Three Musketeers. I Mean, Four Musketeers. Wait. Five. Yes, Five Musketeers. Or Is It Three After All?

 OK, so here’s the way the Plan went originally:

(1) In 2017, year 1 of the current ten-year schedule, read the unabridged version of Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, the English translation of which was only available in shortened form in the 1970s.

(2) Year 2, 2018: Reread The Three Musketeers, one of my favorite adventure books from teen years.

(3) Year 4, 2020: Read Twenty Years After, the sequel to The Three Musketeers, inexplicably unread by me in the forty-three years since I first read TTM. (At least I thought it was the sequel.)

(4) Year 6, 2022: Read The Man in the Iron Mask, the only other Dumas novel whose name I had routinely seen on lists or sets of classic books throughout my life (Classics Illustrated comic books, Barnes & Noble cheap editions, and so on).

In pursuit of that plan, I looked on Amazon several years ago for a Kindle copy of The Three Musketeers. They offered a set called D’Artagnan and the Musketeers: The Complete Collection for free. (Here and there the edition has a few typos from OCR, but overall this free edition works great.) Another edition is entitled The D’Artagnan Romances. Dumas wrote more books about D’Artagnan? Stuff for the Fourth Decade List! Or so I thought.

So I open the book early in 2018 to begin the adventure, flip through the table of contents, and find to my surprise that The Man in the Iron Mask is the last book in the collection. Iron Mask is a D’Artagnan book? At this point in the post, I first wrote the word “Wonderful” with three exclamation points and decided the interjection did not adequately convey my excitement. Anybody reading this blog knows the joy of starting a sequel, of finding a good novel series, of discovering a favorite character in another of the same author’s works. Add to that familiar joy the excellence of D’Artagnan as a character, the love of a teenage boy for adventure stories, and the sentimentalism of a man old enough to get senior discounts at Flapjack’s Pancake House who is reliving his youth, and you get some idea of my elation.

But then, surprise upon surprise, I look at the ToC more closely and discover that The Man in the Iron Mask is not actually a complete novel but only the third of three parts of a longer work called The Vicomte of Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. Each part of TVoB:TYL is about as long as The Three Musketeers, so that puts the total word count of The Vicomte at about 700,000: 20% longer than War and Peace, about equal to David Copperfield and Anna Karenina combined.

Now, here are four facts whose conjunction I find highly problematic:
(1) I must read The Man in the Iron Mask because I’ve wanted to since I was 10.
(2) I have to read it in 2022 because I like Plans.
(3) I have to read 460,000 words worth of other non-Plan material before I get to Iron Mask.
(4) I read slowly.

All I can do to solve this crisis is to make some time to fit the rest of the work in. I usually have time to read a handful of books outside the regular schedule each year, so I just made sure this year to save up and see how far ahead of schedule I was near the end of the year. As it turned out, I had enough time for one-third of The Vicomte. (I’ve discovered that I have no problem reading part of the way through a long novel, stopping, and picking it up a year later.)

The first part of The Vicomte of Bragelonne is called The Vicomte of Bragelonne. (Maybe I wouldn’t have been so confused about all this if Dumas had been a better titler.) The book starts ten years after the action of Twenty Years After. Dumas introduces D’Artagnan in that way that authors of sequels sometimes do when they write about the hero at first as “a mysterious man sitting in the dark,” as if the reader has any trouble identifying his favorite character. Very soon Dumas reveals that the nameless creature has a Gascon accent. No one who loves The Three Musketeers can have any doubt at this moment that he is in the presence of the fourth musketeer, Monsieur D’Artagnan.

But then a second mystery man appears! Could it be? It is! Our old friend Athos, who is, outside of Dickens, one of my top three favorite characters ever. He and D’Artagnan go separately and unbeknownst to each other on the same errand of international intrigue and almost ruin it for each other. The tears of joy are hot on my face. About 70% of the way through this first third of the giant novel (I am reminded of Monty Python identifying the lower two-thirds of the nape of the neck), dear old Porthos appears! Then Aramis! I am as giddy as Scrooge in his Christmas Past reliving the appearance of Ali Baba! This is not just a D’Artagnan book. It is a second Three Musketeers sequel! And it is enormous!

Have my surprises come to an end? Is my happiness complete? No, they have not, and, no, it is not. In googling all these confusing titles, I discover – how did I miss this before? – that director Richard Lester and the original cast of The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers made a film version of Twenty Years After. Clearly Lester learned how to entitle movies from Dumas himself: his films The Three M’s and The Four M’s together tell the story (oh, so faithfully!) of the novel The Three Musketeers, and the story of Twenty Years After is presented under the title The Return of the Musketeers. Michael York as D’Artagnan? Oliver Reed as Athos? Guess what’s on the top of my Christmas list!

A Long-Awaited Completion

After reading a chapter here and a chapter there for over twenty years, I have at last completed all of William James’s Principles of Psychology. I’m sure his work has been superseded in the 130 years since its publication, but still I felt compelled to continue with it a bit each year until I finished reading it all. James teaches me to think about how I think and seems to know me and several of my weird mental habits quite well. In previous posts, I’ve commented on, among other things, James’s explanation for why I need special help with memorization and how many of the mnemonic tricks I’ve developed myself work, why I struggle to move a single muscle in order to get out of bed some mornings, why walking helps my attention-challenged mind to concentrate on a book, how (on the other hand) my habit of wool gathering while reading is a sign of extraordinary intelligence (I choose to read his observations that way, in any case), and most surprisingly why I’ve had trouble recording from old LPs with skips when I’ve tried to drop the needle at just the right moment.

James self-deprecatingly downplayed the value of his work and suggested a scattered and serpentine order of chapters for his readers. So I followed his plan and then wandered around the book over the next several years picking up all the leftover bits, as well as rereading some of the chapters I read first in the early 90s. So, odd as it seems as a plan for finishing a book with twenty-eight chapters, this year I read chapters VIII, XVII, and XXI.

In chapter VIII, “The Relation of Minds to Other Things,” the Psychologist explains, among other things, the ability of exhausted mothers to sleep soundly and yet to be awakened instantly when the baby cries, and the correspondence of the French verbs connaitre and savoir to two distinct psychological states. In the most fascinating passage of the chapter, he claims that many people have multiple consciences, only one of which has access to the mouth. His evidence comes from observations that certain people, while talking animatedly to someone in front, can be made by someone standing behind to follow simple instructions or to grasp something presented to the hand, and yet say that they don’t remember any of this posterior activity. My wife has very little attention for anything else when she’s talking on the phone. I’m going to sneak up behind her someday when she’s talking, tell her to raise her right arm, and see what happens!

In chapter XVII, “Sensation,” James brings up a point that he has made earlier and that he goes into later in the book as well (things I know from having read the book so out of order): that all sensations automatically have a spatial element. It’s his version of Kant’s tenet that space is a category or form of the mind. (Don’t ask me for a treatise on how the two authors might agree or disagree on this topic!) In a passage that I approach with delicate skepticism, he says that babies at first only have a notion that the objects they hear and see are “out there.” It takes many months and many sensations in order to learn to coordinate the “out theres” into a mental concept of a spatial framework. I don’t know. Are horses that different from humans? Foals can walk when they’re born, and they don’t, to my knowledge, constantly bump into trees as if they don’t know how close the trees are. But James hooks me again when he talks about where we locate sensations of touch. We feel the desktop under the pencil point, he says, and we sense the tap of a cane to be located on the ground, even thought the sensation is really all in our hand. I think he’s right, and I’m now convinced that all sensations carry a sense of “out there” with them.

Chapter XXI, “The Perception of Reality,” is really about belief. James says so many thought-provoking things touching on religion, patriotism, family or tribal identity, the created worlds of fiction and what others might term the suspension of disbelief, mathematics, scientific forces, and mad delusions, that I can’t do them all justice. So I’ll just highlight one point. Belief, he says, involves an emotional layer in the thought. Try saying, “The sky is blue” and then “The sky is red,” in order to begin to feel the difference. (I think I do.) Well, if belief involves an emotion, then you can come to believe proposition X by having that emotion while thinking proposition X. Thus someone can make you believe proposition X if they can instill the right emotion in you when trying to convince you of proposition X. (It all sounds a little crazy until you think about the early days of a romance and things you believe without having copious amounts of evidence.) And now, finally, the “one” point I’m trying to highlight: an idea involving an extreme call to action is often believed precisely because the call to action raises such strong emotions. In some cases, the more absurd the action called for, the easier it is to believe the associated idea.

We think we’re so rational, and reason seems so clear when we’re calmly looking at a neat syllogism. Yet our human connection to reason is so tenuous! As Pascal noted, we take pride in the nobility of our lofty thoughts, and yet what power a little fly has to paralyze our minds by simply landing on our knee. Chapter XVII of James reassured me that I have a grasp on reality. Chapter XXI told me my reality may be the result of emotional manipulation. I’m glad my temperament told me early in life to be wary of people trying to convince my mind while toying with my heart.

Even Mississippi

My poor wife! She’s had to listen to me talking about Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought every day for weeks. There’s a reason this history of the United States from 1815 to 1848 won the Pulitzer Prize. Howe, of course, documents every detail, he explains rather than just describing, he uses copious illustrative quotations, he covers daily life and art and entertainment and science and technology as well as economics and politics and war, and he does it all with elegant, vibrant prose. But the stories he tells! I’d heard these stories in school and read about them since, but not with all these details.

Let’s take the Mexican War for an example. I knew Polk wanted this war and that he wanted Texas and got a lot more. I knew that two war heroes emerged from the fighting, both of whom received the Whig nomination for President, and one of whom won. But I didn’t know that Polk secretly negotiated with a captured Santa Anna, let him go, and told him to get himself made President again and ask for a treaty. I didn’t know that Polk, a Democrat who wanted more territory for the extension of slavery, wanted to win the war decisively enough to get California out of the deal but not so decisively as to create war heroes who would beat him in the upcoming election. (Clearly, he failed in that last goal.) I didn’t know that he relieved his ambassador, Trist, before the conclusion of the treaty because he decided he wanted to dismantle the country of Mexico and take it all. I didn’t know that Trist told the Mexican government that he had been relieved and that they should take his offer anyway rather than becoming absorbed in toto. And I didn’t know that gold was discovered in Sutter’s mill the very week that these negotiations were going on, when Mexico was agreeing to sell California for a pittance.

I’ve often chuckled-slash-tilted-my-head when I’ve read or heard the part of Dr. King’s Dream speech in which he says “even the state of Mississippi.” I’m happy to know that Mississippi recently changed its state flag. Perhaps that’s a sign that Dr. King’s dream is coming a bit nearer to reality. But why did he call out that state in particular? Or maybe my question is, why was Mississippi in special need of being called out? Howe went a long way to explaining that. After large tracts of Mississippi were “bought” from the Indians, white settlers came in a rush to establish new cotton fields. Most of them made their black slaves walk to the new land, and most of these workers had to make the trek in winter, since their owners didn’t want to miss out on any of the growing season. So the white people who came to Mississippi were interested in a quick buck; they had no interest in technological investments or building cities as trade centers. As a result, Mississippi ended up a poor area with few large towns. These settlers also represented the type of slave owner that had no sense of “paternalism” toward their chattel, a sense that led some owners elsewhere in the country, say, to care a bit for the health of their possessed humans or to offer them a modicum of comfort or of education. These dynamics tend to pass from generation to generation, and thus we get Mississippi, perennially low in spending on education, perennially low in median wage, and so rife with racial injustice that Dr. King felt a need to give that state a special place in his speech.

(I see that Mississippi is 51st in the country for median wage in 2020, behind all other states and the District of Columbia. The state is now 46th in number of dollars spent per pupil on education. They’ve moved up recently. So, yes, there’s hope, even for Mississippi.)

I could go on and on. The railroads. The canals. The telegraph. The elections. Debates on internal improvements. Debates over paper money and a national bank. Jackson’s appeal as a man of “natural” talent and his supporters’ suspicion of training, education, and expertise. The rise of voluntary associations. The beginnings of abolitionism. On the other hand, Calhoun’s conversion to a states’-rights-er and the rise of the claim that slavery was a “positive good.” The rise of women’s participation in politics. Every story was a bit familiar and yet full of nuance and new detail that made sense not only of that period but of ours as well. Howe may very well soon find himself in possession of an exlibrismagnis book award to go with his Pulitzer!
 

Poetry by Young C. S. Lewis

This year’s literary itinerary included stops at two volumes of poetry by America’s favorite Anglican, C. S. Lewis. The first, Spirits in Bondage, was composed before Lewis became a Christian and includes railings against a God the young man didn’t believe in. The other is a book of poems from Lewis’s Christian years, collected by Walter Hooper, secretary to Lewis late in his life and curator of his literary estate. Having read Lewis’s own accounts of his atheistic years, I expected to enjoy the later poems more, but my expectations were wrong.

Perhaps Spirits in Bondage presents less mature work than the later book. It’s still more advanced than any poetry I might have written. Perhaps it occasionally cries out blasphemous doubts. What Christian hasn’t struggled with doubt and left the battle with the limp of Jacob? I loved these poems because here I found deep questions, stirring emotions, and vivid images expressed by the Lewis I know and love. It’s all here: the scholarship, the dry clip of twentieth-century language moistened with the elegance of earlier eras, the piercing psychological insights, the intelligent arguments, and the humility that suggests the author would gladly sit over a pint with any reader and enjoy a conversation that wouldn’t leave the lesser one embarrassed by the chasm of intellectual ability that separated the two.

The young atheist’s poems, though, also lifted me with passages about desires for and visions of moral standards, about life after death, and about eternal peace. The same collection that contains these lines:

Come let us curse our Master ere we die,
For all our hopes in endless ruin lie.
The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.

also contains these:

When glory I have built in dreams
Along some fiery sunset gleams,
And my dead sin and foolishness
Grow one with Nature’s whole distress, [i.e., when I go the way of all flesh]
To perfect being I shall win,
And where I end will Life begin.

At this point in his life, the future Christian apologist sees God as an inevitable fly in the ointment of the eternal life of “perfect being” he foresees in those lines above. Consider this passage:

For in that house I know a little, silent room
Where Someone’s always waiting, waiting in the gloom
To draw me with an evil eye, and hold me fast –
Yet thither doom will drive me and He will win at last.

That atheist would later in his life bless the Hound of Heaven that drove him to that silent room, and he would explain that among the tools He wielded in order to “win at last” was the special sensation Lewis called “joy,” the phenomenon he first experienced as a child looking at his brother’s toy garden. His description of it in these poems is perhaps even better than his more familiar prose account in Surprised by Joy:

But only the strange power
Of unsought Beauty in some casual hour
Can build a bridge of light or sound or form
To lead you out of all this strife and storm;
When of some beauty we are grown a part
Till from its very glory’s midmost heart
Out leaps a sudden beam of larger light
Into our souls. All things are seen aright
. . . . . . .
The miracle is done
And for one little moment we are one
With the eternal stream of loveliness
That flows so calm, aloft from all distress
Yet leaps and lives around us as a fire
Making us faint with overstrong desire
To sport and swim for ever in its deep.

I don’t like the impersonal you in the fourth line of this excerpt. And I think the poem loses power by constantly affirming that the experience is something that happens to “us” rather than just describing what happens to the author. But I love reading this poem, knowing what God eventually made of these astonishing moments in this astonishing life. Lewis called the piece “Dungeon Grates,” showing that he knew that the materialistic world he moved in was only a narrow prison and that the surrounding world of the eternal stream of loveliness was a wide land of freedom. In fact, doesn’t the book’s title, Spirits in Bondage, indicate a belief in the existence of a spiritual liberty? Lewis eventually entered that liberty. May he continue to go further up and further in.