Gotham Diary:
Historical Documents
19 September 2013
The other night, I wanted to read a good, solid history book from the old days. Little did I foresee what I would encounter.
I pulled down a book that I hadn’t read before, J B Black’s The Reign of Elizabeth. First published in 1936 (my reprint dates from 1949), this slim volume belongs to the Oxford History of England series, a grand old shelf of books with the stout look and feel of a university library. When I was at boarding school, I bought E F Jacob’s The Fifteenth Century, a thick tome remarkable for never referring to the aristocratic upsets that disturbed England for thirty years as “the Wars of the Roses.” I cannot say that I have read it from cover to cover, although I’ve read other entries in the series, namely the three preceding ones. Elizabeth was acquired in a half-hearted flurry of completism and lined up with the others. I expected it to put me to sleep, and it did, but not without hooking me on the story first.
And what is this story? It is not a biography of the queen herself. It is the history of England, not the lives of its rulers, after all, that the series claims to relate. At the same time, few English monarchs have had a higher profile. It is impossible to read about Elizabeth Tudor without meditating on the the chanciness of timing. Is it just the illusion of retrospect, or was Elizabeth an awesome case of the right woman at the right time? And what was so right about her, really? She left a strong impression of shaping the character of modern England, almost of creating the kingdom of which so many generations have been proud to be subjects, but does this amount to more than sentimental piffle?
Don’t worry, that’s not the story. The story is about an Oxford don — an Aberdeen don, actually — who weaves a narrative from the historical records. We need not concern ourselves with what those might be, although I have always wondered what it must be like to peruse the vast corpus of Venetian diplomatic reports, because the footnotes that refer to them always seem to contain the most trenchant tidbits. We are not going to inquire into the historian’s methods, now or seventy-odd years ago. We are simply going to bear in mind that a history book written in 1936 is, to some inescapable extent, a book about 1936, or about a more or less superseded way of going about things.
For example, it’s unlikely that anybody today would write a magnificent, but “editorializing,” sentence such as this one, about Philip II of Spain’s problems in the Low Countries.
The fact that Philip was a foreigner, unimaginative, slow of mind, maladroit, and altogether devoid of that higher statesmanship that takes into account the idiosyncrasies of the people committed to its care, probably increased the difficulties in the way of a mutual understanding, and lessened the chances of fruitful cooperation.
I shouted with glee: the style is perfect. We have, first, four brief characteristics, arranged in worsening order, with the third, “slow of mind,” a halting way of saying “stupid” that anticipates “maladroit.” It’s brilliant! Then, a gliding but complex statement about the duties of the statesman — which of course Philip altogether lacked, and which failing, together with the others, probably — ! — made things worse. It is a “Life of Philip” in one sentence.
Here’s another gem. It relates to the general concern that Elizabeth find a husband and produce a successor, someone other than her cousin Mary Stuart.
In the upper house the earls of Leicester and Pembroke and the duke of Norfolk insisted that a husband should be forcefully imposed upon Elizabeth and the succession regulated by parliamentary statute. For this rank impertinence they were excluded from the presence-chamber, and had to sue for pardon on their knees.
In my days as an ambitious but lazy student, I may not have finished all the books that I started, but I read enough of this sort of thing for it to form the foundation of my own style: “rank impertinence,” when I came upon it, felt like a long-lost cousin, or, in the alternative, something that I might very plausibly write myself, if the situation demanded. There is a finer art at work; it lies in not mentioning the queen in the second sentence. Here we have an example of the strengths of the passive voice, which can magnify unseen powers. The incident is nicely vague; we’re not told anything about the conditions of the exclusion from the “presence chamber,” but we’re informed that it was awful enough to bring three powerful peers to their knees. (At the same time, one can’t help being relieved that, in those wild times, none of them was beheaded. Rash impertinence is not the worst thing in the world.)
A page later, Black writes,
Is it surprising that Elizabeth felt justified in her resistance to parliament’s demands? Their way was the way to chaos: hers was the way to peace.
Black wraps up the episode with a remark by William Camden, the antiquarian who died in 1623:
Thus by a woman’s wisdom she suppressed these commotions, which Time so qualified, shining ever clearer and clearer, that very few, but such as were seditious or timorous, were troubled with care about a successor.
The quote from Camden is very much a part of the story that would not be told today; all that it attests to, fairly, is the glorification of Elizabeth, already well in train during the reign of her successor — who turned out to be not Mary Stuart but Mary’s son, an infant at the time of the “rash impertinence.” No historian today would admit Camden as a witness to parliamentary sentiments in the 1560s, and few would repeat him as Black did. But no one would write like Black, either. Hers the way to peace, theirs to chaos? Goodness, such talk!
The Reign of Elizabeth may tell a story about bygone Englands, the queen’s and the author’s both, but the writing is still very fine.
***
In the current issue of The Nation (September 30) Akiva Gottlieb writes so beguilingly about Steven Soderbergh’s film-making that I was induced to watch a very disturbing movie, The Girlfriend Experience. Made in 2009, the movie has a reputation for being “experimental.” Its relation to chronology is certainly experimental — just how wildly out of sequence can scenes be presented without reducing the project to incoherence. I was not able to follow the story line, which doesn’t seem to be what interested Soderbergh or his writers. What happens is not as arresting as what simply is — Sasha Grey’s face. Grey is apparently playing a slightly modified version of herself; a porn queen in real life, she becomes an escort in the movie. Roger Ebert put it bluntly: Grey “has a disconnect between herself and what she does for a living. So does Chelsea.” That disconnect is what the movie is about. It has no story; it’s just there.
So far as looks go, Grey reminded me of a Demi Moore whose face had been replaned along Keira Knightley lines. It is a face that is composed rather than expressive. Whether it was a matter of makeup or not, I couldn’t tell, but Grey’s eyes don’t seem to open wide enough for dramatic work; she seems mildly sedated. This, I can well imagine, might not be a disadvantage in her regular work, but it will probably prevent her from breaking into A-list movies. At the same time, it served as an embodiment of the disconnect.
The disconnect breaks down at one point: all the circuits are firing together, and the result is tears. The tears are minimal, almost notional, but they crumple the mask and signal despair. Christine/Chelsea, the escort played by Grey, visits the hotel room of a man who might have been a client but who failed to show up at a weekend tryst. (Not to worry: the room was paid for.) She doesn’t berate him about this, but instead complains about the terrible review that she has been given at a Web site that rates escorts. Having seen the preliminaries of Christine’s meeting with this douchebag (too nice a word), you’re not surprised that she might not have been at her best when presenting him with “review copy,” but you’re appalled that she fell for his act. The guy is a middle-aged dork working out the back of a furniture warehouse in Queens — and promising lucrative trips to Dubai, if you please. Such a guy gets to review escorts? What was she thinking? It reminds one of the Gilgo Beach murders. The Internet has made it easy for reasonably attractive women to go into certain lines of business, but it has also exposed them to certain kinds of risks.
Although The Girlfriend Experience has a chic, well-kept surface, it is full of ugliness. Not the ugliness of pornography; there’s very little carnal contact in this film. But the clients are ugly. It’s not just that they’re ordinary-looking men who aren’t always in the best shape, but that they’re also horribly satisfied by the escort’s pretense. They don’t care how she really feels; they’re hoping, possibly, that she’s not feeling anything, because she’s too busy tending to them. The escort experience is that women are inherently less human than men. Do any men really believe this? Some of them certainly talk as though they do, when women aren’t around, and, with an escort, they can act as though they believe it. The escort’s complicity is no less distressing.
And all anybody talks about is investing. It’s 2009, and the gravy train is slowing down. This is cutting into Christine’s business; it explains her visit to Queens. Her clients are obsessed by uncertainty: how much more will they lose? How much less will they take?
In several scenes, Christine is having a meeting over lunch. She actually eats. Of course she eats, she’s a human being, she has to eat. But it’s surprising. When she becomes Chelsea, she doesn’t have any needs at all.