'I'd rather be a good cook'

"If a man has any good in him, let him show it in his conduct, in his ordinary talk, in the way he loves or quarrels, at play, in bed, at table, in the conduct of his affairs and the management of his household. Those whom I see composing good books in poor breeches should have tended to their breeches first, if they had asked me. Ask a Spartan if he would rather be a good rhetorician than a good soldier. As for me, I'd rather be a good, if I didn't have one to serve me.

Good Lord, Madame, how I would hate this sort of reputation, of being an able man in writing and a good-for-nothing and a fool elsewhere."

—Montaigne, Of the Resemblance of Children to Fathers

'A Kind of Mental Inertia'

From The Waning of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga:

"...an assiduous reader of the chronicles and the literature of the fifteenth century will hardly resist the impression that nobility and chivalry occupy a much more considerable place there than our general conception of the epoch would imply. The reason of this disproportion lies in the fact, that long after nobility and feudalism had ceased to be really essential factors in the state and in society, they continued to impress the mind as dominant forms of life. The men of the fifteenth century could not understand that the real moving powers of the political and social evolution might be looked for anywhere else than in the doings of a warlike and courtly nobility. They persisted in regarding the nobility as foremost of social forces and attributed a very exaggerated importance to it, undervaluing altogether the social significance of the lower classes.

So the mistake it may be argued, is theirs, and our conception of the Middle Ages is right. This would be so if, to understand the spirit of an age, it sufficed to know its real and hidden forces and not its illusions, its fancies and its errors. But for the history of civilization every delusion or opinion of an epoch has the value of an important fact...

...This failing to see the social importance of the common people, which is proper to nearly all authors of the fifteenth century, may be regarded as a kind of mental inertia, which is a phenomenon of frequent occurrence and vital importance in history."

'Mental inertia' is the kind of phrase that gets turned around in the mind. One wonders how much one suffers from it oneself. Or how much one's 'epoch' is given over to what, in retrospect, might be clearly seen as delusions of the most untethered sort.

'To Die Usefully and Manfully'

Among the things I admire most about Montaigne is his extensive grasp of military history, both ancient and of his own time, not a predominant trait of our would-be philosophers and clerisy. (What I wouldn’t give to have bagged half the classes I took in college and traded them for a better grounding in Thucydides and the World Wars.) In his first essay, By diverse means we arrive at the same end, he begins by dishing a series of military anecdotes: “As Scanderbeg, prince of Epirus, was pursuing one of his soldiers in order to kill him…” “Emperor Conrad III, having besieged Guelph, duke of Bavaria, would not come down to milder terms…” “Dionysius the Elder, having take the city of Rhegium after extreme delays and difficulties…” These are not the type of specimen one expects to find in contemporary essays. It gives the text muscle. It also gives Montaigne a preoccupation, I expect usual for his day, with matters of honor:

“It is a noble craving to want even to die usefully and manfully; but the outcome lies not so much in our good resolution as in our good fortune. A thousand have proposed to conquer or die fighting, who have failed to do either, wounds and prison crossing this design and lending them a forced life. There are maladies that lay low even our desires and our consciousness.” (Against do-nothingness)

Here’s Joseph Epstein reviewing a book called “Why Honor Matters”.

Flowers at the Portal

In his essay Imagination as Value (from The Necessary Angel, 1942) Wallace Stevens lays out a case for "perceiving the normal," in contradistinction to "the deliberate exploits of the abnormal," as in the case of Rimbaud and Kafka:

"Jean Paulhan, a Frenchman and a writer, is a man of great sense. He is a native of the region of Tarbes. Tarbes is a town in southwestern France in the High Pyrenees. Marshal Foch was born there. An equestrian statue of the Marshal stands there, high in the air, on a pedestal. In his Les Fleurs de Tarbes, Jean Paulhan says:

One sees at the entrance of the public garden of Tarbes, this sign:

It is forbidden
To enter into the garden
Carrying flowers

He goes on to say:

One finds it, also, in our time at the portal of literature. Nevertheless, it would be agreeable to see the girls of Tarbes (and the young writers) carrying a rose, a red poppy, an armful of red poppies.

I repeat that Jean Paulhan is a man of great sense. But to be able to see the portal of literature, that is to say: the portal of the imagination, as a scene of normal love and normal beauty is, of itself, a feat of great imagination. It is the vista a man sees, seated in the public garden of his native town, near by some effigy of a figure celebrated in the normal world, as he considers that the chief problems of any artist, as of any man, are the problems of the normal and that he needs, in order to solve them, everything that the imagination has to give.”

A Second Dance

When I first read them, I found Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time books both highly entertaining and highly irritating. (I'm not the only one to feel irritation. Scribbled on the first page of my paperback copy of A Question of Upbringing is what I take to be a quondam reader’s exasperated warning: “NEVER TRY AGAIN.”) The books' narrative delivery is unusual: The narrator, Nick Jenkins, is a companionable but secondary presence. The books are mainly his investigations into the lives of other people—met at school, in business, and at parties; mixed up in the worlds of business, romance, politics, the arts and the second world war, inter alia. The books are short—they average about 230 pages—but in no hurry. The "action" isn’t so much slow as intermittent, sometimes abrupt. Sixty pages might be spent at a single dinner party. Dialogue alternates with Nick’s philosophical musings. Like Henry James, Powell operates at a slow boil, though to a lighter and a more comic effect.

I found the peculiar ruminativeness of Powell's style—which, if you lack a certain sense of humor, would be absolutely crushing in its deliberativeness—frequently irritating in my first run-through. I don't know why. Maybe I was missing a lot of the humor. Maybe I was more sympathetic to the gist of that famous and priggish Eleanor Roosevelt quote about great minds discussing ideas and small minds discussing people. But aren't novels, primarily about people, a higher form of gossip, anyway? Powell, not a small mind, discusses people first, to delightful effect. That's also his way of getting at ideas, which—it's easy for people like Roosevelt to forget—are never unaccompanied by human bearers. My second time through the Dance, my irritation with Powell is gone; my enjoyment, nearly unadulterated. (There are, here and there, longueurs.) I don’t mind his sixty-page dinner parties in the least. Bring ‘em on, I say! 

To like Powell, you have to find enjoyable this species of reflective riff: 

"There is something overpowering, even a trifle sinister about very large families, the individual members of which often possess in excess the characteristics commonly attributed to 'only' children: neurasthenia: an inability to adapt themselves: all the traits held to be the result of a lonely upbringing. The corporate life of large families can be lived with severity, even barbarity, of a kind unknown in smaller related communities: these savageries and distillations of egoism often rendered even less tolerable if sentimentalized outside the family circle."

Montaigne, showing his conservative streak:

"The worst thing I find in our state is instability, and the fact that our laws cannot, any more than our clothes, take any settled form. It is very easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are full of it. It is very easy to engender in a people contempt for their ancient observances; never did a man undertake that without succeeding. But as for establishing a better state in place of the one they have ruined, many of those who have attempted it have achieved nothing for their pains."

—Of Presumption

Montaigne on having a poor memory:

"Now, the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine."

—Of Presumption

Wallace Stevens on the poet's audience:

"Time and time again it has been said that [the poet] may not address himself to an elite. I think he may. The poet will continue to do this: to address himself to an elite even in a classless society, unless, perhaps, this exposes him to imprisonment or exile. In that event he is likely not to address himself to anyone at all. He may, like Shostakovich, content himself with pretence. He will, nevertheless, still be addressing himself to an elite, for all poets address themselves to someone and it is of the essence of that instinct, and it seems to amount to an instinct, that it should be to an elite, not to a drab but to a woman with the hair of a pythoness, not to a chamber of commerce but to a gallery of one's own, if there are enough of one's own to fill a gallery. And that elite, if it responds, not out of complaisance, but because the poet has quickened it, because he has educed from it that for which it was searching in itself and in the life around it and which it had not yet quite found, will thereafter do for the poet what he cannot do for himself, that is to say, receive the poetry."

—The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words

I’m not well read in poetry. In fact, that’s far too generous. Apart from Philip Larkin and Wallace Stevens—both of whom I love to read—I’ve barely sample any poetry at all. I’m thirty-one. A reader. Almost no poetry.

In the last couple of months, I’ve been reading the little remembered American poet L.E. Sissman. As with Stevens, some of his poems sail right over my head, or “resist the intelligence almost successfully,” as Stevens once rather mysteriously said poetry should do. I’m not sure how much intelligence Sissman is up against in this case.

Those poems of Sissman’s I most enjoy don’t require Talmudic scrutiny, though it helps to have a dictionary at hand. In addition to his poetry and criticism—he published with some regularity in the New Yorker—Sissman was (similar to Stevens in this respect) a businessman. He died at 47 of lymphoma and many of his most affecting poems deal with sickness and death. Among the most bracing is Homage to Clotho: A Hospital Suite:

“Nowhere is all around us, pressureless,

A vacuum waiting for a rupture in
The tegument, a puncture in the skin,
To pass inside without a password and
Implode us to Erewhon. This room
Is dangerously unguarded: in one wall
An empty elevator clangs its doors,
Imperiously, for fodder; in the hall,
Bare stretchers gape for commerce; in the air
Outside a trempbling, empty brightness falls
In hunger on those whom it would devour
Like any sparrow hawk as darkness falls
And rises silently up the steel stairs
To the eleventh and last floor, where I
Resided on sufferance of authorities
Until my visas wither, and I die.”

One of my favorite passages in Sea Room touches on the fluidity of the past:

“There is a temptation to imagine the past as essentially static and the present as essentially mobile and disrupted. Nothing could be further from the truth. The peopling of the Shiants is only one fragment of an endless chain. That is why this crossing of a potentially alarming sea, at a moment which is picked because the weather is kind and the spring is coming, because the tide running with you and the sun is out, when you can see where you are going and you have everything you need, is one of the deepest of historical experiences. Don’t imagine the past as a place full of catastrophe and horror. This is it’s colour: a chance fairly taken, a sense of happiness in the light of spring.”

I think of that passage in relation to another nautical book I’m in the middle of (I don’t know why two; I’m not interested in sailing) Samuel Eliot Morrison’s Columbus: Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Nowadays, Columbus is a hated figure ranked among history’s most portentous villains. Morrison published his biography in 1942, and that's not his prejudice. Later in life, Columbus jumpstarted a grisly slave trade and governed—I’m told—disastrously, but early on he’s simply an adventurer (a visionary, a bit of a crank) taking a fair chance with the wind at his back. I saw his small coffin held aloft in the Seville Cathedral; he can’t have been much over five feet tall. 

I’m reading Sea Room: An Island Life in the Hebrides by Adam Nicolson. Nicolson is the son and grandson of a tribe of writers, the most famous of whom is probably his paternal grandfather, the diplomat Harold Nicolson (author, among other things, of Good Behaviour, being a Study of Certain Types of Civility, 1955). In the early 20C, Adam’s father, Nigel, answered a newspaper ad for the sale of three islands in the Hebrides, the Shiantes, and paid 1,900 pounds for them. When he was twenty-one, Adam inherited the islands like one might age into a trust fund. The upshot, thirty years later, is this unusual, somewhat shaggy book—part memoir and part history, with forays into archeology, botany, boat-making, oceanography, ornithology, even housekeeping. Throughout, Nicolson is a companionable host, showing us around his favorite spots and scrutinizing his beloved birds; dishing rich descriptions without ever boring us (or me). The best travel writer makes one want to visit the place he’s describing. Midway through Sea Room, I really do find myself wanting to stroll across the windswept Shiants, stopping to examine the grassy ruins, to dip—if it's the ripest part of summer and not too chilly—into the peaty pools, and sit and watch the sea birds wing around the cliffs.

Joseph Epstein has a book coming out about charm this fall—Charm: The Elusive Enchantment— and this is what he has to say about his subject: “Charm is magic of a kind; it casts a spell. In the presence of charm the world seems lighter and lovelier. A charming person can cause you to forget your problems, at least temporarily, to hold the world’s dreariness at bay. Charm is a reminder that the world is filled with jolly prospects and delightful possibilities. Watching Fred Astaire dance, or listening to Blossom Dearie sing, or reading the poems of C.P. Cavafy, or merely looking at Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner, one recalls that the world can be a pretty damn fine place.”

I’ve been dipping into the work of the Indian writer R.K. Narayan again and believe charm—casting a spell—to be one of his chief virtues. It isn’t an unearthly charm, like the dancing of a Fred Astaire or the beauty of a Rita Hayworth, but of a  more mundane variety. It consists in the humor and gentleness with which he treats his characters. The book I’m reading is The Bachelor of Arts, the second short novel in a quartet bound together by the Modern Library. The central character, Chandran, is at first a ruthlessly overachieving student, who after graduation discovers the only reading plan worth putting into action:

“He became a member of the Town Public Library and read an enormous amount of fiction and general literature. He discovered Carlyle. He found that after all Shakespeare had written some stirring dramas, and several poets were not as dull as they were made out to be. There was no scheme or order to his study. He read books just as they came. He read a light humorist and switched on to Carlyle, and from there pounced on Shakespeare, and then wandered to Shaw and Wells. The thing that mattered most to him was that the book should be enjoyable, and he ruthlessly shut books that threated to bore him.”

I’ve finished An Apology for Raymond Sebond, the longest and noodliest—some critics believe the best—of Montaigne’s essays. In my translation by Donald M. Frame it runs a stout 170 pages, whereas few of the other essays measure much longer than 10 or 20. It’s as though Montaigne prefers the to run the quarter mile, but mid-way through track season, decides to take up the marathon.

It’s a peculiar riffing essay and has little to do with the medieval Christian apologist of its the title, whose book Montaigne had translated at his dying father’s request. “It was a very strange and a new occupation for me,” Montaigne writes, “but being by chance at leisure at the time, and being unable to disobey any command of the best father there ever was, I got through it the best I could; at which he was singularly pleased, and ordered it to be printed; this was done after his death.”

In an introductory essay, Frame notes: “Less than one tenth of the chapter deals with Sebond at all. Primarily it is a sustained argument of the impotence of unaided human reason…”

It is addressed to a princess whom Frame believes to be Margaret of Valois, who—the theory goes— asked Montaigne to publish a defense of the thinking of the man he had translated. What a response she got instead!

Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote a biography of Nikolai Gogol that I'm about to receive in the mail, said of his fellow Russian: "Gogol was a strange creature, but then genius is always strange." That's the blurb on the back of my Penguin edition of Dead Souls, trans. by Robert A. Maguire. True to Nabokov's reckoning, Dead Souls is a very strange book. The plot is simple: "a gentleman of the middling sort"—"not good looking, but not uncomely in appearance either, not overly fat, nor overly thin"—arrives in a nameless provincial town with an unspoken purpose that gradually reveals itself: to buy the legal rights to the deceased serfs of neighboring landowners. The sleepy town is aroused by this visit from a stranger whom the gentry speculate to be a millionaire; the officials of the town fete and flatter him. Meanwhile Chichikov—that's the name of Gogol's "hero"—drives around in a britska, getting lost and waylaid, paying visits to the landowners and, without revealing why he wants to purchase the dead souls, tries to wheedle them into making a sale.

As one might expect from this description, Dead Souls is a funny book. Gogol's style is wonderfully discursive without coming unglued. He conjures up a world not only through Chichikov's various adventures, and the pen-portraits of the strange landowners he visits, but from wild similes that can end up being small stories of their own, dream-like images, or compose little moral sermons, even attacks on middle-brow taste. Here's an example taken from Chichikov's visit to the demented hermit Plyushkin:

"...suddenly across that wooden face glided a warm ray. It was not a feeling that had found expression, but some pale reflection of a feeling, a phenomenon like the unexpected appearance of a drowning man on the surface of the water, which evokes a joyful shout from the crowd gathered on the bank. But in vain do the rejoicing brothers and sisters throw a rope from the bank and wait for another glimpse of the back or the arms exhausted from struggling—his one appearance was the final one. Everything is quite dead, and thereafter the becalmed surface of the unresponsive element becomes even more dreadful and desolate. So too the face of Plyushkin, in the wake of the feeling that had glided across it for just and instant, became even more unfeeling and more ordinary."

Clippings:

Karen Altenberg reviews Adam Nicolson's The Seabird's Cry.

"The early 20th-century biologist Jakob von Uexküll, the 'Prospero and hidden mage of all modern seabird studies,' as Mr. Nicolson puts it, introduced the concept of Umwelt, German for 'surrounding world,' to describe how each species exists within a 'self-centered world' in which the biological foundations for a cognitive being are fostered. According to Uexküll, animal behavior can only be described in relation to the environment that a particular species perceives. The Umwelt of the seabird is oceanic: a realm that the human mind can never fully understand. 'That,' Mr. Nicolson writes, 'instinctively and subliminally, is what these birds mean to us, voices from the interior of self and ocean, bringing to consciousness those unseen worlds, making apparent what would otherwise be hidden.'"

A few semi-aphoristic clippings, taken at random, from Volume II of Phineas Finn:

“’A woman cannot transfer her heart,’ she had said. Phineas was well aware that many women do transfer their hearts; but he had gone to this woman too soon after the wrench which her love had received; he had been too sudden with his proposal for a transfer; and the punishment for such ill judgement must be that success would now be impossible to him.”

“…it is so difficult for a man to go back to the verdure and malleability of pupildom, who has once escaped from the necessary humility of its conditions.”

“Poor old man! He had run through all the pleasures of life too quickly, and had not much left with which to amuse himself.”

“A man must live, even though his heart be broken, and living he must dine.”

In all of these examples, a certain good sense, humor and economy of phrase is evident, as throughout the book.

Montaigne, and philosophers like him, sometimes place too much emphasis on self-knowledge. I lack the quotation because I've been reading the Apology for Raymond Sebond without, as I usually do, underlining favorite bits. (If I were to do that, the nearly the whole chapter would get marked up.) There's a specific passage in which he questions the value of knowing anything when, as is the case with most of us, we barely know ourselves. I'd contend that there's a pleasure in reveling in certain kinds of arcana, even if the risk is deviating into pedantry and self-obliviousness. Best of all, for sheer entertainment value, is knowledge about the natural world. Here's a soliloquy from Redmond O'Hanlon's Trawler that furnishes an example:

"...that fish, a Roughhead grenadier, Macrourus berglax, is a Rattail, a member of the closely related family the Macrouridae--and they're deep-water fishes that live on the continental slopes and across the abyssal plains of all the oceans of the earth. Their armoured head, those heads of theirs, they're pitted with sense organs, and their eyes I tell you, in 1908 a German biologist, August Breauer--he worked out that the retina of a Rat-tail had around 20 million long slender rods in an area of one-sixteenth of a square-inch. And that, Redmond is around 225 times more than we have in our own eyes. Now, as you may know, the rods are for night-vision, so in dim light a Rat-tail may be able to see over 200 times as well as we can! And that's not all, because on the underside of most Rat-tails , but not ours, not this particular one, the Roughhead grenadier, there's an open gland in which they play host to luminous bacteria. Most of the time they leave their bacteria alone, waiting round the gland and they squeeze their bacteria, they annoy them--and the bacteria light up! And they've other special muscles too, like haddock--they've got really big swimbladders, the Rat-tails, and in the males, only in the males, they have these bizarre muscles set round the swimbladder. So it's obvious, isn't it? Their function must be entirely sexual. So imagine that! The males drum in the abyss--in the black night, the perpetual darkness, they drum up their females! And Redmond, it must be noisy down there, and full of the weirdest flashing lights, red and purples and blues, whatever--because I.G. Priede, Monty Priede, a hero of mine, at my own university, Aberdeen: he's estimated that for just two species of Rat-tails in the abyssal depths, Coryphaenoides armatus and yaquinae, at a population density of about 200 fish per square kilometer, you have a global biomass of around 150X10^6 tonnes. And that, Redmond, is just about the total world commercial fish catch!"

Montaigne riffing on the vanity of human knowledge is one of the more satisfying themes of his essays. He quotes philosophers, scientists and poets, juxtaposes their beliefs and arguments, and, as often as not, confesses his incapacity for voting a party line, or holding to any line whatsoever. "The writings of the ancients, I mean the good writings, full and solid, tempt me and move me almost wherever they please; the one I am listening to always seems to me the strongest; I find each one right in his turn, although they contradict each other." (Apology for Raymond Sebon).

There's a pronounced conservative streak in Montaigne's skepticism: "Thus when some new doctrine is offered to us, we have great occasion to distrust it, and to consider that before it was produced its opposite was in vogue; and, as it was overthrown by this one, there may arise in the future a third invention that will likewise smash the second." 

Perhaps this is what allows him, despite a memory buzzing with Lucretius and other top-drawer pagan writers, to remain a faithful Catholic in a time of religious upheaval.

I've had a copy of Phineas Finn gathering dust on my dresser-drawer for a couple years, but I hadn't read a single line of Anthony Trollope's until last week. A few words of admiration moved me to start, beginning with this pugilistic essay by David Mamet, titled Charles Dickens Makes Me Want to Throw Up:

"I’ve read Anthony Trollope’s entire work several times, not because I am schooled, educated or right-thinking—I don’t believe I am more afflicted in these than most—but because I like to read. Trollope’s 47 novels, nonfiction and incidental work are a delight. His prose is clear, perfectly rhythmic, concise and, at turns, trenchant and profoundly funny."

Mamet's right, whatever one thinks of Dickens. On page 83 of Phineas Finn is a passage that squares with each descriptor of Mamet's phrase; a lucid take on American politics, that doesn't ring false in December 2017:

"[In the United States]...political enmity exists, but the political enmity produces private hatred. The leader of parties there really mean what they way when they abuse each other, and are in earnest when they talk as though they were about to tear each other limb from limb."

Mamet reports that Trollope, a true monster of prolificity, awoke at 5:30 each morning to churn out 2,500 words. He wrote his novels while working a regular shift at the post office and raising two children.

I finished Volume II of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire this morning, which ends on a characteristically ominous note. The Emperor Theodosius is holding a feast for his dangerous and divided subjects, the Goths—recent immigrants and refugees, pushed toward the empire by the invasion of the Huns and finally admitted by the Emperor Valens—who split their allegiance between Fravitta “a valiant and honorable youth,” and “the fierce and faithless Priulf.” Here’s what happens: 

“…When the chiefs of both parties were invited to the Imperial table, they were insensibly heated by wine, till they forgot the usual restraints of discretion and respect; and betrayed, in the presence of Theodosius, the fatal secret of their domestic disputes. The emperor, who had been the reluctant witness of this extraordinary controversy, dissembled his fears and resentment, and soon dismissed the tumultuous assembly. Fravitta, alarmed and exasperated by the insolence of his rival, whose departure from the palace might have been the signal of a civil war, boldly followed him; and, drawing his sword, laid Priulf dead at his feed. Their companions flew to arms; and the faithful champion of Rome would have been oppressed by superior numbers, if he had not been protected by the seasonable interposition of the Imperial guards. Such were the scenes of Barbaric rage, which disgraced the palace and table of the Roman emperor; and, as the impatient Goths could only be restrained by the firm and temperate character of Theodosius, the public safety seemed to depend on the life and abilities of a single man.”

You can guess how that will turn out.