This tale is of negligible value, but it is amusing, filled with vivid historical atmophere, and mercifully brief. It involves a trick played upon the This tale is of negligible value, but it is amusing, filled with vivid historical atmophere, and mercifully brief. It involves a trick played upon the besieged Jews by the besieging Romans, who not wanting to technical offend the Hebrew deity by denying him sacrificial animals, yet contrived to send him a victim he could not accept and that his devotees could not use. This is yet another of the early Poe tales first submitted to the Philadelphia Saturday Courier and eventually intended as one of the sixteen tales in the never-published collection, The Folio Club. It is derived from a passage in Horatio’s Smith’s novel Zillah, a Tale of the Holy City (1828); it is more homage than parody, and contains images—sometimes entire passages—appropriated from the original.
The following is an effective descriptive passage, in which the representatives of the beseiged—Simeon and his associates—hurry to the city walls
That part of the city to which our worthy Gizbarim now hastened, and which bore the name of its architect, King David, was esteemed the most strongly fortified district of Jerusalem; being situated upon the steep and lofty hill of Zion. Here a broad, deep, circumvallatory trench, hewn from the solid rock, was defended by a wall of great strength erected upon its inner edge. This wall was adorned, at regular interspaces, by square towers of white marble; the lowest sixty, and the highest one hundred and twenty cubits in height. But, in the vicinity of the gate of Benjamin, the wall arose by no means from the margin of the fosse. On the contrary, between the level of the ditch and the basement of the rampart, sprang up a perpendicular cliff of two hundred and fifty cubits, forming part of the precipitous Mount Moriah. So that when Simeon and his associates arrived on the summit of the tower called Adoni-Bezek--the loftiest of all the turrets around about Jerusalem, and the usual place of conference with the besieging army--they looked down upon the camp of the enemy from an eminence excelling by many feet that of the Pyramid of Cheops, and, by several, that of the temple of Belus.
“The Wild Fields” was their name, the broad plains that stretched beyond the turbulent waters of the Dneiper River, those Central Ukrainian steppes th “The Wild Fields” was their name, the broad plains that stretched beyond the turbulent waters of the Dneiper River, those Central Ukrainian steppes that the Zaporozhian Cossacks once called home. Now, however, if you go looking for those plains, you will find nothing but water, water trapped by the dams of the Kahkhova Reservoir.
But in the 17th century, “The Wild Fields” were flowing with Cosssacks, running as dangerous and free as the rapids of the Dneiper. Originally a people of the steppes, related to the Khazars, the Cossacks developed into a voluntary tribe—accepting into their ranks runaway serfs, escaped criminals, war refugees, even a Tartar or two—bound together by a bellicose nature, steadfast loyalty, and a fierce pride in their status as warriors and in the truth of their Greek Orthodox faith. They battled against (and occasionally for) the Catholic kings of Poland, the tsars of Russia, and the khans of Crimea, showing themselves to be formidable enemies, dangerous allies.
The protagonist of Taras Bulba is one of these Zaporozhian Cossacks, and the novella tells the tale of a great campaign that the Cossacks once fought against the Poles. When Taras Bulba and his two young sons ride out to do battle, one son will become a hero and the other a traitor; how Taras Bulba faces the fates of his sons becomes central to this narrative of war.
When Gogol was in his twenties, he developed a passion for Ukrainian history, and hoped to earn a position teaching the subject at the University of Kiev. He was rejected for the position as unqualified (despite the support of his friend Pushkin) but the research he did to prepare himself for the post led to the writing of Taras Bulba (1835), Gogol longest effort up to that time. It is a work of unabashed romance, unapologetic nationalism, a celebration of the strengths both of Russia and the Ukraine.
Although Gogol is clearly influenced by the novels of Sir Walter Scott, he seemed to sense that his Cossacks, both in their savagery and generosity, were more primitive—and more monumental—than the medieval knights and Highland chieftains that the Scotch novelist took for his subjects. So Gogol sought a more elemental literary model, and found it in the Iliad of Homer.
I’ll end with with one epic digression, one battle encounter, and one epic simile. We begin with the digression, an anecdote of the early life of the Cossack Mosiy Schilo:
He was a muscular Cossack, who had often commanded at sea, and undergone many vicissitudes. The Turks had once seized him and his men at Trebizond, and borne them captives to the galleys, where they bound them hand and foot with iron chains, gave them no food for a week at a time, and made them drink sea-water. The poor prisoners endured and suffered all, but would not renounce their orthodox faith. Their hetman, Mosiy Schilo, could not bear it: he trampled the Holy Scriptures under foot, wound the vile turban about his sinful head, and became the favourite of a pasha, steward of a ship, and ruler over all the galley slaves. The poor slaves sorrowed greatly thereat, for they knew that if he had renounced his faith he would be a tyrant, and his hand would be the more heavy and severe upon them. So it turned out. Mosiy Schilo had them put in new chains, three to an oar. The cruel fetters cut to the very bone; and he beat them upon the back. But when the Turks, rejoicing at having obtained such a servant, began to carouse, and, forgetful of their law, got all drunk, he distributed all the sixty-four keys among the prisoners, in order that they might free themselves, fling their chains and manacles into the sea, and, seizing their swords, in turn kill the Turks. Then the Cossacks collected great booty, and returned with glory to their country; and the guitar-players celebrated Mosiy Schilo’s exploits for a long time.
Here is a battle encounter containing an epic simile:
“He has left untouched rich plunder,” said Borodaty, hetman of the Oumansky kuren, leaving his men and going to the place where the nobleman killed by Kukubenko lay. “I have killed seven nobles with my own hand, but such spoil I never beheld on any one.” Prompted by greed, Borodaty bent down to strip off the rich armour, and had already secured the Turkish knife set with precious stones, and taken from the foe’s belt a purse of ducats, and from his breast a silver case containing a maiden’s curl, cherished tenderly as a love-token. But he heeded not how the red-faced cornet, whom he had already once hurled from the saddle and given a good blow as a remembrance, flew upon him from behind. The cornet swung his arm with all his might, and brought his sword down upon Borodaty’s bent neck. Greed led to no good: the head rolled off, and the body fell headless, sprinkling the earth with blood far and wide; whilst the Cossack soul ascended, indignant and surprised at having so soon quitted so stout a frame.
The cornet had not succeeded in seizing the hetman’s head by its scalp-lock, and fastening it to his saddle, before an avenger had arrived. As a hawk floating in the sky, sweeping in great circles with his mighty wings, suddenly remains poised in air, in one spot, and thence darts down like an arrow upon the shrieking quail, so Taras’s son Ostap darted suddenly upon the cornet and flung a rope about his neck with one cast. The cornet’s red face became a still deeper purple as the cruel noose compressed his throat, and he tried to use his pistol; but his convulsively quivering hand could not aim straight, and the bullet flew wild across the plain. Ostap immediately unfastened a silken cord which the cornet carried at his saddle bow to bind prisoners, and having with it bound him hand and foot, attached the cord to his saddle and dragged him across the field . . .
You can learn important things about a great writer by reading other great writers who have imitated him. I learned about Twain’s Huckleberry Finn by You can learn important things about a great writer by reading other great writers who have imitated him. I learned about Twain’s Huckleberry Finn by reading Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate, I learned about Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d’Arthur by reading Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and I learned about Shakespeare, his tragedies and histories, by reading Alexander Puskin’s Boris Godunov.
Shakespeare was fascinated by political history, the motivations of kings and would-be kings, and the young Pushkin—an early admirer of Byron, the philosophes, and the revolutions in America and France—was fascinated by political history too. His revolutionary sentiments earned the young poet an exile to his mother’s estate, and there, in his mid-twenties, he immersed himself in the histories and tragedies of Shakespeare (in a French translation) and in Karamzin’s History of the Russian State.
In Karamzin, Pushkin became fascinated with a period contemporaneous with Shakespeare: the reign of Boris Godunov (1598–1605) and the rise of the “False Dmitri.” Godunov acted as regent for Ivan the Terrible’s saintly but weak-willed son Feodor, and, after Feodor’s death, for Dmitri, Feodor’s son. When the boy, at the age of ten, was found dead, Godunov was thought responsible. Gudonov was soon acclaimed czar, but Dmitri’s death came back to haunt him: a young man (rumored to be a renegade monk) claiming to be the real Dmitri, recruited an army in Poland and marched on to Godunov's palace.
Pushkin must have been struck with the Shakespearean echoes: the saintly weak-willed king (Henry VI), the murderous Lord Protector (Richard Duke of Gloster), the guilty king unable to sleep (Henry IV, Macbeth), and a march on the stronghold of the king (Macduff and Birnam Wood, Richmond and Bosworth Field). To this he added some unusual, more surprising Shakespearean touches: a courtship scene with a Romeo and Juliet beginning and an ending with a bargain more like Macbeth; an idiot beggar who speaks the truth to Czar Boris like Lear’s fool speaks the truth to Lear; a Duke of Clarence style dream; and a low tavern with drunken monks, featuring a hair’s-breadth escape which looks a little like Falstaff’s Boar’s Head Inn. But Pushkin’s imitation consists of much more than an echoed scene here and there, for he perfectly captures the free, wide-ranging spirit of Shakespeare: unaffected by the shackles of the classical unities, generous and universal in its sympathies, comprehensive in its soul.
I’ll end with a portion of Boris' famous soliloquy (and one of the finest arias in Mussorgsky’s opera too). The echos of Richard III, Henry IV, and Macbeth are strong here:
I have attained the highest power. Six years Already have I reigned in peace; but joy Dwells not within my soul. Even so in youth We greedily desire the joys of love, But only quell the hunger of the heart With momentary possession. We grow cold, Grow weary and oppressed! In vain the wizards Promise me length of days, days of dominion Immune from treachery--not power, not life Gladden me; I forebode the wrath of Heaven And woe. For me no happiness. . . . Ah! Now I feel it; naught can give us peace Mid worldly cares, nothing save only conscience! Healthy she triumphs over wickedness, Over dark slander; but if in her be found A single casual stain, then misery. With what a deadly sore my soul doth smart; My heart, with venom filled, doth like a hammer Beat in mine ears reproach; all things revolt me, And my head whirls, and in my eyes are children Dripping with blood; and gladly would I flee, But nowhere can find refuge--horrible! Pitiful he whose conscience is unclean!
Geoff Dyer is a writer of non-fiction, a critic of literature and music and film. But he is a fiction-writer too, and in But Beautiful [A Book About J Geoff Dyer is a writer of non-fiction, a critic of literature and music and film. But he is a fiction-writer too, and in But Beautiful [A Book About Jazz], he uses his fiction-writer tools to explore the world of jazz, offering a kind of criticism that is more memorable and more resonant than any critical essay could be.
The book consists of a series of fictionalized vignettes which reveal the personalities of a few geniuses of jazz: an aging Lester Young at the Alvin Hotel, Thelonious Monk and his wife Nellie in the West Sixties, the vicious beating (and resurrection) of Bud Powell, Ben Webster traveling Europe by train, the ever-angry, explosive Charlie Mingus, Chet Baker of the beautiful and ruined face, and the crazy junkie life of Art Pepper, all seven tied together by the road trip conversations of Duke Ellington and his chauffeur/baritone sax/old friend Harry Carney passing the time on the way to another gig.
If you’re not into classic jazz, you might as well skip this book, but if you know who the people listed above are, and you dig their music, I highly recommend this book.
Oh, there is an essay at the end, and it is a very good essay too, but I’ve forgot what it is about already. But I still remember the rest: courtly Lester walking with Lady Day, Monk introducing his favorite lamppost, bloody Bud Powell nightsticked on the sidewalk, Ben blowing his tenor for a stranger on the train, Mingus demolishing his phone, Chet Baker staring into an unforgiving mirror, junkie jailbird Art painting the portrait of a woman with his music.
And the Duke and Harry, of course, forever friends, forever on the road....more
In Darkest Hour, Winston Churchill recites the following verses from "Horatius" (one of the Lays of Ancient Rome) to his fellow passengers in the Lond In Darkest Hour, Winston Churchill recites the following verses from "Horatius" (one of the Lays of Ancient Rome) to his fellow passengers in the London Underground:
“Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate: “To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds For the ashes of his fathers And the temples of his gods…”
The last two lines are spoken by another passenger, Marcus Peters, a young black male—someone from the far reaches of the Empire, possibly the Caribbean. When Churchill hesitates, Peters completes the verse, and the result is extraordinarily moving.
Was I moved by this? Hard to tell, for I was already weeping. I had begun to weep the moment Churchill began his recitation, for I remembered how my Aunt Alice--a contemporary of Sir Winston's--had often recited the very same passage to me. She was of Irish heritage, daughter of an immigrant from England, and had memorized these verses in a Cincinnati grade school during the final years of the First World War. (Aunt Alice also possessed a foot-high iron statue, of a Roman warrior with upraised sword, which she called "Horatius" and used as a door stop. He is still in service to our family, having guarded my bookshelves for most of the last twenty years.)
These poems of courage and patriotism became popular at the height of the British Empire, around the time Victoria was proclaimed "Empress of India," but Macaulay wrote them much earlier, long before he won his fame as an historian, in the years immediately before Victoria was crowned a queen.
Macaulay was in his thirties serving as "the legal member" of the Governor-General’s Supreme Council for India. While ministering to the fledgling empire of the British, Macaulay reflected upon the origin of the Roman; he read closely the first five books of Livy, which are filled with the myths and legends preserved from Rome’s earliest days. Scholars of Macaulay’s time believed the theory—since rejected—that Livy based his history on ballads now lost—works of the early empire which praised the city’s ancient origins—and it was reflecting upon these lost ballads that sparked Macaulay’s creativity. What would these old ballads have looked like? How would they have treated their already mythic material? Would their writers’ view of the present have helped them organize the myths of the past?
Using the English ballad tradition as a model, the young Macaulay wrote four long narrative poems, each an example of what he imagined might be the ancient Roman style: “Horatius” (Horatius Cocles and his companions defend a bridge against the Etruscans), “The Battle of Lake Regillus” (the Roman’s defeat of the Tarquin’s Latin League due to the intervention of twin gods Castor and Pollux), “Virginia” (the decemvir Appius Claudius’ attack upon the maiden Virginia, and its public consequences), and “The Prophecy of Capys” (old prophet Capys tells the victorious Romulus and Remus of the coming empires’ great victories).
The poems themselves are fun, in an old-fashioned bumptious way. They aren’t first-rate poetry, but they are first-rate second-rate poetry, and that’s good enough for me. (“The Raven,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and “The Highwayman” are all excellent examples of my idea of first-rate second-rate verse.)
Just as fun as the poems themselves, though, are the essays that precede them, in which Macaulay discusses the characteristics of the Roman ballad tradition—which is of course his own fabrication—in a way that explains (and excuses) many features of his poems, including the occasional anachronism.
One of my favorite features of ancient poetry is its catalogs: the lists of gods, warriors or cities, each labeled with the appropriate epithet or characteristic. Macaulay excels at this sort of poetry. Here is his list of the Latin League towns and territories from “The Battle of Lake Regillus” (including the Rex Nemorensa of Aricia, memorialized by James Frazer in The Golden Bough):
From every warlike city That boasts the Latian name, Fordoomed to dogs and vultures, That gallant army came; From Setia's purple vineyards, From Norba's ancient wall, From the white streets of Tusculum, The proudist town of all; From where the Witch's Fortress O'er hangs the dark-blue seas; From the still glassy lake that sleeps Beneath Aricia's trees— Those trees in whose dim shadow The ghastly priest doth reign, The priest who slew the slayer, And shall himself be slain; From the drear banks of Ufens, Where flights of marsh-fowl play, And buffaloes lie wallowing Through the hot summer's day; From the gigantic watch-towers, No work of earthly men, Whence Cora's sentinels o'erlook The never-ending fen; From the Laurentian jungle, The wild hog's reedy home; From the green steeps whence Anio leaps In floods of snow-white foam.
First published in The Token and Atlantic Souvenir (1838), “Endicott and the Red Cross”—as close to pure history as Hawthorne ever comes in his tales First published in The Token and Atlantic Souvenir (1838), “Endicott and the Red Cross”—as close to pure history as Hawthorne ever comes in his tales and vignettes—tells us of the first recorded defiance of an overreaching English King by a prominent New England Citizen: the desecration of the militia's English red-cross flag by John Endicott, the Governor of Massachusetts, who saw in it the symbol of a creeping papism in th colonies The time: 1634, almost hundred and fifty years before the ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
For the contemporary reader—and, I suspect, Hawthorne’s reader too—much of the interest of this story derives from its depiction of various colonial offenders, restrained by ancient devices such as the pillory and the stocks. But, among the rest, there is one figure that definitely catches the reader’s attention, a young woman who prefigures the Hester Prynne who would appear a dozen years later in The Scarlet Letter just as surely Endicott himself looks forward to revolutionaries like Sam Adams and James Otis:
There was likewise a young woman, with no mean share of beauty, whose doom it was to wear the letter A on the breast of her gown, in the eyes of all the world and her own children. And even her own children knew what that initial signified. Sporting with her infamy, the lost and desperate creature had embroidered the fatal token in scarlet cloth, with golden thread, and the nicest art of needle-work; so that the capital A might have been thought to mean Admirable, or any thing rather than Adulteress.
I read Troubles because it is an esteemed historical novel, known for its richness of comic incident and irony, a novel which treats a place and perio I read Troubles because it is an esteemed historical novel, known for its richness of comic incident and irony, a novel which treats a place and period I find fascinating (Ireland during the “War of Independence”), but I ended up loving it for very different reasons: I found it to be--in spite of (or because of?) its dark humor--one of the finest romantic Gothics I have encountered. It is redolent with ironies, of course, but they are ironies darkened by tragic waste.
It begins in 1919, when British Major Brendan Archer, still a bit shell-shocked from the war, travels to the fictional east coast town of Kilnalough to visit a woman he is almost sure he is engaged to (although he has no memory of proposing). This woman, Angela Spencer, resides in her father’s seaside hotel near Kilnalough, and the historical interest of the book comes from the Major's observations—on and off, during the next two years—of the changes in the atmosphere of the hotel and the town as the Irish desire for independence intensifies, particularly as it affects the decaying Anglo-Irish Protestant gentry, like the Spencer family itself.
Just as interesting as the history, however, is the ghost of the gothic which envelops the book. In my gothic interpretation, the sex of the protagonist is reversed, with Major Archer in the role of Jane Eyre or the second Mrs. de Winter: he is intelligent, capable, but a bit damaged, and rather unsure of his position in this unfamiliar world.. Angela, who greets her “fiancee” ambiguously and then disappears somewhere into the upper rooms, suggests the crazy lady in the Rochester attic or the ghost of Rebecca de Winter: could she--and her cryptic letters--hold the key to the secrets of the old Majestic Hotel?
The Majestic Hotel! Just like the Rochester mansion or Manderley itself, this old, decrepit three-hundred room hotel is full of gothic terror and delight. Its very structure defeats the explorer, for it is filled with corridors that end inconclusively, stairs that don’t connect where they should. Besides, it is long past its heyday, and—as its future grows perilous and the staff neglectful, the building itself goes to seed. Tropical foliage overruns the “The Palm Court,” thick branches bulge and break through the sitting room walls, and dry rot bores holes in the floor. Odd smells and strange objects may be discovered in the individual apartments (a sheep’s head in a chamber pot, for example), and, throughout the upper reaches of the hotel, and even downstairs, in the old “Imperial Bar,” an army of feral cats—orange, with green eyes, like an Irish flag—are taking over.
Yes, the decaying hotel is a metaphor for the dying British Empire itself. And Farrell’s book is continually, sardonically amusing as it reveals its eccentric Anglo-Irish characters continually besieged by unavoidable entropy and casual hostility: the book’s aging, half-mad Rochester, hotel owner Edward Spencer; his vague, mysterious elder daughter Angela; his selfish, idle son Ripon; his teenage daughters, the malevolent and beautiful twins Faith and Charity; the dozen superannuated maiden lady hotel guests; and an old blind grandmother who packs a revolver.
Farrell is a fine writer. Here is a passage I love: it is an account of the declining days of Edward's favorite dog Rover, which manages to be darkly funny, genuinely poignant, and richly symbolic of the Anglo-Irish situation—all in brisk, straightforward prose:
Like the Major, Rover had always enjoyed trotting from one room to another, prowling the corridors on this floor or that. But now, whenever he ventured upstairs to nose around the upper stories, as likely as not he would be set upon by a horde of cats and chased up and down the corridors to the brink of exhaustion. More than once the Major found him, wheezing and spent, tumbling in terror down a flight of stairs from some shadowy menace on the landing above. Soon he got into the habit of growling whenever he saw a shadow...then, as the shadows gathered with his progressively failing sight, he would rouse himself and bark fiercely even in the broadest of daylight, gripped by remorseless nightmares. Day by day, no matter how wide he opened his eyes, the cat-filled darkness continued to creep a little closer.
I sometimes feel sorry for the second book of a trilogy, for it is often treated more like a bridge, and less like a destination. The deuxième volume I sometimes feel sorry for the second book of a trilogy, for it is often treated more like a bridge, and less like a destination. The deuxième volume is neither the thatched cottage that begins the tale, nor the ancestral mansion that ends it. Instead, it is more like a road, and, however diverting the scenery and people of this road may be, it is—after all—more of a means than an end.
This is doubly true of Louise de la Valliere, the middle volume of the final D’Artagnan romance, sandwiched between The Vicomte de Bragelonne and The Man in the Iron Mask. It is not strictly the second volume of an authentic trilogy, but instead an arbirtary 700 page hunk of narrative prose, the smackdab middle of a 2,000 page serial novel, at least twice the length of Dickens’ Bleak House. If it possesses qualities which distinguish it from the reamaining two-thirds, they are to some degree accidental.
Roughly speaking, The Vicomte de Bragelonne is about the quest to re-establish an absolute monarchy abroad (Charles II of England) while strengthening one at home (Louis XIV), and The Man in the Iron Mask is about a conspiracy to subvert that same domestic monarchy. Louis de Valliere is the portion of the book which describes the social and amatory world of the Sun King near the zenith of its power, and shows how the absolute dominance of one man and his whims can circumscribe the quests for truth and adventure into a taste for gossip and a predilection for conspiracy. We observe the grand political impulse as it operates in the court of Versailles, how it is compelled to fix on the king’s personal dislikes and emphemeral loves, and we sense that what we see before us—though ostentatious, even magnificent in its pageantry—is a reduced and decadent world.
Nevertheless, we find people here to root for: the amiable upstart Malicorne, with a lover to impress and a fortune to earn; Louise de Valliere, the sweetest and most honorable of royal mistresses; Raoul Count de Bragelonne, the noble son of Athos, a young man who loves Louise hopelessly and sincerely; the veteran D’Artagnan, ever willing to serve his king (and enrich himself along the way, if he can); and the Sun King himself, an intelligent young man with generous impulses, who has the power to do anything—anything except to escape from the net of absolute monarchy itself.
Louise de la Valliere, although it seemed a long road at times, never led me to lose confidence in Dumas’ narrative art. It entertained me, and made me look forward to my destination : The Man in the Iron Mask....more
No playwright ever learned more from Shakespeare than Sean O’Casey, and the most profound lesson he learned from the master was how comic figures, fla No playwright ever learned more from Shakespeare than Sean O’Casey, and the most profound lesson he learned from the master was how comic figures, flawed but filled with life—Mercutio, Polonius, Falstaff, Enobarbus—can be smashed to pieces by “mighty opposites” in feuds and broils greater than themselves.
In Juno and the Paycock, perhaps his greatest play, O’Casey introduces us to the four Boyles, a family from the Dublin slums tailor-made for a comedy filled with good-humored satire and human warmth. The play’s great comic figure is "The Paycock” (peacock), “Captain” Boyle. A patriarch who excels in useless eloquence, he is addicted to drink and allergic to work. His nemesis is his (not quite) long-suffering wife Juno, capable of demolishing an argument or deflating a pomposity with a good one-liner or two. She is the sole support of the family: her Marxist daughter Mary is on strike, her revolutionary son Johnny is disabled (hip maimed in “The Rising,” arm shattered to the War for Independence), and the “The Captain” can’t work of course because...because he has pains in his legs. (Although the pains never keep him from scurrying ‘round to the pubs with his worthless toady Joxer Daly.)
And then, the good news! The Boyle family has come into a large inheritance!
Sounds like a sit-com, doesn’t it? Perhaps an Irish version of The Honeymooners plus The Beverly Hillbillies? But O’Casey is too good a playwright—and the world is too cruel—for the Boyles to be blessed with a sit-com existence.
No forgiveness here, no mitigation of fate. And every deed darkened by the fog of Civil War.
Here’s a fine comic passage from Act I, in which “The Captain” romanticizes (and embellishes) his brief period as a merchant sailor, with his “butty” Joker acting as chorus. (Notice how reality intrudes even here, how the street vendor, in answer to the Captain's poetic question “What is the stars?” gives him a harsh, reductive answer):
BOYLE: Them was days, Joxer, them was days. Nothin' was too hot or too heavy for me then. Sailin' from the Gulf o' Mexico to the Antanartic Ocean. I seen things, I seen things, Joxer, that no mortal man should speak about that knows his Catechism. Ofen, an' ofen, when I was fixed to the wheel with a marlinspike, an' the wins blowin' fierce an' the waves lashin' an' lashin', till you'd think every minute was goin' to be your last, an' it blowed, an' blowed — blew is the right word, Joxer, but blowed is what the sailors use. . . .
JOXER. Aw, it's a darlin' word, a daarlin' word.
BOYLE. An', as it blowed an' blowed, I ofen looked up at the sky an' assed meself the question — what is the stars, what is the stars?
VOICE OF COAL VENDOR. Any blocks, coal-blocks;' blocks, coal-blocks !
JOXER, Ah, that's the question, that's the question — what is the stars?
BOYLE. An' then, I'd have another look, an' I'd ass meself — what is the moon?
JOXER. Ah, that's the question — what is the moon, what is the moon?....more
This is the fifth play O’Casey wrote, but the first to be performed. It is set in 1920, during the Irish War for Independence, and tells the story of This is the fifth play O’Casey wrote, but the first to be performed. It is set in 1920, during the Irish War for Independence, and tells the story of thirty-year-old poet and tenement dweller Donal Devoren. His fellow tenants have decided he is an IRA gunman in hiding, they treat him with respect and ask for certain favors, and Donal rather enjoys living under the gunman’s "shadow," for he is a bit of Romantic. “His struggle through life has been a hard one,” O’Casey tells us, “and his efforts have been handicapped by an inherited and self-developed devotion to the might of design, the mystery of colour, and the belief in the redemption of all things by beauty everlasting.” More than anything else, however, he delights in the devotion of Minnie Powell, a pretty young thing who lives in his building and considers him a hero of the revolution.
O’Casey is still learning his craft here, and Gunman’s structure isn’t equal to that of his two subsequent masterpieces, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars. Still it is a suspenseful and moving work, filled with eloquent Irish speech, a wealth of spot-on working class humor (both Catholic and Protestant), and a tragic conclusion that fills the viewer with a horror of violence and pity for the random losses of war.
On the subject of those losses, I would like to quote from the words of the pedlar Seamus Shields to his friend Donal Devoren:
It’s the civilians that suffer; when there’s an ambush they don’t know where to run. Shot in the back to save the British Empire, an’ shot in the breast to save the soul of Ireland. I’m a Nationalist meself, right enough—a Nationalist right enough, but all the same—I’m a Nationalist right enough; I believe in the freedom of Ireland, an’ that England has no right to be here, but I draw the line when I hear the gunmen blowin’ about dyin’ for the people, when it’s the people that are dyin’ for the gunmen! With all due respect to the gunmen, I don’t want them to die for me.
As my 2016 July 4th Independence Day project, I decided to re-read the short story “The Man Without a Country” for the first time in many years, and I As my 2016 July 4th Independence Day project, I decided to re-read the short story “The Man Without a Country” for the first time in many years, and I was pleased to find the narrative still haunting, the plight of its unfortunate hero still moving, and his devotion to the idea of “The United States” of America still an inspiration. Now, in 2018, with "red" states and "blue" states even more sharply divided, and the president himself eager to sow yet further division between them, the concept of the "United States" seems even more precious and worthy of preservation.
In 2016 I became aware of something else too: “The Man Without a Country” is a textbook example of verisimilitude, for author Hale chooses his historical details so meticulously, and presents them with such apparent casualness that even an intelligent reader—my bookish gradeschool self, for example—could be excused for mistaking this fiction for actual history.
Naïve naval officer Philip Nolan exchanges incriminating letters with Aaron Burr during the period when the former vice president was conspiring to become Emperor of Texas. The young man, subsequently tried for treason, blurts out during his court martial, “Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” And, shocked by this rash utterance, the presiding judge devises an appropriate—and uniquely painful—punishment.
Hale published his story in The Atlantic Monthly of 1863 as a passionate defense of the Union, but it lacks the easy patriotism that one might fear to find in a wartime magazine piece. Instead, it avoids cheap partisanship and easy jingoism, deriving its power from the sympathetic plight of its hero who inspires us with the ways by which—though in perpetual exile—he comes to cherish the very concept of these United States of America....more
Appearing first in The Token and Atlantic Souvenir (1837), this tale based on colonial history tells of the 1630 Puritan destruction of the nearby set Appearing first in The Token and Atlantic Souvenir (1837), this tale based on colonial history tells of the 1630 Puritan destruction of the nearby settlement of Merry Mount, together with the felling of its great maypole, the closest thing to a center of worship the rebel community possessed. Hawthorne transforms this history into allegory, showing us how “jollity and gloom” once struggled for the soul of America.
Hawthorne leaves out some interesting history in the pursuit of his allegory, particularly in regard to Thomas Morton, the founder of Merry Mount (now Quincy, Massachusetts). He was a young Elizabethan lawyer, a bit of a roisterer, a self-proclaimed member of “the tribe of Ben” which produced the Cavalier Poets. Arriving in Massachusetts in 1624 to start a fur-trading outpost, he acquired a piece of land from the Algonquin people and established trade relations: they brought him furs, he gave them guns and liquor.
The Puritans, arriving four years later, were not happy with this arrangement, but even more galling was Morton's adoption of a liberal, oddly syncretic form of Christianity which revived the pagan practices of the English countryside. When Morton erected a maypole, celebrating an old-fashioned English Mayday together with the Native American spring festival, the Puritans were horrified, particularly since Morton and his men sought out the Indian women as “consorts,” drinking and “dancing and frisking” with them, and freely calling upon the old gods under their classical names of “Bacchus” and “Flora.” All this was too much for the Puritans: the maypole had to come down.
Hawthorne leaves out the guns, the liquor, and the Indian women, and he soft pedals the classical paganism and the spring festival elements as well. Instead, he concentrates on an old style English country marriage held beneath the maypole, on the day John Endicott and his Puritans have singled out the maypole for destruction. Thus this tale becomes an account of an expulsion from the Garden in which the Puritans are the snakes bringing knowledge of good and evil but also the Lord's angels, the bearers of flaming swords.
The most charming part of this story is that it ends with a compassionate, gentle John Endicott welcoming the couple into the Puritan community. But perhaps this is not really surprising, for it reinforces Hawthorne's complex vision of the Puritan heart as a congeries of principles and secrets, a heart which holds within it all the things it believes it has conquered: witchcraft and adultery certainly, but Quakerism and paganism too....more
This short early tale is notable for its classical Greek setting (unique in Lovecraft) and its stylistic use of archaic inversions—the kind Yoda of St This short early tale is notable for its classical Greek setting (unique in Lovecraft) and its stylistic use of archaic inversions—the kind Yoda of Star Wars is fond of—in order to summon an antique mood.
It tells the story of the esteemed sculptors Kalos and Musides, very close friends who live together, who have become rivals in the creation of a monumental statue of Tyche the Goddess of Fortune commissioned by the Tyrant of Syracuse. It is an old fashioned kind of story—a little Damon and Pythias, a little Cain and Abel—which Lovecraft brings to a satisfying, if somewhat elliptical conclusion.
About that ending: some people see it as inconclusive and unsatisfying, but I do not agree. If you read it, and are one of those who come away puzzled, read it again (it is short, after all), and this time look at the events with the cynical perspective of a veteran homicide detective. Not enough evidence to prosecute, but the conclusion itself is clear....more
If you consider a man's “best” books to be the ones with the most consistent tone and the fewest flaws, then Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper If you consider a man's “best” books to be the ones with the most consistent tone and the fewest flaws, then Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper are Mark Twain’s best works of fiction. If, however, “best” means the most interesting, the most resonant, even if the flaws are considerable and the results problematic, then that honor belongs to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” Huckleberry Finn, and—I would argue—The Tragedy of Puddin’head Wilson too.
The flaws and the problems of Twain’s fiction stem from the fact that the limited but parochial projects of Twain the humorist are often undermined and thwarted by the comprehensive soul of Twain the writer of fiction. In Connecticut Yankee, for example, as much as Twain admired Yankee know-how and despised the “jejune romanticism” of Sir Walter Scott, there was still a part of him that grudgingly admired Southern chivalry and was appalled by how Yankee know-how literally blew that chivalry apart on the great battlefields of the Civil War. For this reason, an essentially humorous book about a cunning modern inventor who outfoxes King Arthur’s finest ends with a bitter picture of modern warfare which considerably alters its tone. And the end of Huckleberry Finn exhibits similar problems in the comic—but essentially unfunny—return of Tom Sawyer to the narrative.
Puddin’head Wilson—a smaller but equally resonant work—is comparably problematic. It began as a novel with the title Those Extraordinary Twins, featuring a pair of conjoined twins based on a well known Italian pair, Giovanni and Giacomo Tocci. Twain wished to contrast their relatively happy life with the dark story of two little Missouri boys growing up in the small town of Dawson’s Landing in the years before the Civil War. The two boys look much alike, but Tom is to be the master of the house, and Chambers is to be his slave. The story of how they are made to switch places, together with tale of Puddin’head Wilson, a lawyer who eventually resolves the mystery—if not the resulting tragedy—through the newly emerging science of fingerprinting, is a fascinating one. Unfortunately, it completely overwhelmed the story of the Italian twins. Twain left them—unconjoined- to wander with little purpose through the story, a baffling vestige of his original comic conception.
Still, it is a powerful narrative, particularly in its account of how the institution of slavery molds the characters of both the false master and the false slave. Twain’s touch is not always sure—there are even moments when Twain appears to be saying that even a drop “black blood’ may be enough to taint the human character—but at its basis this is a profound tale of the fatal effect of nurture versus nature, and how two boys switched at birth can be changed irrevocably, particularly when one is slave and one is free.
The novel isn’t perfect, but it is also a rattling good mystery, with a lot of good stuff about fingerprints, an exciting courtroom scene, and a wickedly ironic conclusion to the fate of the faux master. It’s got problems, sure, but it is well worth a read....more
A book may be influential without being lengthy or long remembered. Each prose poem, each surreal lyric, each tale of terror written in the last one h A book may be influential without being lengthy or long remembered. Each prose poem, each surreal lyric, each tale of terror written in the last one hundred and seventy five years owes a debt--conscious or unconscious--to this little forgotten book.
Aloysius Bertrand's only book is indeed a slim one, written in his teens and twenties. It is little known, and uneven and eccentric in quality. Yet Bertrand won the admiration of his contemporaries Hugo, Saint-Beuve, and Nodier, created the form of the prose poem which later inspired Baudelaire, and eventually left his mark on writers as dissimilar as Arthur Rimbaud, Andre Breton, and Thomas Ligotti.
Bertrand's life was unlucky and brief: sickly, continually impoverished, he died at the age of thirty-four. Yet his painter-like sketches of life in the medieval cities of Dijon, Paris, Madrid, and Rome can be full of robust life, often suggesting the scope of a four volume historical novel. Sometimes, in a few pages, he can achieve the dense reality of Scott, the romantic sweep of Hugo, or the looming gothic atmosphere of Lewis or Maturin. In still others—set in the woods and graveyards—he achieves a dark, hallucinatory quality which reminds me a great deal of E.T.A. Hoffmann, but is still distinctly his own.
This book is unique, and, although I could go on at greater lengths about its merits, I think it would be better for you to read a few pieces for yourself. I have chosen to bypass the more realistic pieces, and instead present two in which Gaspard's alter ego, the sinister dwarf Scarbo, appears.
Here you may glimpse what Rimbaud and Ligotti admired.
SCARBO (1)
“My God, grant me, at the hour of my death, the prayers of a priest, a shroud of linen, a coffin made of wood from a fir tree, and a dry grave.” --The Paternosters of Monsieur the Marshall
“Whether you die absolved or damned,” murmured Scarbo that night in my ear, “you will have for a shroud a cloth woven by a spider, and I shall enshroud the spider with you!”
“Oh! That I should have at least for a shroud,” I replied to him, my eyes red from having wept so much, 'the leaf of an aspen tree in which the breath from the lake will soothe me.”
“No!” jeered the dwarf mocking me. “You would be food for the dung beetle that goes hunting, late in the afternoon, after the tiny flies blinded by the setting sun.”
“Then you would rather,” I responded, still weeping, “then you would rather that I should be drained by a tarantula with the trunk of an elephant?”
“Well then,” he added, “console yourself, you will have a shroud of little bandages, flecked with gold, made from the skin of a serpent, with which I shall embellish you like a mummy.
“And from the darkened crypt of Saint-Benigne, where I shall put you to bed standing up against the big wall, you will hear at your leisure the little children weeping in limbo.”
SCARBO (2)
“He looked under the bed, inside the fireplace, in the chest of drawers. He could not understand by what means he had intruded, but what means he had escaped.”-Hoffman, Nocturnal Tales.”
Oh! How many times have I heard and seen him, Scarbo, when at midnight the moon sparkles like a shield of silver featured on a banner of azure spangled with golden bees!
How many times have I heard his laugh humming in the shadows of my bedroom alcove, and his nail grinding along the silk of the curtains around my bed!
How many times have I seen him alight onto the floor, pirouette on one foot, and revolve all through my chamber like the spindle fallen from the distaff belonging to a sorceress?
Was I thinking that he had vanished? The dwarf grew larger between the moon and myself, like the bell-tower of a Gothic cathedral, with a little bell of gold in motion inside its tall pointed hat!
But before long his body turned blue, diaphanous like the wax in a candle, and his countenance turned pale, like the wax at the candle's end, and all at once he vanished away....more
Somerset Maugham once dismissed this book as “boring.” But other great books are “boring” too. I have read—and enjoyed—Moby Dick and Ulysses, but ther Somerset Maugham once dismissed this book as “boring.” But other great books are “boring” too. I have read—and enjoyed—Moby Dick and Ulysses, but there are passages in each that—at least for me--never fail to bring out the yawns. (The worst come when Melville channels Shakespeare, when Joyce visits a Dublin whorehouse.)
Marius the Epicurean is the account of the coming of age of a young patrician in the age of Marcus Aurelius. Like its near contemporary, Huysmans' Against Nature, it contains a rich portrait of a complex intellectual character written in beautiful, complex prose. Both books deftly use realistic description to achieve distinctly non-realist ends, and both, despite their conventional narrative appearance, are deeply experimental novels, disdaining plot and instead seeking artistic wholeness in a congeries of tone poems, philosophical disquisitions, anecdotes and moral reflections, unified by a single viewpoint and a chronological structure. I think Marius is structurally the more daring of the two, for it also includes a number of translations (the most extensive being an extraordinarily beautiful and somewhat restrained version of Apuleius' tale of “Cupid and Psyche”), cobbling together a “narrative” from various texts in a way that foreshadows the bricolage of post-modernist fiction.
All of which does not mean that it is not boring. It is particularly boring when—in a subject dear to Pater, who was still striving to separate his own “epicureanism” from the scandalous “hedonism” of Wilde—Marius tries to distinguish his own beliefs from the atheism of Diogenes and the Cynics, and show how moral principles may be refined and strengthened by an aesthetic dimension. Pater writes of this in subtle prose that, in its complex and qualified fashion anticipates the later style of Henry James. But I have to admit that reading it gave me the sleepies, just like when Melville dons his “King Lear” mask or Joyce cavorts in The Bordello of Classical Myth.
But I'll tell you what didn't bore me: any time Pater describes a private ceremony, a seasonal festival, a religious ritual or civic pageant. He demonstrates how such practices and performances are intimately connected to the terrain and fruits of the land, to the daily rounds and emotional lives of its people. You can sense how the agnostic Marius yearns to believe in the household gods of his childhood or the risen God of his persecuted friends, and yet you realize the great distance that separates him from them too.
And one thing that kept my interest, even amid the boring parts, was the sense that Pater—beyond the experimentation, the borrowings, the mask of this second century Roman—was writing his own spiritual and emotional autobiography, that Pater—the most artful of writers—is here telling us in his artful fashion his own artless truth....more
There's an old story told by Ezra Pound--I believe it can be found either in "The ABC of Reading" or "From Confucius to Cummings"--about a retired sea There's an old story told by Ezra Pound--I believe it can be found either in "The ABC of Reading" or "From Confucius to Cummings"--about a retired sea captain, determined to improve his primary school Latin, who was tasked by his tutor (the local vicar or schoolmaster) with reading Vergil's Aeneid. When he had finished, his mentor inquired, "How did you like the hero?"
"Hero? What hero?" the captain replied.
"Why, it's Aeneus I mean," answered the teacher.
"Hero? You call him a hero? By God, I thought he was a priest!"
That's how I feel about the "hero" Melmoth. He's supposed to have sold his soul to the devil in exchange for two hundred years of life, but he's so incompetent that he never comes close to leading his would-be substitutes to damnation; instead, he whines about the inferior living to which he has been assigned by his demonic superiors, just like a dissatisfied curate.
"Dissatisfied curate" is a phrase that aptly describes Charles Maturin, the author of "Melmoth the Wanderer." An impoverished, married clergyman, he was convinced that his failure to rise was a consequence of his theological convictions, but it appears that he was more likely snubbed because of his refusal to play politics or follow instructions. I believe, however, that it might very well have been theological rigidity that made it impossible for Maturin to create a thoughtful and thrilling gothic fiction. Although he admired the sensational effects of "Monk" Lewis, the sombre tableaux of Mary Shelly, and the thoughtful meditations of William Godwin, Maturin's conventional moral limitations seem to have prevented him from learning useful literary lessons from any of them, and to have hampered him on every page of this extremely long--this much, much too long--novel.
Maturin is willing to expound on any given insight or expand any given image far beyond intellectual elucidation or sensuous delight. Whether it be a philosophical disquisition, a theological dispute, a sepulchral or an Edenic description, the reader may be sure that, although it may amaze by being exhaustive, it will never please by being succinct. The only exception is Maturin's extraordinary gift for vituperation. Here, Melmoth speaks as eloquently as Shakespeare's Timon. His Juvenalian rants are impressive in their completeness and terrifying in their energy, but--alas!--they too eventually grow repetitive and wearisome. I would be surprised if any admirer of "Melmoth the Wanderer" wished the book longer.
There is, however, much in this book to respect, though it lies more in the conception than in the execution. Its Chinese box structure--with tales within tales breaking off and resuming in surprising places, the damaged "manuscripts" marred with lucunae-- not only evoke "The Arabian Nights" but also serve to help the reader suspend his disbelief and appreciate the unfolding narrative in a distinctly post-modernist fashion. The glimpses of rural Ireland and its people are distinctly observed and well executed, reminding one of the better pages of Walter Scott. Also, the conception of Melmoth himself--a monstrous meld of Byron, Faust and Satan, a creature both human and inhuman, inside and outside of time--is (despite the clerical prissiness inherited from his spiritual father Maturin) a thoroughly original and influential creation. (Listen closely to Melmoth's conversation with the unspoiled Immalee and you may hear the voices of Lord Rochester and Jane Eyre.) I was also pleasantly surprised by the ending, in which all the tales rush precipitously to a powerful conclusion with all the energy and abruptness of "Monk" Lewis. (Maturin wanted to stretch the novel out to five volumes, but his publisher, having had enough, refused.)
All in all, I am glad I read the novel. I am even happier that I read it quickly. I am sure I shall never read it again....more
I recently read Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris for the first time, and was delighted and moved by the experience. Although it lacks the depth and h I recently read Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris for the first time, and was delighted and moved by the experience. Although it lacks the depth and humanity of Les Miserables, it possesses a grandeur of architectonic structure and an Olympian compassion all its own. Best of all, it gives us one of literature's most loving and detailed depictions of a city, rivaled only by Joyce's Dublin in Ulysses.
It is a shame that this book is so seldom referred to in English by its given name, for it is about more than the history of one hunchback, however moving that history may be. First of all, it is about the great cathedral that dominates and defines the city, the setting for much of the novel's action and most of its crucial events. It is also about the “genius loci” of Paris, the maternal spirit that offers sanctuary and support to its most unfortunate children, many of them literally orphans (Gringoire, Quasimodo, Esmeralda, the Frollos), be they ugly or beautiful, virtuous or evil, bringing a measure of comfort to their difficult and and often tragic lives.
Hugo's novel had been on my lengthy “must read” list for years, but what finally moved it to the top was my growing fascination with cities in literature. In childhood, my favorite Arabian Night's tales were the ones that took place in Baghdad, and from early adolescence I loved Sherlock Holmes' London, D'Artagnan's Paris and Nero Wolfe's New York. I also began to appreciate more fantastic cities, such as Stevenson and Machen's London and Leiber's Lankhmar.
Soon I fell in love with the hard boiled detective genre and—having been a childhood fan of Arthurian romances—identified with each of these modern knight-errants on a quest. I also realized that the individuality of each city—and the private detective's familiarity with it and his relation to it--was an essential part of the genre's charm. Even the most realistic of private eye cities—Robert B. Parker's Boston, for example—were filled with as many marvels as any Arthurian Romance: instead of a sorceress, one might meet a sexy widow; instead of a liveried dwarf, a mysterious butler; and instead of a disguised knight offering a cryptic challenge one might be offered a tailing job by a Beacon Hill Brahmin with a mask of smiles and hidden motivations. The world of the marvelous had been transported from the isolated castles, woods and meadows of England's “green and pleasant land” to the magnificent townhouses and seedy alleys of an urban environment. How had this occurred, and what were the literary antecedents?
I believe that Notre Dame de Paris in 1831 is the point where this all begins. Hugo took a shoot of the delicate gothic already in decline, grafted it to the hearty root of the city (or--more precisely--to a Gothic cathedral in the center of a great city, where it was most likely to flourish), watered it from the oasis of Arabian marvels (dangerous hunchback, guild of thieves, beautiful dancing girl), and cultivated the resulting growth with the historical method of Sir Walter Scott. Thus the urban romance was born.
This was just the start, of course. Another decade of industrialism and population growth would make the great European cities seem even more like ancient Baghdad. Dickens would make the thieves guild central to the sinister London of Oliver Twist and Eugene Sue's exploration of urban vices in The Mysteries of Paris (1841) would soon be successfully imitated--commercially if not artistically—by England's Reynolds in The Mysteries of London and America's Lippard in The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monk's Hall.
A little later the detective arrived in the gothic city (Poe's DuPont, Gaboriau's Lecoq, Conan Doyle's Holmes) and soon the marvelous and fantastic were re-introduced (Stevenson's New Arabian Nights, Machen's The Three Imposters) as well, fully preparing the urban landscape for the writers of the 20th century to construct their cities of romance in the worlds of detection and fantasy.
Hugo tells us that the bones of Quasimodo and Esmeralda have long ago turned to dust, but the marvelous city of crimes and dreams continues to live on....more
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