, is a man who likes the Crusades, not all that folderol. There are also some outright mistakes. Surely no character in 1096 is going to say " 'The Pope can no more turn bread into the body of God than he can turn a frog into a potato.' " And no, it's not the disrespect shown the Pope that is anachronistic here.    

And yet. There is a curious freshness to the book. I believe it must come from the author's love of the subject and from his creation of a work of art outside the sacred precincts of that New York publishing world, where talent does batter down the doors sometimes, but where a great many submission guidelines also read like instructions for candidates in the Mandarin examinations of imperial China. ("Excellence is really our only criterion. That said, however -- race, class, and gender, etc. -- if you must trumpet your religion, do it with grace and style -- racist or bigoted characters must be seen to be defeated -- children must solve a unisex problem not involving war, death, or illness," etc.) Those guidelines produce books as stale as can be, books which read like examination papers more than stories. Only last night, I tried another sample on Kindle of a new, correctly published and accredited biography of the saints Brigid (early medieval Ireland) and Genevieve (early medieval Paris). Who knew that the people of that far away time would have spent so much time thinking, in the most painfully fusty academic terms, about gender and sacral spaces? Needless to say, I didn't buy that one. By contrast, Godfrey's freshness in the end even has a  medieval feel to it. Mr. Tozer seems to have captured something of what we imagine to be the eleventh century's flaming, personal Christian passion, as well as something of a medieval chroniclers' bland, sometimes maddeningly distant and unreflective voice ("what I have told you is truly what I have seen and heard, and I have no more to add to it").  

So. Here is an example, for history's sake, of what does not batter down the doors, what does not escape the slush pile, what does not pass the imperial Mandarin examinations. We'll let Mr. Tozer end with this: does this deserve never to have seen the light of day? Ida speaks.

"It is all like a vast poem. We know how it begins, and we know how it ends, and we know that all together it is beautiful. But we live in the middle, between the light and the glory. And thus we do not know what lines we write with our own lives every day. But, with God's help, we can write lines with our  lives that deserve a place in His song."  

Human Accomplishment by Charles Murray

A book about what made the greatest works of art and discoveries in science come to be, and why; and why these came to be where and when they did, and at the hands they did. A book, at the end, about whether or not human accomplishment is actually declining, whether or not it is true, as Keats -- Keats! -- lamented, "the count of mighty Poets is made up, the scroll is folded by the Muses ... the world has done its duty" (Endymion, Book II, lines 720 ff).

Human Accomplishment is clear but still difficult, loaded with propositions and proofs drawn from statistics which, far from being "damned lies," show themselves as very logical and reliable tools to help explain how things shake out in the collective human experience. The book is also loaded with painstaking goings-over of every possible exception and argument that might be presented to everything the author says. That is not a fault, far from it of course, it's the sign of an honest and a rigorous mind trying to out-think you before you do. But you'll have to follow along closely in order to keep up with him, through five hundred pages and nearly three thousand years of world cultural history.

Charles Murray starts, as he started The Bell Curve years ago, by insisting that a few basics of his present study are beyond quibble, never mind laymen's quibbling. They exist. In The Bell Curve it was the fact of I.Q., and its measurability. In Human Accomplishment it is the fact of objective excellence in the arts and sciences, and its measurability.

To find and catalogue excellence in the arts and sciences, Murray does something that you or I could have done if we had thought of it. He consults mini-libraries of the definitive encyclopedias on all his topics -- dictionaries of music, of scientific biography, of mathematics, books of the Oxford-Companion-to- sort -- which chronicle the considered judgment of experts in all fields regarding the finest artists, scientists, and mathematicians who ever lived. If any person is important enough to be mentioned in half the sources, he merits inclusion as a "significant figure" in Human Accomplishment. (And as Murray reminds us, if you happen to paint just one canvas, or write one book, that people still look at or quote a hundred years after you die, you are already in a tiny and honorable human minority.) The very, the extraordinarily rare souls who are mentioned in many sources, or even in all, men like Shakespeare, Milton, Galileo, Mozart and Wagner, earn a kind of raw score -- 20, 50, 93, most rarely, 100 -- and are either "major figures" or simply "the giants."

To readers who would object that consulting encyclopedias simply means consulting and trusting the very fallible and prejudiced opinions of men passing on received tastes about great men, Murray replies, no. Excellence is not subjective. Everyone recognizes that difficult human pursuits have standards of achievement, and everyone can think of something in his life in which he is expert, some topic the amateurish treatment of which will bore him. Understanding and accepting the status of a Michael Jordan or a Jack Nicklaus, even if we don't know basketball or golf, means that we are intellectually obliged to understand and accept the status of Michelangelo, agreed upon among people who know art. Or, in everyday terms: you know how you react when a neophyte innocently expands upon some subject that has been the joy of your lifetime.

It's hardly my task to recapitulate Murray's book here, but I must also salute (in some detail) his dealing deftly with that other objection to one of the facts of excellence in human achievement, namely, the modern whine that the majority of the excellent in all the sources unfailingly turn out to be dead white European males, and that this can't be right. But it is. Even very up-to-date scholars who make reputations purporting to disprove it, to "set the record straight," don't actually do so. Consulting new mini-libraries of histories and encyclopedias loaded with carefully researched entries for ambitious but little-known women and non-Europeans still produces lists of the great which agree, statistically, with his lists, loaded in turn with the usual Bachs and Dantes. Murray's simple phrasing here can't be bettered. Looking at the revisionist books attempting to show that artistic and scientific achievement as great as Europe's has happened consistently outside Europe, and has been ignored, he says:

[Revisionist authors'] language evokes the image of an exaggerated European contribution without ever specifying that it is exaggerated. It is standard practice. ...

... Science and Technology in World History presents material on non- European societies. But [the authors] are also trying to present the substance of what crucial things happened where, done by whom. The ten people with the most index entries are, in order, Aristotle, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Ptolemy, Kepler, Descartes, Euclid, and Archimedes -- a wholly conventional roster of stars. ...

The contrast between the packaging for the books and their actual texts is emblematic of our times. The packaging evokes the way that intellectual fashion says things should be. The facts reflect the way things really are (pp. 254-255).

At the heart of his argument, Murray thus comes to the question: why the preponderance of dead European males at the very pinnacles of literature, music, painting, mathematics, and science? What makes human beings -- what made those men especially -- create and discover grand things, difficult things which benefit mankind, or which still please and teach him centuries and millenia after the giants' deaths?

He carefully works out a formula. You need incomprehensible talent, for one thing. There must be talent of the kind that causes us to gawp at the Sistine chapel ceiling "and ask, how can a human being have done that?" You also need a "monomania" for work. Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven or was it thirty-eight plays, plus all the sonnets plus the long poems, and died at fifty-two. Keats died at twenty-five, Mozart at thirty-five. The poor health and medical care of previous eras is not the point. The point is what these men accomplished even in so little time. They were working, always working, and would have gone on working had they lived to be ninety-nine, as Titian claimed he had.

And, outside the person with talent, you must have a world that gives him a chance. It has nothing to do with a white male world giving a black man or a woman a chance. Talent and a monomania for work can show up in any person, anywhere. Human Accomplishment includes graphs and tables on Chinese painting, Indian philosophy, Arab literature, and more. Part of Murray's theme is that, given even a little time for each generation of humanity to look about it, sublime achievements are not ignored. To the question, for example, why do we not hear more of great women composers? the answer is, there really, really aren't any.

To have a chance, for the talented man or woman with a monomania for work, meant not to be born a subsistence farmer. To have a good chance meant not to be born into a culture which valued duty to family and community -- medieval Islam, Confucian China, even traditional Judaism -- above any inner duty to achieve a personal vocation at any cost. And to have a chance meant to know and contribute to artistic and scientific "structures," ways of working all ready or at least getting ready for the artist or scientist to fill in. The writer needs the structure of the epic poem or later the novel, the composer needs the structure of the symphony. The structures themselves grow out of what Murray calls "meta-inventions," huge mental leaps forward which gave creative people new things to do. In the West the secular observation of nature was one, the development of polyphony (several different lines of melody in one piece of music) another, the working out of linear perspective in painting a third.

And above all, Murray thinks, to foster great accomplishment the talented person needs to be encouraged by his culture to believe that an ultimate Truth, Beauty, and Good exist, which he in turn is personally valuable enough to uncover. Without that confidence, meta inventions don't necessarily happen, and structures can remain empty. It's a kind of double-whammy "aren't things divine/aren't I, too" attitude. It's a religious attitude, shared by hyper-achieving ancient (pagan) Greece and hyper-achieving (Christian) Europe, yet not shared with the same fervor by otherwise deeply religious cultures (Islam), and certainly missing from the modern secular West. Driven out by intellectuals like Freud, Darwin, and John Dewey, who have shaped our modern ideas of relativism and being non-judgmental even though we remain vague about their actual works (and anyway these men certainly did not intend to wreck Western achievement), it has been fiercely kept out by their intellectual disciples. These are the MFA professors who train artists and writers, the people who run galleries and edit poetry journals and would laugh out of court any protest that the creation of objective Beauty, say, is pleasing to God. And yet, strangely, the West suspected accomplishment was collapsing before "postmodernism" came along: recall our friend Keats and his folded scrolls.

Where a culture's elites, artists themselves or gatekeepers of the arts, deny the possibility of finding objective Truth or creating objective Beauty, great lasting art will not be made. The times matter; artists can't rise above their culture, and see what "pygmies" refuse to see. But this is difficult to accept. Shouldn't any real talent still know some sort of inner vision, exactly right, Beautiful, Truthful, and perfectly his in any age?

(Incidentally, scientists here are more or less off the hook when it comes to failing to achieve because their elites discourage the pursuit of truth and beauty. Scientific achievement has declined, but largely, Murray shows, because so much work of the greatest importance has already been done, and scientists know it. He describes science as a kind of jigsaw puzzle whose hugest pieces were fitted into place by men like Aristotle and Galileo. Their professional descendants, however gifted, appear to have little left to do but tinker, to help improve humanity's lot; if they truly were to fall into postmodernism's trap, and start doing bad science for some ideological cause, or because "truth is subjective," the result would only be error, which other scientists would be glad to pounce upon. We hope. Nevertheless, the pouncing scientists would have still to pursue the scientific method to begin with, and the scientific method itself is one of those meta-inventions which, once hit upon, cannot be stolen or lost, but can be forgotten.)

... an inner vision, exactly his, and beautiful in any age? Not particularly. If that were true, there should be hoards of art and literature from talented people who lived in cultures hostile for centuries to individual achievement. By the same token, there should be hoards of superb art from the last century or even the last fifty years, when we all understand that everything is relative and there are no right answers. There are no such hoards. If you would counter that of course there are, only Murray is a judgmental ass, he would counter-counter with the desert island question. It may seem trite, but it provokes honesty. If you were to be stranded on a desert island for ever, what books, art, and music would you pack in one suitcase? Now look carefully at them. What did that era of human accomplishment know that we refuse to know?

The reader can protest he won't recapitulate Murray's book and yet end up doing it, badly, because the work is so involved. It's really not the sort of book you can argue with, because he smothers you with proofs and that rigorous out-thinking of all your protests. Perhaps the best we can do is give ourselves a sort of pop quiz about the whole thing.





Let's see if we understand. Meta-invention: polyphony (France, 12th century); structure: fugue; human accomplishment: the "Little" Fugue (G minor). Creative giant: Johann Sebastian Bach, Germany, fl. 1725. Bach's index score, Western music inventory: 87. Compare to Beethoven (Germany), index score 100 -- i.e., mentioned in all sources, Schubert (Austria), index score 44, and Aaron Copland (USA), index score 7. Duke Ellington (USA) and Walter Piston (USA), index score both 2.

The Riddle of the Dinosaur, by John Noble Wilford

We all have our little things we're interested in. For some people, it's dinosaurs.

I happened to read -- or, honestly, skim through -- John Noble Wilford's The Riddle of the Dinosaur at about the same time I was also glancing through a beautiful coffee table book called Universe: A Journey from Earth to the Edge of the Cosmos by Nicolas Cheetham. The lesson I couldn't help but pull from both books, filled with facts about the most fantastic animals that have ever lived, or with pictures of the most mind-bogglingly distant and gigantic space phenomena known, is that none of this information really means much except that people know it.

Which is fine. I am not a friend to the idea that all human endeavor must have practical applications. Still, simply as an objective thing, I would think even scientists would recognize that only our knowing it gives meaning to the fact that Tyrannosaurus rex once roamed Montana. Only our knowing gives meaning to a picture of NGC 4622, a spiral galaxy gleaming in delicate gold and silver, one hundred and eleven million light years away. For us, the reality of it is not even that far away; it's a photograph, about ten inches by ten inches, sitting on the breakfast table within reach. Knowing about it, looking at it, gives pleasure.

(I'm reminded here of a superb quote from Renoir, as recorded by his son Jean in the biography My Father. " 'That fool Galileo,' " the great painter scoffed across the centuries at the great astronomer, " 'tells us we are no longer at the center of the universe, and yet no one behaves as if it were true.' ")

I wonder if there is a sort of pecking order among scientists, if some laugh up their sleeves at others, depending on whose subject matter is more heroically outlandish, or more popular, or more useful to mankind, or more difficult to master. Midway through The Riddle of the Dinosaur, as if he too were groping with the problem of science as rich inner life, Wilford tries to take it to a higher (more practical?) level (p. 184). What most frustrates paleontologists, he says, is that so much about dinosaurs can never be known. What makes the search worthwhile?

It is reassuringly human of scientists that, when it comes to dinosaurs, they can be just as stricken with puzzlement as the next person and find themselves with little more to work with than their imaginations. Yet they persist in their search for solutions to the riddle, knowing they will never fully succeed but believing they will learn something about the greater mysteries of life. This is the wonder of humans, their faith that there is much about dinosaurs that is worth knowing.

I'm not sure dinosaurs will teach us much about the greater mysteries of life. The sentence could be simplified, a la Renoir perhaps: "this is the wonder of humans, their faith that there is much that is worth knowing." The Riddle of the Dinosaur's most interesting chapters, after all, tell the human story of the great beasts' discovery, beginning in the early 1800s, and of the way those discoveries, the unearthing of giant bones which belonged to no creature any one had ever seen, forced mankind to confront and almost to make mysteries -- wonders -- where before there had been certainty. He was forced, abruptly, to rethink time and his own place on earth. Not that he behaved as though things were any different.

The book also tells the story of how the basic notions about dinosaurs which have seeped into popular culture arrived there. Originally, today's commonplaces -- that some of them were fast-moving predators, that some may have tended their young with an un-reptilian concern, that in the end birds may have evolved from them -- were scandals when they were broached and argued over by sober professionals in the field. The same is true for the last topic dealt with, the dinosaurs' mysterious and likely very sudden extinction. Here again Wilford retraces the arguments and evidence for a scandalous idea about it that has since seeped into the popular consciousness, namely that the dinosaurs died off because an asteroid hit the earth and sent up a cloud of debris thick enough to block sunlight, stunt plant growth, and so for a lethal while -- three years? three months? -- break the entire food chain.

Mass extinction left room on the planet for the dinosaurs' timid prey, the mammals, to emerge from the night and the undergrowth and begin evolving into everything else, including us. Sometimes, science writers take their "popularization" duties a bit far:

The little hoofed animals took to the unpopulated grasslands and grazed where the ceratopsians used to roam. Other mammals developed a taste for meat, initiating new predator-prey relationships in nature. Some took to the trees, and this led to monkeys. Some took to the sea, and this led to whales and porpoises. Some took to the air, and so there are bats today.

In time, no doubt. All this wrapping up leads Wilford to the standard last chapter theme in a science book meant for John Q. Public: isn't it sobering to think we, now, mammals with consciousness and the ability to wonder about our planet and its past, also have the power to cause the kind of catastrophe which ended the dinosaurs' ... yes, yes. (He's talking about the danger of man-made cataclysms, nuclear war, overpopulation, or maybe "nuclear winter," also suddenly destroying the food chain and all life on earth. Global warming had not yet become the dernier cri in 1984.) To paraphrase Wilford: "We've traveled back in time to the fossil fields of Montana and Mongolia, and come face to face with ourselves." Well, yes and no. If in any course of study or pursuit of pleasure or knowledge, we come face to face with ourselves, it seems to be because, in the ways that matter, we were always there.



Image from Hubblesite Newscenter

Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded, by Simon Winchester

Who would have thought a man could write a dull book about the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa? He's repetitive, he's flailing -- from the pepper trade to Darwin to plate tectonics to the 19th century telegraph system to Muslim-Dutch tensions in Java to personal recollections and shop talk about his summer in Greenland in the 1960s -- he's breathlessly anxious to assure us the explosion was hugely, terrifyingly big. It was really, really big. By the time he reaches the actual event, on page 200 and something, he passes it by in a paragraph so that we have to look back and blink and re-read it. Oh. That's it? I guess he found the circus elephant in the hotel room more interesting. And, really, need we know that the Dutch colonial ladies wearing feathers in their hats in Java that summer might have been wearing feathers from birds which had actually flown through Krakatoa's roiling and terrifying (and really big) ash clouds?

He also uses the word "rather" too much, but that's a minor point. The whole thing reinforces my impression: in general, avoid books written after about 1975 or so. Something has simply gone out of the English language, or out of the English-speaking, organizational mind. Let's hope the loss is temporary.

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.

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth by Frances Wilson

I do, occasionally, take up brand new books. I like those nice, crackly new mylar covers, and the feel of new paper and the look of clean bright typeface. I like, who does not, the possibility of fresh discovery, something good of today. And I remember finding and liking new books when I browsed the library shelves at the age of ten or twelve or a little more. Have I since become snarkily judgmental? Or have the books all declined precipitously in quality? Surely it can't be possible that intelligence and talent left the human race -- or the English-language publishing world -- sometime around June of 1977.

I plucked this, The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, off the New Arrivals shelves a few days ago. It looked good. A quick sample of the prose was nice ("a routine of mutton and moonscapes, walking and headaches, watching and waiting, pie baking and poem making"). I am sorry to say that within thirty pages, the promise fell away and the book confirmed the teachings of my inner voice, which has warned me for a long time: in general, avoid new books.

Why? Because not only did this one begin awkwardly and self-consciously, with the author writing in the present tense and omnisciently ("She can stand it no longer. When she looks from her window ....") about a subject whom she will subsequently treat in a more traditional style ("This is the story of four small notebooks whose contents Dorothy Wordsworth never meant to be published"). But it exemplified the bloodless, navel-gazing, oh so archly aware attitudes that come straight from people whose only meaningful education has been in the thin air of the university classroom, and whose cohorts have these last thirty years gone on to suck any healthful oxygen out of English-language publishing officialdom. The result is not only a book like this, but a veritable book-stuffed universe lived in, loved, and guarded by themselves. The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth sings the Academy, with a capital A.

What people learn in an Academy's English literature departments, it seems, is to perfect a basic human skill, and that is the ability to see patterns. If you can see patterns and then weave them into something more or less semantically clever -- if you can " 'make extracts,' " as Mr. Bennett teases his bluestocking daughter Mary in Pride and Prejudice -- then you may be on your way to a book contract with an important firm. (Did I mention that no important firm has ever offered me a book contract? Full disclosure.) Here is where I stopped reading Frances Wilson:

She weighs and measures her condition: her heart is full, she cries until it is lighter; her brothers are together, she is apart from them; they are walking, she is still; she leaves them under the trees, she sits upon a stone. Dorothy initially wrote that she sat upon a stone at "the foot of the lake" before changing "foot" to "margin," which gets in more her sense of frames, limits, borders. It is William who provides the contours of her life.

I would not doubt that William Wordsworth provided the contours of his sister's life, but in this particular case, she may have read over this one page, realized that lakes don't have feet but they do have, what, beaches, shorelines, ah! -- margins! and corrected even her private words accordingly. But to an academic, this is pattern. Capital P. This is something to analyze. And of course the resulting extract is always plausible, publishable, because as long as you provide evidence, who is to say that your pattern analysis might not have been right? At any rate you are thinking for yourself, as your professors want you to do. You are writing your paper. Dorothy Wordsworth is in no position to argue.

I don't know what the rest of the book is like, but I take it that Frances Wilson's oeuvre is the dissection of the idea of the Journal, any journal, as such. "The self as a perceiving subject." Pity, then, poor Dorothy, or any diary keeper. Who knows why people do it? To purge the mind (Aristotle). To not purge it (" 'Aw, Sport, because I've seen them, and I want to remember them,' " Harriet explains in Harriet the Spy). Every journal keeper might list the pretty flowers she saw on a walk, or write down an appalling encounter with a bereaved neighbor who had lost all her children to disease in a year and a half. Let those jottings come under the eye of a well-meaning academic two hundred years on, however, and you've got pattern. The flowers "symbolize her sorrow," as they do for Hamlet's Ophelia; by the tale of the mourning neighbor she "communicates her own fear for her immediate future." It didn't all just happen. No one could get a book out of that.

In the end you can tell you've got an anemic, modern book on your hands, Modern with a capital M, when the quotes in it from older sources, meant to be ancillary, stand out as fresh, adult, and simply normal. The lines from Wordsworth's poems stand out. A bit less so do the snippets from Dorothy's journals. You read them and feel encouraged to go and seek them out for their own sake. That's good; and previous eras have certainly also produced their share of anemic books, which I am sure one by one suffered their inevitable fate, and were forgotten. What strikes me about Modern publishing, and what makes my inner voice say 'life is short, avoid it,' is that a whole industry should seem to be so devoted to making and selling such thin, repetitive, adolescent product. The really dense, impressive but new book, randomly plucked from a shelf as opposed to sought out from an author whose talent you know, is a rare treat. How do good, untried things ever pass the narrow gate? Perhaps it is just randomly done.

A History of Britain: At the Edge of the World? by Simon Schama

A book published in 2000 would not seem to qualify as "an old volume shaking its vellum head, and tantalizing just so," but then, time does march on. The book is already eight years old, and ended up recently in my library's book sale, Withdrawn stamped on its title page. Having only been checked out nine times in seven years, and not at all for the most recent three years running, is grounds for dismissal here.


The book tells an old-fashioned history, the kind that used to be so pleasant, full of famous people, events, and stories. The Roman occupation -- Boadicea -- Christianity, St. Patrick, Lindisfarne -- possibly Arthur -- the Normans, King John, Magna Carta -- the Black Death, the Black Prince -- Henry V, Agincourt, the Tudors, Good Queen Bess. It stops there. 1603.


It is, Schama writes in his preface, the kind of history that drew "hoots of derision" from him and his youthful university friends in the 1950s and '60s, when the enlightened young understood that true history was the study of the worldwide masses, oppressed and rebellious, while the didoes of individual kings and churches made only for a silly patriotic opium to lull the suffering to sleep. So what made him write this hoary -- whore-y -- kind of history in the year 2000? Memories of being impressed by the "gorgeous rhetoric" and good sense of Macaulay and Churchill, even though they wrote mostly about kings; memories of his parents' generation, who stood firmly against Hitler because they did see themselves as English, therefore different, yes therefore better, possessing better laws and government and a history that taught them how to keep them, than their fellow struggling plebs in Germany.


He wrote it, also, as a way of putting a finger in the dike holding back the tides of "self-inflicted, collective memory loss" otherwise apparently threatening to sweep over Britain. If Britons don't learn what was ever special, good, or heroic in British history, he says, then they will have no way of knowing what it means to be British. They will just be citizens of of a "globalized world," eternal children (as he says Cicero warned) not knowing where they have been or where they are going. And unable to argue with people who aren't just globalized themselves, but also loathe Britishness. He doesn't say this outright. You must infer it from other clues later on.


In fact if will be helpful if you have already done some homework before you try to make head or tail of Schama's preface, which is the most interesting chapter in the book despite its timidity. He is an apostate struggling to get free of progressive, academic, history-less orthodoxy for one thing, and for another he is a modern observer looking at modern Britain, seeing a place that Macaulay and Churchill would not have recognized -- and trying to say it's all right because the aim of being globalized and almost identity-less really is right and good. One just don't want total national amnesia. He excuses his new retelling of stories of kings and battles on the grounds that, after all, history can include many records, not just the proper records of the poor and oppressed. And he writes (a groat for those who can decipher these two sentences):

"The colonised, promised by Westminster that the British legacy would be parliamentary democracy and the rule of law, took the promise at face value and decided to move to the source to enjoy those blessings, which was not exactly what the proconculs had meant. Omdurman Gardens all over the country are now populated by precisely the people whose subjugation the street names commemorate, and for them, the imperial triumphalism of the saga of what Churchill repeatedly called 'the island race' is understandably at best incomprehensible and at worst egregiously offensive."


I'll try to earn the groat. Sentence one: people from the former British colonies have moved there en masse. Sentence two: having moved there, they find British culture and British pride "egregiously offensive," and that's okay. Unspoken fact: by the way, they're Muslim. A pair of exquisitely written sentences, but psychologically and morally, what a mess they make.

From this preface, Schama goes on to retrace the great familiar stories that appeared in American schoolchildren's McGuffey's Readers, and probably in magazines like Boy's Life, and to this day in a thousand women's romance novels as well. But those two sentences about the egregiously offended in Omdurman Gardens stuck in my head as I read the book, and so I ended up seeing this British history as a history of vulnerability, invasion, and cultural defeat. Romans displace Celtic British tribesmen -- who themselves displaced God knows whom -- Angles, Picts, Saxons, and Jutes displace Romans. Vikings next. Normans next. Britain as a medieval Darfur: long centuries when ambitious men know that the whole point of life is to own more land, and the way to conquer a piece of land is to go there and kill all the people and animals. Then it becomes yours. In time conquered Britain becomes the conqueror, and English kings bring Darfur to Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Then comes the Plague, and then Protestantism. (Schama seems to be one of those historians who laments the disappearance from history of colorful, Catholic England, Robin Hood's England of fluttering pennons and grey stone church towers under the Pope's blue sky, and who believes that this, too, was a change imposed from above. More cultural defeat.)

The book closes with England's survival of the Spanish Armada and then the death of Queen Elizabeth I. This brings the tale to the eve of the era whose imperial English excitements and English progress in law and personal liberties future, chest-thumping historians would celebrate, and Schama's generation would later loftily deride. It brings us, finally, to the era of the egregiously offended in Omdurman Gardens, and to an Archbishop of Canterbury opining that the imposition of sharia, Islamic law, in Britain will eventually prove unavoidable.

Macaulay and Churchill would spin in their graves. But Schama's history, from preface to close, makes the possibility seem normal. In his telling, the Island Race, whoever they were, have been drowned by outside forces so many times that a new inundation really seems long overdue. Is this the lesson he intended to teach?