¶ A N Wilson writes about the first great press baron, Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, and his (inadvertently) not-very-bright conduct of the Great War. He was, after all, out to sell newspapers.

Fireside chats with political leaders would, for many a decade to come, and perhaps for ever, be one way in which political deals were brokered, and power wielded. But the days in which the political class met in clubs and country houses, and could conduct their nation’s affairs without popular will or consultation, were over.

It was one thing for “the Press” to corral politicians. It seems to be quite something else when “the Media” try to do the same. (more…)

¶ This morning’s chapter of After the Edwardians, “Revolutions, dispenses with Russia and the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in short order, the better to move on to the scientific upheavals that, gathering force as the Nineteenth Century ended, climaxed with the theoretical bang of Einstein’s celebrated theories of relativity on the eve of the Great War. (The audible bang would conclude the next war.)

It was a very long time before the implications of such ideas reached the public imagination, and could be adapted, with such terrifying consequence, for military or political purpose. But by the end of the First World War, scientists who had been away to fight returned to their laboratories to discover that they were quite literally in a different universe.

Wilson gets in a quick but not very sly poke at E M Forster, whose novels “had their unaccountable mid-twentieth-century vogue.” (more…)

¶ In After the Edwardians, A N Wilson considers the Great War as an expression of the lust for destruction that colored the thinking of the Vorticists and the Futurists. He quotes the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, killed at Neuville Saint Vaast in 1915, aged 23:

The war is a great remedy.

In the individual it kills arrogance, self-esteem, pride. It takes away from the masses numbers upon numbers of unimportant units, whose economic activities become noxious as the recent trade crises have shown us.

When artists are misanthropes, a state of emergency cannot be far off. (more…)

¶ A N Wilson looks at World War I from an Asian perspective in today’s chapter — by which he means the importance, to English leaders at the time, of blunting German access to the vicinity of India. The infamous Gallipoli campaign, from the sponsorship of which it was long thought that Churchill would never recover, appears not to have been a bad idea, but a muddled one. At chapter’s end, an intriguing appreciation of T E Lawrence.

Many read Seven Pillars of Wisdom as fraudulent historical text, without realizing that it is intended to be read, as Malory, Homer or the Bible are intended to be read, as a mythological compendium whose stories interpret, as they describe, the world. …

One of the reasons Seven Pillars has such an hypnotic effect on the reader is precisely its lack of realism.

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¶ From After the Edwardians, I learn that nobody referred to the Titanic as “unsinkable” (without the qualifier “practically,” that is) until after she sank. We must also not overlook the Duchess of Cambridge’s capsule history of the Nineteenth Century:

Alas! All the dearest countries that my heart loved best have been stolen (I can’t give it another name)… Hanover, which is the cradle of our English family, Hesse is mine and Nassau was my dear own mother’s; so you may judge of my feelings at the moment; that is the moment of Germany becoming one nation.

The Duchess was Queen Mary’s grandmother. (more…)

I appear to have celebrated the beginning of the new season with a bibulous lunch, yesterday, shoving real work aside on the very day, after a long weekend, when I ought to have made a point of taking it up. I had thoughts of beginning with Rochefoucauld or Chesterfield, but it is all I can do to continue with the books that I’ve already started reading. (more…)

¶ In Moby-Dick, we have “The Street,” another short chapter, makes me wonder about New Bedford and New York, as well as other ports such as Salem. Why wasn’t New York, for one thing, a whaling port? Why didn’t the sailors of New Bedford find something else to exploit after the advent of petroleum?

The chapter ends with one of Melville’s prose poems.

And the women of New Bedford, they bloom like their own red roses. But roses only bloom in summer; whereas the carnation of their cheeks is perennial as sunlightg in the seventh heavens. Elsewhere match that bloom of theirs, ye cannot, save in Salem, where they tell me the young girls breathe such musk, their sailor sweethearts smell them miles off shore, as though they were drawing nigh the odorous Moluccas instead of the Puritanic sands.

¶ Chapter VI of Don Quixote is given over to literary criticism — of a sort. The priest and the barber haul down the books in Don Quixote’s library and consign most, but not all, of them to the flames — or at least to a pile in the corral. I expect that to be a true Cervantes scholar you have to read all these books — if you can find them. I don’t, for example, think that Faber Finds is the the place to go — yet — for a copy of Lenchor Ortega de Ubeda’s Felixmarte of Hyrcania (1556).

¶ In Wilson, an omnium-gatherum, blog-entry of a chapter, “God — And the Americans.” The idea seems to be that the English resisted modernism of any kind — except possibly in fiction. The chapter begins with a very disappointing statement: “Our story occures against the background of Europe’s collective suicide…” Even Wilson knows it’s more interesting than that. He seizes very interestingly on Pius X, “the first holder of that office in modern times not to be educated beyond seminaries, nor to be of noble birth”:

In The Makers of Modern Europe (1930), Count Carlo Sforza remarked upon the peasanty origins of the anti-modernist pope. Whereas “the prejudices of the aristocrat are often counterbalanced by his scepticism, always by his laziness …. those of the peasant have no counterpoise.” Characters such as Pope Pius are “hard on the noblest minds whose doubts and misgivings they do not understand” and “very often put thei whole trust in fanatics who please them with certainties.” There would be plenty of repetitions of this phenomenon in the coming century of the Common Man, when the political dogmas and simplicities of communism and fascism would have little time for noble minds with doubts and misgivings.

¶ In Squillions, I see that editor Barry Day follows certain epistolary threads through to their conclusion even if that means advancing the story by four or five decades. Coward and Esmé Wynne went their different ways after World War I, but they kept in touch, despite the fact that Wynne was a zealous Christian scientist with a knack for catching out her old friend’s moments of cowardice. (“Some things were too serious to be taken seriously,” writes Day.) In 1936, Coward wrote to Wynne about what he called his “realism” and the wintry chill of his expectations of fellow man. But:

You may well imagine that with such a jaundiced view I am a very unhappy creature but this is not so — I have a very nice time all told and enjoy life keenly — I can’t explain this — perhaps there will be a reckoning — perhaps I only think I’m happy — perhaps I shall suddenly find Jesus but I still have the grace to hope, both for his sake and for mine, that I don’t!

¶ You may have noticed that Melville’s name never comes up when the great funny writers of the past are spoken of. It’s not, perhaps, from want of trying on the writer’s part.

However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward, from let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

The language of the Standard Version — or whatever version of Scripture in which New Englanders marinated themselves — doesn’t appear to have been cut out for capers. (more…)

A pattern seems to be developing. I begin the Morning Read with Moby-Dick. Then I put Melville down and pick up Cervantes, looking forward to the breath of sanity. (more…)

¶ In Moby-Dick, a long evening at the Spouter Inn, culminating in one of the most peculiar meetings in literature: pretending to be asleep, Ishmael watches Queequeg disrobe and, in the process, reveal his startling tattoos. Something of a noble savage, Queequeg is quick to purge his space of the interloping Ishmael, but quick, too, to stand down when pacified by the landlord. (more…)

¶ In Moby-Dick, it is a “matter of concernment” for Ishmael to find cheap lodgings in New Bedford. The simple thing would be to sign on with a whaler from that port, but Ishmael prefers significance to simplicity, and is determined to wait for the Nantucket packet so that he can sail from “the Tyre of this Carthage.”

Excuse me, but is this the fabled New World? Or did I miss a stop? Chapter 2 is so loaded with classical and Biblical allusions — not to mention a bogus “black letter” writer of whose work Ishmael claims to have the only copy (a ridiculous pretension in the Gutenberg Age) — that Ishmael seems almost as demented by his reading as Don Quixote. (more…)

Today, we resume the Morning Read in a fashion appropriate to the season: late. We confess, in fact, that we almost forgot all about it. We were nagged by the question that there was something that we were supposed to remember, but it was not until we glanced at the by now hypnotically familiar pile of books on the footstool that we remembered. Ah! Don Quixote. Moby-Dick.

Having avoided reading both of these books for so many years — not just gotten out of having to read them but actually kept them at a distance — I’m not surprised by the appeal of tackling them both together. Salt and pepper, what? (more…)

The next round of Morning Reads will begin on Monday, 18 August 2008.  

Here’s the line-up of books. Indispensably at the core are Don Quixote and Moby-Dick. It may take a while to figure out how much to plow through ever morning, but I’ll always read at least a few pages. If I’m slightly pressed, I may read no more than a bit of AN Wilson’s After the Victorians (a collection of shortish pieces) and a few of Noël Coward’s Letters.

Chesterfield and Rochefoucauld are garnish, for truly energetic mornings.

This really is the end. With the last two stories in Nam Le’s collection, The Boat, I close this season’s Morning Read. We’ll see when I begin the next one. I have already pulled out the Library of America volume that contains Moby-Dick, as well as Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote. Also in the pile is David Remnick’s selection of the writing of A J Liebling — another book that I’d never get through outside the Morning Read format. (more…)

And so I come to the end of the first round of Morning Reads, or almost: I’m done with Aubrey. There are still two stories to read in Nam Le’s The Boat, so perhaps we’ll have one or two more entries headed by the image above, which I decided not to update when I tossed in The Boat a few days ago.

Then what? I know what I’ll be reading in the next round, but not when I’ll begin. I’m inclined to take a break, or to do something different for July and August. I’m also inclined not to think about it, because it is July and will soon be August. (more…)

¶ In The Boat, a near-novella, “Halflead Bay,” set somewhere in Australia that I couldn’t locate. (There is a Maroomba Air, but no Maroomba; not according to Google, anyway.) The story is hard to read because it works like a scenario: the characters have to be followed around an understated landscape. Being teenagers and/or Australians, the characters are understated themselves.

Held up to the right light, “Halflead Bay” looks to be a classic cusp-of-manhood story. Everything is about to change for Jamie anyway, when along comes the girl of his dreams, Alison — trailing in her wake the certainty of a dust-up with her brute of a boyfriend. Held up to the wrong light, however, it has a pre-shrunk quality, as if all the elements of a coming-of-age novel had been anaerobically concentrated so as to fit into a cut-down narrative frame. I had the odd feeling that Jamie would not be happy to know that other people could read his story.

¶ In Aubrey, hints of dyslexia, in the life of Edmund Waller.

He has a great memory, and remembers a history, etc, etc, best when read to him; he used to make his daughters read to him. Yet, notwithstanding his great wit and mastership in rhetoric, etc, he will oftentimes be guilty of misspelling in English. He writes a lamentably bad hand, as bad as the scratching of a hen.

We also learn that Sir Isaac Wake, a diplomat, had a “fine seat at Hampstead in Middlesex, which looks over London and Surrey.”

Instead of wrapping things up with this round of reads, I’ve added a book that I’d already started, Nam Le’s short-story collection, The Boat.
(more…)

Before altogether closing Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts, I thought I’d take a look at the Introduction, which turns out to be as important as anything that follows.

But somewhere within the total field of human knowledge, humanism still beckons to us as our best reason for having minds at all.

That beckoning, however, grows increasingly feeble. The arts and their attendant scholarship are everythwere — imperishable consumer goods which a self-selecting elite can possess while priding itself as being beyond materialism; they have a glamour unprecedented in history — but humanism is hard to find. For that, science is one of the culprits: not the actual achievement of science, but the language of science, which, clumsily imitated by the proponents of Cultural Studies, has helped to make real culture unapproachable for exactly those students who might otherwise have been most attracted to it, and has simultaneously furthered the emergence and consolidation of an international cargo cult whose witch doltors have nothing in mind beyond their own advancement. By putting the humanities to careerist use, they set a bad example even to those who still love what they study. Learned books are published by the thousand, yet learning was never less trusted as something to be pursued for its own sake. Too often used for ill, it is now asked about its use for the good, and usuually on the assumption that any goodwill be measurable on a market, like a commodity. The idea that humanism has no immediately ascertainable use at all, and is invaluable for precisely that reason, is a hard sell in an age when the word “invaluable,” simply by the way it looks, is begging to be construed as “valueless” even by the sophisticated. In fact, especially by them. If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into this new century, it will need advocates. Those advocates will need a memory, and part of that memory will need to be of an age in which they were not yet alive.

James magnificently explodes the idea that humanism lies in the arts, in appreciating what Matthew Arnold called “the best thoughts.” The best thoughts, particularly in the century just ended, can be appreciated by dreadful monsters. A taste for Mozart is useless as a mark of distinction from the likes of Josef Mengele.

Gradually I realized that I had been looking in the wrong place. As a journalist and critic, a premature post-modernist, I was often criticized in my turn for talking about the construction of a poem and of a Grand Prix racing car in the same breath, or of treating gymnasts and high divers … as if they were practising the art of sculpture. It was a sore point, and often the sore point reveals where the real point is. Humjanism wasn’t in the separate activities: humanism was the connection between them.

In other words, humanism is a way of life, not an area of interest. And it is creative and constructive rather than reductive and principled:

Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impusle, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increaser the variety of the created world rather than reduce it.

Finally, if a tad immodestly, I’d like to echo something that James says to his younger readers:

The student who flicks through these pages in the bookshop [or on the browser] will see many strange names, and perhaps be impressed. But what impresses me is all the names that are missing.

Necessarily.

Today, I finish the last of the books in the original Morning Read roundup, which I put together last October as a way of getting through books that one just doesn’t sit down and read all the way through. But I’m certainly not bidding farewell to Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia. Reading it the first time is only the beginning. The book, a collection of pieces published over the years, is the best kind of testament: improvised by the author during his lifetime.
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¶ In Aubrey, the remainder of the letter S: Spelman, Spenser, Stokes, Street, Suckling, and Sutton. Two instances of plus ça change:

(Spenser) The chamber there at Sir Erasmus’ is still called Mr Spenser’s Chamber. Lately, at the college taking down the wainscot of his chamber, they found an abundance of cards with stanzas of the Faerie Queene written on them… (more…)