A Saturday miscellany

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Some reading notes for your Saturday, held together, as you'll see, by the slimmest of threads:

1 As longtime readers of this blog know, I'm fascinated by the topic of dreams. So I've been paying particular attention to Shelley's dreams as I've been reading Richard Holmes's biography of the poet this past week. Shelley was a troubled sleeper from childhood, prone to sleepwalking and vivid dreams--and quite possibly, depending which of his friends you believe, waking visions--that fueled his poetic embrace of the ghostly and the macabre. At one point in the biography, Holmes quotes a passage from an account by Shelley's cousin Tom Medwin that reads like a cross between Borges and the Arabian Nights:

At this time Shelley was ever in a dreamy state, and he told me he was in the habit of noting down his dreams. The first day he said, they amounted to a page, the next to two, the third to several, till at last they constituted the greater part of his existence.

While the thought of the writing of a dream journal consuming one's life is scary enough, after that the account moves into the positively uncanny:

One morning he told me he was satisfied of the existence of two sorts of dreams, the Phrenic and the Psychic; and that he had witnessed a singular phenomenon, proving that the mind and soul were separate and different entities--that it had more than once happened to him to have a dream, which the mind was pleasantly and actively developing; in the midst of which, it was broken off by a dream within a dream--a dream of the soul, to which the mind was not privy; but that from the effect it produced--the start of horror with which he waked--must have been terrific.

2 Which leads me to a dream I had last week: I was in a boat, possibly a police launch, cruising purposefully up the East River on a chilly night. We were looking for a body . . . and Nero Wolfe was with us. I think that's how I realized that it was a dream: no force on earth, I told myself, could get Nero Wolfe to leave his townhouse and board a boat for a wintry nighttime cruise up the East River. That said, I bet he would have found what we were looking for had I only stayed asleep a little longer.

3 Speaking of Nero Wolfe, he tosses off a line in Some Buried Caesar that's been lingering in my mind since I read the novel a couple of weeks ago. Dismissing some complaints about a ruse he'd employed, he says,

Victor Hugo wrote a whole book to prove that a lie could be sublime.

I'm far from a Hugo expert, and a tiny bit of research didn't turn up any obvious answers, so I put the question to the audience: what book is Wolfe talking about?

4 Though I've only lost about half a dozen books in my life, strangely enough two of them were Victor Hugo novels: back in high school, I had mass market paperbacks of Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and both of them disappeared when I was partway through them. Perhaps one of my classmates was a secret Hugo fan?

I've thus never finished either one, though I'll admit that my enjoyment of ridiculously long books has led me to eye Les Miserables at the bookstore on occasion--I'm willing to listen to arguments on its behalf if anyone has any to offer.

5 Finally, on the topic of books I've never finished: nearly four years ago I read about four hundred pages of The Count of Monte Cristo while on a weekend road trip. I was surprised to find that nearly everything I knew about the novel--the frame-up, the imprisonment, the escape--happened in the first three hundred or so of those pages, which were great fun, on par with the best parts of The Three Musketeers. But the next hundred pages proved a bit of a slog: where I was expecting the Count to instantly and implacably begin wreaking vengeance, instead he embarked on a series of improbable picaresque adventures. So I put the book away, unsure that I had the patience for another nine hundred pages of such swashbuckling.

So, I ask any Monte Cristo fans out there: was I wrong? Should I take up the Count's story once more?

6 Now that I think about it, this list comes distressingly close to being a perfect example of how my mind works: I may not be a social butterfly, but I plead guilty to being a mental one.

On the lameness of me and the greatness of detail-oriented scholarship

Since I mentioned earlier in the week that I probably ought to get out more, I can't help but pose the question, before I even begin writing this post: could there possibly be anything more lame than spending the late hours of a Friday night writing about a note to a Penguin Classic? No, no, no, no way. There's just not. This is the lamest.

Does it help if I avow that Rocketlass and I did go out tonight? That we spent the evening with friends? No? Okay, what if I try to justify tonight's post by reference to my longstanding appreciation of the drudge work that goes into editing, establishing, and writing the notes for authoritative texts? It's work that I, by long ago deciding against graduate school, eschewed, but that I appreciate nonetheless, and that therefore I feel should occasionally get its share of attention.

The note I'm interested in tonight is one I picked up on several weeks ago when I was reading the Penguin Classics edition of Tom Jones. Late in the novel, in the midst of some pleasantly rambling remarks introducing a chapter, Henry Fielding describes the untrustworthiness of Tom's sugar mama Lady Bellaston in the following manner:

Tho' the Reader may have long since concluded Lady Bellaston to be a Member (and no inconsiderable one) of the Great World, she was in reality a very considerable Member of the Little World; by which Appellation was distinguished a very worthy and honourable Society which not long since flourished in this Kingdom.

Among other good Principles upon which this Society was founded, there was one very remarkable: For as it was a Rule of an honourable Club of Heroes, who assembled at the close of the late War, that all the Members should every Day fight once at least; so 'twas in this, that every Member should, within the twenty-four Hours, tell at least one merry Fib, which was to be propagated by all Brethren and Sisterhood.

Editors Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely grace readers of that paragraph with the following information:

Although the War of the Austrian Succession, formally concluded in October 1748, was the most recent war to have ended, Battestin plausibly finds an allusion here to a coterie of officeers, the so-called "Derby Captains," who devoted themselves to provoking duels following the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which ended the War of the Spanish Succession. Battestin also cites John Arbuthnot's prospectus for a mock-treatise entitled "The Art of Political Lying" (1727), a chapter of which would outline "a Project for uniting the several smaller Corporations of Lyars into one Society."

Could a note be more suggestive or fascinating? Don't both those societies sound like something right out of Robert Louis Stevenson, or perhaps G. K. Chesterton? Dumas, too, would surely have had fun with these folks. Or, at a further remove, can't you imagine Borges delivering a detailed account of a secret society dedicating to lying and dueling--which, despite its being fully annotated and crammed with references to the appropriate historical documents, you would naturally assume to be a complete fabrication?

Thank you, edition-editing, note-writing scholars. You've kept me up far too late and brought me real pleasure.