The Fires of Vesuvius

This is how a history book should be written -- to inform, to encourage the reader to think, and to entertain. Anyone planning to visit Pompeii who wants to get beyond the standard guidebook clichés should read The Fires of Vesuvius beforehand, taking it along on the trip as well. It will be equally riveting for anyone with a serious interest in the world's most famous historical ruins.

The coach tours instruct their captive audiences that Pompeii is an ancient Roman town "frozen in time," a step back into A.D. 79 when it was buried by ashes from the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Obviously there is some truth in that, but as author Mary Beard shows in various ways, it is by no means entirely true.

For one thing, even motor coach lecturers point out that most of the murals and other artwork decorating the Pompeiian villas are no longer in the ruins, but on display in the Naples archaeological museum. And a damn good thing that is. Few would have survived had they been left in situ. 

Beard includes reproductions of several old drawings of ancient wall paintings and sculptures. The originals are now gone or severely faded. Archaeologists, historians, and art lovers mourn them.

When first excavated in the 18th century the buildings were in considerably worse shape than they are now, after much restoration. Damage from an earthquake in 62 had not been completely fixed when Vesuvius erupted, and the volcanic ash collapsed roofs, which in turn destroyed many interior furnishings. Frozen in time, but a time when a lot of the city had been trashed.

We don't know how much of the evidence uncovered was looted or lost after seeing the light for the first time after some 1,800 years. As if that weren't enough, the city was literally bombed by Allied aircraft in 1943! Why? Beard doesn't say. Of course many sites of historic importance were also blown up in the world wars, the most famous being the abbey Monte Cassino (founded by St. Benedict in 529)  in the campaign to take Rome. But at least Monte Cassino was a military target, believed occupied by the German army -- although there has been controversy about whether that was so at the time of the destruction. Were there German units touring the temples and brothels of Pompeii?

But such considerations make up only a small part of The Fires of Vesuvius. The author concentrates on what is still available to see now, with a historically informed enthusiasm. She seems to have read everything ever written about Pompeian history by ancient and modern authors, although she says her lists of sources are "inevitably selective"; the impressive bibliography includes works in several languages.

Beard wears her learning lightly. Although writing with enough detail to satisfy the curious non-specialist reader, she's no show-off. Her style avoids academic jargon, using ordinary but evocative language. Here's a sample:

One of the hardest things to recapture [for the modern visitor] is the combination of gaudy brightness and dingy gloom that characterised Pompeian houses of this type. The vast majority were originally painted in vivid colours, which have in many cases now faded to, literally, pale imitations of what they once were: deep reds to washed-out pinks, bright yellows to creamy pastel. 

And it was not just a matter of coloured walls. Though the original ceilings rarely survive, where they have been reconstructed (by piecing together the fallen plasterwork found on the floor) they also are sometimes ornately decorated and coloured in rich hues. ... Like the Pompeian street, many a Pompeian house would have been, in our terms, an assault on the visual senses.

The assault was perhaps mitigated by the general darkness. For while the sunlight would have streamed into the atrium through the open roof, and into the peristyle garden, many other rooms had little or no access to light -- except what they could borrow from those internal sources.

External windows, she says, were generally few and small. No wonder we have found so many once-hanging oil lamps.

The Fires of Vesuvius examines Pompeii, and a few nearby areas, from many angles -- streets, shops, residences, religious rites, fun and games, politics (even managing to make the last more interesting than you might think). The famous houses of ill repute (probably not scandalous at the time, although sited in their own "red light district" so to speak) and the gladiatorial games are given their due but not emphasized for the sake of sensationalism. 

Graffiti seem to have been scrawled all over town, including on the internal pillars of the Basilica in the Forum. Some were electioneering "posters," some sexual boasting, some silly jokes, pretty much like what might appear today on billboards or rest room walls.

Mary Beard is a professor (or whatever the proper term may be) at Newnham College, Cambridge. Newnham, incidentally, is where one of the distinguished early leaders of the Society for Psychical Research, Eleanor Sidgwick, taught.

Beard is a media celebrity in the U.K., where she has written and presented the BBC TV series Meet the Romans.

An instance of magic

This is the best contemporary novel I've read. If I wasn't so leery of sweeping statements, I'd be tempted to say the best, period.

Iain Pears began his writing career with a number of high-class mystery novels set in the art world. Presumably he got tired of being a semi-obscure penny-a-liner and decided he would plant his flag in the land of Serious Literature. In 1999 he opened the bidding with An Instance of the Fingerpost, also a kind of mystery but a very different kind, set in 17th century Oxford with an occult tinge.

Fingerpost was impressive, with a splendidly amazing surprise toward the end, but I thought it only partially satisfying. It suffered from the look-at-me-I'm-a-genius syndrome: told from too many points of view, a surfeit of characters (practically every famous name at the time and place shoe-horned in), too long. But it worked for his authorial career, making him famous among the dwindling ranks of recreational readers.

The Dream of Scipio is the follow-up, and while it doesn't seem to have made as much of a splash as Fingerpost, it's a better novel -- a great one. Pears apparently felt he no longer had anything to prove, and that was all to the good. Scipio is leaner, the historical details all relevant, the characters vivid, and the philosophical undertones engaging.

The main personae inhabit southern France, Avignon and nearby -- but widely separated in time, albeit each in a grim, threatening era. Narration switches back and forth among the eras. Devices like this can be pretentious if carried out unskillfully, but Pears creates a metaphysical thread running through the novel but doesn't slap you around with parallels. Thankfully, while each character and period is precisely drawn, there's enough ambiguity that the reader is invited, nay, required to ponder the connections and their deeper meanings. 

The first story takes place in the 5th century, when the power and laws of Rome are vestigial but pagan customs and philosophy retain influence. Manlius, a rich landowner, reluctantly agrees to become a Christian bishop because he recognizes that the Church has become the de facto authority holding together what tenuous civilization remains and the only bulwark against the tribes moving in from beyond the frontier.

Next is the 14th century when Avignon houses the Pope ... and the Plague delivers a more horrifying invasion than any army could. Olivier de Noyen, a poor scholar who manages to obtain the Pope's favor and becomes a member of his entourage, discovers a neo-Platonic manuscript titled The Dream of Scipio, written nearly a millennium earlier by Manlius.

The final episodes are set in the 1930s, centering on Julien Barneuve, an art historian with access to the archives of the Pope, who has long been restored to the Vatican. Barneuve, too, rediscovers the Dream as Europe stumbles toward another slaughterfest.

Each of the men has a woman counterpart who is influential, inspiring, frustrating, and an object of love. For Manlius, it is Sophia (yes, Wisdom), who if I recall right absorbed Greek philosophy at Alexandria where it long remained culturally significant and an irritant to the Church. Olivier finds his desire focused on Rebecca, who had been rescued from destitution by, and became the willing servant of, an aged and scholarly man, also a Jew. Julien has a long and complex relationship with Julia, a Jewish artist and wanderer who -- like all the other characters, come to think of it -- cannot quite find her place in the world. Needless to say, the 14th century and the '30s were especially dangerous for the Jewish women.

I fear I have given a clumsy summation of the story, and am at a loss trying to describe the spirit and style of The Dream of Scipio. Its events are described realistically, sometimes uncomfortably so; but Pears keeps the action from cascading over the rim into lurid drama.

Still, the book is much more, a meditation on the aspects of life whose essence goes beyond history: beauty, the relationship of this world to the invisible one, the nature of truth, good and evil. Regardless of their individual beliefs, intelligent readers should find the questions raised and the answers sometimes proposed fascinating.

Recommended unreservedly. Scipio is tough and magical. Even the American paperback edition's cover art (see above) beautifully, faithfully captures the novel's mood.

Philip Roth's plot against America

I've read a shocking novel by Philip Roth. "So what else is new?" Hasn't he been the literary enfant terrrible at least since Portnoy's Complaint? So he has, but The Plot Against America (published in 2004) shocked me for a reason I never would have expected: it's bad. Really.

As anyone who has followed Roth's writing career probably knows, Plot has a big "concept" (often a sign of a writer who's stuck). Set in the early 1940s, it's fictional alternative history. Charles A. Lindbergh is drafted by the Republicans to run for president in 1940 ... and wins. That's when serious trouble starts for the narrator, a nine-year-old named (wait for it) Philip Roth. His previously more or less normal youth and his family's life in the Jewish neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, is turned upside down.

Lindbergh, you see, is a terrible anti-Semite. So is his vice president, Burton K. Wheeler (an actual U.S. senator of the period). Lindbergh and Adolph Hitler reach an understanding -- Hitler can have free rein to gather Europe, including England, into the Third Reich in exchange for leaving America neutral and at peace.

Roth describes the growing persecution of American Jews. It starts fairly innocently, with a program through which young Jews are temporarily resettled in the American heartland, the better to be assimilated. Philip's -- the character's -- older brother goes off for a stint with a Kentucky farm family. He returns as a Lindbergh spokesman, to the horror of his relatives.

As things develop, pogroms erupt in a dozen American cities, and it's touch-and-go whether Newark will be among them. On October 15, 1942:

Just before dawn Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf [a Lindbergh supporter, married to Philip's aunt] is taken into custody by the FBI under suspicion of being "among the ringleaders of the Jewish conspiratorial plot against America." ... Others arrested in the early-morning roundup include Governor Lehman, Bernard Baruch, Justice Frankfurter, Franfurter protege and Roosevelt administrator David Lilienthal, New Deal advisers Adolf Berle and Sam Rosenman, labor leaders David Dubinsky and Sidney Hillman, economist Isador Lubin, leftist journalists I.F. Stone and James Wechsler, and socialist Louis Waldman.

Walter Winchell, the gossip columnist turned Lindbergh basher, is assassinated. Martial law is declared throughout the country. "Under martial law, America remains calm, though the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and the leaders of the American Nazi Party have jointly called upon the acting president 'to implement extreme measures to protect America from a Jewish coup d'état.'" And so on.

Although the novel is explicitly the drama of a family under the shadow of persecution, large patches of it read like a history book, at times like an old newspaper.

I was waiting for Roth to let us in on the joke. Surely he had something up his sleeve. He must be planning to kayo us with irony. If any irony was there, it was too subtle for me. Roth seems to have meant for us to take his American Jewish Hell literally.

How could the great Philip Roth have sunk to this?

I mean great. I admire Roth's work tremendously, even though some of it is uncomfortable to read. He's a superb stylist -- not in the whiz-bang colorful manner of Updike or Nabokov, but elegantly spare. He simply has the right word for every purpose. Often the words are plain, sometimes slangy, but they convey exactly what he wants to convey, with what overtones, in what mood.

Roth's detractors say he's always writing about the Jews. Well, Dickens wrote a lot of novels about the English. But part of what makes Roth's books -- his other books -- so entertaining is that his central characters are ambivalent about their religious culture. His Jews carry on their ghetto mentality in the United States where there are no Jewish ghettos, just neighborhoods. They are alienated from the goyim, yet want to be part of the gentile smart set.

This can result in terrific dialogue, of the kind Roth is famous for, between Jews with opposing views of secularism, Israel, assimilation, anything Jews can debate (which is anything). I don't know that Roth would agree with it, but he'd probably appreciate one of G.K. Chesterton's typically paradoxical quips: "It is strange that the Jews should be so anxious for international agreements. For one of the few really international agreements is a suspicion of the Jews."

The Plot Against America includes some of Roth's choice language and moments of lovely empathy. It contains a few brief arguments -- father vs. older son, principally -- about "President" Lindbergh. But compared to the intellectually rambunctious verbal fencing matches in, if I remember right, The Counterlife and Operation Shylock, those in Plot are perfunctory remnants. Roth's heart isn't in them.

Only a few years after the publication of the masterly, psychologically acute American Pastoral, Roth has devolved into something very like paranoia. He's so serious about the U.S., of the 1940s anyway, as a seething pit of anti-Semitism that he actually includes several appendixes citing what he thinks is evidence.

I'm not that familiar with all the details of Lindbergh's life, but he showed bad judgment in allowing himself to accept awards from the Nazi German hierarchy, for which he was something of an apologist (before World War II). Having your only child kidnapped and murdered can perhaps cloud your perceptions for you. Roth includes in the appendix as exhibit A for the prosecution Lindbergh's (actual) speech to the America First Committee, dedicated to keeping the country out of the European war, in September 1941. Here's the money quote from Lindbergh's address:

It is not difficult to understand why Jewish people desire the overthrow of Nazi Germany. The persecution they suffered in Germany would be sufficient to make them bitter enemies of any race.

No person with a sense of the dignity of mankind can condone the persecution of the Jewish race in Germany. But no person of honesty and vision can look on their pro-war policy here today without seeing the dangers involved in such a policy, both for us and for them. Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they will be among the first to feel its consequences. ...

[The Jews'] greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government. I am not attacking either the Jewish or the British people [whom he also accused of luring the U.S. into the war]. Both races, I admire. But I am saying that the leaders of both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war.

In hindsight this seems mistaken, of course. "Both races, I admire" is disingenuous, not to mention incorrect in its use of "race." For all that, it seems to me essentially a political argument, and within the realm of legitimate discourse in its own time. It is hardly a call for anti-Semitic frenzy of the kind Roth describes in the "Lindbergh" administration and the following "Wheeler" administration.

I read -- once again, this is from real, not "alternative," history -- about an American army unit that liberated the few survivors of a Nazi concentration camp (whose inmates were mostly Jews) in 1945. That same American army had doubtless suffered many casualties as it fought its way through Germany. General Eisenhower ordered every man, woman, and child in the next-door German village to march through the concentration camp and view the corpses and emaciated victims. That act, by Philip Roth's reckoning, was performed by the army of a country that wanted to kill its own Jews.

Roth remains on my short list of brilliant contemporary novelists, for what he produced before Plot and probably later (I haven't read anything more recent from him). So this is written more in distaste than anger. But a little anger, yes.

On first looking into Fagles's Homer

 

For those who haven't been keeping score, the late Robert Fagles's translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey have been the most popular editions of both since they were published in the 1990s.

This is the third Odyssey translation I've read. I don't remember the first, by Robert Fitzgerald, very well; it must be 30 years since he introduced me to the epic poem. Much more recently, my standard has been Richmond Lattimore (quoted underneath the banner above right). Of course, many others have tried to re-create Homer for readers of English in their time -- I'd had no idea how many till I checked it out. See the remarkable list here. Many, including the famous versions by Alexander Pope, have been literary re-tellings rather than close translations, and I'm not such a purist as to condemn them for that reason.

Fagles, like most modern translators, doesn't try for a strict hexameter, the bardic six-accents-per-line formula of the ancient Greek. He writes, in his postscript: "I would like to hold a middle ground, here between [Homer's] spacious hexameter line -- his 'ear, ear for the sea-surge,' as Pound once heard it -- and a tighter line more native to English verse. ... Working from a five- or six-beat line while leaning more to six, I expand at times to seven beats -- to convey the reach of a simile or the vehemence of a storm at sea or a long-drawn-out conclusion to a story -- or I contract at times to three, to give a point in speech or action sharper stress."

My impression is that Fagles wants to tell the Odyssey story in contemporary language while staying true to the spirit of the original. If -- no one is too sure -- the poem was originally recited before being written by Homer or someone else, it would not have been intended for a literary or intellectual audience. We can assume that its themes, however heroic or archetypal, were expressed in language that everyone could grasp. Fagles wants to communicate as directly as possible with his readers, but no more than Pope did, albeit Pope wrote for an aristocratic public who would have felt at home in his fine-spun eloquence.

Fagles's verse doesn't particularly try for grandeur, but it has dignity and goes down smoothly. Only occasionally, with phrases such as "we'll have a pot-luck" and "catch my drift," does he seem to me to overstep the line between informal speech and slang. 

When it comes to different interpretations of Homer, comparisons are odious. I expect most of the translations linked to above cast some light on the earliest masterpieces of Western civilization. Anybody who has what it takes to read a very long narrative poem in ancient Greek and try to recast it has my respect.

That said, I still think Lattimore did something astounding: produced a modern English Iliad and Odyssey in the six-stress-line meter, with a poetic sensibility, while staying as faithful as possible to the original. For anyone getting acquainted with Homer for the first time, Fagles can be recommended as probably the most accessible. But after reading Fagles, I want to return to Lattimore. 

And I don't mean that as a snide put-down of Fagles's achievement. It's a tribute to the inspiration offered by both.

C.W. Leadbeater: The Inner Life

 

I put off reading Charles W. Leadbeater's The Inner Life for quite a  while -- it has the stamp and bar code of the Tucson Public Library, where I bought it at a book sale, and it's getting on for nine years since I lived in Tucson.

Why the hesitation? The Inner Life consists of transcriptions of lectures given by Leadbeater at the Theosophical Society headquarters in Adhyar, India, around a century ago. I was afraid that the book would exhibit the excess verbosity of some of the writing at the time; I'm a busy person and both in my own work and in reading I prefer a leaner style. As it turned out, that was no problem. Although some of it is hard to understand -- see below -- its discussion, although the language is a little dated, flows smoothly enough without rhetorical overload.

The second reason why I'd put the book aside was my own ambivalence about Theosophy. Leadbeater was, after Helena P. Blavatsky and Annie Besant, perhaps the most significant figure in the Theosophical Society. I've read a little of the Theosophical literature -- dabbled in it, to be honest -- and don't know whether "HPB" and her followers had the inside track on secret spiritual wisdom, were self-deceived, or were frauds. I suspect some of each.

Richard Hodgson, an investigator for the Society for Psychical Research, went to Adhyar to observe HPB at work and report on claims that she was a fake extraordinaire. His report published in 1885 (as his own opinion; the SPR had and has no corporate views on any paranormal issue) found HPB guilty as charged. Much more recently, another SPR researcher, Vernon Harrison, reviewed the Hodgson report and concluded that it was biased. The whole controversy will make fascinating reading some day when I have time to read both Hodgson's and Vernon's full accounts, but for the moment, I'll admit that descriptions of Hodgson's report and other stories about HPB probably prejudiced me against Theosophy.

Whatever; Leadbeater was not Blavatsky, and deserves to be read for himself. If he has a claim to our attention, it is because (if you accept what he says) he was the most talented clairvoyant of all time, or at least the most talented who ever left extensive writings. In his books (e.g., Man Visible and Invisible) he minutely described the geography of the higher planes of existence, including the astral (where many spirits dwell), the mental, the etheric, and the buddhic. While the lectures edited and published in The Inner Life may not contain the detail he provides about the spiritual realm in the books, they still offer a glimpse of the big picture and the phenomena within it -- not only the planes but the human aura, thought forms, the chakras, and beings on a non-human evolutionary path such as devas and nature spirits.

Here and there, my misgivings about theosophical doctrines seemed to be borne out; come on, "Lords of Karma"? "The Great White Lodge"? But while I reserve my right to be skeptical of some of the terminology and supposed facts, I'm also conscious that words change over time, and what might have seemed an appropriate term a hundred years ago can sound ridiculous now. And the phenomena of the higher planes simply don't fit well into language designed for ordinary sense perception.

Other parts of Leadbeater's lectures that I find obscure may be baloney, or may be true and I simply lack the necessary intuitive or spiritual development to process them.

At many points, though, he has a knack for clarifying aspects of the hidden side of life through analogy and explanations which are both precise and open ended. Take this, on the Buddhist concept of nirvana, which is superficially understood by Westerners as extinction of the individual, or even non-existence:

It is quite true that the attaining of nirvana does involve the utter annihilation of that lower side of man which is in truth all that we know of him at the present time. The personality, like everything connected with the lower vehicles [i.e., bodies], is impermanent and will disappear. If we endeavor to realize what man would be when deprived of all which is included under these terms we shall see that for us at our present stage it would be difficult to comprehend that anything remained, and yet the truth is that everything remains -- that in the glorified spirit which them exists, all the essence of all the qualities which have been developed through the centuries of strife and stress in earthly incarnation [i.e., multiple incarnations] will inhere to the fullest possible degree. The man has become more than man, since he is now on the threshold of Divinity; yet he is still himself, even though it be a so much wider self.

The Inner Life is probably not recommendable for anyone just setting out on a study of the mysteries of existence. It is something of an advanced textbook (and like any textbook, not to be accepted uncritically). But for those with a background of knowledge of spiritual traditions, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism -- Theosophy was among the first of their transmission lines to the West -- it is likely to be, at the very least, stimulating and at best, inspiring. We who are far from the threshold of Divinity can still benefit from reading about the much wider self that we truly are.

As the Theosophist Hugh Shearman has written, "The truth about things beyond the separate details of our material existence comes to us more through the liberating emergence from within us of a unitive awareness or perception of ourselves and our world rather than through the occasional revelations handed down to us by sages and seers, valuable though these can sometimes. The best that the sages and seers give us is not so much authoritative and definitive information as evocations addressed by implication to a concealed potential which, collectively, we carry within us."

Forever young

[This entry is cross-posted at 2 Blowhards.]

May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.

— Bob Dylan

The pace is picking up. “My” generation is dying off.

I put quotes around “my” because it doesn’t necessarily mean exact chronological cohorts. Rather, people whose work affected me when I was young, or at least a lot younger than I am now, and left a lasting impression.

It’s hard to imagine them aging, impossible to comprehend them dying. They and I will always be in the 1960s or 1970s when I think of them. (That’s not so long ago in my mind, although for young adults it’s the Pleistocene Age.)

Just this week, two people I never met personally but with whom I connected with emotionally passed out of this life.

The first was Kate McGarrigle, one-half of Kate and Anna McGarrigle. Their first album floored me when I heard it in the early ’70s; some 35 years later, it still does. Practically every track on the album sparkles. They were bilingual “English” girls from French Canada, blessed with splendid voices, individually and in harmony. I’m not sure which songs were written by which sister (the sublime “Heart Like a Wheel” is credited to Anna), but they were synergy in action.

Kate and Anna released other albums over the decades. While they were of uneven quality, and none in my estimation surpassed that original effort, the craftsmanship was always there. They continued to offer consolation to those of us who were immiserated as popular music sank to ever-more artificial, and often cretinous, levels.

The other loss this week that affected me was the detective novel writer Robert B. Parker. I believe I discovered him by way of his first book, The Godwulf Manuscript, about the same time as the sisters McGarrigle swum into my ken. He created the tough, wisecracking detective Spenser who was to Boston what Hammett’s Sam Spade was to San Francisco and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to Los Angeles.

Parker has his detractors, and I agree with some of their reasons. After the first few novels, the Spenser series started to roll off an assembly line -- still entertaining enough to be good company on an airplane ride or for light reading, but successive titles did not grow in depth over the years like Ross Macdonald’s, for instance.

But it was thrilling enough to my young self to learn that the Raymond Chandler tradition was alive and well, and the snappy dialogue probably influenced my own style, as it undoubtedly influenced many others. (I’m not, of course, saying I imitate Parker or comparing myself to him as a writer.)

In the 1960s, even before the McGarrigles and Parker came on the scene, the San Francisco Chronicle’s wonderful columnist Herb Caen wrote a piece I remember: about how he dreaded opening the paper to the obituaries and seeing names of people he’d known for years.

The English poet Philip Larkin said that once he had reached a certain age, there was always Something standing behind him, which he could almost see if he glanced over his shoulder. (Henry James called death “that distinguished thing.”)

We are not forever young, nor are the people who are part of our lives, at least not in the way we imagine when we ourselves are young.

But maybe in a different sense we are. According to many mediumistic communications from the Other Side, souls who have passed over usually take the astral form of the most physically vibrant years of their earth lives. So, even a person who dies very old might have the appearance in spirit of a 20-year-old. Time and aging have no place in the afterlife. Forever young.

Caught in a literary Yale-storm

Michael Blowhard, of 2 Blowhards fame, protests the narrowness of academically correct fiction in a posting about an Open Yale course (I accidentally typed "curse" — hmmm) on "The American Novel Since 1945." He says:

Take that course and you'd learn little if anything about postwar crime, horror, romance, or western fiction. You'd discover next to nothing about erotic fiction or humorous fiction. You'd remain clueless about the enduring influence of writers like Mickey Spillane and Jacqueline Susann. (I bet you also wouldn't wake up to the history of the postwar American publishing business.) Yet you'd emerge convinced that you'd "done" the postwar American novel. And you'd have Yale's imprimatur bolstering your confidence about that judgment.

Here are the novels that will be taught to litivores seeking the Yale professor's insights.

Let's see: I've actually read a couple of them (Lolita and, when I was a pup, On the Road). I've read quite a few of Philip Roth's novels, although not The Human Stain, and Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, though not Franny and Zooey. I vaguely recollect that a writer I think highly of praised Wright's Black Boy. The names of Flannery O'Connor, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy are known to me.

But I have to confess complete ignorance of Maxine Hong Kingston, Marilynne Robinson, Edward P. Jones, and the "students' choice," Jonathan Safran Foer. I am culturally deprived (I accidentally typed "depraved" — hmmm). Get me a grant. Who's the Obama literary czar?

Should I happen to take Professor Amy Hungerford's course — she's not half cute, is she? — to improve my mind, here are some of the conundrums, condoms, and carborundums I could explore.

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior:

Referring to examples throughout the syllabus, but especially Maxine Hong Kingston's Woman Warrior, Hungerford describes the overriding tendency of American novels written after 1945 to explore the tension between individual and collective identities and to interrogate the artistic and political stakes of competing notions of authenticity.

Is Amnesty International on the case? Are harsh interrogation methods, including waterboarding, used to interrogate the … erm, I'm not sure what the object of the verb is, "stakes" or "notions." Why must notions of authenticity compete? Why can't they cooperate? Why can't we all just get along?

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping:

The loss of identity that Emerson describes as becoming a "transparent eyeball" in the woods, Robinson brings into the realm of the home, the built environment. The individual voice and its guiding consciousness are all mixed up in the material substance of the world, giving them a concurrent fixity and fragility that it is Robinson's talent, and our challenge, to explore.

Emerson's lost identity became a transparent eyeball in the woods? Ah, yes, I remember his essay now: the old farmer, chopping down trees to add to his pasture, stopped to pick up the eyeball, irritated to have to interrupt his task. "Yah, tha' use to be Ralph all right, th'old git," his voice with its guiding consciousness said. He contemptuously tossed the eyeball aside, but it and his voice and his consciousness got all mixed up in the material substance of the world. There they remain to this day, fixed and fragile, I've heard it whispered on dark nights in the cabin at the shore of Loon Lake. Challenge enough for anybody.

Edward P. Jones, The Known World:

Professor Hungerford suggests that Jones revives a nineteenth-century form of the novel when his narrator takes on a God-like omniscience, but unlike the nineteenth-century novel's narrators, Jones's omniscient narrator provides little in the way of God-like consolation.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and don't you dare tell Me different. I know everything, you little pipsqueak reader. But even if it was the worst of times, don't worry, be happy. That's why you read Me, for consolation. Not like that wrong number of a deity Jones — think you'll get a scrap of comfort out of him? He was the inspiration for "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by that Reverend Edwards who used to practice his frown in front of a mirror.

Students' Choice Novel: Jonathan Safran Foer,
Everything is Illuminated:

In thus attempting to marry the nineteenth-century social novel with Postmodernist, or late Modernist, techniques, Foer participates in an emerging tradition that risks the confusion between resonant emotion and sentimental cliché.

Now this I can relate to. I'm constantly confusing resonant emotion and sentimental cliché. I'd like to believe I've had some small influence in the emergence of this emerging tradition.

Taking leave of our senses

When our nation and world are in deep crisis, it's especially worth remembering that our senses, the information they provide and the thoughts based on that information do not tell us everything about reality. No matter how bad things are or we fear they will be, there are finer and deeper realities. In some of them, there is no crisis, no problem.

We can have entrée into other worlds, which our ordinary senses block out. Some of them are psychic or "astral," with no particular spiritual importance, but they demonstrate that phenomena exist that cannot be understood through the official present worldview of scientific materialism -- what the late Dr. Arthur Ellison, who was twice president of the Society for Psychical Research, called "naïve realism."

Paranormal experiences (including telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, apparitions, out-of-body experiences, and much else) are a fact. They happen to people, and not just to eccentrics or professed psychics. The evidence is overwhelming to the point that denying it can be done only by rejecting solid evidence. If you're not yet convinced, spend some time reviewing the sites linked to in the blogroll (Man and the Unknown is a good starting place) or read a few good books on parapsychology.

Arthur Ellison was the kind of psychical researcher that skeptics hate: there was no way to accuse him of being easily duped. His background was in a "hard science," electrical engineering. He headed the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at City University, London, wrote electrical engineering textbooks and learned papers. He was dubious about many claims of Spiritualists -- not that he doubted the reality of the phenomena they produced, but he didn't believe most of their messages were from spirits of the deceased in the "Great Beyond."

Yet Ellison, a scientist to the core, spent 50 years studying paranormal phenomena. He went to countless séances, observed experiments in which people altered physical reality through purely mental means (psychokinesis), and observed "impossible" events. He was one of the three SPR investigators of the Scole Experiment (see here and here).

Ellison had previously been, I believe, a lukewarm believer in survival of death. Perhaps what he saw at Scole firsthand clinched it for him. A parenthetical note: He died only a week or two before the first SPR annual conference I attended six or seven years ago. At the conference opening, the session leader -- I seem to remember it was David Fontana -- spoke an informal eulogy. Instead of ending it with the usual deep-sense-of-loss and will-be-sorely-missed platitudes, he concluded: "If anyone receives what they believe is a message from Arthur, please let the Society know."

Ellison wrote:

Many people think that science is the business of describing the physical world 'out there' with ever increasing accuracy. That scientists are, with the aid of various tools such as microscopes and telescopes, together with all the paraphernalia of the modern scientific laboratory, achieving ever greater accuracy in their pictures of the physical world.

This view of science is completely, utterly and fundamentally wrong! In fact science is instead merely the process by which we build mental models to represent our experiences.

If experiences appear to be representations or derivations from a solid world external to the experiencer, which is what most people perceive most of the time, then science's "mental models" will reflect that. And the models will have no room for experiences of a different sort, the kind we call paranormal.

Yet people (and by no means only "believers") do keep having experiences in which they perceive or know things that they could not have acquired through the normal senses. The choices are to ignore them, brand the experiencers as mentally off base, or study them. Psychical research, writes Ellison, "is much more exacting than many other scientific subjects. It forces one to examine the very basis of one's views about consciousness and the universe."

James Hillman is a psychologist, though not a parapsychologist. (He is also that rare bird, a psychologist who writes elegantly and un-academically.) But he too believes that many of our difficulties arise from the refusal to allow into consciousness the awareness of non-material phenomena.

I've been reading his book The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling. Hillman has been much influenced by C.G. Jung -- I wouldn't demean Hillman by calling him a "disciple" -- and his work has been dedicated to turning psychology back to its transcendent element. He believes scientific reductionism has impoverished us mentally and spiritually. We need to pay attention to the invisible as much as the visible.

"In the kindgom (or is it a mall?) of the West, consciousness has lifted the transcendent ever higher and farther away from actual life," Hillman writes. "The bridgeable chasm has become a cosmic void."

In prior ages, almost every human society took seriously unseen presences -- gods, angelic beings, spirits of place, ancestors who had passed out of the body. The seen was an extension of the unseen, the known of the unknown. Today, thanks not only to science but to the arts of commercial promotion, the pleasures and objects of the senses are what call to us. We are mesmerized by things. (Ideas, including religious and political ones, also come to revolve around things: burqas, flags, carbon dioxide, products.)

"Once invisibility has been removed from backing all the things we live among ... all our accumulated 'goods' have become mere 'stuff,' deaf and dumb and dead consumables," Hillman says.

The Soul's Code seems to me a frustrating book, alternately revelatory and exasperating -- sometimes in the same sentence. Like his inspirer Jung, who in my view went haywire with meaningless notions like "sychronicity" (a cause that isn't a cause) and eventually saw everything, including flying saucers, as archetypes, Hillman tends to reify metaphors.

In this book, his theme is the daimon, a kind of guiding spirit who urges the individual to follow his or her path chosen before birth. He includes silly descriptions of celebrities' lives as examples of people who succeeded because their daimon made them succeed. What about people whose lives end in failure? I guess there are a number of underachieving daimons, or daimons whose own daimons are asleep at the switch. He writes about the daimon almost as though he's describing an elf that sits on your shoulder and boxes your ears when you stray from your life's path.

But Hillman has an important larger vision. He wants us to rediscover that the visible derives its meaning from the invisible.

"When the invisible forsakes the actual world -- as it deserts Job, leaving him plagued with every sort of physical disaster -- then the visible world no longer sustains life, because life is no longer invisibly backed," he writes. "Then the world tears you apart."

One dimension of the invisible is Spirit. It is there, ours to rise to, when the world tears us apart.

Nicolas Freeling

He was acknowledged as one of the finest crime fiction writers in the ’60s and ’70s; continued writing novels long after. He is semi-forgotten now. No matter. As Gustav Mahler said of himself, his time will come.

That might seem extravagant, comparing a genre novelist to one of the greatest composers of classical music of all time. In his own field, though, Nicolas Freeling deserves the comparison.

Freeling was sui generis. An expression that has also faded with the decline of Latin knowledge in criticism. It means, literally, self-generated, and it’s almost the ultimate compliment you can pay an artist. Someone who has created out of his own experience, rather than following models. Everyone has influences, and there’s nothing wrong with that – in fact, it would be foolish not to be influenced by other artists who are worth it. But not many can digest influences and then go their own way.

He had the great fortune early in his writing career not only to be recognized by top publishers (Golancz in the U.K. and Harper in the U.S.) but, more important in our age, by a TV producer. The series Van der Valk, based on his most famous character, Amsterdam police inspector Piet Van der Valk, ran for nearly 20 years in Britain. (As far as I know, it was never picked up in the States. I saw one episode of the show, in which Barry Foster played the detective, and it was above the norm for its type.) Both factors, but I suspect especially the financial returns from being on the telly, allowed Freeling to range in his own eccentric way thereafter in his novels.

Freeling has been compared to Georges Simenon, whom he is said to have admired. I haven’t read enough of the latter to say. But within the crime fiction genre, Freeling is – if not in a category of his own – close enough to make no difference.

After he got tired of writing about Van der Valk, he created a new character, Henri Castang, an inspector of the French Police Judiciaire. Castang inhabits an anonymous city resembling Strasbourg, where Freeling lived in his later days. Both Van der Valk and Castang as far as you can get from brain cell athletes like Poirot or Holmes. Neither solves fiendishly clever murderers by brilliant deduction. The detectives just wade in, get acquainted with everyone who played a role in the victim's life, and start gently messing with people's minds to see how they react. Freeling’s detective novels are not about who did it, or how, but why.

Freeling’s crime novels (not all of which center on detective work) are psychological puzzles, character studies. The author is interested not only in people, but in their families, associates, and cultural milieu. This curiosity extends to major characters and those with walk-on parts.

From Double-Barrel, with Van der Valk, unusually, narrating:

For information about all sorts of eccentric things, often simply because I had noticed something and been puzzled, I went to the burgomaster’s secretary; she was the greatest help. She knew everybody and everything …

From her I learned of the long-standing quarrel between the Head of Parks and Gardens and the Municipal Gas Works. She knew the whole history of the throat-cutting between the contractors for the new Garden Suburb, and the figures of the loss taken by the subcontractor in electrical equipment for the sake of prestige – it had been she who had seen that he had tried to make the loss up by skimping the workmanship. She was illuminating about the solitary Communist member of the council, about the row over the new hospital equipment that all the doctors claimed was inadequate, about too much having been spent on the swimming bath, and got back by cheese-paring on the new dustbin lorries.

He can sketch a personality in admirably few words. In The King of the Rainy Country, Van der Valk is asked to locate – very discreetly – an old-money oddball, Jean-Claude Marschal, who has disappeared with no apparent motive and no sign of foul play. He goes to interview Mrs. Marschal in their luxurious Amsterdam flat. It’s a standard scene in many detective novels, the down-to-earth detective meeting the rich wife, but Freeling refuses to fall into the routine of making her a condescending bitch. Quite the reverse:

A woman in a silk housecoat was standing on the steps. Narrow vertical stripes, olive-green and silver-grey.

‘Sorry – I was staring admiring.’ She had his card in her hand which she gave back to him, with a careful slow look of appraisal.

‘That does not matter in the least. Perhaps we will go in here, shall we?’ She opened a door beyond the stairs and waited for him.

‘Please sit down, Mr Van der Valk, and be quite comfortable. You have plenty of time? Good. So have I. Would you like some port?’

‘Not just by myself.’

She gave him a slight smile. ‘Oh no. I like port.’ She did not ring, but went to do it herself.

And Marschal himself, as Van der Valk gets to know him in absentia:

Jean-Claude Marschal was bored. He had a boring wearisome life, and found it tedious beyond belief. That was plain to grasp: the man simply found everything too easy. He had vast amounts of money, and was good at everything. He could win things without trying, help himself to everything he fancied without effort. If he dropped a sixpence, he found half-a-crown lying on the path. There was not much that gave him pleasure, not even vice, not even crime. To run off just because he was sick of everything was quite plausible.

Nicolas Freeling, 1927-2003

Freeling has perfect pitch for the slightly pompous talk of European officialdom of an earlier time, the '60s through the '80s (maybe it hasn’t changed much since). In A City Solitary, Walter Forestier, whose home in a French mountain town somewhere near the Pyrennes had been broken into while he was at home alone, tied up and menaced, is interviewed by a woman judge. In the French legal system, a juge d’instruction is part of the investigative process.

This animal of a judge was keeping him waiting. The company was not such as to give much stimulus: the usual lady whose nose needed blowing; the usual despondent détenu handcuffed to a black and silver gendarme; the usual businessman, venomous and carefully rehearsed. And how did he look, to these others? He has the feel of greasy steel upon his wrists, and certainly exhales an impression of deserving no better.

At last a clerk popped her head out. A small conniving smile. Walter has a quickly flitting vision of an office unexpectedly gay and decorative.

“I say!” gushing without meaning to, “I like your flowers! Sorry – good morning, Madame le Juge.” A small amused turn to the corners of her mouth. And pretty! …

“Sit down then, Monsieur.”

The clerk, at a side table, is not without merit either: flower-bright with shell-pink horn rims; fair hair in ringlets. Grinning more broadly than her boss.

“We do try, don’t we, Genviève? The flowers help us, from becoming too desiccated? Mm, I’ll come straight to the point, Mr. Forestier. I have a report here from your local brigade of gendarmerie, stating that when questioned on this matter you showed yourself a reluctant and evasive witness. What do you have to say about that?”

“True, I suppose.”

“That is candid. You understand then that I am not a hostile counsel.” Mimicking “ ‘Oho, so you admit that.’ I ask you to explain your attitude.”

“I don’t have one; I’m simply unwilling to testify.”

“I show no surprise at that. But I wish to understand.”

“The police seemed to have plenty of evidence. Or they wouldn’t have come to me.”

“The Sergeant explained that an eyewitness naturally carries weight; with an instructing magistrate – myself; eventually before a court?”

“He put no pressure on me.”

“Reluctant witnesses have in general two sorts of motivation. One is shame towards recounting damaging or humiliating episodes. They may feel they don’t show up very well. Could that account at all for your standpoint?”

“It’s true that I don’t much like to talk about the episode.”

“There is also fear. Of course many people go in fear of the law. Simply of ‘histoires’; of lengthy and tedious procedures. We can eliminate that? Good: fear then of being implicated – of the law’s powers of constraint, coercion, even punishment? I accept your denial. Or lastly, frequent in cases of violence, a fear of reprisals? Or some vengeance visited upon them for helping to shop a malefactor?”

“I’m not, I don’t – sorry, I only mean that’s not my argument.”

Smiling – “I’m waiting patiently to hear your argument. When we’ve got through your objections or hesitations you make a statement, my clerk takes it down, and in all probability the matter’s finished with. Is that so hard?”

Things go too fast, and Walter does not “think”. Later he will think that lawyers, like doctors, like engineers, are so accustomed to their intellectual superiority over all comers that they fall the easiest of prey – it’s classic – to card-sharps, confidence-tricksters and speculators of even the crudest sort.

Forestier is taken prisoner in his own home in the first chapter of A City Solitary. It seems to me a masterpiece of malevolent atmosphere, truly terrifying, even though not a drop of Forestier’s blood is spilled … though he discovers afterward that his dog has had its throat slit.

The generation before mine, thinks Walter, was unusually unlucky. Two European wars, and Spain in between. I have known people who have fought in all three, and what’s more survived them all. Whereas mine was fantastically lucky. Too young for Hitler and too old now for any emotion but complacency. The odd bomb here or there is only Corsican folklore. Europe has become a monstrous suburb and the fox or the hawk are scarcely seen. Only the rats are still there.

Freeling was himself of that generation slightly too young for World War II, but the events of ’39 to ’45 were real and present to him. His books are dyed in places with the authentic atmosphere of a civilizational catastrophe that some managed to live through, while being deeply changed by it. Writing about the Nazi high command that was somehow entwined with the past of a character, he refers to one of the Nazis as “the Fat Man.” He doesn’t bother to spell out that he means Göring. When I was a kid, people still said, “the war,” and everyone understood which.

He’s as deft describing places as people. Background can be terribly boring if an author labors over it, but Freeling is interested in where people live, the furnishings of their dwellings, their taste in books and art. His fascination, expressed concisely and with an eye for the telling detail, is infectious for the reader.

… He was in a street on the outskirts of the town, a very French street leading up a hillside to nowhere, made of gravel for drainage, the potholes and bumps nicely levelled with snow, and people’s furnace clinker strewn about to keep it from getting too slidy. The Impasse des Roses, the roses were in people’s front gardens, covered with little plastic sacks against frost.

The houses were French too, amusing and individual. Ridiculous mixtures of the Savoyard chalet, made of logs built out over the hillsides, and fantasies of prestressed concrete, with garages in the basement instead of cows. They all had glassed terraces and double windows, eccentric roofs, tremendous rockgardens and the kind of letterbox with a wooden bird of no known species that nods its beak when you shove an electricity bill in the slot.

Freeling’s style shifted over his long writing career. The early Van der Valks, from the ’60s and ’70s, were reasonably straightforward police procedurals, albeit unorthodox. In the ’80s, when Castang took center stage, the plotting – never Freeling’s strength – became almost completely beside the point, the language often approaching impressionism.

Although many of the Castang novels are as penetrating in their way as those featuring Van der Valk – I especially recommend Wolfnight – they are a little difficult at times. He acquired a bad habit of making obscure, unidentified references that were surely lost on many readers, myself included. And it has to be admitted that his last few books have only intermittent flashes of the old Freeling cut-and-thrust.

If his reputation is in eclipse, it is partly because he is just too sophisticated for a mass audience. His dialogue is great, but doesn’t consist of the kind of snappy one-liners popularized by Raymond Chandler and carried on by such as Robert B. Parker. The titles of his books are strange, although they are usually quotations, and paid off in the text.

“The king of the rainy country” is Freeling’s metaphor for the wayward millionaire Jean-Claude Marschal, and is adopted from a Baudelaire poem:

"I am like the king of a rainy country: rich – and impotent; young – and very old. Who despises the bowing-down of his preceptors, is as bored with his dogs as with all his other creatures, whom nothing now, neither game nor falcon, can cheer. Not even subjects come to die beneath his balcony. A grotesque song from the indulged clown can no longer unwrinkled the forehead of this cruelly ill man: his fleur-de-lysed bed has become a tomb, and the ladies in waiting, who find any prince good looking, can think up no more lewd costumes to drag a smile from this young skeleton. The expert that makes his gold has never managed to purify the corrupt element in his being, and in the bloodbaths the Romans showed us, recalled to their memory by ageing tyrants, he has failed to rewarm the dulled stupor of a corpse in which blood no longer flows, but Lethe’s green water."

A City Solitary is the remote village in which Walter Forestier confronts evil. The title, we learn, derives from the “penitential psalm known as the Lamentations of Jeremiah, forming part of the old monastic ritual of Tenebrae”:

How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people.