Dr. Metablog

A Scots Quair

I've given over the last week or ten days to Lewis Grassic Gibbon's A Scots Quair and I'm very pleased to have done so. And I'm embarrassed that I've only now read this strange brooding wondrous series of novels. How could I not have known? For those equally as ignorant as I, the Quair is a trilogy -- Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933) and Grey Granite (1934). Together they tell the story of Christine Guthrie from childhood -- about the turn of the century -- through the years of the Great Depression. I can't remember reading a piece of fiction that has so thoroughly engaged me, or encountering  a fictional character so fully realized as Chris Guthrie Tavendale Colquhoun Ogilvie.

Here's a picture of Gibbon (birth name: James Leslie Mitchell) who died at age 34 from a botched surgery.

The novels do for the northeast corner of Scotland what Thomas Hardy did for the southwest of England. Gibbon's corner of Scotland is traditional agrarian society beset by doctrinaire religion, industrialization, war, and the Great Depression. The novels range from extremely brutal to marvelously lyrical. They are not without defect: sometimes too long, often too preachy. Occasionally, I felt that I was being treated to a Scottish version of "orientalism": Scotism, perhaps. The books want condensation, editing; sometimes I felt that I was reading a first draft -- but Gibbon wrote fifteen books in seven years, so signs of haste are inevitable. Gibbon might be called a local colorist or a social realist, but he's much more. His feel for the landscape and for history is unparalleled.

In subject matter and tone, A Scots Quair reminds me most of Halldor Laxness's great Icelandic novel, Independent People. It's also like one of Hardy's Wessex novels, but funnier, more playful, and yes, more sensual. There are stream-of-consciousness speeches that recall Faulkner and passages that might have been written by James Joyce (not the Joyce of Ulysses but the Joyce of Portrait).  A much neglected masterpiece. 

Douglas Bush's Milton Course

In the mid 1980s, thirty-five years ago, I was in residence for a week at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., researching an article on one of the lesser English Renaissance dramatists -- a pleasure as well as a condition of employment. The article turned out to be not a bad piece of academic prose, if I do say so myself, but not something for the ages either. It was a mere twenty years since I had completed my degree in "English and American Language and Literature" at a Large Eastern University, specifically Harvard. I was not drawn to the Folger for professional reasons only. It was a delight and a great privilege to hold in my very own hands and to read dozens and scores of four-hundred-year-old ephemeral books that -- more than the canonical literature -- helped me to understand the age of Shakespeare. Sermons by the wagonload, biblical commentaries, almanacs, political pamphlets, poems by minor and unknown versifiers, broadsides, medical textbooks, collections of jokes, how-to-write-a-letter-in-Latin trots, schoolbooks. The library possessed inexhaustible troves of such material. The Folger's plenty licensed my dilettante brain to follow its own naturally wayward inclinations.

While doing my duty and also having some fun, I fell in with a fellow Folgerite named Boyd Berry who was visiting from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. Over cups of coffee, Boyd and I discussed some of the less well-known writers of the period in whom we shared a mutual interest. I remember that we also talked about the teacher's perennial frustration at engaging the interest of our sometimes less-than-enthusiastic students. I do not remember what prompted me to ask Boyd this question: "what was the worst course that you ever took either as an undergraduate or graduate student." He replied, without hesitation, "Douglas Bush's lecture course on Milton at Harvard in 1961." I was flabbergasted, in part because I hadn't guessed that Boyd had been at Harvard during my years there, but more because I had enrolled in exactly the same course -- same time same station same year -- and because Douglas Bush's Milton course was also my own nominee for the worst course ever. Parallel lines had accidentally and miraculously met, so to speak. Although Boyd and I were the same age, he was one year behind me and had taken the course as a senior undergraduate while I had been a first-year graduate student. It seemed an astonishing coincidence, but then, the universe of students of English Renaissance literature is a small one. Nevertheless, the fact that we shared the same opinion about Professor Bush's course was comforting and, as they say, "validating." Boyd said out loud words that I had only speculated upon in petto. Perhaps I wasn't the only outlier.

Why were we in such accord? The obvious answer is that Professor Bush, then in the tail end of his much-celebrated career (he had uttered his infant cries during Grover Cleveland's second presidency), was tired and bored by his teaching and put little heart into the work. In brief, he droned, unconscionably. Not only did he drone, but it seemed as though there was an invisible shield between his podium and our seats. He didn't speak to us -- he addressed the empyrean. His lectures consisted of a superficial running commentary on Milton's poems. "There's a particularly lovely passage starting on line 695," -- as if a challenging idea would be beyond our collective capacity. If a student broke into the drone to hazard a question, Professor Bush's characteristic answer was, "Well, that seems self-explanatory." But Bush's classroom style was not the only reason for my unhappiness; I had more substantive concerns. 

Let me interject a few words about Professor John Nash Douglas Bush. Although almost forgotten today, Bush was by all odds the most formidable and learned literary scholar of his generation. He knew everything there was to know about English, Romance, and classical literature and had written a dozen comprehensive critical and historical books. If the gossip can be trusted, he greeted the dawn of each new day by reading two hundred lines of Latin poetry and a hundred of Greek. I am sure that he knew more about John Milton than Milton knew about himself. He had edited the volume of Milton's complete poetry (English, Latin, Greek, and Italian) and, astonishingly, had memorized the entire twelve books of Paradise Lost. He was an exacting scholar and a stylish and witty writer. Moreover, he was a kindly, gentle man, cordial and generous to his students -- even to me. If he had flaws of character, I didn't know of them. To my mind, he was an unimpeachably excellent person and scholar -- and at the same time a teacher from whom I learned just about nothing.  

I was once invited -- along with a gaggle of my ambitious graduate-school classmates -- to some sort of reception at Professor Bush's Cambridge residence. His home was exactly as it should have been -- that is to say, if one were making a movie about a distinguished Harvard professor, one's location scout would not rest until he discovered the Bush quarters. It was a spacious and civilized home presided over by gracious Mrs. Bush, who was also exactly as she should have been. I remember that the giant main room in the house -- which must once have been two or more large rooms that had been sutured together, was Professor Bush's enormous study. It was more like an institutional library than something to be found in a private home. Just as one would expect, the study was lined floor to ceiling with handsome wooden bookcases chock full of an enviable display of publications in many languages, some of which I could identify. I remember being served sherry, I think, and also something preternaturally green and fishy on an unfamiliar but I'm sure very elite kind of cracker. This dream of an academic utopia filled me with envy. It also scared the living blazes out of me. Why? Because for all Professor Bush's elegance and his library, and his lovely deferential wife, his movie-set home struck me as soft, fey, self-satisfied, and bloodless. I was dazzled and intimidated by its splendors but at the same time wary and resistant. Only five years beyond crowded Erasmus Hall High School in darkest Brooklyn, I knew myself well enough to know that, however seductive, his style of life was not for me. I would have to find a more appropriate path. 

Now I want to step further back and report on two cases in which I was in conflict with Professor Douglas Bush. Actually, the conflicts were only on my side; Professor Bush, Olympian and serene, did not notice -- nor should he have, frankly. These incidents continue to haunt me to this day, sixty years after the fact. Both occurred not in the Milton course, but in an "advanced" seminar called "Science and Humanism in the Seventeenth Century." I must explain that the word "humanism" did not carry the meaning that it does today, as in the phrase "secular humanism" -- an approach to the natural world that is allied with agnosticism and which sometimes resolves into pure atheism. Professor Bush's humanism was the altogether different "Christian humanism." It was, in brief, the noble but ultimately unsuccessful Renaissance attempt to fuse the "inspired" and "revealed" truths of Christianity with the thoughtful, upstanding but unfortunately natural  morality of the Greeks and Romans. If "Christian Humanism" could be distilled to a sentence, it would be Desiderius Erasmus' daring speculation -- that he would like someday to be able to say, "Sancte Socrates, ora pro nobis", or "Saint Socrates, pray for us."

I was a humanist of the secular variety -- by birth, inclination, education and because in my brain there was no place, not even a lone neuron, where "faith" or "prayer' or "worship" might in more standard heads be lodged. Bush, on the other hand, was not just a scholar of Christian Humanism, he was an honest-to-god trapped-in-amber Christian Humanist -- and a devout one, deeply rooted and entirely comfortable in late medieval/early renaissance thinking. In his seminar on Science and Humanism, humanism was right and just, and science, its antagonist, was, if not altogether bad, at minimum a very dangerous alternative. Did not both Bacon and Descartes assert that "nature" -- the real world -- could be studied directly, on its own terms, rather than as an entity infused with god's being and majesty. That we mortals might study nature not to reaffirm the goodness and omnipotence of god, but to accumulate objective knowledge and to reap practical material benefits. It's a fact that the separation of nature from the "truth" of religion has over the centuries unquestionably led to the marginalizing of Christian thinking and therefore, according to Bush's view of the world, to the steep decline of civilization. The world, no longer driven by revelation, has been going to hell in a hand basket, as Professor Bush said or implied every Tuesday at 4:00 pm.

Regular readers of this blague as well as Dr. Metablog's family and friends will recognize that Youthful Me did not accept Bush's premises. In fact, in those days, I was probably even less open to religious ideas than I am now. And therefore, each Tuesday was a day of discomfort.

And then, one afternoon, Professor Bush began the allotted two hours by launching a surprise assault on the then-new and controversial Third Edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. The Third had shocked traditionalists. Until 1962, dictionaries had been "prescriptive "-- that is, they explained how language "should" be used and they stigmatized as colloq. or subst. [substandard] those words or expressions that fell below the bar. The Third forsook tradition and was not prescriptive but descriptive. It aimed to record the language as it was really used. The Third therefore included many words hitherto banned as slang or vulgar and it was loose and permissive with regard to "shall" and "will", and "imply" and "infer," etc. For Professor Bush, the Third was a plunge into darkness -- another example of the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it, or should know it. So he excoriated the new dictionary and its editors and its supporters. The tirade having been completed, he turned mildly to the class and asked if anyone present had a different opinion. Now I had learned a little about modern linguistics at Cornell, and I was a descriptivist both by education and democratic instinct, and I knew that Bush was completely out of step with contemporary thought. I was astonished to discover that I knew more about this particular field of knowledge than he. But, alas, I was totally intimidated and did not open my mouth. What abject cowardice on my part! Nary a word did I say, and so the class segued to a discussion of the Cambridge Platonists and their vain attempt to tame and assimilate Descartes and Spinoza. I still wonder if any of the other 2G's around the table were aware of my shame. Probably not -- did my peers, the late Arthur Oberg, the late Jake Mills, the late Brian Hepworth, the late Terry Logan, the late Bill Godshalk, and others whose names I have forgotten, notice my moral collapse? I suppose that it's too late to worry. Nevertheless, my failure to raise my hand and voice still humiliates me, still rankles. 

Another Tuesday, another surrender. In 1961, William Empson published his innovative study, Milton's God. While Empson was not as learned as Professor Bush (no one was) he was a much more imaginative and challenging reader. Some say that after Johnson and Hazlitt, Sir William has been English literature's most insightful critic. Empson was an intellectual and social dissenter (he had been banished from Magdalen College, Cambridge when a condom [horrors!] was discovered among his possessions). He had written two highly influential critical books that every serious mid-century student of literature studied -- the first on ambiguity, the second on pastoral. Empson read Paradise Lost through a very different lens than Bush. He was not a Christian; in fact, he confessed himself anti-Christian because he judged there to be a serious moral flaw at the heart of the religion -- that the sacrifice of Jesus was a highly elaborated form a scapegoating. About Paradise Lost, he concluded that God (that is, the character God in the epic) was confused and contradictory, repeatedly tying himself into logical and rhetorical knots in order to justify the unjustifiable. He also argued that irrespective of Milton's intention, the character God became more complex and interesting when he became less ideological and more dramatic; more, so to speak, human. He revered Paradise Lost, but for his own, not Bush's, reasons. Milton's God was trashed by Professor Bush, who dismissed Empson as a simple "village atheist." I was stunned. True enough that Empson was an atheist, but true also that he was a powerful thinker, not someone to be given the back of the hand with a flippant ad hominem. Bush's review came out in The New York Times on a Sunday; the following Tuesday, our teacher was lauded by my fellow seminarians. He basked in their admiration. Did my young colleagues genuinely agree with Bush, or were they egregious sycophantic toadies? I don't know and will never know. And then, after the celebration, Bush asked, as if he were open-minded, "Does anyone here have a different opinion?" If Empson had been summarily dispatched, what chance had I? So once again, I fled the field, remained mute -- and slunk deeper into my thick leather chair. 

So there they were, my two abject failures of nerve.

 

Have I flagellated myself sufficiently? 

 

But now I also remember a third Science and Humanism event -- the Tuesday that Professor Bush fell asleep.

 

The class routine was for members of the seminar to offer a ten-minute presentation on the topic of the day, after which Professor Bush would initiate discussion with the unfocussed inquiry, "Any questions, or comments? " At which point I would regularly yearn for my Cloak of Invisibility. One fatal day, the student in question was John Knott, a fine and intelligent youth but not a ball of fire, oratorically speaking. When he brought his effort to a close, there at the head of the table sat Professor Bush, eyes closed, breathing rhythmically, his large round head bobbling on his small round body, lost in blissful slumber. A few seconds went by, then some more seconds, a minute, a minute and a half. Thanks be to all the gods in the pantheon that he did not snore! And yet there we all were, arrayed around that splendid dark mahogany table, frozen. No one moved or even twitched, no one spoke, no one made eye contact with a fellow sufferer. No one breathed. It was unbearable. At last, after another twenty or so ticks of the clock, I had endured all I could endure, and I raised my Complete Poetry of John Milton into the air and was just about to let it slam, when Professor Bush opened his eyes, and without the slightest acknowledgement that something unusual had occurred, intoned the familiar words: "Any questions, or comments?" 

 

I do not recall this event in order to nip at Professor Bush's revered heels. Every teacher is entitled, occasionally in a long career, to lose focus while a beginning graduate student discourses on a volume such as Henry More's Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (an important-in-its-own-day [1660] monograph eloquent in support of rational providentialism and of the preexistence of the soul). For all I know, Professor Bush may have been exhausted because he had been up past the midnight hour Monday night, possibly contributing more to scholarship in an evening than I did in an entire career. In hindsight, it was not the sleep itself that distressed me -- it was the passivity and silence of my fellows -- and the fact that when I remained silent I  honored the charade, the falsehood, that Bush was not asleep. Faced with an emperor's-new-clothes opportunity, I punted. 

 

Just as I had failed to defend modern linguistics, had failed to defend the "village atheist," so I failed to bang my book on the board -- an act which would have been forthright and honest and true to myself. The first two events were disgraces of an intellectual kind; the third was one of manners and, I think, of social class. The alliance of Bush and Harvard had overwhelmed me, taken from me my natural freedom of action. Let me confess that it was a secret guilty pleasure to have been accepted into Harvard's kind embrace. I feared banishment. Would I have still been welcome, would I have been worthy, would I have been a gentleman if I had noisily ended the nightmare. I felt, and I feel to this day, that all of us around the table were in an implicit, unacknowledged conspiracy not to notice the obvious so that we could protect the reverend professor and therefore defend the institutions that he exemplified. We contrived not to notice Bush's well-earned snooze because to do so would have punctured the balloon. It would been bad manners, barbaric manners, and to exhibit bad manners in a wood-paneled seminar room would mean that we were not genteel, not civilized, unworthy of Harvard and of the privileges it bestowed on us. 

 

On the other hand, I myself had only twenty-two years on my scrawny back, and was just five years out of rambunctious Erasmus Hall High School in Flatbush, where if a teacher were to fall asleep in class, he would within seconds have been met with catcalls and a flurry of paper airplanes. And I admit that, although I conformed myself superficially to the ways of my "betters," I had enough of a residual catcall-and-paper-airplane soul that I have regretted my inaction now these sixty years. 

 

Family, friends and stray internet pilgrims: perhaps you think that I'm making too much of these trivial long-ago-and-far-away events. Far too fraught, too melodramatic. Are you not, readers, skeptical of the idea that he (that is, me) honestly believes that the essence of his being was threatened by a seminar in seventeenth-century English humanism? Possibly you also think that I exaggerate the gap between Harvardity and Brooklynity. So let us return to early 1960s and re-examine the historical context of these events.

 

I have reported on Douglas Bush's theological convictions; let us now turn to his retrograde views on education.

 

Bush was, without question, an unapologetic elitist. I don't mean "elitist" as the word is now popularly used -- as an all-purpose insult to those who are presumed to think that they are better than we because they are rich or have studied to a prestigious college. I mean elitist as in "snob." Bush was an elitist because he felt that education was only for the elect. Once you admit ordinary, common folk, by golly, the end is near. He was blunt: "education for all, however fine in theory, in practice ultimately leads to education for none." He deplored the ungenteel idea that "students [would] come to college out of a desire for economic or social advantage." Let them stay in the places to which they were born!  In a still shocking moment of undiluted social and racial snobbery, he pronounced that "the rising flood of students is very much like the barbarian invasions of the early Middle Ages." "Barbarian invasions"? His metaphor is "self-explanatory," is it not?  Bush presented himself as a guardian at the gate, protecting Christian Europe from the wild-eyed, uncivilized incursions of Lombards and Visigoths. And how was I to understand the analogy?  Did it not apply to me? Was I a civilized European or was I a violent Vandal? In theory, once I was admitted to Harvard's sacred precincts, I became an insider. But in reality, in my heart, I could identify only with the migratory hordes. Although I was camouflaged by my thrift-store jacket and tie, and I did not bring my seax to class, did not subsist on mare's milk, and felt no urge to sack Harvard, I knew myself to be, in essence, an interloper -- a Bulgar, Avar, or horrible Hun. Or, in my particular case, a member of the tribe of anxious Ashkenazim. 

 

So now let us circle back to the beginning. Why was "Douglas Bush's Milton course" the worst class ever?  For me, it was not just because Bush regularly lulled his classes to sleep. It was also because in his illiberal hands, John Milton, my John Milton, was diluted and distorted. I was, ante Bush, an admirer of Milton's courage and I was infatuated with his poetry. Milton is the only poet in the language, I believe, who was the equal of Shakespeare. Lycidas (written in 1636, the year of Harvard's founding) is in my opinion the world's single best poem. In tribute, I had memorized its 193 glorious lines. Moreover, Milton was a truly admirable human being. He was the furthest left, the most radical figure in the whole of English literature and perhaps in western literature. Did he not defend the execution of Charles I and the death of monarchy?  Did he not argue that marriage should be based not on dynastic alliances, but on love and sexual compatibility. Did he not authorize every individual to interpret the Bible in his own way, without the interference of a church or its priests and ministers -- the "priesthood of all believers?"  And was it not true that he composed the Areopagitica, a seminal, essential contribution to freedom of thought?  But for Bush, I regret to say, Milton's impassioned advocacy of human dignity distracted from his poetry. He daydreamed in class about the poems Milton might have written if he hadn't allowed himself to be waylaid and distracted by politics. My Milton, on the other hand, was as much a public man as a poet. He had willingly given twenty years of his life and his precious eyesight to work for the radical transformation of society and for human freedom. Bush's judgment was in my opinion a major error, a disabling error, and it meant that the professor, however knowledgeable, was so blinkered by his conservative ideology that he missed the defining points of Milton's life. Just as I could not fully embrace Bush's Milton, he could not or would not ever fully grasp the greatness, the importance of my Milton. It therefore irked me to sit and listen every day, while Milton's contribution to world history was neglected, discounted, or dismissed. It hurt. 

Montaigne, Kinship with

There is no author with whom I feel greater kinship than with Michel de Montaigne and there's none with whom I've passed more hours and days, except for Shakespeare. For many years, Montaigne's Essais has been my bedside companion, first in the old Everyman Library edition as translated by John Florio, a book which I early discovered among my father's small collection, and latterly in the 1958 version by Donald Frame. Of the two writers, Shakespeare is the greater, but he is unknowable and certainly not a comrade. "Negative capability" -- and all that. Shakespeare, the human being, lies hidden behind a profusion of characters and borrowed stories. Sometimes I think I can catch a glimpse of the man himself in recurring images or in a repeated motif, but how can I be sure? It's all guesswork and supposition. Shakespeare is an auctor absconditus. He can be admired, even revered, but he's too mysterious ever to be a pal. Montaigne, on the other hand, is insistently present. He talks directly to me, guy to guy, teaches me, argues with me. Even though there's a universe of differences between me and this astonishingly erudite sixteenth-century French Catholic skeptic, I feel that we are good friends.

Why the kinship? Montaigne is so various, so mutable, so inconsistent, that he's difficult to define, but nevertheless exhibits traits with which I l am in deep sympathy. Of all the important thinkers, he's the least systematic -- which is a benefit, at least for me. I can't make heads or tails of his near-contemporaries Spinoza or Descartes because both are too orderly and logical for my unsubtle head. But Montaigne works differently -- he advances an idea, modifies it, retracts it, illustrates it with a dozen anecdotes, and then announces that he can't come to a definitive conclusion -- which is the way my mind works, although obviously at a much lower order. And then Montaigne's brain is a hodgepodge, a gallimaufry of formidable learning strewn in heaps, like the last scene of Citizen Kane. So is mine, although it's a cramped attic compared to Montaigne's warehouse. And of course, Montaigne writes almost exclusively about himself, as I do in these fragmentary blague entries.

Moreover, we both seem to be at least in part writing for the same purpose. I compose these essaylets for what I conceive of, pretentiously, as dynastic reasons. Because I I so much wish that I had some artifacts or writing of my grandparents or great-grandparents, who left nothing behind, no scrap remaining, I want my descendants to have something of mine. Montaigne agrees: "What a satisfaction it would be to me to hear someone tell me of the habits, the face, the expression, the favorite remarks, and the fortunes of my ancestors. How attentive I would be. Truly it would spring from a bad nature to be scornful of even the portraits of our friends and predecessors, the form of their clothes and their armor." [Montaigne came from a family with a strong military tradition, unlike mine, which is epitomized by grandfather's desertion from the Russian army.] "I keep their handwriting, their seal, the breviary and a peculiar sword that they used, and I have not banished from my study some long sticks that my father ordinarily carried in his hand." I have no "sticks," but as I sit here pecking at the word processor, I see out of the corner of my eye my father's library ladder, used for retrieving just the right law book.

Montaigne is not done with the topic. He continues by exploring an idea about which I also have ruminated. For whom do I devote these hours, if not for myself?  He is eloquent upon the subject.

"If no one reads me, have I wasted my time, entertaining myself for so many idle hours with such useful and agreeable thoughts. In modeling this figure upon myself, I have had to fashion and compose myself so often to bring myself out, that the model itself has to some extent grown firm and taken shape. Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book that my book has made me -- a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life....  Have I wasted my time by taking stock of myself so continually, so carefully. For those who go over themselves only in their minds and occasionally in speech do not penetrate to essentials in their examination as does a man who makes that his study, his work, and his trade, who binds himself to keep an enduring account, with all his faults, with all his strengths."

I wish I could say that I'm as honest as Montaigne; I'm not. I recognize that the "me" that appears here is to some degree different from the me that is me. Although I do not lie about myself, I conceal some of my most flagrant deficiencies. Nor do I blow my own small trumpet. As a result, the portrait that has emerged is solider and also less troubled than the true-to-life person. Don't say I didn't give you notice, unwary descendants. 

Bleak House Once Again

I just completed another long stroll through Bleak House. It's either my fifth or sixth time through -- or almost once a decade since 1958. During this reading, which will no doubt be my last, I felt that I was imprisoned by the novel, hogtied; that I couldn't do anything or read anything else until I made it to the end of entire 900 pages. Dickens took over my life, and not for the first time. It was a struggle, perhaps made worse because my eyes are not as good as they once were and because the print in my Oxford Classics edition seems to be growing tinier and grayer.

It was a willing surrender and I was a willing captive. How can I not be dazzled and impressed by the profusion of Dickens' imagination and by his genius at keeping a dozen plot-balls in the air. 

Nevertheless, I don't ever remember being quite so angry and impatient at Mr. Dickens.  "Let 'em wait." Well, I waited for five days, which as fast as i can trot nowadays. 

The good parts of Bleak House are as good as anything in the language. The death of Jo the crossing sweeper ("And dying thus around us every day") remains the single greatest paragraph in the long history of the English novel. "Dead, your Majesty." The encounter of Sir Leicester and Rouncewell was much better than I remembered it. Mr. Chadband, the oleaginous preacher, was, this time, remarkably pertinent. Mr. Bucket is a triumph. Lady Dedlock's long repressed love for Captain Hawley was more poignant.

But I've lost my admiration for some other parts of the novel. I could hardly bear Esther Summerson's goody-goodiness; and, this time, I have to say that Esther's relationship with her dear darling Ada seemed suspect. Far too sentimentalized. Ada herself, still in mourning seven years after the death of her misguided weak husband -- unbearable.  The Jellyby and Pardiggle satires seemed misguided, excessive.  I was not amused by Mrs. Snagsby's jealousy or by the relentless pillorying of poor Mr. Guppy. Harold Skimpole's infantile nattering has lost its charm.

There's never been a novelist with more heart or less intellect than Dickens. He is the best of novelists, the worst of novelists. 

New Light on Vikings

I read all 599 pages of Neil Price's just-published Children of Ash and Elm, a detailed history of the Vikings, and I'm mighty proud of myself for persevering.  It's a long book bristling with details and data. The author, an archeologist, has made his own original contributions to Viking research. To produce this synthesis, he seems to have read every relevant article and monograph of generations of scholars. An impressive feat. I wonder, how much will my intermittently faulty memory retain? 

Has my understanding of the Vikings changed? Yes, I think it has. I knew that the Vikings were famous for cruelty, plunder, pillage and rape, but I had no idea that they were so deeply involved with human sacrifice and slavery.  "The Vikings," says Price, "were not only slavers, but the kidnapping, sale, and forced exploitation of human beings was always a central pillar of their culture." Slaving was "the main element" of commerce with Russian and Ukraine. The chapter on Viking slavery is grim reading indeed. It won't make you proud of your species. 

Here are a couple of Viking slave collars

 

 

Vikings were polygynous and when a minority of the males monopolize the women, the rest have to find companionship and satisfaction elsewhere. Vikings liked to locate a settlement, kill the men, and capture the women. Recent genetic studies have determined that the founding population if Iceland consisted in large part of Viking men and Scottish women. 

 

It's hard to believe that the age of the Vikings is only a thousand or so years into the past -- a blip in human history. To me, the hideous cruelty of their era figures the dark heart of European and probably all human history. Do not slave labor, pogroms, and genocide periodically erupt?  And yet the Scandinavian cultures that descend from the Vikings are now the most democratic, progressive, and egalitarian on earth. Perhaps there is hope.

 

Those are Viking teeth in the picture above. Price thinks that the filed grooves were filled with some sort of red dye, making the Viking smile truly terrifying.

"The Small House at Allington" (1863)

The nation is in an uproar -- the Covid-19 pandemic, mass unemployment, racial reckoning, disorder in the streets, Russians sabotaging our elections, ignorant authoritarian leadership.

We ourselves are sheltering at home, and are healthy, thanks to the masks and the cooperation of friends and neighbors, but there's little hope of a getaway. We certainly can't travel. What to do for an escape? There's no frigate like a book, so it's time to read a long leisurely novel by Anthony Trollope.

The Small House at Allington is the fifth of six in the Barsetshire series. Had I read it before? Certainly, but it doesn't matter. To read a Barset novel is to put on well-worn old clothes. Loose slippers. The Small House is comfort food. It's the mac and cheese of novels.

It's not 2020, it's 1863. Outside of Barsetshire, millions of working-class Englishmen are living in grinding, soul-destroying poverty. Cholera is rampant. India is being pillaged. Ireland is trying to recover from famine and mass emigration. There's a second Opium War in China. British ships are running the Union blockade of Confederate ports. But all is as ever in the perennial untouched Allington microcosm.  

Should the Dales continue to stay in the dower house even though the squire is sometimes impolitic?  Should Adolphus Crosbie choose to marry Lily Dale (yes!) or Lady Alexandrina de Courcy (big mistake)? Will Plantagenet Palliser run off with Griselda Grantly -- don't do it, Planty Pall!  Should Lucy Dale accept a dinner invitation from the Earl de Guest? Why won't Isabella Dale agree to accept her cousin Bernard as a husband? -- everyone in the family thinks it's a good idea, except Bell herself, who prefers poor but faithful Dr. Crofts.

Political and economic problems do not intrude into the small world of the Small House. Finding a mate, keeping a mate, repairing a frayed relationship is its subject; equally important for men, is to locate a woman of means, so that one can support a comfortable style of life without stooping to real work.  

Adolphus Crosbie, although far from our favorite, accurately describes the three things that he requires in a wife: that she be of a good family, that she have money, and that she be beautiful. Does Mr. Crosbie possess these qualities himself?  No. But he does have a handsome set of whiskers, which seems to be sufficient.

"In This Our Life" -- the Novel by Ellen Glasgow

In this Our Life, the novel by Ellen Glasgow is richer, deeper, and less bound by convention than the film.  Film Life follows the inherited story for its first forty-five minutes but then sharply diverges.

In the film version, bad daughter Stanley is less conflicted and complicated a character and eventually devolves into a stereotypical noir "bad girl." Novel Stanley doesn't drive Peter to suicide, nor does she she bring the film to convenient closure by driving her car down a cliff. Novel Craig is far less worthy and more passive than film Craig and doesn't redeem himself by transforming into a sleuth who exonerates Parry.

Needless to say, the novel offers no Hollywood ending; in strong contrast, novel Roy rejects Craig's offer of marriage because she knows that Craig is still carrying the torch for Stanley. Instead, she tries desperately to leave town and start life anew -- but it's not clear whether or not she will make a clean getaway. We hope that she will.

The most extensive revision is to the character of the sisters' father, Asa Timberlake. In the film, he's a uxorious martyred browbeaten milquetoast who is the long-suffering caretaker of his hypochondriacal bedridden wife. In Ellen Glasgow's novel, much of which is seen through his eyes, Asa loathes his wife, knows that he's wasted his life, craves affection, and even admits to himself that he wants her dead so that he can be free. It's Asa, not Craig, who unravels the mystery of the automobile accident. Moreover, glory be to the proper gods, Asa has a secret lady friend, a widow/farmer a dozen years his junior, whom he visits on his occasional day off. And he nurtures an escapist fantasy that keeps him sane -- he wants to end his life as a simple farm laborer. He doesn't quite get there at the novel's end, but there's hope. Kaye, his very healthy, very appropriate mistress (we think sexual partner, though Glasgow hedges) assures him that she will always have an opening for a hired hand. 

North and South (1854)

I read Elizabeth Cleghorn Stevenson Gaskell's North and South (1854) on the Kindle. It's a long novel, but I don't know how long because when I don't have a book to heft, I don't know how many pages I've read and how many more are left. I can only say that I became impatient after a couple of days and started to think that Mrs. G. was being paid by the word. But just when I thought the novel would never end, I stroked the Kindle one more time, and by gosh and by golly, Mr. Thornton finally proposed to Margaret and bam! it was all over in a flash. I was unprepared. If I had been reading an old-fashioned "book," as we used to call them, I would have known that I was approaching the last page, and my reaction would have been much different. Instead of shock, closure.  

North and South was originally published in parts, twenty of them, and therefore was consumed over a period of months. Later it appeared in book form, so that enthusiastic readers might binge for a long day or two -- a very different experience than reading in discrete chapters, and one I prefer. Kindle-reading is a third way. It's less satisfying to me because I want the weight of the book in my hand and I want to track my progress by means of the physical act of turning the page. Electronic reading will no doubt become the norm; something gained, no doubt, but something also lost. I think I would have been more satisfied with the novel if I had a solid object in my hands rather than words on a screen. Strange to say, but I honestly feel that it would have been a better novel.

North and South is self-consciously "progressive." Those money-hungry northern industrialists turn out to be decent people after all. The strikers may be misguided and impatient, but they have a genuine grievance. Women might be able to live richer lives with a dollop of liberation. 

I confess that I am troubled when I read books that were progressive their own time but that seem reactionary now. I know, and I've been taught, that I should be more historical, less time bound, less, as they say, "presentist." Nevertheless, I was astonished, even offended, that Margaret Hale was to be branded a loose woman because she was seen with a guy at a railway station, unchaperoned. Good thing the man who was with her turned out to be not a potential lover, but her brother, otherwise her gross impropriety would have banished her, lifetime, from the list of the eligible-for-marriage. 

I know that Mrs. Gaskell wanted us to think well of the mill-workers, but why the heck did she make them speak in an impenetrable provincial lower-class dialect which makes them seem sloppy, and ignorant-- another species entirely, less than human?  Even though I tried to resist, the characterization of the masses left me alienated and angry.

And then there's a problem particular to me: every time one of her characters failed or suffered grievous injury or died (there are a number of spontaneous deaths in North and South), Mrs Gaskell felt obliged to invoke an all-purpose explanation -- "God's will!"  "God's will" whether thoughtful or just a tic, becomes, in this ostensibly progressive novel, a justification for political passivity and quietism.

I like this novel better when I read it the first time -- in 1963. Although it's unchanged (except for the kindling), I myself seem to have become much less empathetic and more cantankerous. Age?

 

Little Jimmy Hurt his Arm, by Ralph Ganesha Jefferson

Today's contribution, Little Jimmy Hurt his Arm, was written by Ralph Ganesha Jefferson, the author of the best-selling children's book Leonardo, the Enlightened Lion (2017).

"Little Jimmy hurt his arm.

He said to his mother, my arm hurts. His mother said, let us pray over it. So they prayed.

But it still hurt.

So his mother took him to the wise women at the end of the street. She prescribed CBD oil. Jimmy's mother rubbed CBD oil on his arm.

But it still hurt.

So his mother took him to a psychotherapist. He gave Jimmy some anti-anxiety pills. Jimmy took them.

But his arm still hurt.

So his mother took him to a reflexologist, then to a Kirlian analyst, then to an aromatherapist. Jimmy did what they advised.

But his arm still hurt.

Then Jimmy said, 'why don't we go to a doctor.'  

So they went to a doctor. And the doctor said to Jimmy, "Your arm is broken."  The doctor set the bone and put it in a cast.  

Jimmy's arm stopped hurting.

And then the doctor said, "While you're here, why don't I give you a measles shot?"  And he did.

Book Report: The End of Innocence

I don't read much fiction, but when I do, it's usually one of the 19th-century classics. However, the "international bestseller" The End of Innocence (2016) by Benedict Wells came highly recommended, so I gave it a shot. It's pretty good, not bad, not great, and certainly a novel for today and not for all time -- not even for the next decade. It's thin, simple. 

Egomaniac that I am, I was less interested in the novel itself than I was in my own reaction to it, which was, in a couple of words, both resistant and resentful. 

Why the hostility,  I ask myself?  

In the first place, it's a novel without any sense of style. Perhaps it's the translator's fault, but gosh, it's written in the prose of a bad TV journalist. And second, it's ruthlessly manipulative. The the back-cover blurb, boasts "tear jerker." And so it is, shamelessly. Jules, the first-person narrator, loses his parents in an auto accident, is sent to a boarding school that is depicted as a quasi-penitentiary, is abandoned by his two siblings, suffers from paralyzing guilt, and when he finally marries, has to watch his wife die from cancer (a sequence which is narrated in extended, unnecessary detail).  

I suppose these disasters might have been handled with enough circumspection and integrity to teach us something about the human condition. But no, only to wring a couple of tears from our reluctant eyes. And then the too easily won upbeat ending -- goodness gracious! 

Some parts, but not enough of them, rang true. The family dynamics among the siblings was complicated enough to generate some heft.

Here's a single instance, one of many, to which I objected: a late middle-age writer suffers from Alzheimer's. Our hero, Jules, puts a gun in the man's hands, then walks away and hears the report of the weapon. He never confesses that he assisted in the death, and suffers no psychological ramifications from doing so. Peculiar, especially since the dead man was his rival for the love of his soon-to-be wife. I think most people would agree that assisting in a suicide is a fraught act and that a novelist neglects his duty and cheats his readers when he fails to acknowledge and explore its effects. A major, compromising misstep by Mr.Wells.  

So there it is, in little: disappointed, exploited and cheated. Not a good feeling to take away from a novel.

But I wonder at myself. The most manipulative novelist of all times is Charles Dickens, whose writing  I revere. Dickens is on a level several orders of magnitude more tearjerkery than Wells could possibly imagine, grasp, or emulate. How can it be that I embrace Dickens and reject Wells?

Notting Hill (1990), Two on a Tower (1882)

We watched Notting Hill, a cute 1999 "rom-com" or "date movie" with cute couple Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. (It's hard to believe that the film is almost twenty years old. It's so slight and fluffy that I can't remember whether or not I saw it last millennium, but frankly, it wouldn't make much difference one way or the other.)  In Notting HIll, Julia Roberts plays a pricey celebrity actress ($15,000,000 a film) who happens to wander into Hugh Grant's tiny bookstore and -- a few cute scenes later -- into his tiny Notting Hill bedroom. It's a slight, unconvincing fairy-tale of a film and I'm giving away no secrets when I say that the cute apparently- mismatched couple not only overcome all psychological obstacles and class anxieties in order to marry but that also, in the cute coda scene, when she's lying in his lap on a bench in the park, she's well along in her pregnancy. Ah love! Ah romance! Ah idealized domesticity! Ah cuteness!

Cynic that I am, I'm curious whether she's crammed herself into his narrow digs (and displaced his second-banana roommate) or whether she's purchased the biggest finest mansion in the upscale Notting Hill neighborhood and moved the new husband into it. And closed down the bookstore. The film is wise to sidestep concerns of such dreary ordinariness. 

Notting Hill is a rip-off and inversion of Pretty Woman (1990), in which Julia Roberts was poor and Hugh Grant was Richard Gere, a mega-billionaire. Notting Hill might just as easily have been called Pretty Man -- it's that close a parallel. Only without the shopping.  

And Notting Hill, though upscale, is no Rodeo Drive. It's a neighborhood that has gone through a number of transformations. Once famous for its piggeries, by the middle of the 19th century, it was on the way up. In 1862, when Thomas Hardy left Dorchester and his Wessex homeland to apprentice himself as an architect, he took up residence in Notting HIll's recently constructed Westbourne Park Villas. And there in Notting Hill he wrote his first novel, never published and now lost, called with the remarkably appropriate Hugh-and-Julia title of The Poor Man and the Lady. 

Lower class boy and upper class girl was a perennial theme in Hardy's novels. An obsession, in fact. By coincidence, I'd just finished reading -- on the same day as I watched Notting Hill -- one of Hardy's most thorough explorations of the poor-rich theme -- his novel Two on a Tower (1882).

No idyllic pregnancy in the park in the Hardy universe.

In Two on a Tower, Lady Constantine falls in love with Swithin St. Cleeve, an impoverished amateur astronomer, but Hardy strews their path with one obstacle after another. For the Lady, a wastrel husband who is missing in deep dark Africa, and who may or not be dead; an inadvertent pregnancy; a duped second husband, this time a clergyman; for St. Cleeve, a badly-needed inheritance that can only be claimed if he remains single, and an extended exile. For both of them, misunderstandings, accidental damaging eavesdroppings, important letters gone astray, etc. And finally, when it appears possible that the poor boy and lady might find solace together, a sudden inexplicable spontaneous death.

Good thing that Thomas Hardy didn't write Notting Hill. Trust me, there would have been no happy ending. Perhaps Hugh would been disfigured in the fire that destroyed his bookstore and his livelihood, and Julia, repulsed, would have returned to her abusive alcoholic boyfriend. But very likely something even more arbitrary and cruel.

  

A Cliffhanger

I've been reading the novels of Thomas Hardy. Some of them are familiar old friends, like Jude the Obscure and Return of the Native; some I've read so long ago that they're new again (Mayor of Casterbridge, Far from the Madding Crowd);  and then there are a few that I know I've never looked at before, such as The Woodlanders, Under the Greenwood Tree, and, the one I just finished a half a second ago, A Pair of Blue Eyes.

Blue Eyes is an early novel (1873), moderately autobiographical. In it, young Stephen Smith is an apprentice architect of working class origins (as was Hardy) who woos Elfrida Swancourt, a maiden of a higher station. He has a rival for Elfrida's hand in a former teacher, elegant and prudish Henry Knight.

It's safe to say that this is a novel only for confirmed Hardy enthusiasts. There's little in it that Hardy doesn't do better later on.

On the other hand, Blue Eyes contains one rather wonderful piece of melodramatic excess. Elfrida and Knight go hiking on a dangerous cliff and Knight slips and gets himself into an awkward position, hanging on six hundred and fifty feet above the ocean. His foot "was propped by a bracket of quartz rock, balanced on the edge of the precipice." She's clinging to him and they're both stuck. Knight is ever the gentleman. "Clamber up my body till your feet are on my shoulders: when you are there you will, I think, be able to climb on to level ground." "What will you do?" asks Elfrida. Knight answers that he will wait "whilst you run for assistance." But just their bad luck, there's no one around. And so the chapter comes to a cliffhanging close (the novel was originally published in serial form in Tinsley's Magazine).

Several minutes and several pages of reflection pass. At last, Elfrida reappears, her form "singularly attenuated."  She carries a bundle of white linen.

Jumping jiminy, holy moly, I say, -- the girl has removed her underclothes.

She tears the linen into thin strips, knots them, and forms "a perfect rope, six or seven yards long." Knight 'clambers' up the rope, and is saved.  But by surrendering her undergarments,  Elfrida has, as Hardy delicately puts it, "absolutely nothing between her and the weather but her exterior robe or costume."  Goodness gracious me, the poor dear is clad only in her "outer bodice and skirt."  So, of course, to spare everyone further embarrassment, she runs away as fast as her little legs will carry her.

Poor struggling Thomas Hardy has wrestled Mrs. Grundy to a draw.  

Good thing Elfrida was clothed in sufficient unmentionables to construct a rope seven yards long. Suppose Knight had been down there couple more yards and she had to remove her "upper bodice."  Would she have done so, or would she have let Knight plummet?` Hardy arranges it so that Elfrida can defy social norms, but not to the point of actual nudity. Hardy is bold, but not too bold.  

I suspect that if Hardy had his way and wasn't enchained by the humbug prudery against which he struggled all his life, he would have stripped Elfrida to the skin. How would Henry Knight have responded? Probably keeled over from the shock.

What would Elizabeth Bennet have done in the same situation?  Removed her underclothes to save her suitor?  Probably not. The most likely answer: Jane Austen would never have let her go out walking near a cliff with a gentleman.  

A Choice Euphemism

Victorian novelists had a hard time describing bodies, especially female bodies. Their usual practice was to sidestep such subjects entirely though the more daring of them might resort to suggestion or innuendo.

Here's an instance in which Thomas Hardy ties himself into comic  knots trying to tell his audience that although Tess Derbyfield is very young and almost childish she has early developed a large bosom:  "She had an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage just now; and it was this that caused Alec d'Urberville's eyes to rivet themselves upon her. It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fullness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was. She had inherited the feature from her mother without the quality it denoted.  It had troubled her mind occasionally, till her companions had said that it was a fault which time would cure." 

A later novelist might simply have noted that she was physically mature and that her emotions would eventually catch up but for now she was vulnerable.

Back in Brooklyn we might have said, "She had a pair of gazongas on her like you wouldn't believe and they're going to get her into a lot of trouble"

Cliche of the Decade

There's this woman of a certain age, good looking, usually blonde. Generally, she's a detective but she could be reporter or a spy -- some sort of investigator. She has an instinct for her work, an unusual insight or gift. There's a murderer or villain out there and she's determined to get him; it's personal with her and often she has to violate procedures in order to bring this character to justice. She regularly confronts her superior, an older man who is a stickler for the rules and wants to shut down the investigation. As a last resort, she'll ask for 24 hours, or more rarely 48 hours, to bring the villain in. And guess what -- it turns out that her instinct was right all along and after a brief struggle, in which her life is in danger (often there's an attempted assassination, usually by speeding vehicle), the criminal/mastermind/murderer is handcuffed (British version) or shot (American version).

"Leonardo the Enlightened Lion" by Ralph Ganesha Jefferson

Once Leonardo defeated the old king and began to rule the pride, he evolved into a more modern lion -- more sensitive, more sharing, and more mindful. While he did not trim his mane or become less manly, he transitioned to a new kind of male.

First he decided no longer to bite the necks of the lionesses whom he mounted. Instead he wooed them gently with wine and flowers. He was a considerate mounter -- always taking care that the experience was sweet for his lionesses. He learned to roar more musically.

And soon after, he gave up the custom of breaking the backs of the kittens of the previous king. Instead, he nurtured the babies and brought them porridge and toys and stuffed animals. Nor did he drive the juvenile males into the bush. He taught them to dance and to draw and to meditate.

And finally Leonardo stopped treating other animals as prey. He became a gazelle guardian. Conscious of the environment, he encouraged all in his pride to eat organic fruits and vegetables and wholesome ancient grains.

Nowadays Leonardo the enlightened lion starts each day with a large bowl of gluten-free granola and yoghurt.

He's into wellness.

The Mall of Me

I had to go to the huge shopping mall the other day and let me tell you, what a colossal waste of effort! There was nothing for me. Lots of jewelry, fancy duds, shoes. There must have been ten shoe stores for the ladies and almost as many for the guys. But I've already stocked up on shoes: I buy multiple pairs of a design that works for me, stow them deep in the closet, and pull out a new pair when the one in use springs a leak. Same thing with pants: multiple copies of Lee Regular Fit jeans in a variety of colors, bought online or if I'm in a sociable mood at a shop around the corner. The big malls, with their sun glass huts and perfume counters and candle stores and  knick-knacks, doo-dads, and tschokes interest me not all. Nor their food courts -- gag. Or their muzak music, programmed to make you want to spend, spend and spend again.

I can, however, imagine a shopping mall designed for my particular and personal satisfaction. It would be called "The Mall of Me."

Anchoring one end of the Mall of Me is a large book store, carrying both new and used, but stocked with volumes of history, fine arts, crafts, popular science, biography, travel,  fiction, gardening and what used to be called "natural history", with lots of room to browse and sit and read. Proviso: the "bookstore of me" carries zero books on Spirituality, Self-Improvement, Soul Regression, Tarot, Alternative Therapies, or Healing Arts. No books written by TV pastors or repentant politicians recently released from prison or by instant millionaires. No celebrity autobiographies. At the other end of the Mall of Me, there's a shop selling music cds which  specializes in the great age of middle European music from 1685 (birth of Bach) to 1911 (death of Mahler), but also features a treasury of classic blues, bluegrass, American roots, popular song, rock and roll, and gospel of the golden age. No New Age, No Rap, no Electronic. Between my two "anchors," there will be a good garden store featuring expensive, elegant, heavy-in-the-hand garden tools. No power mowers or power tools, but when appropriate to the season, racks of seeds, preferably of heirloom and antique vegetables. Next to it, a movie memorabilia and poster store, with large collections from the earliest days of cinema right through 1950, especially Shakespeare movies. And then I'd like a high-end antique store displaying walls and shelves of classical and Asian works of art. Unfortunately, because of budgetary constraints, I won't be doing any purchasing in this particular shop, but I'll be pleased to browse in it, at least weekly, perhaps oftener. Also, a cafe where a guy could purchase a hot chocolate and an almond croissant. I would also like a store that specializes in 19th and early 20th century Caucasian rugs and wall-hangings though here, once again -- it would be more for appreciating than for actual buying. Subject to the same constraints, a baseball memorabilia shop -- National League only. A high end crafts store. And as for restaurants: a Jewish deli, modeled after the now defunct Second Avenue Delicatessen. An imaginative Asian fusion restaurant. A bagel bakery. No fish, and certainly no sushi. Perhaps a hole-in-the-wall one-person walk-in shop where a guy or gal could help me with computer and cell phone anomalies and failures -- someone who speaks in traditional English, not in acronyms. And then there will be buskers: at one end of the mall, a string quartet; at the other end, a bluegrass band. No fire-eaters, contortionists, or drummers banging on pots and pans. All performers personally vetted by me. No panhandlers or noble solicitors with their dread clipboards.

And of course, some intelligently-designed play areas for infants, new walkers and small children. And some comfortable chairs for their parents (and me) to sit and watch the kiddies frolic.

Yes, I think that will do it.  It's the Mall of Me.

Now that I think of it, everyone should have their own mall. Instead of vast mall installations, let's have targeted malls. Individually designed and executed.

Merchandising genius!! 

Sciascian Geography

Years ago, I read, in translation of course, a few of Leonardo Sciascia's Sicilian mysteries. Excellent books: The Day of the Owl (Il giorno della civetta -- 1961)), Equal Danger (Uguale pericolo --1973), The Challenge (Il contesto--1971). Last week I tried to read one of Sciascia's short stories in its native Italian. A good idea, but quite a struggle. Too taxing for my present fluency. Sciascia's vocabulary is enormous, mine is puny. Not to mention Sicilian expressions that would be stumpers and require footnoting even for mainland Italians.

The story I tackled is Il lungo viaggio, (The Long Voyage). Some impoverished Sicilian peasants pay a man whom we would call a coyote to smuggle them into America; he takes their entire savings, takes them on board his ship, and then after ten excruciating days sets them right back down in Sicily. A sad tale of exploitation, not, alas, irrelevant today. 

Sciascian geography: the Sicilians think they are headed for the middle Atlantic coast of North America, where they will find Nugioirsi, Nuovaiorche, and my very favorite, Brucchilin.

Reposted: "Crosspatch, / Draw the Latch" and Industrial Capitalism

One of the most joyful of nursery rhymes, and a personal favorite, is this brilliant piece of poetry:  

                               Crosspatch,

                               Draw the latch.

                               Sit by the fire and spin.

                               Take a cup,

                               And drink it up.

                               Then call the neighbors in.

The clicky rhymes and jaunty meter are undeniably beautiful -- and there's much more complexity than first meets the eye.  

In the first triad, a "crosspatch," -- a "cross or ill-tempered person, usually a girl or woman"-- is at work, spinning; in the second triad, she's exhorted to drink and also to invite her neighbors "in" -- presumably into the room, or just as likely, the tiny cottage-- where she lives alone. In the first strophe, the theme is isolation, but in the second, isolation is challenged by the calls of society and by the hope of a more satisfactory and convivial life.   

What can we know about the surly individual addressed by the evocative designation, "crosspatch?"  The first element in the name --"cross"-- implies not only sourness, but also resistance, as in "cross-grained." The second element--"patch"-- suggests that the crosspatch's discontent is not without cause. We can infer that she's poor because she's a person whose garments are either assembled from various rescued materials, as in "patchwork," or that her clothes are, in another sense of the word patch, repaired. In addition, it's possible that ill health has caused her skin to become "patchy." But "patch" also signals a degree of mental stress, as in Shakespeare's "patched fool." In this signification, patch derives from Italian pazzo, crazy. The crosspatch is therefore disabled physically, socially and psychologically.

At the outset of the poem, our "crosspatch" sits glowering, impoverished, perhaps muttering indistinctly, friendless, without family, her youth blighted by poverty, huddled against the last embers of her dying fire. What is it that she is spinning? No doubt she ekes out a meagre living in the impersonal mercantilist "putting-out" system. Some exploitative proto-capitalist venturer has delivered to her lonely door a quantity of unspun wool or cotton; her job is to return the material to him in the processed form that will then be passed on to an equally poor weaver, then to a tailor, etc. She works alone and never sees the fruits of her labor except for the occasional, paltry farthing that allows her a bare subsistence. No wonder she is slightly barmy and has "drawn the latch" -- closed herself off from her fellows. But then, suddenly, comes the antistrophe, and in a series of importunate injunctives the crosspatch is solicited to rejoin the company of humanity. "Take a cup,/ And drink it up,/ Then call the neighbors in." What's in the cup?  Spiritous liquors, no doubt, which, though designed to dull the pain of wage-slavery, also act to augment the revelry with which the poem climaxes. The wine is not sipped, but it is drained to the lees. And once the door is unlatched, and the neighbors -- neighbors of both sexes, no doubt,-- are called "in," why then, let the libations and the wild rumpus begin!  Alienated labor is suddenly set aside and replaced by the natural bonds of one human being to another, and the stasis of the opening lines of the poem transforms in a flash into a wildly kinetic bacchanal. Emotional weakness transmutes into healthy liberated pleasure. Dour Puritanism, with its punishing work ethic, yields to the spirit of holiday and to pagan, perhaps even dionysian, excess. Here, in miniature, is the essence of the comic vision. In a few powerful lines, freedom, good humor, and natural appetite triumph over bondage, artificiality, social constriction and repression; the justifiably sullen crosspatch, in a burst of energy, reintegrates herself into the social nexus from which she has been banished.

Whether or not the crosspatch can permanently liberate herself from the oppressions of industrial capitalism, or whether the anodyne and spurious relief of alcohol is a merely transient solution is left unresolved. To ask a short poem, however dense with meaning, to answer so difficult a question would, just possibly, be to ask too much of it and, perhaps, to push the evidence the merest tad too far.

Even More New Words

Carinate, which sounds vaguely dental, actually describes the shape of a particular kind of ceramic or metal vessel. An object which has a rounded base and inward sloping sides is "carinated." Hypogea, which is drawn directly from Greek under (hypo) and earth (gaia) means, obviously, underground, but in the world of archaeology generally refers to an underground temple or tomb. Catacombs and crypts, therefore, are both hypogea. A megaron was the great hall of a Grecian palace but archaeologists use the word to describe the large entrance room of any substantial structure. An exedra is a semicircular recess set into a building's facade. It think of it, perhaps incorrectly, as a half of a rotunda. A plinth is the base or platform on which a column or statue rests. Ashlar is finely dressed stones, generally in the shape of a cube or a rectangular solid. Ashlar construction is therefore different from rubble masonry, in which walls are made of irregularly shaped or found stones. A tophet is a burial place for children either sacrificed or dead of natural causes; it's a word of Hebrew origin and recalls the valley near Jerusalem n which ancient Canaanites sacrificed children to Moloch or Baal. I'm embarrassed that I apparently never encountered the word annona, which characterizes the grain supply of the city of Rome in ancient times.  Annona, the common noun, is also personified or deified as "a theophany of the emperor's power to care for his people through the provision of staples." Annona, the goddess, is sometimes assimilated to her compatriot Ceres. Acephalous means headless, and describes "clerics not under a bishop" or lines of verse missing a first foot. In archaeology, it's a decapitated statue. A cist is simply a stone-lined grave or shaft.

These splendid words are drawn from Shepherds, Sailors & Conquerors, Archaeology and History in Sardinia from the Stone Age to the Middle Ages by Stephen Dyson and Robert Rowland, 2007, which I read with great care, enjoying especially the middle chapters on Sardinia's fascinating nuraghagic civilizations.  

Sleepers

In the catchment area of P. S. 217, as indeed in my home territory of darkest Flatbush, there was very little immigration or emigration. People stayed put, for the most part, and the students with whom you entered kindergarten were the ones who were likely to graduate with you at the end of eighth grade.

I can think of two outsiders who came not from a near neighborhood but from the rumored "outside world." One was Beryl McLeod, who arrived from Scotland, stayed long enough to engender in me a most powerful and confusing pre-adolescent crush, and then disappeared. Lovely Beryl spoke with a most exotic and enchanting accent, Glaswegian if I remember correctly. And then there was Alan Dean, who dropped in for a year or two from western Pennsylvania. He was a diminutive tough boy, not very bright but competitive on the punch ball field. He also spoke in a dialect unfamiliar to me and which I now judge to have been country or Appalachian. One day in Miss Finsmith's crowded stuffy fifth-grade classroom we pupils were asked to elucidate a picture that the teacher had displayed. It was a young lad with a candle in his hand. I recall very clearly a sentence of Alan Dean's: "you can see that it's nighttime because he's wearing his sleepers."

Alan Dean's "sleepers" made a lifetime impression on me, not only because I had never heard that specific term before, but because I wasn't until that moment aware of dialectical differences in vocabulary. I knew about soda but I had never heard of tonic; I knew about pancakes but had never heard of griddlecakes or flapjacks, and I wore sneakers all day every day but knew nothing of tennis shoes or tennies -- not to mention plimsolls. I was not only monolingual but monodialectical, if there be such a word. For someone to employ the word "sleepers" for an item of clothing that I knew only as "pajamas" was therefore a transformational experience.

And a very sensible word, at that. Much to be preferred to other deplorable dialectal terms for pajamas, as for example the twee diminutive "jammies," or worse, the lazy "pj's" (not doubt employed by the sort of people who would call orange juice, O.J.), or even worser, the infantile reduplicative "jim-jams." 

So I was on the alert the next time that 'sleepers" swam into my imaginative ken, which was when I first became acquainted with John Donne's clever little love poem, "The Good Morrow," in which the poet claims that until he fell in love, he was immature, unconscious: 

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?

Who the heck, I wondered, were these "seven sleepers?" Not, in fact, a wardrobeful of pajamas nor (my first guess) a parody of the famous 'nine worthies" of chivalry?  But no, inasmuch as Donne habitually and regularly conflated religion and sex, he knew that the seven sleepers were a group of enthusiastic early Christian converts who were  imprisoned for their faith in a cave near Ephesus, fell into miraculous sleep, and then woke up two centuries later to discover to their delight that their city had adopted and institutionalized their religion. Rips van Winkles of miraculous devotion.  

Of other religious or literary sleepers the surely the most prominent are Thoreau's. In a poignant passage about railroads in Walden, Thoreau recalls that "sleepers" is the demotic names for the wooden ties on which the steel rails are laid. From this suggestive bit of nomenclature, Thoreau elaborates a conceit about the way the new industrialism favors some and crushes others. "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad?  Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon.” So "sleepers" live on.

I have never heard this sense of "sleepers" in conversation, but then, I don't talk about railroad-making all that much. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to endorse the continued pertinence of Thoreau's witty comparison. 

No doubt my regular metablogian readership has been waiting patiently for me to mention that the "sleeper" is the first and easiest trick learned by beginners with the yo-yo. At least, such was the case in the 1950s P. S. 217 schoolyard. And a spy in a "sleeper cell." And a dark horse. A surprise. A film; in fact, many films.

A lifetime of many and various "sleepers."

September 21, 2015.  Let me add that Sleepers are plentiful in the old West Bradford cemetery, they being one of the first families to colonize the part of Vermont in which I am now writing this paragraph. A quaker Sleeper disrupted a church service in the 1790s, shouting at the congregational minister, 'Sir, you preach false doctrine." There's a Sleeper farm right at the end of South Road, just over the West Bradford line into Corinth. Never met them, don't know if their family's religious enthusiasms have persisted.

Olivier Truc; Fiction; Age

Olivier Truc's Forty Days Without Shadow came highly recommended, both by the forty or so literary awards that it has garnered, and also by trusted friends. It's a murder mystery -- or rather a "police procedural" -- and indeed it is a very good "read." It's set in the northern reaches of Scandinavia amidst tensions between the indigenous Lapps, or more properly Sami, and their Swedish and Norwegian oppressors. It's got everything: a brutal murder, a child molester; a budding but blighted romance between a veteran policeman and his beautiful novice partner; a tough wise old "native" who clings to the traditional ways; a search for an old gold mine; stolen Sami artifacts, and enough red herrings to furnish a medium-size Stockholm restaurant. And snow, lots of snow. Snowshoes, snowmobiles, snowstorms, snowdrifts.

And yet I had to discipline myself to keep on with the reading. Something, perhaps age, has blighted my appetite for fiction -- not just genre fiction, like this mystery, but all fiction. Let me confess: to read stories, rather than to read history or biology or geology has come to seem frivolous. An indulgent  waste of time when I could be learning something substantive. 

I looked up some reviews of this novel. Let me quote one opinion: "the background information about the Sami lifestyle will slow down the action and readers may wish that Olivier Truc had left his documentary days behind." Interesting, but I had exactly the opposite reaction. What kept me intrigued and kept me plowing through the snowheaps was precisely the ethnographic and historical detail that the reviewer deplores. I wasn't just being "entertained";  I was learning something!

Five years ago, I reported on this very blague that in my youth I loved to read science fiction and fantasy, but that somewhere along the line, I lost my taste for such flights of imagination. (If anyone is interested, they can find the relevant paragraph here.) I would say that my condition has worsened -- my resistance to fantasy has now spread to almost all fiction. Odd that I don't feel the same way about movies: I prefer fiction films, stories, to documentaries.  

Darwin carried his Virgil and his Milton to Tierra del Fuego and claimed that the books sustained him throughout his Beagle days. But later, in his autobiography, he revealed that he no longer found any pleasure in poetry.  I can't compare myself to Darwin in any way except that we both grew older.  Yet I wonder whether an impatience with fiction and a loss of aesthetic sensibility isn't a characteristic of septuagenarians.

Lost Books

If a person could rescue one of the many lost books of the Greeks and Romans, which would it be? I think most ordinary walking-around-Americans would nominate the lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics, about which Umberto Eco made such a fuss, and which is presumed to be a philosophical analysis of the genre of comedy.

I myself am not enamored of Aristotle's lit crit. I suspect that if the second book had survived, it would only show that Aristotle had invented a vocabulary to describe the various elements of comedy -- and as a result generations of scholars would have felt an obligation to conduct sterile and inhibiting debates about the precise interpretation of his various technical terms. So, therefore, if I were interested in comedy, rather than rescuing the second book I'd prefer to read Homer's lost Margites, famous among the ancients as a comic counterpart to the Iliad and Odyssey. It might have been fun, and we would certainly learn a lot more than we now know about the archaic Greek sense of humor. My suspicion is that we moderns would find the Margites to be a trial, a puzzle, a genuine challenge.  

Not only comedies but tragedies also have perished. Anyone who has been dazzled by the great Greeks would want to read the 60 or 70 lost plays of Aeschylus, the hundred or so that have disappeared by Sophocles as well as the 60 or so vanished plays of Euripides. No doubt our understanding of the great age of Athens and Athenian religion and art and politics would have to be thoroughly rethought. Nothing more tragic than the loss of the tragedies.

And then there is Livy's history of Rome in 142 books, of which only 35 (plus fragments and reports) survive. How much more full would be our knowledge of the last years of the republic with Livy as a guide.

But if I had to choose a single work of the ancients that has perished, I think I would opt for one of the books that were written by Livy's student and friend, the emperor Claudius. Claudius, whose first wife (and one of his better ones) Plautia Urganilla was a native speaker of Etruscan, wrote two books about the Etruscans: a general history, and a volume on the Etruscan language. It's this second book that I would most want to rescue. Claudius was the last person known to have been able to read Etruscan, a language which was becoming extinct in his lifetime.

Etruscan was an isolate -- a language with no known relatives, like Basque. It was written in an early (8th century) variety of Greek, so it can be recited, but it cannot be understood. Etruscan contributed not only its alphabet but a few words to Latin: "atrium," "histrio," "taberna," "stilus," and "cera," for example. Approximately 13,000 Etruscan inscriptions are in existence, mostly on gravestones. There are also about 300 bronze mirrors with religious or mythological scenes on one side, many with Etruscan inscriptions on the obverse. They are found in the tombs of women who, it would seem, must have been literate. There are no surviving Etruscan manuscripts but there is the Zagreb mummy. Sometime around 125 in the last pre-Christian millennium, an Egyptian technician re-used a linen Etruscan book to wrap a body. Twelve hundred legible words survive. They seem to record prayers and invocations to the gods. Not much else, except for a great linguistic mystery in the heart of civilized Europe. Alas that Claudius's books did not make it through the dark age bottleneck!

What is a Tax-Cart?

What indeed?  In Trollope's Barchester Towers, when Mrs Quiverful discovers that her husband, rector of Puddingdale, is not to become warden of Hiram's Hospital, she sets out to Barchester to confront the bishop. Not a walker, and not the owner of a horse or carriage of her own, she "begged that Farmer Subsoil would take her thither in his tax-cart."  A tax-cart, as far as the dictionary is concerned, is a "small spring-cart on which a tax is paid." So it is properly a "taxed-cart."  A "spring-cart" is a "springed-cart" -- i.e a cart with springs. But were taxes paid on all vehicles? If so, why should this one kind of vehicle be called a "tax-cart?" But if not, why should this particular kind of vehicle be singled out of taxation. Trollope does not illuminate. 

And so to the other nineteenth-century horsedrawn vehicles (barouche, basket carriage, berlin, britchka, brougham, buckboard, buggy, cabriolet, caleche, cariole, carryall, chaise, chariot, clarence, concord wagon, coupe, croydon, curricle, cutter, daumont, dearborn, dennet, diligence, dog-cart, fiacre, fly, fourgon, four-wheeler, gig, go-cart, governess cart, hansom, herdic, jaunty car, jersey-wagon, kibitka, landau, patache, phaeton, pill-box, post-chaise, rockaway, shandrydan, shay, sociable, spider-phaeton, spring-van, stanhope, sulky, surrey, T-cart, telyezhka, tilbury, tarantass, trap, troika, victoria, vis-a-vis, wagonette, whitechapel, and wurt) now add "tax-cart."

Superhero Perils

I awoke this morning from a semi-nightmare all in a dither about Superman's x-ray vision. Inasmuch as the blue-haired one can see through dense objects (except, if I remember correctly, lead) then it follows as night the day that he cannot help seeing through his own eyelids. Superman must therefore suffer from what the sleep consultants call "poor sleep hygiene." Unable to keep the light out of his own eyes, he must therefore be subject to a degree of insomnia. No wonder he's always powing someone in the jaw -- he's just not getting enough sleep.   

Has anyone else given thought to this important topic?

Six-Leggedness

I read Planet of the Bugs (Chicago, 2014) by Scott Richard Shaw, a Wyoming entomologist. It's a good book on a great topic -- the evolution of insects. In the acknowledgements, Shaw thanks his editor for helping him to "shape a bulky manuscript into a sleeker book" but I think I  would have much preferred the fatter unpublished version, which I imagine would have been heavier on lurid, fascinating detail. I think that Shaw's editor may have misunderestimated his enthusiastic readership.

Shaw loves his insects and writes the evolution of life bug-centrically. Instead of the ordinary telling of evolution, where everything leads ineluctably to majestic us, Shaw presents the triumph of the six-legged kind. For example, Shaw disparages our (I mean mankind's) walking and running. "Two-legged bipedal locomotion is so unstable and difficult to master that it seems highly improbable and almost pointless." He has a point there. A child takes a year to learn to walk, and even after he does so, he staggers like a drunken sailor for several months. No other creature on earth is so ungainly at the outset.

Moreover,  Shaw adds, six-leggedness optimizes balance and stability and has the potential for rapid motion. "Six legged form is sublime. Fifty million insect species can't possibly be wrong."

If I understand it correctly, most insect species propel themselves by alternately moving one of their two tripods of legs -- and tripods are inherently stable.  It's a great system. 

Now that I've achieved the "golden years", I spend too much time worrying about crashing to the ground. I don't want to break a hip or a wrist, both of them common afflictions of the two-legged. Nno one has ever seen a beetle trip, or an ant sprawl embarrassingly on the sidewalk. 

Too bad we don't have six legs. Or even four (the othe two having evolved into arms).  We'd be better off. We'd need two pairs of hips, of course, and copulation would be more complicated, but it would be worth it. Speed, stability, grace. Four legs would definitely be sublime.

On the other hand, I'm glad that we evolved an internal skeleton, which the insects never did. I wouldn't want an exoskeleton or carapace. It would be ungainly, troublesome. And probably accompanied by all sorts of emotional displays. "Don't pay any attention to him. He's moulting." 

On the Kindle with Tertius and Rosamund

I'm reading Middlemarch again. It's either my fourth or fifth time through the best novel ever written in the English language. If you want to know about the nineteenth century, start with George Eliot. 

I had the oddest feelings fifty pages in. (Actually, "pages" is an anachronism because I am reading on the kindle.)  Lydgate is flirting with beautiful, empty-headed Rosamund Vincy.  I thought "this time let him be smart;  let him not marry Rosamund."  I must have been in an unusally plastic frame of mind, or in some sort of reading reverie. I know that novels are immutable, but I was hoping against hope that Lydgate had learned something since the last time I read the novel. Even though he made a fool of himself with that actress in Paris. And then last night, just before I turned out the lights, Lydgate did it again -- fell for the blonde curls and the glistening eye. He's learned nothing, not a thing, in the last ten years. And now I have to live through the saga as his crush turns into crushing disappointment and bitterness. Marry in haste, repent at leisure. Poor Lydgate.

 The kindle changes the input but doesns't do a thing for the outcome. 

Three Perspicuous Comments on "Books."

Charlie Dressen (manager, Brooklyn Dodgers,1951-53):  "You  know something? I never read a book in my whole life.... I can read newspapers and magazines. But I never read a book. You think I should?"

Jean Harlow (actress, on her birthday wishes): "Don't get me a book. I already got a book."

Anatole Broyard (critic): "If it hadn't been for books, we'd have been entirely at the mercy of sex."

A New Machiavel

I tried the first three installments -- a netflix diskful of episodes  -- of House of Cards. I plan to watch a few more, but I'm deep into negative enthusiasm, not at all sure that I'm going to continue. Cards certainly grabs you, and it's startling and theatrical, but it's also far too cynical and depraved for my rose-colored tastes. I just don't believe in it. I know that it's all the rage to assume that politicians are horrid and power-obsessed -- but every one of them, all the time, without a moment of relaxation or redemption?  And so I'm skeptical of every character, every twist in the plot, every nasty turn of phrase. And because I'm skeptical, I just can't, as they say, "get into it." Or at least, not all the way in.  (Full disclosure: during episode three I fell into a 'deep rest,' sometimes denominated a minor nap.)

The character who dominates House of Cards is Kevin Spacey's Frank Underbelly -- I mean  Underwood --  who is fascinating but not credible. Or rather, he is not designed to be credible, because he regularly violates the fourth wall and converses intimately with viewers. Underwood is ruthless, implacable, ambitious, vengeful, depraved, vicious, malignant, and amusing. He turns his audience into his co-conspirators.

And where have we seen this curious concatenation of traits before?  Think back, fit audience though few, to your college class in the History of English Drama. There you encountered the vice and his crossbred friend, the machiavel,who were ubiquitous in medieval drama. Shakespeare brought this semi-supernatural hybrid to perfection two separate times -- once in the person of Richard of Gloucester in Richard III and then again as Iago in Othello.

Richard of Gloucester winks to his audience that he "can smile, and murder whiles I smile,/And cry 'Content' to that which grieves my heart, /And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,/ And frame my face to all occasions."  Now if that isn't Frank Underhill to a T, first spotted killing a puppy and a few scenes later baldly and straightfacedly lying to his President. Richard can "set the murderous Machiavel to school" in order to gain a crown; our unFrank friend Frank once wanted to be secretary of state, but now he just wants revenge. Richard and Iago are capable not only of falsity but even of murder to get what they want.  Both of them kill their own wives. "I'll have her, but I wlll not keep her long," says Richard of Queen Anne. 

And therefore If I were to offer advice to Zoe Barnes, the reckless young reporter for the Washington Herald, I would suggest that she steer mighty clear of Frank Underwood. I would tell her to read Othello post-post-haste and take careful note of what happens to Desdemona's lady-in-waiting Emilia.  Hint: "Fie, your knife upon a woman."  

Zoe, please, please, get out of there while the going is good!

In Shakespeare's plays, Richard and Iago both overreach and come to grief. Richard is left to die on the battlefield and Iago is subjected to the rigors of Venetian justice ("Torture will ope his lips.") And that's what is supposed to happen to machiavels.

I'm curious as to what will happen to Frank Underhill. By rights he should be publicly humiliated and die a ghastly death. But inasmuch as we live in an exceedingly cynical age, we can guess that Frank will only die when Kevin Spacey is offered better work, or when ratings plunge, or when the series jumps its inherent shark.  

Lucinda Roanoke

I've been reading Trollope's Palliser novels again -- my third or fourth time through this series of six great big whoppers.  It's a familiar tour -- but with enough forgettings and misrememberings on my part to keep me focussed and surprised.

I finished The Eustace Diamonds late last night. I know that I read this novel for the first time in 1961 because it was in the curriculum of a course taught by showman Professor Edgar Rosenberg. I haven't the siightest recollection of that early reading or of Rosenberg's lectures either, but then, sixty years have gone by and larger and larger cavities riddle my porous Swiss cheese brain. 

The Eustace Diamonds is rich in both plot and character.  In addition to the usual "who is going to marry whom" scenario (three separate instances here) and still another version of the handsome but weak  hero who is going to the dogs but redeems himself in the last installment, there's a genuine cops-and-robbers mystery along with three separate detectives (none of them as competent as Mr. Bucket). And then there's also a riotous profusion of characters. Some, like Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Mealyus, products of Trollope's uncontrollable disgust with those nasty Semites, merely disfigure the page. Others are stock characters who appear in novel after novel, the name alone changed:  in this case the the patient Griselda figure Lucy Morris. But then there's a glorious almost Dickensian abundance of highly-marked, genuinely individualized and extremely imaginative, credible inventions.

There's Lizzie Eustace, with her fibs, taradiddles and utterly conscienceless lies; George de Bruce Carruthers, who has an eye for the main chance but knows how to protect himself against pretty women; elderly Lady Linlithgow, who's all tart tongue and selfishness; Lord Fawn, a pitiful small-minded aristocrat; and the bustling opportunistic hypocrite Mrs. Carbuncle.

And then there's Lucinda Roanoke, who inhabits a corner of the novel but who is fascinatingly perverse. She's an American, very young and handsome, impecunious, who's being shopped around to snare a husband. Under pressure, and against all good sense, she accepts an offer from the brute Sir Griffin Tewett. Lucinda has no intention of becoming an obedient wife. The engagement becomes a war of attrition between the "lovers."  Sir Griffin holds on only because, it appears,  he doesn't like to lose and because he assumes that he'll be able to control Lucinda once he's married and has legal authority over her. He looks forward to the only sort of sex that might occur, which woud be nothing less than rape. Lucinda is sex-averse and finds even a kiss to be abhorrent. As the wedding day approaches, she announces that she will never be Sir Griffin's bride. She threatens both murder and suicide. On the morning of the long anticipated day, she simply refuses to leave her room. Trollope tells us that she has gone mad. And that's the end of the affair.

Lucinda doesn't quite fit into the space. On the surface, the episode makes the point that women were offered no place in society except obedient wife. But this is not comedy of manners;  it's pathology. Sir Griffin is a sadistic monster. Lucinda does not want to submit, and therefore "chooses" insanity. Trollope does not follow Lucinda into her madness; instead, he dismisses her from his novel in exactly the same way that the English society dismisses such women. Trollope can't make a drop of sense out of the situation that he himself created. Lucinda deserves, and will earn, a novel of her own. But it won't be written by Anthony Trollope.

"Barefoot to Palestine"

I'm enchanted by a sentence in Othello that is spoken by Desdemona's lady-in-waiting, Emilia. She's helping Desdemona to undress and the two women are engaged in informal chat. Desdemona, perhaps wondering why she had the misfortune to fall in love with exotic Othello, allows her mind to wander. It comes to rest on a countryman of hers, a good-looking man named Ludovico. And then her interlocutor Emilia praises handsome Ludovico in words that should compel every sentient being to gasp in astonishment and admiration.

About Ludovico, Emilia makes a remarkable claim: "I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip."

All that needs to be said is, wow! But let me try to explain why the sentence so transfixes me.  

It's hyperbole, but not the ordinary hyperbole of largest or smallest or coolest or most awesome. It's a hyperbole beyond hyperbole. A lesser writer might have said, "I know a lady who would have walked a long way to make love to him." Not Shakespeare. For "a long way," Shakespeare give us "barefoot to Palestine"; for "make love" he offers "a touch of his nether lip."  It's extravagant and wheeling.

A hike, shod, to the holy land, would have been a long and exacting journey. Barefoot, beyond belief. The evocative word "Palestine" infuses religion and sanctity into a sentence about sex and desire -- and therefore generates a love-longing that is as powerful, as silly, and as ill-planned as a crusade. And for what aim? Not even, for this mythical lady hiker, a big, zonking, mouth-filling kiss; simply for the merest contact of lips. No, not even lips, just one lip -- the lower one.  It's an hyperbole of minimalism.

In the poetry that Shakespeare knew from his childhood, it was men who would make the vows and undergo the trials to court their beautiful ladies. But this lovely sentence reverses the convention. It is, so to speak, Sadie Hawkins day in Venice. 

Emilia elsewhere asserts that women have desires as strong as lovers of the other sex;  here she demonstrates that women's love-longing can be as ridiculous (and as powerful) as men's. 

And everyone who knows Othello will hear in the word "Palestine" an intimation of the violent act that once, many years ago, shook Aleppo.