The French Revolution by Nesta H. Webster

February 2002

An English lady, "Mrs. Arthur Webster," writes in 1919 a book about the French Revolution which depicts everything as a German-inspired criminal conspiracy. This is the first book I have ever encountered which has no publication information except the date. It must have been "privately printed."

It's an extraordinary book. Because she tells the story as a conspiracy led by, and against, people, it hangs together as a narrative as books driven by analysis of economics do not. She also quotes sources which look very solid, very primary: Desmoulins on Mirabeau, Prussian emissaries on Frederick himself. Yet every conspiracy theory is supposed to have a leap of illogic at its heart, which it is the historian's duty to find. I am too ignorant to yet find Mrs. Webster's -- except that -- who on earth was Nesta Webster?

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.

The Riddle of the Dinosaur, by John Noble Wilford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Image from Hubblesite Newscenter

The Rape of the Lock, by Alexander Pope

One really can't review great poetry. One can only enjoy it. In high school, Pope was a ridiculous chore; now he's delightful.

"Soft yielding minds to Water glide away,
And sip, with Nymphs, their elemental Tea."

But why does Ariel abandon the job of protecting Belinda right in the middle of the story?

"Sudden he viewed, in spite of all her art,
An earthly Lover lurking at her heart.
Amazed, confused, he found his power expired,
Resigned to fate, and with a sigh retired."

Rather an abrupt way to move the action along. And it's only Canto III.

When you have finished this, do move on to John Gay: "To a Lady, on Her Passion for Old China." The dishes, not the country.

Visiting the Gutenberg Project

From Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858)

"All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called 'facts.' They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that always have an ill-conditioned fact or two which they lead after them into decent company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no 'facts' at this table. What! Because bread is good and wholesome and necessary and nourishing, shall you thrust a crumb into my windpipe while I am talking?

**********

"Don’t you know how hard it is for some people to get out of a room after their visit is really over? They want to be off, and you want to have them off, but they don’t know how to manage it. One would think they had been built in your parlour or study, and were waiting to be launched. I have contrived a sort of ceremonial inclined plane for such visitors, which being lubricated with certain smooth phrases, I back them down, metaphorically speaking, stern-foremost, into their 'native element,' the great ocean of out-doors. "

For more, go to the Gutenberg Project, here.

Cleopatra: the Story of a Queen by Emil Ludwig

It beggars the imagination to know that four of the most epochal figures of the ancient world -- can there be a lot of epochal figures even in one part of an epoch? -- all were exact contemporaries, met each other, and that three of the four enjoyed the most intimate alliances, and had children. They were Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Cleopatra, and the Octavian who later became the emperor Augustus. Add a fifth to the Important mix, for there was also Cicero, and we should not forget Brutus and Cassius, assassins though they were, nor Octavian's general, Agrippa, nor the women besides Cleopatra: Fulvia and Octavia, Antony's two first wives, and then Octavian's second wife Livia, who for public television viewers in the last generation may have become the most recognizable of them all.

In 1937 -- just about the time Robert Graves was writing I, Claudius -- Emil Ludwig wrote Cleopatra: Geschichte einer Konigin, which was then translated and published in New York in 1939. His sources, as he writes in his introduction, were for the most part "my master" Plutarch, as well as the few other ancient historians whose scanty records of Cleopatra survive, men unknown now except I suppose to extreme specialists, -- men like Appian and Dio Cassius.

Emil Ludwig is anxious, in that same introduction, to explain why this novel is so unlike his others, he who has been "studying the human heart these thirty years." It contains no dialogue, for example, because none of the great Queen's talk is preserved, and he did not want to make things up entirely; from the mouths or pen of his four main characters, not an authentic word exists except a few lines from a letter of Antony's, noted by an ancient historian in an archive and paraphrased a century after the events. Ludwig happily includes this in his book. ("Are you upset that I sleep with the Queen?" Antony asked Octavian. "She is my wife ....")

This handicap of a lack of dialogue, stemming from those familiarly scanty sources which apparently gave Ludwig not much more information to work with, circa 1930, than Shakespeare had to work with circa 1630, doesn't make for an insurmountable problem if you don't mind reading a novel without the freshness and movement of dialogue -- a novel that takes place almost entirely in the characters' heads. Given his unwillingness to invent scenes around dialogue, there is not much for the author to do, and he admits this, but serve as a sort of psychological companion to the Queen, describing what she likely thought and saw, and whom she loved and hated, during her brief and spectacular career. What is noteworthy, if you compare the gist of his romance to a proper biography like that by Michael Grant (Cleopatra, 1972) is how much he gets essentially right. Perhaps this, again, reflects the uniform paucity of sources, and the fact that ancient historians operated much like modern novelists. They were more interested in their subjects' moral dilemmas, in their tragedy or bravery, than in mucking around with evidence or proving exactly how many men died in a battle. What he got right above all were two things, Cleopatra's politics -- "never against Rome," always Rome's ally, ancient Egypt having little other choice against the superpower -- and her most important ambition, which was to maintain a Greek-speaking cultural counterweight to Roman power in the eastern Mediterranean. She was three hundred years ahead of her time, Michael Grant thinks, for when Rome tottered in the fourth century, its rulers did move east, to establish a rejuvenated Empire for a thousand years in Greek-speaking Byzantium.

The focus of the psychological action, the necessary novelistic "conflict" (such as it is), seems to lie between Cleopatra and Octavian, and it's a simple, visceral conflict. These two people are actually not thrown much together in the story -- Octavian is the one supreme Roman whom Cleopatra never enchants, and in the book we understand it's because he was cold and unworthy of her -- but if it's true that Cleopatra's first child, her son Caesarion, was in fact the son of Julius Caesar, then after Caesar's murder this half-Egyptian boy instantly stood in the way of the official, Roman heir, Octavian. Octavian, after all, was only a great-nephew. And the grandson of a moneylender, as Ludwig gleefully points out more than once. The latter half of the novel is overshadowed by Cleopatra's ghastly problem, namely grooming her son for a supreme monarchy but keeping him, the prey, out of the predator Octavian's claws.

The only other possible source of dramatic conflict in the story of the Queen's life has to do with that plebeian side to Rome, with the clash of personalities or more accurately, the clash of two entirely different civilizations' approach to the world and to life. (Of course Rome is convulsed by civil war at this time, which is why so many great people are so busy with gigantic action, but this is a novel about a woman, and Ludwig is a historian of the human heart.) We see Ludwig illustrate something of this in comparing Cleopatra to her rivals for the great men's affections, Caesar's other mistresses and Antony's other wives, not least of whom was his second wife Octavia, Octavian's sister. Roman women are portrayed as certainly formidable and beautiful in their way, but distinctly un-royal, un goddess-like. They are married to the grandsons of moneylenders and know nothing of what it is to be glorious, silver-robed Isis come to life; Ludwig once compares Cleopatra to a force of nature, an "artist in love," as opposed to the "pious" Octavia who conforms her behavior to the expectations of her noble and yet proudly republican neighbors. He says, noting the fact that the two women did not meet during the time when they both were married to Antony, even as they both sent him ships and supplies and money for his wars, from their two different homes in the Mediterranean:

"But the Roman matron was too much the great lady, too much a part of her family, to desire a [face to face] contest. Such things could be risked by a queen who was also an Amazon and an artist in love, since what she did was right because she did it; but not by a patriotic citizeness whose dignity was determined by the judgment of her fellow citizens."

And Octavia covered her eyes piously when a rhinoceros spitted a criminal in the arena. Cleopatra, "cynically innocent," laughed -- and was the only force of nature capable of holding her own with Caesar. Is the theme of the novel, possibly, something to do with a man's ultimate fantasy of the perfect, lawless, overripe woman? There are tiny hints that somehow, Cleopatra knew secrets characteristic of the ancient Orient, so that in her early twenties she could fascinate and satiate an "ageing" and experienced conqueror, a force of nature himself. The laughing at spitted criminals, or the relishing having younger brothers and sisters executed, or the testing snake venom on slaves, merely added an excusable whiff of piquancy to the Queen's more important splendors ....

The historian Grant agrees with the novelist Ludwig that in her own day, only Cleopatra was simply this, "the Queen." There was no need even to specify what country she ruled. The details of her romance may be found in Grant, or in Ludwig, or in Plutarch -- she had herself unrolled from a smuggled carpet at her first meeting with the well guarded Caesar, she sailed into Tarsus as Aphrodite, in a golden ship exuding perfumes and song, at her first meeting with Antony -- but what beggars our modern imaginations is not only the fact of her permanently bewitching these great men, but the very nature of the world she lived in. Two foundations seem to have supported the whole structure of pagan antiquity: Homer and Alexander. Homer had laid down in his poetry what heroes and gods did in life; Alexander had shown in his life how a hero, and king, could translate those emulations beyond what anyone had ever known as empire. Ludwig describes Caesar assassinated on the eve of carrying out his "Alexander-dream," the conquest of Persia which would make him as great as his model. For her part Cleopatra, a Ptolemy, united Egypt and Greece and Alexander's legacy in herself. It would have been an already stupendous combination even in a personally charmless woman. The Queen was not, never that. To have united with Caesar as well, and to have founded a dynasty with him, would have meant the gathering of almost unfathomable power, and we cannot forget Egypt's wealth, too, and its status as the importer of food into Rome. If Caesar and Cleopatra had had a son, in this world where the gods were understood to walk among men and the expectation and acceptance of divine and royal births seems to have served as a kind of mortar between the foundation stones, that son might, as comically extravagant as it sounds, "have ruled the world."

But they did have a son, it seems, and after the Queen and Antony (who had his own Alexander dream, funded with the Queen's money) and Caesar were all dead, Octavian made sure to annex Egypt and, in Ludwig's telling, have the seventeen-year-old Caesarion strangled. The Queen loses this novelistic conflict, and the predator Octavian wins.




Image from the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow

This Rough Magic by Mary Stewart

How often do you get a chance to read a novel set on the island of Corfu? If only libraries and bookstores, with all their so clever Dewey decimal systems and alphabetical orders, would arrange novels like this: all those set in Corfu, for example, or all those set in T'ang China, or all those that happen to have as a main character some extremely important person (now nearly forgotten) of a bygone age: Robert Grosseteste, say.

Mary Stewart's This Rough Magic (1964) is also a nice example of a certain kind of novel that I like to look for, that I'd like to see categorized officially somehow too, but whose characteristics I can't quite put my finger on: the mid-twentieth century women's novel which, in its depictions of men's and women's relations especially, throws off the safe comforting cloak of historical fiction, ignores what seems the careful prissiness of earlier, still-corseted decades, but hasn't yet descended to the monotonous, sentimental trauma memoirs that so many (women-governed) publishing firms and book clubs love now. I'm talking about novels of the 1950s and '60s in which, for one thing, the horrors of two world wars loom only a short time in the past; even though the plot line may have nothing to do with war, the characters tend to be sadder but wiser, about something. About everything. There will be no Aunt Jane in these novels, justly worried about chaperoning a man and woman on a buggy ride to the state fair. The smell of exhaust and the roar of an engine permeates the mid-century women's novel. Our heroine drives her own car, makes her own vacation plans, and talks frankly with sisters and friends about man, and in-laws, and bed. When she's distraught she doesn't whisper a corseted "profanity of no uncertain meaning" (Gone With The Wind), but rather says "Hell. Hell. Hell." And yet our heroine is literate, too. More modern (often women) novelists tend not only to be sub-literate, but to show a horrible inclination to that worst of (female) failings, the tendency to see everything as personal. I never joined another book discussion group again after having to read, in the long forgotten Ellen Foster (by Kaye Gibbons, the dernier cri in new fiction ten years ago), that the Civil War was "a war about how we should feel about each other."

Oh, really? Was it? The characters in This Rough Magic -- I dare say, the author of This Rough Magic -- are no such fools. As a matter of fact the finest scene comes toward the end, when the heroine, alone with the villain, gives him a dressing down and really psychologically nails what both sheer evil and interior twistedness are. She is aware that large chunks of life have nothing to do with how we all feel. And the author is -- should I say, because she is? -- literate. The plot of the novel actually hinges on what we would call a close reading of The Tempest, so close that every chapter opens with a pertinent quote from the play. The Tempest is set on Corfu. We learn why Prospero may have a lot in common with Corfu's patron saint, the similarly named Spiridion, and there's a great deal about Prospero drowning his books, and giving up the practice of "this rough magic," while the characters in the middle of a romantic suspense story also hunt for important documents hidden in undersea caves.

A few plot devices are a bit cheesy, to use the modern term. Let's just say they involve a friendly dolphin, and leave it at that. The romance is not terribly convincing. Once we figure out which man is good, the cheerful, good-looking blond or the dark brooding recluse, no further sparks fly. Our author's interest lies much more with the world-famous, elderly actor holed up in the castle, who serves as the source for all our information about The Tempest and who is also the link to the heroine's professional world (she's a struggling young actress, come to Corfu on holiday to visit her pregnant, rich sister and to forget her last flop).

If you have no head for inventing fiction (as I haven't), a book like This Rough Magic is at once awe inspiring and disappointing. I am awed to see the effort, the thought that has gone into planning this: no one described it all better than Jane Austen, in her famous "defense of the novel" paragraph from Northanger Abbey:

" 'Oh! it is only a novel!' " replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. 'It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda'; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."

Indeed, it is "only" that, and yet, I'm disappointed too in that I can see the cranking machinery behind the scenes. How do you make a novel? Remember, a novel has to be a certain size in the hand, a certain thickness in pages. Partly, you achieve that size and fill up those pages by figuring out the plot, but partly, you achieve it by describing in unneeded detail a variety of scenes chosen almost at random -- a car trip, a walk to the beach on this day but not that (so that you can witness the actions of this suspicious character but not that one), a long, long near-drowning the precise nautical details of which, after all, no first person narrator could ever plausibly have been expected to remember. In one of his many books, the centenarian colossus-scholar Jacques Barzun acknowledged that any artist eventually has to make some decisions which perhaps are random, if he wants to carry on and finish any work of art at all. And the finished work of art is of course different from what it might have been if the artist had made other decisions. Let's skip the drowning scene, she might have said to herself, and cut the car-trip scene from five pages to two. The reader doesn't need to know precisely when the villain shifted from this gear to that. And that finished, different work of art is not necessarily better. Not necessarily perfect, utterly the best it could have been.

Is it only the greatest artists who are able to tell when they have done that, when they have made all the best decisions -- and then are able to stop? Are they the ones who produce art you want to go back to? "An artist cannot do anything slovenly," Jane Austen wrote in one of her letters. Shall I go back and re read This Rough Magic, or anything more by Mary Stewart?

Possibly. Austen further wrote that all novelists' "productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world," and she was right about that. This Rough Magic is pleasurable -- how often do you read smart, mid-'60s novels set in Corfu? -- even if it does not provide the "heavy lifting" that Professor Barzun says is needed to keep the intellect fully in shape. Perhaps we had better move on to The Tempest, actually.



Image from alternativeef.