Burton: So Soon!

Just a couple of months ago, in late November and early December of 2021, I came up to the entry on my reading list, “Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy.” Now I had encountered references to and quotations from The Anatomy of Melancholy many times in my literary travels. I can’t even tell you where now, although I strongly suspect C. S. Lewis has pointed me to Burton once or twice. And at some point I had read something about this book that got me excited enough to put an exclamation point next to the title in my notes. Especially because I've struggled personally with melancholia (see my comments on this subject elsewhere by clicking on the name Joshua Shenk in the index of labels in the right column of this blog), I had looked with eagerness to this meeting for years.

I won’t say I was disappointed when the anticipated meeting finally occurred, but I was surprised. My first surprise was the length of Burton’s treatise: according to the count of Kindle locations, about one-third again longer than the typical long novel by Dickens. But it’s late November! I don’t have time to read a book that long and still finish my list for the year! (I’m usually not so dramatically wrong about a work’s length when setting out my basic schedule for each year of reading.) The second surprise was Burton’s tendency to ramble through every topic on his long way through, for instance, every possible type of and cause for melancholy, although the rambling shouldn’t have been surprising given the length, for how else does one fill a thousand-page book on one subject but by rambling?

My first decision for how to handle the situation was to choose some selections based on the table of contents. It’s hard for me to leave a book unfinished once started, but if I assign myself to do it in advance, I can usually let myself get away with it. My second decision was to look up Burton on the internet to see what others thought of the book. (I usually don’t want to read what anyone else says about what I’m reading until at least halfway through a book; I like to make up my own half-informed mind first.) As it turns out, Burton’s biggest fans love the book exactly because it meanders through every possible topic in human life as it pertains to melancholy.

A dozen days later, having finished my curtailed plans for the book, I didn’t feel at all sure that I understood what the Anatomy’s admirers saw in it and had to settle for being satisfied that I would have a much better context for the quotations the next time I came across any. Little did I know that I had only one month to wait! Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night begins many chapters with epigraphs from The Anatomy of Melancholy, and they did indeed make more sense after having read (or “read at”) only about a fourth of the whole book.

Poor Sayers! Many of her fans consider Gaudy Night her best book, and I’ve addressed it only by commenting on some quotations it includes. But I’ve decided that if I’m going to keep blogging at any appreciable rate, I have to think less about long(-ish) proclamations of Meaning and Worth and more about short(-ish) reports on my reading experience. So far, the new approach is working.

A Theft

Since I know that I will contribute more to this blog if I write short posts, let me attempt something in fewer than five paragraphs.

As a professor, I kept a sharp eye out for instances of plagiarism in the thousands of expository papers, theses, and dissertations I read. In a student’s writing, offering up the work of another scholar as one’s own is rightly seen as a serious wrong. But is that so true in creative writing? Where would Shakespeare have been without Holinshed’s chronicles or Boccaccio’s tales? Scores of imitations followed the publications of Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, and no one was jailed. Dickens wrote a story about a murderer who gave himself away under interrogation when he mistook his own loudly beating heart for that of his victim’s. It is known that a young Poe sent the more established Englishman some stories to review, so it is probable that Poe is the inventor here, Dickens the thief. Yet surely Poe won this encounter by writing the justly more well known version of the story.

But what about one line? One joke? A few days ago, in reading Sheridan’s The Rivals, I came across this line by Captain Absolute: “Though one eye may be very agreeable, yet as the prejudice has always run in favour of two, I would not wish to affect a singularity in that article.” I immediately thought of Dickens’s description of Wackford Squeers in Nicholas Nickleby: “He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favour of two.” Dickens certainly knew of Sheridan’s work; whether he remembered reading or hearing the joke in Sheridan or believed he had created it himself is debatable. One thing I know: Dickens’s use of the joke in the description of one of the most entertaining of his loathsome characters vastly improves upon Sheridan’s invocation in the service of a man describing what he looks for in a wife.

Now that I think about it, grading those university papers created another weird habit in reading that, I happily realize now, has disappeared from my private reading, as well. I used to enter every student’s sentence more on the lookout for errors in grammar, usage, spelling, and punctuation than I did for content, and I found that my extracurricular reading slowed down from this cautious habit. It occurs to me now that I no longer waste time internally scolding published authors for lack of an Oxfordian comma or idiomatic use of pronoun case.

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.”