Morning Read: Más valiente que estudiante
¶ In La Rochefoucauld, a phrase fit for a sampler, to be looked at, stitched upon a sofa pillow, every day:
Le caprice de notre humeur est encore plus bizarre que celui de la fortune.
I find that I can’t translate this to my satisfaction. “The caprice of our humour is even more bizarre than that of fortune” doesn’t begin to do justice to the elegant thought of the original; we don’t think in that way about that sort of thing in English.
¶ Lord Chesterfield writes one of those marvelous psychological letters that were sure to drive Dr Johnson crazy. He counsels his son not to waste time flattering people on their strong suits, but to find their “prevailing weakness.”
The late Sir Robert Walpole (who was certainly an able man [and who died the Earl of Orford, by the way] was little open to flattery upon that head; for he was in no doubt himself about it; but his prevailing weakness was, to be thought to have a polite and happy turn to gallantry; — of which he had undoubtedly less than any man living; it was his favourite and frequent subject of conversation; which proved, to those who had any penetration, that it was his prevailing weakness. And they applied to it with success.
What would have infuriated Johnson was the letter’s stab at virtue:
Do not mistake me, and think that I mean to recommend to you abject and criminal flattery: no; flatter nobody’s vices or crimes: on the contrary, abhor and discourage the. But there is no living in the world without a complaisant indulgence for people’s weaknesses, and innocent, though ridiculous vanities. If a man has a mind to be thought wiser, and a woman handsomer, than they really are, their error is a comfortable one to themselves, and an innocent one with regard to other people; and I would rather make my friends, by indulging them in it, than my enemies, by endeavouring (and that to no purpose) to undeceive them.
Following this advice requires a comfort with harmless deceitfulness that, because it is nonetheless deceitfulness, repels high-spirited people. The world would be a sweeter place if they could swallow their revulsion.
¶ In Moby-Dick, “The Specksynder” — a word that seems to be a corruption of “specksnyder.” Never mind what it means. Consider the following impenetrable passage with Chesterfield’s lucidity:
For be a man’s intellectual superiority what it will, it can never assume the practical, available supremacy over other men, without the aid of some sort of external arts and entrenchments, always in themselves, more or less paltry and base. This is it, that for ever keeps God’s true princes of the Empire from the world’s hustings; and leaves the highest honors that this air can give, to those men who become famous more through their infinite inferiority to the choice hidden handful of the Divine Inert, than through their undoubted superiority over the dead level of the mass. Such large virtue lurks in these small things when extreme political superstitions invest them, that in some royal instances even to idiot imbecility they have imparted potency. But when, as in the case of Nicholas the Czar, the ringed crown of geographical empire encircles an imperial brain; then, the plebeian herds crouch abased before the tremendous centralization. Nor, will the tragic dramatist who would depict mortal indomitableness in its fullest sweep and direst swing, ever forget a hint, incidentally so important to his art, as the one now alluded to.
Okay.
¶ If you saw The Other Boleyn Girl — especially if you saw it more than once — you will have taken notice of the great Spanish actress, Ana Torrent, who plays Katherine of Aragon. I loved listening to her somehow clipped but lilting accent speaking English that I have conceived the fantasy of listening to her read Don Quijote. The excellence of Edith Grossman’s translation seems perversely designed to lead one back to the original. I reach for the Spanish text again and again. I’ll spare you the extracts, but the love poems that Quixote scratches on the bark of trees in his “madness” are crisp and musical in Spanish even if you don’t know what they mean, but helplessly florid in English.
Miss Grossman’s rendering of the phrase that I’ve stuck in the header, “more soldier than student,” will give you some idea of what I’m talking about.
¶ Reading Squillions, I really have to wonder what sort of book this alleged collection of letters is supposed to be. References are made to illness, appendicitis, and surgery in Chapter 12, but nowhere does the otherwise voluble Barry Day flesh out any of these hints. And his primness about Jeffrey Amherst is inexcusably coy.
Coward to Woollcott, “complaining” that “Ackie-Weezer” has inscribed a copy of While Rome Burns to Amherst, without sending one to his truly:
I have undergone a serious operation and have been very seriously ill and I feel that I am impelled to inform you that your book, When Rome Something or Other has been largely instrumental in seducing me back to life from the valley of the shadow. I was lent this volume by the Earl Amherst, an insignificant blond of my acquaintance, and was grieved to note on the fly leaf an inscription from you. This forced me to two reluctant conclusions.
(A) That you are a crawling mean old snob obviously intent upon ingratiating yourself with titled people and callously disregarding your friends of the gutter who are naturally better equipped to understand and appreciated your work, and (B) — exactly the same as (A).
I wish I had time for Woollcott’s reply.
¶ AN Wilson cheekily compares Churchill and Roosevelt to Laurel and Hardy, in a chapter entitled, “The Special Relationship I” But the odd part of the story is Wilson’s interest in a sordid story about Sumner Welles — a sort of unfunny revision of the Ale and Quail Club episode in The Palm Beach Story.