Reading Notes: Diderot

There’s a lot of name-dropping in Rameau’s Nephew, which may be why Diderot never published the book in his lifetime. It recounts a long, probably fictitious conversation between Diderot himself and the brilliant but unsavory person named in the title, the real-life down-at-heels nephew of the French baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau.

When not performing intricate pantomimes and discoursing on musical theory, Rameau’s nephew (who does most of the talking) explains how he makes his living as a sponge and buffoon in the homes of the rich, as a procurer of young women for randy aristocrats, and as a teacher of music who never really teaches anything. There’s a bit of Falstaff in him, but he’s more sophisticated, more craven.

“For long ages,” says Rameau, “there was an official King’s Jester, but at no time has there been an official King’s Wise Man.” He plays the jester therefore. Like some of Shakespeare’s jesters, he’s venomous as well as diverting:

“People laud virtue, but they hate and avoid it, for it freezes you to death, and in this world you need to keep your feet warm… Virtue commands respect, and respect is a liability. Virtue commands admiration, and admiration is not funny.”

“If it is important to be sublime in anything, it is especially so in evil. You spit on a petty thief, but you can’t withhold a sort of respect from a great criminal. His courage bowls you over. His brutality makes you shudder. What you value in everything is consistency of character.”

What exactly is Diderot about in Rameau’s Nephew? It’s hard to say. He’s giving the devil his due, perhaps, or purging himself, through the puppet of Rameau, of all the uncharitable thoughts he’s harbored about his fellow men. Or maybe he’s trying to inoculate himself (and us) against the allurements of cynicism and easy hypocrisy:

“One swallows the lie that flatters, but sips the bitter truth drop by drop.”

Reading Notes: Richard Holmes

Consider the following two quotations – the first from Humphry Davy and the second from Thomas Carlyle – and ask yourself how we get from the one to the other:

“Imagination, as well as reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic [i.e. scientific] mind. A rapidity of combination, a power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative source of discovery.”

“The progress of science is to destroy Wonder…”

To what degree are the aims of science aligned with those of art? When and why did they begin to diverge? These are some of the questions explored in Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder, an expertly guided tour of the era of “romantic science,” when scientists were still philosophers and philosophers were artists, when discoveries were made (according to the myth) by flashes of insight and obscure inspiration, and when the possibility of scientific horror first began to suggest itself.

We start in 1769 with the young Joseph Banks in Tahiti, there in the capacity of gentleman naturalist assigned to Cook’s expedition to observe the transit of Venus. With his treasury of journals, specimens, and anthropological observations, he returns (just barely) to England and moves from notable disillusionment to notable accomplishment. As vigorous, long-lived president of the Royal Society, Banks becomes the patron spirit of the age, and the rest of the book.

In addition to Banks, Holmes spends a lot of his time with William Herschel, discoverer of Uranus; with his sister Caroline; with Mungo Park in Africa; and with Humphry Davy, who does for the science of chemistry what the Herschels do for astronomy. We’re also given glimpses of George III, Linnaeus, Benjamin Franklin, Erasmus Darwin, a whole host of balloonists, Dr Johnson, Horace Walpole, Gilbert White, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy and Mary Shelley, and – as the new scientific generation comes into its own – Michael Faraday, John Herschel, and the young Charles Darwin.

I’m not a specialist or historian of the period, but I loved every page of this book, and I learned something new on every page. Like a more successful Dr Frankenstein, Holmes has knit together a lost era, but reanimated it so convincingly and compellingly that its questioning spirit, its anxieties, and its sense of wonder become our own again.

The Art of Bilocation

At Winter Quarters on Antarctica’s Ross Island in 1911 you don’t always want one of the so-called great books to read before bed. Of course you’ll read whatever is handy (what else is there to do?), but what you really want, says Apsley Cherry-Garrard in The Worst Journey in the World, is a book that will

take you into the frivolous fripperies of modern social life which you may not know and may never wish to know, but which it is so often pleasant to read about, and never so much so as when its charms are so remote.

The best sort of reading (which may occur even when what you’re reading isn’t the best sort of book) typically induces a sense of bilocation. My son, age nine, tried to explain this to me the other day. “When I’m reading a book,” he said, “the world around me disappears and it’s like I’m really in the story in my imagination, even more than when I’m watching TV.”

We may enjoy a keener pleasure when the contrast between book and life is most pronounced. This, I’m sure, is part of what “Cherry” is getting at. We want to live two lives at once, and if those lives share too much in the way of outward circumstance, the bilocation fails. So, for example, I don’t imagine I would have enjoyed Frans Bengtsson’s The Long Ships quite so much, or in the same way, if I had been a professional pillager myself.

Likewise, I had put off reading The Worst Journey in the World until summer because I knew the contrast between my own gross comfort and the gross discomfort of Cherry and co. would add to the experience. Not that I find satisfaction in their sufferings, but the transport to Antarctica makes for rather effective mental air conditioning.

Sympathetic Imagination

Sympathy, according to Dr Johnson, is “fellowfeeling; mutual sensibility; the quality of being affected by the affection of another.” That’s a lovely, generous definition, broader than we commonly allow the word. Today sympathy is often used as a synonym for pity, which at least in American usage has come to have a negative connotation (“I don’t want your pity!”). Empathy, a word which doesn’t appear in Johnson’s Dictionary, is sometimes employed to do the work that sympathy once covered, but it’s not as musical a word to my ear.

I think a lot about the idea of sympathetic imagination. By sympathetic imagination I simply mean the mental work of putting oneself in another person’s place, imaginatively entering someone else’s perspective. It’s the stuff of cliché (walking in another’s shoes, seeing through another’s eyes, etc.) but without it life and art, I think, become unbearable. Exercising sympathetic imagination means withholding judgment, extending charity, allowing (either by stepping forward or by not retreating) the gap that separates us from others to close at least a little, for a least a little while.

Lack of sympathetic imagination is a prevailing flaw of our civil discourse. It’s a negative temptation for international relations. The partisanship of perspective is total. We’re not only uninterested in the way our intellectual or political opponents view things, we’re doctrinally forbidden from granting their basic premises even for the sake of argument. We don’t dare allow ourselves to believe they can have anything other than hateful, destructive intentions. This is nothing new, I’m sure, but it has consequences.

If only we could learn to be better readers.

It’s strange to reflect that sympathetic imagination can be extended to fictional persons but it can. As readers we’re asked to do it all the time. Of course it helps when the prose is pleasant and the story a good one because characters can disappoint. Not all perspectives deserve sympathy (nor all books reading) but the effort is rarely a total waste. As an exercise of sympathetic imagination the reading of a book, no less than the writing of one, becomes a moral action. How well we read books can affect how well we read people. The library is a school for sympathy.

I recently read The Oregon Trail, Francis Parkman’s autobiographical story of the summer of 1846, which he spent in part with a band of Oglala Sioux in the Black Hills. For all his professed fascination with the “savages,” it’s remarkable how little curiosity he exhibits. He considers them occasionally amusing, physically impressive, but mostly stupid, cruel, stubborn, backward. There are a hundred questions we wish he’d asked or, if he did ask them, that he’d bothered to report the answers.

In his review of the book, Herman Melville gave Parkman some righteous chastisement for his lack of sympathetic imagination. In his own masterpiece, Melville largely avoids the pitfall. His Tashtego and Queequeg, among others, are equal possessors of earth and sea with Ishmael and Ahab. This is not to say that the things people share in common trump their differences. Quite the opposite; difference is always enlightening. But I suppose I believe, as Melville did, that human nature is one and that the accidents of culture and civilization can accrue or melt away in a mere few generations.

As Melville acknowledges after he’s put the stick away, The Oregon Trail is a wonderful book even so. It’s a rich, detailed, companionable travelogue, expertly written. Parkman has blind spots, but he still manages to see an awful lot. And though there’s less sympathy than we might have hoped for, there’s even less sentimentality. To my mind this illustrates the point I’m clumsily trying to make. Parkman’s limitations don’t let us off the hook. In enjoying the book it becomes necessary for us to exercise our sympathetic imagination, as readers, for the benefit of Parkman, who sometimes failed to exercise his own.

Exotic/Domestic

Among the varieties of homo scribus there is a kind of author who employs exceptional language to explore subject matter which is, at least on its surface, fairly unexceptional. Examples abound and I’ll let you think of your own. In any case it’s the author’s prose and the peculiar quality of his or her reflections on familiar things that give readers their pleasure.

However, there’s another kind of author who explores exceptional themes through language which is, on its surface, unexceptional (or at least undistracting). The fireworks here are more in the subject matter and not so much in the language. In fact, the author may use an intentionally understated style to accent, by contrast, the exotic quality of his subject.

Eliot Weinberger – new to me – seems to be an author of the second sort. I almost passed over his essay collection, An Elemental Thing, despite the lovely cover. The canned praise on the back of it scared me. To believe it, Weinberger’s work is totally without precedent, the accomplishment of things yet unattempted in prose and rhyme, the sole flaw in the rule about there being nothing new under the sun.

Weinberger’s book isn’t really so unprecedented. You could point to whole armies of anthropologists and historians, among others, and maybe to Borges too. God spare us such monsters of spontaneous generation anyway. If it had been truly unprecendented I’m sure I would have hated it. (And here’s a lesson for overpraising reviewers: islands are places we like to imagine ourselves bringing a few favorite books, but a book itself makes a poor island.)

An Elemental Thing is a well-curated little museum, worth the price of admission, and Weinberger is a gifted collector. Page after page he holds up curious objects for our consideration without getting himself too much in the way: the recurring Aztec apocalypse, the tiger as symbol and victim, the mysticism of the Taoists, the levitating saints of Italy, the Mandaeans of Iraq, the heathenish folklore of the wren, the ritual life of a Chinese emperor, the Empedoclean follies.

There’s such a thing as too much exoticism, however, and Weinberger pushes a bit beyond my limit. Reflecting on it, I can’t help wondering where this immemorial western obsession with the misty, musty East comes from. Weinberger does occasionally sample from nearer to home but he spends more than half the book stepping over the fewmets of other latter-day Orientalists: Pound perhaps, and the dime-a-dozen Zen-pushers of the twentieth century.

If the West discovered the East in Alexander’s time, the East seems only to have discovered the West in the last century or so – or am I wrong? Was there ever such a thing, I wonder, as an Egyptian Herodotus? Or a Mongol Polo that sojourned among the Venetians and famously wrote it all down? Montesquieu in the Persian Letters had to invent his own Usbek.

Kennel Ink

At the end of a letter to John Payne Collier dated May 6, 1820, Charles Lamb adds the complaint:

I write in misery. N.B. the best pen I could borrow at our butcher’s: the ink, I verily believe, came out of the kennel.

The “kennel” here is the gutter down which blood flows at the butcher’s shop. Lamb was writing away from home and his more reliable instruments. But he seems to like the analogy of ink and blood. In another letter of the same year, he assures Coleridge that, despite appearances, he hasn’t opened his veins for something to write with but was forced to use a cheap red ink commonly known as “clerk’s blood.”

This past weekend I bought a British two-volume Everyman’s Library edition of Lamb’s letters. Though in tolerable shape (even retaining their yellow and white dust jackets), the books are more cheaply made than usual. This is explained by the publication date of 1945 and the stamped image of a lion couchant atop the announcement: “BOOK PRODUCTION WAR ECONOMY STANDARD.”

Though I’ve been a (more often than not) distant admirer of Lamb’s since a college course on the Romantics twenty years ago, I was moved to pick up his letters on the warm endorsement of Patrick Kurp. Like Kurp, I find Lamb’s letters an awful lot of fun. Within a mere ten pages in either direction of the quote above, you will find passages like this from an 1821 letter to Mrs William Ayrton:

My sister desires me, as being a more expert penman than herself, to say that she saw Mrs Paris yesterday, and that she is very much out of spirits, and has expressed a great wish to see your son William, and Fanny

– I like to write that word Fanny. I do not know but it was one reason of taking upon me this pleasant task –

From an 1820 letter to Joseph Cottle we get the following:

I am quite ashamed of not having acknowledg’d your second kind present earlier. But that unknown something, which was never yet discover’d, though so often speculated upon, which stands in the way of Lazy folks’ answering letters, has presented its usual obstacle.

Lamb goes on in the same letter to sympathize with Cottle’s personal distaste for Byron:

It was quite a mistake that I could dislike anything you should write against Lord Byron, for I have a thorough aversion to his character, and a very moderate admiration of his genius – he is great in so little a way – To be a Poet is to be The Man, the whole Man – not a petty portion of occasional low passion worked up into a permanent form of Humanity.

There’s a judgment that might have drawn blood.

But nothing could seem less likely to cost the author himself any blood than Lamb’s letters. They are full of impressive gaiety and ease. For all his kennel ink and clerk’s blood, you don’t imagine Lamb toiling painfully at his correspondence, though I suspect he must have. From letter to letter he reads like a circus performer so well practiced that he makes the high wire look like a stroll down the lawn – only this performer is wearing a clown’s nose.

If, as I sometimes think, laughter is the most precious human commodity, then precious indeed is the blood of the Lamb.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, 1915-2011

Friends and neighbors, he explained, sit up all night round the coffin, telling funny and often improper stories, dancing, and drinking rum, and even, after concealing small objects in the mouth or other natural hiding-places of the corpse, playing games of hunt-the-thimble. If the corpse has been a heavy drinker during his lifetime, bottles of rum are poured down his throat; if a dancer, his body may be removed from the coffin and whirled round the room…

~ Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveller’s Tree

Something similar happens when a figure in world affairs or the arts passes over River Styx. By means of print and commentary, the corpse is explored, predilections and achievements are rehearsed for memory’s sake, and the floor is cleared for a posthumous last dance. I was sick over the weekend and only learned today of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s death. His feats of wartime daring are literally the stuff of celluloid legend, but (like others of my generation) I only came to know him through the first two volumes of the unfinished trilogy that he began with A Time of Gifts. Here’s to hoping that the time of gifts isn’t ended just yet and that among the abandoned articles of his long and magnificent life there’s a manuscript copy of that dearly missed third installment.

An Anthony Powell Abibliography

If you’re interested in Anthony Powell or imaginary books written by imaginary persons, this is for you. I started the list below while reading Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time last year. I scribbled it onto a sheet of paper, stuffed it in a drawer, and forgot about it. I offer it now as an oddity for the odd. Something like this ought to exist somewhere online and it might as well be here.

This is an incomplete list of Powell’s biblia abiblia. I’m sure I missed some. Let me know (by email or in the comments) if there’s anything you feel I should add or change. The rules: 1) Only include books referred to in Anthony Powell’s Music of Time series; 2) Every book must have a title and author; 3) Every author must be a substantial enough character to have a speaking part in one of Powell’s twelve volumes.

Evadne Clapham:
Cain’s Jawbone
Engine Melody
(formerly: The Pistons of our Locomotives Sing the Songs of Our Workers)
Golden Grime

St John Clarke:
Dust Thou Art
E’en the Longest River
Fields of Amaranth
The Heart is Highland
Match Me Such Marvel
Mimosa
Never to the Philistines

Vernon Gainsborough (Werner Guggenbuhl):
Bronstein: Marxist or Mystagogue?

Russell Gwinnett:
Death’s Head Swordsman: The Life and Works of X. Trapnel
The Gothic Symbolism of Mortality in the Texture of Jacobean Stagecraft

Nicholas Jenkins:
Borage and Hellebore: A Study
Fellow Members
Knowing the Right People
Mornings in Wiltshire
Paying the Rent
The Silent Summer

Alaric Kydd:
Sweetskin

Ada Leintwardine:
Bedsores
The Bitch Pack Meets on Wednesday
I Stopped at a Chemist

David Pennistone:
Descartes, Gassendi and the Atomic Theory of Epicurus

J.G. Quiggin:
Unburnt Boats

L.O. Salvidge:
Paper Wine
Secretions

Odo Stevens:
Sad Majors

Sillery:
City State and State of City
Garnered at Sunset

X. Trapnel:
Bin Ends
Camel Ride to the Tomb
Dogs Have No Uncles
Profiles in String

The Irrelevance of Literature

My first year of college I took a course in Arthurian literature. There were fewer than ten of us in the class. After a couple months of smothering our brains in downy volumes of medieval and Gothic-revival romances our professor experienced (or manufactured for our benefit) a crisis of conscience. Why of all things, he asked us, should we waste our time with books like these? When it comes down to it, why read fiction at all? Aren’t books irrelevant? Isn’t the world simply exploding with more serious concerns?

That was 1991. It hadn’t been long since the fall of the Berlin wall, the Soviet Union was just loping off the stage, and Nelson Mandela was free in South Africa. The world as we and our parents had known it was ceasing to be. These were times historians called “momentous” – and had we really shut ourselves indoors to read Chrétien de Troyes and Malory? Our professor, being a wise man, assigned Cervantes for the rest of the course and invited us to feel ourselves on Rocinante’s bony back.

Twenty years later we appear to be in something like momentous times again. Certainly they’re momentous for those engaged in the recent uprisings in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, and other places. What with the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York, the launch of one – or should I say two – wars of questionable wisdom, the collapse of the world economy, and natural disasters in Haiti and Indonesia that have produced human suffering on a scale to dwarf even Voltaire’s Lisbon earthquake, the past decade has felt uncomfortably momentous.

I confess to occasional pangs of conscience when I switch off the radio or set the virtual newspaper aside with a sigh to pick up a book. I feel a twinge of something like guilt when I decline to inform myself further on the goings-on of the world at large and turn instead to the endless revision of my novel or to writing a brief nothing about a clever passage from Stendhal. I hear the question again: Isn’t the world simply exploding with more serious concerns?

The answer is, Yes… And then again, No.

I don’t want to make a lofty defense of bookwormism. Long-winded and complicated apologies rarely convince anyone that doesn’t already share the apologist’s own sympathies. I know that I’m an obsessive person and in certain respects not very representative of my species, most of whom have more balanced personalities and interests than I do. With shockingly few exceptions, the only things I really care about in this world are books: so of course I’m going to find ways of justifying myself to myself.

Even so, I do want to suggest – meekly, cautiously – that being human means something more than politics or economics or geology or weather. Of course it may, and frequently does, mean these things too. But where human experience overflows the bounds of outward necessities, there art and culture are found. Literature, as the art and culture of words, is an attempt to enjoy and account for and preserve that excess. I hope you’ll agree with me that it’s sometimes life’s excesses that are most precious, most irreplaceable.

Reading a book is a human encounter. Reading well is not an escape but a shared search for answers to questions that are sometimes obvious, sometimes sensed only with gloved hands in a dark room. I like to think that when politics and economics and geology and weather conspire to murder and oppress, picking up a book can be a way of giving a damn. I may be a fool – maybe I’m still bouncing on Rocinante’s back – but I like to believe that reading is a form of solidarity. We read for ourselves, but we read for each other too.

Tragedy: The Snake-Man

One of the things I managed to do this year after all was finally read Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children. I’ve owned my copy three years and every year read the first fifty pages or so and stopped. It wasn’t for lack of interest – not at all – but those first fifty pages were so rich and dense and overwhelming, I somehow didn’t dare go on. I needed more time to build up my immunities, perhaps, to get stronger.

A family is a language to itself, but from dumb beginnings and single-syllables any child of the house moves inevitably to perfect fluency. Reading Stead’s book is something like being born yourself as yet another supernumerary child of the Pollit household: you are mesmerized and disoriented by a dialect, a cadence, a register that mysteriously cohere bit by bit to become a world.

Stead’s verbal exuberance and genius for comic invention are just astonishing, of a caliber (I’m tempted to say) with Melville or Shakespeare. Her characters – Sam and Henny and Louie especially – so weigh down the text that the paperback swells to ten times its size, pulpy with flesh and blood. It babbles and complains when left alone on the table. It shouts for tea and sings and sweats and coughs in your face when you open it to read.

If the book has its faults – and there are people glad to point them out to you – I like to agree with those who say that they are nature’s own faults: gratuitous detail, excess vitality, general overabundance. Rather than make a sloppy mess of it all, like a lesser author might, Stead manages to reproduce life where life exceeds art while still fully containing it.