Blacklegs and Bluestockings: Shirley, by Charlotte Bronte
"You name me leopardess; remember, the leopardess is tameless," said she.
"Tame or fierce, wild or subdued, you are MINE."
"I am glad I know my keeper, and am used to him. Only his voice will I follow; only his hand shall manage me; only at his feet will I repose."
This is the sort of novel Jane Austen might have written, had she been concerned with industrial strife. It takes place in a factory town in Yorkshire at a time when Luddites are protesting and destroying labor-saving machinery that threatens to put them out of work. Robert Moore, the factory owner, is problematic. He inherited the place after irresponsible relatives drove it into near-insolvency, and has to cut costs in order to stay open at all (the same way modern capitalists ALWAYS pretend that they can't afford to treat workers well, except that Moore really does live a Spartan life out of necessity); on the other hand, he still acts as if the working class is some sort of lower life form that should be 'kept out of idleness" by punitive social engineering.
Meanwhile, his main love interest--not the woman he actually loves, mind you, but the one who will be a "suitable match" because she is a wealthy heiress--is the title character, Shirley: spirited, educated, and what passes for a "radical feminist" in those days--women should have their own property, but should not take jobs from men; they can be firece and independent, but when all is said and done, they will find that one special man who is worthy of them, and will choose to surrender themselves. Weak tea, and even aggravating by modern standards, but comforting perhaps in a "look how far we've come' sort of way. See also Anne Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall, reviewed last month, featuring another "spirited" heroine who speaks out for some degree of equality before being voluntarily "tamed".
Charlotte lost both of her literary sisters and her brother while writing this novel, and some of the gloom shows.
As Seen Through Civilized Eyes: Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville
Many people in Europe are apt to believe that a great advantage of universal suffrage is that it trusts the direction of affairs to men who are worthy of the public confidence. They admit that the people are unworthy to govern themselves, but they aver that the people always wish the welfare of the state and instinctively designate those who are animated by the same good will and who are most fit to wield the supreme authority. I confess that the observations I made in America by no means coincide with these opinions. On my arrival in the United States I was surprised to find so much distinguished talent among the citizens and so little among the heads of government. It is a constant fact that at present the ablest men in the United States are rarely placed at the head of affairs, and it must be acknowledged that such has been the result in proportion as democracy has exceeded all its former limits. The race of American statesmen has evidently dwindled most remarkably in the course of the last fifty years.
Holy crap, this commentary on American society almost 200 years ago is almost more relevant today, 2017 in particular, than it was when Tocquiville first visited North America and wrote about the new nation, celebrated for its innovative new Constitutional government and its commitment to equality, and views it with a mind steeped in European tradition (the opposite of what happens in The Marble Faun, below, or in Henry James novels).
There are flaws. Toqueville has an extensive section on "the three races", but otherwise pays lip service to slavery and native American genocide, and treats the USA as a nation without titles and rank, in which all people are equal. He has a few spectacular misses, as when he predicts (in a passage quoted frequently by conservatives) that the politically powerful poor will exploit the wealthy minority, making it impossible for large fortunes to be made in this country--presented as having both positive and negative aspects.
But then--the accuracy with which he predicts other American trends is astonishing. The noninvolvement, compared to the French and English, of the common people in civic life and the electoral process--done out of inertia rather than lack of civil rights. The increasing fecklessness and incompetence of successive generations of politicians. The disdain for education, as if understanding a subject made one snooty and not worthy of consideration. The race to the bottom in wages.
There was a time, in the 1970s, when I was much younger, when it seemed as if the country had evolved past these tendencies. That time has passed, and what Toqueville saw has reasserted itself frighteningly. He did not specifically predict, as HL Mencken did a century later, that the USA would one day proudly elevate an utter, utter fucktwit to the office of the Presidency, but the recipe for doing so, and the warnings that were not heeded, are there for those with eyes to read. Very highest recommendations.
The 19th Century Murders: The Shifting Tide; Dark Assassin, by Anne Perry; Dead & Buried; The Shirt on His Back, by Barbara Hambly; The Devil in Music, by Kate Ross
Louvain leaned forward over the railing of the witness box: "You have no idea of life at sea. You dress in smart suits and eat food brought you by a servant, and you've never fought anything except with words. One day on the river and you'd heave your guts with fear. I got the thief and I got back my cargo and I did it without anyone getting hurt or spending money on police time. What else do you want?"
--from The Shifting Tide
The pall bearers bent, lifted the coffin to slide it into the tomb, and Felix--who had spent the interval alternately sobbing and reviving his spirits from a silver flask--staggered in the slicked mud, failed to catch his balance, and, to everyone's horror, fell headlong, still clinging stubbornly to his corner of the coffin.
It struck the wall of the Delacroix family tomb with the force of a battering ram. The polished cherrywood split from end to end and precipitated to the muddy ground not the body of Rameses Ramilles, but the corpse of a white man with close cropped greying red curls, a ruffled white shirt, and a bright green silk vest that was covered with dark, dried blood. Mademoiselle Glasson, evidently forgetting that she'd been fainting with grief moments before, seized the undertaker boy by the arm, jabbed a finger at the corpse, and yelled at the top of her lungs, "Who the hell is THAT?"
--from Dead and Buried
"I meant to ask if you'd be willing to play--Do you play anything besides the piano?"
"You didn't bring one?"
Stewart smote his forehead theatrically, making all the long fringes of his buckskin jacket flutter. "Dagnabbit, I KNEW I forgot to pack something!"
"I'm sure if you ask around the camp, someone will have brought one."
--from The Shirt Off his Back
"I don't know if you've ever had charge of a rich young man with little sense and less discipline, let loose in a country where the wine runs too fast, and the women not fast enough. Perhaps you've tried to carry a swarm of bees about in your pocket--it's much the same thing."
--from The Devil In Music
More mysteries.....
Anne Perry has William Monk among the river police now, as a vehicle to write in depth about the Thames and the docks (an entirely different environment, and more dangerous by far than the rest of London, even St. Giles and the other savage slums), including wharf rats, urchins, hulking sailors, ships with dirty secrets, and (in the case of Dark Assassin) the sewers, being newly built containing structural flaws leaving the city vulnerable to flooding and gas explosions.
Benjamin January, Barbara Hambly's free protagonist of color, twice leaves the relative safety of New Orleans in search of clues, first to a plantation near the Texas border in search of clues to someone's past, and then (in by far the superior book, although the plantation trip is more dangerous) to the western frontier in what would eventually be Idaho, among trappers, natives, American and British Indian agents and others. One of the more poignant aspects of the series is the part highlighting the way in which January is far more easily accepted and better treated out in the so-called lawless, savage frontier where there's no legal recourse for crimes up to and including murder, than he is in an American civilization where any white criminal could have him hanged without trial, no questions asked, just by riding into town and saying he misbehaved with a white woman.
And then there's Kate Ross, by far my favorite mystery writer who chose this period. Like another favorite of mine, Sarah Cauldwell, she produced four masterpieces and died too young.. I am crushed. The Devil in Music is not the best of the four, but it is stunning nonetheless, and brings the "dandy as detective" Julian Kestrel to an Italian villa where a marquis died five years previously, and his protege, a young tenor (who the author has ingeniously arranged for no one to be able to identify by sight) disappeared, thereby being considered the primary suspect. Of the marquis, it was said that great music "made him forget that he was human"....very highest recommendations for character and atmosphere, for excellent wit, and for an ingenious puzzle that fooled me until just a couple of pages before the first big reveal...and right up until the final one. I definitely wish there were more Julian Kestrel.
Whole Lotze Nothing: Microcosmus, by Hermann Lotze
It is a strange and yet an intelligible pride that our scientific illuminati take in requiring for the explanatory reconstruction of reality in thought no other postulates than an original store of matter and force, and the unshaken authority of a group of universal and immutable laws of nature. Strange, because after all these are no trifling postulates, and because it might be expected to be more in accordance with the comprehensive spirit of the human reason to acknowledge the unity of a creative cause than to have imposed on it as the starting point of all explanation the promiscuous variety of merely actually existent things and notions.
It may be that I have been reading thick books in order for too long. I got through Aquinas, I got through Kant and Hegel, but the third-tier 19th century philosopher Lotze was one thick, poorly-translated German work too much for me. I took an instant visceral loathing to the man the moment I saw on the library shelf the thickness of the great fat mass of words he was arrogant enough to expect us to swallow in search of wisdom. This was over two thousand pages by someone most people have never heard of. You write that much, you asshole, you better be good.
And then he went and duplicated Liebniz's theory of monads, in which atoms are living, sentient beings that influence one another, and humans are a larger version thereof, and we are the expression of the will of God and man's mind is unique in its capacity to mentally something something garbanzo and we are the one and the unity and we bring unity into existence via the ideal--I'm done.
I find three reasons to study a particular work of philosophy. Might it be true? No. Is it entertaining? No. Does it inspire one to think? No. then I see no reason to torture myself any further with yet another mass of dull, lifeless prose that convinces me of nothing. Buchner, last month, was dull to read, but at least he was scientific, made empirical sense, and provided a stepping stone from German idealism to Darwin. Lotze just made me feel offended that he thought so much of himself as to expect one to pay attention for so long. TL:DNF.
Like Watching Paint Dry: The Marble Faun, by Nathaniel Hawthorne
While the sculptor sat listlessly gazing at it, there was a sound of small hoofs, clumsily galloping on the campagna, and soon, his frisky acquaintance, the buffalo calf, came and peeped over the edge of the excavation. Almost at the same moment, he heard voices, which approached nearer and nearer; a man's voice and a feminine one, talking the musical tongues of Italy. Besides the hairy visage of his four footed friend, Kenyon now saw the figures of a peasant and a contadina, making gestures of salutation to him, on the opposite verge of the hollow space.
There's a reason Hawthorne is remembered for The Scarlet Letter (see last month's book post), several short stories, and House of the Seven Gables, and only rarely for this one, which I read so that you don't have to. Hawthorne was a master at depicting America's central conflict of identity between neo-Calvinist churchy pseudo-morality and "heathen" free-spirited naturalism in an as-yet unspoiled continent. He should have stuck to writing what he knew.
The Marble Faun blazed a trail toward a genre I have found unbearably tedious, the story, written by an American, about Americans in Europe being overwhelmed by all the history and tradition and veneer, and in which things happen so subtly that you don't notice they even happen. I had to turn back a few pages at one point to realize that the flowery prose-poetry had actually described a homicide that will go on and haunt the four central characters (the virginal woman on a pedestal and her tepid lover, and the woman who has something of a character and is therefore hinted at as being dangerous maybe, and her satyr-like Italian lover) who have one snooze-worthy conversation after another.
I'm pretty sure Henry James read this book and thought to himself, "I can be more boring than this!", and proved himself right.
Bye, Felicia: Felicia's Journey, by William Trevor
There is no arrogance among the people of the streets, no insistent pride in their sleeping features, no lingering telltale of a past's corruption. They have passed the stage of desperation, and on their downward path some among the women have sold themselves; faces chapped, fingernails ingrained, they are beyond that now. Men, in threes and fours, have offered the three-card trick on these same streets. Beards unkempt, hair matted, skin darkened with filth, they would not now attract the wagers of their passing trade. In their dreams there is occasionally the fantasy that they may be cured, that they may be loved, that all voices and visions will cease, that tomorrow they will discover the strength to resist oblivion.
Another not-for-everybody novel for people who like Hitchcock-like suspense and are okay with stories about vulnerable women being targeted by creepy, icky men. Felicia has left her native Ireland for central England in search of the man who left her pregnant. He's nowhere to be found, but she does attract the attention of a much older man whose interest in her is obsessive, and who keeps reminiscing about other such women from his past in ways that imply he may have done them in.
Almost everybody in the book is some kind of misfit, and Trevor has a way of simply describing food in a way that puts one off one's appetite. A good suspenseful read, but potentially triggering.
Nothing Like a Dane: Concluding Unscientific Postscript, by Soren Kierkegaard
I shall be as willing as the next man to fall down in worship before the system, if only I can manage to set eyes on it. Hitherto, I have had no success, and though I have young legs, I am almost weary from running back and forth between Herod and Pilate. Once or twice I have been on the verge of bending the knee, but at the last moment, when I already had my handkerchief spread on the ground to avoid soiling my trousers, and I made a trusting appeal to one of the initiated who stood by: "Tell me now sincerely, is it entirely finished, for if so I will kneel down before it, even at the risk of ruining a pair of trousers (for on account of the heavy traffic to and fro, the road has become quite muddy)', I always received the same answer, 'No, it is not yet quite finished.' And so, there was another postponement, of the system and of my homage.
Wow. Trust Kierkegaard to write his longest, thickest work yet and call it a "postscript".
Like his other long work, Either/Or, it is badly fragmented, full of observations that attribute to the human condition aspects--mostly painful--that he actually feels himself (and yet, with just enough of them ringing true to my own experience--your mileage may vary--to make me deeply uncomfortable). As in his other books, he emphasizes three possible stages of evolution, from aesthetic (sensual, but more Epicurian than hedonistic); to ethical (directed by a set of moral principles), to religious (surrendering one's will wholly to some higher power; by which he means Christianity, proven to be true because things written by humans say it is, as opposed to different things written by other humans). Not everyone goes through all stages; I, for example, have so far lived a life that transitioned from aesthetic to ethical (in that I grew up and learned a little impulse control and delayed gratification) and am not likely to make religion a significant part of my life; this makes me inferior, in Kierkegaard's eyes. I don't mind. He seems like he was the kind of person I might have found interesting to listen to at a social gathering involving lots of marijuana or alcohol, but who would not earn my real respect, nor would it matter to me whether I had his.
Bottom line: people who find the likes of Sartre and Camus to be either profound or depressing but accurate, will also enjoy Kierkegaard, who I think influenced both. Humanists and other philosophers who crave real understanding and a truth that empowers them, will want to look elsewhere.
Sticky Wickets: Flashman's Lady (Flashman #6), by George MacDonald Fraser
I suppose if Fuller pilch had got his bat down just a split second sooner, it would all have turned out different. The Skrang pirates wouldn't have been burned out of their hellish nest, the black queen of Madagascar would have had one lover fewer (not that she'd have missed a mere one, I dare say, the insatiable great bitch), the French and the British wouldn't have bombarded Tamitave, and I'd have been spared kidnapping, slavery, blowpipes, and the risk of death and torture in unimaginable places--aye, old Fuller's got a lot to answer for, God rest him.
The Flashman books are chronologically in a wildly different order than the order in which they were written, spanning roughly 60 years of the 19th century. I'm reading them according to timeline, and Flashman's Lady, taking place in the early 1840s, is the sixth novel but the second chronological episode of Flashman's adventures.
It's also one of my favorites in the series, encompassing three distinct adventures mostly on large islands adjoining three continents (England, Borneo, and Madagascar, respectively). The first part involves playing cricket and dropping names like Felix and Mynne, who were apparently famous players and remembered the way basketball fans remember Magic Johnson and Dr. J...The final hundred pages, which are referenced extensively in future volumes, involve Flashman's captivity and enforced servitude as aide and courtesan to the monstrous Queen Ranavalona, who tortured more people to death every day than most people speak to. Given Flashman's life as a misogynist cad and abuser, I had to continually remind myself that his sufferings under the evil Queen are not "karma" and that no one has it coming. Also, no one who wears the SJW label proudly should read Flashman unless they're in the mood to vent steam at an unrepentant racist, colonialist, imperialist swine who gets unearned honor everywhere he goes (it has occurred to me during this second reading, that Flashman is likely not a historical outlier but that many Victorian-era Englishmen revered as soldier-heroes in real life were every bit as personally obnoxious as Flashy). CN also because he calls all the African characters by the usual racial slurs.
To me, the best part of the book is in the middle, in Singapore and Borneo. I was once called on to write and perform a "historical character" monologue (think "Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain"), and while everyone else in the class picked household names, I chose to "be" James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, largely on the strength of his exuberant portrayal in Flashman's Lady: boyish slayer of pirates, radiator of positive belief in England and picked from central casting to be a sea adventurer with the distinction that he actually existed with his motley crew of fiercely loyal fighters from around the world. The virtuous Brooke is Flashman's moral opposite, and I found the spectacle of the two of them flung together for a frenemy shipping-road trip an absolute delight, warts and all.
The Resolution of Aubrey/Maturin: The Wine Dark Sea; The commodore; The Yellow Admiral, by Patrick O'Brian
"This asafedita is imported for me by a Turkey merchant; and as you perhaps have noticed in spite of the sturgeon's bladder in which it is enclosed, it is by far the most pungent, the most truly fetid variety known to man. For you must know, gentlemen, that when the mariner is dosed, he likes to know that he has been well and truly dosed; with fifteen grains or even less of this valuable substance scenting him and the very air about him there can be no doubt of the matter; and such is the nature of the human mind that he experiences a far greater benefit than the drug itself would provide, were it deprived of its stench."
"Pray, sir, may I ask, where are we to stow it?"
"Why, Mr. Smith," said Stephen, "I had thought it would scarcely be noticed in the midshipmens' berth."
--from The Commodore
The delights of O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series approach nearer to the end with volumes 16 through 18, and are as wonderful as ever, though the series begins to get the sense of an ending. Captain Jack makes Admiral; both he and Stephen have their families and fortunes in hand, and the last of the long-term antagonists exit the stage, right down to Napoleon's first abdication. The final volumes, like the Hundred Days, are like an extended epilogue.
As always, the humorously jarring juxtaposition of absent-minded professorial fancy, Austenesque manners of speech, and coarse sea life pervades. One of those moments that personifies the tone: Jack regretfully informs a captured naive adventurer that, without the requisite letter of marque, his private military actions must be considered piracy, and the Naval regulations require that he be hanged; the adventurer replies, "I am concerned to hear it." Very highest recommendations, as always.
Eating People Is Wrong: Typee, by Herman Melville
Among the islands of Polynesia, no sooner are the images overturned, the temples demolished, and the idolaters converted into nominal Christians, than disease, vice, and premature death make their appearance. The depopulated land is then recruited from the rapacious hordes of enlightened individuals who settle themselves within its borders and clamorously announce the progress of the Truth. Neat villas, trim gardens, shaven lawns, spires and cupolas arise, while the poor savage soon finds himself an interloper in the country of his fathers, and that too on the site of the very hut where he was born. The spontaneous fruits of the earth, which God in his wisdom had ordained for the support of the indolent natives, remorselessly seized upon and appropriated by the stranger, are devoured before the eyes of the starving inhabitants, or sent on board the numerous vessels which now touch at their shores.
When the famished wretches are cut off in this manner from their natural supplies, they are told by their benefactors to work and earn their support by the sweat of their brows. But no fine gentleman born to hereditary opulence does manual labor come more unkindly than to the luxurious Indian when thus robbed of the bounty of Heaven. Habituated to a life of indolence, he cannot and will not exert himself; and want, disease, and vice, all evils of foreign growth, soon terminate his miserable existence.
My, what a lot of books about voyages there are in my library this year. It's as if white Europeans and Americans suddenly discovered everything and were just now setting out to fuck it all up. Although there was plenty of exploration going on during and since the Middle Ages, my historical reading has been very Eurocentric. Now, between Richard Henry Dana, Melville, the Flashman books and the Aubrey/Maturin books, we're really poking around in every corner of the globe, mostly by sea.
Typeee, the possibly autobiographical precursor to Moby Dick (coming later this year) is narrated by a sailor who abandons ship in the South Pacific and ends up on a lush, bountiful island that would be paradise except that he can't leave, and the otherwise friendly, happy natives are probably planning to eat him. Without fava beans.
There's a good deal of anthropology, weighted towards the annoying sort of "noble savage" philosophy that simultaneously looks down on indigenous peoples and puts them on a pedestal; accurate indictments of what the Christians and other white colonialists do to ruin societies that had never harmed them; and suspense about how the heck the narrator will ever escape. It's a good, brief read, and highly recommended.
Bankruptcy for Dummies: Cesar Birotteau, by Honore de Balzac
Every life has its apogee; there is a time in every existence when active causes bring about exactly proportionate results. This high noon of life, when the vital forces are evenly balanced and put forth in all the glory of their strength, is common not only to organic life; you will find it even in the history of cities and nations and institutions and ideas, in commerce, and in every kind of human effort, for, like noble families and dynasties, these too have their birth and rise and fall.
Cesar Birotteau is not one of Balzac's best known works; Mortimer Adler put it on one of his "western canon for the education of serious people" lists, and I believe he selected it because of the fascinating (to me, anyway, but I'm strange) and satirical description toward the end, of how bankruptcy proceedings were conducted in 19th century Paris: a combination of witch-burning, financial hocus pocus, doubletalk and greedy debtors and creditors making spectacles out of themselves. In Balzac's day, bankrupts frequently suicided (leaving grieving family dependents destitute and shamed) rather than face the personal dishonor and moralistic shunning that came with being unable to meet one's debts; nonetheless, if Balzac's novels are an indication, fiduciaries embezzled, speculated recklessly, and absconded on a regular basis, leaving depositors suddenly without funds, and made to feel at fault for it.
Birotteau is bankrupted on purpose by a scheming enemy who traps him in financial snares over a period of time; he begins the story as a prosperous middle class perfume merchant and deputy mayor and member of the Legion of Honor; slowly over the course of 300 pages he is faced with insurmountable crisis, and though indisputably seen as the victim of bad luck, is scorned and shamed and berated as if he were a bad person despite the good reputation built over years. Balzac was a frequent abuser of good, deep-souled protagonists whose long descents into misery and poverty were due to the tragic flaw of naivete.