A brief descent into scatology

I am not, in general, a fan of body humor. That's not to say I don't appreciate vulgarity: friends will gladly attest that, given the right situation or set-up line, I can be as vulgar as any fifteen-year-old boy who's just learned that the gerund form of a certain words can serve as a forceful adjective.

For the most part, however, I line up with Nina Stibbe--or, at least, the twenty-year-old Nina Stibbe who wrote the letters collected in the wonderfully funny Love, Nina. After complaining that A Winter's Tale "doesn't even seem like a comedy" because "the poor little son dies of a broken heart and the baby daughter is left in the woods to die and the wife spends sixteen years as a statue," she moves on to another of the authors on her A-Level syllabus:

It's like Chaucer. People always going on about how rude and funny it is because someone farts.

That said . . . two bits of low body humor made me laugh this week. The first came in Leo Damrosch's excellent new biography of Jonathan Swift--which is appropriate because Swift was as attuned to bodily effluents as any writer, and he's one of the few whose ventures into scatology can make me laugh. There's the sheer horror of the exclamation "Celia shits!" (on which Patrick Kurp can offer a refresher, should one be needed) and also Gulliver's multi-sized problems with waste: his unappreciated firefighting by micturation in Liliput and his spectacular failure to jump a giant cowpat in Brobdingnag.

What made me laugh in Damrosch's book, however, came not from Swift's own work, but instead when Damrosch needed to help the reader understand how poorly sewage was handled in the period. To whom did he turn? Another writer who was never afraid to note what goes into and comes out of the body: Samuel Pepys. In his diary entry for October 20, 1660, Pepys wrote,

This morning one came to me to advise with me where to make me a window into my cellar in lieu of one that Sir W Batten had stopped up; and going down into my cellar to look, I put my foot into a great heap of turds, by which I find that Mr Turner's house of office is full and comes into my cellar, which doth trouble me.

It's the easily (and horribly) visualized "great heap" combined with the now archaic, even prissy-sounding "house of office" and "doth trouble me" that makes me smile: this feels like a misfortune that could only occur to Pepys.

With Swift and Pepys on my mind, I was primed to appreciate a passage from Gwen Raverat's memoir Period Piece (1952) I came across this afternoon, in which she writes about the sewage-laden Cam River late in the nineteenth century:

There is a tale of Queen Victoria being shown over Trinity by the Master, Dr Whewell, and saying, as she looked down over the bridge, "What are all those pieces of paper floating down the river?" To which, with great presence of mind, he replied, "Those, ma'am, are notices that bathing is forbidden."

Which can only be topped by the genius of Bill Watterson:

 

And with that, we flush the scat humor. By Friday, it will all be clean as ever around here, folks. Promise.

Haunting monks and Pepys

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Earlier this month, I drew on the tales of the unnamed monk of Byland Abbey, who collected ghost stories from the surrounding countryside. I imagined the monk, alone in his cell on the quiet, wintry moors, spooking himself as he took pen in hand--so I was pleased to gather some more context for my imaginings last week from Carl Watkins's The Undiscovered Country: Journeys Among the Dead (2013):

The open country of the Vale of York lies to the south of this place but the moors rise steeply above it to the north. Although modest in height, they attract early winter snows, which make them a world unto themselves when the valley below is green. To medieval eyes this landscape was not beautiful but terrifying. Long before the abbey was built, the Venerable Bede thought these "steep and remote hills" more suitable for "dens of robbers and haunts of wild beasts than for men." Generations later, Bede's successors agreed. The monks who colonised the moors in the twelfth century entered "a place of horror and vast solitude," but they did so by choice, alighting on the place precisely because this was wild country, where minds could be bent to God free from distraction.

The exposure and isolation proved too much even for monks, however, and the abbey was eventually moved from the moor to the slightly more sheltered and accessible vale. But my imaginings of the spooky confines of an isolated abbey seem to have been on the mark nonetheless, at least by the fifteenth century, when the nameless monk began to collect his stories:

The heyday of the monasteries was in the past then. Outbreaks of plague and other epidemic disease had whittled away numbers at Byland and fewer recruits came forward to take their places. By 1400, a dozen or so monks were rattling around the cloisters. It was a good place to tell ghost stories and, as the abbey emptied of monks, the land round about was full of spirits.

And the monk had good reason to write down the stories he heard from the people of the surrounding country:

Stories about apparitions could not lightly be set aside and, since the chronicle of Byland warned that things not written down "slip away and wither as the sin of forgetfulness triumphs," there was reason to commit them to writing.

So the monk wrote, and so we know of a tailor named Mr. Snowball who fought a ghostly raven; and of James Tankerlay, a bad priest who walked after death and "blew out the eye" of his mistress; and of the fact that, as Watkins writes,

A soul detained [in Purgatory] suffered for its sins but could and should be helped through prayer and masses undertaken in its name. To write it off, to forget it, was a terrible thing. It was a sin. It was to rob the soul of the prayers that were its right. When a ghost walked, the living must harken to it. They must conjure it, let it speak, discover what it wanted, for it was likely to be suffering and in need of aid and deserved the benefit of the doubt.

Ghosts, however, change as we change, which makes the thumbnail history offered by Roger Clarke in his A Natural History of Ghosts: 500 Years of Hunting for Proof (2012) particularly useful:

Medieval ghosts were reanimated corpses or holy apparitions; Jacobean ghosts, demons pretending to be human.

Post-Restoration ghosts returned to correct injustices, right wrongs and supply information about lost documents and valuables. Regency ghosts were gothic. In Victorian times, ghosts were to be questioned in seances, and ghost-seeing became far more associated with women. Late Victorians embraced paranormality, seeing the ghostly as a manifestation of as yet understood laws of nature. The 1930s found the poltergeist.

And today? Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's more vague:

In one study in 1999, a group of Manchester women thought that hauntings were more to do with malign presences--in other words, a bad feeling--rather than the soul of someone who is dead making themself known.

Ghosts are no longer souls. Ghosts are now an emotion field.

As for me--still a skeptical enthusiast despite having, I'm told, seen a ghost when I was a boy--well, I think it right to end the month with Pepys. The diarist, Watkins tells us, was

an affirmed sceptic about wandering spirits. But he still relished a good story about them. And his scepticism, under the right conditions, might be a fragile thing. Several times he whiled away a dark evening talking with friends about ghosts.

Watkins goes on to mention a time that Pepys stayed in a reputedly haunted house and managed to spook himself. A bit of digging locates the incident on April 8 and 9, 1661. In his diary entry for the 8th, Pepys tells of traveling to the Hill House at Chatham, where:

Here we supped very merry, and late to bed; Sir William telling me that old Edgeborrow, his predecessor, did die and walk in my chamber, did make me some what afeard, but not so much as for mirth’s sake I did seem. So to bed in the treasurer’s chamber.

Mirthful exaggeration or not, his sleep was not untroubled, as he reveals in the next day's entry:

And lay and slept well till 3 in the morning, and then waking, and by the light of the moon I saw my pillow (which overnight I flung from me) stand upright, but not bethinking myself what it might be, I was a little afeard.

Nonetheless, Pepys, that most earthbound, most familiar, most untroubled of men, is not bothered for long, as "sleep overcame all."

As October closes, howling wind and spitting rain and swirls of blowing leaves and all, would that we all could lay our ghosts so easily.

"The tightly packed books burned for a week," or, Yet another way in which it could be worse!

At the close of my post over the weekend about packing my library, I noted that it could be worse: I could be in the position of Robinson Crusoe, limited to a handful of books saved from the seas. Yesterday, however, while reading Jenny Uglow's incredibly good new book about Charles II in the 1660s, A Gambling Man, I was reminded that water is at most the second-greatest foe of books--and that, yes, things could always be much worse:

When the Great Fire roared down Ludgate Hill it swept into a printing house in King's Head Court, off Shoe Lane. John Ogilby's entire stock went up in flames, including the manuscript of his twelve-book epic Carolies--"the pride, divertisement, business and sole comfort of my age."

And that's not even the worst of it:

Many booksellers and publishers, whose shops clustered around St Paul's churchyard, were ruined the same day. Some had placed their stock in Christ Church and Stationer's Hall, where the loss amounted to over £150,000. Others had taken their books and the sheets ready for binding to St Faith's Church, in the cathedral crypt. The great private library of Samuel Cromleholme, High Master of St Paul's School, was also stored here. It was thought to be safe, but the burning roof timbers crashed through the floor into the vault and the tightly packed books burned for a week. Wren's mentor John Wilkins, who had been rector of St Lawrence Jury since 1662, lost his house, his possessions and the manuscript of the Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language on which he had been working for years, and which he had to reconstruct from a proof. Richard Baxter reported that the libraries of most of the ministers in the City were burnt and from his home, six miles from London, he could see "the half burnt leaves of books " whirling in the wind. Pepys's favorite bookseller Kirton lost his house, shop and thousands of pounds' worth of books. He died a year later, having never recovered from the shock.

Uglow's chapter on the Great Fire of London is incredibly gripping. I mostly know the fire from Pepys's irreplaceable eyewitness account, Peter Ackroyd's description in London: A Biography, and other assorted histories; the range of sources and perspectives Uglow brings to her telling brings the scope and ferocity of the fire to life like none I've encountered, from its origins--when the Lord Mayor said, "Pish! A woman might piss it out!"--to its end, when

All the City's finest buildings and churches had vanished: men were bemused and lost, lacking the familiar landmarks. Even the waters in the broken fountains seemed to boil, and evil-smelling smoke swirled up from wells and cellars like fumes from hell.

Uglow pays particular attention to the actions of Charles himself during the fire, which, remarkably, he fought on the front lines all night with his brother, the Duke of York:

[F]ilthy, smoke-blackened, and tired, Charles toured the fireposts, wielding buckets and shovels with the men. Many contemporary accounts mention his bravery and energy, "even labouring in person, & being present," as Evelyn put it, "to command, order, reward, and encourage Workemen; by which he shewed his affection to his people, & gained theirs." The king and duke, wrote Clarendon,

who rode from one place to another, and put themselves in great dangers among the burning and falling houses, to give advice and direction what was to be done, underwent as much fatigue as the meanest, and had as little sleep or rest; and the faces of all men appeared ghastly and in the highest confusion.

Where citizens had fled, Charles and James took charge themselves, exposing themselves to flames and smoke and the danger of falling buildings.

The most memorable of all the many anecdotes and details that Uglow assembles, however, appears at the end of the chapter--which one can't help but read in a rush, the end coming as an almost physical relief--when the fire has finally petered out:

It was a scene of horror, but also one of wonder, a natural curiosity drawing the observant men of the Royal Society. In the broken tombs in St Paul's, they observed the mummified bodies of bishops buried two centuries before, while in the tomb of Dean Colet, a more recent burial, his lead coffin was found to be full of a curious liquor that had conserved the body. "Mr Wyle and Ralph Greatorex tasted it and it was a kind of insipid taste, something of an ironish taste. The body felt, to the probe of a stick which they thrust into a chink, like brawn."

They made scientists out of some very stern stuff back in those days. And, to bring this post back around to where I started: I may have had to pack up all my books, but at least I didn't have to watch them burn, then drink insipid tombwater!

Your friend, Samuel Pepys

In my continuing quest to get anyone who stops at this blog to add the Daily Pepys diary to their RSS reader, I present this bit of bad-neighborliness from Pepys's diary for April 20, 1666:

Thence to Paul's Churchyarde, and there bespoke some new books, and so to my ruling woman's and there did see my work a doing, and so home and to my office a little, but was hindered of business I intended by being sent for to Mrs. Turner, who desired some discourse with me and lay her condition before me, which is bad and poor. Sir Thomas Harvey intends again to have lodgings in her house, which she prays me to prevent if I can, which I promised. Thence to talke generally of our neighbours. I find she tells me the faults of all of them, and their bad words of me and my wife, and indeed do discover more than I thought. So I told her, and so will practise that I will have nothing to do with any of them. She ended all with a promise of shells to my wife, very fine ones indeed, and seems to have great respect and honour for my wife. So home and to bed.

Ah, the perils of neighbors! The only thing worse is . . . family?

How could anyone resist such an intimate, gossipy, even goofy account of life as lived three hundred and fifty years ago? Make Pepys your daily companion; I promise you won't regret it.

"Tom detested murder unless it was absolutely necessary."

From Ripley's Game (1974), by Patricia Highsmith

Tom hated the Mafia, hated their loan-sharking, their blackmail, their bloody church, their cowardlinesss in forever delegating their dirty work to underlings, so that the law couldn't get its hands on the bigger bastards among them, never get them behind bars except on charges of income tax evasion or some other triviality. The Mafiosi made Tom feel almost virtuous by comparison.

What better reward for a morning of rigorous house-cleaning than an afternoon spent with the deliciously creepy Tom Ripley? In Ripley's Game, Tom finds himself a bit ennui-ridden . . . so he engages in some acts of violent altruism--which leave him, to no reader's surprise, with some bodies to dispose of. "Oh," laments a woman who unwillingly gets sucked into the mess, "it's the money, it's the corpses." To which, after my morning of cleaning, I couldn't help but add, "It's the scrubbing the blood off the floor."

Meanwhile, to follow an afternoon spent tidying up with Ripley, Samuel Pepys has a solid suggestion for how we might spend our evening. From his diary entry for November 15, 1665:

I made them, against their resolutions, to stay from houre to houre till it was almost midnight, and a furious, darke and rainy, and windy, stormy night, and, which was best, I, with drinking small beer, made them all drunk drinking wine, at which Sir John Robinson made great sport. But, they being gone, the lady and I very civilly sat an houre by the fireside observing the folly of this Robinson, that makes it his worke to praise himself, and all he say and do, like a heavy-headed coxcombe.

For those of you who follow Pepys's example and find yourselves greeting the office Monday morning wearing the grisly rictus and hooded eyes of overindulgence, the last lines of that day's entry may serve to remind you that it could certainly be worse. Whatever its cruelties, a hangover is not the plague:

The plague, blessed be God! is decreased 400; making the whole this week but 1300 and odd; for which the Lord be praised!

Hear, hear.

"Lay long in bed, having been busy late last night. . . "

{The signature and seal of Samuel Pepys, from the National Archives.}

I'm still traveling so no real post today. But in case you need more post-New Year's commiseration over disarray, personal failures, and already broken resolutions, how about this, from Samuel Pepys's diary entry of January 1, 1665:

After dinner to my office again, where very late alone upon my accounts, but have not brought them to order yet, and very intricate I find it, notwithstanding my care all the year to keep things in as good method as any man can do.

So take heart: it's not just us harried late-modern types who start the new year already behind on everything except Battlestar Galactica--even a very well-regarded, organized, hardworking Chief Secretary of the Admiralty found himself confronting similar problems.

And yet the next day Pepys would record fooling around gaily with two women (with one of whom he did "ce que je voudrais avec," the insertion of French always an indicator of illicit pleasures), making plans for an assignation with a third, and, at day's end, being incited to jealousy about his wife by the sight of a pair of rutting dogs! While we surely should not, if we wish to be able to look ourselves in the mirror, imitate Pepys's behavior, as we open a new year we could hardly be faulted for hoping to approach our days, whatever their complexities, with some smidgen of his unbounded energy, enthusiasm, and dauntlessness.

The Daily Pepys online diary remains one of the joys of the Internet. If it's not in your blog reader, put it there; you won't regret the time you spend with the man.

Some laughs, or, "A dark, even-handed misanthropy"

To leaven yesterday's tales of robbery, killing, and general amorality, today let's have some humor!

I've really just got a few funny items for you, but I think that can be excused when this first one is, I venture, the funniest thing I've ever read. It is, not unexpectedly, by P. G. Wodehouse, and it opens the story "Buried Treasure," a tale of the Angler's Rest club that is collected in Lord Emsworth and Others (1937). The only additional introduction you need is the knowledge that in Angler's Rest stories Wodehouse identifies each speaker by the name of his drink. And now, to the joke:

The situation in Germany had come up for discussion in the bar parlour of the Angler's Rest, and it was generally agreed that Hitler was standing at the crossroads and would soon be compelled to do something definite. His present policy, said a Whisky and Splash, was mere shilly-shallying.

"He'll have to let it grow or shave it off," said the Whisky and Splash. "He can't go on sitting on the fence like this. Either a man has a moustache or he has not. There can be no middle course."

Wodehouse's most impressive achievement in those paragraphs is to maintain complete surprise: even though you know a joke's coming, his opening lines get your thoughts running so completely in one particular track that the sudden jump to another, previously unconsidered track is hilarious.

Now let's shift from the verbal to the visual, and from the twentieth century to the eighteenth, where I've been spending so much of my reading time lately. One of the books that's been holding me in that period is Tom Jones (1749), and the designer of the Penguin Classics edition deserves plaudits for choosing the perfect cover image, James Gillray's print Fashionable Contrasts;--or--The Duchess's Little Shoe Yielding to the Magnitude of the Duke's Feet (1792).



Created to celebrate and satirize the marriage of the Duke and Duchess of York, the print's simplicity is stunning, especially when contrasted with the other works of Gillray and his contemporaries, which tended to be overloaded with characters and symbols. And what a title!

Gillray, whose work I've noted before, was a contemporary of Blake, Rowlandson and Isaac Cruikshank, an artistic descendant of Hogarth, and an influence on Goya. As Vic Gatrell tells us in his spectacularly entertaining City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (2006),

Gillray was an enigmatic fellow, and we're not going to like him. In appearance he seems to have been rather daunting, so it comes as no surprise to learn that, with his "slouching gait and careless habits," he was too taciturn to have intimate friends. As the artist-journalist W. H. Pyne remembered, he was "meanly mischievous" to other people and as lazy in his personal relationships as in his art, and "a stranger to the feelings of friendship." But although he was "a careless sort of cynic, one who neither loved, nor hated society," "his aberrations were more the results of low habits and the want of self-esteem, than from malignity, envy, or meanness."

And though, as Gatrell points out,

Artistic London was a small world, and he grew into his trade alongside significant others. . . . [and in] their tavern lives, these men mingled with literary and theatrical hacks as well as each other, acting out the fashionable cult of dissolute genius with growing conviction,

Gillray seems never quite to have been fully a member of that fraternity of artists, standing decidedly aloof.

Except for a few depictions of St James's characters from life, his works lack warmth or affection. . . . Many are moved by a dark, even-handed misanthropy--by something approaching hatred, mixed with sadism.

That certainly seems the case when you look at some of Gillray's other works, such as this celebration of Nelson's victory on the Nile, Destruction of the French Collossus, which could with some adjustments have been slipped into the pages of an EC comic of the 1950s:



Given the horrors clearly available to Gillray's imagination, it may not surprise you to learn that he went insane in his later years. In his last days he thought George Cruikshank (later to be celebrated for his illustrations of Dickens) was Sir Joshua Reynolds and he himself was Rubens, while a suicide attempt in 1811 inadvertently recreated some of the grotesquely comic air of his prints:

He once tried to throw himself out of [his patron] Hannah Humphrey's upper window, and was saved because he jammed his head and was spotted from White's club across the street.

But now I've allowed my interest in Gillray to derail me from my initial intention to leaven your day with humor--can anything be further from the comedic than suicidal insanity? I'll try to make up for it with, first, another Gillray, this one with none of the elegance of Fashionable Contrasts--for as any Swift fan could tell you, when all else fails, one can always opt for scatology, which Gillray did in his 1793 take on the possibility of a French invasion, The French Invasion;--or--John Bull, Bombarding the Bum-Boats:



Gross, yes, but hard not to smile at, and presumably effective politically. The French, it seems, may find themselves needing the services of the Poopsmith.

Having descended into the gutter, I'll stay there and close with this pleasantly scurillous anecdote that Henry Fielding tosses off in Tom Jones regarding actress Nell Gwyn, mistress of Charles II and good friend of I've Been Reading Lately favorite Lord Rochester:

On this subject, reader, I must stop a moment, to tell thee a story. "The famous Nell Gwynn, stepping one day, from a house where she had made a short visit, into her coach, saw a great mob assembled, and her footman all bloody and dirty; the fellow, being asked by his mistress the reason of his being in that condition, answered, `I have been fighting, madam, with an impudent rascal who called your ladyship a wh--re.' `You blockhead,' replied Mrs Gwynn, `at this rate you must fight every day of your life; why, you fool, all the world knows it.'

`Do they?' cries the fellow, in a muttering voice, after he had shut the coach-door, `they shan't call me a whore's footman for all that.'"

Finally, since it's a day of visuals, and I've already violated all bounds of good taste, I may as well add some nudity. Here's a 1672 engraving by Richard Thomson of a painting by Peter Cross depicting Nell Gwyn as Cupid:



Gwyn's sly smile and, um . . . perkiness . . . may be NSFW these days, but they must have been just fine in Samuel Pepys's day, for he reportedly kept a copy hanging over his desk at the Admiralty.

"Methinks it cannot be clean to go so many bodies into the same water," or, Looking after the Codpiece Oeconomy

{Flea, by Robert Hooke, from Micrographia (1664)}

Is it a mark of shallowness that I never feel the difference between modern life and the past more clearly than when I am reminded that for most of human history people weren't able to take showers? Sure, baths have their virtues--though they, too, were so rare as to be almost nonexistent for most of history--but there are few things quite so satisfying as a hot shower. I think of my post-marathon showers, when I can feel the salt encrusted on my skin give way beneath the water; or the shower in high school that followed a day's work cutting horseweeds out of young beans, with not a hint of shade in sight; or the shower that cleansed the stench of cream cheese and cheap ham that lingered after a shift at Bruegger's Bagel Bakery during college. Oh, how lucky we are!

Those in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries weren't nearly so fortunate, as Emily Cockayne reminds us in her spectacularly rich Hubbub: Filth, Noise, and Stench in England (2007)

Washing routines were so unexceptional that they are usually ignored in contemporary diaries, autobiographies, and letters. Consequently it is difficult to be sure how people washed in the period. . . . Samuel Pepys rarely mentions washing himself, and for him cleansing did not need to involve water--on 5 September 1662 he records "rubbed myself clean." It is unlikely that soap featured much in the cleansing routine. Made from rancid fats and alkaline matter such as ashes, most cakes of soap would have been quite greasy and would have irritated the skin. . . . Some authors did extol the virtues of a wet wash. . . . At the age of thirty-three John Evelyn began "a Course of yearly washing my head with Warme Water, mingl'd with a decoction of sweete herbs, & immediately with cold spring water." This "much refreshed" him.

In line with other physicians Joseph Browne thought that many conditions were improved with cold bathing, which could cure scrofula, rickets, venereal diseases and "weakness of Erection, and a general disorder of the whole Codpiece Oeconomy." . . . Chimney sweeps were besooted from head to toe and known as part of the 'black Fraternity." "I would not recommend my Friend to breed his son to this Trade," remarked Mr. Campbell in 1747, adding, "I think this Branch is chiefly occupied by unhappy Parish Children. Sweeps effectively acted as the chimney brush--their clothes were tattered on the way up the chimney and their skin endured grazes, burns, and scratches. Soot, a carcinogenic substance, would not have washed readily from skin. Millers were prone to lice, which fed off pockets of flour held in folds of skin. Grocer's itch was a condition caused by handling flour or sugar. . . . Jonas Hanaway reported that some sweep masters washed their apprentices annually.

Cockayne continues by citing Lord Chesterfield, which sent me back to his letters to his son for a more full statement of his position on cleanliness. As usual with Chesterfield, I wasn't disappointed:

In your person you must be accurately clean; and your teeth,hands, and nails, should be superlatively so; a dirty mouth has real ill consequences to the owner, for it infallibly causes the decay, as well as the intolerable pain of the teeth, and it is very offensive to his acquaintance, for it will most inevitably stink. I insist, therefore, that you wash your teeth the first thing you do every morning, with a soft sponge and swarm water, for four or five minutes; and then wash your mouth five or six times. Mouton, whom I desire you will send for upon your arrival at Paris, will give you an opiate, and a liquor to be used sometimes. Nothing looks more ordinary, vulgar, and illiberal, than dirty hands, and ugly, uneven, and ragged nails: I do not suspect you of that shocking, awkward trick, of biting yours; but that is not enough: you must keep the ends of them smooth and clean, not tipped with black, as the ordinary people's always are. The ends of your nails should be small segments of circles, which, by a very little care in the cutting, they are very easily brought to; every time that you wipe your hands, rub the skin round your nails backward, that it may not grow up, and shorten your nails too much. The cleanliness of the rest of your person, which, by the way, will conduce greatly to your health, I refer from time to time to the bagnio. My mentioning these particulars arises (I freely own) from some suspicion that the hints are not unnecessary; for, when you were a schoolboy, you were slovenly and dirty above your fellows. I must add another caution, which is that upon no account whatever, you put your fingers, as too many people are apt to do, in your nose or ears. It is the most shocking, nasty, vulgar rudeness, that can be offered to company; it disgusts one, it turns one's stomach; and, for my own part, I would much rather know that a man's fingers were actually in his breech, than see them in his nose.

Since she started me on this topic, it seems only fair to let Cockayne have the last word, which is not completely foreign to those of us who spend our summers swimming in Lake Michigan--though, again, our sufferings pale in comparison to those of the early moderns:

Despite the pollution Londoners used the Thames for bathing. John Evelyn noted that even when they bathed in water "some Miles distance from the City," they still became coated in a "thin Web, or pellicule of dust" gathered from the clouds of city smoke by falling rain.

Lord Rochester, part one

It seems reasonable that biographers, especially those who are essentially dabbling in biography rather than making it their career, should find in their subjects mirrors of their own preoccupations and personalities. After all, few biographers actively choose a subject whose life and opinions they find utterly uncongenial; from there it is but a small step to discovering that one's subject is, it turns out, a slightly refracted version of oneself.

Thus it is no surprise that Graham Greene, in Lord Rochester's Monkey (1974), presents a Lord Rochester whose libertinism and cynicism are born from a disappointed ideal, a sense that the world and all in it have fallen far short of what we might have been--a view that hews closely to what I would attribute to Greene himself. While Greene's ideal was born of Catholicism (which has the added benefit of ascribing nobility to suffering, however self-inflicted, and repentance, however repetitive), it is unclear where Rochester's originated, unless it was simply by analogy: what I see around me is highly praised, despite being utterly unworthy; the fact that I am perceptive enough to see that means there must be something better--a good, perhaps--that lies beyond this tawdriness. In such a world, a man who sees through the pious declarations and pretension to virtue has a choice: he can either stand strong, resist the world's temptations, and call out its failings with religious fervor, or he can succumb--to drink, lust, cynicism--and thus provide crucial support for his own contention. Rochester chose the latter, argues Greene, who, though he might not have put it so bluntly, did the same.

So Rochester, after serving bravely in naval engagements against the Dutch while still in his teens, arrived at the infamously wild court of Charles II as the greatest excesses of the Restoration were just getting underway, letting out all the wantonness that had been bottled up by two decades of war and Puritan rule. Becoming a close friend of the King, Rochester joined him and others in drunken escapades, sharing of mistresses, and all manner of generally unruly behavior (another reminder, if any are still needed, that when right-wing loonies screech about the horrors of contemporary morality, they're demonstrating yet again their willful ignorance). Rochester became embroiled in duels, attempted to kidnap his future wife, and, all the while, wrote poetry that was by turns viciously satirical and breathtakingly salacious. He turns up frequently in the diaries of Pepys, who, despite their similarly concupiscent natures, seems always a bit unsure about Rochester.

Rochester quickly became the foremost poet and wit of the Restoration court, apparently as charming as he was rackety and unreliable. As his friend George Etherege said of him, "I know he is a Devil, but he has something of the Angel yet undefac'd in him." A Mr. Waller writes,

Last night I supped at Lord Rochester's with a select party: on such occasions he is not ambitious of shining; he is rather pleasant than not: he is comparatively reserved; but you find something in that restraint, which is more agreeable than the utmost exertions of talent in others.

Another friend, poet Nathaniel Lee (who was destined to end his days in Bedlam), based a character on Rochester in a play and wrote of him,

He was the spirit of wit and had such an art in gilding his failures, that it was hard not to love his faults. He never spoke a witty thing twice, though to different persons; his imperfections were catching, and his genius was so luxuriant, that he was forced to tame it with a hesitation in his speech to keep it in view. But oh how awkward, how insipid, how poor and wretchedly dull is the imitation of those that have all the affectation of his verses and none of his wit.

More tomorrow.

Claire Tomalin on Thomas Hardy

Claire Tomalin's Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2003) is, hands down, the best biography I've read. In choosing Pepys as her subject, Tomalin set herself a tremendously difficult task--after all, how can any biography top the story Pepys himself tells?

29 June 1663
In Westminster Hall fell in talk with Mrs Lane and after great talk that she never went abroad with any man as she used heretofore to do, I with one word got her to go with me and to meet me at the further Rhenish wine-house--where I did give her a lobster and do so towse her and feel her all over, making her believe how fair and good a skin she had; and endeed, she hath a very white thigh and leg, but monstrous fat. When weary, I did give over, and somebody having seen some of our dalliance, called aloud in the street, "Sir, why do you kiss the gentlewoman so?" and flung a stone at the window--which vexed me--but I believe they could not see my towsing her; and so we broke up and went out the back way, without being observed, I think.

Pepys is an unparalleled narrator of his own life, yet Tomalin's biography is full of verve, so affecting that his death at the close of the book feels like the death of a friend.

Her biography of Thomas Hardy is not quite as powerful, but the fault lies, I judge, less with Tomalin than with Hardy, who, for all his frequent charm, has little of Pepys's self-involved liveliness--but who among us does? Tomalin regardless brings her formidable biographical skills to bear, and despite the frequent assertions by Hardy's friends that he was essentially inscrutable, she succeeds in creating a convincing portrait. Her Hardy is a man whose complicated internalization--and overcoming--of early disappointments fueled a lifetime of tremendous achievements, achievements which were perpetually undercut by a deep-rooted melancholy and doubt. Trapped in an unexpectedly unhappy marriage, resentful his whole life of the class structure that blighted his youth, and unable to will a belief in a higher purpose or eternal reward, Hardy as revealed by Tomalin is frequently a sad, even sometimes pathetic figure. But at the same time, we marvel along with her at Hardy's unflagging curiosity and drive, and she never lets us lose sight of the remarkable talent that makes his life worth remembering.

Tomalin's greatest gift as a biographer is her wide-ranging sympathy. Though realizing that our knowledge can never be perfect, she really wants to understand everyone's reasons, see everyone's point of view. Her inclination is to give each person the benefit of the doubt, but she doesn't flinch from judging when the evidence calls for it; that openness to the multiplicities of motive and feeling are what give her biographies the full roundedness of real life. She's the biographer we all should hope to have.

Her treatment of Hardy's first wife, Emma, whose personal oddity was commented upon in letters and diaries by nearly everyone who met her, is typical of her approach:

[Edmund] Gosse's letter to his wife Nellie included a careful comment on Emma: "She means to be very kind," he wrote. Hardy was too observant not to notice that his friend was sometimes rather at a loss in his attempts at conversation with his wife. To find that Emma's zest for life, so much prized by him during their wooing, was not so attractive to others, and that her charm fell flat, was upsetting. Of course she was middle aged now. She no longer wore her glorious hair over her shoulders in curls, her strong features were settling into heaviness, and her talk sometimes strayed from the point and followed its own track in a way that had once seemed delightful but now sometimes disconcerting.

Hasn't everyone known someone like that, someone just a little off--or felt like that themselves at times? And doesn't Tomalin's portrait elicit sympathy for Hardy? But then she continues:

Feeling unappreciated brings out the worst in everyone, and when people failed to warm to Emma she became more difficult. She had lost her hope of children, hardly saw her own family and was suspicious of his. A letter this year from her friend in Sturminster, Mrs. Dashwood, also reminded her of her failed literary amibitions: "I hope your stories will emerge one after another and astonish the literary world, they have been concocting in your head long enough and should now see the light . . . When will you and Mr. Hardy spend the day with us? You have not visited this gay city for a long time, and ought to renew your acquaintance once with it." Emma could say nothing of any publication prospects, alas, and there was no visit to the gay city of Sturminster. Gosse's friendship with Hardy was strong enough to include Emma, but he never warmed to her in her own right.

Though our sympathies don't shift completely--Emma is, after all, clearly a source of real difficulty for everyone--Tomalin's emotional contextualization of her behavior leavens our judgment; it is a courtesy Tomalin extends to everyone.

In Friday night's post I mentioned how apt I found Tomalin's take on Jude the Obscure (1895); the following passage gives a good sense of how sharp her literary criticism can be. She quotes Hardy essentially abdicating responsibility for his characters' sufferings, saying that he is only reflecting the darkness of fate and circumstance. Then she argues:

Hardy's defense is made weaker because there are other examples in his fiction of people suffering from exceptionally bad luck--luck so bad that it looks as though it has been willed, by the gods, or fate, or possibly by the author. For example, when the young Jude falls into despair at the difficulty of learning Latin and Greek, "he wished he had never seen a book, that he might never see another, that he had never been born." This is a reasonable account of a sensitive boy's reaction to severe disappointment, but Hardy continues. "Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him . . . But nobody did come, because nobody does." I have put the last words in italics because this is not a true account of life. Hardy is not only coercing his plot, he is generalizing falsely. There are times when nobody comes, but there are also times when somebody does come. For example . . . a good many people had come along [for Hardy himself]. Jude is not Hardy, of course, but in so far as he represents Hardy's own unfulfilled wish to go to a university, he is put through a much worse experience than Hardy ever went through. This is part of what made even Hardy's friend Gosse ask in his review, "What has Providence done to Mr Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?"

Most of my thinking about literature ultimately boils down to that question--is this a true representation of life? Thus I view generalizing falsely as one of the greatest offenses an author can commit, and Tomalin the critic is a deeply congenial spirit. The criticism of Hardy's novels in Thomas Hardy not only managed to make me think afresh about them, it woke me as well to his poetry, of which I'd read little. Tightly rhymed, flawlessly rhythmic, with a strong spine of thought, as Tomalin puts it, in each poem, it hadn't impressed me when I was twenty. I was looking for something less formal--Hardy's poetry felt dated, not adventurous enough. But I suppose the list of things that don't impress us when we're twenty are extensive; if we have the good fortune to live long enough, maybe eventually they're no longer even embarrassing.

This is where I take advantage of the fact that this is a blog, rather than a newspaper or magazine. I should end this with a summation, a statement about Hardy or the biography. But instead, because we've had thick, wet snow all day here--the sort through which you splash in the morning and slip at night--and I've spent many an hour in my chair by the window watching wet, puffed-up juncos and finches eat thistle from our feeder, I'll end instead with Hardy's "Snow in the Suburbs" (1925):

Every branch big with it,
Bent every twig with it;
Every fork like a white web-foot;
Every street and pavement mute:
Some flakes have lost their way, and grope back upward when
Meeting those meandering down they turn and descend again.
The palings are glued together like a wall,
And there is no waft of wind with the fleecy fall.
A sparrow enters the tree,
Whereon immediately
A snow-lump thrice his own slight size
Descends on him and showers his head and eye
And overturns him,
And near inurns him,
And lights on a nether twig, when its brush
Starts off a volley of other lodging lumps with a rush.
The steps are a blanched slope,
Up which, with feeble hope,
A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;
And we take him in.

On the road again

I'll be posting very little, maybe none, this week while I travel to Los Angeles for work. While I'm gone, you might read this article about Hard Case Crime that Jim sent me from the L.A. Times.

Or you could just go read Pepys's diary. You can always read Pepys's diary. That's one of its glories.

Life stories

I spent two days flying last week, and as I read Nancy Milford’s Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (2001), I remembered why I like to pack biographies when I travel. With nothing to distract me except the occasional, accidental sight of Martin Lawrence parading around in a dress on the screen above me, I can fully sink into the details of a life. Immersed for hours, uninterrupted by work or the need to listen for my L stop, I’m able to fully enter the subject’s world. Friends, relatives, acquaintances, peripheral as they may be, become firmly placed; I don’t have to consult the index to remind myself of who’s who. For a while, I nearly live the life I read.

I had already been thinking about completed lives, and what remains of a life. Even the quietest of us leaves a lot behind—stories, letters, legal records, collections—and a good biographer can fashion those elements into a coherent narrative of a whole person. Some biographies, like Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys (2002) (the best biography I’ve read), reveal a subject livelier, wiser, and more likable than we expected; others, like A. N. Wilson’s Tolstoy (1986), lead us—and the author—from admiration to astonished disgust. Regardless, a person’s life is rebuilt, assembled from scattered pieces and presented anew, giving us here the perspective of a close friend, there that of a secret diary, and elsewhere that of history. An anecdote gives a glimpse of a moment in time, and someone forever gone is returned. It’s hard to imagine a greater honor.

But most of us are never the subject of biographies. Our letters remain unread by anyone but the recipient, our diaries (unless we put them on the Internet) gather dust, and our secrets, successes, and failures remain, as we would surely prefer, our own. What lingers after us are the stories people remember and retell, the stories they repeat to each other over the years, and maybe, if we’re lucky, pass down to their children and grandchildren. For the promise that such stories would live on, Achilles was willing to sacrifice his life. Few of us are as needy as Achilles; we don't have to sacrifice our lives. We just have to live them.

So I learn that Stacey’s grandmother, on discovering that a young Stacey had managed to climb onto the roof of the garage, admonished her, not to get down, but to wear shoes up there, because the roof was dirty. And that, when asked about the internment camps that she and other Japanese-Americans were forcibly removed to in the early years of World War II, she spoke not about the deprivation, but of the people she met there and the crafts they made. And that she darned Stacey's father's socks, and she turned his collars, so that he assumed for years that everyone practiced such economies.

Or I remember that I’ll have to tell my nephew about my Great-Grandpa Colonel, an auctioneer, born late in the nineteenth century, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, but who, living his whole life in Kansas, experienced a very different twentieth century. I've been told that once he bought a new shed at an auction and, knowing that Great-Grandma Inez would not agree that they needed a second shed, attempted to hide it by placing it behind the first shed. The ploy failed. When my father first met him, on an unbearably humid Kansas night in the late 1960s, Colonel offered him ice cream, then revealed a reach-down freezer holding a dozen different flavors. My father knew from that point that he and Colonel would get along just fine. And I remember that into his early nineties Colonel, an inattentive but enthusiastic driver, delivered meals-on-wheels to housebound old folks.

Then there was my Great-Grandmother Marie. Elegant, patrician, and a bit imperious, she never seemed quite certain about children, though she was always kind to us great-grandkids. Her daughter, my Great-Aunt Mary, had a labrador retriever named Gator, who had a pet rock that he carried in his mouth. He removed it only to eat, and if it somehow went missing, the whole household was enlisted in a careful search. Years of carrying the rock wore the teeth on the right side of Gator's mouth to nubs.

And thus we keep our past and its people with us. Near the end of Wendell Berry’s elegiac novel Jayber Crow (2000) Jayber, who, being younger than most of his friend and acquaintances, has outlived most of them, thinks

I am an old man now and oftentimes I whisper to myself. I have heard myself whispering things that I didn’t know I had ever thought. “Forty years” or “Fifty years” or “Sixty years,” I hear myself whispering. My life lengthens. History grows shorter. I remember old men who remembered the Civil War. I have in my mind word-of-mouth memories more than a hundred years old. It is only twenty hundred years since the birth of Christ. Fifteen or twenty memories such as mine would reach all the way back to the halo-light in the manger at Bethlehem. So few rememberers could sit down together in a small room. They could loaf together in the old poolroom up in Port William and talk all of a Saturday night of war and rumors of war.

I whisper over to myself the way of loss, the names of the dead. One by one, we lose our loved ones, our friends, our powers of work and pleasure, our landmarks, the days of our allotted time. one by one, the way we lose them, they return to us and are treasured up in our hearts. Grief affirms them, preserves them, sets the cots. Finally a man stands up alone, scoured and charred like a burnt tree, having lost everything and (at the cost only of its loss) found everything, and is ready to go. Now I am ready.

But the rest of us remain, and we speak of our friends.

Of fashion and matters sartorial, part 4 of 8

Every group and subgroup, every class and demographic, has its own fashion, its own range of acceptable dress. And that dress frequently looks odd, or even ridiculous, to those outside the group. From the wealthy ladies parading in their furs on Michigan Avenue to the kids hanging around the Dunkin’ Donuts on Belmont getting powdered sugar all over their tongue studs to the bond traders waiting for the train in their expensive suits on a cold morning, no coats, no hats—everyone looks silly if, for a moment, you don’t take them on their own terms.

If I’d realized that when I was twelve, middle school would have been a lot easier.

From Paul Fussell’s Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear (2002)

The universal dilemma can be specified succinctly: everyone must wear a uniform, but everyone must deny wearing one, lest one’s invaluable personality and unique identity be compromised.

From Samuel Pepys’s Diary, 19 August 1661

To Worcester House, where several Lords are met in council this afternoon. And while I am waiting there, in comes the King in a plain common riding-suit and velvet cap in which he seemed a very ordinary man to one that had not known him.

From Céleste Alberet’s Monsieur Proust (1973)

He didn’t wear his shoes out any more than his clothes. He always traveled about in taxis and never walked except on carpets and parquets. And then he was a person of habit; he hated any kind of change. He felt especially comfortable in things he’d worn for a long time. What’s more, choosing, buying, trying things on, were tiring and took up time. Also, we mustn’t forget, he only went out at times when the shops were shut. He never bought anything himself—he ordered it.

From Francine du Plessix Gray’s Them: A Memoir of Parents (2005)

I engaged in numerous diets that might help me to resemble the ghoulishly emaciated models who flocked to Mother’s parties: three days of buttermilk and soda water, three days of hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes, three days of stewed prunes and tea.

From my trip on the #6 Jackson Park Express bus the afternoon of March 30th (2006)

At 56th and Hyde Park Boulevard, a 20-ish Asian-American woman with extravagant, multi-hued hair extensions boarded the bus. She had a pretty face and was good-looking, though very skinny, dressed in a small, tight, white tank top and extremely low-rise jeans. She carried one of those long cruising skateboards, and she was plugged in to her earbuds, listening to music.

On her left hand was written, in big block letters, “BUY A SUIT!”