Defoe on apparitions

These days Daniel Defoe is remembered almost solely for Robinson Crusoe--oh, Journal of the Plague Year is in print, which, centuries after its publication, any of us would surely accept as a legacy, but it's read primarily by specialists and students. (Though I recommend it--it's fun!) But he made his living by his pen for decades (with the occasional bonus paycheck for spying; 'twas a good era for spying), and while he's not inexhaustible the way, say, Dr. Johnson or Hazlitt are, his body of work nonetheless offers plenty of pleasures for the browser.

Which is why it perhaps shouldn't surprise us to learn that he is solid on the topic of ghosts, as I learned on a recent visit to Los Angeles's Museum of Jurassic Technology, whose modest but satisfying bookshop features a limited edition hardcover of a 1999 reprint of Defoe's 1729 compilation The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed (An Essay on the History and Reality of Apparitions). There's something rewarding on almost every page. Here, let's play a bit of sortes defoeiana--page 223:

Thus if the invisible Spirits give a due alarm, they do their part; if they jog us and awaken us in a deep sleep, and pull us again and again, and give us notice that something is coming, that some Danger is at the Door; if we will sleep on 'till it comes, if we will go on, happen what happen may, the kind Spirit has done its Duty, discharg'd its Office, and if we fall into the Mischief, the fault is our own, we can by no means blame the insufficiency of the Notice, and say, to what purpose is it? feeling we had due and timely warning, but would not take the hint; we had due notice of the danger, and would not step out of the way to avoid it; the fault is wholly our own.

Two important notes to help you enjoy that passage to the utmost:

1 Remember that in the facsimile of the 1729 edition, every "s" that isn't capitalized or ending a word looks more like a cursive f.

2 Stop for a moment to think about just how uncannily like Javier Marias's inimitable style the back-and-forth run-on of that narrative self-argument sounds.

Anyway, today what I've happened on is the tale of an apparition sent, it seems, to warn James IV of Scotland not to continue to make war on England. The entreaty failed; the outcome was the Battle of Flodden, which cost James his life and Scotland its last real hope of independence. Defoe writes that James was at his palace in Linlithgow when an "antient" man with "Hair the Colour of Amber, (some Accounts would represent it as a Glory painted round a head by the Limners)" forced his way through the crowd, and

came close up to the King, and, without any Bow or Reverence made to his Person, told him with a low Voice, but such as the King could hear very distinctly, That he was sent to him to warn him, not to proceed in the War which he had undertaken at the Sollicitation of the Priests, and in Favour of the French; and that if he did go on with it he should not prosper. He added also, that he should abstain from his Lewd and Unchristian Practices with wicked Women, for that if he did not, it would issue in his Destruction.

Having deliver'd his Message, he immediately vanish'd, for tho' his pressing up to the King had put the whole Assembly in disorder, and that everyone's Eye was fix'd upon him, while he was delivering his Message to the King; yet not one could see him any more, or perceive his going back from the King; which put them all into the utmost Confusion.

After reiterating that the people and the king were convinced that the speaker was an angel because they didn't see or feel him making his way out after delivering his message--which is entertaining because of the way it calls in physical evidence to support a claim for the supernatural--Defoe laments that James ignored the warning, pressing ahead with his army to the Tweed, the traditional boundary between the kingdoms.

But the angel wasn't through with James, Defoe tells us. As the king sat drinking wine "very plentifully" in a hall in Jedburgh, he was accosted by the messenger yet again,

tho' not in the Form which it appear'd in Lithgo; but with less regards or respect to the Prince, and in an imperious Tone told him, he was commanded to warn him not to proceed in that War, which if he did, he should lose not the Battel only, but his Crown and Kingdom: and that after this, without staying for any Answer, like the Hand to King Ahasuerus, it went to the Chimney, and wrote in the Stone over it, or that which we call the Mantle-piece, the following Distich,

Laeta sit illa dies, Nescitur Origo secundi
Sit labor an requies, sic transit gloria Mundi.

I was raised, like Shakespeare, with little Latin and less Greek, so I'm forced to turn to Google Translate for help on the Ahasuerus-style mantlepiece warning:

Proud to be that day, do not know the origin of the second
Let there be toil or rest, so passes the glory of the world.

I'm going to guess that "do not know the origin of the second" really means something like "does not think of the life to come."

Alas, the warning was not heeded: as Defoe writes,

that he marcht on, fought the English at Flodden-Field, and there lost his Army, all his former Glory, and his Life, is also recorded; I need say no more of it.

Defoe goes on to speculate a bit about the spirit's origins, building his speculation on his accumulated store of tales of apparitions:

Had it been a Heavenly Vision, 'tis more than probably it would have laid hold of the King's Hand, as the Apparition of Angels did to Lot, and as it were dragg'd him away, and said You shall not go forward, that you may not be defeated and slain, both you and your Army.

After offering a few reasonably convincing arguments as to why the spirit couldn't be the devil (the devil loves war and death and thus wouldn't send an emissary to prevent them), Defoe essentially throws up his hands: It's a spirit, probably of someone deceased with some sort of stake in the outcome, and we can't know more.

As a fan of Dorothy Dunnett, and particularly of her House of Niccolo series, I can't help but come up with a different answer. The eight books of the House of Niccolo series end in 1483, five years before James IV took the throne. But throughout the series Niccolo spends substantial time and energy on James's father and his dangerously wild siblings and family, trying to instill in him the wisdom and control required of a good king. Is it so hard to imagine that Niccolo, though essentially retired from meddling in affairs of state, saw the disaster of Flodden approaching and came up with one of his typically convoluted schemes in hopes of preventing it?

Did you mean to attach a document?

As part of my continual trawl through various letters collections, I wandered into those of Daniel Defoe recently. There are almost no extant letters of a personal nature--as George Harris Healey wrote in his introduction to the 1955 collection he edited, "One searches in vain for a single letter written to his parents, or to Mary Defoe, patient helpmeet of a half-century of small triumphs and great calamities."

Which leaves business and politics, in both of which Defoe was up to his ears. Many of the letters are written to patrons, and thus are almost unreadable today for all their florid praise and nonsense. The occasional letter, however, jumps out for its immediacy: when, as a journalist (and spy) in Scotland promoting the cause of union, Defoe scribbles the news and hurries it on its way, the power and immediacy of political machinations come to life, feeling almost news-like, even familiar and contemporary.

My favorite letter, however, is the following, sent on April 17, 1712 to Defoe's patron and spymaster, Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. In the introduction, Healey acknowledges his gratitude to Harley for preserving so many of Defoe's letters . . . though he could have done a slightly better job:

The cautious Harley was a collector, and it is to his instinct for keeping things that we owe the happy preservation of most of the letters in this book. One may wince at his occasional practice of tearing off the now-prized signature of his secret agent, but he did not destroy the letter itself, and for that the student of Defoe must always be the debtor of Harley.

The letter itself I think you'll find amusing:

I am to ask Pardon for a Mistake I thought my Self Uncapable of (Viz.:) That having written to your Ldpp last Night for Cover of The Enclosed, and Given The letter to a Servt to Carry, I Found The Receipt on My Table left Out. I have left it without Date because your Ldpp So Ordred before. I Humbly Ask your Ldpps pardon for the Mistake And am

May it Please your Ldpp

Your Most Humble and Obedt Srvt—

Daniel Defoe

That's right: even three hundred years ago people were forgetting to attach the document before hitting Send.

Books did furnish a room . . .

{Photos by rocketlass.}

From The Library at Night (2006), by Alberto Manguel

Like Machiavelli, I often sit among my books at night. While I prefer to write in the morning, at night I enjoy reading in the thick silence, when triangles of light from the reading lamps split my library shelves in two. Above, the high rows of books vanish into darkness; below sits the privileged section of the illuminated titles. This arbitrary division, which grants certain books a glowing presence and relegates others to the shadows, is superseded by another order, which owes its existence merely to what I can remember. My library has no catalogue; having placed the books on the shelves myself, I generally know their position by recalling the library's layout, and areas of light or darkness make little difference to my exploring. The remembered order follows a pattern in my mind, the shape and division of the library, rather as a stargazer connects in narrative patterns the pinpoints of the stars; but the library in turn reflects the configuration of my mind, its distant astrologer. The deliberate yet random order of the shelves, the choice of subject matters, the intimate history of each book's survival, the traces of certain times and certain places left between the pages, all point to a particular reader. A keen observer might be able to tell who I am from a tattered copy of the poems of Blas de Otero, the number of volumes by Robert Louis Stevenson, the large section devoted to detective stories, the minuscule section devoted to literary theory, the fact that there is much Plato and very little Aristotle on my shelves. Every library is autobiographical.

At the urging of our sympathetic but insistent realtor, rocketlass and I have spent the past week packing up and storing away nearly all of our books. Back in the autumn, when we first put the condominium in which we've lived for ten years on the market, we packed away a couple of bookcases worth of books that had been kept in one of the bedrooms, but we had hoped that we would sell before having to give up the rest.

Alas, four months and seventy boxes later, we now have a home that is, by our standards, denuded of books. Our living room is bare, and our realtor was right: it does look much larger. It also looks significantly less like home--which I suppose is the idea, after all: the less it looks like our home, the sooner it will no longer be, and the sooner we'll be able to re-establish our library in what we both hope, the gods willing, will be its final destination.

Of course, compared to our neighbors, for whom reading is an occasional way to pass the time rather than one of life's central activities, we still have a lot of books in our small apartment: one seven-shelf case, tucked away in a bedroom. It's a desert island case, I suppose, though not exactly, its holdings an atypical distillation of our vanished collection, a mix of the unread, the forever re-read, and the inexhaustible--from all of Anthony Powell to the letters of Byron to The Anatomy of Melancholy to Boswell's Johnson to Sherlock Holmes and the latest from Hard Case Crime. There's no reason it shouldn't be enough to get us through the next few months, though I'm already dreading the first time I need to look something up in a book that's been consigned to storage.

I take heart, however, from a passage found elsewhere in The Library at Night, a reminder that things could be much, much worse:

On one of the early days of October of the year 1659, Robinson Crusoe returned to the mangled remains of his craft and managed to bring ashore a number of tools and various kinds of food, as well as "several things of less value," such as pens, ink, paper and a small collection of books. Of these books, a few were in Portuguese, a couple were "Popish prayer-books" and three were "very good Bibles." His "dreadful deliverance" had left him terrified of death through starvation, but once the tools and the food had met his material needs he was ready to seek entertainment from the ship's meagre store of books. Robinson Crusoe was the founder--if a reluctant founder--of a new society. And Daniel Defoe, his author, thought it necessary that at the beginning of a new society there should be books.

Manguel's book resides in our remaining bookcase; Defoe's, readily available elsewhere, has been relegated to the ship's hold. (Did I mention that for all my carping in this post, we live half a block from an actual library? Okay, I'll admit it's not exactly the salt mines here . . . )

Apocalypse: Earth!

Enjoying Max Brooks's World War Z (2006) and Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) led me to wonder: if I still worked at a bookstore, what would my Apocalypse: Earth! table display look like? I mean, after I placed Zombie Giambi front and center to scare off the young and impressionable, what books would I stock it with?

Much as I love end-of-the-world stories, my knowledge is pretty spotty; I'm always an amateur when venturing into sci-fi, and in a sub-genre as rich as this one, I'm sure to leave out bunches of good books. But here's my initial list, which is guided by a couple of simple criteria: the story needs to be reasonably plausible, and, while I like a bit of politics in my apocalypse, overall I prefer the gory to the allegorical.

George R. Stewart's The Earth Abides (1949) has to be there, as, from what I understand, it kicked off American sci-fi writers' interest in the idea of the end of humanity. The tools for destroying the world were, after all, suddenly at hand; who knew then that we'd succeed in getting through at least sixty years without using them again? And The Earth Abides is still worth reading for a lot of reasons other than its importance in the genre: for the picture it draws of America's pre-interstate infrastructure, the survivors' stubborn insistence on eating canned foods instead of learning to farm, and the post-apocalyptic community's unquestioned privileging of men--all of which place the book clearly in its time; for the scene where the reconstituted community has to decide how to handle a man set on disrupting what they've built; and for the way it highlights the reproductive dangers, both genetic and cultural, that constantly face small populations: if only one person has a particular skill or trait, the chances of losing it forever are staggeringly high.

Going back to the roots of sci-fi, I think War of the Worlds (1898) belongs, but what about The Time Machine (1895)? After all, although it's set in a future that hasn't arrived yet even within the story's own time, it does show us a collapsed society and a lost humanity. I think I'd include it.

Of more recent vintage, I'd have to include The Stand (1978), though I'd never recommend that anyone read the long version, as I did in high school. Even given that time wasted in high school is a lot like time not wasted at all, I'm not sure it was worth it--and that's all before taking into account that, as usual, King has no idea how to end the book. But I would never argue that it doesn't belong on my table; given King's popularity, it's the first apocalypse book a lot of people encounter.

Another contemporary novel I'd make a space for is Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003). Though I was a bit unsatisfied with it overall, I'd include it if only because it's so bleak for so long--and frequently flat-out scary, as the surviving humans spend a lot of their time dodging packs of genetically engineered wolvogs, rakunks, and pigoons. Don't ask me what wolvogs look like--I just know they're very, very scary.

A Journal of the Plague Year definitely gets a place, despite not being about the end of humanity, because Defoe's descriptions of the streets of London are so similar to the descriptions of zombie-ridden cities in World War Z that, as a bookseller, I'd have fun recommending both to people.

World War Z would also go nicely with the five paperback volumes (so far) of Robert Kirkman's comic The Walking Dead (2003) (though I'm beginning to question Kirkman's attitude towards women--being contemporary, he doesn't have George Stewart's excuse for bad gender politics--though since the series is continuing Kirkman still has time, I suppose, to demonstrate that I'm misreading him). The Walking Dead so far demonstrates that zombie stories are well-suited to serial narrative: the world, as it were, can always keep ending. I'd also have to throw in a George Romero four-pack, even if my store didn't generally carry DVDs, because nothing I could do for George Romero would repay him for his role in clarifying the rules of zombification (just as, in a different way, nothing I could do will ever repay him for scaring me so much the first time I saw Night of the LIving Dead (1968)).

As being a good bookseller means knowing books you haven't read, there are quite a few of those I'd certainly think about adding. John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951) definitely belongs, but what about Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826)? I fear it may violate my gory/allegory rule. And do I really have to include Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), even though the lines I've read in praise-filled reviews have been so implausibly overwritten as to make me laugh? If I were really running a bookstore, I'd probably have to.

What about Adam Johnson's Parasites Like Us (2003)--anyone read it? Or two established classics, Nevil Shute's On the Beach and Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon (1959)? Do they hold up well enough to be worth including?

Are there any crucial books I've missed-- like a nice radium-bound edition of The Revelation of St. John the Divine? Any books I've mischaracterized? Imaginary tables are by their nature accommodating, so I'm happy to take suggestions.

Sometimes the cogs mesh, other times the gears just spin

Tonight I attended a talk on Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768). I left with my brain full of so many coincidences and confluences among things I've been reading and thinking about that I decided to map them out. I make no bold (or even timid) claims for the connections, which I openly admit are tenuous, but I think the web of them starts to give a sense of why I find constant pleasure--and a perpetual supply of new thoughts and ways of thinking--in a reading life.

Laurence Sterne had been on my mind since just after Christmas, when my friend gave me a DVD of A Cock and Bull Story, the 2005 movie of Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1759). The movie, which I heartily recommend, stays impressively true to the digressive, hilarious, muddled spirit of the book; the sheer fun of it had me thinking that maybe I should read the novel itself again this winter. So a few weeks ago, as Stacey and I leaned against a wall waiting to be admitted to a different lecture (on bird song), having Sterne on the brain no doubt helped me pick out the poster for tonight's lecture from the usually indistinct mess of fliers and announcements papering the hallway.

Between work and the lecture, read a bit of Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), for which Maggie and Christmas are also, in a sense, responsible. When Maggie was in town in December, she was reading Robinson Crusoe (1719), our discussion of which made me think I should try A Journal of the Plague Year. However, it's unlikely that I'd have gotten around to it by now except that for Christmas Stacey got me Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map (2006), a history of London's 1854 cholera epidemic, and my brother got me Max Brooks's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006). Clearly, if there was ever going to be a time to read A Journal of the Plague Year, it was now.

In the pages I read just before I left the bar feature Defoe's narrator, H. F., decides to flee London in the early days of the plague, only to discover that there are no horses available. Following that disappointment, he turns to bibliomancy to decide whether he will stay or set out on foot; he opens the Bible to Psalm 91, which exhorts him to

Say of the Lord, He is my refuge, and my foretress, my God, in him will I trust. Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler and from the noisome pestilence.

Thus reassured, H. F. decides to place his hopes (and his soul) in God's hands and stay in London.

Arriving at the talk, I learned that it was to focus largely on the role played in Sterne and subsequent sentimental literature (down to Frank Capra!) by the ideas of the vehicle and motion. It was fairly heady stuff, exploring the real and metaphorical roles of actual vehicles and motion, as well as more abstruse spiritual concepts of vehicles for the workings (and movement) of the soul, the emotions, and sentimental communication. But it did immediately call to mind H. F.'s worries about transportation and his entrusting his soul to God for delivery, if not physically out of London, then at least safely into the afterlife. The soldiers and zombies of World War Z came to mind, too: the soldiers, forced by society's collapse to eschew the vehicles they had come to depend on, are brought face-to-face with the zombies, the ultimate expression of Descartes's concept of a body without a soul They're empty vessels, still animate but to no good purpose--and with whom there is no communication. No matter how earnest and heartfelt an entreaty one makes, there is no hope that they will be moved.

Finally, a mention late in the talk of J. M. Coetzee's most recent novel brought me, in a sense, full circle, as Coetzee's 1988 novel, Foe, is a reworking of the Crusoe story. Though it's not nearly as good as Coetzee's best, if you're a Crusoe fan it's worth at least looking at; I had just today reminded myself to send Maggie a note asking if she knew about it.

So what does all of this mean? As I said at the top, almost certainly nothing of substance. But I know that it--and the talk itself--got the wheels of my brain spinning, and they're still going. And I know that if I were to ever imagine coming to believe in a soul, its vehicle-of communication, transit to immortality, whatever--would most certainly be some form of that whirring activity.