Ah, beautiful is decay!Or, as Timothy Hallinan in his crime novel Crashed put it,
Hope, the slut, always springs eternal.Happy New Year, folks--and the gods bless Damion Searls for bringing us the NYRB Classics edition of Thoreau's journals, which are guaranteed to while away many a future day.
[A] tall, spindly huntsman, dressed in green from top to toe. Upon his jaunty cap swayed a red feather, a little red beard blazed in his swarthy face, and, nearly concealed between curving nose and pointy chin, like a cave under an overhang, a mouth opened and asked, "What is the matter, good people, that you sit here wailing so piteously as to drive the very stones from the earth and the branches from the trees?"The devil, I think, should be jaunty. And, as he does later in The Black Spider, he should show pity: he sees your plight, and he wants above all else to help you!
Then the green man's face grew even blacker, the red beard so red it seemed to crackle and spark like fir twigs on the fire, the mouth contracted to an arrow-like point.
In the late summer, the fields and marshes along Riverview Road are dense green jungles dotted with the gaudy magenta of purple loosestrife. The road follows the southernmost edge of Saratoga County, N.Y., paralleling the Mohawk River and stretches of the old Barge Canal.The rest of the story lives up to its opening, bringing together youth and age, wisdom and inexperience, and uniting them through simple care for an animal that most likely is incapable of understanding it.
In 1997, in Athens Greece, a cousin of mine had an extended house-sitting arrangement with an elderly woman who had gone to London for some kind of therapy. It was a one-floor house in Kypseli, an area of Athens that had once been both a popular middle-class neighbourhood as well as home to all kinds of writers, musicians and arts, but had now become overpopulated, even slummy in parts. The living room had French windows that opened to a shabby, dusty garden surrounded on all sides by apartment buildings. The old woman had rescued two turtles in the early 1980s and given them a home in this garden. They were still alive when my cousin was staying there and one of her duties was to make sure they had food and water.I'm a sucker for a good Lassie story, especially when the Lassie character wears a shell. Thomas, if you'll drop me an e-mail with your address, I'll get the book out to you.
One day she was sitting in the living room when she heard a thudding noise on the French windows. She tried to ignore it, but it kept occurring. Finally she got up. Through the window she saw one of the turtles knocking at the base of the door with its head. When she opened, it turned around and started walking away. After a few steps, it stopped and looked back at her. It took a few more steps and again looked back. To my cousin's amazement, the turtle was trying to lead her to the end of the garden.
She followed it to where some empty ceramic pots were kept, and among them she found the other turtle, which had somehow managed to fall over and was stuck on its back. She turned it over again, and the two turtles went off to another corner of the garden together.
The Jazz Novel, especially as produced by white writers, was not simply a novel set in the jazz world. It became associated with a rote cycle of banalities centered on a doomed, misunderstood genius, white or black; a wise black mentor or worshipful white acolyte; competing women (nice and marriageable versus evil and sexy); and friends who try in vain to impede his tragic demise. The hero is usually fixated on hitting a fatal high note, consumes alcohol or drugs, and is given to shuffling alone in the rain.That's from Giddens's afterword, and it pretty much nails it. Nails, that is, what ails your typical jazz novel--none of which is a problem in Young Man with a Horn. Some of the elements are there: a drink-sodden hero, well-meaning friends, a high note. But none of them feels wrong, none feels unearned or overly demonstrative. Instead, what Baker gives us is a story of obsession that we can believe in, a man who only really comes alive when playing music and is essentially unfitted for the world in every other regard. As Baker offers brief, disconnected scenes from her trumpet player's life, some important, some not, she weaves what Giddens describes as a "sustained elegy," making us mourn his clearly inevitable demise because she makes us believe in his genius--and, more important his, bone-deep love of the music.
Settled in for the afternoon, surrounded by adoring ladies, the recluse of Rye sat complacent, holding my last new Persian kitten between his open palms, talking animatedly to the Beauty [Hunt's niece], who could not talk but looked. He quite forgot the poor beast, which was too polite and too squeezed between the upper and the nether millstone of the great man's hands to remind him of its existence, and I dared not rescue it until the sentence on which Mr. James was engaged was brought to a close--inside of half an hour.Another book that Gorra's study of Portrait led me to pluck from my shelves is the NYRB Classics edition of the journals of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. I was surprised to find that no mention of James had made its way into the NYRB's selection; James didn't spend that much time in their circle, but I assumed he would pop up somewhere in their journals nonetheless, and, if so, that editor and translator Robert Baldick would have included it in his selection.
After dinner we talked about love and the strange tastes women have in love. Turgenev told us that in Russia there was a charming woman, a woman with curly hair of the palest blond imaginable and a slightly cafe-au-lait complexion in which the undissolved coffee grains formed a crowd of little beauty spots. This woman had been courted by the most intelligent and most famous of men. One day Turgenev asked her why, out of all her suitors, she had made a perfectly inexplicable choice, and the woman replied: "Perhaps you are right, but then you have never heard the way he says: 'Really? You don't say!'"I hope Anthony Powell came across that entry at some point; I expect he would have been delighted by it.
Maqroll doesn't so much have adventures and love affairs as that they have him; the reverse would require a bit too much active desire, too much engagement with this decrepit dinosaur of a world.As with many a hero, one of Maqroll's strengths is simple knowledge: he's been everywhere, met everyone, has a memory or story for every occasion. But where James Bond, for example, takes the world as known and thus his, Maqroll takes the world as known and thus no one's, with nothing to offer but memories of what's been lost and anticipations of the losses to come. He's much more Marlow than Indiana Jones, more fatalist than flaneur:
For Maqroll, life has long ceased to have a meaning beyond one's connections to friends and lovers--who, in the face of his best efforts to keep them close, are perpetually being lost to such rivals as distance and death. Yet he continues to plod on nonetheless, driven by inertia and a curiosity, barely acknowledged as such, that continues to seek new experiences and new answers, despite knowing that every time, they will be revealed to be the same as the last, simultaneously dangerous and disappointing.I've been slowly reading my way through the 700 pages of Maqroll stories and novels that NYRB Classics collected in The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, and this time out, I read Abdul Bashur, Dreamer of Ships, a section that's primarily focused on Bashur, the Gaviero's oldest and closest friend. In a passage early in the volume that Mutis clearly had fun writing, he sets out the differences between the two, and in the process reveals both in loving detail:
I had already heard a good deal about his friendship with Maqroll; when I met Bashur, it was easy enough to understand. It was rooted in an interplay of their ways of behaving, some contrary, others complementary or consonant, but in their totality creating an unbreakable harmony between the two men. Maqroll acted on the conviction that everything was already hopelessly lost. We are born, he would say, with a vocation for defeat. Bashur believed that everything was waiting to be done and that those who lost were the others, the irredeemable fools who undermine the world with sophistry and camouflaged ancestral weakness. From women Maqroll expected friendship without commitment or any trade in guilt, and in the end he always left them. With infallible regularity Bashur fell in love as if for the first time; he accepted, without analysis or judgment and as though it were an inestimable gift of heaven, everything that came from women. Maqroll only rarely confronted his adversaries; he preferred to leave punishment and reprisals to life and its changing fortunes. Abdul reacted immediately and brutally, not calculating the risk. Maqroll forgot offenses and therefore never thought of revenge, but Bashur cultivated vengeance as long as necessary and took it without mercy, as if the offense had just occurred. Maqroll had absolutely no money sense. Abdul was immeasurably generous, but at bottom he kept a running balance of profits and losses. Maqroll called no place on earth home. Abdul, a distant descendant of Bedouins, always yearned for the nomadic encampment where he would be welcomed with familial warmth. Maqroll was a voracious reader, especially of history and the memoirs of illustrious men, liking in this way to confirm his hopeless pessimism regarding the much vaunted human condition, concerning which he held a rather disillusioned and melancholy opinion. Abdul not only never opened a book but did not understand what possible use such a thing could have in his life. He had no faith in humans as a species but always gave each person the opportunity to prove to him that he was wrong.If that doesn't make you want to read these books, then they're definitely not for you.
That is how the two friends traveled the world together, engaging in the most outlandish enterprises, sowing both intimate and legendary memories in their wake.
This is June, the month of grass and leaves. The deciduous trees are investing the evergreens and revealing how dark they are. Already the aspens are trembling again, and a new summer is offered me. I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late. Each season is but an infinitesimal point. It no sooner comes than it is gone. It has no duration. It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought. Each annual phenomenon is a reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolutions of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other. We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact. A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature.And with that, back to books and birds. Enjoy the weekend, folks.
That “sir” was curious and comforting. In spite of my shabby foreign clothing and filthy shoes, the cook had placed me at a glance in Class X He would undoubtedly describe me as a gent, and Mr Vaner would feel he ought to see me.There seems to be a bit of protesting too much in this account, and I wonder how the narrator’s (and presumably Household’s) notion of England as not particularly class-conscious might have been altered by the great postwar attempts at redistribution and class leveling. But at the same time, much of what he says rings true, and reminds me of something Paul Fussell wrote in his book on the subject, Class: A Guide through the American Status System (1992):
I say Class X because there is no definition of it. To talk of an upper or ruling class is nonsense. The upper class, if the term has any meaning at all, means landed gentry who probably do belong to Class X but form only a small proportion of it. The ruling class are, I presume, politicians and servants of the State--terms which are self-contradictory.
I wish there were some explanation of Class X. We are politically a democracy--or should I say that we are an oligarchy with its ranks ever open to talent?--and the least class-conscious of nations in a Marxian sense. The only class-conscious people are those who would like to belong to Class X and don’t: the suburban old-school-tie brigade and their wives, especially their wives. Yet we have a profound division of classes which defies analysis since it is in a continual state of flux.
Who belongs to Class X? I don’t know till I talk to him and then I know at once. It is not, I think, a question of accent, but rather of the gentle voice. It is certainly not a question of clothes. It may be a question of bearing. I am not talking, of course, of provincial society in which the division between gentry and non-gentry is purely and simply a question of education.
I should like some socialist pundit to explain to me why it is that in England a man can be a member of the proletariat by every definition of the proletariat (that is, by the nature of his employment and his poverty) and yet obviously belong to Class X, and why another can be a bulging capitalist or cabinet minister or both and never get nearer to Class X than being directed to the Saloon Bar if he enters the Public.
I worry with this analysis in the hope of hitting on some new method of effacing my identity. When I speak a foreign language I can disguise my class, background, and nationality without effort, but when I speak English to an Englishman I am at once spotted as a member of X. I want to avoid that, and if the class could be defined I might know how.
Actually, you reveal a great deal about your social class by the amount of annoyance or fury you feel when the subject is brought up. A tendency to get very anxious suggests that you are middle-class and nervous about slipping down a run or two. On the other hand, upper-class people love the topic to come up: the more attention paid to the matter the better off they seem to be. Proletarians generally don’t mind discussion of the subject because they know they can do little to alter their class identity. Thus the whole class matter is likely to seem like a joke to them--the upper classes fatuous in their empty aristocratic pretentiousness, the middles loathsome in their anxious gentility.I, on the other hand, prefer whenever possible--when not, for example, discussing political or socioeconomic policies or dissecting the subtle shades of privilege found in A Dance to the Music of Time--to reduce class to a simple test, found in Bernard DeVoto's lovely little book The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto (1951). DeVoto writes:
There are only two cocktails. The bar manuals and the women's pages of the daily press, I know, print scores of messes to which they give that honorable and glorious name. They are not cocktails, they are slops. They are fit to be drunk only in the barbarian marches and mostly are drunk there, by the barbarians.Whiskey and martinis, in other words, mark us as belonging; all other drinks and drinkers are beyond the pale. It is a hard rule, worthy of the Old Testament God at his most pestilential and least forgiving, but that is how one holds the line under withering fire; that is how one beats back the forces that attempt to undermine civilization's gains. Had the Romans but known of gin and vermouth, Rome's glory might still stand today.
So when I realized that I had, this to me exciting discovery, I thought, you know, I've got, I've got a novel here, and I rubbed my hands together and then, and I wrote lots of notes, and I didn't have a novel, I had, I had a theory. But it was an extreme enough theory that it seemed to me the right thing for a fictional character to have. This guy has strong opinions, and the great liberating thing about writing it as a novel is that you can just follow out those, those, strong opinions--you can just lay it out, and realize you're being inconsistent with yourself, but you're, you're, you're telling it as truthfully as, as you know how to tell it, that afternoon, out in the side yard. You're doing your best--that's what a novel allows you to do, is do your best at that moment and not worry about the fact that you're not coming up with a codified, perfectly consistent body of theory that you can publish as a, as a new doctrine of rhyme."You're doing your best--that's what a novel allows you to do." The task of defining the novel is impossible, every definition doomed by exceptions, but I'm tempted to adopt Baker's: it's an attempt, the best attempt one can make, to get down what it was like at that moment. Which, unexpectedly, aligns me to some extent with Shields, who loves the idea of the essay as the verb form of the word, a test or attempt, and who lists Baker as one of the hybrid writers he admires--though if one accepts that the novel (and, let us be broad, fiction in general) is fundamentally a hybrid genre, capable of assimilating nearly everything, then the need for a manifesto damning its sins rapidly fades away.
I thought what an amazing thing that Mr. Updike has been writing all the years that I have been growing up, and how I have come to depend on the idea that he is writing away as a soothing idea, and then I was reminded of Trollope, and how nice it must have been for writers back then to go about their lives knowing that Mr. Trollope was going to have a new book coming out soon, that it would be good; and they might not read all of the things he wrote, but they would read some, and they would know that what they didn’t read they were missing, but were comforted also that they knew what kind of man he was because they had already read a lot of what he wrote; and the idea they had of the man who gradually had written all these books was a powerful, happy thing in their lives.All too often, we aim for detachment, rational assessment of artworks; once in a while, it's okay to make a space for unabashed love, and the gratitude that should follow.
Now, as you settle into your third hour of shoveling, you can console yourself with the fact that you're just taking your place in a long American tradition of snow appreciation!December 24, 1856More snow in the night and to-day. making nine or ten inches.
P.M.--To Walden and Baker Farm with Ricketson, it still snowing a little.
It was very pleasant walking thus before the the storm was over, in the soft, subdued light.December 25, 1856
Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.
Ahem.Dec. 10, 1853Another still more glorious day, if possible; Indian-summery even. These are among the finest days in the year, on account of the wholesome bracing coolness and clearness.
Paddled Cheney's boat up Assabet.Lest you become too jealous of Thoreau's lovely day--or too troubled by your own blustery, frigid one--you should know that a mere two weeks earlier he had been convinced that winter's grip was as solid as it gets:
Passed in some places between shooting ice-crystals, extending from both sides of the stream. Upon the thinnest black ice-crystals, just cemented, was the appearance of broad fern leaves, or ostrich-plumes, or flat fir trees with branches bent down. The surface was far from even, rather in sharp-edged plaits or folds. The form of the crystals was oftenest that of low, flattish, three-sided pyramids; when the base was very broad the apex was imperfect, with many irregular rosettes of small and perfect pyramids, the largest with bases equal to two or three inches. All this appeared to advantage only while the ice (one twelfth of an inch thick, perhaps) rested on the black water.
What I write about at home I understand so well, comparatively! and I write with such repose and freedom from exaggeration!
Before I turn to my fireplace and mulled wine, I'll give you an entry for tomorrow, too, because I can't resist the way this entry combines wildly disparate modes of thought:Nov. 27Now a man will eat his heart, if ever, now while the earth is bare, barren and cheerless, and we have the coldness of winter without the variety of ice and snow; but methinks the variety and compensation are in the stars now. How bright they are now by contrast with the dark earth! The days are short enough now. The sun is already setting before I have reached the ordinary limit of my walk, but the 21st of next month the day will be shorter still by about twenty-five minutes.
It is too cold to-day to use a paddle; the water freezes on the hand and numbs my fingers.
That closing meditation makes me wonder what sort of arguments Thoreau had been getting himself into that day!Dec. 11, 1858To Walden. An overcast afternoon and rather warm. The snow on the ground in pastures brings out the warm red in leafy oak woodlands by contrast. These are what Thomson calls "the tawny copse." So that they suggest both shelter and warmth. All browns, indeed, are warmer now than a week ago. How much warmer our woodlands look and are for these withered leaves that still hang on! Without them the woods would be dreary, bleak, and wintry indeed!
A "swirl" applied to leaves suddenly caught up by a sort of whirlwind, is a good word enough, methinks.
Some, being offended, think sharp and satirical things, which yet they are not prepared consciously to utter. But in some unguarded moment these things escape from them, when they are as it were unconscious. They betray their thoughts, as it were by talking in their sleep, for the truth will out, under whatever veil of civility.
The choice of of Cyril Connolly for your quotes was intentional, right? If not, then you've just blown my mind!Cryptic, no? And these days, what do we do when faced with something cryptic? We hie ourselves to the Google! . . . Where I learned, from the Guardian's 2008 obituary for Elaine Dundy, that The Old Man and Me was
derived from attentions paid to her by the critic Cyril Connolly.Now, even after acknowledging that Connolly did more than his share of sleeping around and that I tend to fall back on Connolly regularly, in connection with all manner of other writers, I remain pleasantly surprised by the coincidence. And if I'm willing to imagine that the overweight, unhealthy, dissipated middle-aged literary critic C. D. McKee of Dundy's novel was such a faithful portrait of Connolly that it subconsciously brought him to mind, it does make me wonder just how obvious the portrayal must have been at the time. Imagine if she'd given McKee a lemur or two!
Her first novel, The Dud Avocado, was a best-seller (Connolly unkindly suggested that it should have been called The Dud Dundy, by Elaine Avocado). A few year later, Dundy published The Old Man and Me, the heroine of which is a young American adrift in literary London. She falls in love with a stout, blue-eyed writer in his late fifties, beside whom all the young men in her life seem dull dogs indeed. He pores over menus in restaurants, has a passion for collecting antiques, and casts "dazzling and worshipful glances" in her direction.I think I detect the fell hand of England's stringent libel law there, Lewis's circumspection surely prompted by fears that Dundy, still alive when the biography was published in 1997, might sue him.
"Make up your mind, you can either be a monster or a doormat." I opted for the former.Advice that perhaps Connolly found occasion to regret?
From today's prospect, I was able to cancel a word or half a line throughout, understanding what I didn't then: that in this novel, speech read is preferable to speech spoken. The latter is full of "um," "oh" and "ah"--dead foliage that smothers the text. I eliminated most but not all of them. Some were too stubbornly embedded in the text. Words such as the all-purpose "just" that runs around this book as in "you just want to, "just a moment," "just in time," just the wrong way." I cut some of the beginnings of sentences that use such weakening qualifications as "well" and "I'm afraid" followed by I, you, he, she, it. I cut "perfectly" and "definitely." These, being eliminated, I felt released the core of the text to glow. I wanted the two protagonists to express themselves through exchanges that are brisk, crisp, direct and unadorned, sometimes to the point, often around it, even at times, soul to soul.To think she was making all those painstaking revisions to a book of which the Master himself, P. G. Wodehouse, wrote, "There isn't a dull line in it"!
Father Fabre, coming from the bathroom, stopped and knocked at the pastor’s door—something about the door had said, Why not? No sound came from the room, but the pastor had a ghostly step and there he was, opening the door an inch, giving his new curate a glimpse of the green eyeshade he wore and of the chaos in which he dwelt. Father Fabre saw the radio in the unmade bed, the correspondence, the pamphlets, the folding money, and all the rest of it—what the bishop, on an official visitation, barging into the room and then hurriedly backing out, had passed off to the attending clergy as “a little unfinished business.”Thus begins my favorite of J. F. Powers's stories, an opening that makes me laugh every time. Father Fabre, we know almost instantly, is up against a force stronger than he is: his pastor is a master of obstruction and obfuscation, instintively throwing up impenetrable roadblocks to any request while ever maintaining what in a more openly political context would be called plausible deniability.
“Yes? Yes?”
“How about that table you promised me?”
The pastor just looked at him.
“The one for my room, remember? Something to put my typewriter on.”
“See what I can do.”
The pastor had said that before. Father Fabre said, “I’m using the radiator now.”
The pastor nodded, apparently granting him permission to continue using it.
[Graham] Greene is enjoyed by Catholics in part, one suspects, because his pessimism is not threatening. He tells us, in effect, that the religious life is more complicated than we imagined, which ultimately consoles us. But Powers is very threatening, and ought not to be easily enjoyed by Catholics, because the cumulative suggestion of his work is that the religious life, at least for priests, has become practically unattainable. Hardly ever, in over a thousand pages of fiction, do we see one of Powers's priests reflect spiritually on a spiritual matter. . . . [T]hey are slaves to what Kierkegaard attacked as "Christendom"--the business of priestly activity rather than the practice of Christian witness, love of the world rather than imitation of Christ.Wood is right that Powers's stories are more about work than about faith, but at the same time I think he is a bit too quick to see despair of religion in them. Yes, Powers's priests spend their days worried more about their building funds than their parishioners' souls, about their frustrations with the housekeeper than the difficulties of faith, but his refusal to portray these men as anything but workers with a job to do affords their rare moments of actual testing--of principle, if not necessarily of faith, in action--all the more powerful. After a lifetime of mostly thoughtless self-indulgence, Father Urban achieves a certain grace when unexpectedly forced to make an ethical choice; similarly, in the moving (yet still hilarious) sequel to "A Losing Game," "The Presence of Grace," Father Fabre's pastor reveals that the very weapon of rebarbative inarticulacy that he uses out of habit against his curate can also be deployed in support of human love and kindness (of which he may know more, it turns out, than the inexperienced Father Fabre.)
It was impossible to decide what it all meant. In the clothes tree alone, Father Fabre noticed a cartridge belt, a canteen stenciled with the letters U.S., a pair of snowshoes, an old bicycle tire of wrinkled red rubber, a beekeeper's veil. One of Father Fabre's first services to the pastor had been to help John carry two workbenches into the basement. At that time he had thought the pastor must have plans for a school in which manual training would be taught. Now he felt that the pastor had no plans at all for any of the furniture and junk. A few of the unemployed statues when seen at a distance, those with their arms extended, appeared to be trying to get the place straightened up, carrying things, but on closer examination they, too, proved to be preoccupied with a higher kind of order, and carrying crosiers.The last few lines, with their half-serious, wholly futile attempt to discern meaning amid chaos, remind me of no one so much as Anthony Powell, while the sheer exhaustion of Father Fabre's survey calls to mind poor Bartleby. Fans of any of the writers I've named could do far worse than picking up the three Powers volumes published by the New York Review of Books: the volume of stories and the novels Morte D'Urban and Wheat That Springeth Green.
Paul said that Hannah, after breaking up with Vale, the cameraman, resumed an old affair with a policeman, who apparently brutalzed her, beat her up all the time, the details were unclear. At any rate, out the window she went.Meanwhile, Feneon himself--having last year been rescued from the obscurity of the pre-war French newspaper Le Matin via a Luc Sante translation of his acrid little mouthfuls published by the New York Review of Books--has this week stepped fully into our post-millennial world: he's Twittering from beyond the grave. Which seems perfect.
Eccentric Behaviour and Noble MannersThey're from Born Under Saturn (1963), an anecdote-laden study of the relationship of art and madness by Margot and Rudolf Wittkower. Just republished by those strenuous supporters of melancholy, the New York Review of Books, I can tell after mere minutes that it's going to offer many a great line to share. Like this, from the section in "Genius, Madness, and Melancholy" called, "Was Franz Xaver Messerschmidt Insane?":
Genius Madness, and Melancholy
Suicides of Artists
Celibacy, Love, and Licentiousness
Misers and Wastrels
Even the most extravagant beliefs can hardle be quoted as proof of an individual's insanity, if they are shared by many thousands for hundreds of years.Or this, from "Artists and the Law":
It must be recalled that lawbreakers infested every country and every class of society. Unrestrained passions, violence and felonies of all kinds were not confined to a "criminal class." Kings and popes, members of the aristocracy and clergy burghers, craftsmen and peasants were all capable of crimes which now, as a rule, are the reserve of specialized professionals or maniacs.Elsewhere, they relate the story of an artist who slashes the face of a rival, but, through the peculiar justice of the early Renaissance,
at the last moment the penalty was commuted to service on one of the papal galleys, "in consideration of his being innocent of most of the accusations except the sin of face-slashing--if sin it is."No question that you'll be hearing more from this one in the coming months.
I have been having a terrible time with After the Ball, mainly on account of Mary Ellis's singing voice which, to coin a phrase, sounds like someone fucking the cat.If I may be forgiven the pun, that's some first-rate cattiness. With deceptive ease, Coward sets his slagging apart from common lot by the simple replacement of "cats fucking," which we've all heard, with "someone" actively fucking the cat, which, thank god, we've not.
To smoke in front of the mirror, as everyone knows, is an intelligent exercise. It is also to know how to confront our most ordinary, considered face.It's hard for me to imagine Coward--one of the great smokers of the twentieth century, at least to the extent that photographs don't lie--not regularly taking pleasure from smoking in front of the mirror. I'm even willing to believe that he would have agreed with Vila-Matas's sentiments, however tongue-in-cheek, for you never get the sense that Coward is anything less than fully aware of the cigarette and its position in the overall composition of Coward-ness (or is it Coward-ice?). Try to picture him puffing away distractedly like your common mid-century American smoker, who, Luc Sante explains, "often smoked without being aware we were smoking"--you can't, can you?
My philosophy is as simple as ever. I love smoking, drinking, moderate sexual intercourse on a diminishing scale, reading and writing (not arithmetic). I have a selfless absorption in the well-being and achievements of Noel Coward.Since I don't smoke, I think I'll have to do the next-best thing and buy Coward's letters. After all, as a society we've more or less agreed that reflected glory is almost the same as real glory, right?
"Six cutlets would have been enough," said Horace. "They know we do not eat seven. One cold cutlet does not serve any purpose. It means that one of the servants will eat it for supper."
"And is that quite a useless end for it?" said Mortimer.
"Of course it is, when other things are provided. It will be eaten as an extra, and that is pure waste."
"Not quite pure, is it?" said Emilia, smiling.
"I suppose Cook thought Emilia or I might take a second cutlet," said Charlotte. "It was not such an unnatural line of thought."
"I wish they would not think," said Horace, who tended to take both this view and the opposite. "Their thinking can be done for them."
"And other things cannot," said Emilia. "That is the strength of their position."
"I will have the cutlet," said Charlotte, "and prevent the end that is feared for it."
"But it will establish the custom of having one too many," said Horace.
"It is not so easy to mold the future. One cutlet will hardly do so much. They will only think we don't usually have quite enough to eat, and I daresay they already think that."
"They cannot," said Horace, sharply. "We are not large eaters, and why should we supply the table simply for show?"
George entered to remove the plates, and cast his eyes over the empty dish.
"George had counted on that cutlet," said Horace, with grim comprehension.
"Do not expose the tragedies underlying daily life," said Charlotte. "We do not want George to come back and find me in tears. Though of course he would not know I was weeping for him."
"You are childish at times, Charlotte. You know that George is well fed."
"I know nothing about it. I somehow feel he is not. I can not ask him if he has the same feeling."
"The housekeeping is not your province."
"No, it is a dark undercurrent that I do not dare to sound. That may be why I like to refer to it. Speaking of things robs them of half their terrors."
[The price] may not have seemed to expensive to the princes, for it was not they who paid the price. Famine in Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel caused the Duke to notice that his table was less plentifully supplied than usual, and three bad wine harvests on the Lower Danube once prevented Ferdinand from sending his annual gift of tokay to John George of Saxony--such minute draughts blew in through palace windows from the hurricane without. Mortgaged lands, empty exchequers, noisy creditors, the discomforts of wounds and imprisonment, the loss of children in battle, these are all griefs which man can bear with comparative equanimity. The bitter mental sufferings which followed from mistaken policies, loss of prestige, the stings of conscience, and the blame of public opinion gave the German rulers cause to regret the war but seldom acted as an incentive to peace. No German ruler perished homeless in the winter's cold, nor was found dead with grass in his mouth, nor saw his wife and daughters ravished; few, significantly few, caught the pest. Secure in the formalities of their lives, in the food and drink at their table, they could afford to think in terms of politics and not of human sufferings.That relative immunity to consequence, Wedgwood argues, was one of the primary reasons the war lasted as long as it did, but another, just as important, were the particular strengths and weaknesses of the leading players. Time and again, she asserts convincingly that, had the Emperor Ferdinand, or naive Prince Frederick, or General Wallenstein been just slightly different people, decades of suffering might have been averted. For example, of John George, the dithering, uncertain Elector of Saxony, she says, "he was one of those who, seeing both sides to every question, have not the courage to choose. When he did act his motives were wise, honest, and constructive, but he always acted too late."
In spite of [his] claims to culture, John George had preserved the good old German custom of carousing in a manner that shocked men under French or Spanish influence, Frederick of the Palatinate and Ferdinand of Styria. John George, who scorned foreign delicacies, had been known to sit at table gorging homely foods and swilling native beer for seven hours on end, his sole approach at conversation to box his dwarf's ears, or pour the dregs of a tankard over a servant's head as a signal for more. He was not a confirmed drunkard; his brain when he was sober was perfectly clear, and he drank through habit and good fellowship rather than weakness. But he drank too much and too often. Later on it became the fashion to say whenever he made an inept political decision that he had been far gone at the time, and the dispatches of one ambassador at least are punctuated with such remarks as, "He began to be somewhat heated with wine," and "He seemed to me to be very drunk." It made diplomacy difficult.But that's not the worst the Germans come in for from Wedgwood, who, however objective her intentions, was writing as the Nazis were sweeping across Europe:
Germany was in fact celebrated throughout Europe at this period for nothing so much as eating and d rinking. "Oxen," said the French, "stop drinking when they are no longer thirsty. Germans only begin then." Travellers from Spain and Italy were alike amazed at the immense appetites and lack of conversational talent in a country where the rich of all classes sat eating and drinking for hours to the deafening accompaniment of a brass band. The Germans did not deny the accusation. "We Germans," ran a national proverb, "pour money away through our stomachs." "Valete et inebriamini" a jovial prince was in the habit of closing his letter s to his friends. The Landgrave of Hesse founded a Temperance society but its first president died of drink; Lewis of Wurttember, surnamed the Pious, drank two challengers into stupor, and being himself still sober enough to give orders, had them sent home in a cart in company with a pig. The vice ran through all classes of society; young gentlemen in Berlin, reeling home in their cups, would break into the houses of peaceful burghers and hunt them into the street. At the weddings of peasants in Hesse more would be spent on food and drink than could be saved in a year, and the bridal party arrived at the Church more often drunk than sober. . . . This was not a reputation of which the intelligent German could be proud, yet there was a tendency among the simpler sort of patriots to glorify the national enjoyment of meat and wine. They had the authority of Tacitus that their ancestors had behaved in much the same way.In fact, it's reasonable to say that the shadow of Nazi Germany hangs over much of the book; some scholars trace vicious strains of German nationalism to the decentralized German state left by the eventual peace, and while Wedgwood doesn't go quite that far, it's hard not to feel the presence of the Nazis throughout, even indirectly in statements such as this one:
Few men are so disinterested as to prefer to live in discomfort under a government which they hold to be right rather than in comfort under one which they hold to be wrong.
