Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, doorstop

Once in a while you pick up a classic and find you cannot get more than fifty pages into it.

I was just barely beginning to hack into the two-inch-thickness' worth (paperback, 1994) of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941). Already in the Prologue she says most encouraging things.

I knew that in the next war we women would have scarcely any need to fear bereavement, since air raids unpreceded by declaration of war would send us and our loved ones to the next world in the breachless unity of scrambled eggs. 

...the word 'idiot' comes from a Greek root meaning private person. Idiocy is the female defect: intent on their private lives, women follow their fate through a darkness deep as that cast by malformed cells in the brain. It is not worse than the male defect, which is lunacy: they are so obsessed by public affairs that they see the world as by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature.

And, she writes on Fascism, when it was still dutifully understood as some bizarre but horridly recognizable new weed of a political construct totally outside the human experience, and not as what it is, frightfully confident liberalism on frightfully strong steroids:

All forms of compulsion are practised on any element within the state that is resistant or is even suspected of retaining consciousness of its difference from the dominating party.... [Christian wedding cake bakers -- or fill-in-the-blank dissenters -- anyone?] 

The Prologue to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon bedazzled me further, because it reinforced a notion I have had since reading Gone With the Wind at the age of 12, and gawping at its easy references to the Borgias and Thermopylae and the First Triumvirate of Rome. Withal Scarlett O'Hara was presented as a charming ignoramus, because she did not know these things! It was astonishing, what the author and her editors expected the reading public of 1936 to absorb. My notion was that when everyone was better educated, writers wrote better books. That rising tide did lift all boats.

And here was Rebecca West, same era as Margaret Mitchell, real name -- West's, not Mitchell's -- Cicily Isabel Fairfield (why cloak that?) getting ready to plunge into the Balkans, remembering the three royal assassinations that shaped the wars of her youth and therefore her fate -- hence the talk of being blown to eternity amid the morning's scrambled eggs, it did happen to some -- and French poetry is a part of her life, too! On page one. Before drifting off under an injection preparatory to surgery, West is reading "that sonnet by Joachim du Bellay which begins, 'Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage [Happy he who, like Ulysses, makes a good journey]." She is civilized. This, along with most of the books of her era and before, so easily showed it.

Now I did quickly begin to suspect that the du Bellay wheeze (as Bertie Wooster might say) might be schoolgirl memorization. I took French too, and I could quote, par exemple, Francois Villon in a pinch, just like anybody. "Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan [Where are the snows of yesteryear]?" This Villon is the poet whom Bette Davis' character in the movie Petrified Forest keeps calling "Francis Vill-yun," while erudite wanderer Leslie Howard looks on with pity and adoration (same era).

After West's Prologue begins the Journey. I was still bedazzled, for where should she begin this but in the city of Salzburg, Austria, in Mozart's house. What a thing to think of. I have actually been there. Rebecca West and I have stood in the same room and looked at Mozart's spinet, perhaps fifty years apart. She visited in about 1936, I in 1983. In fact she died, at the age of 90, just a few days I think before the Icelandair plane took off for my first and no doubt last trip to Europe. Hear me Lord. All I could think of, as the wheels inexorably rolled, was that I wanted to be home for an ordinary evening with my gray cat.

Upon reaching the Journey after the Prologue, I began to be less bedazzled and more annoyed with BLGF, as the great thick majestic book is called among the citizen-reviewers, whether pitying or adoring, on Amazon. (I love this service, by the way. The negative reviews of any book always contain the most wonderful nuggets of truth and crankiness and wildly unfounded but probably just supposition.) My disappointment seemed the severer because Rebecca West's word-painting is very lovely. Not quite as gleaming and many-prismed as Dorothy Carrrington's Granite Island, but very good. One hates to give up on an 1100-page book, closely printed, after only fifty pages. One stands stupefied at a 500,000 word memoir, and at a lady who can judge in passing that the embroidery for sale in a Yugoslavian village market is inauthentic Slav, only imitation "Victorian Berlin woolwork." Still, when her writing began to drift into the dotty territory of madmen and dreamers and princes lost in the woods, I balked. I met and disliked this style, I am sorry to say, most thoroughly in the work of Elie Wiesel. Oddly, he of all people came to me right away. Central Europe, again. No word painting. But the same era.

Rebecca West begins the Journey chapter on the train with German tourists, on vacation from Nazi Germany, which is a thing you don't think about. They complain that Nazi party-loyalist tenants in an apartment building can't be scolded or evicted, whatever constant ruckus they make ... " 'the private citizen hasn't any liberty, but the state hasn't any real authority either.' " If you want to vacation you may only go to certain approved places, because when you holiday of course you are taking your money out of noble and needful Germany ....

But for West the main thing is, these people are tourists. At long last I think I understand what a tourist is, for I have read my share of travel writing by people who sniff at the sub-species. The tourist is concerned that unexpected and disagreeable things may happen before he reaches his destination. Perhaps in that way he is the ghost of a true pilgrim, only with nowhere really significant to go. A real traveler, on the other hand, looks forward or claims to do, to the unexpected. All the hotels in Zagreb are so comfortable and all the food good. If the tourists can't after all get into one or find the other, they will find substitutes just as good. In fact West considers the tourist's worry, paradoxically, to be dithering and "inefficient." 

When the train arrives at Zagreb the real holiday, true foreignness, begins. She looks out the train window to see an elderly man running alongside the tracks carrying an umbrella, in the pouring rain, holding the umbrella well out from himself and getting no shelter from it while he calls repeatedly " 'Anna! Anna!' " Three times he makes this performance, running up and down alongside the train, calling for Anna. Rebecca West, refreshed, now purrs, "I was among people I could understand."

This is what makes me abandon a thousand-page, twentieth-century classic at page 38. Am I wrong to do so? Remember what Ernest Hemingway said about the mental transformation of the downtrodden husband in The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber? "Fear gone like an operation." In my case, it was curiosity to read more, gone like an operation. Rebecca West's very next anecdote, about her bizarre tour guide at Zagreb, who once wrote a flamingly angry political article, and submitted it to "the censor," but then had to delete all of it because he was the censor himself -- that tale, so to speak, even erased the scar from the operation. " 'In what capacity, as author or as censor, must I be untrue to my ideals?' " she claims he asked proudly. Again our Rebecca swoons at magical foreignness, and purrs, "I am among people I understand" (p. 46). Later she explains this Gregorivitch or whoever in well-sculpted prose. He was heir to a different time, when an office and its responsibilities outranked the man, the man did not do the job to his own satisfaction or convenience, depending on what sense it made to him.

"He must have been conscious, all his life, of the social value of patriotic poets and, for the last unhappy twenty years, of censors. Therefore it seemed to him that he must do his best in both capacities, not that he should modify his performances to uphold the consistence of his personality. That, I could perfectly understand ...." 

And this is where I began thinking of the books of Elie Wiesel. He was not a travel writer but he would write a story like that, and about the umbrella-man too, men who were heroes of some other code, madmen or dreamers who then disappear in the woods. The key is that he understands them. After his first book of terrible witness, Night, he tended to venture into literary realms where no one can follow because he uses storytelling to paint himself as a perceiving subject, rather than to make clear on the canvas what he wants anyone to see. Is that what it means to be a Gnostic? -- to be privy to secret meaning? When he begins about beggars and princes lost in the woods, fine, but I don't know what he is talking about, nor whether he is hiding, or revealing, anything true.

It's the same for Rebecca West. Having established that of course she is not a mere tourist, looking at things as they are: when she says an old man ran up and down alongside the train doing something that makes no sense, or when some other man wrote and censored his own essay because each act was upright in itself, fine, but I have no interest in reading further because I don't know what Rebecca West is using language for. One hates to be the cynic saying these things don't happen, except perhaps among Slavs, who are mad. I don't like that dismissal when it comes to the Bible, say. "So religious people are mad, so what." Since Rebecca West is not actually divine revelation corroborated by witness, we are left only with her, fascinated by herself as the perceiving subject, restful among people she can understand. Which seems like a bald lie. At any rate it wasn't enough to carry five hundred thousand words.

I said that I love the reviews on Amazon. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon gets a lot of five stars, and only a few one-stars. Probably the best assessment is from a five-star reader who thinks that the people who hate this book are hung up on West's sympathy for the Serbs, a nation much admired in her era but not in ours. He assumes the detractors even wade in that deep. I nod at the one-star snorts. " Much too long." "Drivel." "The Britisher abroad in that era." I close Black Lamb and Grey Falcon at page fifty, wondering at the taste of another era, and deciding, No, I'm not being idiotic.

Go to the cast-off book sales

I'm reading a biography of Jacqueline du Pre (Elizabeth Wilson, Jacqueline du Pre: Her Life, Her Music, Her Legend, Arcade, 1999). It stood out, dark, sleek, serious, from the other castoffs on the library's used book sale shelves. The name stirred a vague memory of something tragic, something a long time ago.

I like reading about musicians and music even though I can't play or sing. In truth I can't understand whole paragraphs, nay pages, of this biography. The author, a musician herself, delves enthusiastically into artistic and emotional assessments of technical work. She goes on about fingering, slides, portamenti and coda, but also discusses concerts as if they were painting or cooking. We have the "brushstrokes" of "that tragic, noble resignation on the glissando" or the "warm, nutty tone" of a Stradivarius cello made in 1680. "...by placing the thumb on the harmonic D and disguising the shift with a bow change, she could articulate the top note with immense clarity and power." One accepts it all kneeling, mystified.

What intrigues also in a biography of a musician is to meet artists who have an intellectual and a creative vocation, who can't pursue it in solitude like a painter, a writer, or I suppose a scientist doing research. Like an actor or a ballerina, the musician can rehearse alone -- but he cannot begin to bring both intellectual and physical work together without the company of other musicians. And yet unlike the actor or dancer, he doesn't require an audience as such. One fellow will do. Jacqueline du Pre, "Jackie," is described often playing happily late into the night with one friend or teacher, or perhaps in a hostess' home for a beloved audience of two. These intimates went away savoring "a never-to-be-forgotten evening listening to the D major Cello Sonatas by Bach and Beethoven." Perfect art, in perfect privacy, with perfect professionalism and perfect companionship -- it is all beautiful and solid and perfect. I like the photo of New Year's Eve in an apartment in New York, 1970. Itzhak Perlman, Artur Rubinstein, and Jacqueline du Pre play trios. Daniel Barenboim turns over [the pages of music as needed]. Champagne coupes sit on nearby little tables.

Another intriguing, and a related thing, that emerges from the biography of a musician is this: musicians deal with great art, but they re-make it as no other artist does. It's like a priesthood, maintaining a supernatural truth. Actors act lines and dancers dance steps, but no painter is permitted to work on a Raphael, or playwright to change a line of Shakespeare. (If those great men had left "scores"" to be re-painted, or rewritten, again and again for centuries, that might be something like music.) Even you or I could badly declaim or clumsily dance. But when musicians bring alive what was in the mind of Bach or Beethoven, they are themselves the necessary partner, operating from another language. We observe. Like the photographer in the New York apartment, we stand outside the priestly circle.

I like this biography in particular because it is so well written and because Jacqueline du Pre herself seems to have been such a joyous and delightful person. Occasionally the author mentions a bit of depression or frustration in her life, and I have not yet reached the tragedy, which was multiple sclerosis at the age of 28. The joy in the book seems to come from three factors which are a pleasure to immerse in. These are, "Jackie" herself, the artist fully happy in her work; the circumstances of her early success, which allowed her to fly busily about, from London to Paris to Berlin to London to Sermoneta -- where are the famed gardens of Ninfa -- and back to London again, making music, studying with masters, playing in the plazas of little Italian towns during summer teaching festivals; and last there is the early 1960s classical music scene in London. Naturally l know absolutely nothing about this, but it enchants. One has an impression of talented, eager young things rushing to and fro in the great city at all hours carrying their cellos, staying for months with friends who live near recording studios, and going into great concert halls to play and be starchily but sympathetically critiqued by very knowledgeable men and women in great newspapers the next day.

One wonders what comes first, talent, a joyous personality, or music? If I buy an inexpensive electronic keyboard and sheet scores simple enough for children, will I too eventually be able to get inside the mind of Mozart? Will I then know what musicians know? (Because I must say I don't care for the sound of the cello. It seems harsh and ugly.) For Jackie the love and knowledge was immediate. She heard a cello on the radio at the age of four and exclaimed "Mommy I want to make that sound." Luckily her mother was a professional pianist, and in time could even pull strings with a fairy godmother able to afford a Stradivarius. Again the almost supernatural, the priestly, shades to music.

Because I came across the name "Shuttleworth" early in the book -- that is Anna Shuttleworth, another cellist, now in her 90s -- I mistakenly thought here was a name from Jaqueline du Pre's parents' generation, maybe a name from the 1920s which my great favorite E.F. Benson, London gadabout, might have picked up and given to his character Olga Bracely. She is the prima donna of the Mapp and Lucia novels, who marries Mr. Shuttleworth and then sighs that she really should start using his name.

It turned out to be coincidence only. One grasps at straws. But Jacqueline du Pre's life and music- making in the 1960s jibe somewhat with the fictional lives and music-making in Benson's books of the 1930s. In both worlds people still entertain themselves. Everybody owns a piano. He too summons his characters for musical evenings, where the hosts play or, on grand occasions, hire famed string quartets down from London. The running joke of the series is that Lucia can always be persuaded to favor her friends with the Moonlight Sonata. Later, when she inherits a townhouse and becomes avant garde, it's "a morsel of Stravinski." She is at once a great snob and an ignoramus; if Benson had been writing in the '60s he would have had her angling to meet the exciting young cellist, only to cluck kindly at the tiny, tiny flaws in her playing.

Finally we consider the miracle of the internet, even as it touches this discarded biography of a great and lovely artist. Elizabeth Wilson is careful to catalogue where she listened to  recordings of Jacqueline du Pre's music, or watched old films of her happy in London (she was famous enough to have documentaries made about her when she was only twenty-two). In 1999 this research amounted to a pilgrimage route that the average reader would not be able to follow. Already "some of her performances were being re-issued on CDs," yes, but for the bulk of it Wilson went to the sources. She visited studios in London or at Danish Radio, or at the New York Philharmonic. A reader at that time would have had to do what we used to do: carefully jot down which album of which concert he hoped to look for in a local music store, then grab his wallet, walk out of his house, and hope for the best. Today we go to YouTube and type in "Jacqueline du Pre" and see a riot of information. We can watch films of her performing the Elgar concerto, conducted by Barenboim. We can watch bits of the very BBC television program broadcast for the first time in 1967. "We did not know what lay ahead," the narrator now says, "but we knew one thing -- Jacqueline du Pre would never be twenty-two again."

If it all sounds a bit sad, well yes it can't help being. But memorial funds, music buildings, and  concerts exist in her name. And as the biographer says, none of it can ever replace the voice which lives on in her audio and video recordings.

Comfort zones

Go outside your comfort zone, and where does it get you? I went outside mine a few weeks ago, to borrow from the library a novel written in the 21st century. Normally I have a theory and rules about that, i.e., they're not that good so don't bother.

I am sure this particular novelist is a lovely person but her novel confirmed my theory and rules. I abandoned it after thirty pages. It was familiar: written as if by someone who had attended too many writers' workshops, and been mentored and edited by people who had done too much the same. I believe -- another theory -- that they are all taught to fill pages by minutely describing action. She crosses her legs, the slick polyester lining of her knock-off wool pants catching at her unshaved legs. Lord, had it been that long? Since Matt left? That's me, not her. But you see how it goes.

When you borrow a clutch of novels from the library and the rest are Georgette Heyer and Norah Lofts and Barbara Pym, and yes I do read men novelists sometimes and yes I can see why Barbara Pym's seventh was rejected by her publishers since it does very much resemble the previous six, lots of middle aged scholarly women fluttering about the vicar, still, -- when you borrow books at least fifty years old and then this new one, you spot a change. I think you spot a depletion in educational background, in a depth of material to write about. More importantly, you spot a change in what I might call the effort of tone. "Attack" perhaps, as musicians are said to attack their instruments as they begin to play. You miss the sense of a writer merely transparently struggling to describe, in beautiful language, what has never been seen just this way before. What you get instead is the trained, workshop voice: a consensus having assured the novelist "just describe anything, once you get going it's all interesting and true." Meanwhile, because she has not dug into her own ideas, her soul if you like, we meet no people in her first thirty pages whom we can really see, and see no houses we can really enter.

Norah Lofts, to take a random example of fifty years ago, is different. She effaces herself from the story in Which Way to Bethlehem? (1965), sketching natural scenes of generations of people building a road by dropping stones in a muddy path each time they go to the well to fetch water; or of an old slave woman in ancient Korea trying to earn a little money telling fortunes, and unwittingly telling such accurate ones that her angry clients pay her almost nothing but lie awake all night aghast. Georgette Heyer, well, she is just Georgette Heyer. In the past I have abandoned her, when her downmarket characters' dialogue becomes too annoyingly well-researched to be borne. But one forgives her for her titles -- Regency Buck! -- and her ability to have a lofty lady on page one respond to deadly insult by lifting a lorgnette and exclaiming " 'This is indeed the language of the theatre!' " Things like that. I promise I will still try the occasional modern novel, but for a long time they have seemed so predictable. They just don't go well.

Part of the reading for the day happened to be -- the day's reading. Have you ever looked at the "Readings for the Week" in your parish bulletin (of course you have) and wondered, mercy, what holy rollers read the Bible just any old day? The readings are very specific and relate to each other, having been chosen for the purpose by whatever group of scholars assembles the Lectionary. On Monday, March 5, you might have read from the Gospel of Luke about that time the ex-neighbors tried to throw Jesus off a cliff.

No kidding. We pick up the thread at Luke 4:27. He is in Nazareth, talking about no prophet meeting faithfulness in his own country.

"Again, there were many lepers in Israel during the time of Elisha the prophet; yet not one of them was cleansed but only Naaman the Syrian [we had just read that story, from the Second Book of the Kings]." When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury. They rose up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong. But he passed through the midst of them and went away. 

This is the sort of thing you encounter when you are either a convert or a returned prodigal. You dig, perhaps partly to distract yourself from the awareness of being outside a comfort zone. And this brings me to the topic of the newest Catholic internet sensation, Lizzie. Have you met her? She's a delight really, all of 23 years old, having been on YouTube "since I was sixteen, in 2011," and now having converted to Catholicism and, in tears of happy anguish, told all her hundreds of thousands of subscribers so. She's on the cover of Catholic Herald, which is a bit like being on the cover of Rolling Stone I suppose. She pulls nervously at her long bicolored hair while marveling to the camera how amazing Eusebius is. She is also planning to produce a video all about her upcoming first confession, which I hope someone will dissuade her from doing. Surely that would mean breaking the seal of the confessional. The recompense for this new obedience, however, could be that she may add it to the sparkling list of new sacrifices and obediences which she has shouldered already. I don't smirk, I think truly if the Holy Spirit is working astonishingly in anyone in this internet age, it is working in her.

Now at my end of the Catholic involvement spectrum, life is a bit more humdrum. On a clear late-winter night with the constellation Orion still reigning high overhead, I drive out to a local parish and find my way (with help) through cavernous dark "multipurpose rooms" and big stairwells to an upper conference room, where two women wait to give a talk on the characteristics of a vibrant church. How do we reach the non-churchgoers, the people who are content to be "spiritual but not religious," especially the young who tick the Religious Affiliation box "none"? They are kind and good but they explain the empty churches. And (one lifts one's lorgnette perhaps), can they be really happy?

Three more women enter. And that is all. We congratulate ourselves on the advantages of a small, intimate group, and get underway. As the hour or so moves on, I probably make a bit of a nuisance of myself by remarking the confident, counter-cultural "truth claims" of Islam, and by noting what we all look like to the kind, good "nones." We look sweet and out-of-touch. Why are we attracted to this meeting but no one else is? And never mind reaching the spiritual but not religious, what about the happily non-spiritual? I remember reading very recently that "it is always Satan's desire to persuade us that life with God is half a life." Is that persuasion easier now than ever?

Perhaps not necessarily. One of the women told us how many ex-Catholics are to be found at the rock-and-roll megachurch down the street. How do we get those people? They have found a vital comfort zone. So have our Muslim neighbors who, one of the women testified, begin training their children to memorize the Koran at age four, and whose mosques are filled. A silence. "Serve coffee," the nun joked. For that night, under the cold glittering spread of Orion, that was the best we could do. 

Why The Seven Storey Mountain?

Nine hours of sleep is enough. Get to bed at a decent hour, set your alarm, get your ass out of bed, bundle up, scrape the ice off your car, and go to Mass on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul -- that was January 25th. Pray for whoever it was under the blue tarp, on the driver's side of the smashed car, along the icy road yesterday morning. A dozen police cars, lights flashing, the empty closed road, the quiet and patience of all the other drivers obediently crowding into one lane; then a jack-knifed semi and two or three flattened small trees in the median strip, all witnessed that here eternity and the world just met.

I had been reading and since have finished Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain. It was one of four spiritual classics offered for sale at Bishop Barron's site Word on Fire. I thought well yes, I'll get it, but I can just as well buy it and the other three from Amazon.Smile cheaper, and make the half-percent donation to my local parish. This wasn't mean of me, I hope.

Thomas Merton's prose is beautiful, better than his poetry, but something about him annoys me. Why is his story considered so remarkable? Because he had been known in the publishing world since childhood -- his grandfather worked for Grosset and Dunlap, he met "Bob" Giroux and Mark van Doren at Columbia -- and so when he became a Catholic and a monk, the word spread? ("A Trappist, no kidding! Well well ... say, tell him if he can give me eighty thousand words, I'll take a look at it. He had a way with words as I recall." Pause. "Are monks allowed to write memoirs - at thirty?" Professional chuckle....) Then there is the whole business of his own hermitage on the grounds of Our Lady of Gesthemani in Kentucky. I've seen photos, it's a lovely little house. What did the other monks think of his being allowed this treat? Did he need such quiet and privacy, or was it a reward for being a rainmaker for the firm?

The Seven Storey Mountain doesn't even seem very spiritual. Three or four times in the book, he suddenly outflows with a short paragraph that seems to come from outside himself, and to be wise. You'll know because you'll be startled, and underline it. Otherwise he seems to be always looking at himself, admiring himself and marveling at his journey.

Often it's a literal one. From the interesting childhood and adolescence in Bermuda, France, and England to the specific geography of Manhattan streets, churches, and college campus sports fields, one gets the impression of someone privately telling a circle of friends, not so much anything spiritual that they can use, but rather: Ah yes, remember? I left all that. I left it. In fact I would even say (it's me talking again, not him), that in the chapter on his trip to pre-Castro, lushly Catholic Cuba, he writes the only psychological explanation I have ever read and begun to understand, on why some people enjoy really eat-everything, ride-the-local-buses travel. Admitting that he survived "the perilous streets and dives of Havana" with probably angelic protection, he says,

... this absence of trouble, this apparent immunity from passion or from accident, was something that I calmly took for granted. God was giving me a taste of that sense of proprietorship to which grace gives a sort of a right in the hearts of all His children. For all things are theirs, and they are Christ's, and Christ is God's. They own the world, because they have renounced proprietorship of anything in the world .... 

Maybe not too many travelers think in those words, -- and again, if this is a spiritual classic for everyone, what does all that mean? -- but the attitude of own-the-world confidence might be common. Merton here sounds as if made in the very mold of his own grandfather, "Pop" of the childhood chapters, whose loud, American (of course) tourist enthusiasm embarrassed the boy living, for the moment, authentically with his artist father in a hamlet in the Auvergne.

He may own the world but he perhaps should have explored his own backyard more, or read more comic novels. As we read on we meet his "little man" for example, the mysterious Indian "poor little monk" Bramachari, whom he met among his young Columbia friends and who seems to have introduced Merton to the idea of "spirituality" being the possession of all religions. This man sounds just like the Guru of E.F. Benson's Mapp and Lucia novels. He too wafted about, penniless and peaceful, boarding with and teaching meditation to wealthy middle aged ladies (and running up liquor bills) until their husbands had had enough. When "Daisy's Guru" was found out as a London curry cook he decamped in the night with the silver .... The decade is right, too: the spiritualism-mad, table-turning 1930s. Did Merton never crack a smile at himself?

For that matter, did he ever have a backyard to explore? Not really. For all I know Thomas Merton may be among the greatest saints in heaven, and it may be most uncharitable to pick out the annoyances in his most famed book. But the curmudgeons who give it bad reviews on Amazon notice what I do. They notice the endless word painting about landscapes, and the tales of a sad little orphaned family -- he had one brother -- brought up helter skelter and pulled in and out of schools in Europe and America without much rhyme or reason, none of this background striking him as perhaps explaining some emptiness and anger. About three fourths of the way along in his story, he does, as one curmudgeonly reviewer says, go into sheer raving. He discovers Harlem, and the plight of the Negro. It's all the "furtive sensualities and lusts of the rich whose sins have bred this abominable slum," and so on, pages' worth, only by the time the crusading Russian baroness who raised his consciousness about it asks him "Well Tom are you coming out to Harlem for good?" to help, he had made up his mind about his vocation and had been accepted into the monastery in fresh, rural Kentucky.

He seems to show a pattern of discovering and condemning evil, and then of turning on his heel and walking prayerfully away, full of "peace." So do we all, we sinners, but can he never crack that smile at himself? As a very young man he bowed his head before his generation's wholesale, amorphous guilt at the coming of World War II. It was the inevitable wages of their evil. He was in his early twenties. But then he had to think very hard about whether or not he was willing to be drafted and serve. Odd logic, no? And why do anguished pacifists always want to be stretcher bearers? There is the Quartermaster's Department. Ask around. My father did.

And what of the great sin in his life? -- the one that got him rejected from the Franciscans and that you cannot find in the pages of The Seven Storey Mountain? The one you have to go to Wikipedia, for example, to sniff out? Apparently he had an affair and got a girl pregnant in England when hardly out of his teens. He was swiftly bundled up and shot off to America, to live with, or at least near, Pop. Of mother and child nothing was ever known. They "may have died in the London Blitz." "The child has never been identified." It was as if Merton was a wayward prince and heir, desperately requiring all this protection.

What bothers me (about this episode) is the way Merton harps (throughout) on the theme of the evil and filth of his early life. Because he cloaks the actual event, but we know from other sources that this is the big one, we are left to presume (unless we hear of something worse) that by filth he is talking about a girl he once loved and about a son or daughter who is his. As the abbess interviewing a postulant remarks in the novel In This House of Brede, " 'A cold heart is no good for a religious.' " And what also bothers me is that all the fine people Merton went on to meet and, some of them, to draw into the Church after his example, "Lax" and "Rice" and Mark Van Doren and Bob Giroux and the Baroness and all the rest, never not a one of them said you know Tom, the better part of faith might be to go back to England and find that girl and at least be a father to your child. The only one who comes close, and it is to Merton's credit that he chronicles this, is the priest in the confessional in New York who lambastes the weeping man after the Franciscans reject him. "He gave me to understand I was wasting his time and insulting the Sacrament of Penance by indulging my self pity in his confessional." You cheer for that priest.

Now, who knows? The woman herself or her family may have had so much of the future Father Louis' annoyances that they were glad to hand him his walking papers and shrink into anonymity from him. But by now my impression of the writer is of a rudderless, unhealthy personality, and I am only halfway through. And the book is said to be a spiritual classic.

While finishing it I cheated and looked ahead, as you see, at Wikipedia's article on the whole life of Thomas Merton. I learned he "battled" with his abbotts at the monastery he had been so happy to enter, about being allowed to leave, rather frequently it seems, to travel and live out the famous writer's life of scholarly correspondence and conferences that his books had earned him. Just turned fifty in 1966, he also undertook a serious love affair with a young woman who was his nurse when he was hospitalized for back surgery. Forays into Zen and American Indian mysticism -- in general the hunt for mystic experiences and the freedom they give the community of mystics above religion, since who is to say what God may not vouchsafe to his best creatures? -- that is my judgment of what he  was looking for -- these explorations continued apace. He foreshadowed them when he described his first few nights in Our Lady of Gesthemani at the age of 25. (His life is so full of genuine adventure we forget how young he is throughout.) Disappointed at the "icy" reading material he is given, which prudently discourages the newcomer's hope of any "summits" or otherworldly contemplative joys, he writes,

...I was left with the impression that contemplation in a Trappist monastery was liable to be pretty much secundum quid [i..e., true or fruitful sometimes, as far as it went], and that if I had a secret desire for what the lingo of the pious manuals would call 'the summits' I had better be cautious about the way I manifested it."   

Here the former lycee schoolboy also objected to bad transliterated French, particularly the word "vouchsafe." On top of everything else Merton knew full well, and he was told by people who knew, that his vocation was writing first. The writer wants quiet and solitude -- a little hermitage -- the writer wants to have or invent experience -- travel, mysticism, love affairs -- the writer has almost an extra organ where is housed lack of charity, which he needs to look askance at the world and chronicle it with his precious comments added on, unlike any other writer's: so Merton sneered at ordinary people's "unsophisticated" taste in movies, or at his grandmother's wasting her life putting on cold cream, because she hadn't got grace, or at his fellow postulant "Fat Boy," who couldn't hack the Trappists and returned to the world. True, Merton is young all during a lot of this. Some writer once said the young are righteous.

I would not for a moment want to give the impression that I dislike The Seven Storey Mountain because it shows the author was imperfect, or chose the wrong path in life. He may stand among the greatest saints of heaven. And I must disclose some small prejudice against him, as he disclosed the angry priest in the confessional. Years ago I wrote an article lamenting my spotty Catholic education, and I mentioned that I knew nothing of one "Thomas Merton." An old lady wrote me in the days of letter writing still. She exclaimed with underlining, "Thomas Merton was a devil! He turned Buddhist ...." I never forgot her vehemence.

I dislike it because the author seems to me such an unlikable man. Here is someone who, for all the beautiful prose, knows in his bones that he is on his own and so is everyone else. Well, alone except for God, who, on the last pages, offers to Thomas Merton a sort of grand doxology, in italics. You have to read it to believe it. " 'You will be praised, and it will be like burning at the stake ....' "

The Seven Storey Mountain was offered for sale on Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire website. But in one of his many excellent YouTube videos, the Bishop once said that religious journey memoirs are not very interesting in general because they are all the same. The convert, the returning soul, whoever, are all "influenced by" this book or that, this teacher, that friend, this mysterious "pull," this set of coincidences (frankly) or some other. The theme of all of them must be, here I am, a brand plucked from the burning; aren't I marvelous, and aren't you glad? Though the writers of religious journey memoirs will not like to hear it, it's Christ who is interesting, not us.

In a way it's easy to write a brand-plucked-from-the-burning memoir. Merton shows how: word-painting about landscapes and some blushing acknowledgement of past foolishness. But that leaves another category of book, the true spiritual classic, which I submit The Seven Storey Mountain, religious journey memoir and a cagey one at that, is not. So then what really is? 

The twenty-parts-water rule?

So I have just started my subscription to Horticulture magazine, and spent a relaxing evening this week going through it from cover to cover. (I promised you the occasional houseplant or cocktail theme, remember, while we dip our toe into the ocean of Gregorian chant.) In a short article called "Air Plants Aloft" by Frank Hyman, September-October issue, I find he makes use of "the dregs of leftover beverages" like coffee or sodas, mixed one part beverage to twenty parts water, as a substitute for expensive commercial air-plant (Tillandsia) fertilizer. But he pours it into other houseplants as well.

I like this. In an old houseplant care book from the '70s I once came across the suggestion to use the rinsing-out water from milk jugs as a fertilizer for a particular purpose, I forget what, and then not long ago in a wine book -- I forget which -- was it Kermit Lynch's Adventures on the Wine Trail? -- I think maybe -- the writer admired the chic French lady winemaker who made beautiful wine and poured the tired dregs into her outdoor rosemary plants and potted lemon trees, of course this was in Provence or someplace romantic and hot, and they were beautiful and healthy too. As to Mr. Hyman's specific twenty-parts-water-to-one-part-beverage-dregs rule (mind you the French lady used pure wine), that is interesting because in his Vintage: the Story of Wine Hugh Johnson retells the Odyssey's tale of strong Thracian wine being normally diluted with twenty parts water. Odysseus gives it full strength to the Cyclops: the Cyclops passes out and Odysseus gouges out his eye and escapes.

But I am asking whether I ought to try the twenty parts water rule with my leftover wine, for my houseplants. They need nutrients, no? Why should a meek teaspoon per gallon, of some blue-green store-bought tincture that has been under my sink in a yellow bottle for a year and a half, burst more with good properties than a 6 ounce splash of a stale Rhone in that same gallon? Only it looks so odd to water your philodendrons and things with reddish water. What if it kills them? What if it attracts bugs in this early fall heat? What if it works great?

 

Meanwhile, chant: Three minutes and 42 seconds. Modern people (good looking people), modern dress. Twelfth-century music from our twelfth century friend, Hildegard of Bingen. I don't have the exact text handy, but it's Ave Maria and you will note the melismas, the long fluttering singing of many notes on one syllable. Of course you can also upload all sorts of very serious videos accompanied by Renaissance art full of flailing arms and legs of angels and spiky crowns, but then people think you are some sort of holy roller and all you want to show is that this is possible.

The soprano is Geraldine Zeller, the recorder player, Helge Burggrabe. Concert in February 2010. No applause! You're in church. 




  

Wow. Just, wow (or: the summer intern and me)

Of course. Of course. It's July. The season of summer interns.

Now it may be the essay wasn't very good, and it may be that summer interns also have strict instructions: we don't do personal spiritual journey stuff, that crap is a dime a dozen.

Which is fine and perfectly understandable. However, a response time of 48 hours is a new thing for me, even in this age of submissions by email attachment only. Remember the fun of manila envelopes, and the hand-writing of an address of a magazine or book publisher, usually including an exciting New York zip code? You waited ages for a reply. A thin little envelope meant no. Once in a great while a thicker SASE -- self-addressed stamped envelope -- held better, held most exciting developments. Yes, I have seen "galley proofs."

A no in 48 hours tells me that the essay was not read. (Can't you hear every amateur huffing just that complaint?) Perfectly understandable. No summer intern building her resume is going to forward anything from an uncredentialed person like myself. Or an old one -- I slyly mentioned that her very magazine had published me in 1992! I can almost see the "face palm" and the "eye roll." Before she was born, perhaps. I can almost hear what they have each been told. "You're the gatekeepers. It's summer.  Keep the crap off my desk and only send me stuff you can absolutely get behind." And I was honest in my "short bio," admitting to a day job in retail liquor and to blogging because that made me more productive than carefully composing obedient things for gatekeepers. I didn't phrase that quite so rudely.

And I was obedient, too. I cut amusing anecdotes, and a great deal of junk, to bring the word count within required limits. I had already learned a fresh lesson all on my own. Sometimes you have to write very badly to purge from your system topics you are not competent to write about.

So my options today are to put the essay here, a little at a time, or to hunt for another publishing platform. That means to unearth its unsolicited manuscript address -- they are devilishly harder and harder to find -- research "our needs," and present myself again to a summer intern. All the while they get younger, and oneself does not.

The thing was about religion. On a related note, I was reading St. Augustine on my Kindle at lunch yesterday. Do you know he went on and on about the pears he and his friends stole "from the tree beside our vineyard" (in North Africa?) when he was sixteen? I mean, seriously went on and on. I don't compare myself to him in the slightest, I only note, he perhaps would have gotten a face palm/eye roll from a summer intern too.  

Psychology -- a toast of water -- then again ...

Doesn't this say it all? I mean the silver sticker on a bottle of a little-known (surely) champagne, Forget-Brimont, boasting 91 points from Wine Spectator.

Of course I liked the wine. So biscuity, so almost almond-like, so light and bubbly and yet with a solid little buttery core of body or mouthfeel, too. Of course it was delicious. I should hope any normal person would like good champagne -- and be appalled, like me, at people who don't. I say this, remembering the poor soul who came to buy "champagne" over the holidays "just for a toast, because nobody drinks it." Many people do buy sparkling wine just for a toast but no one else has ever clarified the matter to me to that extent. Why not, then, sir, "toast" with water? Toast: "[n. from the use of toasted spiced bread to flavor the wine, and the notion that the person honored also added flavor] 1. a person, thing, idea, etc., in honor of which a person or persons raise their glasses and drink; toast from the Middle English tosten < Old French toster, < Vulgar Latin tostare, < Latin tostus, < torrere, to parch, roast, see THIRST."  

To be fair I'm no one to talk. I mean as far as blissful ignorance is concerned. I have been in the liquor industry for almost ten years, and yet up until two nights ago was not aware, off the top of my head, that the town of Calistoga is in Napa County. I may plead mea culpa, or I may riposte that here you see it is possible to be in the industry for ten years, and be competent, and yet not have any reason to know that the town of Calistoga is in Napa. What then must I know? "Where is the moscato? It's for my mom ... I don't know anything about wine."

Me neither, much. I had to fumfer around and act humble and charming (I hope), in my ignorance, for the young couple who didn't know Calistoga either, but who bought two thousand dollars' worth of fine wine in ten minutes anyway. They went for big points, big names, and big expense. Bless their hearts they ended up choosing the Napa Valley monster cabernets that tick all three of those big boxes. If only I had had my cheater eyeglasses with me, I could have spotted the name Napa clearly placed on a label of Diamond Creek Volcanic Hill Calistoga cabernet. The wine got 100 points from Robert Parker. Incidentally I still say that gentleman has thrown out perfect ratings abundantly and meaninglessly since he retired from tasting Bordeaux in 2015.

We all, the nice young couple and I, kept squinting at the fine print of his review, on a paper "shelf talker" clipped to the shelf, to confirm we saw the word Napa. But at his level Parker is far beyond signaling something so basic given a fifty-word space. It was all cassis and graphite and sexiness. I was almost sure this must be a Napa wine, how could it not be? Only the nice young man with a young man's eyesight said the label didn't say. I thought, well it is very likely I am wrong. Until I can retrieve my glasses, I must fumfer. It might be Sonoma, it might be Paso Robles, it might be Santa Clara, Santa Rita, Santa Lucia, it might be mountains or counties or highlands or benches, or who knows how many other nomenclatures or subregions extant within the large state of California. A day or two later I had occasion to tell another customer so simple a thing as that Paso Robles is south of San Francisco. This was a fact I absolutely knew. But then I looked at a map and double checked distance, since I had a funny feeling. It turns out that Paso Robles is south of San Francisco in the same way the Mississippi River is west of Chicago. Way west -- way south.

All in all it is peculiarly satisfying to have just finished reading Kermit Lynch's Adventures on the Wine Route (1988). Here, Kermit does France. And Kermit complains, thirty years ago already, of the big-point, big-expense uniformity, plus the legal tinkering with appellation boundaries, that makes knowing wine place-names -- even in France -- more and more an academic exercise. Cote Rotie (the northern Rhone) -- or Bordeaux or so by extension even Calistoga -- what matter? The consumer wants lush, fruit-pie wines, and if, say, wines called Beaujolais (a part of Burgundy) used to be light and fizzy enough to wash down Lyons' robust tripe-and-garlic cuisine and now no longer can, well then. It is done. Already thirty years ago Beaujolais had grown "fleshy," "supple," words Kermit considers profanities. He called what consumer taste and winemaker sellouts had done to this region, rather extravagantly, "genocide." "I cannot begin to communicate how profoundly the critics' embrace of such freak wines depresses me," because the critics' embrace persuades new wine drinkers that each new bosomy style is traditional. And so that's where they spend. Ah, the critics and the points, even then. We remember also Michael Broadbent's tired dismissal of the "global red" (Vintage Wine, 2003). And yet everyone is also trying to sniff out complexity, now! Like it's there.  


So that's half the theme of the Adventures: uniformity smothering terroir. The other half is that a handful of producers were or are still doing it right, and Kermit will find them. Full circle: Kermit Lynch's name on a back label now is an indication of a palate and a badge of this-isn't-"supple"-it's-what-it-used-to-be-warning:-probably-surprisingly-thin approval, just as much as are Robert Parker's breathless "100s" on reviews clipped to the shelf beside Calistoga monsters. Broadbent has his own selections, too. 

So back to the champagne at the top of the page. We could fumfer, and ask whether it's Ay or Epernay, and what was the precise dosage. But the silver sticker is the first thing we see. Do you think someday archaeologists will dig this bottle out of the ground and wonder what the sticker meant? We know the ancient Romans liked "Falernian" but we don't know what it was. We know the still more ancient Egyptians were serious connoisseurs, but can't imagine what swill must have come out of that desert furnace climate (see Hugh Johnson's Vintage). Would someone looking at this bottle understand, oh yes, they must have had a 100-point rating system for their wines, the points allotted by respected authorities in the trade who published their scores in famed magazines. Naturally a vintner whose product received such a "score" would want to boast about it, and so the business practice developed of affixing proof of the score to the actual bottle. It helped drive sales. Curious ... the archaeologist of A.D. 4017 will cock his head to one side, as he thinks alone in a windy field. The public themselves must have had little knowledge .... 

This is why I declare that the people and the psychologies in wine are far more interesting than wine itself. Though generally it tastes very good of course. 

The moon, and the modern mind; and things

Really. One comes across the wildest things in Barbara Pym novels. Here is page 2 of No Fond Return of Love:

"But at least it would be interesting, she told herself bravely, to share a room with a stranger."

One imagines this sentiment rendered into a work of art to be found for sale in the Acorn or Bas Bleu catalogs. Distressed wood, I think, unframed, or a canvas painted over in pink maybe. The words to be spelled out in blue, black, and sea-green; some of them placed sideways and some very much larger than others. Certainly interesting, room, and stranger would be written large. She told herself bravely might go sideways.

And then there is this, from the same novel.

" 'What does one do and wear?'

" 'I suppose nobody really knows,' said Dulcie. 'It might be like the first night on board ship when nobody changes for dinner.' "

So that's it. I have always wondered what it meant in the superb, old (dear me it is old, 1985. When  P.G. Wodehouse wrote novels in the 1920s featuring elderly gentleman characters who had been roustabouts in "the 'Seventies," we understand the young Wodehouse is talking about antiquity), I say, I have always wondered what it meant in the old Mapp and Lucia TV series, when Georgie admires Lucia's costume for their first dinner intime in holiday Tilling. He exclaims, "Oh yes, very chic! And I'm glad to see we think alike. Not dressed like the first night out on board ship." Since in this scene they are both smartly, if unfussily, got up, he must mean that they have each made an effort to look good. To not dress like the first night out on board ship. In other words, yes they changed for dinner.

I love little bits of knowledge like that. They are the peaks, perhaps the froth, of a civilization, capping the bulk or ocean of magnificent, fathomless, living achievement below. When the peaks and the froth are forgotten, when they are not thrown up anymore by the living bulk below or are not recognized, well it's time to worry.  

The same thing with the moon. Though the moon is much more basic.

I work with a man who is of those who say "I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but." Why does not only British literature but British comic television seem to have an answer for everything? -- for one thinks now of comic John Cleese, interviewed around the time of some Fawlty Towers anniversary or compilation. He noted that the character Basil Fawlty was one of those prudes liking to protest "I'm not a prude, but." What Basil really means, Cleese laughed, was "I am a prude, and."

What my friend really means, I fear, is "I am a conspiracy theorist, and." He entertains quite a few, the most recent of which was something to do with a great light seen at "the Arctic -- the South Pole," [sic, of course], over the length of a whole night. It wasn't a helicopter, and it wasn't a passing comet. It lit up everything like it was day, for hours, and they're not saying what it was because they don't want you to know. It was like another sun.

A second man in the warehouse had marveled -- as my friend told the story -- "so you think there's another sun?" "No, I don't think that," my friend said, testy probably.

I marveled at him too, but noncommittally. This technique of manners helps greatly in society. "Wow, I hadn't heard that...."

Then I did some searching at home because the internet is out there for you to do research on, and anyway isn't Christian love (remember we've been blogging the Gospels occasionally) all about "willing the good of the other --- as other"?

It turns out that the great light at the pole, whichever pole, that shone all night and wasn't a comet or a helicopter, and lit up the landscape like it was day, might have been the full moon. The full moon will do that, at the poles' (whichever one's) winter, when night lasts for months anyway. This in turn would correspond to my friend's story of "what they don't want you to know" having happened recently. It's been winter in the Arctic. 

But isn't it idiotic that neither my friend nor I thought at once of the full moon? Isn't it idiotic that I had to look up "light mystery Arctic" and only then learn? I told him, by the way. He said, "Ah, there's an explanation for everything."

Far more than shipboard dress, I sometimes think the moon should represent that great bulk and froth of civilization, all that is lost among ordinary people's knowledge of the world. The moon is very basic. Knowing what it does and how it appears is like knowing enough to boil unsafe water, or to avoid a wild animal .... The earth only spins one way. A half-moon overhead, in an indigo-blue, late winter dusk, is heading toward the west, like the sun toward sunset. This is literally just a phase. All of the moon's phases are regular and eternal. It will grow to full, and then shrink to a crescent facing the other way, and while it is doing that you will see it, in a week or so, weirdly in the western sky at 9 or 10 in the morning. It's setting then. After that, it will be a crescent facing the other way once more, only it will set -- in the west of course, we only spin one way -- but at twilight. You might even see the outline of the whole moon then, faintly, as if drawn with faint moonshine chalk from the guiding tips of the crescent. I believe this is called "the old moon in the new moon's arms." Things like that.

As for other things. Here at Pluot we have read Rex Stout's Please Pass the Guilt (1973). Excellent as always, even though the mystery is never such as to make Nero Wolfe lean back in his chair, close his eyes, and move his pursed lips in and out, which is the sign of real intellectual struggle for him. Author Stout deftly threads the modern world into what he might have kept, always, the pristine, postwar, somewhat gritty but never degraded "private dick's" Manhattan of say, the month of Sometime, 1952. Here in the late 1960s, Nero Wolfe fears his cleaning lady may be a Black Panther; the method of murder is a bomb in a desk drawer; there is an Arab terrorist false clue; and a liberated young woman studying etymology speaks the words pecker and prick. (And why does modernity always seem to equate with 'more degraded, more vulgar'? The '50s were modern too.) Wolfe still says " 'Pfui' " when exasperated, and cookery and orchids still feature.

As for still other things, well. Marvelous biography of Alicia Markova by Tina Sutton (The Making of Markova, 2013). At first one thinks the author could have cut down the bulk a little -- 623 pages -- by not reprinting every press clipping about the prima ballerina there ever was. But then, it does help recreate some of the excitement about her at that time. In Kansas City and everywhere.

Lastly (one must stop somewhere), what about interior decoration? An English manor called Barsham is for sale for millions of dollars. Henry VIII used to visit on country jaunts. So one longs to bring Tudor effects into the apartment, like steeply pitched ceilings, stone fireplaces, and random heavy wood mouldings and doorjambs. I may have to settle for "heavy, rich draperies -- nothing filmy or lacy" as online interior decorating guides suggest. But "MCM," mid-20th century modern, is also very chic: streamlined looks, low-slung plain furniture, colors of pink and green, and what I think of as those '50s advertising sparkles everywhere. There's even a giant sculpted one in the lobby of the Inland Steel building in Chicago. 1957. You can just see Cary Grant in a suit and thin tie walking in, on some very suave business. I'm sure he knew what the moon is.

What we're reading -- books with beautiful covers

We're reading Spice, by Jack Turner (Knopf, 2004). The cover image is Conrad Witz' Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, ca. 1435.

Here are careful and wonderful scholarship; and hesitant prose. One thinks the book might have done well as a perhaps 30-page pamphlet. One senses a certain over-writing, as if a person who wanted to say "part of the appeal of cinnamon as an aphrodisiac was its great expense" instead labored on. As if he said,  at that time as throughout most of the beleaguered human story, the more precious a commodity, the greater its cost -- or rather, perhaps, the greater a commodity's cost, the more precious it seemed to become. And rarely more so than with the very thing everyone hoped must be useful in the bedroom of  emperor and slave, king and washerwoman: wonderful and wondrous -- and expensive -- cinnamon. Yet strangely, as it perfumed Cleopatra's writhing young limbs, so it also swathed the dead in their billowing funeral pyres .....

Like that. Reading young Jack Turner's Spice (he's thirteen years older now), one wishes for the relaxed, musing, confident style of those middle brow dons, male and female, of the mid-twentieth century, who kept, for example, an old magazine like Horizon in business. We remember J.H. Plumb, Morris Bishop, Henry Steele Commager. We wish for a story, even in a history. But there is a something in careful modern scholarship which tamps down stories. Over-writing occurs when the thrum of a story is absent. And stories can be strangled in their cradle anyway by modern liberal scholarship's command that, where the West is concerned, the story is bad. Mr. Turner knows this. "The real prize [this is a real quote, p. 26] in everyone's mind was the fabulous, far eastern Indies. Whom did they really belong to, Spain or Portugal? (The possibility that the Indies might belong to the Indians did not enter into consideration)."

Say you want actually to learn about spices. Why is it that Sylvia Windle Humphrey, in A Matter of Taste (MacMillan, 1965), can simply tell us so much more?

Ginger is a romantic plant. The beckoning perfume of its pure white flower leads needy man to its fabulous roots. According to Oriental legend, the flower lends some of its allure to whoever wears it. The plainest woman who understands the ways of the root of ginger will be sought by many husbands, for she will be the finest cook.  

Here we have pure information, the composure of lovely imagery, and an acknowledgment of the worth of a non-Western culture all in one breath. We have, in short, gusto.

  
(Cover image, Lorenzo di Credi, Portrait of Caterina Sforza, signora di Imola, ca. 1500)

What else we're reading is Elizabeth Lev's The Tigress of Forli (Houghton Mifflin, 2011), a very good if rather abstractedly clinical biography of "Caterina Riario Sforza de' Medici." This was a minor Renaissance lady whom I had never heard of either. Born a Sforza (major Italian aristocracy), married to a Riario (minor Italian aristocracy, assassinated), then to a Feo (jumped up stable boy, assassinated) and finally to a de' Medici (very major Italian aristocracy, died of a fever), I don't understand why her name on the cover does not go chronologically "Caterina Sforza Riario Feo de' Medici," but that's unimportant.

If I give this lady more time than I give to spices it's because her story raises a personal moral question which spices do not. Except in the eyes of God I would say this lady's name and life were not historically important anyway. But because the fine old world keeps spinning around and the West is still standing if only just, there is always a market for new biographies of women, just as there always seems to be a market for new nuggets of romance fiction. The whole fine, Western world is romance's oyster, a few pearls of course being the biggest. When you've strung Tudor and Regency England and Eleanor of Aquitaine's France on the thread, who knows where you might not go? Byzantium, Rome, Greece, perhaps Sam Spade's 1940s L.A. are some of the smaller pearls. And surely this, Renaissance Italy? Yes. In fact, to glance over the mere three-star reviews of The Tigress on Amazon is to see the disappointment in readers who thought they were picking up a bodice-ripper only to find the book "reads like a textbook." It kind of does.  

Halfway through the Tigress' life -- the book takes its name from contemporary comparisons of the Countess to a mother tiger, reputed occasionally to eat its young; this was after she had stood on the ramparts of her castle, Ravaldino, and had delivered "the retort," defying a besieging army's threats to kill her children -- halfway through, my thought was: modern scholarship has to cope with a sort of Rubik's cube of intellectual and moral, or amoral, demands when it comes to past lives, most especially now women's lives. Jack Turner didn't have to cope with it so much because he did not concentrate on any one life.

It's like this. Since we are all good liberals, we understand that everyone is equal and that women used to be oppressed. (Grasp the cube.) Because they were oppressed, their stories and accomplishments have been unjustly neglected, so here let's dust off Caterina. (Shift.) There's a contradiction, since if women used to be oppressed then there can't be much accomplishment to unearth (shift). If it does exist, then they weren't so oppressed (and again). The liberal answer to all this for a long time has been not much better than "never mind," like when you were a kid and you gave up on the Cube temporarily.

The next shelf of the Rubik's cube that modern biography must grapple with, like the kid picking it up again, is Christianity: the reality of it in Christian people's lives in Christian Europe long ago. That includes Caterina. The correct modern mood about the religion seems to be, well -- as Christians they should have been tolerant liberals like Jesus and they obviously were not (they oppressed women), therefore the faith is meaningless to understanding them. They didn't do it correctly. Shift. And anyway Christianity, as a private matter, was always a bit like any old concurrent belief past people might have had, say in the efficacy of leeches in medicine. It was a part of their lives too big for them to see, but as we know now, absurd. We look with objectivity. (Shift, shift, shift. ...but howso?) Once in a while, biographer and reader together come across some quaint detail about a holiday or a procession, that's all, and we note it exactly as we note a death by doctor-bleeding.

An aside. Really even the most sympathetic and imaginative modern writers never seem to enter into the mind of a time, good or bad. By the same token, history-epic movies never show any historically correct abuse of animals, let the human characters be how bathed in gore soever. Not that we want to see animals tortured. Precisely -- we do not. Or, for example to read the actual letters of Lord Byron is to encounter reality in 1808. The teen aristocrat, in debt over women and liquor, goes to "the Israelitish tribe," Jewish moneylenders, for loans even while outraged that they dare dirty him with help.  

As for the mind of the Renaissance, there seems only one scene in The Tigress in which we do enter into it. The Rubik's cube drops from our hand.

Countess Caterina led a rather ghastly life, though with bravery. She was married off at age ten, her own father substituting her in the marriage bed of the Pope's nephew after another little girl, a cousin, was shielded from that fate by an outraged mother. (Ah, what then was "Costanza's" story? Now there is a romance.) For our Caterina there followed all those assassinations, and a general atmosphere more like today's drugland Mexico than anything sunny and art-filled, anything Renaissance. Talking of oppressed (or not) women, when a twenty-something widowed warrior-countess' lands are repeatedly invaded by neighboring men, what does that mean? That she kept her domains in such a plum state that they were always tempting? Or that she, busy mother of six, was incompetent to manage them? Or that it drove premodern, illiberal men mad to take a woman ruler seriously and so they battered pathetic Forli as they never would have each other's properties (but they did)? These are the truths it seems we cannot learn from modern biography, because the modern scholar must first address himself to the proprieties of his cube. Women were oppressed ....

Caterina's stable-boy lover was murdered. She caused anyone remotely involved to be hunted down and killed, including collateral wives and babies thrown alive down wells. I believe the grand total was thirty-eight dead. For our pivotal, mind-of-the-Renaissance scene the Countess, now at bay herself, bangs on a door and screams to have removed from her presence an anonymous priest who has warned her she may go to hell for her crimes (p.129). Elizabeth Lev treats this episode as though the "weary" Caterina was only appalled -- "horrified" -- by perhaps the man's bad taste. What can't be suggested is that she, fifteenth-century Christian in a Christian world, believed in him. Thus for a moment we enter into the mind of the time.

The curious thing is that later in her life and in the book, she seems to know repentance and some sort of peace of mind. Total defeat in war and a stint in the dungeons of a castle-prison she once ruled, helped. But because the modern outlook cannot cope with the true Christian roots of this -- Lev does tell us she met with Savonarola -- we still find, as with questions about her political and military management, we don't know her. Christian salvation in Renaissance Italy surely did not just give peace of mind to a weary, but justifiably outraged, but perhaps overvengeful (shift, shift, shift) and lifelong-oppressed-because-she-lived-before-liberalism murderess' conscience. Even if peace of mind did and does come, repentance, salvation for Caterina would have meant confession of sin and faith in the sacrifice and Resurrection of Jesus as having bought forgiveness for her immortal soul. It would also have meant donations for a purpose to her favorite convents. The monies were not just woman-to-woman supportive business transactions, which seems to be the way the author records the several dealings between the countess and the nuns she supported. The money, instead, said "pray for me (keep me out of hell)."

Here is where a biographer not beholden to his cube might step in and give us a deeper understanding of a human being long ago. Elizabeth Lev plunges heroically into fifteenth-century provincial Italian diaries and into the wasps' nests of Renaissance city-state family wars too, to build the Countess of Forli's story. What I find frustrating is this cool amoral skirting, this obedient skirting, of the very matter -- apart from survival, maybe -- that would have mattered most to this lady.

I don't ask that a biographer switch to theology in the last chapter. But: if you are in earnest about writing a life, could you not explore, a little, the soul? My understanding of Christianity tells me that yes, with repentance even Caterina's sins can be pardoned by God, because of the gigantic truth of Jesus' atoning for all sin for all time. My understanding of Judaism (and Caterina would not have dreamed of thinking this way, no more than Byron, but it is the only other meaningful moral code) tells me that you may ask God to forgive your sins, but if you have offended another person you must first ask pardon of him. If you have killed him you can't ask his pardon. His life and all that he might have been, even to that infant down the well, is lost forever. The point is not that a vengeful Old Testament God does not forgive. The point is, don't kill.

No I don't expect a biographer to switch to theology in the last chapter. But I scribbled this note while reading The Tigress --  

Without a moral reaction on the part of the chronicler, future generations cannot know the truth of what happened even if they know all the facts. Even the revelation of your prejudice helps toward the truth because it is also true.

Reader reviews of the book at Amazon tend to describe Caterina delightedly as "bold" and "dynamic." Those are adjectives to apply to anything. Colors, architecture, Hitler. They mean nothing about a human being possessed of an immortal soul, one of us, but shaped by her own era and by truth also. And what is truth? We think we are objective, but howso? Because we have exchanged a religion which understood sin, for a modern one that only asks you to hate intolerance? 

Her readers' reactions on Amazon are not quite Elizabeth Lev's fault of course. My question is, what could biography do today to more honestly bring past people to life? What could be done to call to life even the scraps of people's stories? -- like those explorers who shipped us cinnamon, even though we know they were intolerant? Modern biography makes such stick figures of the past. Stick figures are bold and dynamic too. To cease doing that biography, scholarship, would almost have to cease to be liberal, to drop -- for good -- the shifting, teaching cube. Which seems unthinkable. Which is why in my reading I hunt for publication dates before the mid 1970s. They tend to be better books, and to have uglier covers.

At long last! Lemon cake and cloves, again

From the Nahe region of Germany: Paul Anheuser, 2000 Kreuznacher (" --er" indicating the town of Kreuznach) Kahlenberg (the vineyard, a site "first mentioned in 1499") Riesling (the grape) Spatlese (the harvest designation, in other words, second pass through the vines to pluck riper grapes). It proved a happy chance, to find a sixteen-year-old riesling on the shelves, for a retail price of only about $20. The color was golden amber, the aroma at long last --- after so many charming German rieslings that are all "racy" and zingy acidity and not much scent -- the lemon cake and cloves I remember from my first trade tasting ever. A supple mouthfeel balanced the sweetness. 

I always like to add a story to my wine thoughts, so there is this: I am trying Wuthering Heights again, for the third time in this life. Now I remember -- now I have reached the spot that annoys me. Unfortunately it is early on. The first narrator, Mr. Lockwood, gives place to the second narrator, Mrs. Dean, and then you must grapple with which characters in her telling are Hindley, and Hareton, and Heathcliff, and Cathy, and which were how old when the story begins in her memory, and which were how old or long dead from the first page of the first chapter. In real time, so to speak. In her introduction, Charlotte Bronte admits to the flaws in her late sister Emily's work. "How so?" you think. "It is a classic. Charlotte must be looking back on it very firmly, holding it to very high standards." But then, in that introduction you are also so distracted by the horrible brief chronicle of her two sisters' deaths from consumption, in a little more than five months from Christmas 1848 to spring 1849, that you resolve to overlook all flaws.    

One thing leads to another

One thing leads to another. Buying, packing, moving, and unpacking has meant houses and (balcony) gardens are on my mind; the last thing I was reading before commencing this particular five mile trek was Deborah, the Duchess of Devonshire's The House: A Portrait of Chatsworth (MacMillan, 1982). I found this book because the search for decorating color scheme ideas led me to google "eighteenth century" in general. (I seem to remember instructions about combining black, ice blue, red, sage, and lemon yellow, and dubbing it vaguely "Regency.") There, amid links to eighteenth-century matters, including the career of the very famous, scandalous Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire and some scholarly articles about this and that, cropped up several links to obituaries for the more contemporary lady whom we might call our Duchess. 

It turns out that our duchess Deborah, nee Mitford, sister of the (not very interesting) authoress Nancy, was not scandalous at all. In in fact she was quite the respected chicken-keeper and country house chatelaine, enthusiastic reverser of staircases and preserver of rotting historic velvets and "slub" silks. Writer, too. Altogether she was just about the perfect person to happen to fall into respectful responsibility for an English stately home. It's a curious thing. She became a duchess of course by marrying a man who became a duke. But he had an older brother who would have inherited if he had not been killed in World War II, and that older brother was actually married to a Kennedy -- Kathleen, one of Joseph and Rose Kennedy's huge family and therefore sister of the future president. What a "Duchess Kathleen" would have made of Chatsworth, who knows, perhaps something marvelous, too. Although one suspects the Kennedy money might have made "the House" a bit too shiny and new. I must mention that my copy of The House, to my surprise, proved to be signed by her -- Deborah-ed -- Grace.

I was saying one thing leads to another. In the middle of the book she quotes a nineteenth-century predecessor duke's inventory of his statuary. This included busts, full figures, and medallions of everything and everyone the West found fascinating, like mythic heroes or Napoleon's scandalous sister Pauline posing as Venus, back in the days when young gentlemen made the Grand Tour and bachelor dukes bought entire, ancient marble slabs for flooring, "at Rome."

That name, Pauline Borghese (nee Bonaparte), struck me. Perhaps she could be a candidate for our "celebrity historic personality" column here? I know we had been studying Tancred of Hauteville for a while. "... for the Princess Borghese, when compelled not to talk about dress, was extremely entertaining, and full of the histories of her times" (p. 186).

But I began reading a little about her elsewhere and thought, well, perhaps not. Pauline may just have been famous for being famous. One doesn't begrudge a woman her private life, but what interest can one take in her whose first lover was a certain ghastly French revolutionary, Freron, a signer of orders for mass executions? Biographer Hector Fleishmann (Pauline Bonaparte and her Lovers, 1914), thinks that Napoleon scotched the couple's marriage because even he, no stranger to bloodshed, would not have the wretch allied with his family. Wikipedia says it was Madame Mere, mother of the brood Laetizia Bonaparte, who opposed.

All this returns me to a thought I have had before. Pauline Bonaparte Borghese only had a famous life because her brother was Napoleon. She pretended to no other significances that I know of. After Freron she was married off, and reluctantly took ship for Haiti because her husband had just been appointed provincial governor there. When for her second marriage she treated herself to, or was proffered to or if you like was able to catch, one of the superbest names in the Italian aristocracy, a Borghese! -- she got the villas and the title "princess" and she made sure to get a promise of "the use of the Borghese family diamonds." Meanwhile the lovers came and went. If you wish to see her body you may look at Canova's Venus. People who have reason to write about her always parrot the same story here: that when asked whether she did not find it 'difficult' to pose nude for Canova, la divina Paola lightly replied oh no, it was no trouble. His studio was heated.

All in all, she seems to have ridden the crest for one short life. She died at 45, "full of the histories of her times." Unlike her first lover, she did no harm. The question she prompts is, how do we make art out of history, when the founding characters to be dealt with are merely Pauline-esque? Or worse, Freron-like? In our own era it seems we have still another type which will one day be fodder for art but which is least worthy of all. These are the little, cocooned authoritarians who risk nothing, glide into power, quietly sever three or four arteries, and then when confronted perhaps glide away. I am thinking of Lois Lerner, and of what sort of great speech or aria could be written for her. There's no question of sculpture. Valerie Jarrett, the same, except there's no question of her being confronted and gliding away. A composer or a playwright of talent will want to make these people complex, changeable, chasten-able, if only by their own fates. But how so, unless future talent just makes stuff up? In life it's difficult to imagine these women understanding the meaning of the word "chasten." And because of that, it's offensive to imagine art, in the future, plumping them up and making them characters with a capital C.

If your politics or your interests are different you might substitute other names under "cocooned little authoritarian," besides La Lerner. But it is helpful to consider what eras artists tend to mine for material, and which historic figures in them pop up most often. The Tudors are the never-ending franchise for romance novels, television dramas and, years ago, operas. Among them Anne Boleyn stands very high in interest, Jane Grey hardly at all; yet both were young women of the same rank and both suffered the same death. Why the difference in attention? As far as exterior lives, action, goes, the one lived a little longer, married, and had children, so there is more "there." But romance loves also to mine the life of a virgin martyr from another time, Joan of Arc. Lack of children and a teen death are not an insuperable obstacle to a character being interesting. It seems Jane Grey was a superb person who went to the scaffold with eerie resignation. Anne Boleyn, truthfully, was probably a sort of boring high school prom-queen shrew. At the end she kept twisting about and looking behind her for the king's messenger bearing the pardon which never came. That's not a black mark against her, being no more than what we would do. Perhaps just that sort of behavior accounts for the difference in attention these two get in art. We want to see normal people, like us, on the stage or in our novels, not perfect doves. And not necessarily giants. Speaking of Pauline (remember?), where are the plays and operas about her brother?

Perhaps what we want to see above all in art is risk, risk-taking. (Not the same thing as "conflict." And not risk among giants.) As far as interior lives go, -- the source material to be perhaps plumped up -- Jane Grey, superb person, saintly scholar, walked through life an obedient dove reading Greek, and was sacrificed. Anne Boleyn, sometimes rather awful, reached out from safety to get something more, and was sacrificed. Joan of Arc seems to have been a combination of the two: a superb person who marched through life an obedient dove but also reached out from safety to get something more. For other people, not herself. And was sacrificed. Risk makes the second two interesting. Likewise, what makes it offensive to imagine La Lerner or La Jarrett given arias and complexity is the absence of risk in anything they do. Simply rather awful ... and marching through life ... and reaching out from safety to get more for themselves ... they seem merely to succeed. Perhaps "the Bullen's" half-despondent enemies thought exactly the same thing, until the morning of May 19, A.D. 1536. What does art, after all, do? What historical figures are immortalized deservingly, and how would you pick and embellish yours?

Deborah Devonshire's The House -- remember? -- has proved to be one of those delightful books that I return to and dip into from time to time. In it you get a bit of relatively recent country-house diary keeping, startling information on real servant life back in Downton Abbey days (shared bathwater for six laundrymaids once a week -- "the head laundrymaid was the first to get in, followed by her five helpers in order of seniority. More hot water was tipped in as the bathing progressed. Imagine the horrible grey soapy puddle the last one must have got into"), and the general sense that as far as The House physically is concerned, it is a massive stone square so solid that anything at all may be done to its interior without danger of its falling down. Hence the enthusiastic reversing of staircases or the transforming of rooms into corridors and back again. Parts of it look regally eighteenth century, with enormous checkerboard marble floors and football fields-ful of ceilings covered in rococo nudity. In other photos you see huge, tatty historic royal thrones like red and gold fringed dinosaurs pushed up against some wall, or what the Duchess acknowledges a French visitor called "le desordre Britannique." In a huge library there might be a television set thrust almost into a disused fireplace, and then magazines and farm equipment ads piled over lovely old gold inkwells carved with roses. Surely they must once have been caressed and dipped into, on a far tidier desk, by the scandalous but thoughtful Georgiana.

Of course our own libraries don't keep these sorts of books on hand anymore. Neither do big contemporary bookstores, so I get them from Amazon or the used book warehouses which I am glad to see have popped into existence and seem crowded with custom. By sheer chance the most recent half-forgotten English woman writer of the mid-twentieth century -- I believe it was a little silver age of literature, really -- whom I have come across, and whom I must investigate, is one Dorothy Carrington. She wrote about Corsica, Granite Island (1971), coincidentally the land of Napoleon.

Driving to work with Chesterton

Listening to Chesterton's Orthodoxy on disk in the car. So far he seems to be saying that the modern Western world is living in a state of insanity because we are governed by single-subject intellectuals who function as the insane do: they reason perfectly inside their own tiny circles of obsession, but are as untruthful, in day to day living as humans, as lunatics are. We know our modern joke about the man wearing a tin-foil hat. In Chesterton's day they were said to stick straws in their hair. "The madman has reason, and nothing else," Chesterton says.

And this in 1908, when the single-subject intellectuals at least propounded rather meaty codes like "materialism." They at least knew they were objecting to Christianity which, as Chesterton saw, they were glad to use "any stick to beat with." Too meek! Too violent! Unscientific! Uselessly scholastic! Today their great-great-grandchildren (in spirit) know nothing whatever. But they have only to nod their royal heads at the society under their care, to put women in combat and men in women's bathrooms. Just mopping up operations, as it were.

But -- the problem with Chesterton is that after a short while he is so annoying. I tried Napoleon of Notting Hill once, on a Kindle, so perhaps I could not do it justice one tiny screen at a time. At any rate I had to bail quickly. He described two friends walking together. Every so often one friend lay down on his back and waved his arms and legs in the air. Probably the author was on his way to some fine lesson about crazy behavior in public actually being holy, or about how long it takes bystanders to question crazy-holy behavior, or something. This went on for page after page, and it was early in the book. I shut off my Kindle and thought "Chesterton was insane."      

Now with Orthodoxy we have, I am sure, many fine thoughts and lessons, but all done in strings of sing-song paradoxes that just go on and on. "Far from the lion eating the baby, the baby ate the lion." Not exactly that, but very much like it. On and on. I pulled into the parking lot after thirty minutes of this, parked, pulled out the disk from the player and thought, "This guy was mentally a mess." A terrible thing to think of Chesterton -- twice -- the happy and healthy and productive and satisfied. But I couldn't help it. He mentions Nietzsche often, the "God is dead" philosopher who went insane. But what with the sing-song, and the artistically blurred photo of himself on the disk cover, glaring and mustachioed, I thought again -- well sir. I'm sorry but you look a bit like Nietzsche yourself.