Woolf on Hazlitt, or, The art of complicated admiration

I praised Virginia Woolf's essays last week, but I can't let the topic go without drawing attention to the brilliance of her essay on William Hazlitt, himself one of our greatest essayists. Found in Woolf's The Common Reader, the essay opens like this:

Had one met Hazlitt no doubt one would have liked him on his own principle that "We can scarcely hate anyone we know." But Hazlitt has been dead now a hundred years, and it is perhaps a question how far we can know him well enough to overcome those feelings of dislike, both personal and intellectual, which his writings still so sharply arouse. For Hazlitt--it is one of his prime merits--was not one of those noncommittal writers who shuffle off in a mist and die of their own insignificance. His essays are emphatically himself. He has no essays and he has no shame. He tells us exactly what he thinks, and he tells us--the confidence is less seductive--exactly what he feels.

Good god, can you get a better opening to an essay? Acknowledging uncertainty while nevertheless making confident, declarative statements; balancing oppositions; and, in a few short lines, beginning to give a real sense of the tumultuous, strange, divided personality about whom you're writing--this, it seems to me, a Hazlitt fan, is about as good as it gets.

And Woolf backs it up: her essay shifts easily between biographical detail and literary analysis, showing how, in this prickly, principled man ("He had quarrelled with all his old friends, save perhaps with Lamb"--but, we should remember, almost no one quarrelled with Lamb, the gentlest of souls.) person and idea weren't so separable as the ancients would have had it, the former fully subservient to the latter:

[H]e was a man of divided tastes and thwarted ambition; a man whose happiness, even in early life, lay behind. His mind had set early and bore forever the stamp of his first impressions.

Woolf continues,

And Hazlitt felt with the intensity of a poet. The most abstract of his essays will suddenly grow red-hot or white-hot if something reminds him of his past. . . . [H]ow violently we are switched from reason to rhapsody--how embarrassingly our austere thinker falls upon our shoulders and demands our sympathy!

Yes--and yet that's exactly what I love in Hazlitt: his essays are not the product of Wordsworth's "emotions recollected in tranquility"; they are instead tranquility forever troubled by the bubbling under of those emotions--and that bubbling under, that admixture of the personal and the impersonal, is what makes him feel so much our kin, our contemporary, at shining moments our friend.

And Woolf gets that, even as she also catalogues Hazlitt's faults. How rare that ability is--how I wish I had more of it--to truly, rather than grudgingly, appreciate the merits of one whose faults you also find glaring. Woolf evinces it time and again in her essays, and that alone is enough reason to seek them out.

But while you're at it, seek out, if you've not, Hazlitt, whose voice rings out as strong for us a century after Woolf as it did for her a century after his death. If I've not convinced you yet, perhaps the conclusion of her essay will:

When he lay dying a hundred years ago in a lodging in Soho his voice rang out with the old pugnacity and conviction: "Well, I have had a happy life." One has only to read him to believe it.

Read Woolf's essays, read Hazlitt's essays--start with "The Indian Jugglers" or "The Fight", both of which can be found on On the Pleasure of Hating--and next Thanksgiving you'll have one more reason to be grateful.

Ghost writers

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Earlier this month, I wrote about Henry James’s ghost stories, which are among my favorites. But then I started thinking about James as a person—and realized that he’d be one of the last authors I would want to have describe an actual encounter with a ghost. Think about it: he’d circle around and around the visitation, honing his impressions to an ever-finer point, conveying each little nuance of feeling aroused by the ghost . . . and by the end, as in The Turn of the Screw, you wouldn’t even be sure he’d seen a ghost at all!

Which got me thinking: which author would be the best for reporting back on a supernatural encounter? Which of my favorites would I enter into the lists against the ghouls?

So many of my favorites would be, well, useless. Iris Murdoch would get too spiritual about it. Nancy Mitford would be too sarcastically dismissive. Evelyn Waugh would ascribe it to the DTs. Actually, any number of my favorite authors would probably ascribe it to the DTs.

But I think I’ve hit upon a couple who could be relied on to face down an apparition and come back with a satisfyingly detailed and interesting report. Here goes:

1 First, there’s William Hazlitt. If ever Hazlitt saw a ghost, there’s no record of it that I’ve found. But in his writings on English theater, collected as A View of the English Stage in 1818, he did give some idea of what he expected from a ghost.

First, there are the expected Shakespearian ghosts. In an account of a performance of Hamlet at Drury Lane in 1814, he tells us what he expects of a ghost:

We cannot speak too highly of Mr. Raymond's representation of the Ghost. It glided across the stage with the preternatural grandeur of a spirit. His manner of speaking the part was not equally excellent. A spirit should not whine or shed tears.

As for how we should behave in the presence of a presence, this appraisal of Eliza O’Neill’s portrayal of Juliet at Covent Garden in 1814, gives a good idea. O’Neill, he writes, she strikes only one false note: when she screams aloud at the sight of Tybalt’s ghost:

[T]here [is] a distinction to be kept up between physical and intellectual horror (for the latter becomes more general, internal, and absorbed, in proportion as it becomes more intense).

In other words, confronted with a ghost, Hazlitt might be terrified, but he wouldn’t lose his cool.

And an account of another stage ghost, from one of the many long-forgotten plays of the period, Frightened to Death?—a farce about a drunk whose friends, to force him to mend his ways, convince him he has died and is seeing ghosts—tells us something of the line of attack that Hazlitt might take on seeing a ghost:

A very laughable dialogue and duet here take place between the Ghost and the Ghost-seer, the latter inquiring of him with great curiosity about his ancestors in the other world, and being desirous to cultivate an acquaintance with the living apparition, in the hope of obtaining some insight into the state of that state “from which no traveller returns.”

Dignified terror and probing questions: a good starting point.

2 Then there’s Samuel Johnson. Who better than the good Doctor to tackle a ghost? I’ve quoted before—even recently—Dr. Johnson’s take on the subject of the afterlife, but it’s always worth revisiting for its characteristically Johnsonian quality of judicious language inflected by the inescapable force of human emotion:

It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.

And it’s also worth remembering that, at one of the most fortuitous meetings in literary history, Johnson first appeared, if not as a ghost, then at least with the effect of one. Here’s Boswell, recounting their first meeting, on the premises of Mr. Davies’s bookshop:

At last, on Monday the 16th of May, when I was sitting in Mr. Davies's back parlour, after having drunk tea with him and Mrs. Davies, Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop; and Mr. Davies having perceived him through the glass door of the room in which we were sitting, advancing towards us,—he announced his awefi.il approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost, " Look, my Lord, it comes."

Johnson, so far as we know, never met a ghost, but it’s not hard to imagine him standing up to one ferociously. I picture him demanding of the spirit credentials—some proof that its existence wasn’t the lingering effects of, as Scrooge put it, “an undigested bit of beef”—then, that established, hectoring it, absolutely unafraid, about the afterlife. Oh, the answers we could get were Dr. Johnson our inquisitor!

3 My final choice will surprise no longtime reader of this blog: Anthony Powell. Unlike the authors above, Powell had at least second-hand dealings with ghosts. The appearance of a ghost, offstage, plays a part in an unforgettable scene from the childhood of Nick Jenkins in A Dance to the Music of Time, as a maid is driven to breakdown by hauntings in the Jenkins family home. In his memoirs, To Keep the Ball Rolling, Powell revealed that the house in Dance was modeled closely on his childhood home, Stonehurst, which was itself home to ghosts: “a whiteish shape, misty, of no great density but some height” that appeared in the bedrooms of successive maids, and a terrifying, paralyzing presence that once accosted his mother as she lay abed. Wrote Powell,

Some parents would have tried to keep all this from a child of seven or eight. My father, left to himself, would probably have done so. My mother, on the other hand, regarded any such concealments as cutting off an essential aspect of life. Talk about “ghosts” was never at all curtailed on my account, and did not in the least disturb me. I have fairly strong feelings about the “atmosphere” of houses, but never, in fact, found that of Stonehurst in the least uneasy.

The choice of Powell, however, reflects less his experience with ghosts than my own sentimentality, and the nature of my preferred way of imagining a ghostly existence: if there must be an afterlife, and haunting, I’d like it to be as much like this life as possible. I want my ghosts to be congenial and chatty, retaining as much as conceivable of the concerns, amusements, foibles, and self-involvement of the living. And who better to engage that sort of ghost than Powell, as unfazed by differences of quickness as he was of rank, ever alert to oddity and humor? Who better to guide us through the land of the dead than the writer who’s done more than any other to guide me through the land of the living?

And for you? Who are your nominees?

Coleridge the Dreamer

I've mentioned before that I love footnotes? And dreams? Then let's just dive into a post about a wonderful footnote from Adam Sisman's The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge.

The footnoted scene occurs in 1796, when the young Coleridge was touring the countryside to drum up subscriptions for a new political and literary periodical, of which he was to be the editor (to the surprise and dismay of his friends, who doubted his reliability: "Of all men, Mr Coleridge was the least qualified to display periodical industry," laments his friend and publisher Joseph Cottle (which makes me picture Coleridge as one of those bloggers who gives up after half a dozen posts)). Having been invited to the house of a dissenting minister for an evening of friendly conversation, he made the mistake of smoking some opium beforehand,

which left him feeling so ill that on arriving at the minister's house pale and sweating profusely, he sank back on the sofa in a sort of swoon. At length "he awoke from insensibility" and looked around the room, blinking in the light of the candles that had been lit in the interim. One of the gentlemen present asked him if he had read a newspaper that day. "Sir," he replied, rubbing his eyes, "I am far from convinced that a Christian is permitted to read either newspapers or any other works of merely political and temporary interest." The ludicrous incongruity of this remark produced a general burst of laughter, and during the remainder of the evening those present joined in attempting to convince Coleridge "in the most friendly and yet most flattering expressions that the employment was neither fit for me, nor I fit for the employment."

To this scene, entertaining enough in itself, Sisman appends the following:

Hazlitt (who of course was not present) gives another account of what seems to have been the same occasion, in which Coleridge awoke on a sofa and then "launched into a three hours' description of the third heaven, of which he had had a dream."

Now, though I am one of those people who unquestionably takes pleasure in recounting his dreams, I do think I would have the good sense to stop well before I'd entered the third hour--though I suppose my friends are welcome to set me straight in the comments, if they see fit.

But, then again, I suppose I've never dreamed Kubla Khan, either, have I? Three hours of confusion and banality here and there in exchange for such a poem isn't that much to ask, no?

"The dust and smoke and noise of modern literature have nothing in common with the pure, silent air of immortality."

Despite having never read any of Samuel Richardson's monumental novels, I have recently gotten into the habit of taking note when I come across valued authors delivering themselves of opinions of the man and his work. It's the least I can do for my friend Maggie, who valiantly slogged through the 1,630 pages of Richardson's Clarissa (1748) when I gave it to her for Christmas a couple of years ago--and retained the energy and goodwill to report on the book's pleasures and pains. ("I would not say that I didn't enjoy the book, but there is so, so much of it.") It seems only fair that, having followed Clarissa through her near-endless travails, Maggie should feel she has company, should be able to see herself as part of a centuries-long chorus of voices of those who've done the same--a survivors' support group, say.

So yesterday I as I was reading William Hazlitt's pleasantly meandering essay "On Reading Old Books" (1821), to which I'd been directed by Patrick Kurp at Anecdotal Evidence, I was pleased to encounter some strong praise for Richardson. Hazlitt writes,

I consider myself a thorough adept in Richardson. I like the longest of his novels best, and think no part of them tedious; nor should I ask to have anything better to do than to read them from beginning to end, to take them up when I chose, and lay them down when I was tired, in some old family mansion in the country, till every word and syllable relating to the bright Clarissa, the Divine Clementina, the beautiful Pamela, "with every trick and line of their sweet favour," were once more "graven in my heart's table."

Now, Maggie, surely that makes you feel that you could have done better by the bright Clarissa? Perhaps you should re-read her story, attempting to approach it this time in a more generous frame of mind?

Strong as is Hazlitt's praise for Richardson, it pales next to his words for Edmund Burke later in the essay. Burke's conservatisim was anathema to Hazlitt, but in some ways that made his appreciation of Burke's mind and writing even more powerful:

To understand an adversary is some praise: to admire him is more. . . . For the first time I ever cast my eyes on anything of Burke's . . . I said to myself, "this is true eloquence: this is a man pouring out his mind on paper." All other styles seemed to me pedantic and impertinent. Dr. Johnson's was walking on stilts; and even Junius's (who was at that time a favourite with me) with all his terseness, shrunk up into little antithetic points and well-trimmed sentences. But Burke's style was forked and playful as the lightening, crested like the serpent. He delivered plain things on plain ground; but when he rose, there was no end of his flights and circumgyrations.

But even the finest of prose styles can only go so far if the reader disagrees with the argument they decorate, and Hazlitt has fun reminding the reader of that:

I did not care for his doctrines. I was then and am still, proof against their contagion. . . . I conceived, too, that he might be wrong in his main argument, and yet deliver fifty truths in arriving at a false conclusion.

Hazlitt's essay--which he opens with the bald statement,

I hate to read new books. There are twenty or thirty volumes that I have read over and over again, and these are the only ones that I have any desire ever to read at all.

--has not only caused me to reopen my volume of Burke, but has also inspired in me a general spate of re-reading, sending me back yesterday to Penelope Fitzgerald's light and lovely Gate of Angels and today to Moby-Dick . . . and all the while my favorite book to re-read, Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, maintains its perpetual beck. We'll see if I'm strong enough to resist and instead pluck something from the stacks of the unread instead.

That Dog Won't Hunt, or, Cigarette Shenanigans

{All photos by Maura.}

Paul Collins at Weekend Stubble has a fascinating post up today about a forthcoming article he's written for the New York Times Book Review [It's now up at the Times site.]
about the cigarette ads that were bound into the middle of a lot of American paperbacks in the 1970s. Though I've come across these when buying used books before, I'd forgotten all about them--and I certainly never knew how commmon they were. (Collins reveals that Lorillard alone ran ads in 540 million paperbacks in one three-year period.)



He links to a creepily nefarious 1986 memo from a Phillip Morris executive noting that he had commissioned a positive review of a book, Robert D. Tollison's Smoking and Society: Toward a More Balanced Assessment, and had been trying, unsuccessfully, to plant it in the San Francisco Chronicle.



I found a real treat buried in the memo: the reviewer, David Hunter (described by the exec as "a freelancer who wants to work for me") submitted the review under the pen name Leigh Hunt.



The English lit fans among you will recognize that name. (And don't you love his louche pose in that portrait?) Friend of Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Hazlitt, among many others, Hunt was in his lifetime well known for his poetry, his political journalism (which he put in the service of liberal political reform), and his integrity. He spent time in jail for attacking the Prince Regent in print, and he remained within at least arm's length of financial ruin his whole life. As his Wikipedia entry puts it, Hunt should be remembered for

his unremitting literary industry under the most discouraging circumstances, and for his uncompromising independence as a journalist and an author.

Dickens called him

The very soul of truth and honour,

while Byron, in his journal, wrote that

Hunt is an extraordinary character, and not exactly of the present age. He reminds me more of the Pym and Hampden times--much talent, great independence of spirit, and an austere, yet not repulsive, aspect. If he goes on qualis ab incepto, I know few men who will deserve more praise or obtain it. . . . [H]e is a man worth knowing. . . . [W]ithal, a valuable man, and less vain than success and even the consciousness of preferring "the right to the expedient" might excuse.

So why did David Hunter use Hunt's name? I think there's no question that he was thumbing his nose at his boss at Philip Morris, whom he could be confident wouldn't know Hunt. Was he also just indicating his utter cynicism, as the taking of the assignment in the first place might suggest? Or could he possibly have secretly been attempting to sabotage the company's efforts--was he trying to set off alarm bells among the review editors to whom the piece would be submitted?

That last does, I grant you, seem unlikely. But people's relationships to cigarettes--and thus to cigarette companies--are often complicated. Take as an example this passage from Luc Sante's spectacular, nigh-erotic paean to cigarettes, "Our Friend the Cigarette," available in his recent collection, Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces 1990-2005 (2007):

Nowadays no one will really defend smoking, even the most unregenerate addicts being inclined now and then to sermonize against their filthy habit. Hardly anyone wishes to dignify the appalling cynicism of the tobacco cartels and their decades of suppressing facts and falsifying statistics. When you see a tract issued by a smokers' rights group, you can be sure that it originated either in the public-relations department of a cigarette manufacturer or else somewhere on the coldly literal-minded fringe of the libertarian movement.

And yet . . .

Maybe there are ex-smokers out there who feel uncomplicated relief at having quit. I doubt there are very many, though. Your cigarette was a friend--the sort of friend parents and teachers warned you against, who would lead you down dark alleys and leave you holding the bag when things went wrong--but a friend nevertheless. It's terribly sad that you can't enjoy a smoke now and again without tumbling into the whirlpool of perdition, the way you can take a glass of spirits on the weekend with no danger that by Monday you will end up filtering the shoe polish after exhausting the cooking sherry.

I wonder whether David Hunter was a smoker . . . in 1986, a man following the sometimes lonely, hand-to-mouth existence that is the life of a freelance writer, taking a distasteful job from a cigarette company to pay the bills? My bet's on the butts.

Conversation: A Declining Art?, Part Two

Part one, which is full of praise for the first two-thirds of the book, is here.

In the last third of Conversation: A Declining Art , Stephen Miller attempts to track what he perceives as the decline of conversation in twentieth-century America. He begins with a flat and fairly perfunctory consideration of the laconic hero in twentieth-century American literature and film. But while he points to Hemingway and John Wayne in order to demonstrate that the strong, silent type was the American ideal in this period, he ignores substantial contrary evidence, everything from screwball comedies to the golden age of radio to Dorothy Parker.

He uses evidence selectively like that throughout the closing chapters. The worst is when Miller attempts to blame the most recent downturn in the quality and place of conversation in American life on fifties and sixties counterculture. He considers Easy Rider at length, then spends more time than anyone ought to spend these days on Norman Mailer. His critique boils down to this: neither privileging visceral experience nor doing drugs makes for good conversation. That’s not news (Garry Wills, for one, manages a much more interesting and nuanced critique of those aspects of sixties youth culture, in passing, in Nixon Agonistes), and by using that as the crux of his argument Miller takes ignores the fact that the late sixties were also a time of contentious private and public discussions about how society should be structured. Serious conversations, in groups large and small, were central to that reconsideration.

Then we get pages and pages on possibly the most over-analyzed subject since Madonna, talk shows, and suddenly we’re back to “conversation avoidance mechanisms.” I’ll spare you the details; as I said before, anyone who willfully misrepresents the purpose of an iPod as a barrier to conversation has no authority to speak on the subject.

But once Miller gets to the present, the details are less important. The real reason his arguments about conversation’s decline fail is that he's writing about our era, and I think he’s flat-out wrong. I live in a world of great conversation. No, I don’t want to talk to strangers on planes, or on the L (though I'm a shameless eavesdropper), and I don’t spend time chatting with strangers in coffeehouses or bars. But within my circle of friends and family, conversation is the basis of our relationship. When my friends get together, we talk. We cook and talk, we eat dinner and talk, we have drinks and talk. We tell stories, discuss work and family life, talk politics. When we go to baseball games—or when we watch the playoffs at my house throughout October—we analyze the game, gossip about the players, and chat. Even when we watch a TV show, it’s frequently a group event, and we talk and talk about the show afterwards. I don’t think we’re that unusual.

One of my favorite adult memories is of a night in January of 2005 when my parents were in town and we invited half a dozen friends to dinner. Dinner turned into an hours-long conversation, running well past bedtime, about our perplexity over George Bush’s reelection. My parents brought a downstate, rural perspective; most of their neighbors had voted for Bush. My friends and I came at the question as residents of the city that had given Kerry his largest plurality. The conversation was impassioned, serious, and interesting. It was a real attempt, by all of us, to understand something we feared was inexplicable. I think we all experienced the exhilaration that Hazlitt describes following a good talk, “feelings lighter and more ethereal than I have at any other time.”

And, while there are plenty of times when I am an awkward conversationalist, I have friends whose conversational facility, with everyone and in every situation, regularly amazes me. This description by Hazlitt of his friend, painter James Northcote, could easily apply to my friend Becky:

He lends his ear to an observation as if you have brought him a piece of news and enters into it with as much avidity and earnestness as if it interested himself personally. . . . His thoughts bubble up and sparkle like heads on old wine. The fund of anecdote, the collection of curious particulars, is enough to set up any common retailer of jests that dines out every day; but these are not strung together like a row of galley-slaves, but are always introduced to illustrate some argument or bring out some fine distinction of character.

I greatly admire, deeply envy, and hopelessly aspire to her talents as a conversationalist. And I have many other friends like her.

Maybe Miller doesn’t have such friends. Maybe he’s stuck in an academic environment, where talk, as in the novels of Barbara Pym or Ivy Compton-Burnett, can be more combat than conversation. Maybe he is paying too much attention to young people and teenagers—as, it seems, do many cultural commentators—forgetting that, while they’re certainly different from us adults, they’ll also soon, as adults, be different from what they are now. They might turn out to be able to have good conversations, even with a curmudgeon like Miller.

I’m not saying the state of conversation in America is perfect, but just as the golden age was never that golden, the fallen present is certainly brighter than Miller makes it out to be. If he’s ever in town, I’ll gladly introduce him to people who, I hope, will make him see my side. I’ll gladly make the martinis and sit back and listen.

Conversation: A Declining Art?

In the Introduction to his Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, Stephen Miller decries the rise of “conversation avoidance mechanisms,” by which he means such devices as iPods and video games. I picture his grandchildren rolling their eyes as he tells them, “Don’t bring any of those conversation avoidance mechanisms to my house!” Such an intentional, perverse misunderstanding of the reasons people use—and like—such devices served to make me skeptical of Miller’s credibility from the start, which is not how you want to start reading a book.

For more than two-thirds of its 300 pages, however, Conversation is great fun, a digressive, anecdotal history of the role of conversation in Western society. Miller begins in ancient times, with the Bible (which is nearly devoid of actual conversation), then the Greeks and, in particular, Plato’s Symposium, which tells of a drunken conversation after a dinner party gets out of hand: “There was noise everywhere, and all order was abandoned; everyone was forced to drink vast amounts of wine.” I’ve been to a fair number of parties like that, but none has produced any conversation as odd and fascinating as the one recorded in the Symposium. Socrates seems to be a necessary catalyst. As Miller says,

Socrates is an unsettling conversationalist. . . . Alcibiades describes his mixed feelings about Socrates: “Often I’ve felt I’d be glad to see him removed from the human race; but if this did happen, I know well I’d be much more upset. I just don’t know how to deal with this person.”

You simply never knew where a conversation with Socrates might end up. In that regard, Plato’s reconstructions of his dialogues frequently resemble late-night dorm-room conversations, with vastly more rigor, and without that one evangelical Christian kid who always ruined everything.

The discussion of Greek conversation is really just a prelude to the heart of the book—and Miller’s area of expertise—the eighteenth century, “the age of conversation.” It’s the era of the Paris salon and of the coffeehouse in Britain. It’s the time of Dr. Johnson, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, and William Hazlitt. For the intellectual men of London, coffeehouses were second homes, offices, and debating halls, and Miller gives a good sense of their place and their ambience. A French visitor to London writes,

Some coffee houses are a resort for . . . scholars and for wits; others are the resort of dandies or of politicians, or again of professional newsmongers; and many others are temples of Venus.

As that suggests, coffee wasn’t the point of the coffeehouse, of course, just as in coffeehouses today. The men were there to talk, hash out ideas, and engage with the thinkers of the age—and often, it seems, to complain about them to one another. Of the poet Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole says,

He is the worst company in the world—from a melancholy turn, from living reclusively, and from a little too much dignity, he never converses easily—all his words are measured, and chosen, and formed into sentences; his writings are admirable; he himself is not agreeable.”

And Johnson agrees,

Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where. He was dull in a new way, and that made people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.

It’s hard not to assume that most coffeehouse conversations were, like most bar conversations today, full of blowhards spouting ill-informed opinions. But there was clearly greatness there, too, at least on occasion. As Johnson, no fan of fools, told Boswell, “For spending three pence in a coffee house, you may be for hours in very good company.” On a good day, the company must have been impressive, from Hazlitt, with whom, it seems, everyone eventually quarreled (“Hazlitt suffered for his lack of politeness. He once said: ‘I want to know why everybody has such a dislike of me.’”) to Thomas De Quincey, of whom Jane Welsh Carlyle said, “What one would give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk!”

Throughout this section, Conversation is a truly wonderful book. Miller isn’t trying very hard to make an argument; he simply wants to plunge us into the intellectual and social life of the eighteenth century, and he does so with the texture, color, and goofy detail available only to someone who’s read deeply and widely in the period. We learn that John Adams described the life of Benjamin Franklin as “a Scene of constant dissipation,” and that Boswell, to cure a hangover, went to the King’s Arms Coffee House and ate “a basin of gravy soup, and a basin of pease soup.” Conversation is exactly the sort of writing that made me start this blog; without the blog, I would at some point have been unable to avoid reading aloud to friends the argument of an anti-coffee pamphleteer, who wrote that

The excessive use of that newfangled, abominable, heathenish liquor called coffee . . . [has] so eunuched our husbands, and crippled our more kind gallants, that they are become as impotent as age.

But then Miller enters the twentieth century and begins to attempt to put forth an argument rather than just retailing anecdotes, and the book goes off the rails. As this post is already too long, I’ll explain more tomorrow.

On monarchs, in spirit if not in fact

From William Hazlitt’s “On the Spirit of Monarchy,” published in The Liberal, 1823, collected in The Pleasure of Hating (2005)

We make kings of common men, and are proud of our own handy-work. We take a child from his birth, and we agree, when he grows up to be a man, to heap the highest honours of the state upon him, and to pay the most devoted homage to his will. Is there any thing in the person, “any mark, any likelihood,” to warrant this sovereign awe and dread? No: he may be little better than an idiot, little short of a madman, and yet he is no less qualified for king.

From an an interview the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag conducted with George W. Bush on May 7, 2006, Bush's response to the question, "What was the most wonderful moment in your terms of being President so far?"

The best moment was—you know, I've had a lot of great moments. I don't know, it's hard to characterize the great moments. They've all been busy moments, by the way. I would say the best moment was when I caught a seven-and-a-half pound large mouth bass on my lake. (Laughter.)

From William Hazlitt’s “On the Spirit of Monarchy”

There is a cant among court-sycophants of calling all those who are opposed to them “the rabble,” “fellows,” “miscreants,” &c. . . . Whatever is opposed to power, they think despicable; whatever suffers oppression, they think deserves it. They are ever ready to side with the strong, to insult and trample on the weak.

From the New York Times, December 20, 2005

Mr. Bush strongly hinted that the government was beginning a leak investigation into how the existence of the program was disclosed. It was first revealed in an article published on the New York Times Web site on Thursday night, though some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists had been omitted.

From William Hazlitt’s “On the Spirit of Monarchy”

The worthlessness of the object does not diminish but irritate the propensity to admire. It serves to pamper our imagination equally, and does not provoke our envy. All we want is to aggrandize our own vain-glory at second hand; and the less of real superiority or excellence there is in the person we fix upon as our proxy in this dramatic exhibition, the more easily can we change places with him, and fancy ourselves as good as he.

From Hardball, May 1, 2003, collected at MediaMatters.org

CHRIS MATTHEWS: The president there—look at this guy! We're watching him. He looks like he flew the plane. He only flew it as a passenger, but he's flown—

PAT CADDELL: He looks like a fighter pilot.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: He looks for real. What is it about the commander in chief role, the hat that he does wear, that makes him—I mean, he seems like—he didn't fight in a war, but he looks like he does.

From William Hazlitt’s “On the Spirit of Monarchy”

The more absurd the fiction, the louder was the noise made to hide it—the more mischievous its tendency, the more did it excite all the frenzy of the passions. . . . There was nothing so odious or contemptible but it found a sanctuary in the more odious and contemptible perversity of human nature. The barbarous Gods of antiquity reigned in contempt of their worshippers!

From USA Today, October 1, 2005

[Bush’s] sunny presentation of the situation in Iraq is part of a renewed push by the administration to win support for the war effort from an increasingly reluctant American public.

It conflicts with the news from Iraq and some assessments from top commanders.

From William Hazlitt’s “On the Spirit of Monarchy”

Really, that men born to a throne should employ the brief span of their existence here in doing all the mischief in their power, in levying cruel wars and undermining the liberties of the world, to prove to themselves and others that their pride and passions are of more consequence than the welfare of mankind at large, would seem a little astonishing, but that the fact is so.

From Time, May 1, 2006

Presidential advisers believe that by putting pressure on Iran, Bush may be able to rehabilitate himself on national security, a core strength that has been compromised by a discouraging outlook in Iraq. "In the face of the Iranian menace, the Democrats will lose," said a Republican frequently consulted by the White House. However, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll this April 8-11, found that 54% of respondents did not trust Bush to "make the right decision about whether we should go to war with Iran."

The Pleasures of Biography

From Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755)

Biographer: A writer of lives, a relator not of the history of nations, but of the actions of particular persons.
"Our Grubstreet biographers watch for the death of a great man like so many undertakers, on purpose to make a penny of him."—Addison's Freeholders, No. 35

From Javier Marias's Written Lives (2005)

When Malcolm Lowry got into trouble in 1946 during his second stay in Mexico and, in an attempt not to be expelled from the country, asked the sub-chief of the Immigration department in Acapulco what there was against him from his previous visit in 1938, the government employee took out a file, tapped it with one finger and said: "Drunk, Drunk, Drunk. Here is your life." These words are as brutal as they are exact, and perhaps, on more compassionate lips, the right word would have been "calamitous," because Lowry does seem to have been the most calamitous writer in the whole history of literature, which is no mean feat, given the intense competition in the field.

From John Aubrey's Brief Lives (169?)

Thomas Chaloner had a trick some times to goe into Wesminster-hall in a morning in Term-time, and tell some strange story (Sham) and would come thither again about 11 or 12 to have the pleasure to heare how it spred; and sometime it would be altered, with additions, he could scarce know it to be his owne. He was neither proud nor covetous, nor a hypocrite, nor apt to do injustice, but apt to revenge

After the restauration of King Charles the Second, he kept the Castle at the Isle of Man, where he had a pretty Wench that was his Concubine; where when Newes was brought to him that there were some come to the Castle to demaund it for his Majestie, he spake to his Girle to make him a Possett, into which he putt, out of a paper he had, some Poyson, which did, in a very short time, make him fall a vomiting exceedingly; and after some time vomited nothing but Bloud. His Retchings were so violent that the Standers by were much grieved to behold it. Within three howres he dyed. The Demandants of the Castle came and sawe him dead: he was swoln so extremely that they could not see any eie he had, and no more of his nose than the tip of it, which shewed like a wart, and his Coddes were swoln as big as one's head.

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

The very next afternoon, shortly after returning to [the school] Les Roches, Alex started vomiting blood. The nurse at the school infirmary told him that "nobody vomits blood" and that he'd probably eaten too much currant jelly.

From Javier Marias's Written Lives (2005)

According to contemporary accounts, Rimbaud never changed his clothes and therefore smelled disgusting, left any bed he slept in full of lice, drank constantly (preferably absinthe), and rewarded his acquaintances with nothing but impertinence and insults.

From William Hazlitt's "The Indian Juggler" (1821), reprinted in On the Pleasure of Hating

Ingenuity is genius in trifles, greatness is genius in undertakings of much pith and moment. A clever or ingenious man is one who can do any thing well, whether it is worth doing or not; a great man is one who can do that which when done is of the highest importance. Themistocles said he could not play on the flute, but that he could make of a small city a great one. This gives a pretty good idea of the distinction in question. . . . John Hunter was a great man. That anyone might see without the smallest skill in surgery. His style and manner shewed the man. He would set about cutting up the carcase of a whale with the same greatness of gusto that Michael Angelo would have hewn a block of marble. Lord Nelson was a great naval commander, but for myself, I have not much opinion of a sea-faring life. Sir Humphry Davy was a great chemist, but I am not sure he is a great man. I am not a bit the wiser for one of his discoveries, nor I never met with any one that was.

From Javier Marias's Written Lives (2005)

Lowry did not make a very good impression during his stay in Ronda and especially in Granada: at the time, although still very young, he was fat, drank wine all the time, and insisted on wearing huge Cordoban hats of a kind that no one has ever worn. In Granada he soon became known as "the drunken Englishman;" people poked fun and the Guardia Civil were also keeping an eye on him. [Conrad] Aiken's wife remembers Lowry walking around the city surrounded by a troop of children who were all laughing at him and whom he was unable to shake off.

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

Throughout these innocent adventures she had retained much of the anarchic extravagance of her Soviet youth: upon entering a restaurant and seeing a group of her friends at the other end of a crowded room, she had simply jumped onto a table and leaped from table to table until she reached her pals, impervious to any disturbance she might cause to the diners on the way.

From Javier Marias's Written Lives (2005)

It is hardly surprising that Djuna Barnes should have considered her first name as so unequivocally hers when Anais Nin took the liberty of using it, for most of the names in her family seem to have been chosen precisely so that no one else could usurp them. Suffice it to say that among her own siblings and ancestors were the following extravagant examples, which, in many cases, do not even give a clue as to the gender of the person bearing them: Urlan, Niar, Unade, Reon, Hinda, Zadel, Gaybert, Culmer, Kilmeny, Thurn, Zendon, Saxon, Shangar, Wald, and Llewellyn. At least the last name is recognized in Wales. Perhaps it is understandable that, on reaching adulthood, some members of the Barnes family adopted banal nicknames like Bud or Charlie.

From David Riggs's The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004)

During the months leading up to Marlowe's murder in a hired room near London, the pamphleteer Robert Greene publicly predicted that if the "famous gracer of tragedians" did not repent his blasphemies, God would soon strike him down. A few days before Marlowe was killed, the spy Richard Baines informed the Queen's Privy Council that he was a proselytizing atheist, a counterfeiter, and a consumer "of boys and tobacco."

From Javier Marias's Written Lives (2005)

Adah Isaacs Menken had numerous lovers, some of whom, inevitably, were writers, such as Alexandre Dumas pere at the end of his days and that masochistic poet par excellence, Algernon Charles Swinburne, that tiny red-haired, Victorian, homosexual drunkard, addicted to the whip.

From Anthony Powell's review of Rare Sir William Davenant, by Mary Edmond, collected in Some Poets, Artists, and "A Reference for Mellors" (2005)

Miss Edmond has been extremely ingenious in digging out material about Davenant; in fact one is staggered by her research, which proves the point that scholarly biography is by far the most entertaining kind. Davenant, as might be expected, was not very good at paying his tailor, who sued him (though Davenant continued to have his clothes made there), which leads to a lot of relevant information.

From "The Life and Times of John Aubrey," (1949) by Oliver Lawson Dick, in the David R. Godine edition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives

Having decided to write a life, Aubrey selected a page in one of his notebooks and jotted down as quickly as possible everything that he could remember about the character concerned: his friends, his appearance, his actions, his books, and his sayings. Any facts or dates that did not occur to him on the spur of the moment were left blank, and as Aubrey was so extremely sociable that he was usually suffering from a hangover when he came to put pen to paper, the number of these omissions was often very large.

On the job

From James Salter’s Solo Faces (1979)

A breed of aimless wanderers can be found in California, working as mason’s helpers, carpenters, parking cars. They somehow keep a certain dignity, they are surprisingly unashamed. It’s one thing to know their faces will become lined, their plain talk stupid, that they will be crushed in the end by those who stayed in school, bought land, practiced law. Still, they have an infuriating power, that of condemned men. They can talk to anybody, they can speak the truth.

From Richard Aleas’s Little Girl Lost (2004)

I thought about all the other bruises I’d gotten over the past half decade of working for Leo, that and the other threats, the fights I’d only narrowly talked my way out of, the dirt I’d dug up on people who’d wanted to keep it hidden. How had I ended up doing this for a living? Around the time Miranda had been making plans to become a doctor, what was it I thought I’d be doing? I couldn’t remember, but it wasn’t this. I did remember the day I met Leo and the day I joined him full-time because it was either that or go to work for an Internet company, and I still had some self-respect.

From William Hazlitt’s The Indian Jugglers (1821), collected in On the Pleasure of Hating

[Seeing the Indian juggler] makes me ashamed of myself. I ask what there is that I can do as well as this? Nothing. What have I been doing all my life? Have I been idle, or have I nothing to shew for all my labours and pains? Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them? Is there no one thing in which I can challenge competition, that I can bring as an instance of exact perfection, in which others cannot find a flaw? The utmost I can pretend to do is write a description of what this fellow can do. I can write a book: so can many others who have not even learned to spell. What abortions are these Essays! What errors, what ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is made out, and that little how ill! Yet they are the best I can do. I endeavour to recollect all I have ever observed or thought upon a subject, and to express it as nearly as I can.

From James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1951)

"And remember," Warden said. "Mon-Sewer O'Hayer says you got to straighten up this mess sometime today."

"Your face," Leva said.

"Your mother's box," Milt said. "Get to work."

Accounts receivable, or thoughts of life and death

Andrew Delbanco, Herman Melville: His World and Work

In one of [Melville’s books], Isaac Disraeli’s The Literary Character, [Melville’s widow] Lizzie marked the following passage by Disraeli’s widow: “My ideas of my husband . . . are so much associated with his books, that to part with them would be as it were breaking some of the last ties which still connect me with so beloved an object. The being in the midst of books he has been accustomed to read, and which contain his marks and notes, will still give him a sort of existence with me.”

On Herman’s desk she placed the precious bread box containing his unpublished manuscripts, from which she would extract a poem or two, or a few pages of [the then unpublished] Billy Budd, to show to some interested guest.

Ecclesiasticus 41:1-3

O death, how bitter is the remembrance of thee to a man that liveth at rest in his possessions, unto the man that hath nothing to vex him, and that hath prosperity in all things: yea, unto him that is yet able to receive meat!

O death, acceptable is thy sentence unto the needy, and unto him whose strength faileth, that is now in the last age, and is vexed with all things, and to him that despaireth, and hath lost patience!

Fear not the sentence of death, remember them that have been before thee, and that come after; for this is the sentence of the Lord over all flesh.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, Timothy, or Notes of an Abject Reptile

Is death so fearsome that it must be undone? Is this life so poor a thing? Is not eternity somewhat too long?
Theirs is a niggardly faith, withal. Parishioners believe only as much as will save the humans among them. Never mind the rest of creation. Unwilling to distinguish the dead from the living. But eager to set apart the rest of creation.

He rises to the pulpit. God’s family, he says, is numberless. “comprehending the whole race of mankind.” And only the race of mankind. Thereby cutting off most of creation.

But numberless is not the race of mankind. Numberless is the race of beetles. Numberless are “the most insignificant insects and reptiles.” Flying ants that swarm by millions in this garden. Armies of aphids falling in showers over the village. Palmer-worms hanging by threads from the oaks. Shoals of shell-snails. the earthworms. Mighty, Mr. Gilbert White avers, in their effect on the economy of nature. Yet excluded from the family of god.

William Hazlitt, "The Fight" (1822), collected in On the Pleasure of Hating

Even a highwayman, in the way of trade, may blow out your brains, but if he uses foul language at the same time, I should say he was not a gentleman.

Don't worry, folks. These selections aren't signs of a creeping morbidity or melancholy. I just happened to come across all of them yesterday and thought I'd group them.