The Iliad, Book 2

School teachers spend their careers warning students against simply summarizing the plot of a book they've been assigned to write about. True enough. You're supposed to reflect on your book, not merely know how it's ordered. But the grandest classics are not like ordinary books. When coping with them, we still have to double check the course of action -- and often we're surprised at what we have already missed -- because to fail to do so is to go on ignorant of their complexities, and so miss the point of age-old reputations and age-old lessons. By the time we soldier through Book 24 of the Iliad ("and so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses") we'll hope to have processed the plot accurately enough for all the worthiest personal-and-yet-universal extracts to assert themselves.

So, Book 2.  

Zeus, having promised the sea-goddess Thetis that he would wreak some sort of havoc among the Greek (Achaean) troops outside Troy as vengeance for King Agamemnon having taken Achilles' woman away from him (Achilles is Thetis' son), -- lies awake on Olympus wondering how to accomplish this. He decides to send a dream to the king in the form of the Achaean wise man Nestor. The dream "Nestor" duly urges him to renew the war against Troy, because the gods have finally determined on Greek victory.

After he wakes, Agamemnon calls a council of his chiefs and tells them what has happened. All including Nestor agree that this dream must be trustworthy, and that now is the time for action. However, Agamemnon further decides that "according to time-honored custom" the troops should be tested before battle: he will announce to all of them that the siege of Troy has proved futile and that they should "cut and run."

When the king does this, the soldiers take him at his word and bolt for the ships. The goddess Hera is appalled and sends Athena down to stop the panic. The first man she goes to is Odysseus, who was furious at the panic to begin with. Commanded by Athena to calm the men, he ranges among them, exhorting his equals and lambasting the commoners to order. Last to be controlled is the strange,  deformed, obscenity-spewing Thersites, who finally earns a crack on the head with Odysseus' scepter and a relieved laugh from the armies.

With Athena beside him, Odysseus now speaks to the throngs and to Agamemnon. He acknowledges that the war has been long, but reminds them of the sign given to them at a sacrifice held before they sailed for Troy -- they all witnessed the omen of a snake devouring a nest of eight fledgling birds and their mother, and of the snake then being turned to stone; they all remember the explanation of this portent was that the war against Troy would last nine years, but that the city would in the end fall.

The men are cheered by this, and Nestor echoes Odysseus' encouragement. He seems briefly to allude to Achilles' absence from the scene -- "Let them rot, the one or two who hatch their plans apart from all the troops; what good can they win from that?" -- and he advises the king to marshal the men by tribes and clans so that any cowardice among them will stand out most shamefully. Agamemnon salutes Nestor for his advice,  comments briefly himself on his fight with Achilles ("imagine, I and Achilles wrangling over a girl"), and then the troops disperse to eat and make a sacrifice before battle commences.

The rest of Book 2 is a list of the legions making up the Achaean and then the Trojan army ("who were the captains of the Achaean army? Who were the kings?"). The largest Greek contingent is that from Mycenae, commanded by Agamemnon; his brother, Menelaus, leads the forces from Lacedaemon, "and his own heart blazed the most to avenge the groans and shocks of war they'd borne for Helen." Odysseus hails from Ithaca, Idomeneus from Crete. We get a glimpse of "Nireus the handsomest man who ever came to Troy," but who only commands three ships and is a lightweight. We see Achilles and his fifty ships' worth of men, out of action because of Achilles' rage at losing Briseis.

The goddess Iris now flies down from heaven to the Trojans in their assembly, demanding that the Trojan king Priam open the gates and send the army out to meet the invaders. Despite her disguise, Priam's son Hector recognizes divinity and obeys her instantly. He "breaks up the assembly," and the Trojans pour out onto the plain. They are much more quickly described, their two greatest heroes being Hector and Aeneas.

The Iliad, Book 1

Let's all make a pact, a New Year's resolution maybe, to approach the most gigantic classics a little bit at a time. By the chapter, by the "book." I've often grimly determined to do this with lots of things, with Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for instance, whose three volumes, I think, could only be managed one paragraph at a time -- but so far I have always lost my nerve. With Gibbon, and with much more. Moby Dick, anyone?  

No more quavering. Let us at least get the rough outlines of the plot of the Iliad clear in our heads, so that we may not continue forever ignorant of a founding book of the Western world. Besides, reading it helps us decipher art.

Book one opens with sickness, and a quarrel over women.The Greek (or we should say, Achaean) army is camped outside the walls of Troy, suffering a plague sent by Apollo because the Achaean king Agamemnon has taken as a prize Chryseis, the daughter of one of Apollo's priests, and has refused to free her even for a ransom. A seer, speaking under the protection of the great warrior Achilles, reveals this publicly. Agamemnon is furious. He says that to stay the plague, one of the other captains may have the chore of returning the girl to her father, provided he is given a compensatory prize, that is, one of their women. This in turn outrages Achilles, who shouts that the army has already fought Agamemnon's (endless) war and seen him take extra plunder "whenever we sack some wealthy Trojan stronghold." He seems to loathe Agamemnon personally anyway, apart from any grievance. Agamemnon then declares that he will therefore take Briseis, Achilles' woman, and before Achilles can draw a sword on him, the goddess Athena swoops in from heaven and orders him to stop.

Achilles, though he is called a king, must submit to Agamemnon's authority as a greater one ("no one can match the honors dealt a sceptered king"). Nevertheless, he vows that because of this outrage, and the acquiescence of the army witnessing it,  he will not fight with them any more and that the time will come when they will need him desperately but be slaughtered without him. Nestor attemps to make peace between the two men, but cannot. Agamemnon sends two underlings to take Briseis away, while no less a hero than Odysseus respectfully escorts the priest's daughter back to her father. Achilles, weeping with rage on the beach, prays to his mother, the sea goddess Thetis, to go to Zeus and beg him to harm the Achaeans and to further the Trojan cause. Thetis agrees to try, although she says she can do nothing until Zeus returns from a twelve day feast "at the Ocean River with the Aethiopians, loyal, lordly men."

In twelve days, while Achilles "grinds his heart out" for sorrow at losing Briseis, Thetis goes to Olympus to plead with Zeus. He reluctantly agrees to help "pay her dear son back" for his lost honors, reluctantly because his wife Hera already thinks he favors the Trojans too much over the Achaeans whom she loves. "Even now in the face of all the immortal gods she harries me perpetually," he complains. Thetis, having won his assent, dives back to her ocean home. Hera indeed immediately understands what has just happened, but Zeus tells her she cannot do anything about his decisions and silences her with threats to strangle her. She and all the gods are terrified; her son Hephaestus comes to her with a cup of wine and asks her to remember Zeus' power and have patience, or else all the joys of Olympus will be over. The book ends with laughter, music and feasting in heaven, and then with the picture of all the gods returning to their own houses, and of Zeus and Hera in bed.

(This translation of the Iliad is by Robert Fagles, first published in 1990.)

I haven't actually stopped reading

The trouble is, a Kindle allows you to read so much at once. The Works of Lord Byron, vol. 1 -- here, the teenaged genius discusses his annoying mother:

... though timely Severity may sometimes be necessary & justifiable, surely a peevish harassing System of Torment is by no means commendable, & when that is interrupted by ridiculous Indulgence, the only purpose answered is to soften the feelings for a moment which are soon after to be doubly wounded by the recal of accustomed Harshness. I will now give this disagreeable Subject to the Winds.

And he writes a lot about his debts and his weight loss. It is interesting and encouraging, though, to see him grow up, to read him become sympathetic, self-deprecating even about his poetry, and humbly anxious to maintain old friendships. "I do not know how far our destinations in life may throw us together, but if opportunity and inclination allow you to waste a thought on such a hare-brained being as myself, you will find me at least sincere, and not so bigoted to my faults as to involve others in the consequences."  Old men kept his letters for fifty years.

Lays of Ancient Rome, Thomas Babington MacAulay. The Victorian schoolboy of legend read it or was assigned to read it, and out of it all, memorized it seems mostly this:

Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods...."

I liked the scholarly prose discussion of what happened to Rome's pre-imperial historical documents better than the poetry which MacAulay invented to try to recreate something of what they had said. It seems the Gauls burned Rome's archives in the 4th century B.C.E. when they sacked the city, and that Roman historians of later centuries knew perfectly well they had no documents upon which to base anything they wrote or thought they knew about that time. They had only, it seems, memories of popular legend and poetry; it would be as if American historians could only reconstruct the colonial period from childlike songs about Paul Revere's ride, or Washington crossing the Delaware. MacAulay's Lays are his imaginative reconstructions of what those word of mouth songs might have been; they concern the biggest topics of remote Roman history, like Rome's wars against more powerful Italian neighbors, or the class struggles between patrician and plebeian. It's astonishing, what MacAulay understood his readers would already know about what he was doing.

The loves of the Vestal and the God of War, the cradle laid among the reeds of the Tiber, the fig-tree, the she-wolf, the shepherd's cabin, the recognition, the fratricide, the rape of the Sabines, the death of Tarpeia, the fall of Hostus Hostilius, the struggle of Mettus Curtius through the marsh, the women rushing with torn raiment and dishevelled hair between their fathers and their husbands, the nightly meetings of Numa and the Nymph by the well in the sacred grove, the fight of the three Romans and the three Albans, the purchase of the Sibylline books, the crime of Tullia, the simulated madness of Brutus, the ambiguous reply of the Delphian oracle to the Tarquins, the wrongs of Lucretia, the heroic actions of Horatius Cocles, of Scaevola, and of Cloelia, the battle of Regillus won by the aid of Castor and Pollux, the defense of Cremera, the touching story of Coriolanus, the still more touching story of Virginia, the wild legend about the draining of the Alban lake, the combat between Valerius Corvus and the gigantic Gaul, are among the many instances which will at once suggest themselves to every reader.

Victorian Short Stories of Troubled Marriages. Not at all what you might think -- not at all gamy little exposes of Victorian marriages that were troubled, as written by the men and women involved. Rather, simply short stories by a variety of Victorian authors, Kipling, Conan Doyle, etc., about characters in troubled marriages. Kipling's "The Bronckhorst Divorce Case" was not very interesting, and I have yet to move on to Doyle's "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange."

Also on my Kindle home page are the Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de l'Enclos -- very strange; are the French really that different? When she warbles on about "love," does she mean sex, does she mean the love that makes a couple married sixty years nurse one another through the last illnesses, or does she mean a kind of freewheeling indulgence (including sex), of every new crush that comes along and excites you and flatters your vanity? -- on the grounds that indulging so is only human nature and therefore one must be humane and sophisticated and true to it? 

The White House Cookbook. The Rubaiyat of a Huffy Husband. The Spectator. Under Two Flags by Ouida, who I think was somehow scandalous and terribly popular in another era. The Chaplet of Pearls by Charlotte Yonge, ditto. Confessions of an English Opium Eater, certainly ditto. Aristotle. Twenty-four Little French Dinners ... not by Aristotle, that last.

Twelfth Night

Difficult, of course. It will require a second reading even to begin to get the plot straight, even though it is "only" a comedy.

The prime difficulty is that for the bulk of the story, we follow "the lighter people," the non-noble characters, as they play three successive tricks on one another: first a steward, Malvolio, finds a forged letter that deceives him into behaving pompously before the countess Olivia, whom he now thinks is in love with him; then the delightful idiot, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, is tricked into provoking a near-duel with Count Orsino's young manservant "Cesario" (who is really the disguised girl, Viola); finally Malvolio is hied off to a dungeon and succored and visited as a madman by the rest of the lighter folk, ostensibly because of the behavior encouraged in him by the forged letter.

All this takes up quite a bit of time, and it all taxes the modern reader's understanding because the non-nobles, not only Andrew and Malvolio but Sir Toby Belch, Maria (she forges the letter), and Feste the clown, speak in language much more obscure than that used by their betters. They speak, I venture to guess, like common people of 1600. Their banter is full of lost references to popular songs and jokes, they are forever joshing each other in that pun-infested, can-you-top-this style that Shakespeare loved (Samuel Johnson complained about his "quibbles"), and naturally they use the slang and idiom of the time, some of it bastardized French, some of it simply vocabulary long disused. A "catch" is a song, "Catay" is China. Decipher this, either on the page or in the theater, and by the way I know people who attended a performance of Twelfth Night just this past weekend.

TOBY: "My lady's a Cataian, we are politicians, Malvolio's a Peg-a-Ramsey, and [sings] 'Three merry men are we.' Am not I consanguineous? Am I not of her blood? Tilly-vally, lady. [sings] 'There dwelt a man in Babylon, lady, lady."  (II, iii, 69-72)

There's plenty more, and why does it always seem that the helpful notes at the bottom of a page of Shakespeare never elucidate what is truly bizarre? Your scholarly editor will assure us that "skill-less" means "without knowledge," but will not explain why Viola wants a beard, but "would not have it grow on my chin" (III, i, 45). Good luck to all.

So oddly enough it is the daunting-looking columns of poetry given to Viola, to the Countess Olivia, to Sebastian and to Duke Orsino which seem to swing aside like doors and, actually comprehensible, open up the movement of the play beyond. As an example of this sheer mental refreshment, here is Viola. She has been sent in her male disguise from her master, Orsino, to woo the mourning and cloistered Olivia by proxy.  "What would you?" Olivia asks, amused and attracted by the beardless "Cesario." Viola answers. She would

Make me a willow cabin at your gate
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of contemned love
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Hallo your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out 'Olivia'! ....

At least we understand this as English, or think we do. It sounds very feeling. But we may yet be deceived. This may not be as dreamy and deeply meaningful a speech as changed modern ears are apt to hear. Explanatory notes at the bottom of the page, useful at long last, tell us that the willow is a symbol of grief for unrequited love, so the image of a shack built of willows at someone's door might have been intended as simply enjoyably silly. The same for "calling upon my soul within the house" -- imagine some lovelorn person wandering around literally saying "Upon my soul," as characters did in plays and books until that oath fell out of use. Because we're not used to glowing language (and who ever gets used to Shakespeare in any case?) we may see profundity, and make extracts, where the great man intended pleasant absurdity. 

While the reader is deciphering the lighter people's three successive barroom tricks, the nobility carries on, behind its swinging doors of poetry, with the love story. Its focus is the entrancing disguised girl, Viola. She has been shipwrecked along with her brother, Sebastian, on the coast of Illyria. Separated by the storm, each thinks the other is drowned. Viola dresses as a man, and takes service with the Duke, Orsino; her chief duty is to pursue his romance with the Countess. Olivia rejects him, but falls in love with the new page, "Cesario." For her part, Cesario falls in love with the duke herself.

It remains only for Sebastian to enter the fray, exactly resembling his sister, to astonish everyone and prompt questions, accusations, and confessions of truth and love, and thus launch the action softly down to its denouement, all the while he eyes Olivia himself. Did Shakespeare mean for us to draw any profound lessons from it all? I doubt it; only the fine expression "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, some have greatness thrust upon them," thrice repeated, suggests a peg upon which a grand theme might hang. And yet the fine expression comes from Maria's forged letter, so possibly it is all in fun, too.

The introduction to Twelfth Night in my 1960s-era volume of Shakespeare says that this is one of the three "Joyous Comedies," the other two being Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It. Very well, but four hundred years is a long time for one civilization's definition of a joyous comedy to endure. It's a long time specifically for an upper class, courtly definition of joyous comedy to endure -- the joy of the gentleman's belly laugh at the idea of a steward being persuaded a gentlewoman loves him. The joke on Malvolio is about far more than his yellow stockings. I wonder what went on at the theater this weekend; I wonder how any theater company can make a modern audience understand and relish this play. I'm not such a virtuous and democratic killjoy that I can't laugh at Malvolio, but the entire world that bred him and his mockers (and they included everyone, beginning with his fellow servants) has gone, and how are we to resurrect them, even in make believe? For us pale twenty-first century weaklings, it's far easier to understand Viola and Olivia, arguing like soft-voiced birds over personal identity. "I prithee tell me what thou think'st of me"/"That you do think you are not what you are," etc.

...
OLIVIA: Love sought is good, but given unsought is better.
VIOLA: By innocence I swear, and by my youth,
I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth,
And that no woman has; nor never none
Shall mistress be of it, save I alone. ... (III,i,153-157)

Beautiful. The writer of my '60s era introduction also dwells much on the love story, but I think Shakespeare liked his servants and his Belches better here. And just how do we go about properly appreciating that?

The Bostonians by Henry James

From my "Book Lover's Journal," January 2002

Most excellent. Surprised the feminist movement survived it. However, if it was a "failure" when it first came out, I can see why: it all hinges on the character of Olive Chancellor, and there is no reason for her to be as she is, at least no explanation -- though perhaps that is James' point. She is like Iago, totally rational and totally malicious -- but why?

I suppose the theme of the novel is that people are going to do what they like, and always have, and that the purpose of life is to be true to oneself (like Miss Birdseye, who is a radical), and not to give oneself over to a cause, even a cause for freedom. Subjection to a cause always leads to obedience: the Boston audience howling for Verena at the end. As for oppression, not a single woman in the book is beholden to anyone, except perhaps Olive herself, who at the end has a male agent, Mr. Filer. Obedience being the price of belonging, James would not be at all surprised to find today that the feminist movement's demand now is that all women work, and wish to work. As for Basil Ransom, he, like Miss Birdseye, is one of the few characters true to himself -- and true to the absolute truth, love -- but even with him, James has "not cheated." He really does want women to stay home and make men happy. Or so he protests. He also "sits on fences" for them.

A curious note: I think James cannot describe the American landscape. He has no feel for it -- he describes it as if from a map, with no real smells, sounds, details, love.

As for Verena: a pure and lovely creature, yet, as such, her subjection to the horror of Olive also makes little sense. I feel James knew none of these people, except Ransom and Birdseye; the rest are types, set to lay a scene.

The Long Secret by Louise Fitzhugh

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

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

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

They were having a discussion about where to go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Smashing," said Janie.

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

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

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

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

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

For more information:

Purple Socks: a Louise Fitzhugh tribute site

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

Louise Fitzhugh (wikipedia article)

Harriet the Spy (movie, 1996)

Typhoon by Joseph Conrad

The sea story. The fo'c'sle and the mizzenmast, the bosun and the 'tween-decks. The storm.

I have tremendous respect for Joseph Conrad, even though I never could finish Lord Jim. I understand that Conrad muscled himself into being a gorgeous stylist of English prose, and an utterly natural recorder of English dialogue, despite not knowing the language until he was twenty (he was born a Polish aristocrat). Still, there is something about the sea story that must only appeal to a limited cadre of readers. If you have lived on a boat and loved it, perhaps you're the cadre; but in that case you would not need the careful descriptions of rigging, pistons, and booms. They are for the landlubber, and more power to Conrad and his fellow sea-writers for trying to make it all clear to us. The trouble is, after a while, all the fo'c'sle talk does become so enervating. It would be as if an ordinary writer were to tell a tale set in a house, and painstakingly depict everything about how the faucets and the doorknobs work. Perhaps, by definition, the writer of sea stories is no ordinary writer.

In Typhoon, Conrad sets himself the task of recording two things, apart from the fo'c'sle talk which sets the stage. He records the reactions of a good, competent, but by no means dazzling man, to his first life-and-death challenge from his chosen element, the sea. We know that Captain MacWhirr ran away to be a sailor when he was fifteen, and has ploddingly loved it and never looked back. Now he is well into middle age. And Conrad tells us, as well as he can, what a typhoon is.

That last is hard to do, though I doubt anyone could do it any better or try any harder. Deafening noise, blackness, the glimpse of huge walls of water approaching the crew on deck, and then the sensation of their weight hitting, which is all the passengers below can know, all give as good an idea as any of a storm that lasts hours, and that seems to take place in some other universe, where calm and sunshine are unknown.

One more obstacle to the landlubber's enjoyment of the sea story, and one that is not remotely Conrad's fault, is the tendency while reading it to remember your undergraduate training in everlastingly analyzing Litt-trah-ture. It poisons good books in any case, but the sea story in particular is so helpless to defend itself against English Lit preciousness. Of course any voyage in a boat represents life. Of course the passengers below decks, scrambling in the midst of the storm to recover their money scattered from the broken chests, represent the futility of man. Since the passengers are "Chinamen," and are brought to order and given lifelines to cling to by the actions of the English captain and crew, I suppose today that must raise shrieks of racism and the condescension of the imperialist West towards the East. Reading the story as Conrad wrote it, and not as the poison of your training has taught you to read it, will be your best corrective here.

At the end we come away, lubbers though we are, with an affection and respect for Captain MacWhirr, unimaginative, untalkative, untried man who had to consult books about typhoons when he noticed the "glass" falling, but in whom the storm finally "met its match." And there are some great lines, lessons really, which stand out partly because they are great and partly because the ex-English major has been trained to spot them. In a lesser author they would merely be precious, attention-please, drumroll prose. In Conrad they are true, and striking. At the beginning, we read,

Captain MacWhirr had sailed over the surface of the oceans as some men go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to see all it may contain of perfidy, of violence, and of terror. There are on sea and land such men thus fortunate -- or thus disdained by destiny or by the sea.

But midway through, already things have changed. They have encountered far more than "dirty" weather, and the worst is to come. Expecting he might die, he tells his second in command,

"Don't you be put out by anything. Keep her facing it. They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind. Facing it -- always facing it -- that's the way to get through. You are a young sailor. Face it. That's enough for any man. Keep a cool head."

"Yes, sir," said Jukes, with a flutter of the heart.

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens

I have a friend who loves Dickens, loves him with a new and mature fervor. "Some characters are horrible people, some are so wonderful ... and yet in the end, there's always hope. Goodness."

Perhaps I should try him again.

March 1999

The story might be excellent, in other hands, but Dickens is always Dickens. He is neither funny nor feeling; Sydney Carton, grown man weeping into his pillow because he can't be good, is very distasteful. Miss Pross is well drawn but little seen. Finished it quickly, as marvellous story, but again Dickens is always Dickens. Mawkish, hysterical. Had a chance for a great psychological scene at the end, when Carton convinces Darnay to leave and let him take his place on the guillotine; instead of which, Carton drugs him with some handy, unexplained vapour (on a wafted handkerchief).

Mr. Jarvis Lorry very good.

Death in the Afternoon, by Ernest Hemingway

May, 2000

Very interesting; I would never have imagined bull fighting was so complex. His interpolations about war and death were not much to the point, and his views on writing seemed totally purposeless. Occasionally he unbent and wrote a few sentences that seemed to come directly from the heart: "If you ever bolt with someone, go to Ronda," was the first.

However, the one salient characteristic emerging from his book is, I think, fear. In his nervous vituperation of everything except himself and the bulls, in his honest, youthful pomposity, he strikes me as the most terrified soul ever to set pen to paper and try to pretend he wasn't -- or try to find experiences which drowned his fright at himself.

Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt

July, 2001

Massive and superior, of course, but still not exactly what I was looking for. I want the story, not a synopsis of its economic causes and psychic effects. Still, what a fund of knowledge he had. There is also this quote from a man once "well-known," one Luigi Cornaro:

"...how cheerful, amusing, and contented I am ... in my eighty-third year I have written a most amusing comedy."

What stands out above all is Burckhardt's contention that individuality marks the Renaissance type, while race-membership marked the medieval.

Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding (d---- me)

This is my second go-round with Tom Jones. Of course it's splendid; I understand it's splendid. What modern writer, for example, has the brains to accomplish this? --

Hushed be every ruder breath. May the heathen ruler of the winds confine in iron chains the boisterous limbs of noisy Boreas and the sharp-pointed nose of bitter-biting Eurus. Do thou, sweet Zephyrus, rising from thy fragrant bed, mount the western sky and lead on those delicious gales, the charms of which call forth the lovely Flora from her chamber, perfumed with pearly dews, when on the first of June, her birthday, the blooming maid in loose attire gently tips it over the verdant mead, where every flower rises to do her homage till the whole field becomes enamelled and colours contend with sweets which shall ravish her most (Book IV, chapter 2).

My trouble is that I get bogged down, in Tom Jones, in the long middle chapters concerning the inn or inns at Upton. We begin well, otherwise. I understand that Tom is a foundling, a fine, decent, red-blooded English boy. Out in the country among his gentry foster family and neighbors, there are only a handful of characters to keep track of. There's his foster father, Squire Allworthy, and Allworthy's sister, and the boozing and hunting and really rather awful Squire Western across the fields. There's Squire Western's lovely daughter Sophia, and Western has a sister, too, the d----d b---- who is the plague of his life now that his d----d wife is dead. Then Allworthy's sister marries one Blifil and has a son, young Blifil, who grows up to be all that is snivelling, mean, and wretched. There are parsons, tutors, and maids, and we can't forget that in eighteenth century English usage a maid was an "Abigail," just as a youngest son could be a "Benjamin" even though his name might be Hal, and a single woman over a certain age was credited with the honorific "Mrs."

So far so good. There is nothing quite like eighteenth-century English prose, as a matter of fact, and what I find especially awe-inspiring about Fielding's use of it is precisely that it is so often unstuffy. If anybody taught him the rule that one never ends a sentence with a preposition, he forgot it or didn't care. If anyone taught him that one never mixes up persons in one's narrator, he forgot that, too, or didn't care. He writes with blooming confidence, almost at dictation speed, and if amid that arch, slightly hectoring but good-natured tone, and all the rolling Latinate periods, a sentence runs on something like "reader, we think it best to inform thee, as I have hinted before, that Fate had placed the youth in a situation he couldn't get out from," Fielding leaves it all at that.

Another extraordinary thing about Fielding's work -- watch me try to imitate his confidence, and fail -- is the conversations he records among his characters, including the lower orders whom the reader might assume in real life would not speak well. Possibly our own age has gotten so lazy with language, spoken and written, that we simply can't believe anyone ever kept his mind so engaged in his own discourse, and his neighbors', that he could reel off full thoughts in good grammatical structure as a daily, an hourly, habit. The maidservant, Mrs. Honour, is my favorite, especially when she is in a self-justifying passion: " 'I don't care a farthing! I speaks no scandal of any one; but to be sure, the servants make no scruple of saying as how her ladyship meets men at another place -- where the house goes under the name of a poor gentlewoman but her ladyship pays the rent; and many's the good thing besides, they say, she hath of her.' " These conversations are extraordinary also in the way they appear on the page: not for Fielding the obvious separation of lines of dialogue, speech by speech, a dozen new little paragraphs all down the paper. Instead, the characters' confrontations are treated as whole scenes, so the reader faces huge blocks of thickly printed text which can't be skimmed over. If you want to really know who is saying what to whom, you must read, and watch out for the quotation marks or you'll get confused.

So far, so good. Tom Jones, virtuous foundling, loves Sophia, and Sophia loves him. Her father finds out and locks her up, insisting she won't get out until she marries the wretch, young Blifil, who in turn has poisoned his uncle's, Squire Allworthy's, mind against Jones and so now stands to inherit all Allworthy's fortune. Jones is kicked out of Allworthy's house. Sophia escapes to the open road with her maid, intending to throw herself upon the mercy and protection of an aunt in London. We attend our characters to the midpoint of their journey, the inn, or inns, at Upton.

Of course Fielding has to separate his lovers in some way, but here at Upton I get bogged down. The middle fourth, or perhaps third, of the book is spent here, in what seems an endless series of marches and counter-marches, most of them at night, by which Jones and Sophia stumble from one inn to another, are kept carefully apart, and yet thrown in with more characters who will play big roles in their fate in the final part of the novel. The army is here, too, for it's 1745 and the last Stuart pretender to the English monarchy, Bonnie Prince Charlie, is lurking about or his "rebels" are. There are plenty of soldiers for the hot-blooded Jones to get in fights with, and Sophia is briefly mistaken for Jenny Cameron, famous mistress of the prince. In the middle of all this Jones meets the mysterious Man of the Hill, a recluse who tells a long story about his past misfortunes and then disappears.

Eventually we leave Upton and attend our hero and heroine to London. The hailstorm of new characters whom we had met -- landladies, ensigns, post boys, parlor maids -- now becomes a tornadic blizzard of even newer characters in "town." Lords, ladies, lawyers, husbands, wives (or not), Mrs. Miller and her daughters, Mrs. Miller's daughter's beau, Mrs. Miller's cousin who turns out to be the highwayman who had accosted Jones outside Upton, and all along Mrs. Miller has been well acquainted with Squire Allworthy plus I had forgotten to mention that all along Jones has been jogging along in the company of the delightful idiot Partridge, who had been expelled from Allworthy's employ twenty years earlier because he was reputed to be Jones' natural father.

When Fielding opens up a fresh plot twist by saying, "the reader will remember that this was the lady who had departed the inn just a few minutes before Sophia in the ninth book of this history," or something similar, well -- you know you have taken too long to read the tale. You have forgotten too much. You want to have done well enough by the master to be able to chime right in with the character who, almost at the end, sees the villainy that has dogged Jones' and his lady's footsteps, exclaiming with her " 'I see all! I see all!' "

And what do we see? Even before getting bogged down in Upton, it should occur to us that one of the themes of the story is deception. Over and over again, Jones especially is the unwitting victim of someone else's simple lie, someone's theft, someone's silent complicity in an injustice, someone's unwitting obedience to a nefarious plot. And yet Fielding himself thinks the theme is something different (although he does allow that "any human mind may be imposed upon," and there is nothing to be done about it). Way down at the bottom of the deep well that is Tom Jones, at chapter 10 of Book XVIII, the theme screams out at even the most forgetful and sleepy-eyed reader. Squire Allworthy says, " 'Prudence is indeed the duty which we owe to ourselves, and if we will be so much our own enemies as to neglect it, we are not to wonder if the world is deficient in discharging their duty to us, for when a man lays the foundation of his own ruin, others will, I am afraid, be too apt to build upon it.' "

True, but it's hard to know in what sense Jones has been imprudent throughout the story. His worst deeds seem to be that he sleeps with a lot of women while in love with the pure Sophia, but Fielding is no prude to be horrified at that. Sophia, naturally, is horrified by it, but then she is the picture of eighteenth-century female imprudence herself. How many well-brought up gentry girls simply left their homes and cast themselves upon the world to avoid an odious marriage, in an era when there was nothing for a woman of a certain class to do to survive except marry? Although Tom Jones is a light-hearted book, Fielding does hint at the brutality of the world he chronicled, the world that Sophia and Tom suffer (briefly) in. There is the long, strange story of the Man of the Hill, for one thing, which seems to be Dickensian in its moral purpose. And later Sophia's own protectress in London tries to arrange for her to be raped by a lord who wants her, so that she'll be too soiled to marry anything but that.

On the back of my paperback edition of this book, Coleridge is quoted as saying that "upon his word, he thinks Tom Jones, the Alchemist, and Oedipus Tyrannus the three most perfect plots ever planned." (The Alchemist was a play by Ben Jonson, written in 1610.) He's probably right, but following the master, Fielding, through the convolutions of Tom Jones will require, for me, more than two readings. Perhaps it requires an eighteenth-century mind -- a mind able also to make conversation in full sentences, nay paragraphs, with other people. I know that he has made no mistakes. I know that he has thought everything out, and quite a time it must have taken. I'm just d----d if I can see it all yet. And oh by the way, we've forgotten to acknowledge the work and wit that went into the introductory chapters of every single "book" in the book, in which Fielding unburdened himself of various ideas, on love, on critics, "On the serious in writing, and for what purpose it is introduced." He says that if these introductory chapters are too dull, we may skip them.

And oh by the way -- Henry Fielding was a professional playwright, then "went back to school" as we would phrase it, studying law and serving as a justice of the peace in order to earn a living after the Licensing Act of 1737 closed down a good many theaters. While pursuing this second career, he opened his third, novel writing. Joseph Andrews and Amelia are also his. All that, before the eighteenth century's health hazards caught up with him, killing him at the age of 47.

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:

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.

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).

King Henry IV, part I

It may have been a help or a hindrance to have seen Kenneth Branagh's film of Henry V years before reading, to give it its long title, The First Part of King Henry the Fourth. The film is interlarded with specially created flashback-style scenes lifted from this latter play, so that the viewer of all the action leading up to the battle of Agincourt, involving all those kings and dukes, can understand what is going on with un-noble characters like Bardolph, Pistol, and Hostess Quickly as well. And Falstaff.

It may have been a help because it ensured that some of Falstaff's lines from 1 Henry IV were already in my mind, as the actor playing him delivered them. It helps to be able to recall a professional making sense of Shakespeare's language. "Do thou amend thy face, and I'll amend my life;" "Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world." (As a matter of fact the actor was Robbie Coltrane, later of Hagrid fame in the Harry Potter movies. And the newest Batman, Christian Bale, showed up then as the Boy. Yes, this movie is twenty years old.)

Remembering the droll meet-the-peasantry scenes in Henry V may have been a hindrance to reading Henry IV, however, because those scenes in their vividness prepared me to descry one particular theme in the play, and that is the theme of legitimacy. Those same droll scenes become tragic, when mighty Prince Hal abandons his peasant friends, as he must do in order to take up his father's crown and simply to become completely what he is -- king, in fate and in soul. He hangs Bardolph for theft on the road to Agincourt ("Do not thou, when thou art king, hang a thief" -- "No. Thou shalt"). He goes nowhere near Falstaff's deathbed (Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world -- "I do. I will."). Branagh may have played fast and loose with the niceties of Shakespeare's meanings in these flashbacks, but they do stay in the mind either because they are filled with a human sorrow that remains true, or because we modern little democratic types are so appalled by the sixteenth century's definitions of nobility that we fixate on them. Either way, they obstruct our view of other possible themes. Or do they? Are there other themes in 1 Henry IV besides legitimacy -- besides who belongs where?

What other themes could there be? Legitimacy seems to trump all. The action in the play shifts rhythmically between noble and commoner. We see the king and his court in palaces, then Falstaff and Prince Hal and their cronies in inn yards and taverns. Then back to king and dukes, then back to Eastcheap. After a while, this firm switching in scenery and action seems nearly pedestrian, as if we are reading a young playwright who has been told to mix it up and not bore people, but also to remember to tie his characters together somehow. They are tied by the Prince and Falstaff -- who, after all, is Sir John Falstaff, and therefore himself a titled link between Hal and the commoners -- but the Prince in his very first soliloquy announces his distance ("I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humor of your idleness"), while Falstaff is only permitted to enter Hal's world in the fifth act and even then, is told to be quiet in the presence of majesty ("Peace, chewet, peace"). Who belongs where may not even have been a question that sixteenth-century playgoers would have asked, as they watched a Prince of Wales and a happy sack-swiller pal about together. They knew that was temporary. They were probably far more exercised by the question of who belongs on the throne in the first place.

The storyline of 1 Henry IV concerns this more important legitimacy, that of the king, Hal's father, and his right to the crown he usurped from King Richard II. As the play opens, rebellion is underway, among other powerful lords of course, not among the common folk. The Earl of Northumberland and his son, Harry Percy (Hotspur), are at the head of a confederation including Scots and Welsh nobles and no less a magnate than the Archbishop of York, angry at the death of a brother in battle. We learn that one of these lords, Mortimer, had been proclaimed next in line to the throne by the deposed Richard before he was, it seems, murdered by the present king Henry himself; the reader can either read history or read Richard II or both in order to get all the details, but suffice it to say that this noble confederation has it in for Henry IV. All have grievances, but fundamentally all think they can do better as king, and that they deserve the position more.

The story wends its way to the battle of Shrewsbury (July 21, 1403), where the rebel lords will meet the forces of the king, his two sons Prince Hal (a refugee from the taverns) and John of Lancaster, and the loyal Earl of Westmoreland. We see almost nothing of the common soldiers who are the fighting forces there, except through the eyes of Falstaff. He is ordered by the Prince to raise a levy of men, and of the one hundred and fifty "rag-of-muffins" he presses into service, "not three are left alive" at the end (V., iii.). As it happens, three important rebel lords don't come to Shrewsbury in time, and so treason fails. The prince kills his opposite number, Hotspur, in single combat, after having rescued his father from assassination. The play ends mid-story. The king sends his two sons in opposite directions, to fight the barons who missed the battle but who still stand in defiance of his rule.

Never having seen 1 Henry IV performed, I can't say what it looks like, but Falstaff must be great fun to watch ("Go hang thyself in thine own heir-apparent garters!" he shouts at his future sovereign). Hostess Quickly's shrieking arguments with him about the safety of her inn not only make the reader smile, but make him cheer for her as she holds her own against him and in the presence of the Prince, too. There is a part for Mortimer's wife, the "Lady" who speaks only Welsh but whose words are not set down. How is this handled? And it seems, theater troupes must know and carry on the tradition that Bardolph has some sort of disgusting skin problem; he is the butt of all sorts of jokes about his face being fiery or lamp-like. What is supposed to be wrong with him?

And above all, who, what, is legitimate and what is not? Prince Hal is the son of a man who should not necessarily be king, yet we are to understand that he is a magnificent person not only in his own right, but also because this is natural in the son of a king. He is gentle, brave, chivalrous, and quiet. When noble circumstances arise, like insurrection and war, he behaves nobly amid them. Falstaff is a commoner, loud, drunken, witty, good-hearted. When noble circumstances arise, he behaves like an ordinary man who wants to stay alive. Before the battle, he and his royal friend have a simple exchange:

FALSTAFF: I would 'twere bedtime, Hal, and all well.
PRINCE: Why, thou owest God a death. [Exit.]
FALSTAFF: 'Tis not due yet ....

The Prince loves honor, and is not afraid of that simple thing he owes God. He will stake his life honorably, royally, on defending and possessing power. Falstaff, the common man, expresses the simple wish of all common men who have ever gone into battle for the sake of their betters -- or their own, to be fair ("every man that dies ill, the ill upon his own head" -- Henry V, IV., i). When it comes to mortal combat, he fakes his own death and then rises up happily a moment later, bragging that he has killed Hotspur himself after a fight lasting an hour.

PRINCE: Why, Percy I killed myself, and saw thee dead!
FALSTAFF: Didst thou? Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying.

For all the space and fun given to Falstaff, the reader can't help but think, as soon as Hal speaks in his own voice (that first soliloquy is in blank verse, of course) -- this man is not your friend. You're not legitimate, not enough. Of course, the reader with memories of watching Henry V knows the road these characters are taking, and it's especially the modern, democratic reader who finds Hal's abandonment of the people at Eastcheap to be almost the heart of all the action. Sixteenth-century readers, or theater-goers, may have known better. Perhaps to them it was Shrewsbury and Agincourt that mattered, and perhaps they couldn't wait for Hal to do what was right, and for everyone's sake get there.



Battlefield at Shrewsbury. Photo from englishmonarchs.co.uk

Plutarch: The Life of Alexander

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beeton's Book of Household Management by Isabella Beeton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Knight of Maison-Rouge by Alexandre Dumas; tr. by Julie Rose

"A novel of Marie Antoinette," this book is subtitled, and although she is not quite a main character, the scenes centering on the imprisoned Queen of France are the most vivid and interesting of the tale. I have tried Dumas before, and have unfortunately found, in The Three Musketeers for example, that his endless action, his swordfight-on-every-page style, is not to my taste. He seems to have had a penchant for mysterious figures skulking through the back alleys of historical romances too, pulling strings, being hugely important, and evading capture while never descending to the level of actual human beings themselves. In The Three Musketeers it's "Milady," who I think has somebody killed at a riverside toward the end; in The Knight of Maison Rouge it is the eponymous but disguised hero, who has devoted himself to rescuing Marie Antoinette from her jailers and is also the guardian of the aristocratic heroine aiding him, who falls in love herself with the young republican Revolutionary Maurice, who ought not to want to be remotely involved with rescuing queens or aristocrats, and who is the real hero of the story.



A bit confusing. As it's a French tale, of course the young beautiful heroine is already married, to the stolid and unforgiving M. Dixmer. Passionate denunciations are always coldly polite ("you shall be punished, Madame!"). Meanwhile Maurice has a trusty friend, Lorin, who is also a good revolutionary but ends up throwing in his lot with the Queen's would-be saviors, and declaims poems on the spot to make light of any occasion. Among the fictional characters of tumultuous eighteenth century Paris there is the dreadful real life jailer, Simon, who coached Marie Antoinette's son to sing hideous songs about her after they had been separated; there is the real-life executioner, Sanson, who operated the guillotine so efficiently; and there are a number of real life prosecutors, politicians, and chiefs of police, whom -- it is faintly chilling to realize -- did have and did use real power to overturn all social order and imprison and kill those who disagreed with them.


The translation jars a little. Did Dumas, in the 1840s, really use expressions which can be faithfully translated as "flew the coop" or "pronto"? They contribute to an overall jerky feeling in the prose and dialogue. The book's foreward explains that Dumas wrote most of his novels as newspaper serials in collaboration with one Auguste Maquet, and that does explain a lot. The vivid, interesting scenes -- the Queen in prison, the Queen trying to meet her saviors halfway as they attempt heroic feats to break her out -- perhaps came from the hand of the master. The master, perhaps, was also capable of honest insight into the Majesty he obviously respected:


"...soon, in her dream, bars and bolts fell away; she saw herself in the middle of a great army, somber and pitiless; she ordered the flames to burn, the blades to shoot out of their sheaths; she took her revenge on a people who were not, in the end, her own."


The more labored parts ("Maison-Rouge! Oh! Miserable wretch that I am not to have killed both of them!") perhaps came from the junior partner.




It's a beautiful looking book, but in the end it makes most sense as something fun which Parisians in 1845 amused themselves with -- only half a century after the terrifying events, however! -- as they flipped through the papers and sipped their morning coffee. A compliment to their taste in ephemera, certainly. After that it must have gone to wrap fish, as the saying goes, which is no doubt what the honest Dumas expected. For me, my copy is going back to the local library's used book sale, so that someone else can pick it up for a dollar and enjoy it too.