Who would have thought a man could write a dull book about the eruption of the volcano Krakatoa? He's repetitive, he's flailing -- from the pepper trade to Darwin to plate tectonics to the 19th century telegraph system to Muslim-Dutch tensions in Java to personal recollections and shop talk about his summer in Greenland in the 1960s -- he's breathlessly anxious to assure us the explosion was hugely, terrifyingly big. It was really, really big. By the time he reaches the actual event, on page 200 and something, he passes it by in a paragraph so that we have to look back and blink and re-read it. Oh. That's it? I guess he found the circus elephant in the hotel room more interesting. And, really, need we know that the Dutch colonial ladies wearing feathers in their hats in Java that summer might have been wearing feathers from birds which had actually flown through Krakatoa's roiling and terrifying (and really big) ash clouds?
He also uses the word "rather" too much, but that's a minor point. The whole thing reinforces my impression: in general, avoid books written after about 1975 or so. Something has simply gone out of the English language, or out of the English-speaking, organizational mind. Let's hope the loss is temporary.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Sunday, October 25, 2009
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? --
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Digging into my old Book Lover's Journal
I think pre-formatted, blank page book review journals may have been more in vogue ten or twelve years ago than they are now. Is it the kind of thing worth dipping into, or will what you see just make you cringe?
July 1997 (I distinctly remember I wrote this while sitting in the backyard on a hot day. Four toddlers played in a wading pool while the baby slept nearby.)
Desiree by Annemarie Selinko (pub. 1953)
Novel of Desiree Clary, affianced to Napoleon before he became famous and found Josephine. Desiree marries Bernadotte (relation to Count assassinated in Cairo, '47 -- Israeli independence?) -- and becomes Queen of Sweden.
Surprisingly good, considering length and laborious detail. Well-arranged, astonishing research; first intro to the Vasas of Sweden. Learned more about Napoleon here than in any book yet. (Prob. not saying much.)
My understanding of the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte was hazy.
November 1997
Louis XIV: A Royal Life by Olivier Bernier (pub. 1987)
Good. Interesting analysis of 17th vs. 20th century politics and war, and expectations of both. "Freedom" in the 17th century meant the right to state protection of the weak and the poor.
Well now. That's pertinent.
Monday, August 31, 2009
The Strange Case of Mademoiselle P. by Brian O'Doherty
Wildly dull. So much so that I wonder at the awareness of the author. At some point, doesn't a writer step back from his work and think, "my God, this is going to bore people to death"? We all write dull things occasionally; editors help correct that propensity, usually. The wonder is that this got published even with an editor's help.
Not that the book isn't competently assembled, and the sentences grammatical and sometimes artful. The trouble is that the author is trying to tell a story without telling a story. He wants to recreate a real historical incident, about the well-meaning quack doctor Mesmer in 18th century Vienna whose name has entered our language in the term "mesmerize," without actually stooping to any kind of clarity about people, places, or events. The brief tale is told in chapters narrated as memoirs by the handful of main characters -- doctor, patient, patient's father. It seems that one of Mesmer's patients or subjects was a young woman surnamed Paradies, whose father was an official at the court of the Empress Maria Theresa and who was herself an accomplished pianist. She was blind, and at 18 her parents submitted her to Mesmer's care for a cure for this. Mesmer had strange ideas about fluids and "animal magnetism." ("I see it as a luminous sheath of weightless extension which binds the stars and our souls in one glowing substance ....") He believed he could help people suffering any variety of ills by massaging this fluid through their bodies, until they achieved some sort of "crisis," at which point his assistants, hale young men, would bear off the spasming patient to a padded room and close the door on the screams.
This would be terrific stuff in the hands of a good professional women's romance novelist, but O'Doherty, I fear, prefers to be an artiste. Instead of anything that might keep our attention, we get long pages on father Paradies, disappointed in his daughter's cure, wondering how he can pull strings at court to get Mesmer disgraced without seeming petty or scheming himself. Mozart wanders in, because the time frame is right -- although the brief note at the end of the book tells us that in fact Mozart and Mlle. P. actually met, and he wrote a concerto for her (B flat, K. 456). Marie Antoinette lurks on the sidelines, as do the scientists who went to the guillotine during the French Revolution, also because the time is right.
The best chapter is the one told from the point of view of Mlle. P. herself. The problem with Mesmer's cure of her is that it worked. She began to regain her sight, but the overload of new information that this brought her became a worse handicap than the blindness she had learned to cope with. There are very interesting pages here on what it must be like for a person to suddenly face a world in which he is expected to take in knowledge through his eyes. Mlle has no understanding of perspective; objects appear to her as in a Cubist painting, their angles and shadows ever-changing and meaningless. She has no experience associating words with the physical look of objects. To her, a "table" may as well be a "cat" -- she is in the midst of learning a foreign language on several levels, and so her mistakes under quizzing make her look like an imbecile. "To me the Danube looked like a white ribbon that I could reach out and pick up. It had no character of water that I could see."
Her own crisis comes when her new sight ruins her ability to play the piano, which is her meal ticket at the Empress' court and in life. Distracted by the visual chaos of sheet music and by the spectacle of her hands' gyrations, she regresses to such a point that her father removes her from Mesmer's house. Then the story winds down, but ever so slowly. Mesmer leaves Vienna for Paris, and Mlle P. carries on, offstage, playing and earning a living as a teacher. The well meaning quack, at eighty, suffers agonies of guilt for having erotic dreams about her. He massages his fluids.
So there is interesting matter here, but O'Doherty has chosen to spin it out as half a dozen very long winded and overthought diary entries graced by absolutely no conversation nor any other devices to move the reader forward through a story. You'll learn more, more enjoyably, from the jacket flap summary, which has to be about the last thing an author would want to hear about his novel.
Except the jacket flap also says the book is "thriller-like." As the modern vernacular puts it: um, no.
Not that the book isn't competently assembled, and the sentences grammatical and sometimes artful. The trouble is that the author is trying to tell a story without telling a story. He wants to recreate a real historical incident, about the well-meaning quack doctor Mesmer in 18th century Vienna whose name has entered our language in the term "mesmerize," without actually stooping to any kind of clarity about people, places, or events. The brief tale is told in chapters narrated as memoirs by the handful of main characters -- doctor, patient, patient's father. It seems that one of Mesmer's patients or subjects was a young woman surnamed Paradies, whose father was an official at the court of the Empress Maria Theresa and who was herself an accomplished pianist. She was blind, and at 18 her parents submitted her to Mesmer's care for a cure for this. Mesmer had strange ideas about fluids and "animal magnetism." ("I see it as a luminous sheath of weightless extension which binds the stars and our souls in one glowing substance ....") He believed he could help people suffering any variety of ills by massaging this fluid through their bodies, until they achieved some sort of "crisis," at which point his assistants, hale young men, would bear off the spasming patient to a padded room and close the door on the screams.
This would be terrific stuff in the hands of a good professional women's romance novelist, but O'Doherty, I fear, prefers to be an artiste. Instead of anything that might keep our attention, we get long pages on father Paradies, disappointed in his daughter's cure, wondering how he can pull strings at court to get Mesmer disgraced without seeming petty or scheming himself. Mozart wanders in, because the time frame is right -- although the brief note at the end of the book tells us that in fact Mozart and Mlle. P. actually met, and he wrote a concerto for her (B flat, K. 456). Marie Antoinette lurks on the sidelines, as do the scientists who went to the guillotine during the French Revolution, also because the time is right.
The best chapter is the one told from the point of view of Mlle. P. herself. The problem with Mesmer's cure of her is that it worked. She began to regain her sight, but the overload of new information that this brought her became a worse handicap than the blindness she had learned to cope with. There are very interesting pages here on what it must be like for a person to suddenly face a world in which he is expected to take in knowledge through his eyes. Mlle has no understanding of perspective; objects appear to her as in a Cubist painting, their angles and shadows ever-changing and meaningless. She has no experience associating words with the physical look of objects. To her, a "table" may as well be a "cat" -- she is in the midst of learning a foreign language on several levels, and so her mistakes under quizzing make her look like an imbecile. "To me the Danube looked like a white ribbon that I could reach out and pick up. It had no character of water that I could see."
Her own crisis comes when her new sight ruins her ability to play the piano, which is her meal ticket at the Empress' court and in life. Distracted by the visual chaos of sheet music and by the spectacle of her hands' gyrations, she regresses to such a point that her father removes her from Mesmer's house. Then the story winds down, but ever so slowly. Mesmer leaves Vienna for Paris, and Mlle P. carries on, offstage, playing and earning a living as a teacher. The well meaning quack, at eighty, suffers agonies of guilt for having erotic dreams about her. He massages his fluids.
So there is interesting matter here, but O'Doherty has chosen to spin it out as half a dozen very long winded and overthought diary entries graced by absolutely no conversation nor any other devices to move the reader forward through a story. You'll learn more, more enjoyably, from the jacket flap summary, which has to be about the last thing an author would want to hear about his novel.
Except the jacket flap also says the book is "thriller-like." As the modern vernacular puts it: um, no.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Queen Isabella by Alison Weir
Writing biographies of medieval queens has to be tricky. We know these women led interesting lives, sometimes hideously so. Yet if the author dutifully chronicles only the lady's life, he ends up telling us how she traveled from this manor to that, or gave that gift or this to some monastery, poor man, or relative. If, instead, he chronicles the grand events of the day, he ends up telling us of the activities of the lady's male family members, who were the ones most deeply involved in the action.
And how does the biographer handle the question of female authority, circa 1300? Were women monarchs uniquely incapable, or did all the talent in the world fail to protect them from the trouble caused by men who could not stomach female authority? Modern authors are anxious to cope with this question, with general questions of responsibility and guilt, but they are also anxious to obey our modern world's self-understanding that we are uniquely enlightened compared to all previous generations. We understand sex, sexism, class, classism, (good) judgment and (bad) judgmentalism. The biographer's woman subject must be held accountable for her deeds; but if she happens to be a queen vilified in previous histories, then the modern author is anxious also to be different and fresh, and find ways in which she is not guilty.
All of this is a tribute to Alison Weir, and the mammoth amount of work she has put into this biography of Isabella, "the She-wolf of France." Very much in the style of Tudor historian David Starkey, she has assembled every primary source in the universe and gone through them in chronological order, explaining month by month and sometimes day by day, for a lifetime lasting from 1295 to 1358, where the queen was and what she did, or what the people around her did. It's a brilliant approach -- are they taught to do this, in Oxford perhaps? -- but one trouble with it is that it doesn't tell a story. Another trouble with it is that, for long stretches while a queen didn't do much, we have to hear about the decor of her palaces and who built them and when. And when she arrived at what gate, and who greeted her. The one life event which modern biographers of queens tend to ignore is their experience of childbirth, which I for one would like to know more about. Of course the mechanics of that don't change much, but I'd like to know how anybody survived it then and how exactly the midwives and physicians cared for their patients.
Queen Isabella's story can be briefly summarized, which Weir does in a preliminary chapter. A daughter of the King of France, she was married off at the age of twelve (1308) to King Edward II, the son of England's mighty King Edward I. Edward made a habit of falling in love with, raising up and then toying with and essentially destroying male lovers, first Piers Gaveston and then Hugh Despenser. Edward not only fawned shockingly and physically over these favorites -- he gave Gaveston the little queen Isabella's wedding jewels, for a start -- he allotted them such power that they strutted as demi kings through exchequer, government, and other people's private property, dangerously outraging powerful barons and the commons alike. Piers Gaveston survived two exiles and two recalls to his master's side, but did not survive a third; Hugh Despenser might have taken heed and given the king a wide berth, however handsome and rich he was. He did not.
Youth, virtuous obedience, and childbearing kept Isabella too busy to raise any kind of standard of revolt until the 1320s. By this time, though Gaveston was long dead, the Despensers (there was a father and son) had become such tyrants that she feared for her own life at their hands. They had already stripped her of much of her income and separated her from her children, with the king's acquiescence if not worse. She fled to her homeland, France, formed an open liaison with the dashing exiled English traitor Roger Mortimer, and with him sailed back to England at the head of an army determined to overthrow the king and his minions.
They succeeded in this, the first more or less constitutional deposition of an English king. The Despensers suffered hanging, drawing, and quartering, as befitted traitors, with castration while bound to a fifty-foot high ladder thrown in for the younger man. (Isabella watched.) Edward II abdicated in favor of his son, was imprisoned and then he was either murdered grotesquely or he escaped to become a hermit in Italy. Alison Weir works hard to convince us of this latter possibility, but, amateur though I am, I doubt it. It all hinges on feckless Edward, who liked nothing better than to dig ditches and pitch hay with common men, quietly murdering a poor porter one night and then fleeing in the porter's clothes. That is the action of a hero, not an Edward II.
Isabella and Mortimer then spent a few, a very few years enjoying power as regents for the heir, Isabella's firstborn prince Edward. The lovers turned out to be just as rapacious and tyrannical as any previous favorites of the previous, useless king. As the young prince's eighteenth birthday and therefore his majority approached, he became so alarmed at what his mother and her lover might do to maintain their authority that he launched a coup on his own behalf. It was an actual one-night, one-chance cloak and dagger affair, complete with underground passageways into a castle and then -- the breaking up of a sinister meeting, and the seventeen year old boy standing with sword drawn outside his mother's rooms, ignoring her shrieks for mercy as Mortimer was dragged away. That's the action of a hero.
Mortimer was only beheaded. King Edward III claimed his crown (1330), and after a short spell out of the public eye, which she spent either recovering from a stillbirth or nervous collapse or both, Isabella lived the rest of her life in comfort, in this manor and that, as Queen Mother and grande dame. She entertained visitors. She enjoyed her grandchildren. She gossiped with other formidable ladies, visiting queens and duchesses, daughters and cousins and aunts who all could have told life stories almost as gamy as her own. Who says women are ignored by history? Oh, and yes -- the Black Death came, in 1348, when she was in her fifties. She survived.
What the reader gets from this book, I think, amid all the details of chronology and the speculation that ventures toward the Hollywoodesque (Edward II as Italian hermit secretly visiting his son in England in the 1330s -- really?) is finally a broad appreciation for a few medieval things. These people lived life at breakneck speed. They traveled perpetually, really pounded out the miles on horseback or in tubby little ships, and trusted everywhere to who knows what lodging and food. And fate. Weir says that Edward II visited four thousand places in England in his lifetime, partly of course because big, messy royal courts had to move about in the search for cleaner houses to live in for a while. Isabella crossed and recrossed the Channel nine times, once as the head of an invading army. A granddaughter died of the Black Death on the way to her own wedding. What did this do to a human being's memories, sense of home, perception of time? They married at thirteen or fourteen, which meant, for women like Isabella, abruptly assuming and relinquishing glamorous adult titles, wealth, and prestige. She was queen of England at twelve, supplanting all other women; when her son's beautiful teen wife Philippa in turn supplanted her, she was instantly a dowager at thirty-two. In another blink of an eye thirty years had passed, lover Mortimer was long gone, and she was enjoying the company of her last grandchild, the now forty-year-old Philippa's thirteenth.
And at every turn lay violent death. The modern world may shrug correctly at royal biographies, because they say nothing of the People, but it seems to me that the privileges medieval aristocracy enjoyed may have been more than counterbalanced by the daily risks they ran. Without law, which English society at this time was still struggling to create, people born into the lawmaking strata -- and none of them chose it -- learned quickly that the choice in life personally was often either to remain royal or die by evisceration. "Random aristocratic violence" sums up the middle ages, according to the historian Norman F. Cantor in Inventing the Middle Ages, and he praises, of all things, the Japanese movie Ran (Chaos) as clearly illustrating this.
One final medieval thing we can try to appreciate from a biography like this is the presence of religion in these people's lives, but that's a difficult mental leap to make. The modern world's ignorance of religion is the biggest handicap we have to either writing, reading, or thinking accurately about how human beings really lived in Europe seven hundred years ago. Daily worship, excited and happy plans to go on pilgrimage to shrines rather than "on vacation," the existence of the Catholic church as a governing body in daily life, the custom of leaving orders that one's body was to be buried apart from one's heart, so that two places of rest would allow for two places of eternal prayers commissioned for the soul -- all these and a hundred other commonplaces of medieval living stand so far outside our experience that in looking back at them we are really looking back at an alien planet. We do our best to understand them; Alison Weir consulted seven and a half pages (closely printed) full of primary source documents for us, into which I suppose we could also plunge if we chose. But it's not the same thing as understanding a world in which sun and moon and wind were the same, but all attitudes, every thought and every sentence, began with in the name of our Lord, amen.
Castle Rising, Norfolk, Isabella's main home after the accession of her son (1330); photo from castlerising.co.uk
For those who like trivia: Isabella makes an appearance in the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart, but the liberties taken with history are very extravagant. She is a gorgeous adult, and sleeps with the Scottish rebel William Wallace (Gibson) so that she can taunt her dying and paralyzed father in law, Edward I, that "a child ... not of your line ... grows in my womb." In a previous scene, the old king has already thrown Piers Gaveston out of a window to his death, to young Edward II's helpless horror. Great fun, but Wallace was executed -- drawing and quartering, of course -- in 1305, when Isabella was, by Alison Weir's reckoning, a child of nine in Paris. That's just for a start.
And how does the biographer handle the question of female authority, circa 1300? Were women monarchs uniquely incapable, or did all the talent in the world fail to protect them from the trouble caused by men who could not stomach female authority? Modern authors are anxious to cope with this question, with general questions of responsibility and guilt, but they are also anxious to obey our modern world's self-understanding that we are uniquely enlightened compared to all previous generations. We understand sex, sexism, class, classism, (good) judgment and (bad) judgmentalism. The biographer's woman subject must be held accountable for her deeds; but if she happens to be a queen vilified in previous histories, then the modern author is anxious also to be different and fresh, and find ways in which she is not guilty.
All of this is a tribute to Alison Weir, and the mammoth amount of work she has put into this biography of Isabella, "the She-wolf of France." Very much in the style of Tudor historian David Starkey, she has assembled every primary source in the universe and gone through them in chronological order, explaining month by month and sometimes day by day, for a lifetime lasting from 1295 to 1358, where the queen was and what she did, or what the people around her did. It's a brilliant approach -- are they taught to do this, in Oxford perhaps? -- but one trouble with it is that it doesn't tell a story. Another trouble with it is that, for long stretches while a queen didn't do much, we have to hear about the decor of her palaces and who built them and when. And when she arrived at what gate, and who greeted her. The one life event which modern biographers of queens tend to ignore is their experience of childbirth, which I for one would like to know more about. Of course the mechanics of that don't change much, but I'd like to know how anybody survived it then and how exactly the midwives and physicians cared for their patients.
Queen Isabella's story can be briefly summarized, which Weir does in a preliminary chapter. A daughter of the King of France, she was married off at the age of twelve (1308) to King Edward II, the son of England's mighty King Edward I. Edward made a habit of falling in love with, raising up and then toying with and essentially destroying male lovers, first Piers Gaveston and then Hugh Despenser. Edward not only fawned shockingly and physically over these favorites -- he gave Gaveston the little queen Isabella's wedding jewels, for a start -- he allotted them such power that they strutted as demi kings through exchequer, government, and other people's private property, dangerously outraging powerful barons and the commons alike. Piers Gaveston survived two exiles and two recalls to his master's side, but did not survive a third; Hugh Despenser might have taken heed and given the king a wide berth, however handsome and rich he was. He did not.
Youth, virtuous obedience, and childbearing kept Isabella too busy to raise any kind of standard of revolt until the 1320s. By this time, though Gaveston was long dead, the Despensers (there was a father and son) had become such tyrants that she feared for her own life at their hands. They had already stripped her of much of her income and separated her from her children, with the king's acquiescence if not worse. She fled to her homeland, France, formed an open liaison with the dashing exiled English traitor Roger Mortimer, and with him sailed back to England at the head of an army determined to overthrow the king and his minions.
They succeeded in this, the first more or less constitutional deposition of an English king. The Despensers suffered hanging, drawing, and quartering, as befitted traitors, with castration while bound to a fifty-foot high ladder thrown in for the younger man. (Isabella watched.) Edward II abdicated in favor of his son, was imprisoned and then he was either murdered grotesquely or he escaped to become a hermit in Italy. Alison Weir works hard to convince us of this latter possibility, but, amateur though I am, I doubt it. It all hinges on feckless Edward, who liked nothing better than to dig ditches and pitch hay with common men, quietly murdering a poor porter one night and then fleeing in the porter's clothes. That is the action of a hero, not an Edward II.
Isabella and Mortimer then spent a few, a very few years enjoying power as regents for the heir, Isabella's firstborn prince Edward. The lovers turned out to be just as rapacious and tyrannical as any previous favorites of the previous, useless king. As the young prince's eighteenth birthday and therefore his majority approached, he became so alarmed at what his mother and her lover might do to maintain their authority that he launched a coup on his own behalf. It was an actual one-night, one-chance cloak and dagger affair, complete with underground passageways into a castle and then -- the breaking up of a sinister meeting, and the seventeen year old boy standing with sword drawn outside his mother's rooms, ignoring her shrieks for mercy as Mortimer was dragged away. That's the action of a hero.
Mortimer was only beheaded. King Edward III claimed his crown (1330), and after a short spell out of the public eye, which she spent either recovering from a stillbirth or nervous collapse or both, Isabella lived the rest of her life in comfort, in this manor and that, as Queen Mother and grande dame. She entertained visitors. She enjoyed her grandchildren. She gossiped with other formidable ladies, visiting queens and duchesses, daughters and cousins and aunts who all could have told life stories almost as gamy as her own. Who says women are ignored by history? Oh, and yes -- the Black Death came, in 1348, when she was in her fifties. She survived.
What the reader gets from this book, I think, amid all the details of chronology and the speculation that ventures toward the Hollywoodesque (Edward II as Italian hermit secretly visiting his son in England in the 1330s -- really?) is finally a broad appreciation for a few medieval things. These people lived life at breakneck speed. They traveled perpetually, really pounded out the miles on horseback or in tubby little ships, and trusted everywhere to who knows what lodging and food. And fate. Weir says that Edward II visited four thousand places in England in his lifetime, partly of course because big, messy royal courts had to move about in the search for cleaner houses to live in for a while. Isabella crossed and recrossed the Channel nine times, once as the head of an invading army. A granddaughter died of the Black Death on the way to her own wedding. What did this do to a human being's memories, sense of home, perception of time? They married at thirteen or fourteen, which meant, for women like Isabella, abruptly assuming and relinquishing glamorous adult titles, wealth, and prestige. She was queen of England at twelve, supplanting all other women; when her son's beautiful teen wife Philippa in turn supplanted her, she was instantly a dowager at thirty-two. In another blink of an eye thirty years had passed, lover Mortimer was long gone, and she was enjoying the company of her last grandchild, the now forty-year-old Philippa's thirteenth.
And at every turn lay violent death. The modern world may shrug correctly at royal biographies, because they say nothing of the People, but it seems to me that the privileges medieval aristocracy enjoyed may have been more than counterbalanced by the daily risks they ran. Without law, which English society at this time was still struggling to create, people born into the lawmaking strata -- and none of them chose it -- learned quickly that the choice in life personally was often either to remain royal or die by evisceration. "Random aristocratic violence" sums up the middle ages, according to the historian Norman F. Cantor in Inventing the Middle Ages, and he praises, of all things, the Japanese movie Ran (Chaos) as clearly illustrating this.
One final medieval thing we can try to appreciate from a biography like this is the presence of religion in these people's lives, but that's a difficult mental leap to make. The modern world's ignorance of religion is the biggest handicap we have to either writing, reading, or thinking accurately about how human beings really lived in Europe seven hundred years ago. Daily worship, excited and happy plans to go on pilgrimage to shrines rather than "on vacation," the existence of the Catholic church as a governing body in daily life, the custom of leaving orders that one's body was to be buried apart from one's heart, so that two places of rest would allow for two places of eternal prayers commissioned for the soul -- all these and a hundred other commonplaces of medieval living stand so far outside our experience that in looking back at them we are really looking back at an alien planet. We do our best to understand them; Alison Weir consulted seven and a half pages (closely printed) full of primary source documents for us, into which I suppose we could also plunge if we chose. But it's not the same thing as understanding a world in which sun and moon and wind were the same, but all attitudes, every thought and every sentence, began with in the name of our Lord, amen.
Castle Rising, Norfolk, Isabella's main home after the accession of her son (1330); photo from castlerising.co.uk
For those who like trivia: Isabella makes an appearance in the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart, but the liberties taken with history are very extravagant. She is a gorgeous adult, and sleeps with the Scottish rebel William Wallace (Gibson) so that she can taunt her dying and paralyzed father in law, Edward I, that "a child ... not of your line ... grows in my womb." In a previous scene, the old king has already thrown Piers Gaveston out of a window to his death, to young Edward II's helpless horror. Great fun, but Wallace was executed -- drawing and quartering, of course -- in 1305, when Isabella was, by Alison Weir's reckoning, a child of nine in Paris. That's just for a start.
Friday, July 3, 2009
The Weapon Shops of Isher by A.E. van Vogt
The release of Star Trek this spring, and my own reconnection with the old Star Trek TV show from the 1960s, prompted me lately to wander the stacks of the local public library, browsing for science fiction books. I almost never read them otherwise. Correction: I never read them. Growing up, my older brother owned bookshelves of the genre, but I could never build an appreciation for it. I recall trying, and abandoning the effort in disgust when the opening page of some classic story had the protagonist stepping over a Raggedy Ann doll in the street, and tumbling therewith into another dimension. "That's what's cool about it," my brother said. I only harrumphed.
It's all curious, because this year, not only has Star Trek resurfaced and great fun it is too, but a science fiction master, Robert Heinlein, has been quoted by people who are watching President Obama take on the powers of a dictator amid the orgasmic baying of a lapdog press and the silence of an apparently disbelieving (at best) public; one of the many dangers to democracy, Heinlein said years ago, arises not just from ignorance or apathy but from a simple money problem. When a bare majority of the population decides to vote itself goodies out of its neighbors' taxed wealth, forever, when once 51 percent of a country can learn to do that and call it fair and like it, the future looks bleak. And, my goodness, thanks to my brother's library, I had already heard of this wise Robert Heinlein.
It's curious, too, that The Weapon Shops of Isher by A. E. van Vogt should happen to concern grand political themes like dictatorship, an imperial cult, government theft of private property, the suppression of dissent, and gun ownership. Being science fiction, it also includes time travel, and invisibility suits, and doorknobs that reach out to, and weapons that jump into, the right people's hands.
The tale is extremely painstakingly thought out. Roughly, it gathers together three or four plots -- politics, liberty, love -- with four main characters, all interconnected. It starts in 1951, somewhere in America. A weird new shopfront suddenly appears on some Main Street, taking the place of a store already there. Its blinking neon sign reads "Fine weapons. The right to buy weapons is the right to be free." A journalist investigates, enters the shop, and is never seen again.
This journalist, McAllister, is catapulted seven thousand years into the future, into an empire of Isher run by the young, lovely, adored, and more or less vicious Empress Innelda. Among her subjects she counts the fractured Clark family, whose father Fara and son Cayle don't get along. Cayle meets the dark and fetching Lucy, who is a weapon shop employee and who was McAllister's first contact when the shop materialized in the wrong time. As the plot develops, we learn that things everywhere and everytime are out of whack because the Empress is trying to launch one final attack against the shops, which represent the only thing in the empire that she does not control. (Cayle's father is all for it. Squashing evil and insurrection, and rebellious sons, and so on.) Doing this requires the harnessing and disguising of fantastic amounts of energy -- buildings shimmer in and out of existence across time and space -- and it was only McAllister's stumbling into one of the targeted shops that revealed to their fraternity of owners the scope and the kinks of the terrible plan.
Author van Vogt keeps his science going at a good clip, or at any rate he describes men walking on mid-air floors, and viewing real-time graphs charting the movement of giant buildings swinging on wild energy fulcrums through "quadrillions" of years of space time, in such a way that the reader can root for him and think, well at least he's not just saying "it's so." He also takes care to describe a completely corrupt future world. Isher is gangland Las Vegas and Chicago, and every day is potentially the St. Valentine's Day massacre. Every day is also a play day for the masses, who gamble themselves into mental oblivion in gigantic department store/casinos, or graduate to patronize seamy "Houses of Illusion" where all sensual desires are gratified through fantasy. The planets outside Earth are penal mining colonies with populations in the tens of millions.
The weapon shops at the center of the story, with their defiant slogan "the right to buy weapons is the right to be free," stand as the Empress' target, but as the story unfolds we learn that they are practically inviolable. They are run by one man, Robert Hedrock, who plays the admittedly serious game of defending them with a trump card no one else has or guesses he has. What's more interesting about them, though, is that they function as a kind of religion or even an underground government. Undergirding their existence, and their ad slogan, is a philosophy which the weapon shop men say in italics: "People always have the government they want." Given that, no other political fact matters or is even of much interest -- as long as the people can also arm themselves. "Thousands of years ago," the weapon shops' founders invented guns that could only be used in defense and only for their owners. Physical defense always being possible, the weapon shops say nothing and do nothing to interfere in any way in anyone's life. They agitate for nothing politically, they neither support nor decry any group. By their existence, they prove that while people may choose to fool away their time and energies by the millions, still the power of the state remains ultimately nil.
Maybe. This story inspired me to think anew about the Second Amendment. In 1789 the states insisted on a Bill of Rights being attached to the Constitution before they would consider ratifying it, and number two, no less, on the list of absolute rights desired was the right of the common man to own a gun. In places where it certainly seems "people do not have the government they want," in Iran, in North Korea, the people also do not have guns. And yet, earlier this week in Houston, the federal government's agents went door to door confiscating guns. And what good is a gun when the gun-owning citizen cannot keep it without (presumably, logically) committing the sin and crime of attempted murder or murder to do so -- which the gun-confiscating state will then punish with jail time?
Van Vogt solves the problem with his nearly sentient, defensive future guns. And yet, what is the point even of them when the bulk of the population doesn't want them? (Or do they?)
It's a wild story, and points up afresh, as I unburden myself of my criticisms, the quote that I happened to have come across recently, that criticism is always easier than craft. So it is, and far be it from me to criticize the man (the woman? who is A.E.?) who thought all this out. I respect the depth of the material. This science fiction is not all space ships and warp speeds, even though that's fun too. I even credit him with a remarkable case of clairvoyance. The Weapon Shops of Isher is a part of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher in 1959. Fifty years ago, Van Vogt describes his heroine searching for information, seven thousand years hence:
"First she pressed the machine-file activator, pecking out the key word illusion. The file screen remained blank. She clicked off the word house. No response."
What else is Lucy doing, but Googling? And how cool is that?
It's all curious, because this year, not only has Star Trek resurfaced and great fun it is too, but a science fiction master, Robert Heinlein, has been quoted by people who are watching President Obama take on the powers of a dictator amid the orgasmic baying of a lapdog press and the silence of an apparently disbelieving (at best) public; one of the many dangers to democracy, Heinlein said years ago, arises not just from ignorance or apathy but from a simple money problem. When a bare majority of the population decides to vote itself goodies out of its neighbors' taxed wealth, forever, when once 51 percent of a country can learn to do that and call it fair and like it, the future looks bleak. And, my goodness, thanks to my brother's library, I had already heard of this wise Robert Heinlein.
It's curious, too, that The Weapon Shops of Isher by A. E. van Vogt should happen to concern grand political themes like dictatorship, an imperial cult, government theft of private property, the suppression of dissent, and gun ownership. Being science fiction, it also includes time travel, and invisibility suits, and doorknobs that reach out to, and weapons that jump into, the right people's hands.
The tale is extremely painstakingly thought out. Roughly, it gathers together three or four plots -- politics, liberty, love -- with four main characters, all interconnected. It starts in 1951, somewhere in America. A weird new shopfront suddenly appears on some Main Street, taking the place of a store already there. Its blinking neon sign reads "Fine weapons. The right to buy weapons is the right to be free." A journalist investigates, enters the shop, and is never seen again.
This journalist, McAllister, is catapulted seven thousand years into the future, into an empire of Isher run by the young, lovely, adored, and more or less vicious Empress Innelda. Among her subjects she counts the fractured Clark family, whose father Fara and son Cayle don't get along. Cayle meets the dark and fetching Lucy, who is a weapon shop employee and who was McAllister's first contact when the shop materialized in the wrong time. As the plot develops, we learn that things everywhere and everytime are out of whack because the Empress is trying to launch one final attack against the shops, which represent the only thing in the empire that she does not control. (Cayle's father is all for it. Squashing evil and insurrection, and rebellious sons, and so on.) Doing this requires the harnessing and disguising of fantastic amounts of energy -- buildings shimmer in and out of existence across time and space -- and it was only McAllister's stumbling into one of the targeted shops that revealed to their fraternity of owners the scope and the kinks of the terrible plan.
Author van Vogt keeps his science going at a good clip, or at any rate he describes men walking on mid-air floors, and viewing real-time graphs charting the movement of giant buildings swinging on wild energy fulcrums through "quadrillions" of years of space time, in such a way that the reader can root for him and think, well at least he's not just saying "it's so." He also takes care to describe a completely corrupt future world. Isher is gangland Las Vegas and Chicago, and every day is potentially the St. Valentine's Day massacre. Every day is also a play day for the masses, who gamble themselves into mental oblivion in gigantic department store/casinos, or graduate to patronize seamy "Houses of Illusion" where all sensual desires are gratified through fantasy. The planets outside Earth are penal mining colonies with populations in the tens of millions.
The weapon shops at the center of the story, with their defiant slogan "the right to buy weapons is the right to be free," stand as the Empress' target, but as the story unfolds we learn that they are practically inviolable. They are run by one man, Robert Hedrock, who plays the admittedly serious game of defending them with a trump card no one else has or guesses he has. What's more interesting about them, though, is that they function as a kind of religion or even an underground government. Undergirding their existence, and their ad slogan, is a philosophy which the weapon shop men say in italics: "People always have the government they want." Given that, no other political fact matters or is even of much interest -- as long as the people can also arm themselves. "Thousands of years ago," the weapon shops' founders invented guns that could only be used in defense and only for their owners. Physical defense always being possible, the weapon shops say nothing and do nothing to interfere in any way in anyone's life. They agitate for nothing politically, they neither support nor decry any group. By their existence, they prove that while people may choose to fool away their time and energies by the millions, still the power of the state remains ultimately nil.
Maybe. This story inspired me to think anew about the Second Amendment. In 1789 the states insisted on a Bill of Rights being attached to the Constitution before they would consider ratifying it, and number two, no less, on the list of absolute rights desired was the right of the common man to own a gun. In places where it certainly seems "people do not have the government they want," in Iran, in North Korea, the people also do not have guns. And yet, earlier this week in Houston, the federal government's agents went door to door confiscating guns. And what good is a gun when the gun-owning citizen cannot keep it without (presumably, logically) committing the sin and crime of attempted murder or murder to do so -- which the gun-confiscating state will then punish with jail time?
Van Vogt solves the problem with his nearly sentient, defensive future guns. And yet, what is the point even of them when the bulk of the population doesn't want them? (Or do they?)
It's a wild story, and points up afresh, as I unburden myself of my criticisms, the quote that I happened to have come across recently, that criticism is always easier than craft. So it is, and far be it from me to criticize the man (the woman? who is A.E.?) who thought all this out. I respect the depth of the material. This science fiction is not all space ships and warp speeds, even though that's fun too. I even credit him with a remarkable case of clairvoyance. The Weapon Shops of Isher is a part of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher in 1959. Fifty years ago, Van Vogt describes his heroine searching for information, seven thousand years hence:
"First she pressed the machine-file activator, pecking out the key word illusion. The file screen remained blank. She clicked off the word house. No response."
What else is Lucy doing, but Googling? And how cool is that?
Sunday, June 21, 2009
The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Vol. 1 by Washington Irving
This opening volume of Irving's biography takes us from Columbus' birth to a climactic point during his second voyage to the New World, when, as the result of what can inadequately be described as overwork, Columbus collapsed and his crew "spread their sails to the east wind and bore him back, in a state of complete insensibility, to the harbor of Isabella" (a Caribbean port).
There are two volumes to go. That will make the reading sound like a chore, but it isn't; Washington Irving's prose is very pleasant, having a unique tone -- circa 1830 -- that stands refreshingly somewhere between the august rolling periods of the eighteenth century and the fussiness of the nineteenth. What the reader should know, however, is that Irving either really, really liked the subject, or else he had terrific sources of information, not one of which he wanted to neglect. This latter seems to have been the case. Irving's descriptions of his researches in his preface are absolutely worthy of any professional historian today. And why do we assume anyway that our professional standards must of course outrank those of previous eras?
Or perhaps people -- to continue the warning -- in previous eras simply had little else to do with leisure except read, and so they were willing to sit down to a painstakingly recollected three volume history of the life of anybody or anything. Columbus? Certainly, bring it on. What I hint at here, with all due respect to Irving and previous readers, is that by golly as you read along you are going to visit with the hero every coast he saw, and study every cubic foot of shoal water, and measure every day's weather and greet every native chief (cacique) he did. Do not look for summation, except concerning the kinds of topics we moderns slaver over: what about that illegitimate son?
Columbus' achievement is so gigantic that as we rock along with Irving's pleasant prose, we find it startling to understand that the first voyage only took seven months all told. He and the three famous ships left Palos -- there are suburbs in Chicago named Palos, who knew? -- in August of 1492. Columbus returned in the Nina, first briefly to Portugal and then back to Palos, in March 1493. To the residents of the little town, the sudden appearance of that ship in the river one quiet March morning must have seemed like an apparition from another universe. In a sense, it was. The Admiral was back -- but how, and from where? Why only one vessel, and who was left alive? Church bells pealed all day, and "all business was suspended" amid the "hurry and tumult."
The Pinta, commanded by Columbus' mysterious right hand man, Pinzon, returned that same evening. And there lies a tale to set any Hollywood director's imagination racing, surely. There was something wrong about Pinzon, and the Pinta. The Pinta disappeared from Columbus' side twice during those seven months, the second time on the journey home. (The Santa Maria ran aground and was wrecked in the New World.) Where did it go, and why? Pinzon's explanations, the first time, seem to have followed rather dubious terrible-storm-we-thought-you-were-dead-sir lines. The second time, as he sailed into Palos to hear the bells still clanging and to see the Nina already there, explanations were pointless. The first man back got the glory and, so to speak, the end-of-year bonus. Like Columbus, Pinzon had made a first landfall before turning his ship toward Palos, and from Bayonne had already dispatched a letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, announcing his arrival and his discoveries; now he slunk home and lived long enough to receive their answering missive "of a reproachful tenor," forbidding him to come to court. He died a few days later, of illness and chagrin. But "let no one indulge in hard censures over the grave of Pinzon!" Irving warns. "His merits and services are entitled to the highest praise; his errors should be regarded with indulgence."
Columbus' plan to reach the fabulous Orient by sailing west was very much like plans for space travel today. It wasn't that people in the fifteenth century believed it could not be done, certainly not that they believed the earth was flat and the ships would fall off, although perhaps some true bumpkins might have reasoned so. The terror was that no one knew what lay out there in that howling wilderness of water. Did the sun boil the sea in the southern latitudes? What monsters awaited? How far did Ocean extend? How could anyone come back? Even the best educated men were hampered by one colossal mistake, handed down to them from Ptolemy. They believed that the circumference of the earth was a good 7000 miles less than it was. Columbus acted as if he had a presentiment of this, for he kept two logs on the journey west. For his private log he recorded distances accurately. For the log the crew could look at, he wrote down figures hundreds of leagues short of what they had actually traveled. Even so, as the ships pounded west before beautiful winds day after day and week after week, no one could know, as today no astronaut can know -- where are we, and when does all this space end?
It ended of course, after seven weeks of sailing, in the islands of the Caribbean, which to the end of his life Columbus believed was the fringe of Asia or at least the outer edge of "Cipangu," Japan. His guiding text was Marco Polo. In exploring islands today called by familiar names like Cuba (with its fine bay, Guantanamo), Jamaica, and "Hayti," Columbus met new peoples with whom he had somehow to communicate two prime desires, one, to know if there was gold nearby, and two, to know where and how to reach the Great Khan. The natives, no fools despite having every reason to believe these fantastic white men had indeed descended from heaven, continually pointed the newcomers onward in both quests. Cipangu, whatever it meant amid garbled misunderstandings and signs and gestures, was always south and west -- always away from here.
The desire for gold, incidentally, seems not to have been entirely a function of Western greed. The native Indians did wear small gold ornaments, which they were happy to trade for anything that came from the heavenly men's hands, hawk's bells especially. It was the presence of gold, and pearls and gems, that would have reassured the Spaniards that they had reached their goal: the glorious wealth of Asia. This was also why they were forever literally sniffing the island winds for the smell of spices.
In later volumes, Irving tells us, we will retrace the story of the tragedy that Columbus' landfall eventually brought the native tribes. Trouble began quickly with the second voyage, which the Admiral undertook in September 1493, only a year and a month after setting out on his first. On the second trip, a larger cohort of men had greater scope for human mischief. The Spaniards had greater contact this time with the fierce Caribs, free-ranging warriors and cannibals who held most of the humbler islanders in thrall. And there were problems with women. Columbus seems to have held things together, on both voyages, by the strength of his personality and sheer crippling hard work; the Santa Maria only ran aground on the first voyage because he personally dared to allow himself a little bit of sleep on a calm night. With that the whole crew nodded off, including the man at the wheel. And now, with more men to control, Columbus found that these Spanish grandees considered themselves above such nonsense as, for example, work. For their part they began to realize that he was after all an Italian, a foreigner. What right had he to lord it over them? And if they stood before a burnt-out Spanish settlement, sure that a cacique whom the Admiral trusted was in fact a murdering heathen scoundrel, well -- what did he plan to do about it?
And all the while Columbus kept on searching, searching, always tacking south and west, south and west, looking for evidence that these jungle shores were in fact the suburbs of teeming Cathay. He returned from his fourth voyage, I believe, actually under arrest and in chains. Irving's first volume does not take us that far. But early in this book he says:
There are two volumes to go. That will make the reading sound like a chore, but it isn't; Washington Irving's prose is very pleasant, having a unique tone -- circa 1830 -- that stands refreshingly somewhere between the august rolling periods of the eighteenth century and the fussiness of the nineteenth. What the reader should know, however, is that Irving either really, really liked the subject, or else he had terrific sources of information, not one of which he wanted to neglect. This latter seems to have been the case. Irving's descriptions of his researches in his preface are absolutely worthy of any professional historian today. And why do we assume anyway that our professional standards must of course outrank those of previous eras?
Or perhaps people -- to continue the warning -- in previous eras simply had little else to do with leisure except read, and so they were willing to sit down to a painstakingly recollected three volume history of the life of anybody or anything. Columbus? Certainly, bring it on. What I hint at here, with all due respect to Irving and previous readers, is that by golly as you read along you are going to visit with the hero every coast he saw, and study every cubic foot of shoal water, and measure every day's weather and greet every native chief (cacique) he did. Do not look for summation, except concerning the kinds of topics we moderns slaver over: what about that illegitimate son?
Columbus' achievement is so gigantic that as we rock along with Irving's pleasant prose, we find it startling to understand that the first voyage only took seven months all told. He and the three famous ships left Palos -- there are suburbs in Chicago named Palos, who knew? -- in August of 1492. Columbus returned in the Nina, first briefly to Portugal and then back to Palos, in March 1493. To the residents of the little town, the sudden appearance of that ship in the river one quiet March morning must have seemed like an apparition from another universe. In a sense, it was. The Admiral was back -- but how, and from where? Why only one vessel, and who was left alive? Church bells pealed all day, and "all business was suspended" amid the "hurry and tumult."
The Pinta, commanded by Columbus' mysterious right hand man, Pinzon, returned that same evening. And there lies a tale to set any Hollywood director's imagination racing, surely. There was something wrong about Pinzon, and the Pinta. The Pinta disappeared from Columbus' side twice during those seven months, the second time on the journey home. (The Santa Maria ran aground and was wrecked in the New World.) Where did it go, and why? Pinzon's explanations, the first time, seem to have followed rather dubious terrible-storm-we-thought-you-were-dead-sir lines. The second time, as he sailed into Palos to hear the bells still clanging and to see the Nina already there, explanations were pointless. The first man back got the glory and, so to speak, the end-of-year bonus. Like Columbus, Pinzon had made a first landfall before turning his ship toward Palos, and from Bayonne had already dispatched a letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, announcing his arrival and his discoveries; now he slunk home and lived long enough to receive their answering missive "of a reproachful tenor," forbidding him to come to court. He died a few days later, of illness and chagrin. But "let no one indulge in hard censures over the grave of Pinzon!" Irving warns. "His merits and services are entitled to the highest praise; his errors should be regarded with indulgence."
Columbus' plan to reach the fabulous Orient by sailing west was very much like plans for space travel today. It wasn't that people in the fifteenth century believed it could not be done, certainly not that they believed the earth was flat and the ships would fall off, although perhaps some true bumpkins might have reasoned so. The terror was that no one knew what lay out there in that howling wilderness of water. Did the sun boil the sea in the southern latitudes? What monsters awaited? How far did Ocean extend? How could anyone come back? Even the best educated men were hampered by one colossal mistake, handed down to them from Ptolemy. They believed that the circumference of the earth was a good 7000 miles less than it was. Columbus acted as if he had a presentiment of this, for he kept two logs on the journey west. For his private log he recorded distances accurately. For the log the crew could look at, he wrote down figures hundreds of leagues short of what they had actually traveled. Even so, as the ships pounded west before beautiful winds day after day and week after week, no one could know, as today no astronaut can know -- where are we, and when does all this space end?
It ended of course, after seven weeks of sailing, in the islands of the Caribbean, which to the end of his life Columbus believed was the fringe of Asia or at least the outer edge of "Cipangu," Japan. His guiding text was Marco Polo. In exploring islands today called by familiar names like Cuba (with its fine bay, Guantanamo), Jamaica, and "Hayti," Columbus met new peoples with whom he had somehow to communicate two prime desires, one, to know if there was gold nearby, and two, to know where and how to reach the Great Khan. The natives, no fools despite having every reason to believe these fantastic white men had indeed descended from heaven, continually pointed the newcomers onward in both quests. Cipangu, whatever it meant amid garbled misunderstandings and signs and gestures, was always south and west -- always away from here.
The desire for gold, incidentally, seems not to have been entirely a function of Western greed. The native Indians did wear small gold ornaments, which they were happy to trade for anything that came from the heavenly men's hands, hawk's bells especially. It was the presence of gold, and pearls and gems, that would have reassured the Spaniards that they had reached their goal: the glorious wealth of Asia. This was also why they were forever literally sniffing the island winds for the smell of spices.
In later volumes, Irving tells us, we will retrace the story of the tragedy that Columbus' landfall eventually brought the native tribes. Trouble began quickly with the second voyage, which the Admiral undertook in September 1493, only a year and a month after setting out on his first. On the second trip, a larger cohort of men had greater scope for human mischief. The Spaniards had greater contact this time with the fierce Caribs, free-ranging warriors and cannibals who held most of the humbler islanders in thrall. And there were problems with women. Columbus seems to have held things together, on both voyages, by the strength of his personality and sheer crippling hard work; the Santa Maria only ran aground on the first voyage because he personally dared to allow himself a little bit of sleep on a calm night. With that the whole crew nodded off, including the man at the wheel. And now, with more men to control, Columbus found that these Spanish grandees considered themselves above such nonsense as, for example, work. For their part they began to realize that he was after all an Italian, a foreigner. What right had he to lord it over them? And if they stood before a burnt-out Spanish settlement, sure that a cacique whom the Admiral trusted was in fact a murdering heathen scoundrel, well -- what did he plan to do about it?
And all the while Columbus kept on searching, searching, always tacking south and west, south and west, looking for evidence that these jungle shores were in fact the suburbs of teeming Cathay. He returned from his fourth voyage, I believe, actually under arrest and in chains. Irving's first volume does not take us that far. But early in this book he says:
Let those who are disposed to faint under difficulties, in the prosecution of any great and worthy undertaking, remember that eighteen years elapsed after the time that Columbus conceived his enterprise, before he was enabled to carry it into effect; that the greater part of that time was passed in almost hopeless solicitation, amidst poverty, neglect, and taunting ridicule; that the prime of his life had wasted away in the struggle, and that when his perseverance was finally crowned with success, he was in his fifty-sixth year. His example should encourage the enterprising never to despair.
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