Morning Read: Repent of it like Jonah
¶ 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.
¶ In Don Quixote, the battle of the Basque and our hero swiftly concludes with Don Quixote’s unexpected victory, but the bulk of the chapter is given over to an elaborate authorial ruse about discovering the continuation of the Manchegan’s heroics (accounted lost in the previous chapter) in the marketplace at Toledo, in an Arabic translation. Cervantes’s sarcastic deadpan is almost stand-up.
If any objection can be raised regarding the truth of [the Arabic translation], it can only be that its author was Arabic, since the people of that nation are very prone to telling falsehoods, but because they are such great enemies of ours, it can be assumed that he has given us too little rather than too much. So it appears to me, for when he could and should have wielded his pen to praise the virtues of so good a knight, it seems he intentionally passes over them in silence…
¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward continues to find his footing in the theatre, spending a lot of time at Davos, of all place, in attendance to a tubercular patron, the Earl of Lathom. Back in England, his new review, London Calling, is something of a hit, but a barely-concealed swipe at the Sitwells opens a cold war of forty years’ duration. Only near the end of Dame Edith’s life were things patched up and made nice; Barry Day brings this tangent in Coward’s life to its close in 1963. One of the offending lines from London Calling is very funny indeed, if you know anything about Sitwell’s Elizabetho-modernist aesthetic:
Life is essentially a curve and Art is an oblong within that curve. My brothers and I have been brought up on Rhythm as other children are brought up on Glaxo.
The line is spoken by a character called Hernia. As Coward discovered, it wasn’t nice to fool with Edith Sitwell.
¶ I have saved Moby-Dick for last because today’s chapter, “The Sermon,” far from being the deadly dull desert of homiletic fustian that I was dreading, gave me the first inkling’s of the novel’s greatness. As Pastor Mapple rousingly retold the tale of Jonah in whaleboat terms, I saw that Melville is claiming for his book something of the mission that runs throughout the prophetic books of Scripture — books far more familiar to his fellow Americans than they would be to the liberal Protestants of later years or the fundamentalists of the Twentieth Century (who prefer Revelation and rapture to social scourging). Mapple’s sermon is nothing less than a stand-alone piece of bravura writing, retelling a well-known tale in riveting language and concluding on a note of overwhelmingly genuine spirituality.
“Then Jonah prayed unto the Lord out of the fish’s belly. But observe his prayer, and learn a weighty lesson. For sinful as he is, Jonah does not weep and wail for direct deliverance. He feels that his dreadful punishment is just. He leaves all his deliverance to God, contenting himself with this, that spite of all his pains and pangs, he will still look towards His holy temple. And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment. And how pleasing to God was this conduct in Jonah, is shown in the eventual deliverance of him from the sea and the whale. Shipmates, I do not place Jonah before you to be copied for his sin but I do place him before you as a model for repentance. Sin not; but if you do, take heed to repent of it like Jonah.”