Book Awards – 2021

I finished my 2021 reading list this morning, just in time for the book awards ceremony. The winners have been written down, put in sealed envelopes, and given to Price Waterhouse. In the mean time, they were all copied, placed in other sealed envelopes and slipped under my mattress, which is a safer place for either valuables or information than Price Waterhouse.

Author Who Understands the Best of Times and the Worst of Times: Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens always gets his own category in these awards so as to give other fictional writers a fighting chance at winning. This year I reread Bleak House (for I believe the third time) and several of his short stories for the Christmas numbers of his magazines. Bleak House gets better every time. The short Christmas stories don’t. But perhaps I should give some of them another go next December now that it’s so easy to read all the other authors’ contributions to the collaborative novellas.

Best New Read in History: Chris DeRose, The Presidents' War
During the Civil War, five ex-Presidents broke the tradition of refraining from political statements. Martin Van Buren was the most supportive of Lincoln's policies but died soon after the war started. Millard Fillmore remained marginally supportive of Lincoln. James Buchanan supported Lincoln, saying that he would have done exactly the same thing, but spent most of the war trying to redeem his own image. Clearly that plan didn’t work. James Pierce criticized Lincoln openly and engaged in Copperhead messaging. But he wasn’t the biggest problem. John Tyler went to the Confederacy, was elected to the Congress, and is the only President to die a traitor to his country. (Hmm.)

Most Disturbing Read: Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Reading Douglas’s arguments from 160 years ago about White America and the need to keep black Americans from citizenship, voting rights, or any basic human right was chilling.

Best New Read in Fiction: John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
Rarely does a book make me laugh on every page. Even more rarely does it do that and leave me with a sense that I understand humanity more deeply.

Most Disappointing Read: Alexandre Dumas, Louise de la Vallière
OK, The Well at the World’s End by William Morris was more disappointing – so disappointing in fact that I gave up on it, something I’ve done to a book only a handful of times in my entire life. But I didn’t expect as much from it as I did from this part of the D’Artagnan series. I’m hoping for a great rebound from Dumas when I read The Man in the Iron Mask next summer.

Best New Read in Poetry: William Cullen Bryant, “November”
I needed Cullen’s love of virtuous life and his love of nature and his understanding that they go together.

Most Uses of the Words “shadow,” “sword,” “delve,” and “precious”: J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
(The category “Best Reread in Fiction” was renamed this year at the suggestion of the Rules Committee.) I needed Tolkien’s love of virtuous life and his love of nature and his understanding that they go together. I also needed some orc killing.

Book Causing the Most Diusruption in the Reading Plan: James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
I’ll be floating a way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun past Eve and Adam’s for each of the next fifteen years now. Joyce said that since it took him seventeen years to write the book, readers should take as long. So I’m just following his advice – give or take a year.

Best Mystery: Dorothy L. Sayers, The Nine Tailors
Read my post about it from earlier in the year, listen to some change ringing, and then read this book!

Best New Read in Biography: Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens
Tomalin’s work reveals much more about the women in Dickens’s life than have other biographies I’ve read. I’ve come to terms with the fact that the Christian hero and promoter of domestic bliss had an extramarital affair with actress Nelly Tiernan. But now I know more about Nelly. And if Tomalin can still find Dickens a hero even if he was “too complicated to be a gentleman,” so can I. In any case, despite his flaws, he left us Bleak House (which I read this year) and Little Dorrit (which I will read in a couple of months).

I’m looking forward to so many books scheduled for 2022: Capote’s In Cold Blood, Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, Augustine’s homilies on I John, even Tarzan at the Earth’s Core. With everything that’s been happening in the family, I’ve still kept up with the reading, even if I haven’t had time to write about it so much. Will I have time to tell you about all these wonderful books scheduled for next year? Somehow I doubt that I’ll give up entirely on blogging this coming year; if nothing else I’ll be back in December with the annual awards. Until we meet again, whenever that may be, may you have a very Happy New Year of reading!

November Round-Up

Today I offer some quick notes on several things read in late October and in November, just to get the blog caught up.  Now let’s get these stray dogies rounded up and on the trail to KC. Yee-haw!

Volume 9 of the Durants’ history of western civilization is entitled The Age of Voltaire. Needless to say, the pages focus on France. But should they have? Yes, the absolutism of Louis XIV and XV influenced European politics, the writers in the coffee shops influenced European philosophy, and the ladies in the salons influenced European letters and fashion. But, in the words of Peggy Lee, Is that all there is? Fortunately, the Durants were interested in music and did a good job retelling its history in this first part of the eighteenth century, and most of this story took them out of the land of Montesqieu and Madame de Pompadour. Italian opera spread almost everywhere in this period, and even in France some critics questioned whether Italian might not be the superior language for singing. In fact, this France-centered volume devotes a whole section to the great German who learned opera composition in Italy and then made it the hottest thing in London theaters, also incidentally writing Messiah, which the authors declare the greatest musical composition in history. It goes on to tell the story of J. S. Bach quite well also, calling this non-French guy the greatest composer in history. Tell me, does designating the St. Matthew Passion the masterpiece of the greatest composer in history belie at all the Durants' opinion of Messiah as the greatest composition?

At almost the same time, I read Rutherfurd’s Paris and Dumas’s Louise de la Vallière. So these weeks were for me filled with French history, fictionalized and otherwise. Rutherfurd’s book is better than his Princes of Ireland, but not so good as London, Sarum, New York, or Russka. Still, he told some good yarns and made the point well that aristocrats, priests, socialist laborers, merchants, engineers, thieves, and courtesans each provide essential flavors to the soup that is Paris. Dumas’s book, the middle third of the gargantuan final novel about D’Artagnan and his friends, is the first book by that author that I just didn’t like. Things get suddenly way better whenever the musketeers show up (a boon that happens all too infrequently in this one), not just because they’re who I want to read about but also because they’re more interesting characters than the courtiers of Louis XIV. But mostly what made this book so tedious for me was the constant presence of the theme that ties all these books about France together, in fact the quality that seems to define France if these books are any indication: adultery.

The Faerie Queene was every bit as good as I remembered it being. Its stories exemplify and teach virtues, and its poetic presentation promotes eloquence of the highest order. It doesn’t leave the reader with memorable lines like Eliot and his “cruelest month” and “handful of dust,” but its goodness and beauty permeate the soul with lasting comfort and influence.

Similarly, the Lincoln-Douglas debates were every bit as good as I had hoped they would be. We want Lincoln to be perfect, so it’s hard to read his words and see his disgust at the idea of interracial marriage and his lack of hope (or even lack of desire to hope?) for full political equality for blacks. But a man must be judged against his times, and no white person at the time except (and Lincoln would grant the exception) Harriet Beecher Stowe spoke more consistently and efficaciously about the evils of slavery, the humanity of black Americans, and the right of blacks to citizenship, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And set against Douglas with his white supremacy, his white nationalism, and his professed indifference regarding slavery (surely he was the only person in the country who didn’t have an opinion on the ethical value of the institution), Lincoln seems very progressive indeed. My favorite among Lincoln’s tactics was his argument that indifference is the same as support: either slavery is evil or it isn’t, and professing indifference says that it isn’t. Good reading for these times.

I don’t know if 2022 will continue in the manner of the last few months of 2021. If so, I may set aside the blog for a while. But I hope to finish up this year with one more regular post about reading and the annual announcement of awards.

Revisiting Dr. Johnson

exlibrismagnis was going along pretty well this year . . . until late September. And then life got turned on end. There was illness, and there were legal shenanigans by someone who has tried several times to steal from us, and there was a man shooting at my daughter’s fence. So it’s actually November as I write this post. We’ve just enjoyed a St. Martin’s summer – ending on St. Martin’s Day! (See my notes on March 10, 2021 about using that term for warm days in November) – and now the crisp is back in the air and the leaves are on the ground and on the driveway. Rather than going out with the leafblower, though, I’m going to start catching up on the blog with some brief comments about some reading from October.

I just can’t pass up writing about this year’s passage from Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson. It was the passage that, exactly ten years ago, inspired my favorite post on this blog. I can’t find now where or when I posted the note about temporarily losing this piece about dining with Samuel Johnson and his friends in Wendy’s. But I did. That fateful October day of 2011, after my mind churned with the idea during the lunch break and all the rest of the afternoon during work, I sat down and composed the post on the blogspot editor, almost without stopping or going back to correct anything. I know I didn’t edit much at all because the piece was completely finished when I committed the dreadful error of trying to undo one mistake using control-Z . . . and found out that the online editor considered that key combination to be a command to obliterate the post and all memory of it. (Did I click “Save” at all during this time? No, I did not.) I thought about just starting over, but my head, having emptied itself in emitting the full-grown production once, found itself unable to recreate Athena. Still, I knew that that string of characters had to be in my computer’s RAM somewhere, and I searched online until I found an explanation and an app that brought my precious lamb back home to me. Of course I love it more than the ninety-nine that never went astray! And since I have now apparently lost the post in which I thanked the people who showed me how to recover a lost post, let me take the opportunity.ten years too late, to thank the Villeneuve family once again for their invaluable help.

So now I’ve written about shooters and St. Martin and old posts, but I haven’t yet said anything about my reading from October, even though my express purpose today is to begin catching up on blogging, which is done best without extraneous comments. I haven’t yet written anything about the passage in which Dr. Johnson says that a majority of any professional's time is not spent on the proper focus of his work: the author, for instance, spends most of his time reading, not writing. (Maybe I should take that comment as exoneration since, in today’s post about Boswell and Dr. Johnson, I’ve spent most of my effort not writing about Boswell and Dr. Johnson?) I haven’t given any space to Dr. Johnson’s observation that knowledge must come through reading, not conversation, because conversation is not systematic. I haven’t mentioned Johnson’s practice, when entering a man's home for the first time, of rushing to his bookshelves and perusing the "backs" (covers?) of the books. It’s a pity; I could say a lot about it since I have the same habit. And I haven’t even said anything about Boswell’s account of the time in France when Dr. Johnson, much less fluent in French than in Latin, nevertheless spoke in broken French to a Frenchman who spoke back in broken English. If I had, I could have said that I found myself several times having that same surprising kind of conversation in Italy. Well, you know, except using Italian.

I’ll have to leave it all unwritten, though: I have to start thinking now about writing on some November reading.

Heroes

Harry Clavering loves Julia Brabazon and she seems to love him back. But then she marries Lord Ongar, who mistreats her miserably for a year before changing his ways by dying. In the meantime, Harry has moved on and has become engaged to Florence Burton. Then Julia comes back to England. All of this happens in just a couple of chapters in Anthony Trollope’s The Claverings. The rest of the book is taken up with (1) Harry’s vacillation between Julia and Florence and (2) other men vying for Julia’s rich hand.

Trollope’s original readers (and I join them in this) wanted Harry to marry Florence because she is the better person. But they also wanted a hero, and this Trollope does not want to give them. He explains it all right in the narration (as is his delightful wont): it is a weighty and painful burden the public places on an author when they expect of him the presentation of heroes, because then the author cannot write realistically. Trollope intends to give the public a real man in Harry Clavering, not a hero. And, after all, once stories began in the latter part of that century to emphasize and base plots upon antagonism within one character rather than antagonism between characters, heroes can no longer be the protagonists of novels. If Harry just says, “Oh, you’re back, Julia? Sorry. You had your chance. But I’ve met a nice girl now, so go have fun with your money,” there is no novel, no story to tell.

But Anthony Trollope doesn’t deny the existence of heroes altogether. He isn’t a cynic. He believes, for instance, that romantic love is a good, real thing, not just a plot point that sells stories to middle-class housewives. I know this because, again, he just comes out and says it in the narration. OK, it’s conceivable that the personal confessions by the narrator are deliberate canards to sell more books and magazines. But, having read a lot of his novels and his autobiography, I don’t think so. He truly believes in love, and he believes in heroes, as well. But if his male protagonist, the character who is going to get one girl or another at the end, can’t be heroic, and if his female protagonist doesn’t want to be a “hero” and win the man, how does Trollope display heroism in his tale?

Enter the Burtons of Onslow Crescent. Harry dislikes Theodore Burton, Florence’s brother, the minute he sees Theodore in the office (the Burton business is very much a family affair) dusting his boots with his pocket handkerchief. But, of course, Theodore invites Harry for a family dinner after work one day, so Harry must make the effort to be amiable, discovering in the process that he actually admires the domestic life of Theodore, his wife Cecilia, and several honest, devoted, humble, obedient, and cute Burton tykes. The fine line Theodore and Cecelia walk that both protects Florence and steers Harry toward honor is nothing short of heroic. Their display of heroism involves no blood, no banners or fanfares, but it requires intelligence, fortitude, a restraint of judgment, and emotional self-control.

I would happily read an entire book about the Burtons of Onslow Crescent. No wicked villains would appear; the conflicts would arise from an urgent bill for which cash is not readily available, a childhood illness, a neighbor spreading rumors, a black sheep of the Burton family (if such a thing can exist) asking for shelter, a nest of mice in the attic, a messenger at the business that routinely misremembers addresses, and a warped window frame that lets in a cold breeze. But the Burtons of Onslow Crescent would face all with the proper mixture of healthy emotional reaction and virtuous Christian composure, and I would love and learn from every page.

Speaking of Wanting Rebel Fighters to Be Perfect . . .

Just a few days ago, I wrote about Churchill’s complaints that earlier historians had tried to paint Oliver Cromwell as a paragon, and I said that I at least sympathized with those who want the people who fight for their cause to be perfect, even though we should all know that they can’t be. But, wow! Then I got to the crucial parts of a Robert E. Lee biography. I had no idea how far this desire for holiness could go.

I started the year with the plan to read Douglas Freeman’s biography of the Confederate general, based on the fact that it won a Pulitzer Prize and was published (I thought) in 2008. As I started reading the forward by James McPherson, though, I discovered that what came out in 2008 was a new abridgment, that the book had originally been published in 1935, and that it was the work that established the mythical sainthood of the rebel for twentieth-century readers. I quickly shifted to a more recent treatment, one by Elizabeth Pryor, after reading recommendations that she gives the man a well-documented and fair examination.

And I have to say that Pryor tries her very best at various times through the book and especially at the end to make the reader admire what was admirable in the oathbreaker. But do I really have to admire the virtues he had? Al Capone reportedly loved his wife and mother with utmost devotion. Am I really under an obligation to look to Al Capone as a model of family love? The problem is that, as Pryor worked to be fair in reporting the good in Robert E. Lee, she labored just as hard to expose the bad. Here’s a quick list of some highlights:

• He broke the oath he took in 1829 to “bear true allegiance to the United States of America” and to serve “against all their enemies.”
• He broke his word given in 1861 that he would fight only to defend Virginia and would “never bear arms against the United States.” (The promise was contradictory in the context of the time since he would be bearing arms against the United States Army in “defending” Virginia. But the promise, made to many, would fall apart entirely when he invaded Maryland.)
• He put out bounties on runaway slaves and punished them by contracting them out to harsh masters.
• He kept a whipping post at Arlington and ordered that it be used.
• He broke families apart by trading and selling slaves,
• He condoned the capturing and enslaving of free blacks by “virtually every unit” of his army when he invaded Pennsylvania.
• He gave only slight punishments to students at Washington College, where he was president after the Civil War, when they terrorized local black citizens. (He was more harsh to students who didn’t continue studying over Christmas break.)

As Pryor says, the only reason we are interested in him is that he is one of history’s greatest generals. So only in this regard can I begin to join anyone in looking to Lee as an example. And yet even here Pryor assesses both supporters and detractors. Did Lee, for instance, formulate the winning tactics at Chancellorsville, one of the most daring in all history, or was it Jackson? Should he be blamed for thinking that invading the northern states (twice!) would break the resolve of their citizens rather than understanding what should have been perfectly obvious given his recent experience – that people attacked in their homeland find even greater determination to fight? Was his plan at Gettysburg foolhardy as Longstreet said, or is the fault for his loss there to be laid on a hesitant Longstreet? Either way, I’m glad for America that Lee did lose at Gettysburg, so I have little desire to admire his tactical thinking even where I find it interesting.

Still, the myth exists and many Americans do look up to him. Even as I applaud the recent removal of monuments to the man who fought for the rights of white Virginians to own human beings (it risks erasing history only for those who don’t read!), I can understand that many admirers see Lee as a symbol of something other than racism, something other than a desire to return to a fairy-tale world in which all slaves were content and all owners kindhearted, gentle masters who only gave their servants good jobs, civilization, and Christianity. They may see in Lee the gallant champion against government overreach. They may see in him the defender of a relaxed, agrarian, southern way of life. And these positions I can begin to appreciate even if I can’t go shoulder to shoulder with those who hold them. But when “artists” from recent years paint halos around Lee and Elvis, standing as pillars of the saints on either side of a glorified Jesus Christ, I can only respond with a line from Dr. Johnson that I read just this morning: “There is no trusting to that crazy piety.”

The War on Christmas

You’d think that with all his Ciceronian rhetorical skill and all his Plutarchian knowledge of history, Winston Churchill would have written the definitive history of England. But his History of the English-Speaking Peoples (i.e. History of England with Notes on Places that Ended Up Speaking Its Language) has some problems. Churchill assumes much of his reader; it’s his right since his original readers had all been educated in English public schools in the early twentieth century. But for me, the book has gaps, abridgements, unexplained terms. Even though the work is four volumes long, it still reads at times like summary notes for people who already know the story. When James I dies, for instance, he says, “The first king of Great Britain was dead.” That reference to “Great Britain” jarred me when I read it several days ago because it reminded me of the significance of the united crown, which he had not explained (or even mentioned in the chapter). Yes, he said that James was King of Scotland and that he inherited the English crown. But he didn’t stop to highlight it: “Now for the first time one person reigned as monarch of both Scotland and England.” In a history for the uninitiated, the author would at the very least have introduced the term “Great Britain” at the beginning of James’s reign. OK, so maybe “Great Britain” isn’t all that hard to understand. But several other terms, even more cryptic to the American, appear without explanation: “Black Rod” (a person?), “the Chapel” (which he opposes to the Church), and “the Ironsides” (apparently a nickname for both Cromwell and, in some instances, for his cavalry).

Now I learned all about these problems thirty years ago when I first read the HESP. But I still wanted to read it again. Maybe I know enough now that reminders are all I need. Or maybe I just wanted to enjoy the stodgy eloquence again. In any case, this year, I reread The New World, volume 2 of the HESP, and thoroughly enjoyed it. The stories were good, and the missing bits didn’t bother me so much this time around since I wasn’t reading to learn this history for the first time.

But I actually started learning things (or relearning, I guess) in chapters 19 and 20, covering the English Civil War. “Here,” Sir Winston says in almost the last good thing he has to offer about Oliver Cromwell, “is the salient fact which distinguishes the English Revolution from all others: that those who wielded irresistible physical force were throughout convinced that it would give them no security. Nothing is more characteristic of the English people than their instinctive reverence even in rebellion for law and tradition.” The rebel forces may at first have tried to find legal precedent for their treason and may have sought a new stability that fit into their interpretation of existing law. But it goes downhill from there. After the King’s forces have been totally defeated, the Roundhead (i.e. rebel) army won’t disband because they have not been paid. Now begins what Churchill calls the Second Civil War. (So much for “irresistible physical force” respecting “law and tradition.”) Once Cromwell and his army takes over, he says, “We must not be led by Victorian writers into regarding this triumph of the Ironsides and of Cromwell as a kind of victory for democracy and the Parliamentary system over Divine Right and Old World dreams. It was the victory of some twenty thousand resolute, ruthless, disciplined, military fanatics over all that England ever willed or ever wished. . . . Thus the struggle, in which we have in these days so much sympathy and part, begun to bring about a constitutional and limited monarchy, had led only to the autocracy of the sword.”

Again, Churchill assumes things. I don’t know who those Victorian writers were. I didn’t grow up thinking of Cromwell as a lightbearer for democracy and parliamentarism. But I get the idea. I live in a free democracy, as well, and I want those who established my freedom to have had no flaws and to have labored and bled solely for the abstract cause of freedom for future generations. So I can see why historians of a previous age would want to make heroes out of very flawed humans who fought for their own purposes and yet, even on a route as indirect as that leading from Oliver Cromwell, paved the way for the progress of greater freedom from tyranny. But when Cromwell and his brand of Puritanism won the rule of a Brave New England, he wanted no such thing as personal liberty for all. Among all the tyrannical policies enacted by this regicide and traitor, none seems more telling to me than his war on Christmas. A literal war. On Christmas. His understanding of Christianity dictated that this holiday smacked of Catholicism and should not be celebrated by him or by anyone he had power over. So the armed forces of the English government entered English homes on December 25 without a warrant and examined dinners. If a goose was involved, they confiscated the goose and sometimes took into custody the perpetrators of the lewd crime of being merry about the birth of Christ.

As I think about it, I want Churchill to be perfect, too. I actually believe I owe my freedom partly to him and his stalwart stand against Hitler, lonely but unwavering until the rest of the English-Speaking Peoples (i.e. us) went shoulder-to-shoulder with him. So I want him to be a paragon, even though I know that in reality he was human, as broken and self-centered as the rest of us. And yet I must admire the good and the noble in the man, and high among those admirable qualities is his understanding that shutting down Christmas with guns is an atrocity.

Modern Morality

In the early days of this blog, I would have made at least three posts out of three books. These days, I’m inclined to make just one post out of Hardy, Galsworthy, and Joyce.

Hardy

Let’s begin with Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I don’t know exactly what I expected from a book that I had heard characterized as “shocking”; maybe I thought it would be graphic in its depiction of sex or violence. It was not graphic, and, not being a Victorian, I didn’t find it shocking, either. Tragic and heartbreaking, yes. Surprising or offensive (are these the two main definitions of “shocking”?), no. Tess is seduced by a man who uses a very dirty trick, and then she despises him and tries to start a new life in a place where people don’t know she’s not a virgin. Is this shocking? The book itself describes the situation as one that “happens to girls.” Surely every proper Victorian had – I don't know – cousins who went astray. Then Tess suffers the hypocritical judgment of a man who otherwise seems like a very decent fellow; I imagine most women have found themselves victim to the male's double standard. So, again, it just looks like honest storytelling to me. I sympathized with and admired Tess until the end (I won’t give it away), and I’m really not sure why even Victorian ladies had such trouble with it.

Perhaps more shocking than the question of sexual morals, though, was Hardy’s anti-Christian, anti-Theist stance. But how offensive could this really have been? Tess’s Christianity is ill informed and syncretistically infused with folk legends. Sure. Such things happen in rural areas. The clergymen in her area are mostly hypocrites and nonbelievers. I’ve known several of these myself, and surely the most sincere Victorian believers were familiar with such, as well. I don’t see how they could have taken that part of the atmosphere of the book as an attack on all Christianity. I’m sad for Hardy that he couldn’t believe. It seems to me that he wanted to and just couldn’t. His books, including this one, don’t come across to me as personal accusations of stupidity and hypocrisy on the part of all Christians but as the honest observations of a struggling man. His narration denies the existence of a God who makes sense of Tess’s life, a God who cares for her. But he doesn’t want to tear down the social fabric. He doesn’t ask for a change in the Constitution or the disestablishment of the Anglican Church. He shows no scorn for the believer. I’m sure it helps that I approach the book from a perspective different from that of Victorians: I live after the modern age and in a country with no established church. But, really, why were they shocked?

Before I move on with my thoughts on modern morality in my recent reading, I have to say that I don’t believe I’ve ever read more beautifully poetic descriptions of rural life than those Hardy provides in Tess. A sample:

Thus, during this October month of wonderful afternoons they roved along the meads by creeping paths which followed the brinks of trickling tributary brooks, hopping across by little wooden bridges to the other side, and back again. They were never out of the sound of some purling weir, whose buzz accompanied their own murmuring, while the beams of the sun, almost as horizontal as the mead itself, formed a pollen of radiance over the landscape.

Yes, it is very hard to believe sometimes that God cares for girls like Tess. But I hope that Hardy, in stolen moments, thought that perhaps a God could have made that pastoral landscape and empowered that beautiful language.

Galsworthy

Right after finishing Tess, I read Silver Spoon, the fifth entry in John Galsworthy’s nine-part Forsyte Saga. Partly because the story was so similar to Tess, which I had just found so moving, and partly because I had enjoyed book 4, The White Monkey, so much last year, this book was a bit disappointing. Again, the story revolves around a young woman, Marjorie Ferrar, who has had a premarital affair. But, unlike Tess, Marjorie has no shame about it, no regrets. Galsworthy, calling the situation “modern morality,” literally puts this new morality on trial. An acquaintance, Fleur Mont, writes to a friend that Marjorie “hasn’t a moral about her,” and Marjorie takes Fleur to court for libel, where Fleur’s only defense is to show that what she said is totally true. The jury finds in Fleur’s favor, but Fleur loses in the court of Society. Right or wrong, says Galsworthy, this is where we are: our culture is a spoiled baby, tossing food around with a silver spoon and delighting in the mess while our only consequence lies in being told by an indulgent nurse that we’re naughty. (Actually, why was I disappointed? That all sounds pretty interesting!)

Joyce

I’ve read that some people think James Joyce spoke “the last word” on human sexuality in Ulysses. All I can say is that those critics and readers must not know very many words about human sexuality; I think much more can be spoken. In any case, I expected more “modern morality” in Finnegans Wake, but I didn’t find it. In fact, I didn’t find much that I could understand at all. I knew that the book ended with the line “A way a lone a last a loved a long the,” a string of words that strikes me as both interestingly cryptic and extremely beautiful. So I knew that the adventure would be loopy, but I didn’t know it would be quite as crazy as it has turned out to be. I had immense trouble getting through just the first day’s portion. I told myself decades ago that one day I would read this “hardest of all books to read.” So I don’t want to give up.

But in reading more about the book, I found that most readers don’t just sit down and take it in in a few days. Most take years. So, new plan. I’m going to divide Finnegans Wake up over not only the remaining five years of my current ten-year reading plan but also the ten years of my next decade-long schedule (most of which is already set). I don’t know what I’ll get out of the experience, but, assuming I live that long, I will finish reading this book!

Top 100 – Part VII

What?! 700 posts on exlibrismagnis.com?! Yes, even with my slower pace over the last few years, I have made it to my seven-hundredth contribution to this blog. Every hundred posts, I’ve departed from writing about current reading to offer moments from my past reading, ideas and stories and images that I think about often. My original idea for the subseries was to outline my hundred favorite books, but that idea quickly changed. These books are not necessarily in my top 100 books, in spite of my misleading title. In fact, if I were ever to put such a list into black and white, at least four of these titles wouldn’t make it. (I don’t even remember one of the titles.) Maybe if I get to 1000 posts I’ll actually try to decide what my favorite 100 books are.

• Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy. At Thanksgiving a few years ago, a distantish relative (the exact description of our relationship would involve the phrase “in-law” three times) wanted to talk at me about the Commedia. Knowing my education, he still assumed I knew nothing of this greatest of all classics, and tried to explain to me that no one reads anything but the Inferno because the other parts aren’t enjoyable. I told him that I read all three parts every few years and actually preferred Purgatorio and Paradiso. He corrected my pronunciation of commedia and moved on to his next topic. I think of many passages from all three parts of the epic poem often, but for now, I want to mention just one moment, when Dante gets to the empyrean heaven and sees all the concentric spheres of the heavens turned inside out so that God is at the center while everything else revolves around Him in a dance of love. I fail in all my attempts to put the image into words, and yet the topographical oxymoron shines clearly and distinctly in my inner eye. It is the master image in my mind of the God who encompasses all things, is at the center of all things, and yet stays separate from all his creation, the God who rules by orderly love. I love Dante, and I love God more because of Dante.

• John Milton, Paradise Lost. While we’re on the subject of epic poetry about Heaven and Hell, let’s talk about Milton a minute. In book IV, Satan visits Paradise. Many readers have thought that Milton makes Satan too sympathetic in these passages. Perhaps the poet, seeing his own antimonarchical bent in the archfiend who rebelled against the Divine Throne, injected too much of himself into the character. In any case, Satan’s sympathetic moment (“Warring in Heaven against Heaven’s matchless King! / Ah, wherefore? He deserved no such return / From me”) works for me and makes his next scene even more powerful. The Deceiver now takes the form of a cormorant and sits on the walls of the Garden of Eden, viewing first the flowers, the fruit, and then our first parents. “Ah! gentle pair,” he says, “ye little think how nigh /  Your change approaches, when all these delights / Will vanish, and deliver ye to woe.” An unforgettable turn!

• H. W. Brands, TR. President Teddy Roosevelt is visited by a French ambassador and takes him on his daily rugged walk. After crossing a river, the President looks back to see his visitor, still on the opposite bank stripping naked except for a pair of pink gloves. “Why did you remove your clothes?” asks Roosevelt once his fellow hiker completes the crossing. “I do not think we will meet any ladies out here,” replies the Frenchman. “Then why did you keep the gloves on?” “Just in case we do.” I hope the story is completely true.

• John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University. I love Newman’s description of the properly educated mind and aspire to approach its condition. “It is almost prophetic from its knowledge of history; it is almost heart-searching from its knowledge of human nature; it has almost supernatural charity from its freedom from littleness and prejudice; it has almost the repose of faith, because nothing can startle it; it has almost the beauty and harmony of heavenly contemplation.” Without the “almost,” the description would be heresy. With it, it is merely overly optimistic: I believe in the vision of this mind, but how could even the best university ever produce it?

• Malcom Gladwell, Blink. Forget careful, prolonged judgment of new people and situations, advises Gladwell. The human mind is equipped to make reasonable judgments in the blink of an eye. In one example, he cites a study showing that students viewing fifteen seconds of video of each of several professors rate them essentially the same as do other students after taking entire courses with the same professors. I thought about times I made decisions to hire people as soon they walked in the door; I no longer feel privately ashamed to have done so. (Not one that I chose in this way gave me any cause for regret.)

• Isaac Asimov, A-story-that-has-a-title-which-I-have-forgotten. In the future, everyone uses calculators. One day one person shows his ability to add up a couple of multi-digit numbers, and everyone else is amazed. Thus does new technology diminish traditional skills. Have we already reached this future?

• Michael Ward, Planet Narnia. Michael Ward, admitting that he sounds like a conspiracy theorist, says that he has discovered the secret organizing plan to Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, a plan so secret that no one – not one friend of Lewis, not one professor, not one faithful reader, not Warnie, not Joy, not Douglas – no one suspected it. And yet his evidence is totally convincing not just to me but to apparently all C. S. Lewis experts. Each of the volumes in the series corresponds to the Renaissance image of one of the seven planets. (OK, more exactly, each corresponds to Lewis’s image of the Renaissance image of one of the planets.) And each is ultimately about Christ, displaying Him not only in the person of Aslan but in the pervading atmosphere of each book, the very medium through which each plot swims. Christ is Jupiter, the jolly King with a red spot on his wounded side (LW&W). He is Mars, Forger of iron, Master of courage, Lord of Hosts (PC). He is the Sun of Righteousness, our Light, more precious than gold (VotDT). He is the Moon, Reflector of God’s glory, Mediator between Earth and Heaven, Great Physician of health and sanity (SC). He is Mercury, the Word, He who sunders and unites (HaHB). He is Venus, God of Love, Creator (MN). And He is Saturn, End of Desire, Keeper of the keys of Hell and of Death (LB). Is this a favorite book? I don’t know. It is a book about other books. All of its virtue cultivates love but directs all that love away from itself. And yet it has changed my thinking more than any other book I’ve read in the last twenty years or more.

There you have it. Seven more bits from my reading that I think about often. If I make it to post 800, I’ll have seven more. I hope you stick with me until then.

The Meaning Is in the Singing

Many years ago, as I was researching ideas of meaning in music, I came across an idea that has greatly affected my thinking ever since. Because I am who I am, I don’t remember the book or the author or even the century the author lived in. All in all, I’d rather be the kind of reader who forgets the source but is changed by the idea than the kind who remembers all the bibliographic details but isn’t moved by what he reads at all.

The idea was this: meaning in music is like meaning in baby talk. Yes, toddlers eventually assign words to objects and activities, sometimes totally fabricated words. (Our first called a tree a “doot.”) But the cooing of the infant can’t be translated, is not a thought expressed in words with codified meanings. And yet the baby’s cooing isn’t meaningless. The meaning of a baby’s talking is in the talking. His talking means that he is expressive. It means he wants to make an aural mark on his world. It means he wants to be like all the strange big animals he sees who make sounds with their mouths constantly. It’s not that “bak-gak” means a bottle and “bbbthhhhh” means a toy. It’s that they both mean, “Talking is fun!” Similarly, except in cases of quotation or obvious iconic reference, harmonic progression and melodic shape don’t and can’t ever say anything as specific as, say, “I want an orange because my mother liked apples.” And, contrary to the claim of another author, whose name I have deliberately and justly forgotten, as reported in a professional music journal that should have known better, there is no “gay” chord in Schubert. No, the meaning of the melody is in the singing itself. (I’m reminded here of Annie Dillard talking about the beauty of birdsong. Thanks, Annie Dillard!)

This year, many years after my introduction to him in a poetry class in college, I decided to revisit and deepen my acquaintance with T. S. Eliot. I remember the professor of that class saying of The Waste Land, “Even experts have trouble understanding it all.” In my ignorant, cocky, youthful confidence, I told myself that I would work it out. After all, I had recently learned to understand Shakespeare, and I had grown up with the idea that he, too, was impenetrable. Alas, I got lost on the first page, somewhere around Eliot’s announcement that he goes south for the winter. But I wanted to understand The Waste Land. I wanted to work it all out. Anybody who can come up with such great phrases as “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” and “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper” deserves to be understood. (Yes, I know that last one is from Hollow Men, but it’s still a really great phrase.)

Well, this time around, I was surprised to find that the foreign-language bits were much shorter and fewer than I remembered and that most of the English bits made much more sense without any extra work. It helped to be 62 and to know more literature and more history than I did at 19. It helped (a little) to know that the title referred to the waste land in the Arthurian legends. But still there were all those elusive allusions. Maybe, I thought, I should buy a book that will tell me what it all means, a guide that will help me work it all out.

Then it occurred to me that my problem was in thinking that a poem was something to be worked out. I understood the point Eliot was making in presenting vapid conversation even if I didn’t always know who was talking or exactly what they were talking about. Why should I learn what they were talking about anyway if the point is that the conversation is vapid? The thought sprang up: The meaning of the music is in the singing. And I thought of Eliot like a bird sitting in the waste land of inter-war European society wanting to sing beautiful melody and finding the reverberations of his song made tinny and hollow by the corruption of the landscape around him. I understood The Waste Land so much more when I quit trying to understand it.

Already very happy with my plan to reap great swaths of Eliot this summer after reading all the early poems, I next came upon the choruses from The Rock. Not only did I have one of the best reading days of the year. I also found that much of what I had quit trying to understand in the earlier work suddenly became very clear. Like Wallace Stevens’s jar in Tennessee (look it up if you don’t know this one!), the first chorus made all the rest of the Eliot wilderness (including the Eliot Waste Land) an organized realm rising up to its thoughts. In fact, the chorus presents a similar image when it speaks of the Incarnation as a point in history that contains all history and makes all history an organized story surrounding and flowing both toward and from it. Suddenly all the seeming contradictions in all of Eliot’s poetry made sense as echoes of this one thought. I thought of the circles in the Divine Comedy that turn inside out when Dante reaches the Empyrean Heaven, the Divine Point in the center becoming the all-encompassing circumference. (Eliot may have been thinking of that image, too, if only because no Christian poet can long have Dante out of his mind: at some point in the choruses, Eliot quotes Dante in invoking Mary as figlia del tuo figlio, an expression of mystery that, in context, also gave me images of points that contain the circles that surround them.) I also thought of Henry Vaughan and “I saw Eternity the other night,” another poem of divine circles. (Look this one up, too, if you don’t know it!)

This morning, I read Thomas’s Christmas sermon in Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. We celebrate, the soon-to-be-martyred saint tells us, both the birth and death of Christ in a mass on that most blessed day. How can we celebrate both at the same time? How can we be both joyful and sorrowful at the same time, joyful in our sorrow and sorrowful in our joy? The world doesn’t understand the peace that Jesus gives, he reminds us (“Not as the world gives, give I unto you”), and it doesn’t understand the joy that is compatible with sorrow. If the image of the point that contains the whole line of history summarizes what I felt reading Eliot, this theological statement on joy-and-sorrow summarizes what I took to be the meaning of his singing. I’ve had to learn the hard way in my life that all those Christians who have told me I didn’t have the joy of the Lord must not truly understand the divine joy in godly sorrow. (Or let us charitably say that they momentarily forgot that they understood it.) In the last post, I said I hoped for an antidote to my disappointment in William Morris, as Bryant had been after Browning. I didn’t know the elixir would be right around the corner.

Disappointments

Today I report two disappointments: one minor and one major. I had been looking forward to both the books for a long time, so even the minor disappointment stings. But that’s just the way it goes; as an explorer, I’m not going to enjoy all my planned destinations. And as I noted in March, after a disappointment like Browning, there’s usually a pleasant surprise like William Cullen Bryant.

First the minor disappointment. I had read about Roger Bacon many times. I knew him to be the Doctor Mirabilis, a thirteenth-century philosopher practicing and advocating empirical experiment three hundred years before Galileo. In reading his Opus Majus, I thought I would encounter a hundred-and-one ideas, half of them not quite right, but all of them too odd for the rest of the European intelligentsia to appreciate before their time. Instead, what I found was a man working hard to convince the Pope that intellectual study was a good Christian pursuit and offering not a compendium of his scientific findings but a mere sampling offered to support his persuasive argument without overwhelming His Holiness with details and jargon.

Bacon’s physics, for instance, consisted mostly of examples of the application of one representative principle: that things striking at an angle impact with less force than things striking perpendicularly. His explanation that things coming at 90 degrees come faster isn’t quite right: a stone heaved by a catapult actually travels faster after reaching the apex of its arc than a similarly massive stone dropped from the same height since added to the vertical speed of falling, which is the same for the two stones, the lobbed one has lateral motion, as well. But Bacon’s on to something when he observes that the stone hitting obliquely does less damage, and, since he knows that the earth is a sphere, he gets close to being right when he says the same principle is the reason that the sun’s rays give less heat when they strike us at an angle (as either in the morning or near one of the earth’s poles) than they do when the sun is overhead.

Still, I enjoyed reading through his dissertation on the causes of human error, his argument that Adam and Noah knew mathematics and other branches of philosophy, his demonstration that musical knowledge is essential to understanding languages, and many other parts of his Great Work. By contrast, I did not enjoy reading William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End at all. I disliked it so much, in fact, that, for only the third time in three decades of planned reading, I gave up on a book.

I know that Lewis and Tolkien admired this book and found inspiration in it. But I don’t see it. To begin with, there is no moral center here, no purpose to Ralph’s questing higher than his own desires and passions. He falls in love instantly with various women because of their beauty and has free sex (although the land is ostensibly Christian!). He seeks the Well at the World’s End only because he hears about it from everyone he meets and because it gives eternal youth. But he’s unhappy, so why should he want to prolong his life unnaturally? On top of these problems, Ralph encounters, deals with, and talks about far too many women-whom-the-woman-in-the-woods-met and tall-men-who-remind-him-of-the-man-from-the-village. To riff on Churchill, every character is an enigma which, taken away, leaves a mystery which, unwrapped, reveals only one more dude wanting to fight or yet another girl wanting to have sex with Ralph. I cannot help but think of Mark Twain’s rule no. 10:

They [the rules of literary art in fiction] require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale [Twain’s target was Fennimore Cooper] dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

If anyone knows of a good analysis of Morris’s fantasy that could change my mind, let me know. In the meantime, I’m on the lookout for the next William Cullen Bryant.

They Never Get Music Theory Right

Readers of this blog know how much I love Patrick O’Brian’s tales of Captain Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin and their sea adventures during the Napoleonic wars. Part of what makes these books so enjoyable is O’Brian’s lofty mastery of so many subjects. It’s not just that I know now from reading these books what a binnacle is or an orlop or what it means that a ship is close-hauled. O’Brian filled his books with the vocabulary and ideas of espionage, Linnaean taxonomy, nineteenth-century medical practice, economics, colonial social etiquette, flora and fauna of the sea and of a thousand-and-one islands, cookery, Latin poetry, prisons, charlatans and mountebanks (both elected and self-made), and many, many other topics.

Naturally, one of the most interesting of these threads to me is the music that Jack and Stephen play. The reader of one of these twenty volumes never has to wait very many chapters before the two friends pull out their instruments and set their hands to a piece by J. C. Bach or Albinoni or Arne. In reading Treason’s Harbour this month, I learned afresh of a composer that I surely had heard of before, since this was my second reading of the novel. Jack mentions Johann Melchior Molter in a terrible pun, suggesting that the duo play the “Molter Adagio.” Always hoping (but failing) to be as witty as he is courageous, Jack laughs uproariously at his own joke (which sounds more like the Italian tempo marking “molto adagio” in his British accent than it does in mine). So surely an author who can invent bad puns using the jargon of music knows music really well, right?

*sigh* They never get music theory right. I remember once hearing a very intelligent speaker, in drawing an analogy from music theory, say these words or words very close to these: “Playing only on the white keys is like making a black-and-white line drawing. But using the black keys adds color to the picture.” I don’t remember what larger point he was making; maybe he was trying to emphasize the importance of peripheral ideas (like espionage, biological taxonomy, medicine, and economics in an O’Brian novel!). But whatever his point was, it had nothing to do either with music or with visual art. Tragically, this very intelligent man made a mistake by trying to make himself sound more intelligent than he was with an analogy outside his normal expertise.

Alas, the analogy was outside of any expertise at all. Lets set aside the construction of the analogy, construction so poor that the listener gets confused trying to figure out how the black on the keyboard doesn’t correspond to the black in the drawing but instead refers to red and blue and green. Let’s set aside the huge problem that this very intelligent speaker believes that all paintings are essentially cartoons, with color filling in black outlines. Set those issues aside, and we still have a huge, essential problem. The music theory in the analogy makes no sense because it fails to recognize any music other than music in the key of C major. Yes, notes outside the basic scale of a key are called “chromatic” because, in a beautiful bit of poetry frozen into music’s terminology, they are said to add color. Surely my speaker had heard this observation and had tried to assimilate it, but he did so without understanding that black keys aren’t necessarily chromatic. In the key of E, for instance, F-sharp, G-sharp, C-sharp, and D-sharp are normal parts of the scale. We might even call them “natural” notes in that scale, while F-natural is not natural in the context but chromatic. (Hey, O’Brian taught me that a hawser is cable-laid, not hawser-laid. So, please, just let music theory have its own consistent inconsistencies.)

And this presentation is not an isolated case. When the New York Public Library Desk Reference came out in the 80s, I thought of buying it until I turned to the musical section. If the book didn’t know how to explain sharps (again with the sharps!), how could I trust it on anything else? Believe me, when a speaker or author not professionally trained in music theory uses music theory in an analogy or even dares to say something directly about music theory, I pay attention. And based on my experience, if you come across a musico-theoretical analogy from someone who doesn’t know who Gioseffo Zarlino is, odds are 50-to-1 that it’s wrong.

And now the point of the post. Yes, Patrick O’Brian made a mistake involving music theory. Stephen and Andrew Wray are speaking in a friendly way (this is before Stephen finds out who and what Wray really is!) about some Ambrosian chant they have heard at a church in Malta. “No grace-notes,” says Stephen, “no passing-notes, no showing away.” Wray adds: “And no new-fangled melismata either.” At that I’m already pulling my hair. But when I turn the page and read, “They talked about modes, agreeing that in general they preferred the Ambrosian to the plagal,” I drop my head and moan to the departed author, “Oh, woe is me! Oh, O’Brian! Oh, woe!”

While finding “passing-notes” in monophonic melody involves a good degree of subjectivity, medieval Christian chant – both Gregorian and Ambrosian – certainly employs them. Neither is the melisma, a series of pitches sung to a single syllable, a rare occurrence in Ambrosian chant. Google “Ambrosian chant” and glance at the first few images that pop up for proof. Melismas aren’t “new fangled,” either. (In the context of misunderstanding the melisma, even O’Brian’s use of the Greek plural form, “melismata,” grates on me as a pretension designed to feign expertise.) In fact, the tenth century saw the beginning of a trend in which performers “troped” many melismas, meaning in this case that they added new text to the traditional melody, singing one syllable for every note in what had been but was no longer a melisma. So far, O’Brian’s errors might be said to fall into the realm of historical musicology rather than music theory. But then he has to mention modes. “Ambrosian” is not a designation of a type of musical mode, to begin with. As a result, to explore more deeply in the dark cavern O’Brian has dug himself into, plagal modes cannot be opposed to Ambrosian modes, since they don’t exist; rather, plagal modes are opposed to authentic modes.

A thought occurs to me. A dreadful thought. My apostrophe continues: “Ai! Ai! And lack-a-day! Patrick O’Brian! Why must thou attempt that which is beyond thee? And if thou hast thus erred concerning music theory, do I indeed know that a hawser is cable-laid?”

We’re Going for the Cheese

 Last year I reported my embarrassment at discovering that my ongoing thirty-plus-year project of reading all of G. K. Chesterton’s weekly essays for the Illustrated London News would never honor my eyes again with the pieces I had read in the '80s in some collections owned by the Baylor library. It turns out that those were earlier essays written for the Daily News. So I changed my reading plan and made sure this year to reread one of the collections I read and loved almost forty years ago: Alarms and Discursions.

And – bless my soul! – there were all my old favorites. Last year I said I remembered especially a piece called “On Cheese” that began with the line “If all the seas were bread and cheese there would be quite a lot of deforestation in my neighborhood.” That memory was pretty faithful. It turns out that the title is actually just “Cheese,” that the sentiment appears just a few sentences in, not at the very beginning, and that the quotation verbatim runs this way: “If all the trees were bread and cheese there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England where I was living.” Here also was “The Glory of Grey,” in which Chesterton praises not only the beauty of different types of cloudy days in England, but also the fact that bright colors stand out on a dreary day, where on a sunny day even browns are bright. I love cloudy days and soon grew tired of hearing Texans complaining about rainy days, as if water were a bad thing. So this essay played a pivotal role in making me fall in love with Chesterton early in my acquaintance with him. (His extreme veneration for Dickens sealed the deal.)

I had read some, or maybe even all, of these essays to my wife many years ago. We especially enjoyed one called “The Philosophy of Sight-seeing.” Here, Chesterton points out that monuments, even the tomb of an aristocrat, are democratic things: they are meant to be seen by the public. And the public sees them in passing from one business to another or on the way from work to home. Visitors, then, he reasons, will get the proper effect from monuments not by standing in front of them and staring (GKC would have deplored selfies!) but by doing other things around them. We decided that when we returned to Paris, the most authentic way to enjoy the Eiffel Tower would be to eat at a sidewalk café with the Tower in sight.

“Cheese” also gives advice on traveling. Railway stations and tourist attractions all seem about the same anywhere you go, he says, but one thing changes from county to county: cheese. If you want to get a taste – a literal taste – of what unique pleasures a place has to offer, eat the local cheese. After reading this one, Nancy and I branded our new traveling outlook with the phrase “We’re going for the cheese.”

To go off of reading for just a moment, I’ll mention that in more recent times, Rick Steves often corroborated this view in saying that one should travel to Europe to see European people and things, not things that feel comfortable. Don’t stay in the five-star American hotel with other Americans; stay in the pension with the family that doesn’t speak English. He also gave us good advice about taking kids to Europe: let them plan it.

So one evening when our kids were about 8 and 11, we took them to dinner and said, “Look, a music professor is never going to be rich. But we figure we can take you on two good trips before you graduate. Where do you want to go?” They said the northeastern United States (DC, New York, Boston, Niagara Falls, etc.) and Europe. Excellent choices. We took the domestic trip first, standing on top of the trade towers just one month before they came down. (Don’t ask me about those nightmares.) When it came time to plan the European trip, we left almost all of it up to the kids. They told me what they wanted to see, and I made the arrangements.

But as we were getting the details ironed out, we told them The Philosophy: We’re going for the cheese. They ate it up. Well, I mean, they ate the idea up. But after we got to Europe, they definitely ate up the cheese, too. On our way up to the Bernina Pass into Switzerland, we saw a hand-painted sign in front of a small wooden building: Bergkäse. Boy, did we stop fast. and, boy, was that cheese good. And not like any other cheese I’ve ever tasted. The kids ate up other local cuisine, too, and they never once asked to stop at McDonald’s. Just a few days ago, our daughter reminded us of the delicious onion soup we had at a sidewalk café in Paris. “You remember,” she prompted, “at the place where we could see the Eiffel Tower while we ate?”

Dickens the Mixed

I’ve been wanting to read a recent biography of Charles Dickens (more recent than the nineteenth century, anyway) for quite a while now, but I’ve hesitated because the descriptions of these biographies always warn that the reader will find his hero indelibly tarnished. I’ve known that this warning could mean one of three things. (1) It could mean that the author, not having recovered from the twentieth century and thus unable to believe that Dickens’s sentimentalism has anything to do with any real life, just wants to expose Dickens as a fraud for believing in love and joy when such things do not in fact exist. (2) It could mean that Dickens was a horrible person and that I’ll have to find a way to live with the knowledge every day of my life after reading the biography. (3) Or it could mean that Dickens was a human and that I will learn of flaws that his early biographers kept quiet.

I don’t see how option (2) could be true. Dickens had to have in him something genuine in order to bless us with Mr Pickwick, Nicholas Nickleby, Captain Cuttle, Bob Cratchit, and Betsey Trotwood. So that narrows down the possibilities to just two. I have known and spoken with a Dickensian scholar whose views lay somewhere in the vicinity of option (1), so I knew I wanted to try to avoid any biography on those lines. But option (3) I wasn’t worried about. I already knew that the Great Promoter of Domestic Harmony separated from his wife in later years and had a relationship with an actress named Nelly Ternan. My love for Dickens had survived my discovery of Nelly, and the truth couldn’t reasonably get much worse than that, so I got ready to swallow the red pill and settled on Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life. And I’m so glad I did!

OK. Nelly Ternan first. Dickens’s affair with her isn’t the ideal story for a Christian life, I know. But having a second relationship after separation is not distinctly worse than divorcing and remarrying, and, although that sequence of events is no one’s Plan A, I’ve known people with that life story whose Christianity I respect. For extenuating (not exonerating) circumstances, I may point out that all but the oldest of Dickens’s children went with him in the separation, as did his wife’s sister. Perhaps Katherine Hogarth Dickens was intolerable to live with, and can’t we all find pity for the family who has to live with an impossible personality?

Tomalin points out other faults, of course, because Dickens was human and because “more recent” biographers have no incentive to keep his skeletons hidden in the closet. He demanded that publishers break old contracts when they no longer seemed fair. He always needed his friends to believe him in the right when any argument arose. He lost all patience with those of his sons (all but Henry Fielding Dickens, sadly) who constantly fell into debt and asked their famous father for a bailout.

But Tomalin also provided a lot of detail on aspects of Dickens’s life I hadn’t read much about before: aspects that, far from making him look more like a monster, made him seem even more funny and fascinating and pitiable than before. A biographer can concentrate on any threads in the fabric that she finds especially interesting, and my interests seemed to run parallel with Tomalin’s. She talked about Dickens’s frequent severe colds. She talked about several girls he fell in love with before marrying Catherine. She had a great deal to say about his interest in mesmerism and about one family friend, Madame de la Rue, who depended on Dickens’s therapeutic applications of his skill. Best of all, Tomalin gave a prolonged account of twelve-year-old Kate Wiggin finding Dickens on a train, worming her way into the seat beside him, and telling him, to his great delight, about all the dull parts in his books. Just after finishing the biography, I read Kate Wiggin’s own beautiful rendition of the encounter, and now I find that I must read this eventually successful author’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. My current guess is that the reputation of that book that I’ve received from culture is the result of a lot of option-(1) critics and that I will find it quite enjoyable.

And, of course, Tomalin confirmed several of the things I knew about Dickens that make him truly heroic, in spite of his failings. Besides having blessed the world with fourteen and a half beautiful novels and the second greatest Christmas story of all time (surpassed only by the original history), Dickens helped young, penitent prostitutes get educated and move abroad to start a new life, he aided and saved many fellow passengers on a train that suffered a horrific accident on a bridge, and he regularly went out of his way to speak to the homeless, the asylum patient, and the prisoner and to treat them with dignity and grace.

After Dickens’s death, his daughter Katey told her view of his life to a writer named Gladys Storey, who, after Katey’s own death, wrote from her notes and published Dickens and Daughter. In that book, Katey, who thought the time right to tell the adoring world that her father had his dark side, summed it all up by saying, “My father was . . . too mixed to be a gentleman.” Tomalin, recalling that line, sums up her biography by saying that Dickens was “too mixed to be a gentleman – but wonderful.” Amen, Claire Tomalin. Amen.

Adventures in the Ocean, Adventures in OCR

 I’ve lamented previously on these pages the near anonymity of Kenneth Roberts, once a best-selling American author and winner of a special Pulitzer Prize for his historical fiction. It’s not just that people who read Stieg Larsson or Patricia Cornwell don’t know Roberts. It’s that it appears the people who read Cather and Fitzgerald and Updike don’t know of him anymore, either.

Earlier this month, I read Roberts’s The Lively Lady. I didn’t know until I started reading that it was a part of his Nason family series, but it turns out that it is (at least!) the third in a series beginning with one of my favorite books of twentieth-century American fiction: Arundel. The series – Arundel, Rabble at Arms, and The Lively Lady – tells stories about the Nasons and other people from the Maine town of Arundel (pronounced a-RUN-del at the time, now pronounced ken-ne-BUNK-port), and all place them in American wars (as far as I know: maybe Roberts wrote other books about the Nasons of Arundel that I don’t know about). Lively Lady finds Richard Nason outfitting a privateer and going after the British in the War of 1812. It felt so much like Patrick O’Brian at times that I found myself subliminally rooting for the British before remembering: “Hey! They pressed our men from our ships!”

I enjoyed the story, but I did not enjoy the frequent typos from the weak optical-character-recognition scan. It seems that no one at Amazon reads Kenneth Roberts, either: they just scanned the book, left the file as is without any editing, and sold it for $9.49. My purchase alone probably paid for all the labor and overhead involved in the production of the faulty file. To give you an idea of the problems, I offer you a quiz. Match each word or phrase, as it appears in the Kindle version of The Lively Lady, with its definition or description. It helps a lot to think that the OCR is reading thick vertical lines correctly but tripping up on the thinner curves that join the verticals. Here are 10 “words” as they appear in the text:

1. fives
2. tinned
3. bum
4. bam
5. dumb
6. comers
7. yam
8. half fight
9. cudass
10. stem

And here are 10 definitions or descriptions for the words that Roberts actually wrote:

a. A building in which to house animals and to store seeds, fodder, and tools
b. A fighting blade
c. A tale; a strand of wool or other fiber
d. Changed the direction in which one is facing
e. The aft end of a ship
f. The celestial condition at mid-dawn or mid-dusk
g. The parts of the eyes out of which one looks with suspicion
h. What a privateer might do to a captured ship
i. What people spend in their hometowns
j. What the yokel did to the cliffs

OK, don’t scroll down farther until you’ve matched them all and are ready for the answers.


Answers below.


Answers below.


Answers below.


Are you peeking before you should?


Answers below.


Answers below.


And now:


The Answers

1-i: fives = lives
2-d: tinned = turned
3-h: bum = burn
4-a: bam = barn
5-j: dumb = clumb (i.e. climbed)
6-g: comers = corners
7-c: yam = yarn
8-f: half fight = half light
9-b: cudass = cutlass (Yes, cudass isn’t even a word.)
10-e: stem = stern

Parts of Parts of Aquinas about Parts and Types of Parts

Thomas Aquinas gets the largest number of pages in the Britannica Great Books set. Only he and Shakespeare get two volumes, and the Domenican Ox’s volumes are quite a bit larger than the Bard’s. (Thanks to Aquinas, I now know that calling Shakespeare “the Bard” is a figure of speech known as antonomasia. Antonomastically, Aristotle is “the Philosopher” for Aquinas, and Irene Adler is “the Woman” for Sherlock Holmes.) Still, the whole of Aquinas’s monumental Summa Theologica doesn’t quite fit in all those pages. What another Adler – Mortimer, the driving force behind the Britannica collection – left out of the Britannica set were a supplement that may not have been written by Aquinas himself and parts of the Second Part of the Second Part. Yes, that is Aquinas’s own designation for his very medieval organizational scheme: the Summa as a whole is in three parts, and the second part itself has two parts.

For 2020 and 2021, I assigned myself to read large portions of the part excised from the Britannica set, and it has become clear to me why, if something had to be left out, it was these passages. The bulk of II-II (as A. abbreviates it) focuses on the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. I fell in love with Aquinas several years ago primarily because of his clear, balanced mode of presentation, but also because in laying out Christian theology he actually gives me good, practical advice on how to live in a manner befitting a Christian. And I had hoped that these pages on the virtues would run over with wholesome instruction.

But, alas, St. Thomas is more interested here in analyzing and categorizing the virtues than in exhorting his readers to embody them. His primary method of analysis is to divide each virtue into . . . wait for it . . . parts. He even tells us that there are three different kinds of parts, so each cardinal virtue gets divided three ways. Then he asks such questions as whether martyrdom is a part of charity. Well, the answer goes, all virtues come from charity, but martyrdom is primarily a part of fortitude because it involves facing evil for the sake of a higher good.

Still, Aquinas made many interesting and useful points in the passages I read this year (on fortitude and temperance). Here’s a sample:

• Fear is sometimes quite rational.

• One can be humble proudly.

• All virtue in anyone whatsoever comes by the grace of God. (Not all grace is sanctifying grace.)

• "Insensibility," the denial of pleasures themselves, is a sin because pleasure in necessary things is part of the natural order.

• There is a good pride (happiness in the gifts of God) and a bad pride (essentially, the belief that oneself is more deserving of God than others).

• Pride is even more principal than the capital (i.e. “deadly”) sins, since they all flow from pride. The pride in the list of seven capital sins is actually “vainglory”: the desire for outward show of excellence and recognition of one’s special status.

• Knowledge of the truth is good in itself, but the virtue of studiousness can become the vice of curiosity when done to take pride in the acquired knowledge, to discover faults in others for the pleasure of knowing them, etc.

Given the subject, I’ll be medieval and leave that list at a wholesome, round seven points. May you use them to live more virtuously today!

Alec Forbes Is an Unco Bonnie Buik

On numerous occasions, C. S. Lewis emphatically expressed his debt to George MacDonald. He said Phantastes baptized his imagination. He said, “I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master.” And yet, while it was a novel of MacDonald’s that so changed Lewis’s imagination, he also said of his “master,” “Few of his novels are good and none is very good.” It seems it was not MacDonald’s handling of character, plot, and description that so inspired Lewis. And to be clear, Phantastes is, as its name implies, a fantasy novel, and most of MacDonald’s fictional output consists of realistic (not to say realist), domestic novels.

Somewhere in the last eight years or so, I read that, among those novels he thought weren’t very good, Alec Forbes was Lewis’s favorite; I know I read it somewhere because I put a note to that effect on my current ten-year plan. I don’t remember now where I read that factoid, and the source could have been wrong. I also wrote a note to myself saying that at some point (again, I didn’t bother with the details; *sigh*) someone writing for Christian History magazine said that What’s Mine’s Mine was Lewis’s favorite of MacDonald’s novels. Well, the good professor may have said different things at different times. One thing seems certain to me, though. After reading Alec Forbes, I can’t help thinking that Lewis must have liked it better than some of the other novels I’ve read in recent years. Two pervasive features of the book direct me to this conclusion.

First, Alec finds Christian counsel in multiple sources. MacDonald’s novels often feature one Christian sage mentoring the young people. (I always imagine that MacDonald saw in these characters the kind of pastor and teacher he hoped to be.) Alec Forbes has at least four spiritual guides. There’s the minister at the state church. He has no “enthusiasm” (i.e., he doesn’t go in for revival meetings and prefers staid, liturgical worship services), but he consistently teaches godly love, through his actions even more than by words. Recognizing an awareness of the constant presence of God in the dissenting preachers, Alec prefers to go to their church, although he doesn’t necessarily agree with everything he hears there. (They read only the Old Testament, MacDonald explains, and view covenant as the only thing standing between them and what God really wants to do to them.) Alec finds a model of simple and joyful Christian humility in young Annie Anderson, with whom he goes to school. And then there’s the town stonemason, who constantly talks to Alec frankly about his need to escape Hell by getting right with God. I was reminded of the many doors in the foyer of Lewis’s house of “Mere Christianity,” all leading to rooms where Christian fellowship and worship of God can be found.

Second, MacDonald talks in the narration about God calling people "through a back door." The scent of flowers, the warmth of sunlight, a blanket of snow, a windstorm, a gift of a couple of shillings – one earthly thing after another in the story flashes forth grace and beauty and speaks divine truth to the hearts of Alec and Annie. But, the narrator explains, if they – or we – pursue any gracious thing directly, hoping to make the sacred moment last forever, the freshness goes away. These moments in the novel not only make me think of Lewis saying that MacDonald was the first author he had read who could transform common objects into conduits of light, they also remind me of Lewis’s central idea of joy. I won’t try to explain Lewis’s special definition of joy here. If you don’t know about Warnie’s toy garden, but you’re the kind of person to read this much of this blog post, I guarantee that you will thank me for telling you to read Surprised by Joy sometime in the next . . . OK, sometime in the next ten years.

But should you read Alec Forbes? If you enjoy nineteenth-century coming-of-age novels as much as I do, if you love to hate the draconian schoolteachers of Nicholas Nickleby and Jane Eyre, if you think you would like a story in which the male protagonist (sixteen years old?) builds a snow fort and the female protagonist (twelve?) wanders into it and falls asleep and needs a respectful rescue, if you long for a book in which the ultimate spiritual state of the boy is as important as whether or not he gets the girl, then yes, you should read Alec Forbes. Oh, and there’s one more thing. Gin the unco mickle Scots mak ye frichtit, dinna gang greitin’ and speirin’ me a’ aboot it.

My Continuing Quest Through Poetryland

 My planned reading forms the foundation of my adult project of giving myself the classic education of which my high school and college deprived me. (I also continue to study mathematics and languages just for the sake of learning, but I have no complaints about the way my schools handled those subjects.) Of course, I realize that what I’ve learned in my self-assigned regimen of learning, which has been going on for around twenty-five years now, I could never have assimilated by the time I was twenty years old. So I should quit complaining about school, claim victory, and move on. Right?

But still, why didn’t someone in eleven years of public school and four years of college teach me about the music of poetry? We studied some poetry in high-school English classes but never talked about, for instance, the ways rhythm plays against an underlying meter. I hazily remember a teacher once scanning a line of poetry and just leaving the alternating chalk marks above the syllables sketched out on the board, as if we had learned something by looking at an accent mark above the word of. I took a class in poetry in college in an attempt to remedy the deficiency, but we read almost exclusively modern poetry, and if there’s a rhythmic scheme to that body of literature, my professor never spoke of it, and it has totally escaped me since.

In any case, I plod along in my own awkward way trying to learn poetry, fully knowing that, however much I may enjoy Milton and Shelley and Tennyson, I’ll never really get their idiom into my bones since I didn’t grow up with it. Reading even the most enjoyable poetry, I still feel a lot like the way I felt when, at the age of 53, I studied Rosetta Stone Italian for a year and then went to live in Tuscany for four months. And how much sense does it make to read all or most of one or two poets’ works every year? Not much, maybe, but at least the system gets me reading.

This year I actually have three poets on my plan. My first assignment in poetry for 2021 was Robert Browning, and I have to say that I surprised myself by finding a classic poet that I really don’t like. Some I haven’t understood as much as I wished. Some, like Coleridge, disappointed me, but in his case only because he seemed inferior to Wordsworth, who is, as far as my dim sight can tell, practically perfect. But Browning I actually found repulsive at times.

As I said, it was a surprise. I went in to the year expecting to fall in love with Browning and simply to become acquainted with the second poet on the schedule for 2021, the now little-known William Cullen Bryant. But just the opposite happened. I will now smile and give a polite nod to Browning as I pass him on the street, but Bryant will receive invitations to lunch.

And now I come to the big problem in writing blog posts about poetry. I see from my stats that some of my posts about poetry are among the most visited on exlibrismagnis. Many of the visitors are probably people just like me, finally trying to understand poetry at a time when they fear it’s too late. I’m guessing (and hoping) that many of those views come from homeschooling moms and dads who are trying to give their kids something better than what we received. So I feel the burden of obligation to say something profound, something eye-opening about Bryant for readers who are looking for a cup to dip into the pool at a poetic oasis in the middle of the great desert of Literature as Seen by Americans Raised in Public School. So, here goes. But really. Don’t expect much. Just dip your hand into Bryant’s “November” and take a cool, refreshing sip.

Yet one smile more, departing, distant sun!
One mellow smile through the soft vapory air,
Ere, o'er the frozen earth, the loud winds run,
Or snows are sifted o'er the meadows bare.
One smile on the brown hills and naked trees,
And the dark rocks whose summer wreaths are cast,
And the blue gentian flower, that, in the breeze,
Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.
Yet a few sunny days, in which the bee
Shall murmur by the hedge that skirts the way,
The cricket chirp upon the russet lea,
And man delight to linger in thy ray.
Yet one rich smile, and we will try to bear
The piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air.

OK, let’s start with the main conceit: the sun smiles in the summer, and we live on the memory of those smiles during the winter months, when, as you know, the sun is doing something other than smiling. (Side note: this morning, in reading a novel by George MacDonald, I learned a new, very useful name for unseasonably warm days in November. We in America tend to call this meteorological phenomenon by a phrase invoking a mistaken name for indigenous American people. In Scotland, apparently, the pattern is known as St. Martin’s summer, presumably because the feast day of that good man is in early November.) During a St. Martin’s summer, Bryant asks the sun to extend his beneficence for just one more day, stoking the inner fire that will make the bitterness of the coming December, January, and February more bearable. It’s a pretty picture, and who wouldn’t want to have the cheery sun as a friend with whom to hold such a pleasant conversation?

Now, to do my best at making a technical observation, I want to concentrate on some articles that my old teacher would have contentedly put an accent above. (To avoid alignment problems with accent marks, I’ll show accented syllables in all caps.) Consider the second line. My teacher (bless her heart, at least she was trying to teach us something about poetry) would have marked it this way:

One MELlow SMILE through THE soft VAp’ry AIR

“See?” she would have said, “Five iambs. That’s iambic pentameter.” But surely we ought to read the line in a more normal way:

One MELlow SMILE through the SOFT VAp’ry AIR

Now this I will grant my teacher: the effect I sense only works if you know the straightforward pattern of iambs. Against that meter, which lies in the back of your mind as you read the words – should it lie there? I don’t know; nobody ever really explained it to me; but this is the way it happens in my weird, old head – against that meter, the actual pattern of accents sounds like a change, and that change has a clear effect. To my ear, the two consecutive accented syllables in this case primarily serve to slow the line down. And we should slow down. It’s a mellow sun. The air is soft and vapory. We’re not in a rush here. We want this final solar grin to last a while.

The same rhythmic exchange occurs in the phrases “on the BROWN HILLS” and “the DARK ROCKS” and with “the BLUE GENtian FLOW’R” and in “a FEW SUNny DAYS”: all images we want to linger over on this last warm day of the year. Without the slowing inversions, my old teacher and I would have been accenting the articles the and a quite a bit. A triple accent appears near the end in “ONE RICH SMILE,” as Bryant makes his final plea to the sun to stop for a moment before leaving.

One last note. It’s difficult to write a sentence in English without the letter t. So, of course, it happens here and there throughout the poem. But in lines 2 through 13, the t’s are scattered, like the opposing team’s hits on a pitcher’s good day. In the first and last lines, by contrast, they come in clumps: “deparTing, disTanT sun” and “Piercing winTer frosT.” OK, yeah, I also highlighted a p in that last line. But doesn’t it have the same cold sharpness to its sound? This isn’t science; it’s art. So I can’t say that Bryant meant to distribute his sounds in this way or that anybody else even hears them my way. But for me, the beating voiceless stops in the first line hammer a note of scolding; the sun needs a berating for abandoning us each year. And those hard consonants in the last line make me feel the bitterness of a deep winter freeze.

Wow. Some accents and a few consonants. I’m probably working at a fifth-grade level here. But I didn’t do this work in actual fifth grade. So, better late than never?

Augustine Is Really Smart

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading my yearly allotment of Augustine: books 6-10 in the African bishop’s treatise on the Trinity. He didn’t convince me with his main point, but he did convince me (if, indeed, I needed any convincing on this point) that his intelligence embraced broad fields of knowledge and dealt with them in great power and insight.

OK, Augustine’s main point. Books 1-5 (which I read three years ago) deal mostly with terms regarding relationships between the Persons of the Trinity and with the question of Who made the appearances to Abraham, Moses, and others in certain Old Testament stories. I divided the treatise arbitrarily into thirds for my ten-year reading plan, but my artificial division seems to have worked, since books 6-10 shift focus to our relationship with and understanding of the Trinity. Augustine’s primary question is this: How can we love the Trinity when we can’t understand or form an accurate mental picture of the Trinity?

His basic answer is that we sometimes love a thing without exact knowledge of it because we have loved something else like it and reason by analogy. I, for instance, will sit down eagerly later this year as I begin The Claverings, a book by Anthony Trollope that I have not read. Why do I relish the experience in anticipation when I don’t know the book? Because I have read and enjoyed several other Trollope books, so my love is founded on the likelihood that I will enjoy this one as much.

What then, Augustine asks, do we know that is like the Trinity so that we can love the Trinity as we begin and continue to know the ultimately incomprehensible God in three Persons? There is, Augustine tells us, a trinity in my mind: the mind itself, its knowledge, and its love. This answer works to some extent: the knowledge and the love, like the Word and the Holy Spirit being respectively begotten and breathed by the Father, come from and reflect the mind itself, and the mind is not what it is without its actions of knowing and willing. But do knowledge and love have a separate identity that bears an analogy to Christ saying that He doesn’t know everything the Father knows? And doesn’t the mind perform other functions, as well, like reasoning? Augustine suggests a second trinity of human mentality: memory, understanding, and will. In some ways, this analogy seems better, and in other ways it seems just as arbitrarily limited to three as did the first proposition. But Augustine’s question still seems important to me, and his approach still provides a door to my search for an answer. I am inclined to say that I love the Trinity because God in three Persons is like nothing else in existence (thing A cannot both be with thing B and be thing B except in the case of the Trinity: John tells us that, in the beginning, the Word was with God and the Word was God), and I like other things that are unique. Yeah, there’s the problem of saying that all these things are alike in that they aren’t like anything else.

My dissatisfaction with his answers doesn’t negate the point that Augustine wrestles with a fascinating, important question. And the intelligence and knowledge he uses to put all the parts of the argument together are astonishing. Did anyone else before Augustine ever examine the human mind to the point of questioning why we love things we don’t know? Plato and Aristotle both have lots of helpful things to say about loving what we do know and even loving what we mistakenly think we know. But loving what we don’t know? Augustine also appears to me to have invented, some 1500 years ahead of time, the field of semiotics, with all of his analysis of words and mental thoughts as signs of both external things and of each other. In other books, he talks about music, mathematics, and history. In the Confessions, he takes on the mystery of consciousness of time.

In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine commended study of all these fields and more, thus, I thank God, granting approval for medieval Christians to study literature and grammar and astronomy and geometry and to create cathedral schools and universities. He is the most influential Christian writer between the writing of the New Testament and now. Had I never read a word of his prodigious output, he would still bear responsibility for much of the shape of my intellectual life, as he does for anyone geeky and odd enough to be reading this blog. Graduates wear robes at school commencements because monks delivered medieval education because Augustine sanctioned academic pursuit for Christendom.

So what can we call Augustine? An intellectual powerhouse? The founder of Christian academicism? A beacon atop the mountain of western education? It’s difficult to find the right words to describe him adequately and to capture the importance of his far-reaching achievement. He isn’t like anyone else.

Beauty in Ashes

Happy Charles Dickens’s Birthday! I just finished reading Bleak House for the third time in my life, and before writing this blog post, I looked back to see what I blogged about in 2012, the last time I enjoyed the Great Man’s ninth novel. It appears I wrote six times about the book. How did I find so much time to write these posts while I was working?

I have just one thing to write about after this visit with the deep, mysterious, disturbingly comforting Bleak House. I see that I touched on it in one of my posts from nine years ago when I commented on this passage:

It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the solemn thunder and to see the lightning; and while thinking with awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are encompassed, to consider how beneficent they are and how upon the smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from all this seeming rage which seemed to make creation new again.

The dark storm makes creation new. After the deluge comes a new brilliantly colored sign in the heavens.

Throughout Bleak House, characters are immersed in atmospheres of influence. Influence, a common word in the book, originally referred to streams of celestial power in our atmosphere flowing (fluens in Latin) in from the planets. These influences, it was believed, both shaped character and caused temporary changes of temperament or health. Influenza came from the influences. At the beginning of Bleak House, the air is filled with “fog,” which sounds romantic to us now but actually consisted mostly of smoke from factories. As we progress through the pages, we get the pervading rain around Chesney Wold, the dust that blankets everything in Tulkinghorn’s chambers, the soot of the poor neighborhoods, the disease in the noisome air of a cramped urban cemetery, and, most importantly, the poisonous influence of the Court of Chancery, touching and harming everyone who has the misfortune to find his business taken up therein:

How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very wide question. From the master upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes, down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks' Office who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery folio-pages under that eternal heading, no man's nature has been made better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good. The very solicitors' boys who have kept the wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr. Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise was particularly engaged and had appointments until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it but has acquired too a distrust of his own mother and a contempt for his own kind. Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter and see what can be done for Drizzle—who was not well used—when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and sharking in all their many varieties have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong it was in some off-hand manner never meant to go right.

And yet beauty arises from the wreckage of this whirlwind. This isn’t Great Expectations, so Dickens awards his good characters happy endings in this novel with the sad name. And yet every happy ending summarized in the last chapter of Bleak House has a depth of beauty that comes from some tragic mark. One character ends happily married and has a baby girl – who is deaf and dumb. But doesn’t the mother only love her child the more for that deficiency? The narration tells us explicitly that one pretty widow is more beautiful with the shadow of loss on her face. Two neighbors who have argued over the ownership of a disputed strip of land try reconciling but find that they actually have more fun arguing. John Jarndyce still calls his study the Growlery. And the house, in commemoration of the storm that has made creation new, is still affectionately known as Bleak House. Because of its realism and familiarity, isn’t this the happiest of all Dickens’s happy endings?

Ringing the Changes

Dorothy L. Sayers’s mystery novels were once thought of as “literary” detective stories, as opposed, I suppose, to the – what? flaccid pulp? – of Agatha Christie’s offerings. I happen to like both authors quite a lot, although I can see why Sayers was once thought to be artistically better than Christie. The very qualities that earned her this reputation are probably responsible for her books appealing less (and to fewer) today than her counterpart’s, but if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably up for it. If you haven’t tried these out, start with Murder Must Advertise, and then, if you’re still happy, proceed right to The Nine Tailors.

The Nine Tailors! Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow! If you didn’t know anything about change ringing before, you will by the time you’re finished with the book. But look up some articles while you’re reading the novel, and dig even deeper. (Here’s a good place to start.) Listen to some change ringing on Youtube. The topic is fascinating in itself, provides a pervasive atmosphere of activity and terminology throughout the book, and plays an important role in the solution of the mystery.

What is it, you ask? In short, change ringing is a practice of tolling a given set of bells one at a time over and over but changing the order each time. For instance, in a Plain Bob, a set of six bells would begin by ringing in order: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6. The line is then divided into three pairs, which change places: 2 - 1 - 4 - 3 - 6 - 5. Now the end bells retain their rhythmic placement while the four inner bells swap in pairs: 2 - 4 - 1 - 6 - 3 - 5. And so it goes. A complete peal, which takes several hours (more or less, depending on the number of bells involved), gets around to the performance of every ordered permutation. If you had heard this description before knowing it takes place in a mystery by Dorothy L. Sayers, would you have guessed that such a mathematical practice was English? But if I told you that the methods for changing the order of the bells have such quaint names as Steadman’s Triples and Kent Treble Bob Major, would you have guessed any country other than England?

The performances require stamina, athleticism, and mental focus. Imagine going to a cold, windy bell tower and pulling on a rope that controls a massively heavy bell for nine, fifteen, perhaps twenty hours, all the time paying attention to the pattern and keeping track of when to dodge and when to hunt! The herculean feat is made possible by alternates who are ready to sub in when it’s time for a refreshment break and by a leader who helps by shouting the changes like a caller in a square-dance (another artistic form involving the reordering of the participants). The adjustment of the timing that makes the permutations come about is made possible by the method of swinging the bell all the way to its vertical position, where it hovers like a gymnast doing a handstand on the top of the high bar until called to descend and toll again.

I offer a couple of caveats before you go wading into The Nine Tailors and wonder why you let this weird blog writer lead you into a morass. First, it’s long. Mystery novels work best in about 250 pages: enough to hide the connections of the pertinent details but few enough that the reader doesn’t forget those details by day 6 of reading. The Nine Tailors comes in at around 400. Second, Sayers’s language (especially her slang) is just different enough from ours to make descriptions of some key events obscure. I’ve read the book twice, and both times I got bogged down on page 1 trying to figure out how Lord Peter’s car got bogged down in a ditch. The situation isn’t relevant to the mystery other than as a means of getting Lord Peter delayed long enough to get involved in the local intrigue. But let me help potential readers out by suggesting that “the road cresting the dyke” should be interpreted as “the road that ran along the crest of the dyke.” I’ll also point out that a “lag” is a convict and that it’s best just to assume that someone asking for “Paul who is a tailor” could be remembered as and taken as someone asking for Paul Taylor. (Perhaps the book was so long that even Sayers forgot her own details.)

At one point while reading the book, I was looking up what some other people thought about it and found that Upton Sinclair considered it one of four “essential” detective stories. Also on his list was Dickens’s Bleak House, which, it just so happens, was on my plan as the book to start on the day after I finished The Nine Tailors! So I’m reading half of all essential detective novels in one month. That’s an accomplishment almost as impressive as ringing a full peal of Bristol Surprise Major.