Trollope goes digital, Borges goes ghostly, Donne goes on a peace mission

Not a lot of time tonight, so all I've got for you is a collection of odds and ends.

1 In all the writing about Trollope I've been doing this summer, I've neglected to mention Penguin's great new Trollope site, created with the help of the Trollope Society. It's everything such a site should be--especially for a writer as prolific as Trollope--giving a brief synopsis of each novel and major character, information about his Barset and Palliser sequences, and biographical information about Trollope. A particularly nice touch are the eye-catching (though slightly too contemporary?) cartoon renderings of Trollope's characters. But surely Phineas Finn didn't really look as horrid as this?

I also learned from the site that Trollope thought that the ending of Phineas Finn was a bit abrupt and unsatisfying, as did I. In his Autobiography, Trollope admitted:

It is all fairly good except the ending,--as to which till I got to it I had made no provision. As I fully intended to bring my hero again into the world, I was wrong to marry him to a simple pretty Irish girl, who could only be felt as an encumbrance on such return.

If I may be allowed to absurdly mix eras and forms: the ending reminded me of the end of Don Knotts's great comedy The Love God?, wherein Knotts's character ends up not with the vivacious career woman (and bombshell) he's been seeing, but with the lovely young lady from his hometown who has been patiently waiting--and who is as dull as paste. It makes sense for the ethical arc of the story, but it's impossible to believe and makes no damn sense on any other level.

2 I learned about the Trollope site through the ReadySteadyBook blog, where I was involved in the following exchange after blogger Mark Thwaite ended his post by asking if he should give Trollope a try:

Stephen Mitchelmore: No!

Mark Thwaite: Sage, succinct advice as ever, sir!

Levi Stahl: I totally disagree with Stephen Mitchelmore: Yes!

The Palliser novels provide insight into politics, strongly drawn characters--including several fully realized, sympathetic portrayals of strong-willed women--and a drawn-out, sensitive depiction of a marriage of two very different partners who despite their differences (and the strictures placed on them by society) are essentially equals.

Trollope doesn't have the humor of Dickens, the godlike sympathy and understanding of Tolstoy, the fire of Dostoevsky, or the piercing aphoristic insight of George Eliot, but his attention to his characters and the realities of their world make him well worth reading.

Stephen Mitchelmore: But Levi, we do share the same reasons!

3 In With Borges, which I wrote about the other day, Alberto Manguel mentions that he's just one of many people who, over the years, served as readers for the blind master. I imagine them reuniting once a year in a secret library, an invisible college of readers conjuring the Borges who is not in the library, the lost Borges, the one who, in "Borges and I," writes:

It's Borges, the other one, that things happen to. I walk through Buenos Aires and I pause--mechanically now, perhaps--to gaze at the arch of an entryway and its inner door; news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson; Borges shares those preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrements of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that our relationship is hostile--I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can spin out his literature, and that literature is my justification.

At the end of a long evening of wine and talk, during which they've tricked him into lowering his guard, the Borges they conjure is swiftly trapped between two covers and filed away in an obscure, rarely visited section of this already obscure library.

As the years mount, and death slowly winnows the circle of readers, the Borges they conjure becomes less solid; what was at their first meeting a gargantuan reference book becomes, by their last, perhaps a single line of poetry.

4 After writing about Borges's admonition to his nephew ("If you behave, I'll give you permission to think of a bear."), I thought that Borges might have enjoyed my favorite Victor Borge joke, which I heard him deliver to a young whippersnapper on the Jack Benny Show:

Borge: How old are you?

Whippersnapper: I'm six!

Borge: Shame on you! When I was your age, I was twice that old!

5 Having written recently about the Thirty Years War, I was surprised to learn yesterday from John Stubbs's John Donne: The Reformed Soul (2007) that Donne served as chaplain to the delegation that King James sent to Frederick and Ferdinand, the chief warring parties, in 1619. The mission, however, was doomed from the start, as it had been

entirely seeded and nurtured by a Spanish subterfuge. Spain's great aim in the Bohemian crisis was to keep England from sending military and financial aid to the Protestant rebels: the neutrality desired by the Spanish was assured by massaging King James's diplomatic ego. The great Machiavellian Spanish ambassador, the Count of Gondomar, reassured his masters that "the vanity of the present King of England is so great that he will always think it of great importance that peace should be obtained by his means, so that his authority may be increased."

Actually that's the sense I get of the whole war: if you were involved, you were probably being double-crossed.

For his part, Donne in the years to come would be a strong voice against English involvement in the war, despite anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish public sentiment. Donne surely took up that position at least in part because it was the position of the King, in whose good graces Donne needed to stay--but it's also not hard to trace that preference to Donne's youthful memories of the horrors of war and his seeming general distaste for sectarianism and the violence it often entailed.

6 Finally, it seems fitting to follow Donne, the poet of love in secular and religious guises, to a couple of fun throwaway lines from Lawrence Block's Grifter's Game (1961):

I lighted her cigarette. She was poised and cool but not at all subtle. She leaned forward to take the light and to give me a look at large breasts harnessed by a lacy black bra. Eve learned that one the day they got dressed and moved out of Eden. It has been just as effective ever since.

Borges's memory, memories of Borges

{Henri Rousseau, Tiger in a Tropical Storm (Surprised!), 1891}

On a night in the mid-1960s, as a young Alberto Manguel read aloud to Jorge Luis Borges from Kipling's stories, Borges lamented,

What a pity not to have been born a tiger.

I think we can be pardoned for being glad that he didn't get his wish.


{Borges in the Hotel Beaux, Paris, 1969}

As a sixteen-year-old in 1964, Manguel became another in a long line of readers who supplied Borges with his necessary daily allowance of those words he could no longer see, and he's gathered his memories of those evenings into a slim book, With Borges (2006). Simultaneously a book of anecdotes and a meditation on Borges and his work, it's a charming, pleasant little book--the sort of book I wish were available for every writer I love. (Just how unobtrusive was Anthony Powell as he watched his contemporaries at parties? What did Haruki Murakami talk about with his patrons and his fellow clerks when he worked in a record store? How irritating--or frustrating--was Casanova for his male friends?)

The Borges that Manguel presents is not unfamiliar or surprising. We encounter yet again his odd reading tastes--in some sense arrested in a precocious adolescence--the Kipling, Chesterton, Homer, Dante, Stevenson, Cervantes that he read over and over again. We are reminded of his unusual reading prejudices:

One could construct a perfectly acceptable history of literature consisting only of the authors Borges rejected: Goethe, Rabelais, Flaubert (except the first chapter of Bouvard et Pechuchet), Calderon, Stendhal, Zweig, Maupassant, Boccaccio, Proust, Zola, Balzac, Galdos, Lovecraft, Edith Wharton, Neruda, Alejo Carpentier, Thomas Mann, Garcia Marquez, Amado, Tolstoi, Lope de Vega, Lorca, Pirandello.

Even after Tolstoy, there are half a dozen or so of my favorites there (and then there's the one that's most surprising to me, Maupassant, whose style and subjects I would have expected to resonate with Borges). But it was a matter, he explained in an interview, of simply reading what he liked:

I am a pleasure-seeking reader: I've never allowed my sense of duty to have a hand in such a personal matter as that of buying books.

I think Borges is being somewhat disingenuous there: his reading carried with it a whiff of the obsessional as well, and obsessions, though they may begin in pleasure, rarely end there. Yet it's hard to criticize Borges's choices: as readers we are all riddled with holes, gaps intentional or unintentional, and almost no one has drawn on his reading as fruitfully as Borges, reading and rereading and interpreting and distilling books until they became something totally new.

What Manguel gives us instead of a new view of Borges is a more intimate view--still focused on books, because books were Borges, it seems--a fascinating glimpse of his conversation and passing comments. We learn that he was never satisfied with his story "Shakespeare's Memory," one of my favorites, and that he felt he had never quite honored its inspiration, which was an overheard line in a dream: "I will sell you the memory of Shakespeare." After revealing that Borges asserted the questionable proposition that a writer should not be so impolite as to surprise the reader, Manguel points out, rightly, that Borges, instead, sought conclusions

that were astonishing but obvious. Recalling that Ulysses, tired of prodigies, wept for love at the sight of his green Ithaca, he concluded: "Art should be like that Ithaca--of green eternity, not of prodigies."

Following a discussion of the lost Library of Alexandria--a loss which one would expect a librarian and bibliophile to include among eternity's great laments--Borges explained that

The number of themes, of words, of texts, is limited. Therefore nothing is ever lost. If a book is lost, then someone will write it again, eventually. That should be enough immortality for anyone.

Presumably the Library at Alexandria didn't serve double duty the way that we learn Borges's personal library did: when he found himself with currency, he would tuck it into various books; when he needed money, he would pluck books from the shelves until he found some. {Side note: the book collection as bank, an organizational schema I failed to consider.} Perhaps that was simply another aspect of the playful side of Borges, which appears again and again, as when Manguel reports that Borges

once recited the "Our Father" in Old English, in a crumbling Saxon chapel near Dr. Johnson's Lichfield, "to give God a little surprise."

I suppose it's okay to surprise God--after all, such opportunities are surely rare, and thus such a surprise wouldn't be the cheap shot that surprising one's readers would be.

But the best of playful Borges, and probably my favorite moment in the book, the one I'll recall the other anecdotes and opinions have been forgotten, is an admonition by Borges to his five- or six-year-old nephew:

If you behave, I'll give you permission to think of a bear.

It's Borges at his cleverest and lightest--and yet that line also hints at the essence of his art. Thought is all, subjectivity is can nearly create its own realities--and even the simplest statement can be momentarily dislocating. It reminds me of his "Argumentum Ornithologicaum," collected in Dreamtigers (1964):

I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a second or perhaps less; I don't know how many birds I saw. Were they a definite or an indefinite number? This problem involves the question of the existence of God. If God exists, the number is definite, because how many birds I saw is known to God. If God does not exist, the number is indefinite, because nobody was able to take count. In this case, I saw fewer than ten birds (let's say) and more than one; but I did not see nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between ten and one, but not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc. That number, as a whole number, is inconceivable; ergo, God exists.

{Photo by rocketlass}

Sometimes, just as an elephant cannot not be thought of, one may actually need permission to think of a bear.

I'll close with Manguel's account of what could be taken as Borges's ethos:

He believed, against all odds, that our moral duty was to be happy, and he believed that happiness could be found in books, even though he was unable to explain why this was so. "I don't know exactly why I believe that a book brings us the possibility of happiness," he said, "but I am truly grateful for that modest miracle."

Its intentionally limited compass could certainly be argued with--in my morally healthiest moments, I'd replace happiness there with justice--but at the end of a night of passing happily from one book to another book to another book as thunderstorms rumble in the background, I'll gladly adopt it, however temporarily, as my own.