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?

Back into the desert

On Friday I wrote that perhaps only Charles Doughty’s loving, detailed, ornate descriptions of the desert could convince me, a lifelong Midwesterner, of its charms and enchantments. But moments after I posted that, I remembered that I’d recently encountered another writer who had done nearly so well at that task: Dorothy Dunnett.

In Scales of Gold (1991), the fourth book of her House of Niccolo series, Nicholas and his friend, Umar, a former slave who is Nicholas’s great friend and has been his host during a journey to Africa, head north through the desert from Timbuktu towards Arawan with a caravan of some two hundred and fifty camels and three hundred or so people. They set out:

There are few wells in the Sahara, and the journey between them depends on navigation as exact and as strict as that employed by a captain at sea, venturing out of sight of his port, and into waters unknown. In time of clear skies, the Sahara caravan makes its way as the birds do, and the captains: by the sun and the stars, and by whatever landmarks the sand may have left. But the winds blow, and dunes shift, and the marks left by one caravan are obliterated before the next comes. And so men will wander, and perish.

The guide Umar had chosen for Nicholas was a Mesufa Tuareg, and blind. For two days, walking or riding, he turned the white jelly of his sightless eyes to the light and the wind, and opened his palpitating black nostrils to the report of the dead, scentless sand which was neither scentless nor dead, but by some fineness of aroma proclaimed its composition and place. At each mile’s end, he filled his hands with the stuff, and, rubbing, passed it through his brown fingers. Then he smiled and said, “Arawan.”

“Umar,” Nicholas said, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Though Dunnett doesn’t underplay the risks that face the caravan--like any good adventure novelist, she takes full advantage of them--at the same time she portrays the quiet of the desert, with its cool nights and tapestry of stars, as a potential healing force, drawing Nicholas, for once, away from the constant plotting and battling that have engulfed his life:

To begin with, they spoke very little. With the rest, they walked through the first night and part of the day, halting rarely. Sleep was brief, and taken by day. During the worst of the heat, they lay with the camels under the white, shimmering sky, and ate, and rested. . . . On the long transit to Taghaza, walking under the Andalusian vaults of the stars, there was time to talk again now and then--and a need. The clarity of the desert demanded something as rare; demanded truth, vision, honesty of those who walked in it.

T. E. Lawrence, in his introduction to Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta, which I quoted from on Friday, makes much the same (admittedly essentialist) point:

The desert inhibits considered judgments; its bareness and openness make its habitants frank. Men in it speak out their minds suddenly and unreservedly. Words in the desert are clear-cut.

I know that in my heart I’ll always prefere the decadent ease of an early autumn day in the northern forests over that harshness, but don’t they make it sound at least a bit tempting?

Finally, since I’ve been wandering the desert the past couple of days, I figure I might as well link to the commonplace book–style piece I put together for the New York Moon a couple of years ago on the topic, in case you haven’t seen it. The Moon’s editors got some great illustrators for it, and the result, I think, is a lot of fun. Pour yourself a tall, refreshing glass of iced tea and enjoy!

And now let us praise Dorothy Dunnett. Again.

This weekend, as I made my joyful way through Scales of Gold (1991), the fourth volume of Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo series, I realized that I've now read more than 2,500 pages by Dunnett since I first picked her up in May. Even for someone who spends nearly every spare minute reading, that's a lot of pages by one author, and that realization made me think I should take another pass at explaining just what it is about her books that's captivated me so completely.

I wrote about her deft handling of intrigue a while back, and that's definitely what initially drew my interest. But what's kept me reading her, and what makes her stand out from other historical novelists I've read with less pleasure, is her ability to present the fruits of her copious research in such as way as to simply make them part of the story, and often of the mere backdrop of the story.

Her characters and settings are all obviously historical--early Renaissance, in the case of the House of Niccolo series, which follows a merchant adventurer from Bruges--but her presentation of that history is remarkable for its combination of confidence in her storytelling and in her readers. She is never guilty of over-explaining, whether it's a question of historical events or of terms that are sure to be unfamiliar to contemporary readers. Rather than break the flow of her narrative--and our belief in her setting--with explanations, she trusts that her reader will simply look up what they don't know. And it is in large part, I think, that refusal to pander, to contextualize and explain, that allows her to present her scenes, be they of everyday life or high adventure, commerce or warfare, with a confidence and clarity that belies our knowledge that she can't know firsthand of what she writes.

So, for example, her depiction in Niccolo Rising of the celebrated arrival in Bruges of the year's trading ships from Venice is vivid and fascinating; her sixty-page telling in King Hereafter of a day-long battle in eleventh-century Scotland is as clear, harrowing, wearing, and believable as any historical account of the last century's wars; and her incidental descriptions of the operations of fifteenth-century dyeworks and sugar mills give a strong sense of the ins-and-outs of running such businesses.

Along the way, she offers many beautifully detailed descriptions of unimportant moments, scenes that, in the hands of an author more focused on making a point, or drawing parallels to our own time, or simply less confident in the attention span of her audience, would have been passed over briefly. And that is where I want to turn in this post. I'm quoting the scene below at far greater length than I usually would, but I think it's worth it to give a full sense of the powers Dunnett brings to her writing, the way she tells history without ever seeming like she's telling history.

The scene comes early in Scales of Gold, and it tells of the launching of a newly commissioned ship, with which Niccolo, the Bruges merchant, plans to sail on a trading mission to Africa:

The ship rode in deep water, her masts rocking, her passengers out of the way as she made ready to sail. They had practised this, the formal routine of departure, and Nicholas knew it by heart. He took his place on the high vestibule of the poop, watching without seeming to watch as the orders passed from captain to mate, and from mate to the helm and the mariners. The bare feet thudded on deck: stowing the companionway; hooking the tackle and hoisting the ship's boats inboard.

A whistle blew and was followed by jerks of racketing noise: the anchor-chain coming in, bringing the new, two-hundred-pound anchor strewn with weed and sand that would be unlike the weed and sand of its next bedding. Then a rush and a chanting of voices and the ship trembled as the triangular foresail rose and broke out, followed by the great racking heave as the mainsail began to ride up.

The helm stirred. The caravel moved, the sea bathing her flank. The smell of paint struck Nicholas for the last time, and the odours of sawn wood and resin and pristine white hemp, and the great flaxen draught of new canvas as the mainsail shook out its folds and was pulled in and bellied, and the mizzen sail followed.

Then the wind found her and nudged, and for the first time the San Niccolo heeled, dipping her gleaming black flank in the sea, and all the limp smells of earth were blown through her and vanished. The second mate, gripping a trumpet, came up the ladder and stood, his gaze switching from the captain to the six handgunners dodging across to the rail, match in hand. Nicholas turned his eyes to the shore, slowly receding.

The wharf was crowded, and the rough beach, and the path along the edge of the estuary. Not only the King's representatives but the whole of Lagos had come to watch the San Niccolo leave; for those who had not built her had equipped and provisioned her, and those who had done none of these had stood on the shore waving off other ships bound for Bilad Ghana, the Country of Wealth, and had seen them return as, God willing, this pretty caravel would, laden with parrots and feathers and ostrich eggs, and Negroes, and gold.

On board, the trumpeter's fanfare rang out: a strong one, for he had good lungs, and he did it for pleasure. Then, gay as fireworks, there came a crackle of fire from the red-capped schioppettieri on deck, hazed in smoke and coughing and panting from their stint in the yards. Behind them, stamping into rough line, stood those seamen who could be spared.

On shore, the Governor lifted his hand. A grey posy of smoke showed itself on the wall of the fort, heralding the thunder of its number one culverin, followed by the second and third, up to six. The noise knocked from end to end of the bay, sending up screaming birds and punctuating the roar from hundreds of throats as, bonnets in hand, the town of Lagos bade them Godspeed.

Can't you see it? It's the certainty that strikes me most strongly: this is the way it was, she is saying. The smells, the sounds, the incidental sights--the "grey posy of smoke," the second mate's "gaze switching from the captain to the six handgunners," the seamen "who could be spared," "stumping into rough line."

If this doesn't convince you to give Dunnett a try, I don't know what will. But if it does, be warned: if you're like me, you'll start fretting about running out before you're even a third of the way through her oeuvre.