"Our speeches in the day time cause our phantasy to work upon the like in our sleep," or, In dreams

"I had dreams, not nightmares but musical dreams, dreams about transparent questions . . . "--from Amulet, by Roberto Bolano

1 I was reading Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which I've not read.

"I think dreams have a great many sorts of explanation. Once the Freud virus has, as it were, got into you, you keep on looking at things in that way. But surely there's a lot of pure accident in dreams. One has kinds of obsessions and fears that can't be given a sexual meaning. I think the inventiveness and details of dreams are amazing."--from From a Small Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris Murdoch

2 I am playing basketball with the Chicago Bulls. I take a pass and fling up an outside shot, which misses abysmally. I turn around to find Michael Jordan shaming me by wagging a long finger, while Dennis Rodman is doubled over, gripping his knees in helpless laughter.

"The Atlantes, according to my sources, never eat any living thing, and never dream, either."--from The Histories, by Herodotus

3 At my nephew's ninth birthday party I was surprised to notice two guests whose attendance I certainly had not expected: Marcel Proust and Eloise of the Plaza. I got the sense that they'd somehow been invited in error, that it was quite possible that they knew no one at the party aside from each other. That wasn't really a problem, however, as they gave the impression of being the sort of close friends who need little to no outside contact. Huddled together in a corner, they sipped from the tiny teacups of my niece's tea set and quietly shared private, gossipy jokes that caused them now and again to break out in skeins of poorly muffled giggles.

"I knew that in many dreams one must disregard the appearance of people, who may be disguised or may have exchanged faces with one another, like those mutilated saints on the fronts of cathedrals which have been repaired by ignorant archaeologists in a jumble of mismatched heads and bodies, attributes and names. Those we give to characters in our dreams can be misleading. The one we love can be recognized only by the quality of the pain we feel."--from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, by Marcel Proust

4 I am running a marathon in some anonymous but lovely European mountain town. The course, which winds through the narrow, wandering late-medieval streets of the town, is convoluted and difficult to follow, but that difficulty, in the early part of the race, is a help, giving my mind something to focus on aside from the details of my exertion. But around mile twelve I realize quite suddenly that I'm all alone, the body of fellow runners having silently slipped away somewhere along the course. It's clear that I've take a wrong turn and left the course behind. Worried, I look around, hoping to find a guide or a map. All I see is a quaint-looking pastry shop spilling a warm glow of candlelight onto the crooked sidewalk. I enter the pastry shop, conscious of the salty sweat caking my body, and, with apologies for my gross condition, I ask the baker whether he might happen to have a map of the marathon course. Smiling, he reaches into the display case and selects a cookie baked in the shape of an elephant balancing on a ball. He pokes a pudgy finger at the intricate lines that, pressed into the cookie, make up the design. In a voice tinged with a vaguely Germanic accent, he says, "You simply follow these lines." The cookie is a map of the route; the route forms the shape of an elephant balancing on a ball.

With a smile on my face and a cookie in hand, I leave the shop and begin to trot back toward the course.

"It is not much of a dream, considering the vast extent of the domains of dreamland, and their wonderful productions; it is only remarkable for being unusually restless, and unusually real. He dreams of lying there, asleep, and yet counting his companion's footsteps as he walks to and fro. He dreams that the footsteps die away into distance of time and of space, and that something touches him, and that something falls from his hand. Then something clinks and gropes about, and he dreams that he is alone for so long a time, that the lanes of light take new directions as the moon advances in her course. From succeeding unconsciousness he passes into a dream of slow uneasiness from cold; and painfully awakes to a perception of the lanes of light--really changed, much as he had dreamed--and Jasper walking among them, beating his hands and feet."--from The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Charles Dickens

5 One of the editors at my workplace had arranged for some prominent authors to give lectures on their craft to the entire office. First up were Ernest Hemingway and Joseph Conrad. They took turns speaking, and they actually had fairly interesting things to say about each other’s work. Hemingway was surprisingly self-effacing, and Conrad was exactly as I expected: formal, precise, and thoroughly serious.

It was only after I’d returned to my office following the lecture that I remembered that both Hemingway and Conrad were long dead. “Of course!” I thought. “Those must have been professional impersonators!”

I ran for the front desk, hoping to catch them before they left. Conrad was gone by the time I got there, but Hemingway was just stepping into the elevator. “Wait!” I shouted. “Who do you do when you’re not doing Hemingway?”

Hemingway turned. Then, smiling, he ripped off his mask, held it aloft, and jauntily shouted, "Yourcenar!”

"Against fearful and troublesome dreams, nightmare and such inconveniences, wherewith melancholy men are molested, the best remedy is to eat a light supper, and of such meats as are easy of digestion; no Hare, Venison, Beef, &c. not to lie on his back, not to meditate or think in the day time of any terrible objects, or especially talk of them before he goes to bed. For, as he said in Lucian after such conference, I seem to dream of Hecate, I can think of nothing but Hobgoblins; and, as Tully notes, for the most part our speeches in the day time cause our phantasy to work upon the like in our sleep, which Ennius writes of Homer: as a dog dreams of an hare, so do men dream on such subjects they thought on last."--from The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton

6 I was at the zoo, watching a gorilla very close up through the bars of his cage. He gave me a quizzical look, tugged at his earlobe, then pointed at my earlobes while mouthing the word, "Earring?" I stared for a second, then remembered that I was wearing a big, gold pirate-style hoop in each ear.

"There is no great difference, says Proust, between the memory of a dream and the memory of reality. When the sleeper awakes, this emissary of his habit assures him that his 'personality' has not disappeared with his fatigue."--from Proust, by Samuel Beckett

7 I am reading James Boswell's Life of Johnson and find a typo that somehow turns an ordinary sentence into some sort of prognostication about my brother's life. As I read it I am amused but impressed, and I remember that Johnson himself left a cryptic note about dreams and brothers in his diary. The entry for January 23, 1759, the day of his mother's funeral, includes the line, "The dream of my Brother I shall remember." Johnson's brother, Nathanael, had died at only twenty-four, a possible suicide; his sole surviving letter is an indictment of Samuel for his harsh treatment.

"It makes a difference whether your dreams usually come true or not. . . . See then if you can follow my example, and give a happy interpretation to your dream."--from a letter to Suetonius Tranquillus by Pliny the Younger

8 I was at Wrigley Field to watch a Cubs game, and, as game time approached, I got out my scorebook to take down the starting lineup. The public address announcer began to rattle off the Cubs lineup. "Leading off, and playing right field . . . a sesame ball." I wrote it down. "Batting second, and playing second base, a furry kitten." I wrote it down. "Batting third, and playing first base, Stacey Shintani." On hearing my wife's name, I threw down my pencil and exclaimed to my seatmate, "They're trying to throw this game!"

"My earliest memory is of a dream. It was in the house where we lived when I was three or four years of age. I dreamed I was asleep in the house in an upper room.

Then I awoke and came downstairs and stood in the living room. The lights were on in the living room, although it was hushed and empty. The usual dark green sofa and chairs stood along the usual pale green walls. It was the same old living room as ever, I knew it well, nothing was out of place. And yet it was utterly, certainly, different. Inside its usual appearance the living room was as changed as if it had gone mad."--from "Every Exit is an Entrance (A Praise of Sleep)," by Anne Carson

9 I was reading—and greatly enjoying—Anthony Powell's’s biography of Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy. It was only after I woke up that I remembered that Powell never wrote a biography of Burton; that was Nick Jenkins, the narrator of Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, who serves as Powell’s stand-in.

"In some ways a narrative is like a dream. You don't analyze a dream--you just pass through it. A dream is sometimes healing and sometimes makes you anxious. A narrative is just the same--you are just in it. A novelist is not an analyst. He just transforms one scene into another. A novelist is one who dreams wide awake. He decides to write and he sits down and dreams away, then wraps it into a package called fiction which allows other people to dream. Fiction warms the hearts and minds of the readers. So I believe that there is something deep and enduring in fiction, and I have learned to trust the power of narrative."--Haruki Murakami, from a lecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2005

10 I dreamed that Van Morrison was at a dinner party I was attending with about a dozen other friends. After dinner, he got up to play a few songs. He ran through a somewhat perfunctory "Moondance," then asked me if I would accompany him on vocals and guitar for a couple of numbers. I don't play guitar, and while I do like to sing, I'm far from a good singer. But, unwilling to refuse Van Morrison, I got up and faked my way through "The Way Young Lovers Do," strumming and singing along. I was sufficiently nervous that I forgot nearly half the lyrics, but Van sang them all beautifully.

Then he launched into Sam Cooke's "That's Where It's At," and suddenly everything was right: I happened across the right chords, was even able to throw in some simple, but convincing finger-picked flourishes, and Van and I sounded stunningly good singing together.

"He was also terrified with manifest warnings, both old and new, arising from dreams, auspices, and omens. He had never been used to dream before the murder of his mother. After that event, he fancied in his sleep that he was steering a ship, and that the rudder was forced from him: that he was dragged by his wife Octavia into a prodigiously dark place; and was at one time covered over with a vast swarm of winged ants, and at another, surrounded by the national images which were set up near Pompey's theatre, and hindered from advancing farther; that a Spanish jennet he was fond of, had his hinder parts so changed, as to resemble those of an ape, and having his head only left unaltered, neighed very harmoniously. The doors of the mausoleum of Augustus flying open of themselves, there issued from it a voice, calling on him by name."--from The Lives of the Twelve Caesars, by Suetonius

11 I was rereading Vladimir Nabokov's Laughter in the Dark, in the pages of which I encountered a book I hadn't noticed on my first reading: Ghost Whim, by Robin Anne Powter.

According to Nabokov's narrator, Ghost Whim is a cultural history of dreaming . . . but before I could learn what would happen if I read a nonexistent cultural history of dreaming inside an actual novel inside a dream, I woke up.

"Night comes when you least expect it. You are making dinner or working late, you look out the window and the sky is already dark. The arrival of night can be elusive, mysterious, and in the city we don't often see it, though we always know when it has fallen. In the country night takes its time. A glorious sunset might flag its approach, yet it seems we can never pinpoint its exact arrival. Nightfall is a subtle process."--from Acquainted with the Night, by Christopher Dewdney

Conrad and Powell

Anthony Powell fans who turn to Joseph Conrad's novella The Duel (one of the five novellas of that title that Melville House, in a clever gimmick, published together last week) will enjoy an amusing echo of Uncle Giles in the whinging of one of the two contestants. Conrad's tale concerns Feraud and D'Hubert, a pair of officers in Napoleon's army who, through the insane readiness of Feraud to take offense, spend more than decade of the Napoleonic Wars in an on-and-off duel. Or, rather, a perpetually on duel, one whose interstices are forced by circumstance: recovery from wounds, lack of proximity, or, in the case that calls Uncle GIles to mind, difference in rank. D'Hubert is promoted to colonel, which leaves Lieutenant Feraud unable to challenge him without rendering both men liable to court martial. Feraud, formerly a casual, even feckless soldier, felt "an urgent desire to get on" spring up in his breast. He

resolved in his mind to seize showy occasions and to court the favourable opinion of his chiefs like a mere worldling.

That in itself is not much like Uncle Giles, who didn't tend to court work or opinion of any sort. But this certainly is:

He began to make bitter allusions to "clever fellows who stick at nothing to get on." The army was full of them, he would say; you had only to look around. . . . Once he confided to an appreciative friend: "You see, I don't know how to fawn on the right sort of people. It isn't in my character."

The minute he gets his promotion, Feraud begins making the arrangements to meet D'Hubert at arms, for,

"I know my bird," he observed grimly. "If I don't look sharp he will take care to get himself promoted over the heads of a dozen men better than himself. He's got the knack for that sort of thing."

Powell was a staunch fan of Conrad, calling him "one of our greatest novelists" in a 1974 article, so it's not unreasonable to think that Feraud's cynical disdain played a part in the creation of Giles.

In a different article on Conrad, published in the Times Literary Supplement in 1947, occasioned by a two new volumes of biography, Powell draws out a couple of succinct distillations of Conrad's stance and concerns as a writer. One is constructed almost entirely from some lines from Razumov, the student from Under Western Eyes who, as Powell puts it, is "forced to play a shabby part through no particular fault of his own . . a favourite theme of Conrad's":

"As if anything could be changed!" thinsk Razumov. "In this world of men nothing can be changed--neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives--a futile game for arrogant philosophers and sanguinary trifles." This was the lesson Conrad himself had learnt.

Then there's this, which fruitfully compares Conrad to Kipling (an author to whose fundamental literary and imaginative qualities Powell, with his conservative leanings, is probably a better guide than many, able to judge with relative dispassion Kipling's achievements and failures; those of us on the left can then decide where to set the balance regarding other aspects):

Indeed, his informed distrust of pretentious claims to idealism and of pursuit of power masquerading as liberalism sets him apart form the mood of his literary contemporaries. . . . In this divergence he resembles Kipling--an author personally unsympathetic to him--who shares Conrad's respect for a sense of duty, his recognition of the practical difficulties of exercising command, and also, to some degree, his satirical attitude towards officials. Conrad is more sensitive than Kipling in handling the niceties of human character, but he does not possess Kipling's dexterity nor, perhaps, his imaginative powers. On the other hand Kipling--although his dislike for Peter Ivanovitch and his [anti-Tsarist terrorist] circle would in no way have fallen short of Conrad's--could never have achieved the objectivity of Under Western Eyes.

For the best distillation of Conrad's moral sensibility, however, you'll be best off turning to Conrad himself--and if you don't have time to read the whole of Victory, where it's given its most explicit treatment, then this brief passage of scene-setting from The Duel will suffice:

No man succeeds in everything he undertakes. In that sense we are all failures. The great point is not to fail in ordering and sustaining the effort of our life. In this matter vanity is what leads us astray. It hurries us into situations from which we must come out damaged; whereas pride is our safeguard, by the reserve which it imposes on the choice of our endeavour as much as by the virtue of its sustaining power.

I suppose as a key to Conrad, that passage could be faulted for lacking an explicit reference to honor and duty, but it's at least a good start.

Joseph Conrad

Now this is how you open a story:

Napoleon I, whose career had the quality of a duel against the whole of Europe, disliked duelling between the officers of his army. The great military emperor was not a swashbuckler, and had little respect for tradition.

Nevertheless, a story of duelling, which became a legend in the army, runs through the epic of imperial wars. To the surprise and admiration of their fellows, two officers, like insane artists trying to gild refined gold or paint the lily, pursued a private contest through the years of universal carnage. They were officers of cavalry, and their connection with the high-spirited but fanciful animal which carries men into battle seems particularly appropriate. It would be difficult to imagine for heroes of this legend two offices of infantry of the line, for example, whose fantasy is tamed by much walking exercise, and whose valour necessarily must be of a more plodding kind. As to gunners or engineers, whose heads are kept cool on a diet of mathematics, it is simply unthinkable.

That's how Joseph Conrad begins his novella The Duel. I know there are those who dislike Conrad's prose--Ha Jin, for example, has written that it "tends to be purple at the expense of immediacy and penetrativeness"--but I find it almost always suited to his aims at a particular moment. What better way to begin a somewhat ridiculous, satirical account of a decade-long running duel than with the gentle irony of these sentences? The opening sentence alone, with its almost immediate interpolation of opinion, instantly reveals a narrative voice at some remove, both temporally and intellectually, from his subject, the perfect location for a Conradian narrative voice. (It's the position in which we find Marlowe at times, Heart of Darkness aside--though his emotional connection to the stories he tells prevents him from ever being as wry as this opening.)

One of the pleasures of Conrad is that he feels almost inexhaustible: there are nearly twenty novels, a handful of memoirs, and countless short stories. A reader can pick up one or two each year, when the hot late summer breeze brings thoughts of distant islands, and not run out for a long time. Such a summer night is this one; I'm glad The Duel is here.

Dueling

{Photo by rocketlass.}

From Le Morte D'Arthur, by Sir Thomas Malory:

So that knight, Sir Pellinore, rode after Sir Tristram and required him of jousts. Then Sir Tristram smote him down and wounded him through the shoulder, and so he passed on his way. And on the next day following Sir Tristram met with pursuivants, and they told him that there was made a great cry of tournament between King Carados of Scotland the King of North Wales, and either should joust against other at the Castle of Maidens; and these pursuivants sought all the country after the good knights. . . . Then Sir Sagramore le Desirous rode after Sir Tristram, and made him to joust with him, and there Sir Tristram smote down Sir Sagramore le Desirous from his horse, and made his way.

As a belated birthday present, some friends took me and rocketlass to Medieval Times this weekend. Braving the Slough of Expressway and venturing into the uncharted Swamps of Suburbia, we hit upon Castle Schaumburg and, once there, enjoyed a throughly pleasant, if fundamentally ridiculous, evening of falconry, horse ballet, stage combat, and, yes, jousting.

I had read a bit of Malory that day in preparation, but I found myself thinking less of his endless catalog of combats than of Dorothy Dunnett. One of the most effective ways--to this untrained history dillettante--that Dunnett unmoors readers a bit from our own era is through her depiction of the deadly sporting contests in which her characters engage. Nearly every novel has one, and they range from the familiar (a fox hunt) to the somewhat familiar but ridiculously dangerous (a proto-polo, a castle-top game of soccer) to the absolutely ridiculous (a footrace across the moving oars of a galley, a drunken chase across city rooftops). In most of the games, at least one contestant dies, and the loss is essentially shrugged off: no one is blamed or held to account. Life, Dunnett convinces us, was cheaper then; people mourned their own as powerfully as we do today, but that sense of loss wasn't extended to strangers.

I also found myself thinking about Robert Massie's Peter the Great, because, along with weaponry, Medieval Times has a collection of medieval instruments. While they're presented (and presumably received by the majority of the patrons) as relatively uncharged artifacts of long-gone days, they're nonetheless horrifying and disturbing, their sick ingenuity a reminder that torture always goes beyond its (perceived) instrumentality and becomes its own end. In Peter the Great's reign, torture was commonplace, the regular response to murmurs of conspiracy, and Peter regularly required nobles to prove their loyalty by taking part in the torture and execution of the accused. Massie makes a fairly convincing case that Peter was by no means unusually cruel by the standards of his day, but that doesn't make even his occasional acts of "mercy" much more palatable: frequently, on seeing a conspirator broken on the wheel, Peter would order his sufferings ended through immediate beheading. That the beheadings were often conducted by inexperienced headsmen and thus became in themselves a form of torture only adds to the train of horrors.

Which brings me back to Malory. When I first read Malory, at age ten or so, having sought him out in our public library, I was amazed by the fact that it's just a litany of knights meeting in the woods, clouting each other a bit, and then traveling on. There's little discernible narrative movement relative to the book's bulk, and very little sense of progress or achievement. As a pre-teen, I was confused and ultimately bored; as an adult, I see it as more interesting, if more wearying: good does not vanquish evil; rather, the two keep knocking each other about, and wherever good wanders, evil is there to challenge it. The cycle continues without end, as long as the knights exist.

And that brings to mind, of all things, the Incredible Hulk. I remember as a teen reading a long run of Hulk comics from, say, the mid-1970s through the mid-'80s, and it seemed as if every issue told this exact story: Bruce Banner wakes up somewhere in torn clothes, without any memory of where he is or how he got there. He staggers about for a bit like a man trying to shake a hangover, and then he runs into some supervillain . . . who makes him angry. He hulks out, stomps the supervillian, and then bounds away to parts unknown, his uncomprehending Hulk brain unable to understand how he got into the fight or what he should do now that it's over. The issue would end, and between issues the Hulk would calm down and return to his Banner form, and the cycle would continue.

I swear, it seemed like that was what happened, month after month after month, unbroken, for approximately a decade. As a kid, I liked the Hulk enough to want to keep reading, but even then I thought it was bizarre: what Marvel Comics had done for the concept of superheroes was to allow them a continuing story and the possibility of change; this was almost a direct refutation of the breakthrough.

Looking back, however, I like those issues. Oh, I won't pretend to believe that they took that form out of some grand design; I suspect laziness and lack of creativity were the reasons for the Hulk's stagnation. But if all superheroes and their battles are in some way metaphorical, I like seeing the Hulk's lost decade as a successful metaphor: Bruce Banner is forever trapped in bad patterns of behavior, reacting in the same way to the same triggers, not knowing how to change for the better; evil and destruction erupt into life again and again, never to be eternally vanquished.

And now that I've brought this post so far from Medieval Times and its jousting, dueling knights: what better to turn to now than Melville House's five new entries in their Art of the Novella series . . . all titled The Duel? I think that's got to be next.

The very existence of this entry, I fear, suggests that I need a hobby (beyond, that is, this blogging thing).

{Photo by Flickr user penreyes, used under a Creative Commons license that reserves some rights.}

At a party a couple of weeks ago, my friend Joseph Clayton Mills and I got onto the topic of Chet Morton, friend of the Hardy Boys; brother of Joe Hardy's girlfriend, Iola; and inveterate hobbyist. I mentioned my favorite of Chet's one-per-book hobbies, taxidermy, and Joseph countered that he was always most impressed by Chet's brief passion for falconry.

"Falconry?" I asked. "Where in Bayport would Chet have encountered falconry, the sport of kings?"

Then, earlier this week, I stumbled upon what I thought might be the answer: perhaps Chet's interest in falconry began with a session of George Plimpton's Video Falconry on Biff Hooper's Colecovision?



This led Joseph to some quick research on the subject of Chet's hobbies. The list on Wikipedia, he reported, is "woefully inadequate," but the entry did deliver this remarkable bit of information:

Chet is one of the most popular characters in The Hardy Boys. In fact, by the mid-sixties, Chet had become so popular that in 1965 the Stratemeyer Syndicate was planning to develop a series about him and his hobbies.

It seems that the Stratemeyer Syndicate did a lot of work on this series (even some complete chapters were written), yet the Syndicate never began to publish it.

And that's not all:

A list of proposed titles in the Chet Morton series were found in the Stratemeyer Archives at the New York Public Library.
1. Chet Morton and the Funny Putty Caper
2. Chet Morton and the Talking Turkey
3. Chet Morton and the Mighty Muscle Builder
4. Chet Morton and the Stolen Flea Circus
5. Chet Morton and his Electronic Exam Passer
6. Chet Morton and his Bird-Brain Blimp
7. Chet Morton and the Monkey’s Uncle
8. Chet Morton and the Flying Fruitcake
9. Chet Morton and the Mystery at Tucks Cove
10 Chet Morton and the Mystery at the Friar Tuck House
11 Chet Morton and the Mystery of Ben's Bat

Those aren't quite Invisible Library titles, but I couldn't resist at least passing them on to my fellow invisible librarian, Ed Park, who replied, "Why do I feel like these could all be euphemisms in House of Holes??"

Surely someone's already working on the Chet Morton fanfiction, right?

Chabon misses a trick, Westlake upholds his usual standards, and McMurtry sneaks into this post somehow, too

My good friend Bob has sent along what seems to be a clear case of a inexcusable failure to make a Sydney Greenstreet simile! Here it is, from Chapter 7 of Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay:

At a time when an honorable place in the taxonomy of male elegance was still reserved for the genus Fat Man, Harkoo was a classic instance of the Mystic Potentate species, managing to look at once commanding, stylish, and ultramundane in a vast purple-and-brown caftan, heavily embroidered, that hung down almost to the tops of his Mexican sandals.

The "Mystic Potentate species"? Could there be a more Greenstreetian character than that?



As many of you know, I am on a crusade of sorts--a calm, even patient one, the kind that would not cause even Greenstreet's ample frame to break a sweat--to encourage the use of Greenstreet as a descriptive and metaphorical reference point in fiction. Should any of you know Chabon, I ask you to urge him to correct this oversight in subsequent printings of his Pulitzer Prize–winner. America's literary landscape would be a more well-rounded place for it.

While we're speaking of large men, I have to share a bit of description from Donald Westlake's final novel, Get Real (2009). One of the pleasures of the Dortmunder series is the nearly unhinged joy Westlake took in describing Dortmunder's crony Tiny Bulcher. While Bulcher is far too large to be an apt subject for a Greenstreet reference, nonetheless in book after book Westlake found new and amusing ways to tell us how boot-quakingly enormous Tiny is.

Tiny's entrance in Get Real is one of the simplest, but also one of the best:

As Dortmunder nodded, the doorway filled up with enough person to choke Jonah's whale. This creature, who was known only to those who felt safe in considering him their friend, as Tiny, had the body of a top-of-the-line SUV, in jacket and pants of a neutral gray that made him look like an oncoming low, atop which was a head that didn't make you think so much of Easter Island as Halloween Island.

All these oddities of the human shape call to mind a passage I read the other day in Lonesome Dove (1985). It's fairly long, but so's the book, and I think both are worth it:

Lippy finished his concert and came and joined them. He wore a brown bowler hat he had picked up on the road to San Antonio some years before. Either it had blown out of a stagecoach or the Indians had snatched some careless drummer and not bothered to take his hat. At least those were the two theories Lippy had worked out in order to explain his good fortune in finding the hat. In Augustus's view the hat would have looked better blowing around the country for two years than it did at present. Lippy only wore it when he played the piano; when he was just gambling or sitting around attending to the leak from [the wound in] his stomach he frequently used the hat for an ashtray and then sometimes forgot to empty the ashes before putting the hat back on his head. He only had a few strips of stringy gray hair hanging off his skull, and the ashes didn't make them look much worse, but ashes represented only a fraction of the abuse the bowler had suffered. It was also Lippy's pillow, and had had so many things spilled on it or in it that Augustus could hardly look at it without gagging.

"That hat looks about like a buffalo cud," Augustus said. "A hat ain't meant to be a chamber pot, you know. If I was you, I'd throw it away."

Lippy was so named because his lower lip was about the size of the flap on a saddlebag. He could tuck enough snuff under it to last a normal person at least a month; in general the lip lived a life of its own, there toward the bottom of his face. Even when he was just sitting quietly, studying his cards, the lip waved and wiggled as if it had a breeze blowing across it, which in fact it did. Lippy had something wrong with his nose and breathed with his mouth wide open.

Accustomed as she was to hard doings, it had still taken Lorena a while to get used to the way Lippy slurped when he was eating, and she had once had a dream in which a cowboy walked by Lippy and buttoned the lip to his nose as if it were the flap of a pocket. But her disgust was nothing compared to Xavier's, who suddenly stopped wiping tables and came over and grabbed Lippy's hat off his head. Xavier was in a bad mood, and his features quivered like those of a trapped rabbit.

"Disgrace! I won't have this hat. Who can eat?" Xavier said, though nobody was trying to eat. He took the hat around the bar and flung it out the back door.

If you laughed like I did at that, well, McMurtry's got another 850 pages of it for you. I'm 300 in and have been grateful for each one so far.

The Magician King

Last year I wrote, of Lev Grossman's novel The Magicians, which tells of a young man who discovers that magic is real and he's good at it, but that it doesn't make him a hero or make the world any more amenable to heroic quests:

The occasional frustrations in this otherwise very satisfying novel seem to come from Grossman's rejection of one of the now-standard characteristics of fantasy literature: the carefully balanced, multi-book story arc. It's as if, because there can be no truly heroic quest in The Magicians, because the world--even, or perhaps especially, the magic world--simply isn't like that, then the story itself can't be made to fit the same the heroic shape we're used to. The result is that portions of the novel feel compressed, bits of its impressively imaginative world-building more suggested than fully worked out. . . . A sequel apparently is in the works, and perhaps Grossman will flesh out some of these aspects in its pages, but within The Magicians itself I felt the lack.

That sequel, The Magician King, has arrived, and while it's quite good, it, too, feels as if it would have benefited from being expanded: some of the major characters from the first book, including Eliot and Janet, barely register in this one, making little impression even when they're present on the page; Brakebills, so important to Quentin and his friends in the first book, is given only a token appearance; and some key elements of the plot and the world Grossman's created (like the role of the Order in protecting the Neitherlands) are dispatched far too quickly.

In nearly all other respects, however, The Magician King is impressive, and a better book than The Magicians: more dramatic, more inventive, and similarly clear about its characters' failings of character while feeling less deliberate about foregrounding them. Its central quest is modeled on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but interwoven with the story of that sea journey is the story of Julia, a high school friend of Quentin, Grossman's protagonist. In The Magicians, Julia fails the Brakebills entrance exam, but the spell that routinely wipes the memories of failed applicants doesn't work, and the realization that magic exists--and she's been shut out of it--drives Julia to learn it on her own. By the end of that novel, she has reappeared as a "hedge witch" (Grossman's brilliant coinage for a self-taught magician [CORRECTION: As Biblibio points out in the comments, this is a common term, not Grossman's invention.]); in this book, we learn how she did it--and what she had to sacrifice along the way. It's a brutal, harrowing tale, and it shows Grossman at his best: watching Julia move through the subculture of samizdat magic is fascinating, and Grossman absolutely nails the combination of self-regard, self-satisfaction, power games, and pathologies that subcultures so often breed. The network of self-taught magicians is so well-conceived and fully realized that it seems almost plausible.

Julia's journey ends with a scene of violent destruction as surprising as it is frightening; as in the first book, Grossman is extremely good at conveying terror and unbridgeable imbalances of power. All books dealing with magic, it seems, ought to have a scene wherein mortals find themselves in over their heads, sparring with powers whose extent they've woefully, oh-too-humanly underestimated. If there is hidden power in the universe, there surely are also hidden Powers, and a fantasy that can convincingly depict them can be deliciously frightening.

I want to end with a brief note about the Brakebills exam itself. The test was one of the real highlights of The Magicians: Quentin, Julia, and a host of strangers are essentially plucked off the streets of ordinary life, magically shuttled to Brakebills, and told they are to stand an examination. As they're smart teens, that's far less odd than it seems--think back to your math nerd years and how often you were taken to some other school to match wits with strangers for vaguely spelled-out prizes. And Grossman's account of the test brings back the feeling of being a smart teen like nothing else I can remember reading: even when he's not sure of the point, Quentin takes each complicated math and language problem as a personal challenge, getting wholly wrapped up in them with the near-autistic intensity that, for me at least, is now only a memory. And what nerd wouldn't, with questions like this:

[T]he test gave him a passage from The Tempest, then asked him to make up a fake language, and then translate the Shakespeare into the made-up language. He was then asked questions about the grammar and orthography of his made-up language, and then--honestly, what was the point?--questions about the geography and culture and society of the made-up country where his made-up language was so fluently spoken. Then he had to translate the original passage from the fake language back into English, paying particular attention to any resulting distortions in grammar, word choice, and meaning. Seriously.

But why, then, did Julia fail? She's clearly intelligent, and she's gifted enough in magic to eventually make her way without instruction, so why did she not pass the test? In The Magician King we get the explanation. Whereas Quentin took the events of that day as much in his stride as would be humanly possible, because he'd always been expecting his drab life to suddenly change for the better,

Julia had been blindsided. She had never expected anything special to just happen to her. Her plan for life was to get out there and make special things happen, which was a much more sensible plan from a probability point of view, given how unlikely it was that anything as exciting as Brakebills would ever just fall into your lap. So when she got there she had the presence of mind to step back and make a full appraisal of exactly how weird it all was. She could have handled the math, God knew. She'd been in math classes with Quentin since they were ten years old, and anything he could do she could do just as well, backward and in high heels if necessary.

But she spent too much time looking around, trying to work it through, the implications of it. She didn't take it at face value the way Quentin did. The uppermost thought in her mind was, why are you all sitting here doing differential geometry and generally jumping through hoops when fundamental laws of thermodynamics and Newtonian physics are being broken left and right all around you? This shit was major. The test was the last of her priorities. It was the least interesting thing in the room.

Magic aside, that, too, is familiar, a risk I recall lurking at the verge of consciousness at every one of those teenage tests, from math contest to the SAT: if you let your glance slide to the bigger picture, you were sunk. It's one of the difficulties of teenage life that's hardest to recover as an adult. We tend to say that we want young people to think of the bigger picture (college, jobs), but we fail to realize that a successful teenage life, even strictly on the academic side, requires a fairly fundamental myopia, an ability to attend blindly to this task, that moment without lifting one's eyes to the horizon. Because if you do, those concerns, those requirements, even those achievements, will almost inevitably look small, partial, or even inconsequential . . . even as the years between you and adulthood remain just as substantial as ever.

[CENSORED]

I accidentally left my shoulder bag at the Asian grocery across the street when I was buying tofu tonight, and I didn't realize it and go retrieve the bag for a couple of hours . . . which was enough to convince me that I can't really blog about Nicholson Baker's new novel House of Holes: A Book of Raunch, because as I was jaywalking my way back to my bag, what was running through my head was, "Please don't let them have looked in it. Please don't let them have looked in it. Please don't let them have looked in it." Because House of Holes was one of the books I'd been carrying today.

As others have already alerted you, if you're one to attend to book news, House of Holes is unapologetically a book of porn. Sam Anderson calls it "a porny Alice in Wonderland." Charles McGrath calls it "a blue-flaring plume of smut-talk." (Apparently the Times style guide calls for "smut-talk" to be hyphenated. Now we know.) And while this blog is unabashedly a fan of, and occasional home to, swearing of nearly all sorts (look closely at this post if you don't believe me), it does not generally take notice of the bluer reachers of our literasphere.

Then there's the fact that, frankly, I don't know what to make of it. I love Baker--love his prose, love his goofy mind, love his utter shamelessness. And Baker's written porn before, in Vox and its better successor, The Fermata. But in those books--particularly the sometimes disturbing latter--the pornographic sequences were part of a larger narrative centered in characters, ideas, and ways of thinking about human (and gender) relations in our era. Here . . . they're just, well, porn.

But that's not fair. The'yre not just porn. Baker's too good a writer of sentences and too humane and intelligent a person for that. The charge against porn is that it's reductive and degrading; Baker's porn is reductive and . . . celebratory? Innocent? Loving? At its best, House of Holes is simultaneously hot, ridiculous, charming, silly, elegant, and inventive. As Baker piles on the ideas--Masturboats, the Porndecahedron, and more inventions whose names I refuse to type--at times his wildly creative prurience offers shades of the lighter Calvino, of a mind choosing carefully among finite permutations and making of them something new.

And House of Holes also has value, for fans of slang, as a poorly organized glossary of creative names for actions and organs. A brief, highly edited list, sans definitions, in deference my online prudishness:

wonderloaves
scants
prune elevator
toad-in-the-hole
ladyboys
pornsludge
manhandling
ensemble

I'll stop there. You get the idea.

But where does that leave us? Honestly, I have very little idea at this point. If you've never read Baker, don't read this one; go get The Mezzanine, his unqualified masterpiece. If you love Baker, you're going to give this a try anyway, despite the fact that it's far from his best book. It's those who find themselves squishing around in the middle ground who are in question . . . and oh, I don't know what to tell you folks. Maybe see what you think the next time you pop up, wide awake, at midnight?

Crime time!

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Sorry, can't blog today. Too busy reading Gillian Flynn's Dark Places.

Oh, fine. How about a quick crime novel roundup, and then I'll go back to trying to figure out what wonderfully horrible twist Flynn's going to surprise me with next?

1 The new batch of Parker novels is out now from the University of Chicago Press: Flashfire (2000) and Firebreak (2001). They've got an introduction by Terry Teachout that's one of the best we've published. Teachout points out that despite his sociopathic tendencies, "Parker kills only when absolutely necessary, a clear sign that he isn't crazy"; does a nice job of drawing the distinction between Stark's Parker and Westlake's Dortmunder; and quotes my favorite Dortmunder line, which just might be my favorite Westlake line, period:

Whenever things sound easy, it turns out there's one part you didn't hear.

Flashfire is one of the best in the series, featuring a lot of heists, a strong female character (who's a civilian, no less!), and some truly great exchanges between Parker and a Florida sheriff. It's easy to why Hollywood chose this one to launch the upcoming Parker movie series.

2 Over the weekend I continued my progress through the rest of Westlake's novels. I started with a darkly comic novel called Two Much (1975), in which one of Westlake's least honorable and least likable protagonists cons two rich twin sisters into thinking that he, too, is a twin--and a separate twin is sleeping with each sister. It's a great example of two Westlake strengths: his enjoyment of playing out the implications of a puzzle he sets for himself and his understanding, most clearly on display in the Parker novels, that our instinct as readers is to want the narrator to get away with what he's doing almost regardless of how awful it is or how amoral he is. Present us with a problem and we want to see it solved; Westlake knew that better than anyone I can think of.

3 The other Westlake I read this weekend was refreshingly light: Good Behavior (1985), which finds John Dortmunder and his gang trying to kidnap a nun . . . on behalf of her convent. It won't surprise you that the gang ends up dressed in habits:

Very strange. When nothing shows but your face, enclosed by the white oval of a wimple and the featureless black of a nun's costume, you wouldn't expect much by way of individual character to show through, but it did, it did. . . . Tiny, whose face mostly consisted of knuckles anyway, was barely plausible as the kind of false nun who, in the Middle Ages, poisoned and robbed unwary travelers. Stan Murch looked like a pilgrim in The Canterbury Tales, probably the one with ideas for alternate routes to Canterbury. . . . Kelp was surely someone whose sister was the pretty one, while Dortmunder looked mostly like a missionary nun who was already among the cannibals and headhunters before realizing she'd lost her faith.

It's all as ridiculous as it sounds, and it makes for one of the best of the Dortmunder series.

4 While Hard Case Crime will officially mark their welcome return next month with the publication of Lawrence Block's new book of smut and crime, Getting Off (which I'm looking forward to reading soon alongside Nicholson Baker's new book of smut and smut, House of Holes), they'll also be publishing a new book by Max Allan Collins, Quarry's Ex (2011). Collins is at his best when writing about Quarry, whose character is perfectly suited for Collins's tight mix of violence, quips, and social observation, and I've really enjoyed watching him flesh out the hitman's backstory these past couple of years. Quarry's Ex is a strong addition to that story. It should show up in stores in September; it's available for pre-order now.

5 I'll close by returning to Gillian Flynn, so that I can return to reading Gillian Flynn: last summer, at the start of the annual Stahl family vacation, I gave a copy of Flynn's first novel, Sharp Objects, to my sister. She blazed through it, then lent it to my brother. As he was nearing the end, my sister and I sat and watched him, waiting for him to get to that part, so we could see how he reacted. He kept looking up and laughing at us . . . and then he got to that part. He stopped laughing.

The Beauties of Powell--and no, this isn't a post about Pamela Flitton and Matilda Donners

When you re-read a favorite book as often as I re-read Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, you find yourself focusing on different aspects each time through. This time around, as I've been reading the penultimate volume, Temporary Kings, the past couple of days, I've found myself reading it almost as if it's one of those collections from the days of lax copyright enforcement, a "Beauties of" collection, this one not The Beauties of Shakespeare or The Beauties of Sterne, but The Beauties of Powell.

I'm drawn to his frequently memorable turns of phrase, their aphoristic nature softened--even as their effect is heightened--by Powell's habit of putting them in the mouths of specific characters. Take this, for example, from Dr. Brightman, an academic Nick Jenkins meets at a conference in Venice:

Certain persons require a court. Others prefer a harem. That is not quite the same thing.

It's a line that could have come from any number of Nick's closest friends--Barnby, Moreland, and even Isobel come to mind--and its function here is not only make us smile with recognition, but to help us understand the affinity Nick feels, to his mild surprise, for Brightman.

Then there are Nick's own observations, which tend to be more extended and to carry a meditative, worried-over, even self-doubting quality. Here, he's reflecting on some stories provided by a potential biographer of X. Trapnel:

Enormous simplifications were possibly necessary to carry a deeper truth than lay on the surface of a mass of unsorted detail. That was, after all, what happened when history was written; many, if not most, of the true facts discarded.

Then there's this, provoked by meeting a pair of acquaintances whom logic suggests would only be found together if sex is involved:

Ada's immediate assumption of the exaggeratedly welcoming manner of one caught in compromising circumstances was not very convincing either.

Or this, on an old boss re-encountered:

He gave minute instructions, forcibly bringing back the years when I had worked under him, something establishing a relationship which can never wholly fade.

Or his assessment of his father, whose finicky, martinet-by-way-of-habitual-grumpiness marked Nick's childhood:

My father had few friends. The cause of that was not, I think, his own ever smouldering irascibility: people put up surprisingly well with irascibility, some even finding in it a spice to life otherwise humdrum. There is little evidence that the irascible, as a class, are friendless, and my father's bursts of temper may, for certain acquaintances, have added to the excitement of knowing him. It was more a kind of diffidence, uncertainty of himself (to some extent inducing the irascibility) that also militated against intimacy.

Adding interest to this description is the fact that Nick, while alert to his father's faults, is himself diffident, more seen than heard, a quality that makes him the perfect narrative window.

Page after page of Dance offer similar pleasures, presenting the world seen, not, in Browning's sense, plain, but through a distinct sensibility, Nick's, informed by the experience (and gossip) of decades and generous enough to encompass, gratefully, the stories and opinions and judgments of the many other people who make up the weave of a life. There's a reason this is my favorite book in the world, folks; I'll be reading and re-reading it for a long, long time to come.

Temporary Kings

Finding myself last night in one of those rare moods when I couldn't settle into any one book--I tried fiction, criticism, poetry, history--I finally remembered the best rule for a situation like that: turn to an old favorite. For me, that was Anthony Powell, and the moment I opened A Dance to the Music of Time my restlessness was cured.

I picked up at the penultimate volume, Temporary Kings (1973), where I'd last left off in my perpetual re-reading. The final volumes of Dance are unquestionably the weakest. Some critics, including Christopher Hitchens, deem them (or at least the final one, Hearing Secret Harmonies) a failure,

no longer informed by experience and curiosity, well-recollected and hard-won and wrought over in reflection. Rather, it resembles the plaintive tone of a beached colonial retiree, convinced that all around him is going to the dogs.

Though I think Hitchens certainly goes too far (a specialty of his), and I've defended the final volumes before, I'll concede that the final two books, at least, don't have quite the verve or appeal as the earlier ones: many of the most interesting characters of the earlier volumes are dead, and even Trapnel, the series' final brilliantly living invention, is no longer around, leaving the narrative to be carried by second stringers (Ada Leintwardine, Polly Duport, Books Bagshaw) and new characters, some compelling (Gwinnett, Brightman), others flat or one-note (Jacky Bragadin, Louis Glober).

This leads to a slight, but palpable sense of disengagement--but one that is, if frustrating at times, nonetheless suitable. The greatest achievement of Dance is its tracking of the way that age changes a cohort, from Nick Jenkins, the narrator, on down. By Temporary Kings, Nick and friends are in their mid-fifties, and while a true aficionado and observer of human behavior will always find new wrinkles to fascinate him, by the time of Temporary Kings, Nick evinces an awareness that the stories most important to his life, the threads that have truly been woven in with his own, have been spun out, tied off, and that when most of the new threads he sees around him, spun out by people in a younger generation, are resolved, he won't be around to see them. The novel's title, taken from a reference Nick makes to The Golden Bough, is an acknowledgment of that fact: the world is slowly passing him, and his generation, by, as it always has and always will.

Which is not to say, by any means, that a reader of Dance won't find pleasures in the characters in this volume, nor that they shouldn't look forward to some of its truly dramatic and revealing scenes featuring older favorites. The first time around, there will be plenty to engage and surprise in Temporary Kings. But on what must I think be my fifth time through, I found myself taking pleasure in and attending less to the specifics of character or plot than to the simple pleasure of being in company with Nick Jenkins and his approach to thought and observation, modeled, one feels comfortable assuming, on Powell's own.

Take the opening scene, which finds Nick, in Venice for an academic conference, watching an aged singer of Neapolitan songs perform. As usual with Nick, art occasions reflection, offering new ways of thinking of, classifying, and understanding friends, family, and experience, seeing how each holds up against or is refracted by similar or dissimilar portrayals in various art forms. In this case, a memory of a youthful visit to Venice (during which he saw a singer who looked remarkably similar to this one) leads to comparisons of the singer to an old acquaintance:

The stylized movements of the hands were reminiscent of Dicky Umfraville at one of his impersonations. He too should have harnessed his gift, in early life, to an ever renewing art from which there was no retiring age. To exhibit themselves, perform before a crowd, is the keenest pleasure many people know, yet self-presentation without a basis in art is liable to crumble into dust and ashes. Professional commitment to his own representations might have kept at bay the melancholy--all but chronic Frederica and his stepchildren complained--now that Umfraville had retired from work as agent at Thrubworth.

Which eventually returns Nick to the singer himself:

The aged singer looked as if thoughts of death, melancholy in any form, were unknown to him. He could be conceived as suffering from rage, desire, misery, anguish, despair; not melancholy. That was clear; additionally so after the round of applause following his number. The clapping was reasonably hearty considering the heat, almost as oppressive as throughout the day just passed. Dr Emily Brightman and I joined in. Acknowledgment of his talent delighted the performer. He bowed again and again, repeatedly baring blackened sporadic stumps, while he mopped away streams of sweat that coursed down channels of dry loose skin ridging either side of his mouth. Longevity had brought not the smallest sense of repletion where public recognition was in question. That was on the whole sympathetic. One found oneself taking more interest than formerly in the habits and lineaments of old age.

What I appreciate about these passages is less the specifics of Nick's reflections, though I definitely enjoy those, than the fact of them: this, I realize as I read them, is how we experience art, one part of our brain engaging, sometimes deeply, with it, while another part meditates, zooms off on tangents, weaves it into the larger fabric of life and our attempts to understand it. Reading Dance reminds me of how frustratingly short shrift art (and especially books) gets within fiction; a reader's life, mental and emotional, is always wrapped up in the books he's reading, but how often do you encounter a fictional character who manifests that relationship to any kind of art?

I'll have more to say about Temporary Kings in Friday's post. For now, I'm just pleased to be back in Powell's world, one where art is as much a part of life as friends, gossip, love, and loss.

"The beginning is not a beginning at all," or, Maybe it's time to read Tristram Shandy again?

I pulled Adam Thirlwell's The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, and Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, and Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, and a Variety of Helpful Indexes (2007), a book as precious yet as satisfying as its title, off my shelf over the weekend because I remembered that Thirlwell wrote well on the topic of Tristram Shandy. And I wasn't disappointed. Here, for example, is as good a distillation of Shandy as I could imagine being crammed into five sentences:

The essence of Sterne's novel is the way, deadpan, he makes Tristram a character who is stricken by a mania for comprehensiveness. To describe this type of mania, Sterne came up with the word hobbyhorse. Sterne's style is predicated on the hobbyhorse. All his destabilising of beginnings and endings (and everything in between) are part of his way of describing character: a construction helplessly at its own mercy, in thrall of compulsions of its own making. And Tristram's mania for comprehensiveness creates havoc with the book.

Writing a novel, you can try to get it all in; you can leave it all out; you can strike a middle ground and pretend that you've covered it all. Brutally: David Foster Wallace; Chekhov; Trollope. Sterne decided to make a game of pretending to care most about trying to get it all in; we've been playing in his playground ever since.

But Thirwell's next paragraph is even better, because it can so easily be turned on us, readers racing through our piles of unread books:

Tristram takes his life so seriously that his Life becomes impossible. For Tristram discovers that no beginning is ever a beginning. Every description of a beginning requires another description of the beginning's beginning, and so on. Therefore, although Tristram's Life, in its final state, take up around 600 pages, he has still not managed to get past the first few months of his life.

We read, in part, to illuminate and understand our experience, but what is the balance? When, instead, should we put down the book and go out?

All of this reminded me of a line from an early review of the novel in the Royal Female Magazine of February 1760, collected in the Norton Critical Edition of Tristram Shandy, which makes up for its ugliness as a book with this section of contemporary reviews:

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy . . . affects (and not unsuccessfully) to please, by a contempt of all the rules observed in other writings, and therefore cannot justly have its merit measured by them.

The reviewer does, however, go on to complain of the "wantonness of the author's wit" and to wish that a note of delicacy could have been introduced. The very idea of a delicate, inoffensive Sterne boggles the mind (a topic that came up a couple of years ago in connection with Thirlwell and one of those oh-so-eighteenth-century volumes, The Beauties of Sterne).

Then there's the first review of the novel, by William Kentrick in the December 1759 issue of the Monthly Review, which notes what is still a valid objection, and its, if not refutation, then at least its leavening factor:

There prevails, indeed, a certain quaintness, and something like an affectation of being immoderately witty, throughout the whole work. But this is perhaps the Author's manner. Be that, however, as it will, it is generally attended with spirit and humour enough to render it entertaining.

Which, if my memory of sixteen years ago is true, remains the case these 250 years later. There is, in Tristram Shandy, some flop sweat, but it's more than made up for by the true humor, inventiveness, surprise, and even genius on offer elsewhere in the book. Yet sixteen years is a long time to be away from a book one professes to love: perhaps it's time to revisit Tristram and Uncle Toby and the rest? Any thoughts, readers?

A Friday night story

{Photo by rocketlass.}

I suspect that Friday night is the best time to read the title story of Harvey Swados's Nights in the Gardens of Brookyln. An adult Friday night, that is, spent in, not out; at home, perhaps alone, or, if with your spouse, quietly. For it is about remembering, with nostalgia but realism, the city of one's youth, half real and half the product of your hopes of the time. The opening sets the scene:

There was a time when New York was everything to me: my mother, my mistress, my Mecca, when I could no more have wanted to live any place else than I could have conceived of myself as a daddy, disciplining my boy and dandling my daughter. I was young, the war (the one that ended in 1945, the only one that will ever be "the war" for people my age) was just over, and I was free.

It's about being young and in love--with a city and with a person--and having friends who are in the same situation, and of feeling like the city is a stage for your explorations and adventures. Even those of us who are homebodies by nature remember those days.

But it's also about how a city is a perpetual reminder than you can't stop change: you can't hold a city still or make it be or stay what you want any more than you can do that with your friends. So that even a scene like this, of recalled mornings of pleasure, contains the implied sting of loss:

It started with late breakfast at our place on Remsen Street; then around noon we'd meander over the little Penny Bridge at the foot of Montague Street and on through the broken-down bars and vague-eyed derelicts of Myrtle Avenue and Sands Street (all gone now, replaced by handsome characterless courthouses and office buildings), on to the great bridge. So there are pictures of Barney and me cavorting, of Deelie and Pauline strolling like models on the promenade, of us all lined up before the struts with the marvelous skyline and the springtime sun behind us, our faces half in shadow but leaning forward to the camera's eye in hope and expectation.

In "hope and expectation": what Swados does in just forty pages is remind us of what that felt like and map out the difference between those who, as the years pile up, trade expectation, profitably, for contentment, and those who keep looking, sometimes to their detriment. In its ability to distinguish emotionally between youth and age it's as good as anything I can think of outside of a favorite passage from William Maxwell's Ancestors, which I quoted in this post a couple of years ago.

Are the compromises worth it? Should we lament the passing of youthful expectations? The beauty of Swados's story is that he shows us their allure without luring us, shows us their poisons without preaching, and leaves us--as we sit at home on this Friday night with our piano, the ballgame on quietly in the background--for tonight, at least feeling as if the trade-off was a good one.

Short, round, tall, short, or, "Now that was a silly business."

1 Charles Portis's wonderfully cracked Norwood (1966) has provided me another citation for my running file of comparisons to Sydney Greenstreet!

The man with the funny voice was a midget of inestimable age. He was sitting on the end of the bowling machine runway with his legs crossed. On his face there was a Sydney Greenstreet look of weary petulance.

Weary petulance--that's the best way to describe Greenstreet's best, and most typical, look. The only other look I can imagine competing with it would be his look of rapidly eroding patience.

I'll take this occasion to repeat my plea: all you novelists out there, I want more Sydney Greenstreet comparisons! Even after Donald Westlake's honorable efforts, the field remains relatively unploughed, ready for your best efforts! In an earlier post on this topic, I even wrote some that you're welcome to use to get started:

"The next morning the sun announcing my hangover was like Sydney Greenstreet in Casablanca: huge, round, smug, and disasteful."

"She was built like Sydney Greenstreet, and even had his laugh, but you couldn't take your eyes off her--which, come to think of it, made her even more like Greenstreet."

"Give it up, man--you couldn't keep a lid on this story if you put it in a steamer trunk and plopped Sydney Greenstreet on the top."

Get to it, writers of America!

2 Since I started with a classic fat man, it seems right to turn to one of the strangest bits of information in Robert K. Massie's Peter the Great (1980), which I also read last week: his account of Frederick William I of Prussia's obsession with giants:

The King's most famous obsession was his collection of giants, for which he was renowned throughout Europe. Known as the Blue Prussians or the Giants of Potsdam, there were over 1,200 of them, organized into two battalions of 600 men each. None was under six feet tall, and some, in the special Red Unit of the First Battalion, were almost seven feet tall. The King dressed them in blue jackets with gold trim and scarlet lapels, scarlet trousers, white stockings, black shoes and tall red hats. He gave them muskets, white bandoleers and small daggers, and he played with them as a child would with enormous living toys. No expense was too great for this hobby, and Frederick William spent millions to recruit and equip his giant grenadiers. They were hired or bought all over Europe; especially desirable specimens, refusing the offer of the King's recruiting agents, were simply kidnapped. Eventually, recruiting in this way became too expensive--one seven-foot-two-inch Irishman cost over 6,000 pounds--and Frederick William tried to breed giants. Every tall man in his realm was forced to marry a tall woman. The drawback was that the King had to wait twenty years for the products of these unions to mature, and often as not a boy or girl of normal height resulted. The easiest method of obtaining giants was to receive them as gifts. Foreign ambassadors advised their masters that the way to find favor with the King of Prussia was to send him giants. Peter especially appreciated his fellow sovereign's interest in nature's curios, and Russia supplied the Prussian King with fifty new giants every year. (Once, when Peter recalled some of the giants lent to Frederick William and replaced them with men who were a trifle shorter, the King was so upset that he could not discuss business with the Russian ambassador; the wound in his heart, he said, was still too raw.)

As I typed that passage, I kept thinking that it was getting too long and I should cut it off. But where could I have stopped? Would you have wanted to continue in life not knowing about Peter's annual fifty-giant gift? Or Frederick's despondence when he took some back? Each sentence piles on yet another amazing detail. The past is a foreign country indeed--they do things insanely differently there.

3 Or maybe not so much, depending on whether you're hanging out in the American South in a Charles Portis novel. Back to Norwood, and a conversation with the earlier "midget of inestimable age," who introduces himself to Norwood as Edmund B. Ratner, the world's smallest perfect man:

"My father sold me when I was just a pup."

"Sold you?"

"Yes."

"I don't believe that."

"It's true, yes. He sold me to a man named Curly Hill. Those were dreadful times! My father, Solomon Ratner, was not an uneducated man but he was only a junior railway clerk and there were so many mouths to feed. And imagine, a midget in the house! Well, Curly came to town with his animal show--he toured all the fairs. He saw me at the station and asked me how I would like to wear a cowboy suit and ride an Irish wolfhound. He had a chimp named Bob doing it at the time. I directed him to my father and they came to terms. I never learned the price though I expect it was around twenty pounds, perhaps more. Now understand, I don't brood on it. Curly was like a second father to me, a very decent, humorous man. He came from good people. His mother was the oldest practical nurse in the United Kingdom. I saw her once, she looked like a mummy, poor thing. The pound was worth five dollars at that time."

"Are you with a circus here?"

"No, no, I thought I told you, I left circus work. Now that was a silly business. I let my appetite run away with me. I can't account for it, it came and it went. Pizzas, thick pastramis, chili dogs--nothing was too gross and I simply could not get enough. Some gland acting up. I grew four inches and gained almost two stone. Well, the upshot was, they took away my billing as the World's Smallest Perfect Man and gave it to a little goon who calls himself Bumblebee Billy. I ask you! Bumblebee Billy! All his fingers are like toes. Needless to say, I was furious and I said some regrettable little things to the boss. The long and short is, I was sacked altogether. "

"Them are regular little hands you got."

"Of course they are."

"If you were out somewhere without anything else around, like a desert, and I was to start walking toward you I would walk right into you because I would think you were further off than what you were."

"I've never heard it put quite that way."

Doesn't that make you want to, first, thank the gods that the world has someone as strange as Charles Portis in it, and, second, run out and buy, not a midget or giant, for that would be wrong, but the first Portis novel you find?

In Search of Lost Nuance, or, Twitter and Proust

I quoted the following line from Francisco Goldman's moving, awkwardly intimate memoir Say Her Name (2011) on my Twitter feed today:

Show me the Proust of forgetting, and I'll read him tomorrow.

Stephen Mitchelmore, a blogger and critic I enjoy reading both for his perceptiveness and for his well defined taste and point of view, replied

What do you mean? Proust is as much about forgetting as remembering; habit and the sudden ending of habit.

Realizing I'd been quoting, he wrote that he presumed Goldman hadn't read In Search of Lost Time. I explained that I'd quoted the line because I liked the idea of an author who was as identified with forgetting as Proust is with remembering, but Mitchelmore wasn't convinced, writing:

I think it's awful; it's based on what's at best a misrepresentation, at worst a philistine refusal to understand.

It's nothing new to point out that Twitter's 140-character limit can kill nuance, but I do think this question deserves a bit more delving. First off, Mitchelmore is unquestionably right; in fact, what most surprised me about reading In Search of Lost Time for the first time fourteen years ago was that it was at least as much about losing the past, losing those things and people that we for so long in our lives take for granted as perpetual, as it was about retention. The famous memory-laden madeleine, which for the general literary public has essentially become a synecdoche for the whole sprawling novel, is itself as much a token of forgetting and neglect as it is of memory: it brings the past to life precisely because the mind has let it languish, unthought of. As Proust explains later in the second volume, Within a Budding Grove,

Now the memories of love are no exception to the general laws of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general laws of Habit. And as Habit weakens everything, what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we have forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our memories exists outside of us, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again. Outside us? Within us, rather, but hidden from our eyes in an oblivion more or less prolonged. It is thanks to this oblivion alone that we can from time to time recover the person that we were, place ourself in relation to things as he was placed, suffer anew because we are no longer ourselves but he, and because he loved what now leaves us indifferent. In the broad daylight of our habitual memory the images of the past turn gradually pale and fade out of sight, nothing remains of them, we shall never recapture it. Or rather we should never recapture it had not a few words . . . been carefully locked away in oblivion, just as an author deposits in the National Library a copy of a book which might otherwise become unattainable.

Funes the Memorious aside, it simply isn't possible to retain everything--much less to retain everything with its full emotional valence. Proust recognized that, and he explained and even dramatized it, along with the concomitant bursts of overwhelming recall that such selective memory enables, better than anyone.

Yet Proust is known as the writer of retention, of holding tight to memory. That's his public, madeleine-soaked image. Mitchelmore is right that such a thumbnail description is a misapprehension or misrepresentation, but I don't think those of us who have read, and loved, Proust have any chance of actually changing that perception now. The madeleine is Proust is the madeleine is Proust. Maybe Mitchelmore would disagree, or say that it's our duty to try nonetheless, but I tend to think, rather, that all we can do is encourage people to actually read Proust, engage with his prose and his mind, and be surprised by what they find.

And that's why I like Goldman's line, wrong as it is: given that we aren't likely to make the public acknowledge a more nuanced Proust, I like imagining a writer whose public persona, wanted or unwanted, is as closely tied to forgetting as Proust's is to remembering. What pleasures such a writer could offer! What nuances of the relationship between remembering and forgetting could he or she explore--informed, we would hope, by Proust's--and what mixed melancholy and joy such a writer could evoke!

Old favorites

In Iris Murdoch's Under the Net, the narrator, on picking up a book of philosophy he'd written years before and then essentially banished from his mind, thinks,

It's always a strange experience to read one's own writings again after an interval. They so rarely fail to impress.

I certainly wouldn't say that's true of my own writing--cringing is surely my response at least as often--but when you've written more than 1,000 blog posts, you're bound to occasionally come across something you'd forgotten writing and are glad to rediscover.

Such was the case with this post from 2007 about, among other things, Sei Shonagon, Iris Murdoch, and Achilles, which ended with a topic I thought was well worth revisiting today: prompted by Murdoch's nomination of Achilles as one of her two favorite characters, I put together an off-the-top-of-my-head list of my favorites. Here's how I described my thinking then:

Unlike her, I think if I put together a list it won't consist of characters with whom I particularly identify; rather--like Odysseus--they'd be characters who I can't stop thinking about, who seem forever capable of revealing new surprises.

And, after Odysseus, here's who I came up with:

Bjartur from Independent People

Tess from Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Lieutenant Amanda Turck from James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor

Bartleby the Scrivener

Jayber Crow, from Wendell Berry's books about the Port William Membership

King David

Barnby, Uncle Giles, and Tuffy Weedon from A Dance to the Music of Time

First Sergeant Milt Warden from From Here to Eternity

Lyra from the His Dark Materials trilogy

Sir Lancelot

Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky from Anna Karenina

Huckleberry Finn

Philip Marlowe

Mrs. Aubrey from Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows

Rose Ryder from John Crowley's Aegypt series

Nearly four years on, who would I add? Again, off the top of my head:

Niccolo, Dr. Tobie, and Katelijne Sersanders from Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo series

Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer

Roberto Bolano's Arturo Belano

David Gately from Infinite Jest

Trollope's Madame Max Goesler

And you?

{An administrative note to close: Work and travel have finally caught me out, and I'm taking next week off from blogging, which I don't think I've done in . . . three years? The annex will still be active, though, and you can follow that either through Tumblr itself or through your Google Reader. See you all in a week.}

On the road

{Photos by rocketlass.}

I've spent the past few days on the road--in fiction, that is. And they couldn't have been two more different American roads: the contemporary Southern blacktops traveled by the ex-con Sailor Ripley and his love, Lula Pace Fortune, in Barry Gifford's Wild at Heart (1991), a celebration of all that is broke-down, displaced, casual, passionate, dead-end, and makeshift in American culture; and the still largely virgin motorways, all potholes and cow crossings, of the wide-open American West of the early automobile era, in Sinclair Lewis's Free Air (1919).

I'll have more to say about Sailor and Lula's road, and Gifford's word-drunk, hyper-charged vernacular depiction of it, sometime later. Right now I'm hampered by the fact that the 600-page Sailor and Lula: The Complete Novels is the sort of book that as you read it you know you absolutely have to lend to a friend--and, if that someone is another writer for whom you know you've found a crucial book . . . well, sometimes you have to lend it when you've still got 400 pages to go.

So I'll stick to Lewis, which, coincidentally, was put into my hands by a friend, and also shares with Gifford an infectious joy in unusual language and over-the-top slang. The book, which tells of a young woman's cross-country drive and the freedom from social mustiness she finds there, is full of everything from Minnesota pidgin German to slang phrases that snap like (and make as little sense as) Damon Runyon or Ring Lardner. The language reaches its apotheosis in this bit of venting by Bill, a Minnesota country boy surprised at the high-class company an old friend is keeping in his new home in Seattle:

Aw, how d'you get that way? Rats, you don't want to go tagging after them Willy boys. Damn dirty snobs. And the girls are worse. I tell you, Milt, these hoop-te-doodle society Janes may look all right to hicks like us, but on the side they raise more hell than any milliner's trimmer from Chi that ever vamped a rube burg.

That linguistic verve carries through the whole scene, which turns into the novel's most comic:

He wandered for an hour and came back to find that, in a "dry" city which he had never seen before, the crafty Bill had obtained a quart of bourbon, and was in a state of unsteady beatitude. He wanted, he announced, to dance.

Milt got him into the community bathtub, and soused him under, but Bill's wet body was slippery, and Bill's merry soul was all for frolicsome gamboling, and he slid out of Milt's grasp, he sloshed around in the tub, he sprinkled Milt's sacred good suit with soapy water, and escaped, and in the costume of Adam he danced orientally in Milt's room, till he was seized with sleepiness and cosmic grief, and retired to Milt's bed in tears and nothing else.

Is there a word in that passage that's not perfectly chosen? Nearly all seem to do treble duty: they describe the scene, they cast its events in terms just outsized and unexpected enough to render it grand (if not Biblical), and they mesh sonically so that we trip merrily along, laughing all the way. Even the simplest line, "He wanted, he announced, to dance," conveys exactly the right rhythm for its pronouncement: we can see Bill's face, flattened carefully into drunken seriousness, as he raises a solemn finger and takes his first step to a beat that only he can hear.

And that's ultimately what pleased me most about Free Air: it's a fun book more than anything else. Lewis is always a satirist, but here the satire is gentle, humane, even loving--there's none of the scorched-earth bleakness that makes the laughs in Babbitt, great though they are, so damned hopeless. It's a bon-bon of a book, perfect for summer; take it on the road in your flivver.

Under the Net

Spending time with the young Iris Murdoch last week--in the form of her letters--sent me back to her first novel, long a favorite, Under the Net (1954). It had been years since I'd read the book, and I remembered it as having a freshness, a fundamental lightness of spirit that, for all the comedy that her later books would retain, she never came close to replicating.

What I discovered on reacquaintance is that, if anything, I underestimated Under the Net's lightness. Its protagonist, Jake Donaghue, a translator and would-be writer who is primarily a layabout and sponge, is like nothing so much as a penniless Bertie Wooster, and his feckless, solipsistic bobbing through postwar London gives the whole novel a Wodehousian verve. There's a ridiculous dog-napping (temporarily interrupted for a spot of whiskey), a socialist riot on a film set of ancient Rome, and a drunken revel to rival any of Bertie and Catsmeat's Race Night escapades. That particular incident ends with a drunken swim in the Thames:

A moment later we were climbing the wall.

"Watch out for police," said Lefty. "They'll think we're going to rob a warehouse. If you see one, pretend to be drunk,"

This was rather superfluous advice.

I also really enjoyed this silly rumination, which gives a good sense of the not-always sensible way that Donaghue's mind works:

There are some parts of London which are necessary and some parts which are contingent. Everywhere west of Earl's Court is contingent, except for a few places along the river. I hate contingency. I want everything in my life to have a sufficient reason.

What I find particularly interesting about that passage is that Murdoch's husband, John Bayley, talking with her in an interview I've cited before, specifically praised its air of contingency:

Curiously I think Under the Net is the only one of your novels where you can feel that the novelist doesn't know how it's going to end, if you see what I mean. . . . I may be quite wrong about Under the Net; you probably did know how it was going to end, but it has a kind of freshness that is very mysterious, and that we strangely associate with something that is not planned.

If anything, Under the Net goes too far in that direction; at time it verges on being a picaresque. But its comic joy and its gentle handling of themes (responsibility, self-deception, illusion, and the transformative magic of erotic and romantic love) that would obsess Murdoch for the next forty-plus years, make it a remarkable, charming novel, and a great way for a reader new to Murdoch to make her acquaintance.

If we were to limit checkouts to a single book . . . which Invisible title would you choose?

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Earlier this week Laura Miller, author of an excellent book on growing up with (and to some extent growing out of) Narnia, The Magician's Book, and book columnist for Salon, wrote about invisible books--and the Invisible Library that Ed Park and I have been curating, with a certain appropriate vagueness of effort, since 2008. Fans of the Library should go read the whole article, but there are two bits that I think are well worth pointing out here.

First, there's this, which includes a fact that, as a committed Dickens fan, I can't believe I didn't know:

The pseudonymous Dr. Beachcomber would like to expand the Invisible Library to include fake books -- that is, titles that don't even exist in a fictional universe. They appear only on the spines of sham bookshelves used to disguise secret doors in exceptionally interesting houses. Charles Dickens had just such a door installed in his own study in London, with fake titles of his own devising, including "Socrates on Wedlock."

To which I can only reply: of course he did. If you look up "fecund" in the dictionary, alongside stipple pictures of soybeans germinating you'll find an image of Dickens stroking his beard in satisfaction.

In Tearing Haste, the recent volume of letters between Patrick Leigh Fermor and Deborah Mitford included a list of that sort of book--unquestionably not truly Invisible Library titles, despite Dr. Beachcomber's stance--requested by Deborah for a door in her house. To a one they were, as Ed put it when I sent them to him, "horrible"--pun-riddled and silly, though at least acknowledged to be so. (And there was at least one clever and slightly sassy title: Bondage, by Anne Fleming, a play on an apparently poorly kept secret about the sexual proclivities of their friends Ian and Anne.)

Then there's this question, the crux, really, of Miller's article, and not a question that had yet occurred to me:

Which raises an intriguing question: If allowed to choose only one, which volume in the Invisible Library would you most want to read?

If you're the sort to dive into the scrum that is a comments section, what better invitation do you need? Hie thee to Salon and plump for your favorite!

No one who's read this blog for long can be in any doubt about my choice: any one of the novels or memoirs written by Nicholas Jenkins, narrator of A Dance to the Music of Time. Like all fans of Dance, I suspect they'd be much like Anthony Powell's non-Dance novels; like nearly all fans of Dance, that would bring me great, great joy.

{Though if I were to get a second choice . . . who would turn down the chance to read Orbius Tertius?}

In honor of Independence Day

I may be a few days late, but love of country knoweth no season, abideth by no clock, is reck'd not by the sun nor the moon, surely?

So here, in honor of the 4th of July, which in my neighborhood didn't really end until at least 4 AM on the 5th--at least, that's when I remember hearing the last explosion--a brief passage from Adam Goodheart's wonderful look at the incidentals, interstices, and forgotten elements of the first year of America's Civil War, 1861: The Civil War Awakening:

Like later generations, the men of the 1850s and 1860s expressed their ideals of masculinity through their physical appearance. Most noticeable, and revealing, was the astonishing profusion of facial hair that sprouted forth during those years, including on the previously smooth faces of [James] Garfield and his friends. For a century and a half, American men (and most Europeans) had, nearly without exception, gone clean-shaven: it was a sign of gentility, civility, and restraint. (In the late eighteenth century, one Philadelphia woman considered it a matter of note that she had seen "an elephant and two bearded men" in the street that day.) This changed very suddenly. Most American historians, when they have considered the topic at all, have assumed it had to do with Civil War soldiers avoiding the inconvenience of shaving while in the field.

In fact, the phenomenon predated the war by a number of years--and was the subject of a great deal of contemporary comment and debate. As early as 1844, one physician began inveighing against "woman faced men" with their habit of "emasculating [the] face with a razor," even suggesting that shaving caused diseases of the throat. At the time, this was still an eccentric opinion. By the following decade, however, talk of a "beard movement" was sweeping the nation. In 1857, a conscientious journalist took a stroll through Boston's streets and conducted a statistical survey: of the 543 men he encountered, no fewer than 338 had full, bushy beards, "as God meant to have them," while nearly all the rest sported lesser facial hair of various sorts. Only four were "men of the old school, smooth shaven, with the exception of slight tufted promontories jutting down from either ear, as if designed as a compromise measure between the good old doctrine and modern radicalism."

Good to know that trend stories have been with us nearly as long as newspapers (though this one does seem a bit more grounded than today's "Let's go see what six hipsters in Brooklyn are doing!" variety).

No post on the history of American facial hair would be complete without a photo of Union general Ambrose Burnside, who, though no great shakes as a general, remains a familiar figure to even casual Civil War buffs for the twin redans of his facial hair.


Happy birthday, America!

A young Iris Murdoch

Caught by the pleasures (illicit?) of reading other people's mail, I went straight last week from the new book of William Maxwell and Eudora Welty's letters to the first selection of what I hope will be many volumes of Iris Murdoch's, A Writer at War: Letters and Diaries, 1939-1945. The letters are to two of her simultaneous paramours, the ill-fated Frank Thompson, who was to be executed in Bulgaria during the war, and David Hicks, to whom she was briefly engaged; it's hard to imagine any fan of Murdoch not falling for these letters, which are absolutely sizzling with youthful energy, passion, and intellectual archness. The exchange in which she confesses to Thompson that she's lost her virginity, and he responds, are a stunningly perfect example of the way that, when young, we want to seem sophisticated, imperturbable, and intellectual--even as we also more than anything else want to know how the other person feels, really feels, and how much we can influence that feeling by our actions. Both say exactly, in clinical terms, what they're thinking and feeling; neither one says anything of the truth about what they're thinking and feeling.

But the moments that really struck me--and perhaps it's just an early days of summer thing, the return, fifteen years too late, of the feeling that school ought to be out now--as embodying the things I remember about being young come in the diary portion of the book, which covers a tour Murdoch made of the West Country in 1939, when she was twenty, with a troupe of fellow actors from Oxford who visited towns and country manors to put on a musical revue, even as Europe was sliding into war. Seventy years later, the diary still carries the distinct air of youth, the fierce engagement with the immediate that sits side-by-side with ignorance, even dismissal, of the larger world. There are simple, self-consciously silly passages like this:

Am sharing room with Joan, which is excellent. We are luxurious compared to others, in that we have a private room, complete with dressing table, washstand, and Improving Textes. One bed is a Goosefeather Bed. My romantic spirit forthwith inclined me to sleep therein in spite of Joan's warnings--now I understand why the lady in the song preferred a cold open field. That was the hottest night of my life. That bed was as hot as flaming cinders on the flagstones of hell. I slept toward dawn--and then was wakened by cocks crowing. Realised this is the first time that I have lived on a genuine farm. Thought poetically about the Bird of Dawning--then 5 o/c struck & confirmed the cocks. (I never really believed it till now.) Then the cows passed under the window--giving tongue. Lay and laughed silently , hoping I wouldn't wake Joan. All sorts of strange birds sing. I sleep, & get up at 7:45 to accompaniment of more cows.

There's madcap adventure:

VIctor's car was an incredible sight. The hobby horses & banner stuck thro' the roof, placards bedecked the sides, & Hugh's haversack was strapped to the spare wheel, all but obscuring the number plate. In front were Victor & Tom--Tom as often as not opening the roof & standing up to view the countryside--while in the back were Charley & Joan & Hugh & me, woven in and out of each other like a half-inch twill, as Charley put it. Hugh & I sat in the middle, & the other two lay diagonally across us with their feet out of the windows. It was a splendid sight, & drew shouts of mirth & glee from all beholders. After an hour or so Hugh nobly got out & rode dangerously on the running board--at least it wouldn't have been so dangerous if he hadn't insisted on doing Cossack tricks all the way. Then it began to rain & we packed Hugh in again & I sat on his knee.

And there's what young actors always end up with, love:

After the show Hugh & I wandered down to the Cherwell which flows thro' meadows below the house, & sat & watched the moon rise. A group of white swans sailed silently past. It was a most magical evening. Hugh lay down beside me with his head touching my side, & I sat & looked across the river. Then gradually we gave expression to what had been tacit between us for several days. There is something incredibly tender & gentle about Hugh, for all his terrific strength & bluffness.

But the moment that most clearly brings back age twenty, with all its unrealized blindness and perpetual change, is this simple one, from relatively early in the trip:

I have revised my ideas of Cecil. Strange how quickly one can change estimations of character. He is not the lofty conceited & utterly snobbish young swine I thought he was at all. He is very keen on the drama, & he is humble enough to want to be liked. Ruth observed that "he didn't seem quite at home here," and I think she's right. I watched him & Hugh fencing with considerable interest. Hugh had it every time of course, but was kind to his opponent. Cecil eventually retired into a rather awkward silence. I thought of the last time I had seen him, at John Russell's sherry party, & wondered at the contrast.

That age when we're not sure yet who we are, much less who anyone else is--for 70 pages, Murdoch's diary brings it back in force, and the added knowledge that, because of the war, adulthood was about to demand brutal sacrifices of the members of the troupe makes the whole positively wrenching.