THE ANATOMY OF INFLUENCE - Literature as a Way of Life

I have nearly always been moved to reconsider my ideas on literature and often life and faith by the writings of Harold Bloom.  His unpopularity notwithstanding, Prof. Bloom is convincing where other academics and critics are simply strident.  Arguing from sincerity is a fool's game;  belief is irrelevant and intense belief less so.  It is mere zealotry which loses on all levels.  Bloom does not deign to lower himself to such nonsense.

I conceive of the practice of reading as the creation of a map that charts flows, peaks, crossroads and connections between ideas and books.  Deeply influenced by the short paragraph On Exactitude in Science, I am taxed by the Carrollian irony of a map so large, so detailed that it takes the place of place.  The ironic mapping of empiricism in science and, indeed, in literature in this Borges piece denies any salvation offered by Galilean modelling.  Are all attempts at representation in literature and science nothing more than exercises in the futile task of replacing the world with a model of our own making?  If it is so, then why bother?  What model could be the equal of the universe?  Is equivalency enough?  Theory first, observation after?  Or vice versa.  Now that is a dilemna worthy of Lewis Carroll.  We, modern humanity as a whole, have opted for the latter - empricism is king.  Asking if that is right gets one killed.  Or at least threatened.

As much as my influence is the map, the cartographic model, Bloom's is the labyrinth.  Heavily influenced by labyrinths in Borges, Bloom's model encompasses mazes and mysteries, hidden passages that lead back to beginnings and blind  alleys that lead one to the center.  The center of what?  I think that is what Bloom is attempting to communicate in The Anatomy of Influence.  Complement to his earlier tour de force The Anxiety of Influence, Bloom has created a narrative that is so labyrinthine, so representative of his own marvelous mind though that I think he has left most of us behind.  His humility - he never stops talking - doesn't necessarily serve him well here.  He says so much we can't possibly follow.  There are bread crumbs that help, but not nearly enough to make it possible to find our way in this Borgesian dream.  It is the measure of our own abilities as readers how much of Bloom we can take in.  In fact, it may be the measure of our humanity since the capacity for close, deep reading is the tell of our worth.  As Shakespeare may have invented the Human, we achieve humanity by reading ourselves more and more deeply into him and all the others in the canon.  Yes, Bloom believes in the canon;  what else is there to believe in?

When I began writing this book, in the summer of 2004, I intended an even more baroque work than it has become.  My model was to be Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a thousand-page labyrinth that has dazzled me since I was young...  Traces of Burton's marvelous madness abide in this book, and yet it  may be that all I share with Burton is an obsessiveness somewhat parallel to his own.

I think I am grateful Bloom never lived up to his ambition.  But this note from his Praeludium confirms my own belief that Bloom is intentionally writing a labyrinth for us to get lost in.  Maybe he has become lonely in his labyrinth and is merely looking for company.

Valéry, so far as I know, never found the right time and place to "discuss the influence of a mind on itself and of a work on its author."  This book is my time and place to do so.

Nothing could be clearer or more appalling.  I, for one, am grateful for the book and its intensely idionsyncratic look into Prof. Bloom's mind, but I happily admit I am also intimidated.  I hope to understand some of it someday, but for now I'll have to settle for being a gleaner who can only hope for a real harvest of my own.

The appalling lack of curiosity and literacy in every corner of the Bush White House should leave each of us gasping for air.  It isn't to be so.  Part of the appeal of this worst of all presidents for Americans has been his crass insipidity and deliberate ignorance.  We ought to have spewed him from our mouths at first taste.  But he was, instead, happily gathered in as one of the family.  For shame.

À REBOURS

Translated variously as Against the Grain, or Against Nature, J. K. Huysmans' slight book is (sort of) the 'poisonous French novel' of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.

A conscious rejection of French Naturalism and Realism, À Rebours follows an enervated aristocrat through a journey of aesthetic decay.  Using assorted arts, antiques, books, languages, perfumes, tastes, and scents, the hero - he was so to many young artists - Des Esseintes works through the extremes of sensory experience to expurgate the ennui he feels in fetid French society.  Huysmans immerses Des Esseintes in plants, jewels, and, strangely enough, the exquisite beauties of the high Roman church - the vestments, the liturgies, the Eucharist, the music, the texts.  Each one quickly loses its appeal for Des Esseintes as he maximizes its promise and  moves on to something else.  Declining in health, he returns to some of these only to be sickened even further.  His body failing as the old house he has made his hermitage is made decadent through Des Esseintes' efforts, his physician orders him back to the Paris which bred his original discontents.  The claustrophobia of his tower mimics the closeness of his soul.

Now a bourgeois haven for the newly wealthy, Paris society is anathema to the effete monster.

It was the vast, foul bagnio of America transported to our Continent; it was, in a word, the limitless, unfathomable, incommensurable firmament of blackguardism of the financier and the self-made man, beaming down, like a despicable sun, on the idolatrous city that grovelled on its belly, hymning vile songs of praise before the impious tabernacle of Commerce.

Des Esseintes is in throes of ecstasy over the vulgarity that money has bestowed on the very societies which he loathes at the beginning of Huysman's story.  The young Victorian Wildes may not have felt the irony.  Their own love of Des Esseintes feels like a panicky clinging to old hierarchies that no longer obtain.

À Rebours is often referred to as the pinnacle of decadence;  it is named the ultimate expression of the sensibilites Walter Pater described at the beginning of the aesthetic movement of the Victorian age.  I disagree.  Des Esseintes' indulgences don't have the fine shadings of Pater's Marius, for example.  Neither does Huysmans have the prose style of a genius like Pater.  Compare any passage in The Renaissance, Appreciations or Imaginary Portraits to Huysmans' book.  Pater's prose glows;  it is subtle and beautiful where Huysmans' is bloated and sluggish. 

Zola suggested that Huysmans broke his own genre with this book.  He wrote that, "no type of literature was possible in this genre, exhausted by a single volume".  It is plausible, for no other novel of this type seems feasible.  What is there left to say in this manner, in this repressive, self-regarding way?

Perhaps I am being unfair to a book which clearly affected some of the best writers of the late 19th century.  But some seminal works are so tied to their eras as to be unmanageable ever afterward.  Huysmans' rancid little book seems so to me.

I do recognize the self-same self-indulgence of the Bushites as Des Esseintes.  The closed circle of a mind that has only its own sensibilities to attend to is the kind of mind which reeks of insanity and decay.  Unfortunately we still have the stench of that decay in our nostrils and filth on our hands after eight years of the nastiness of fiddling with corpses.  This book does go in the library, and we do recommend it for reading, but it must be done with an especially sharpened mind and a skepticism towards its self-blessed atrocities.

WHY AMERICA FAILED; The Roots of Imperial Decline

It is the conventional wisdom, the accepted truth that requires the greatest skepticism.  The rabiditiy in response to the challenge to these conventional truths may be the indicator of how corrupt they really are.

I have been a bit stunned by the response of the professional reviewing class to Morris Berman's latest book.  Deep in their hearts I believe they realize that American Progressivism is another kind of 'hustle' and may be foundationally nothing more or less than another stone in the wall that is the edifice of our multifarious failure.  As I discover more and more about the various 'grass-roots' movements, even apart from their politics, (OWS, Tea Party, Astroturfing, Greens, etc.) I become less and less enamored of the entire idea of Progressivity.  I understand many of these groups are committed to ideas that are not progressive as such, but their fundamental approach similarly dismisses as heretical any careful analysis or thoughtful, multi-sided approach  In other words, it's the same hustle that has poisoned America from the beginning.

The progressives in the media industry seem to me to have been paying Prof. Berman's book lip-service while wailing on about how wrong he is.  These objections often take the form of denying the basic premise of the book.  They insist it can all be fixed if we just do x.  Others make conventional objections to his subtle and complex analysis of non-hustling cultures.  But Berman makes his courageous and unorthodox critique stick with a careful historical analysis of American history.

I find it interesting that the book is titled Why America Failed, and not Why the United States Failed.  Berman's original title apparently was Capitalism and Its Discontents which his publisher talked him into putting aside.  It's a better title, but not one for our hustling culture.  But America was the idea which Berman demonstrates was corrupted or, better yet, illusory from the beginning.  The utopian ideas our founders chucked about like free candy in a noisy kindergarten, were maybe sincere, but undercut by the rush for personal wealth which was the real motive for the flight to the New World.  For instance, we find it difficult to reconcile our Founding Father's demands for equality and liberty while keeping slaves and denying suffrage to everyone.  But we love our delusions.

The Hegelian knot at the center of America is Berman's focus.  The ultimate working-out of our Republicanism is finally our destruction.  We can't stop hustling because it is the definition of who we are.  Either fulfillment of the huckster culture or denial of it is the end of America.  The virtues we claim to stand for don't really exist in our lives.  Meaning, in the broadest sense of the word, is irrelevant to money.  The stage flames at the end of Faust are just technological wizardry.  He was on fire from the beginning, as are we.  As someone once told me, "Don't tell me what your priorities are;  tell me what you do and I'll tell you what's important to you."  It hurts, but it's true.  In order to be Capitalists we must be Narcissists - there's no other way.

The best guide to the future, of course, is the past.  Not that change does not occur, but for the most part it tends to be evolutionary, and characterized by great continuity with what came before.  Hustling, the pursuit of affluence, technology, and "progress," have amounted to a huge steamroller in American history, a steamroller that is now going off the edge of a cliff.  And our ingrained optimism has not helped much in this regard;  indeed it has blinded us to what is going on. Given this native demand for "solutions," even when there are none, books of this sort... (are) required to conclude on a positive note, showing how things can be fixed... if only "we" take matters into our own hands and create a different outcome.  But this is fantasy.

As Berman has demonstrated in Why America Failed, we actually built the steamroller on the edge of the cliff and happily climbed all over it like children on a playground toy while it slowly tipped over.  We are not  doing much more right now than throwing our arms in the air and squealing ecstatically like riders on a roller coaster flying down the highest hill.  But there is no stopping at the bottom of this ride.  There is no recovery with a new peak of wealth to climb.  Eventually these tracks simply end and our ride is over.


As an aside, I have been reading Why America Failed while simultaneously re-reading Richard Hofstadter's remarkable Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.  It is a great pairing.  The two historical analyses complement each other quite nicely and provide full and rich commentary on foundational currents of America.  Try them together:

Everywhere, as the machine tradition arose, it drew a line of demarcation between the utilitarian and the traditional.  In the main, America took its stand with utility, with improvement and invention, money and comfort.  It was clearly understood that the advance of the machine was destroying old inertias, discomforts, and brutalities, but it was not so commonly understood that the machine was creating new discomforts and brutalities, undermining traditions and ideals, sentiments and loyalties, esthetic sensitivities.

And on the subject of agriculture in Protestant America:

The vast extent of the American land, the mobile and non-traditional character of American rural life, and the Protestant dynamism of American society made for a commercially minded and speculative style in farming...  As early as 1813 John Taylor of Caroline, in his Arator, found that Virginia was "nearly ruined" for lack of careful cultivation, and begged his countrymen:  "Forbear, oh forbear matricide, not for futurity, not for God's sake, but for your own sake."   ... but the preponderant attitude of dirt farmers toward improvement in their own industry was a crass, self-defeating kind of pragmatism.

Hofstadter, in a way, prefigures Berman.  The two, coming from different directions, meet at the center of the argument.


I apologize, this 'review' has turned into a kind of impressionistic response to Prof. Berman's very fine book.  Clearly this idea of a collapsing empire has been tearing around in my head for a long time waiting for such a book as Why America Failed to describe and analyze what has been nothing more than a gut feeling for me.  Berman's books often get to the core of conventional thinking and illustrate its strengths, weaknesses, failures and, sometimes, successes.  Berman gets behind the mythology of America and looks at the clanking, grinding, failing machine that is more truthful than the illusion we overwhelmingly buy into.

The BPL has made a point of blaming the Bush/Cheney Administration for the state of the Union.  Berman argues that it is really nothing of the sort.  The buggery of most of the first decade of the 21st century is nothing more or less than a fulfillment of our history.  It's true, but never-the-less, the Bushites have much to answer for.  Their acceleration of an already downward spiral is not simply fate.  They went out of their way to make life as difficult as possible, if not absolutely impossible, for the vast majority of Americans,  Iraqis, Afghans and many others.  Why America Failed describes the flaws that the Bushites cunningly exploited to pull down our already collapsing roof.

MONSIEUR

I have a minor difficulty here at the beginning of this marvelous, twisted, difficult book by Lawrence Durrell.

My copy (from the shelves of the great wonderland of Powell's) is an American first edition.  The difficulty is that every reference to this book I can find lists a more complete title:  Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness.  However, that subtitle appears nowhere in the American edition.  This may seem a niggling point to many, but it leaves me perplexed.  Where did the extra title come from?  Is it the author's doing or a later editor's?  Apparently, it is on the U.K. first edition, but why not the American?  Are the puritans so frightened by the nod to Satan/the devil/Lucifer/Archon that the publisher balked? 

Man is in a trap... and goodness avails him nothing in the new dispensation.  There is nobody now to care one way or the other.  Good and evil, pessimism and optimism - are a question of blood group, not angelic disposition.  Whoever it was that used to heed us and care for us, who had concern for our fate and the world's, has been replaced by another who glories in our servitude to matter, and to the basest part of our own natures.

The book itself is is a testament of dissent.  It is a Barnardine-like thumb in the eye of narrative, plot, beauty and Western ideas of straightness.  Durrell's Gnostic sources have been the subject of some debate, but not their legitimacy as gnosticism.  In fact, his very structure is gnostic hidden secrets within hidden secrets.  The obvious analogy is the nesting doll.  Don't trust the outermost shell to be the final one, though it is nevertheless real and means something.  It is the 'what' that we must determine.

Opening with the chapter titled Outremer, Durrell gives us some hint as to what we are in for.  French for 'overseas' the substrate of the word means to go abroad for The Crusades.  Piers de Nogaret, whose ancestor, we learn, betrayed the Templars, has just committed suicide... maybe.  His lover/brother-in-law is headed for Avignon, the former capitol of the Roman Catholic church, to make arrangements for the burial and to visit his own wife who is Piers' sister and who, incidentally, is mad and living in an asylum and who may have murdered her brother - maybe inadvertently, maybe not.  And the sister seems to have been at one time pregnant and lost the fetus whose paternity is in dispute - again, it may have been her husband's or, Durrell implies, it may have been her brother's.

This three-cornered passion has held me spellbound for a lifetime and will see me beyond the grave.  I knew I had found my onlie begetters.  I was reliving the plot and counterplot of Shakespeare's Sonnets in my own life.  I had found the master-mistress of my passion.  Who could ask for more?

Who indeed.  The complexity, the overt and even slathered-on pathos, is part of Durrell's gnostic vision of a rancid world that is hidden under a thin patina of beauty.  Beauty is the trap.

It was hard to keep one's mind centred on the universe as a giant maggotry when the landscapes and humours of Egypt were so beautiful, and its passing days so enticing: moreover when one was loved.

Contrary to what other reviewers have said, Monsieur is not a difficult read;  it is a very difficult book and  rewards re-readings.  There are narrative reversals and nested narrators, deceptions and odd byways, but Durrell is a gifted prose writer and there are moments of enticing, entrapping beauty in the book.

The biggest difficulty begins with the second section: Macabru.  An enigmatic chapter that begins with an outrageously beautiful ride across the desert, through a necropolis and into a gnostic vision.  The death before rebirth is inverted gnosticism.  St. Paul warned Timothy of the heretics who demanded rebirth before death - the gnostics.  Why Durrell reverses the order is just another of the mysteries (i.e. secrets) of this mirage.  After a drug-assisted hallucination, Piers converts, experiences disillusionment at the hands of his gnostic guru and is reborn into the mysteries of the 'faith'.

From this point on Durrell requires us to read back into the book, replacing details that we thought we believed as Piers must renegotiate his past to include his new gnosticism.

The end of the Macabru section gives us a hint or two as to the nature of the narrative Durrell is undermining.  We get another friend, Sutcliffe, and his novelization of this 'three-cornered passion' and descending/ascending spirals of meaning as Durrell gives lie to the beautiful and toxic story he began for us.  It is disturbing, to say the least;  if the finality of the novel is the reality, then we are being called upon to jettison our melancholy and nostalgia for the early chapters and learn a new worldview which is as harsh as Piers' gnosticism, but utterly false.  It is the wisdom of the vision at Macabru.  But wanting it is no easy task.  We, like Sylvie, Piers' mad sister, are "In the perspex cube of an unshakable autism" and we have no inclination to allow ourselves to be disillusioned.

"Unshakable" is the word used of the descendants of Seth, the 'father' of one line of Gnostics.  It is a word which makes me uneasy for it could be used of the clan of the Bushites and their followers.  Perhaps another word for it is 'sincerity' which is always to be viewed with profound skepticism. There is this great, American, puritanical belief in personal enlightenment, inner truth and sincerity.  We have convinced ourselves that if we believe sincerely, whether honestly or not, then we have achieved salvation.  It is inside-out faith and one called into question by the dissent of the Gnostics.  I deny the faith, or faiths, of the Bushites.  They are without wisdom and lost in the dark ways.

THE KLINGON HAMLET

You have not experienced Shakespeare, until you have read him in the original Klingon.


Chancellor Gorkon

Star Trek VI:  The Undiscovered Country

I have a demotic response to 'versions' of Shakespeare that hew to the original in an entirely original manner:  graphic novels, film adaptations (including animation for children), t-shirts, whatever.  All I ask is that they don't 'dumb down' the material for half-wit audiences.  The joke in the Star Trek movie quoted above was clever and effective.  Who could fail to enjoy Christopher Plummer's Klingon howl, "Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war."?  Wry reference to Julius Caesar and Plummer's own stage history aside, it just fit in the film.

(Some St. Crispin's Day ripoffs from Henry V are hardly crap at all - reference that allusion!)

But this Christmas I have received one of my all-time favorites.

I ask that you join us in our suspended disbelief; accept for a moment that this is the original version of the play... A wondrous thing has been created here, a translation (or restoration, as we prefer) that has been labored over, argued about, and finally put before you.  

Lawrence M. Schoen, Ph.D.
Klingon Language Institute Director

It's a fair request.  Accept it for what it is:  a labor of love that mind-melds two literatures, one drawn broadly from the other.  The nod to the original Creator is generous and just.  Wil'yam Shex'pir - as Klingon's would have him -  would, I believe, laugh himself silly over this treat of a book.  As a long-time bardolater, my sympathies are with the much-maligned Star Trek and Star Wars (and other) nerds, geeks and obsessives.  It's hard to explain away a faith.  So here's the tragedy of Khamlet, Son of the Emperor of Kronos.  A worthy effort.

                               vaj Hat yISIQ,
'ej tujDI, DopIIj qul ylchenmoHQo'.
chalDaq, ghorDaq je law'bej Doch, Horey'So.
'ej puSqu' Dochmey'e' neH najbogh QeDIIj.

(And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
                                                   There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
                                                   Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.) 
                                                                                            Act I scene v

Screw the very un-Klingonlike Bushites for whom there is no batlh.  They confuse sincerity with truthfulness and great vision.  A tip of the hat to the original (for this purpose) Shakespeareans. May they live and die with honor.

HIATUS

Forgive the long hiatus. 

I was consulting with the Bush Presidential Library planners on a replica of an Extraordinary Rendition/CIA site. 

We resisted the temptation to recreate a Guantanamo Bay cell, and settled instead on a nice 2'x2'x6' barbed wire enclosure that we found in Somalia.

It will fit nicely in the alcove between the smiling portraits of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield.

Carpe Noctem.

A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS

A transcendence that cannot somehow be expressed is an incoherence; authentic transcendence can be communicated by mastery of language, since metaphor is a transference, a carrying-across from one kind of experience to another.

Omens of Millenium
Harold Bloom

The irony shouldn't escape us here. Bloom is a devotee of David Lindsay and his book, A Voyage to Arcturus. But the truth is that Arcturus is incoherent. I'm not saying it doesn't have its own profound insights, but Lindsay's writing is so awful (in the bad way) as to be nearly unreadable. Lindsay wrestles metaphor into submission and leaves it dead on the ground like Charles at the hand of Orlando. 'Tis a pity. Lindsay has much to say... I think. He clearly has achieved a sort of gnostic awareness, but the transcendent nature of the vision is lost because he cannot articulate what it is.

Nightspore shuddered... He comprehended at last how the whole world of will was doomed to eternal anguish in order that one Being might feel joy.

It is a gnostic vision of our own world subjugated to the demiurge who enslaves us to his will. But these articulated insights are all too rare in Arcturus.

"You think you are thoroughly disillusioned, don't you? Well, that may prove to be the last and strongest illusion of all."

Lindsay, if we have been paying attention, hits us with Hephaestus' hammer here. He has something, but it is lost in the Arcturian mist. Perhaps his belief that 'beauty is a trap' restrained him; perhaps he believed that prose too perfect would belie his message. Unfortunately, whatever Lindsay's beliefs, his prose fails him utterly throughout the majority of his book. Otherwise this might have been one of the most important books of the early century.

Lindsay's protagonist, Maskull (names are so important in his book, but he fails to... oh never mind.) journeys rather carelessly to Arcturus where he meets, and kills, a multitude of the inhabitants. Maskull is overcoming multiple levels of delusional philosophy which blind him to THE TRUTH. Lindsay/Maskull is brutal. His murders are often abrupt, merciless and appalling. These bloody scenes convey the ferocity of Lindsay's hatred of our shared illusions, but they nearly never take us through the steps necessary to understand our delusions and what it takes to destroy them. We need more, much more in order to follow Maskull. As it is we are just nauseated at his violence.

So, with a strong stomach and a will to get through the atrocious prose, you can pick up Arcturus and get a glimpse of Lindsay's gnostic reality. But be prepared. It isn't easy and understanding is illusory.

But now to my real complaint: Lindsay is clearly influenced by George MacDonald (read Lilith, not completely transparent, but nowhere near as difficult as Arcturus. And the prose is much, much better) and, Nietzsche. Influence is impossible to avoid, but the books most under the influence of Lindsay's fantasy, if not his philosophy, are the first two of C. S. Lewis' Perelandra trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. Lewis steals shamelessly and tries to place his thanks with the much more acceptable H. G. Wells rather than the difficult Lindsay. I have no problem with the fact that Lewis loathed Lindsay's philosophies, but to fail to acknowledge the obvious creative debt is unforgivable. Adpoting the trope of the explorer in the fantasy world (used, of course, before him by Swift, Morris and others) with the twist of travel to another planet, without a nod to Lindsay would have been bad enough, but Lewis borrows wholesale from Arcturus without so much as a thanks for all the fish. It looks bad for Lewis.

Well, the Bushites won't read this either. They had difficulty with facts, not to mention metaphors and symbols. Let them eat yellow-cake.

"Selfishness has far too many disguises."

MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS

I should like to pay a special tribute to my mother, to whom this book is dedicated. Like a gentle, enthusiastic, and understanding Noah, she has steered her vessel full of strange progeny through the stormy seas of life with great skill, always faced with the possibility of mutiny, always surrounded by the dangerous shoals of overdraft and extravagance, never being sure that her navigation would be approved by the crew, but certain that she would be blamed for anything that went wrong. That she survived the voyage is a miracle, but survive it she did, and, moreover, with her reason more or less intact.

This is the beginning of a perfect paragraph in Gerald Durrell's first chapter, entitled The Speech for the Defence. It isn't quite epigrammatic (not really witty, per se) or aphoristic (too long), but is a kind of promythium. 'Mother' is the supratext, the true spirit of the story, who is the angelic presence hovering over the family - the apparent bumbler who is actually the demigoddess of the family. But enough babbling, let's finish this excellent bit:

As my brother Larry rightly points out, we can be proud of the way we have brought her up; she is a credit to us. That she has reached that happy Nirvana where nothing shocks or startles is exemplified by the fact that one week-end recently, when all alone in the house, she was treated to the sudden arrival of a series of crates containing two pelicans, a scarlet ibis, a vulture, and eight monkeys. A lesser mortal might have quailed at such a contingency, but not Mother. On Monday morning I found her in the garage being pursued round and round by an irate pelican which she was trying to feed with sardines from a tin.

Nearly nothing else in the book is as overtly comical as this short, shining paragraph. It is a sweet tale of a born naturalist generalizing in every bit of flora and fauna he could lay his grubby little hands on. By our modern lights he was a tiny monster, catching and imprisoning innocent creatures that previously had lived an edenic life on the Greek island of Corfu. Modernity, och! Let the romantics eat cake.

A professor of English once told me that there were no stories of happy domesticity in Western literature. He meant, I think, three things. First, tension or tragedy are the central components of all stories, even comedies. You must have a conflict in order to have a story. All tales fall geographically on a wheel of stories. Tragedy and comedy are opposite each other on the wheel, but all stories start somewhere and round the circle to their conclusion. Second, I think he implied strongly that domesticity was boring. We simply aren't interest in people being happy. In the West we live on drama with all the irony that implies. Finally, Western literature has not managed to master, in extended ways, the themes of happiness and domesticity. Our conventions tie our hands when it comes to certain themes: happiness, the moment of death, states of consciousness previous to our own, etc.

Well, there's conflict in Durrell's tale of a sunny childhood in Greece. But the conflict is handled with such love and gentleness that it is nearly impossible to recognize it as such. Domestic life is chaos, but conflict? Not so much, no.

With the fireflies above and the illuminated porpoises below it was a fantastic sight. We could even see the luminous trails beneath the surface where the porpoises swam in fiery patterns across the sandy bottom, and when they leapt high in the air the drops of emerald glowing water flicked from, and you couldnot tell if it was phosphorescence or fireflies you were looking at. For an hour or so we watched this pageant, and then slowly the fireflies drifted back inland and farther down the coast. Then the porpoises lined up and sped out to sea, leaving a flaming path behind them that flickered and glowed, and then died slowly, like a glowing branch laid across the bay.

Durrell's prose is itself phosphorescent. It shines in the Mediterranean sun and glows in the moonlight. Well, that doesn't exactly work, but in Greece days and nights each have their own lights and it takes a stylist like Durrell to illuminate it all.

Gerry himself grew to be a renowned naturalist and preservationist. He set rational guidelines for zoos, including the eminently sensible: An animal should be present in the zoo only as a last resort, when all efforts to save it in the wild have failed. His work with animals set the international standard for preservationist efforts since.

Book treats like this come along far too rarely and to miss them is almost criminal. I, for one, can fruitfully shut out the noise and stupidity of the world with books like this. They are not 'GREAT' literature, but they are good literature. Read books like this when you can find them and ignore the age of "Global Warming when all things are growing colder". It is an age created by the Bushites who eagerly anticipate the end of all things. Maybe the library, with all these subversive books we have snuck in will survive the Armageddon they have begun. Maybe the books will survive our new Dark Age America.

ALAMEIN TO ZEM ZEM

I have no use for hawks. Hawks are the Dick Cheneys, George W. Bushes, and Rick Santorums of the world who have never seen 'action' (as the word is used of battle), but find it in themselves to loudly beat the drums of war and urge young men and women to die for 'their country'.

"It is more honourable to save a citizen than to kill an enemy" as Samuel Johnson put it. But these warmongers demand a debt, a death of whatever enemy they christen for our hostilities.

"... the experience of battle was something I must have" Keith Douglas wrote. But the 'must' means something other than a desire. It is a reluctant acknowledgement that the time and place and position he found himself in required his active participation in the realities of war. Alamein to Zem Zem is the account of that 'must'.

Douglas was anti-militaristic, according to all accounts, prior to the war. Perhaps this was the kind of distaste for hawkishness and chest-thumping practiced in every country as a correlative to patriotism. In Douglas it certainly was not pacificism. He had no conviction that violence was an unacceptable response to aggression, but his participation in battle has a kind of humility and dignity that does not sit happily with the hawks of the world.

Ordered to remain at divisional headquarters as battle broke out at El Alamein, Douglas disobeyed and six days later essentially stole a truck reporting to his colonel at the front. Astoundingly Douglas was allowed to remain with his regiment without repercussions and was given command of a tank and crew. He reports the response of one of his men:

"I like you, sir," he said. "You're shit or bust, you are." This praise gratified me a lot.

But for those looking for a John Wayne-style (if there is such a thing) account of war, Douglas' book will be a disappointment.

I am not writing about these battles as a soldier, nor trying to discuss them as military operations. I am thinking of them - selfishly, but as I always shall think of them - as my first experience of fighting: that is how I shall write of them.

He was intensely interested in how he would react in battle, whether he could face it bravely and with a clear-headedness, or if he would collapse in terror. It isn't his own impending death he seems worried over, but rather a fear of the effect, the aesthetic effect even that battle would have on his psyche.

I suddenly found myself assuming that I was going to die tomorrow. For perhaps a quarter of an hour I considered to what possibilities of suffering, more than of death, I had laid myself open... I persuaded myself that I had passed the worst ordeals of fear and that there would be no time for sharp, instantaneous fear in battle. If I thought so, I was not long to be so deceived.

The book we have is in a way incomplete for two reasons. First, the text that Douglas would have seen prior to publication has been lost. We have a text that isn't the final one emended by Douglas. It is based on an earlier manuscript which the author altered for publication. Second, the book (perhaps because of the primary problem with our existing version) seems rough. It is polished with the sure hand of a poet, but feels as if it should have gone through another draft or two. That is the opinion of a reader who hasn't access to the manuscript, but who reads with the sense that Douglas might have made more once a period of extended reflection was possible.

The geography of the country in which I spent those few months is already as vague to me as if I had learned it from an atlas much longer ago. The dates have slipped away, the tactical lessons have been learned by someone else. But what remains in my mind - a flurry of violent impressions - is vivid enough. Against a backcloth of indeterminate landscapes, of moods and smells, dance the black and bright incidents.

I wouldn't have any of this changed, though. It is a brilliant recollection of a chaotic time which rebels against nostalgia. And Douglas didn't have a chance to tinker with the manuscript. He died in France three days after participating in the main assault upon the beaches at Normandy. He was twenty four.

But Marlow was not typical... and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

Joseph Conrad's narrator of the Heart of Darkness is a Douglasite. Douglas finds the meaning as a function of the chaos and ambiguity of the battle, not obscured by the dust and noise, but explicated by the details. It is the reason he is so careful of the specifics.

So, goodbye to the Hawks among us. Can't we learn to distrust them upon sight and sound? Can't we finally evolve to the point where we are inherently suspicious when asked to give up all for a nothing of territory or oil or security? Keith Douglas' book is a reminder that all crusades are Children's Crusades. Here's the book, lonely on the shelves amongst the tales of war and bloodshed. Give it to your children so they may learn these lessons before it is too late for them. We certainly didn't.

CULTURAL AMNESIA

"For he was a sincere man, and in spite of his superficial airs and graces, at root a humble one. And it is always the humble man who talks too much; the proud man watches himself too closely."

G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Thursday

At 851 pages Mr. James (Clive, that is) is definitely a humble man.

His loquaciousness is our gain. A proud man would write a short book on a single topic and tell us everything about it. Our humble (and very vain) man has written a long book on a million - give or take - topics and told us just enough about each one to make us crave much, much more. That isn't a complaint or criticism, it's a compliment. The writer who wants to tell us everything also wants to tell us what to think in a very specific way, his way. The writer who tells us a little very quickly wants to tell us what he thinks and doesn't care much what we think. It may sound unpleasant, but he makes for a great conversationalist and a great writer. Truth is we hang on every word. No time to agree or disagree, no time to dispute or add on, we must just go along for the ride. The wind is in our hair and the bugs are in our teeth and we haven't the breath to answer. Yes, Mr. James is a pompous ass and yes, he can be infuriating, but take him in the right way and you will have no greater time with any other essayist.

When we talk about the imponderables of life, we don't really mean that we can't ponder them. We mean that we can't stop.

Well, god! That's exactly what it should mean, though in the shadow of the Bush years it means exactly the opposite. Talking seriously about anything that means anything is just so gauche.

James goes off on 106 different individuals, excluding the introduction, coda, overture and a few other small sections. I won't bore you with how diverse his choices are, either thematically, historically, chronologically, or whatever other category you might name. It's the point of the book. James is an avowed humanist - a word he uses the way Humpty Dumpty in Alice uses "Glory". His subtitle 'Necessary Memories From History and the Arts' is designed to describe his intent to a 'T'. He thinks we have forgotten too much and that rankles with him. Of course, the implication of the book is that there is much even he hasn't remembered to remind us of and that infuriates him. How could we remember everything? How could we read everything? Even the apparently omniliterate Harold Bloom happily admits that no one can read every good book, much less every book. How, then, could James guttle the Babel Library? Well, he couldn't, but that doesn't mean he isn't pissed off about it. 'Dammit!' he seems to be saying, 'Somebody has to remember everything!'

And the beginning of understanding more is to realize that there is more than can be understood. As an aid to that end, this book is not a testament to my capabilities, but to the lack of them.

Disingenuously humble - I hate that!

There is nothing inherently wrong with erudition: it's not as if we're drowning in it...

Much better. He is erudite in a way an American never can be.

But this book is the reverse of erudite. It does not just record what I have learned. It also suggests what I have failed to learn, and now will probably never learn, because it is getting late... what impresses me is all the names that are missing.

Nah, it's erudite.

The motto for this book shows in the primary chapter called 'Vienna' which is an apt image for what James is doing in his book.

If we can't remember it all, we should at least have some idea of what we have forgotten.

He is citing the place and time where the 20th century was birthed and died an infant death. If we could have fulfilled 'Vienna', if we could all have become Viennese we might have survived our century, but instead we all died. This may not be obvious to everyone yet, but obvious it will become sooner rather than later.

Ours was an age of extermination, an epoch of the abattoir.

It is impossible to deny. We exterminated the whole universe and don't know it yet. It reminds me of the Randy Newman song about Paul McCartney: I'm dead (but I don't know it) which is a multifarious image of our times.

James is vain. belligerent, annoying, sometimes verbose, self-congratulating and boorish. He is also fascinating, articulate, humble, adept and as inclusive as it may be human to be. You shouldn't, you can't ignore this book. If you leave it frustrated because he hasn't told you enough about any individual, it's because you haven't the humanity to go find out more. These essays are sparks not wildfires.

The Bushites are the exemplars of those who have forgotten. Forgetting is a kind of moral cauterising. Forgetting allows us 'plausible deniability' for how could we know a thing is bad if we have forgotten it? Theirs was an extreme of infantile bowel control: they shit where they liked to prove their control over us. They were, and are, proud, nasty, vicious, malicious, totalitarians. Or would have been totalitarians given just a bit more leash. The metaphor is unjust: a leash is for a smart, loyal, loving, companionable dog. They were none of it. We have yet to shed the 20th century. Bush, which heretofore becomes a name for all that lives in hatred and fear of humanity, is the nox noctis of our recent history. Trim your candles - carpe noctem.

SPY VS. SPY MASTERS OF MAYHEM

Since I am hirpling about in my childhood anyway, let's move on from the grade school years to my thoughtless, wasted adolescence.

I suppose not every young man in America read Mad magazine in the 60's and 70's, but I've never met one who didn't. Where else were we going to find vaguely audacious and sophomoric humor? Prime time television? Not damn likely. Maybe Mad wasn't uncensored, but it felt like it to us.
Antonio Prohias was unknown to us. We didn't know he was Cuban. We didn't know he illustrated for newspapers under Castro. We didn't know Castro awarded him honors for his anti-Batista cartoons. Hell, we had never heard of Batista and could barely recognize Fidel. But here was this Cuban exile in New York drawing these outrageously funny strips that mocked the global politics our parents followed voraciously on Walter Cronkite's evening newscast.

I originally bought this re-release of Spy vs. Spy strips with the wild idea of writing a libretto for a comic opera based on these two and their friend, the Lady in Grey who won every confrontation and was the object of White and Black spy's affections. Nothing has yet come of it, but the idea festers in my amygdalae waiting for the proper moment to suppurate.

Mocking our Cold War fears, Prohias gave us mutually-assured-destruction in its most hilarious form. These two alternately destroyed each other in the most convoluted, failure-guaranteed ways that could be imagined by Prohias' twisted silliness. It was pure joy to 'read' them. The wordless battles also mocked America's and Russia's inability to speak one another's languages. Spy vs. Spy implied the dunderheadedness of the translators waiting by the 'Red Phone' in the White House. Being themselves colorless, the strips also slily undercut the silliness of the color fetish of the times: Red, White and Blue; White House; Red communists; Iron (which was a color as much as a substance) Curtain; red phone, and so on.

We loved these strips in Mad as much, or more, than anything else in the magazine. For a variety of reasons, including their apparent simplicity, we usually turned to them first. It was a quick laugh to see what mayhem they would cause and while the comic kick was nearly instantaneous, they would bubble around in our heads for weeks and we would often return to them.

An administration much admired by some and maligned by most for its various evil secrets might find something in these little gems to make them uncomfortable. The 'lessons' learned here may have caused a compensatory drive toward a certain kind of paranoia. Did we render prisoners secretly, torture and kill at Abu Ghraib, and isolate 'combatants' behind chain link at Guantanamo out of fear of being ambushed by those we thought we had utterly defeated? Are our continuing and extreme national security efforts an attempt to cover every contingency? I don't know, but there never seems to be enough fear these days to counter the attacks we expect each and every minute. Here is an ironic little book to, maybe, put our worries into perspective a little. Don't let Dick Cheney see it. It might burst his wee, little blackened heart.

TOMORROW'S CHILDREN

Some school librarian - bless them all! - stuck a book in my hands. It was grade school and I was bored. I was bored. I was bored. Who knows if (probably) she even knew what she was giving me. The cover (judge all books by them) was garish and weird and it was big - lots of pages - and I don't doubt that I was being gotten rid of. A long book of science fiction short stories was just the thing to keep me from coming back any time soon. Oy.

That was September or October. I renewed the book in November and December. I renewed it in January, February and March. In April the librarian suggested I should turn the book in so other students could read it. I think she just wanted it for herself to see what the attraction was. I kept it to the last day of the school year when I discovered my family was moving and I wouldn't be back the following year. I should have stolen it.

But my cheap paperback copy of Tomorrow's Children reached me recently, mailed from some dusty Dickensian bookseller in a narrow street in London (at least I hope it was) and I couldn't be happier. The stories are there: The creepiness of Jerome Bixby's It's a Good Life; the sweetness of Zenna Henderson's Gilead; poor Margot of Ray Bradbury's All Summer in a Day; and Philip K. Dick's The Father-Thing, a body-snatcher story which left me terrified of my own parents for months.

As you can tell the 'sci fi' heavyweights are nearly all here: those stories plus ones by Damon Knight, Isaac Asimov (also the editor of the collection who wrote terrible short introductions to each piece), Robert A. Heinlein, Clifford D. Simak, Fritz Leiber and more.

The Children of the title are brilliant, evil, pathetic, ugly, alien and painfully normal. They clearly terrified their creators - not all, but most did. They could create realities with a word and destroy them with a thought; they could escape their parents into the future or escape them to the corner candy store; they could be terribly damaged by a hostile world or exceed the bounds of their natural minority and make the world serve them. These were the anxieties of parents looking over the shoulders and, they thought, heads of the children they brought into the world. The science fiction trappings aside these were the kidfears of every parent. And reading it as a child I knew it - I was on the verge of transcending my parents. I was Tomorrow's Child, too.

The kids are gone!
I've been waiting an hour for them. I know they wouldn't stay away so long if they could get back. There must be something they've run into. Bright as they are, they're still only children.
I have some clues.

Actually, he doesn't. That's the great irony of childhood. Big people are in charge; big people have no clue.

"It's not going to be easy to leave the Nest," I said, wanting to cry, kind of. "It's so small and there's just the four of us. I get scared at the idea of big places and a lot of strangers."

Don't we all.

I wish I could reproduce even one of Emanuel Schongut's black & white, oh-so-very-60's illustrations for this collection of stories. They remind me a tiny little bit of some of Aubrey Beardsley's prints in tone, though not in style. They are uncanny and weird, and clearly Schongut 'got it'. He understood the extreme otherness of the stories and gave each a perfect portrait. These illustrations were so much to-the-point that I often skipped over them hurriedly as a child because they unnerved me so much. But then, I was a timid child.

Whilst this volume goes on the shelves of the presidential library with all the others, I won't draw the owner's attention to it. He always seemed to learn the wrong lesson.

N BY E

I'm not entirely certain what Rockwell Kent means by his title. At least, of course, he is referring to the directions on a ship's compass: North by East. At least he is referring to the general direction of the voyage he took on the Direction, his ship crossing from New York to Greenland. At least he is referring to a kind of emotional shorthand that suggests an unorthodox choice of life and thought and art. But what else does he mean. I'm really not certain.

Kent gives us dates, lattitudes, longitudes, ports, dimensions, names, provisions, ropes, sails and all the other hullaballo that goes along with a maritime memoir, but he is as oblique as his title when it comes to telling his tale. Every page is rife with some thing that is unsaid. Is it his homosexuality, his reason for the journey, his aesthetics?

Kent's first two chapters are brief, just a few lines each. The first is a tiny narrative, a wisp of a dialogue wherein he proposes attaching himself to a Greenland voyage. So brief is this that without the rest of the novel - it is a novel, not a memoir - for context we may not understand what he is talking about. The second chapter is horrible in the sense of provoking feelings of horror. Again just a few lines to describe his captain and Kent falls in love. The captain, Sam Allen the Junior of the Arthur Allen of the previous chapter, is "a beauty! Tall... strong and lithe; slow moving, slow and courteous of speech, and calm... He loved the sea and was made for it." It is the romantic love of a girl left in port by a roving sailor. It is sentimental - Kent is sentimental. Every girl, or boy, left behind by a sailor lives with the fear of their beloved's death on the sea. It is the one point in the book where Kent is self-consciously literary. Will his new love return from the sea? Going along on the journey is no guarantee of return and only heightens the horror of the supertext above the engraving: "Arthur S. Allen, Jr. Born 1907, died 1929" the year of the journey. What is the terrible catastrophe ahead?

Chapter III is a parable. Kent tells the tale of a city-dweller, a subway-rider, an accountant maybe, whose life at sea is contrasted by his epiphanic vision of a life at sea, riding the waves instead of the train. The keel is laid, the boat is built, the man constructs his dream and is abruptly sunk by a prosaic wife. Kent doesn't comment, but he looks back on the chapter for another 246 pages plus an appendix of poetry.

It is interesting to note that Kent's Greenland voyage and his work on the illustrations for Moby Dick are concurrent. Here is the Father Mapple engraving from Moby Dick, above left is the Chapter Three engraving from N by E. Male bodies tend toward the lithe and muscular, faces are harsh and even grotesque. The pictures strangely convey no sense of color unlike a B&W photograph or movie. They are dark/light/shaded, but colorless as if to convey puritanical moral feeling. Lovely and terrible like the sea itself.

My first edition copy of N by E is a constant reminder of the ethos of the Bushites. It has been defaced by some cretin who razored out some of the engravings most likely to frame and resell for more money. Isn't that the perfect metaphor for these monsters? Anything can be corrupted or destroyed for the sake of another dollar in their pocket. It is the cynicism of another Children's Crusade - another exemplary metaphor for their greed and nastiness. Enough! Put a book in their library and another nail in their coffin.

100 SHAKESPEARE FILMS BFI SCREEN GUIDES

The British Film Institute and author Daniel Rosenthal have done us all (yes! you too) by providing a nice overview of films based on the bard.

It's often not about the story at all, but all about how you tell it.

Foreward

Julie Taymor (she of Spider-man fame - poor dear, life's so unfair) spends most of her brief foreward to the BFI guide writing of her own productions of Titus Andronicus. Fair enough, but this guide deserved a bit better. I understand her position as a director of films, and I can even endorse it. However, so much more on the topic needed saying.

An acquaintance of mine teaches film classes at a good liberal arts college. I suggested to him that some of Will's plays (notably Hamlet) could be condensed into the most infinitesimal of productions and still be recognized. To use the mythopoeic school's definition: they had achieved a kind of mythological status where the particulars of the plot, character, settings, etc. could be altered or even erased and the story would still be recognizable. There are, on film, a number of truncated Hamlets which are eminently recognizable, but not anything like the play Good Will penned or produced. My film school friend was skeptical, "Surely, as with a familiar song, we hear a few notes and know the entirety." Perhaps, but I think it's more than that.

As BFIs guide admirably demonstrates many 'Shakespeare' films evidently neglect the Bard entirely. But we still recognize the play. Gus van Sant's My Own Private Idaho is Henry IV whatever hash he has made of it. Likewise West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet (better and better!) Even more to the point, a disc of Silent Shakespeare which gives a chance to see early, short films of Shakespeare without dialogue convinces me, at least, that there is an essential, even mythological essence which is the apotheosis of the original plays.

Shakespeare himself was, of course, a great adapter. In borrowing from a huge range of historical and fictional sources, he wrote plays that Richard Eyre, former Director of Britain's National Theatre, terms 'the DNA' of all subsequent English stage drama. After watching well over 100 original-text and genre adaptations, I am inclined to extend Eyre's metaphor and view Shakespeare's plays as the genetic building blocks of much commercial cinema.

That's it! And even Rosenthal understates the case. The DNA of English stage drama, Wiiliam Shakespeare's plays, is our DNA. The twirl of our cells somehow has a fifth base that Watson and Crick didn't model: A, T, C, G and a W for Will.

I really can't make a comparison between a movie-maker and Shakespeare. No movie that will ever be made is worthy of being discussed in the same breath.

Orson Welles

A trifle disingenuous, I suspect. Welles' Othello and Chimes at Midnight are towering successes in the history of filmed Shakespeare and he knew it, but even faux worship of my great idol is appreciated. I'll happily take what the great man offered.

There was nothing comic, or tragic, about the jigging fool who fronted the Bush administration. We put him in the White House and kept him there while his cronies tried hard to dismantle the Republic. They were, and continue to be, Trolls. Malicious, spineless and destructive they are our avatars. Continue to stock the library with books which may yet point us toward the truth. No, it's too late. The best we can hope for is a record of our demise.

CONTESTED WILL - WHO WROTE SHAKESPEARE?

Once proposed, (the Shakespeare authorship question) ... the issue gained momentum among people whose conviction was the greater in proportion to their ignorance of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, history, and society... The Baconians, the Oxfordians, and supporters of other candidates have one trait in common - they are snobs.

The Pelican Shakespeare
The Sonnets
The General Editors

Recently a poster to The Guardian website review of James Shapiro's current book claimed that the Oxfordians never said the man from Stratford couldn't write the plays and poems, just that he didn't. How absurd! It has been the contention since the days of Mary Bacon that Will lacked the education, courtly knowledge and access to 'inside information' required to spring these remarkable works from his pen. It is the foundation upon which all Shakespeare theories are built.

Consider:

Molière was born in Paris, the son of Jean Poquelin the "valet de chambre ordinaire et tapissier du Roi" ("valet in ordinary of the King's chamber and keeper of carpets and upholstery") for Louis XIII.

Miguel de Cervantes was the son of Rodrigo de Cervantes, a surgeon.

John Milton's father (1562–1647), moved to London around 1583 after being disinherited by his devout Catholic father and found lasting financial success as a scrivener.

Charles Dicken's father, John Dickens spent beyond his means and was imprisoned in the Marshallsea debtors prison in Southwark, London.

Herman Melville's father spent a good deal of time abroad doing business deals as a commission merchant and an importer of French dry goods.

John Keats' father, Thomas, was working as a barman at the Hoop and Swan pub when Keats was born, an establishment Thomas later managed and where the growing family would live for some years.

Chaucer was born circa 1343 in London. His father and grandfather were both London vintners and before that, for several generations, the family members were merchants in Ipswich.

Jane Austen's parents, George Austen and his wife, Cassandra, were members of substantial gentry families. George was descended from a family of woollen manufacturers which had risen through the professions to the lower ranks of the landed gentry.

Montaigne was born on the family estate Château de Montaigne not far from Bordeaux. The family was very rich; his grandfather, Ramon Eyquem, had made a fortune as a herring merchant and had bought the estate in 1477.

Charles Robert Darwin was born the fifth of six children of wealthy society doctor and financier Robert Darwin.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devon, England. Samuel's father, the Reverend John Coleridge was a vicar of the parish and headmaster of Henry VIII's Free Grammar School at Ottery.

Ben Jonson's father died a month before Ben's birth, and his mother remarried two years later, to a master bricklayer.

Kit Marlowe was born to a shoemaker named John Marlowe and his wife Catherine.

I am finding it hard to locate a single aristocratic family in this list. Most were wealthy bourgeoisie and a few were craftsmen, tradesmen or laborers. Nope. No inbred bluebloods here.

But Prof. Shapiro, being a better man, isn't particularly interested here in pursuing the endlessly circular arguments of the Oxfordians, Baconians, Marlovians, Elizabethans, Derbyites or any of the other -ans, -ites and whatsits who have been put forward as authors of the Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare.

My interest... is not in what people think - which has been stated again and again in unambiguous terms - so much as why they think it... I think it's possible to get at why people have come to believe what they believe about Shakespeare's authorship, and it is partly in the hope of doing so that I have written this book.

It's an honourable goal and Shapiro makes more than a good run at it. It is, of course, slightly disingenuous also. Shapiro is a thorough Stratfordian - he cheerfully tells us so - and is more than a little interested in debunking the conspiracy theories around the authorship question.

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it "Bulverism". Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father — who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third — "Oh you say that because you are a man." "At that moment", E. Bulver assures us, "there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall." That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.

Jack Lewis gave us the classic description of a uniquely 20th century version of the ad hominem attack. Is Shapiro guilty of such? It would make the Oxfordians and Baconians lives much simpler if he was, but it isn't to be.

... (Edmond) Malone helped institutionalize a methodology that would prove crucial to those who would subsequently deny Shakespeare's authorship of the plays... Until Malone had established a working chronology of Shakespeare's plays, no critic or biographer had ever thought to interpret Shakespeare's work through events in his life.

Shapiro redeems his claim to interest in the how rather than the what. Contested Will fruitfully reconstructs the documents, claims, history and critical methods that resulted in the legion that is the Conspiracy industry.

... (the Oxfordians claim) Shakespeare could only write about what he had felt or done rather than heard about, read about, borrowed from other writers, or imagined. Yet another precondition for challenging Shakespeare's authorship had now been established, one that would be trotted out more often than all the others combined.

But Shapiro only glancingly alludes to perhaps the greatest building block of the Babel Tower: the Reformation.

From the sixteenth century onward, the history of European thought is dominated by the Reformation... The result, in thought as in literature, was a continually deepening subjectivism... advancing towards a personal isolation inimical to social sanity.

A History of Western Philosophy
Bertrand Russell

Well, so this is using a wrecking ball to drive a 4d nail. The point is amateurism becomes the greatest authority - which is laughingly at odds with the snobbery of the Oxfordians, et. al. - and, as the Pelican editors wrote (see above) conviction is inversely related to actual knowledge particularly on the question of authorship. The Romantics have a great deal to answer for. We give the Reformation full marks for releasing us from one kind of tyranny, but it must accept blame for dumping us into another kind.

Evangelical fervor on any topic makes me leery. Bulging veins, wide eyes and saliva-flecked lips are a sure sign that someone is getting a surge of adrenalin from their zealot's gland and should be locked in a dark closet until they have either calmed down or expired. Oh, I'm not suggesting we kill anyone, just maybe maim them a little; you know, glue their mouths shut or give them thorazine. Perhaps a little waterboarding would be in order. (Someone call Dick Cheney right this instant!)

Given the state of the Academy these days, I suspect that Oxfordianism (to coin a word describing all the theories of Shakespeare Authority) will be taught in most American universities. Pluralism is wonderful, but you have to remember that the intent is consider all ideas until proven true or false. We are under no obligation to continually listen to the idiots who demand that we listen to their thoroughly discounted, discredited bullshit over and over and over again. The Holocaust really occurred, there is no such thing as racial inferiority, Bubba was never abducted from his '72 Dodge pickup on a back road in Texas, coffee enemas will not cure you of cancer and the man from Stratford wrote the plays and poems of William Shakespeare. Get over it.

So at the end of all this ranting I bring us back to House of Cards that is the Bush Presidential Library. The people who peopled the Bush administration were, and are, liars. It was in their best interests - not ours - to promote unfounded claims and wild conspiracies to achieve their ends. A book like Prof. Shapiro's is a pinprick to their kind of hot-air-balloon conspiracies. Let us put Contested Will on the shelves of the Library and take every opportunity given us to jab the Bushites with a great big sharp needle and let the air out of their Montgolfiers.

THE LODGER SHAKESPEARE

Cryptozoologists, alien abductees, evangelicals, Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists, Holocaust-deniers, creationists, Tea Party radicals, 9-11 truthers, birthers, anti-fluoridationists, practitioners of alternative medicine, eschatologists, Republicans and Oxfordians all leave me gasping in the face of unbelievable human gullibility and ignorance.

...even if we don't know much about his personality, we know a great deal about Shakespeare's career as a writer (more than enough to persuade a reasonable skeptic that he wrote his plays himself.)

Preface
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 1599

James Shapiro states it baldly. As he also notes in his review of Charles Nicholl's excellent book, the Oxfordians and their co-irritants will find the detail in The Lodger Shakespeare difficult to board. We have all been taught in lazy English classes that little is known about William Shakespeare, the man. Upon this rock the Oxfordians have built their church. But it's all bollocks. Nicholl lays out a consummately savory Shakespeare. We are sated, though seconds wouldn't be refused for we are gluttons when it comes to Will. Nicholl isn't out to piss off the Oxfordians, it's just a happy by-product.

I am interested in recreating the physical and cultural circumstances of a period of Shakespeare's life. The plays he was writing at the time are part of those circumstances. They are on his desk; they are on his mind; and it is permissible, within precise chronological boundaries, to draw links between them and the milieu in which he was living when he wrote them. If Shakespeare had written - say - a play about a young Frenchman being pressed reluctantly into marriage, and if it could be shown that he wrote the play at a time when he was himself pressing a young Frenchman into marriage, then one might think it worth asking whether there was a connection between the fictional nuptials on stage and the actual ones he was involved in.

So Nicholl goes on to point out that All's Well That Ends Well does exactly that. If the endless circumstantial evidence that Oxfordians trot out to prove their hero is the author of the plays is supposed to be convincing, then evidence on the other side paired with the fact that every person of the time knew Will of Stratford as the playwright must be of greater value.

But Nicholl's story isn't the purported conundrum of authorship. It's a tale of a lodger in the house of a French family living among the tiny twisted streets of Elizabethan London. In documents uncovered in the early parts of the last century a civil case is tried in the Court of Requests in Westminster. William Shakespeare, who has arranged the marriage of the daughter of his landlady to the family's apprentice, is called upon to give a deposition as to the dowry promised to the young couple. Appended to said deposition is one of the few authentic signatures of the Bard. So we have Will's own words attested to by his own hand. And not just the words entered into record, but hems and haws and restatements and retractions,

So what?

In the Wigmaker's Lawsuit we see Shakespeare almost literally, almost simultaneously, speaking out of both sides of his mouth, creating double
meanings on the fly.

The Shakespeare Wars
Ron Rosenbaum

As Rosenbaum describes the actual deposition, we have an authorial voice very like Will's own. Shakespeare's authorial doubleness stating, revising, reviewing and revising again in the very act of speaking forcing everyone involved to interpolate what really happened. For me the deposition does much to confirm the Shakespeare I have always expected: He was cagey and, what a previous generation would call, sharp. He was careful about being pinned down to statements that could come back to harm him. That may be just the fact of living in Elizabethan times when writings and comments could be used years later to condemn a subject, even unto the death. But, in short, I don't think I would have liked Will very much. He sells out the young couple denying any precise knowledge of the amount of a promised dowry, but only after admitting he remembers the original compact that he apparently helped negotiate. It wasn't a very nice thing to have done.

On the other hand, his plays and circumstances demonstrate a man who is tolerant in a way. Despite his middle-ish class upbringing in Stratford, Will lives amongst the working class. The lodging of the title is with foreigners, a suspect class for the Elizabethans similar to the way in which the Japanese are suspect in America during WWII. Maybe a result of being a player in every sense of the word, Shakespeare seems comfortable with the pimps and prostitutes, the threadbare and squalid. There is a even a sense in Nicholl's book of a Shakespeare who luxuriates in this milieu. Every young student of Shakespeare will point out that it is the material he oftens uses in the plays, but the feeling goes deeper. We are left with the impression of a man something like Prince Hal who, not concurrently, but simultaneously lives darkly in the weeds and flowers in the sunshine of palaces and playhouses.

But Nicholl is doing something much more subtle that simply making a case for Stratford, he is attempting what Anthony Burgess aptly refers to as creating his own Shakespeare. The details, the connections, the records (much more numerous than we have been led to believe), and the personalities conspire to make a Will. It's a gift from Nicholl and we ought to be immensely grateful.

(Shakespeare) appends the hurried, perfunctory signature which one sees at the bottom of the paper. The pen blotches on the k and tails off: 'Willm Shaks'. It will do. It will get him out of that courtroom, away from all these questions and quarrels, the interminable loose ends of other people's lives... The signature attests his presence at that moment, but in his mind he is already leaving. After a last few formalities he bids good day to the Mountjoys and the Belotts. He walks down to the wharf at Westminster Stairs to catch a boat downriver....

This is cinematic. It is a brief scene of melancholy Nicholl carves out from the end of a spectacular array of fascinating detail. More dedicated to building a world out of the minutiae of life, this moment tops the story with a crisp flag fluttering prettily in the morning air on the opening day of a new play by good old Will Shakespeare.

Again we place lovely books on the shelves of a library where no one will go to look for them. The sheer bulk of unread books here, I hope, will testify to the stupidity, ignorance and arrogance of those who have left the world in such shambles. Was it Twain? Something about the man who refuses to read is no better than the man who cannot read.