I've been packing boxes; Donald Hall's been unpacking them.

Today's post is more a directional sign than a real post (a signpost?): I've got a review over at Identity Theory of Donald Hall's recent memoir, Unpacking the Boxes. Go there to see what confession I consider damning for a memoirist!

Blogging proper resumes Wednesday--promise!

The early steps of the Dance, or, The young Anthony Powell

Finding myself in need of a bit of literary comfort food last weekend, I turned to my old standby, Anthony Powell. Rather than diving back into my perpetual re-reading of A Dance to the Music of Time, however, this time I opted for one of his earlier novels, Venusburg (1932).

Venusburg, Powell's second novel is much like his first, Afternoon Men: slight but worthy, showing equally the influence of Hemingway and Waugh, its spare prose and emotional aridity reminiscent of the former, the satire they serve clear kin to the work of the latter. While Dance is frequently very funny, the early novels are a reminder that, had Powell chosen, he might have become as straight, and nearly as vicious, a satirist as Waugh: in these books his eye for absurdity is married seamlessly to the affectless, listless cynicism that Waugh attributed to their entire generation.

For example, this bit of dialogue, between two English expatriates, Da Costa and Lushington, in an Eastern European nation, could easily have come from Waugh:

"And how are the Communists?"

"Splendid. They blew up the new gas-works the other day. At least that is supposed. Either that or the works manager, who was, it appears, a very erratic man. As everything is blown up it is hard to say. It is a pity, because architecturally they were of considerable beauty."

"Do you ever come in contact with the Soviet legation?"

"Not as a rule. But you ought to. I met one of their secretaries the other day at a tea-party. We were both lodged in a corner and he thought I was an American engineer on his way to some mines out in Russia and I thought he was a French author on his way back. They have invented an entirely new form of boredom, like the worst moments of being in the boy scouts at one's preparatory school. He was a fine example of it."

This exchange, too, between the same two men, feels distinctly Wauvian:

"That was Pope. I've arranged for him to valet you. He doesn't have much to do and he said he'd like to take the job on. I inherited him from the last man who was here. He's a curious fellow, as you see. Rather a character."

"But I don't like characters."

"I know you don't. Neither do I. But we can't always have what we like."

What I found most interesting, however, reading Venusburg for the second time, was a passage late in the novel that comes after Lushington's secret lover has been killed inadvertently by a political assassin:

Lushington stood and looked through the doorway of the bedroom. Here then was that rather astonishing mystery about which so much had been said that, when the fact itself was there, no further comment was possible. For the moment no near-at-hand formula seemed at all adequate. This was something well-defined and at the same time not easy to believe in. It seemed absurd, overdone. Lacking in proportion, like other people's love affairs. Here were all the signs of a loss of control. A breakdown of the essential machinery. The sort of thing no one could be expected to be on the look-out for.

That paragraph reads like nothing else in the novel, and, to my memory, nothing else in any of Powell's pre-war novels; rather, it reads like an early, slightly hesitant working out of the more serious approach he would take to matters of love and loss in Dance.

Many of the basic elements of the style Powell would reveal in Dance are there: a circling around matters of feeling that, though much less developed or finicky than that of Henry James, nonetheless calls him to mind in its dogged attention to indefinable shades of emotion; a reticence that in its very insistence reveals the storms underlying it; a deliberate, occasionally awkward vagueness of image; even a well-turned, aphoristic phrase--"Lacking in proportion, like other people's love affairs"--tossed in as if it were a long-agreed truth. Powell would both polish his style and significantly broaden his emotional range by the time he wrote Dance, but this passage makes surprisingly clear the fact that the seeds of the later work were already present before he'd turned thirty.

Don't say the Louvin Brothers didn't warn you!

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Now, if I know my Bible, it's the day of the Lord that so cometh like a thief in the night, and we should watch therefore for we know not the hour of his arrival . . . but this week it's been not the Lord, but Satan who's been sneak-sneak-sneaking into my reading!

His first appearance of the week was courtesy of the satirical pen of Wilkie Collins, who turns one portion of the narration of The Moonstone (1868) over to the wonderfully entertaining, pious, and hypocritical Miss Clack. In hopes of saving her dying aunt's immortal soul (and, if it should just happen that way, securing a small monetary legacy for herself), Miss Clack comes loaded for bear--heathen bear, that is:

Here was a golden opportunity! I seized it on the spot. In other words, I instantly opened my bag, and took out the top publication. It proved to be an early edition--only the twenty-fifth of the famous anonymous work (believed to be by precious Miss Bellows), entitled The Serpent at Home. The design of the book--with which the worldly reader may not be acquainted--is to show how the Evil One lies in wait for us in all the most apparently innocent actions of our daily lives. The chapters best adapted to female perusal are "Satan in the Hair Brush"; "Satan behind the Looking Glass"; "Satan under the Tea Table"; "Satan out of the Window"--and many others.

"Give your attention, dear aunt, to this precious book--and you will give me all I ask." With these words, I handed it to her open, at a marked passage--one continuous burst of burning eloquence! Subject: Satan among the Sofa Cushions.

Sadly, like that of Onan, Miss Clack's seed falls on fallow ground: her aunt is not saved, her legacy remains but notional. The Invisible Library, however, is not so hard-hearted: we'll be cataloging this veritable gazetteer of Satanic hideouts as soon as our next shift clocks in!

For his next appearance, Satan chose Uzbekistan. Elif Batuman, in her hilarious new book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, tells about a summer she spent in Samarkand, a city whose glory has faded a smidge since Tamerlane's day. There to study Old Uzbek language and literature, she lived with her boyfriend, Eric, who was pretending to be her husband, in the house of a woman whose actual husband, she was told, was in California studying to be a yogi--a story that was given the lie by his arrival on the scene:

Shiny-headed, with muscular shoulders and a paunch, Sharif indeed projected the impression of someone who had never lived in California, which he thought shared a border with New York.

He may not be a yogi, but Sharif, it turns out, is interested in Satan:

Another statement Sharif liked to repeat was that Satan wasn't outside us, in the world, but within us. "You think Satan is out there" (pointing in the bushes); "but Satan is everywhere--above all, inside us!" (pointing at his stomach).

"What's wrong with his stomach?" Eric asked.

"He thinks Satan lives there," I told him.

"Tell him!" Sharif urged me. "Tell your husband! Satan is everywhere!"

"He wants me to tell you that Satan is everywhere, including his stomach."

Eric narrowed his eyes, assessing Sharif's stomach.

All of which sent me back to Zachary Schomburg's strange and impressive new book of poems, Scary, No Scary, which I reviewed for the Quarterly Conversation earlier in the week--and to its handy index, which led me to the dreamlike prose poem "The Darkness and the Light," where I once again found the conniver lurking. After a few lines describing a house that is nothing but light inside and nothing but darkness outside, around which a parade marches noisily, Schomburg's speaker reveals:

There is only one thing that can be seen: Satan. Satan is floating endlessly, tirelessly, a few feet above the ground along the parade route outside of my house, arms crossed across his fiery chest. He looks like he's made of glowing rock, cracking with the pressure of hot gaseous lava. Lava is spilling out of his hollowed eye sockets. His hair is wind-swept wild-fire. The heat that radiates from his body keeps my house very warm. Like a clock, he slowly floats past the front window of my house at noon and midnight. It is how I keep time. It is Satan's job to keep time. It is Satan's job to be the only light in the darkness. Some people think it is Satan's job to make what is wrong with this world, but those people are wrong. It is Satan's job to make us choose between the only two things that are right with it.

And should we choose wrong, well, as Elif Batuman tells us, Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying.

What? You said one blog wasn't enough?

In conjunction with the new issue, the Quarterly Conversation has launched a blog! Founding editor Scott Esposito has put together a solid team of contributors, including booksellers, poets, publishing professionals, and critics, and together we'll be blogging regularly under the name the Constant Conversation.

I'll probably be writing one or two posts per week, generally trying to focus on poetry, since that's my editorial role for the Quarterly Conversation. I've just now put up a post about verse novels and Ernest Hilbert's Sixty Sonnets, and last week I wrote about . . . what else but Isaac D'Israeli? You can take the boy out of his blog . . .

Add it to your RSS reader--I think you'll be pleased at the range of writing you find there.

Scary, No Scary--or, the Quarterly Conversation Number 19!

The Spring issue of the Quarterly Conversation is here!

In this issue:

• Patrick Kurp tells us about Jonathan Swift's poetry: "When puppies and kitties show up in one of Swift's poems, you can be certain they have drowned."
• Caleb Powell interviews David Shields about his much-discussed new book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.
• Ellen Welcker reviews Hurry Home Honey, by poet and translator Sawako Nakayasu.
• Michael Moreci reviews one of the most exciting books I've read this year, Zachary Mason's debut novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey.
• And, speaking of Zacharys, I review Zachary Schomberg's funny, silly, slightly creepy, and wholly unforgettable Scary, No Scary.

And much, much more! If your productivity at the office suffers all week, feel free to have your boss e-mail me to complain.

"How many secrets may the man of genius learn from literary anecdotes!", or, Isaac D'Israeli and the fortunate limits of method

The impressively unsystematic nature of Isaac D'Israeli's thought and writing is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that his clearest defense of his method doesn't appear until near the end of the first edition of his enormous (and ever-expanding) Curiosities of Literature. In the essay "Literary Anecdotes," he writes,

A writer of penetration sees connexions in literary anecdotes which are not immediately perceived by others; in his hands anecdotes, even should they be familiar to us, are susceptible of deductions and inferences, which become novel and important truths. Facts of themselves are barren; it is when these facts pass through our reflections, and become interwoven with our feelings, or our reasonings, that they are the finest illustrations; that they assume the dignity of “philosophy teaching by example;” that, in the moral world, they are what the wise system of Bacon inculcated in the natural knowledge deduced from experiments; the study of Nature in her operations. . . . For this reason, writers and artists should, among their recreations, be forming a constant acquaintance with the history of their departed kindred.

But D'Israeli doesn't rest his claims there--instead, he ups the ante a bit:

What perhaps he had in vain desired to know for half his life is revealed to him by a literary anecdote; and thus the amusements of indolent hours may impart the vigour of study; as we find sometimes in the fruit we have taken for pleasure the medicine which restores our health. How superficial is that cry of some impertinent pretended geniuses of these times, who affect to exclaim, “Give me no anecdotes of an author, but give me his works!” I have often found the anecdotes more interesting than the works.

A handful of writers featured in Javier Marias's catty, addictive Written Lives come to mind, though really one need only read D'Israeli to see his point: he tells of many a writer whose well-deserved literary obscurity does nothing to lessen the pleasures of the anecdotes retailed about him.

What makes this essay particularly interesting, however, is where D'Israeli carries his argument in subsequent paragraphs. First he recruits Dr. Johnson, avowed fan of anecdotes, to argue for his side, then he pivots on Johnson's acknowledgment that collectors "are not always so happy as to select the most important" in order to launch into a series of examples of anecdotes that offer little in the way of illumination:

Dr. J. Warton has informed the world that many of our poets have been handsome. This, certainly, neither concerns the world, nor the class of poets. It is trifling to tell us that Dr. Johnson was accustomed "to cut his nails to the quick." I am not much gratified by being informed, that Menage wore a greater number of stockings than any other person, excepting one, whose name I have really forgotten. The biographer of Cujas, a celebrated lawyer, says that two things were remarkable of this scholar. The first, that he studied on the floor, lying prostrate on a carpet, with his books about him; and, secondly, that his perspiration exhaled an agreeable smell, which he used to inform his friends he had in common with Alexander the Great!

It seems to me that D'Israeli gives the game away by that exclamation point at the end, if not by the earlier "I have really forgotten." Try as he might to make an argument that will bring him in line with Johnson and acknowledge a criticism he must surely have heard often from friends and acquaintances, he can't overcome his eye for a story: these tidbits are too good not to share--even when he's trying to select inanities, he can't help but choose entertaining ones.

In the essay's closing paragraph, D'Israeli even seems to acknowledge, if not the spirit of his disagreement with the point he claims to be trying to make, then at least a practical reason to object to overly assiduous weeding:

Yet of anecdotes which appear trifling, something may be alleged in their defence. It is certainly safer for some writers to give us all they know, than to try their discernment for rejection. Let us sometimes recollect that the page over which we toil will probably furnish materials for authors of happier talents.

Which seems worthy of a Friday night toast: to the literary magpies; long may they quest for shiny things in the quietest precincts of our libraries!

"It is a great conviction of youth from which some people never escape that everyone is having a better time than they are," or, Powell to Batuman

A tip for any aspiring bloggers out there: should you be on any given night too busy to put together a proper post, turn ye to Anthony Powell's grab-bag of notes, ideas, thoughts on character, and snippets of dialogue, A Writer's Notebook, and thereof shall ye feast!

Being in that situation myself tonight, I offer you this:

Love is like being seasick, you feel you are going to die, then when you walk down the gangway on to dry land you can hardly remember what you have suffered.

Or:

I shouldn't think a woman could ever really forget a man with breath like his.

Then there's a pair of bits about literary critics:

Having no opinions is a positive advantage for a literary critic.

A literary critic says, "It's rather exterior."

But, because I'm an old hand at this blogging thing, I'll go one more and also offer a passage from Elif Batuman's wonderfully strange and funny new book, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them--which is full of literary critics like the ones Powell was imagining, and which might just as honestly be titled, OMG, Aren't Russians and Academics--Particularly Graduate Students--Weird? (with a subtitle of Lovably, Endearingly, Almost at Times Understandably So, That Is).

The book is absolutely stuffed with quotable oddities, which makes it a particularly good chaser for a week of Isaac D'Israeli. I've chosen the following passage, relatively pedestrian by the high standards of the rest of the book, to share tonight because of the brief, unexpectedly Powellian aside in its last line. Batuman is telling about the wedding of Peter the Great's niece, Anna Ioannovna to Duke Friedrich Wilhelm of Courland:

At the wedding banquet, the tsar cut open two pies with his dagger. A splendidly dressed dwarf jumped out of each pie and together they danced a minuet on the table. The next day, Peter treated his guests to a second wedding: that of his favorite dwarf attended by forty-two other dwarfs from all corners of the empire. Some foreign guests saw a certain symmetry in the double wedding, one between two miniature people, the other between two pawns in the great game of European politics.

One the way back to Courland, the teenage duke died, of alcohol poisoning. One his last night in Petersburg, he had engaged--rashly, one feels--in a drinking contest with Peter the Great.

Yet another item to add to the list of things one ought not to do if one ever found oneself in possession of a time machine: engage in a contest of any kind with Peter the Great.

As for Anna--"'seven-foot, 280-pound Anna,' in the words of one courtier"--this would be far from her last experience with dwarves, who ended up playing many unpleasant parts in the litany of cruel whimsy that was her reign. Batuman's got plenty of jaw-dropping details there, too; Empress Anna and her ice palace alone are enough to make the whole book worth reading.

"He himself always remained a man of the eighteenth century," or, Powell weighs in on D'Israeli

{Portrait of Isaac D'Israeli, by Daniel Maclise, circa 1832.}

I can't believe I've been writing about Isaac D'Israeli for more than a week without checking in with my old friend Anthony Powell! Who, after all, is more likely to appreciate D'Israeli's towering piles of anecdote and gossip and oddity than that inveterate collector of same? Powell's love of pattern and recurrence, as well as his appreciation of self-willed complexity, is enough to have landed him in Robert Burton's melancholy camp rather than D'Israeli's cheerier one, but these are less warring armies than different regiments in the same, working together--if in styles as different as the cavalry and the infantry--to demonstrate the centrality of literature to the inner life of man.

Powell wrote about D'Israeli only once, in a review for the Daily Telegraph in 1969 of a biography by James Ogden, but even that brief account offers some new angles, as well as a pleasant dose of Powell's own preoccupations, such as D'Israeli's relatively scant references to John Aubrey.

From Benjamin Disraeli's introduction to his father's Curiosities of Literature, I knew that Isaac's father (also named Benjamin) had been a successful businessman, but from Powell I learned that he was one of the founders of the London Stock Exchange, his legacy substantial enough to keep his son in books and leisure despite his preferring the library over work. As Powell puts it,

Isaac seems to be a classic case of a young man given every opportunity for making a successful business career who for no particular reason decided he wanted to "write."

In the face of that--as I wrote on Sunday for the Constant Conversation, the new blog of the Quarterly Conversation--his father sent him away to Europe, which was of no use: Dizzy, as Powell calls him, was not destined to be any sort of businessman.

Powell also informs us that D'Israeli, as will not be surprising to anyone who's noted his skepticism about religion, was far from an observant Jew:

D'Israelie contributed liberally to synagogue funds and had certainly caused Benjamin to be given instruction in the Jewish faith, but he was not ardent in his religious observances. Accordingly the governors of the synagogue, as a call to order and much to his own annoyance, elected him as Warden; when he refused, they tried to fine him £40. This appears to be why Benjamin Disraeli was baptized at the age of twelve.

Which, given that Benjamin became Prime Minister of England, is quite a revenge.

Sadly, Powell also passes on a judgment that I'd rather not have heard:

There are indications that D'Israeli was regarded at times as a bore in his ceaseless asking of questions at dinner-parties.

Much as I'd have preferred to learn that D'Israeli was sparkling company, however, I'm selfish enough to be glad that he bored his contemporaries in order to entertain us, rather than vice-versa. To his dinner companions, I raise a grateful glass.

Angel urine is not conducive to spiritual growth, or, How not to create devotional paintings, courtesy of Isaac D'Israeli

While Isaac D'Israeli's Curiosities of Literature is more frequently witty and wry than straight-up funny, one entry that made me laugh out loud was "Religious Nouvellettes." D'Israeli opens the essay by describing an illustrated prayer book from the fifteenth century, entitled Hortulus Animae, cum Oratiunculis aliquibus, superadditis quae in prioribus Libris non habentur (which my Internet Latin tells me means roughly "A Little Garden of the Spirit, with added short speeches not found in previous books").

The book's author calls his work "A garden, which abounds with flowers for the pleasure of the soul"--but, writes D'Israeli,

[T]hey are full of poison. In spite of his fine promises, the chief part of these meditations are as puerile as they are superstitious.

He saves his real scorn, however, for the accompanying illustrations--which, in their insipid mix of eras and beliefs, remind him of some truly hilarious-sounding devotional paintings:

We have had many gross anachronisms in similar designs. There is a laughable picture in a village in Holland, in which Abraham appears ready to sacrifice his son Issac by a loaded blunderbuss; but his pious intention is entirely frustrated by an angel urining in the pan. . . . [A]nother happy invention, to be seen on an alltar-piece at Worms, is that in which the Virgin throws Jesus into the hopper of a mill, while from the other side he issues changed into little morsels of bread, with which the priests feed the people. Matthison, a modern traveller, describes a picture in a church in Constance, called the Conception of the Holy Virgin. An old man lies on a cloud, whence he darts out a vast beam, which passes through a dove hovering just below; at the end of the beam appears a large, transparent egg, in which is seen a child in swaddling clothes with a glory round it. Mary sits leaning in an arm chair, and opens her mouth to receive the egg.

Is it just me, or does this all call to mind some definitely unholy mix of prog rock album cover art and these overly literal (and certainly overly competitive) depictions of Jesus?

Spider, spider, spinning bright . . .

{Photo by rocketlass.}

In my post the other day that drew on Isaac D'Israeli's accounts of how some literary luminaries spent their leisure time, I didn't point out the one that I found the strangest: Spinoza's habit of relaxing by setting spiders to fight each other. An admirer of Spinoza, I tend to glorify him a bit, thinking of him as an essentially gentle, bookish soul much put upon by the world, but learning of this oddly violent pastime has made me wonder whether I might have him all wrong. For a placid soul, what fun could there possibly be in watching spiders fight?

These spideatorial combats also led me to another question: how on earth did Spinoza find spiders whenever he happened to need a break from his labors? Maybe the Lords of the Ma'amad were right about his "monstrous deeds" after all--maybe a man who can conjure spiders at will should be cursed by day and by night, when he rises up and when he lies down, when he comes in and when he goes out.

Fortunately, further reading in D'Israeli restored my faith in Spinoza, at least so far as conjuring fighting spiders was concerned. Apparently spiders were just more readily at hand back in ye olden days, as they make two other appearances in the Curiosities of Literature.

The first example comes from the essay "Medical Music," which features an account of an unnamed officer who, confined to the Bastille, charmed his non-human cellmates with his lute:

At the end of a few days, this modern Orpheus, playing on his lute, was greatly astonished to see frisking from their holes great numbers of mice, and descending from their woven habitations crowds of spiders, who formed a circle about him, while he continued breathing his soul-subduing instrument. He was petrified with astonishment. Having ceased to play, the assembly, who did not come to see his person, but to hear his instrument, immediately broke up. As he had a great dislike to spiders, it was two days before he ventured again to touch his instrument. At length, having overcome, for the novelty of his company, his dislike of them, he recommenced his concert, when the assembly was by far more numerous than at first, and in the course of farther time, he found himself surrounded by a hundred musical amateurs.

At this point, it all seems like a scene from Disney short--music hath charms and all, right? Ah, but this soldier hath more of the Nuge than of Saint Francis about him:

Having thus succeeded in attracting this company, he treacherously contrived to get rid of them at his will. For this purpose he begged the keeper to give him a cat, which he put in a cage, and let loose at the very instant when the hairy people were most entranced by the Orphean skill he had displayed.

Now if you want to talk about someone who deserves to be cursed when he rises up and cursed when he lies down, &tc. . . .

But rather than blacken our souls with curses, let us turn to an act of kindness toward spiders, from D'Israeli's account of Anthony Magliabechi, a reader so voracious as to be nicknamed "the Glutton of Literature." D'Israeli describes him thus:

His habits of life were uniform. Ever among his books, he troubled himself with no other concern whatever, and the only interest he appeared to take for any living thing was his spiders. While sitting among his literary piles, he affected great sympathy for these weavers of webs, and perhaps in contempt of those whose curiosity appeared impertinent, he frequently cried out, "to take care not to hurt his spiders!"

I don't know whether D'Israeli was a fan of spiders--though his attention to them in his book is suggestive--but the rest of that description could easily apply to the compiler of the Curiosities himself.