A Vindication of the Rights of Women

Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft is a polemical work; it tries to convince. Nowadays if you have a non-zero chance of reading the book, you will already agree with the argument it's trying to make: that women should be given a good education, the equivalent of anything given to men; that both the women themselves and society at large will be better off for women having a good education; and that anyone educated to be silly and manipulative, well, will be silly and manipulative.

"Contending for the rights of women, my main argument is built on this simple premise, that if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge, for truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence on general practice."

Maybe in 1792 there were people who might read this book and learn from it. It's not that there aren't people now who could to stand to learn these things--I could name a few--but they won't be reading this book. Alas.

I enjoyed it. It's always flattering to be told things you already believed are in fact true. 😉 

Wollstonecraft has a few targets in writing this. There's a couple of Scottish moralists that I had to look up to find out who they were: Dr. John Gregory, James Fordyce. I suspect nobody would read them now except for Mary Wollstonecraft. The big target--and the one she spends most of her firepower on--is Rousseau. Well, Rousseau's idea of female education, given at the end of Émile is pretty awful, and Rousseau is a bit weird about women in general--cf. The Confessions, fascinating though that work may be--or in his relationship with Thérèse Levasseur. Wollstonecraft gets the better of this argument by far. 

I learned that the first English translation of Émile is titled Emilius, and it's the version Wollstonecraft quotes. Sophie becomes Sophia. 

At several points I thought Jane Austen knows this book well. Wikipedia tells me Austen doesn't ever mention Wollstonecraft, but it seems I'm not the only person to have decided Austen liked the book.

A few quotes:

"I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour."

"Happy is it when people have the cares of life to struggle with; for these struggles prevent their becoming a prey to enervating vices, merely from idleness."

"Strength of body, and that character of countenance, which the French term a physionomie, women do not acquire before thirty, any more than men."

"From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind."

"I know not what is wanted to render this the happiest as well as the most respectable situation in the world, but a taste for literature, to throw a little variety and interest into social converse, and some superfluous money to give to the needy, and to buy books."

This post has been in draft mode for a very long time now. (It was the last spin book & I finished the book on time.) There's a print copy (a Penguin) somewhere in the house, but I couldn't find it when I was about to start reading the book, so I grabbed a copy from Project Gutenberg. I finished it on the eReader. I started writing this post, but then thought I should read the introduction before posting.

I still haven't found the Penguin so I'm just publishing this post anyway. I'm sorry to report this is the sort of house where books can get lost among their brethren and then are impossible to find... 

 

Zadie Smith's Intimations

 

The Other Reader and I sometimes wonder if Zadie Smith is a better essayist or novelist; the real answer is, why choose? Her two previous volumes of essays (Changing My Mind and Feel Free) were both great; there's a great deal of incisive intelligence in them, not necessarily a thing one expects in a novelist. I found the first more of a revelation: I particularly loved her reminiscences of her father in the earlier volume. It may also be that I'd already read a good deal of the second (in the New York Review of Books) by the time I read the collection.

Intimations is a short volume (under a hundred pages) and a product of our current crazy times: she's donating her royalties to charities for racial justice and pandemic relief. It deals with perceptions of race, being in New York in the pandemic, too much quiet (especially when one has children). Something to do, when there's nothing to do.

But the longest and best essay is called Screengrabs, written, it seems and as the subtitle suggests, 'before the virus', and it's largely a series of character sketches: 'a character in a wheelchair', 'a woman with a little dog', 'an elder at the bus stop'. They feel very true.

So maybe she's a novelist after all.

I was in a new bookstore for the first time in a long time (Type Books here in Toronto) and it felt wonderful, even if I had to wear a mask, making my glasses fog up. So nice to once again see what's on the table at a good independent bookstore.

I also picked up the Vivian Gornick book on rereading, but the first book she discusses rereading is D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers.  I thought maybe I ought to read it first, for the first time.

Brandes on Nietzsche

After finishing Henrik Pontoppidan's Lucky Per, I was wondering how well-known Nietzsche was in Scandinavia, and when. The main events of Pontoppidan's novel take place in the 1880s; there's a lot of Nietzschean-sounding language, though no actual reference to Nietzsche; was that anachronistic? For other reasons I had a bunch of Project Gutenberg books by Georg Brandes already on my eReader. (Post on James Huneker coming maybe some day?) One of them was Brandes' short book on Nietzsche.

Brandes was a well-known Danish critic in his day. He died at the age of 85 in 1927. He wrote mostly in Danish, but had a European reputation and his works were rapidly translated into other languages, including English. He was Jewish. The introduction to Lucky Per told me that the Dr. Nathan of that novel was a stand-in for Dr. Brandes, a not entirely flattering portrait Brandes took in good humor anyway. (Per calls him an ineffectual aesthete at some point, but perhaps Per is not entirely to be trusted.)

This book consists of three essays written on Nietzsche at different times, the earliest in 1889, just after Nietzsche's embracing the horse and descending into madness; the last in 1900, just after he died. They're sensible, I thought, taking Nietzsche seriously, but not completely reverently. He chastises Nietzsche for his attitude on women, preferring Mill. He emphasizes Nietzsche's opposition to anti-Semitism. There are better introductory works on Nietzsche now, though.

The most interesting part of the book were the letters between Brandes and Nietzsche. Nietzsche had his publishers send copies to Brandes of two of his books in the hope that this prominent European intellectual would do something with them. Brandes ignores the first couple (Beyond Good and Evil and Human, All Too Human) but then reads the third, The Genealogy of Morals. He writes a letter to Nietzsche apologizing for ignoring his earlier books, explaining he gets so many...But now he plans to read them and say something. This is the opening letter between them in November of 1887.

Nietzsche for us is Nietzsche, i.e., terrifying, one of the unscalable mountains of philosophy, but in 1887, even though he'd written a good deal of his major work, he's still pretty much a nobody, and he's charmingly thrilled and deferential that such a luminary as Brandes is reading him. Now that's reversed. My spell-checker is perfectly happy with Nietzsche as a word. Brandes is underlined everywhere. So fleeting is fame.

And Brandes does take Nietzsche seriously. In the spring of 1888, Brandes gives a two-lecture series on Nietzsche in Copenhagen; the first was poorly attended, "since no one knew who and what you are", and Brandes apologizes for that; but his first lecture got a favorable notice in the newspaper and so the second was better attended. Nietzsche writes from Turin, "I am so relieved, so strengthened, in such good humor...Have I not the good north winds to thank for it, the north winds which do not always come from the Alps?--they come now and then even from Copenhagen!"

The last of the letters is a postcard from Turin, one of the so-called Wahnzettel, the madness letters, written after Nietzsche's breakdown. He signs it 'The Crucified.'

Anyway, that more or less answered my question. Per almost certainly would not have read Nietzsche at the time he was saying rather Nietzschean things. So you have to just assume it was in the air. But the question usefully got me to read the book...

Some more quotes (all from Brandes' letters to Nietzsche):

"There is a writer who would interest you, if only he were translated: Søren Kierkegaard."
  --Letter of Jan. 11, 1888 (Ha! I can just imagine.)

"I am not an intruder by nature, so little in fact that I lead an almost isolated life, am indeed loth to write letters and, like all authors, loth to write at all."
  --Letter of Apr. 3, 1888 (Amusing, though a bit disingenuous.)

"In my early days I was passionately polemical, now I can only expound; silence is my only weapon of offence."
  --Letter of Nov. 23, 1888

In My Father's Court

"No man is judged in his hour of grief."

Those are the words of Singer's father when he hears a woman curse after her son had committed suicide.

Isaac Bashevis Singer has been on my mind lately. Various bloggers have been reading I. B. Singer (and also I. J. Singer); the Other Reader has recently finished Enemies, A Love Story and that's been a topic of dinner conversations. I was spouting off about his memoir In My Father's Court, and also Shosha, but then I wasn't really certain I'd read In My Father's Court. (I'm quite sure about Shosha. A great novel.) The database says I hadn't, but I thought I remembered parts of it. It's possible I didn't complete it previously, or it's also possible the database was wrong.

I went through a serious Singer phase in the 80s--this was when a friend suggested I should try reading a living author before they won the Nobel prize--and read a bunch of them. They're generally great.

In My Father's Court runs from Singer's earliest memories--he was born in 1902--until the end of World War I. The book is a series of short pieces that first appeared in Yiddish in the Jewish Daily Forward in the 60s (under a pseudonym) and were then translated into English before being collected into book form. Singer's father was an impoverished Hasidic rabbi who moved the family to Warsaw before the war; his mother was the daughter of a more prestigious Hasidic rabbi from Bilgoray in southeast Poland.

From the introduction:

"The book tells the story of a family and of a rabbinical court that were so close together it was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. The rabbinical court, the Beth Din, is an ancient institution among the Jews...The Beth Din was a kind of blend of a court of law, synagogue, house of study, and, if you will, psychoanalyst's office where people of a troubled spirit could come to unburden themselves."

And, perhaps we can add, a good training ground for a future writer.

There are stories of his father deciding in cases of divorce, wills, Talmudic disputations. At the same time events happen in their lives: his sister, his parents' first-born, marries into a Jewish family in Amsterdam and moves there. His brother, Joseph, ten years older, loses his faith, becomes a communist and an artist (he both writes and paints; now he's more famous for his writing); I. B. is studious, is fascinated by Jewish traditions, but at the same time reads Dostoevsky, gradually begins to doubt, discovers girls. The greatest part of the episodes take place in Warsaw, on Krochmalna Street, in the Warsaw ghetto. But during World War I, after Warsaw falls to the Germans and Austria-Hungary takes Bilgoray, it becomes possible to travel to his maternal grandfather's home, and with food short in Warsaw, he goes with his mother and younger brother to the country. The book ends with them in Bilgoray and his father and older brother still in Warsaw.

Very good and very touching. I'm not quite sure what the cover has to do with the book--though what do covers ever have to do with books?--unless it's the last lines:

"Suddenly I was dazzled by a particular narrow face, a dark girl with coal-black eyes and an indescribable smile. I became confused and when she asked me a question I did not know what she was saying. Many novels and a lot of poetry had filled my mind by then; I was prepared for the turmoil that writers call 'love'..."

Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra

"The peculiar charm of this old dreamy palace is its power of calling up vague reveries and picturings of the past,..."

Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra (1832) relies upon the power and charm of the Alhambra to work its magic. Though no doubt Irving worked on those reveries for a while himself.

In 1829, Irving, already a professional writer, traveled to Spain, and in particular to Granada, where he had arranged to live in the Alhambra. Though he had originally intended to stay longer, he was only there six months before he was drafted into taking on the secretary role at the American embassy in London. But he gathered enough material in those six months to write this book.

It's structured as a travel or guide book, and it begins with his crossing the lonely mountains north of Granada and worrying about bandits. He arrives in Granada, establishes himself in the Alhambra, and hires Mateo as his guide/valet. He looks around the Alhambra and describes its various features, famous towers and halls, and here it functions particularly like a guide book.

But the truly fun part is the embedded tales, unsurprising from the man who brought us Rip van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Irving knew Spanish and ten years later he was the U.S. Ambassador to Spain, and he presents these tales as picked up in conversation, quite often from Mateo. They're Romantic--Irving was influenced by Sir Walter Scott--but have an ironic humor to them that lightens the romanticizing. There's the tale of the three Moorish princesses in the Tower of Princesses, or the Two Discreet Statues that indicate (to those who know) where (one of the) buried Moorish treasures are. My favorite story was the longest, the story of Ahmed the Perfect, or the Pilgrim of Love. Ahmed is a Moorish prince, and the prophecies say he will live long and happily in a happy realm if only his father can keep him from thinking about love until after his teen years are done. Well, we know how that will go, don't we? (Or do we?)

His prose is a little fulsome, with more adjectives than it needs (see above) but also is also capable of amusing ironies like this, "Mohammed the Left-handed was acknowledged to be a wise king by his courtiers and was certainly so considered by himself." He's also, especially for a New England Protestant of that period, surprisingly tolerant of Catholicism and even of Islam.

Anyway, quite a fun book and a better read than I thought it was going to be. My edition is printed in Spain, in Granada in fact, and has an introduction by R. Villa-Real, though I bought it in Chicago. Mr. Royal House is almost too appropriate as the author of an introduction to a book on the Alhambra. It also comes with colored engravings from the 19th century of the Alhambra that are an amusing accompaniment.

Kate Briggs' This Little Art (#Fitzcarraldo Fortnight)

Well, I've got a couple of hours to squeeze in one last book for Kaggsy's and Lizzy's Fitzcarraldo Fortnight, but I can't dilly-dally...

This Little Art by Kate Briggs is an essay/meditation on the translation of works from one language to another. Briggs herself is the translator of two of Barthes' late lectures from French to English and she brings that experience to bear, but she also looks at other translators, in particular Helen Lowe-Porter (the person responsible for originally translating most of Thomas Mann into English) and Dorothy Bussy (who was André Gide's first translator into English.) And, in fact, the title of her book comes from an off-hand, possibly meant as disparaging, comment by Lowe-Porter about her own work.

Lowe-Porter has taken a bit of a beating over the years, and Briggs is supportive of her work and gives reasonable indulgence to Lowe-Porter's method and the possibility of errors. She's even better, I thought, on the complicated, but loving, relationship between Bussy and Gide, which comes across as touching in Briggs' telling.

For me, one of the most interesting suggestions in the book is Briggs' notion that the translator/artist has a sense of recreating the original work, adopting it as one's own, pushing it almost into the area of original creation.

"All books are made from other books and so, in their way, all books are translations in one way or another." (p.138)

She cites an essay by Elena Ferrante with an interesting example about Ferrante's reading of Madame Bovary and wanting to write a story in Italian that could the very sentence Ferrante found in Flaubert. She doesn't cite, but could, something like Zadie Smith's retelling of Howards End as On Beauty. Is that a translation? Well it is a carrying-across (the Latin root of the word) of a story on class relations, on the relations between art and commerce, from 1900 to 2000. From a white England to a multiracial United States.  It's a fascinating idea and Briggs pushes it hard, but is careful not to push it farther than it should go.

The other thing that definitely needs to be remarked is the prose, and here, I'm afraid, I was less taken with the book. I wrote 'essay/meditation' above with deliberation: Briggs has a way of meditatively circling around an idea without ever quite lighting upon it. Some of this may come from Barthes, whom I scarcely know (and haven't read the works Briggs translated.) Sometimes it may be to remind of the way a translator works, trying out different words before settling on the preferred one. But some of it I just found maddeningly repetitive. Robinson Crusoe's table! I love Robinson Crusoe. But I will not be able to reread Defoe for quite a long time into the future without thinking, "Robinson Crusoe needs a table...He wanted a table because it was wanting." (p.237) And yes, I did definitely elide there.

Ah, well. Still a fascinating read.

In Googling for an image of the cover, I saw that Benjamin Moser reviewed the book for the New York Times. Moser himself is sometimes a controversial figure, but he cares about translation and is responsible for our most recent versions of Clarice Lispector. (As translator, but also as general editor.) But he fundamentally misread this book, I'm afraid. He sees Briggs as advocating some sort of translatorial relativism, as if all translations are equally good. No. "Translation cannot dispense with...the effort to get it right." (p.140) Now maybe Briggs' way of talking around an issue and seeing all sides made it a bit more difficult to see what she was saying, but, heck, I got it, and I felt Moser was just phoning it in, working out some issues he'd been irritated about in the past. Bah.

And that leaves me with no unread Fitzcarraldo Editions books! I may very well have to do something about that...

Thanks to Kaggsy and Lizzy for the great idea and for hosting!

Call Me Ishmael

"I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.

It is geography at bottom, a hell of a wide land from the beginning. That made the first American story (Parkman's): exploration." 

Charles Olson was born in Massachusetts in 1910 and grew up there. He attended Wesleyan, Yale, and finally worked on a Ph.D. at Harvard in American Studies. In 1939 he won a Guggenheim grant to study Melville. Call Me Ishmael was the result. After various war-related jobs, and a stint working for the Democratic party and FDR's re-election in 1944, the book came out in 1947. Though he had academic qualifications, as the quote above might show, it's not exactly an academic book.

Olson might have seen SPACE as the crucial American quality because he occupied a lot of it: he was 6'8" tall.

The book has a certain oracular quality to it:

"I am interested in a Melville who decided sometime in 1850 to write a book about the whaling industry and what happened to a man in command of one of the most successful machines Americans had perfected up to that time--the whaleship. 

This captain, Ahab by name, knew space. He rode it across the seven seas. He was an able skipper, what the fishing people I was raised with call a highliner. Big catches: he brought back holds barrel full of oil of the sperm, the light of American and European communities up until the 19th century. 

This Ahab had gone wild. The object of his attention was something unconscionably big and white. He had become a specialist: he had all space concentrated into the form of a whale called Moby-Dick. And he assailed it as Columbus an ocean, La Salle a continent, the Donner Party their winter Pass."

"Some men ride on such space, others have to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive. As I see it Poe dug in and Melville mounted. They are the alternatives."

After the publication of Call Me Ishmael, Olson first taught and then later became the rector of Black Mountain College, in the 50s the gathering place of a substantial strand of modern American art: poetry, dance, music, sculpture and other visual arts; Robert Duncan, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly. Olson himself was also a noted poet.

I read the book umpteen years ago and I remembered it more for its oracular quality about the nature of American art--about which I think he's interesting and astute--and I suspect that's what it's read for now. After all my edition is City Lights Books, and not some university press. I was twigged to it by friends interested in the American avant-garde, not by Melville scholars. He's definitely influenced by his era: the Great Depression has led him to think about American art in terms of economics and industry.

But in reading it again, and right after reading Moby-Dick, I have also discovered that he did real work on Melville. The Melville revival--the Moby-Dick revival--is, in 1947, not to mention 1939 when he gets the grant, still quite new. It's not so long since Melville died. Olson has gotten hold, from Melville's granddaughter, of Meville's personal copy of Shakespeare, in six volumes, the one Melville read just before composing Moby-Dick, and there are scribblings in it and Olson builds arguments around them. He's seen Melville's copy of Don Quixote, which Melville read in 1856 and has other scribblings, and Olson has things to say about that.

Olson has also read around in the history of the whaling industry and is full of fascinating facts: whaling was the third largest source of export goods for the US in the 1840s; of 900 whaling ships world wide in 1846, 735 were American; the Essex, the ship destroyed by a whale and model for the Pequod, set sail on its fatal voyage in 1819, the year of Melville's birth; of the eight survivors from the voyage of the Essex, at least five went on to become captains of their own ship.

It's fascinating, short, (120 pages) and very highly recommended.

Actual facts about Olson come from Robert Creeley's introduction to Olson's Selected Writings, which I also pulled off the shelf to look at.

One more book for Brona's Moby-Dick readalong!

Two by Brian Dillon (#FitzcarraldoFortnight)

I first read Brian Dillon's Essayism (2017) just under two years ago. I didn't blog about it, but I did feel it was one of the best things I read that year. So when I saw In The Dark Room late last year, I picked it up. I read it this week and then reread Essayism.

In The Dark Room (2005) is Dillon's first book, and the Fitzcarraldo Edition is a reprint with an introduction by Frances Wilson.

"...a reflection on memory might also be a reflection on my memory..."

-p. 235

That quote is a bit of an aside in context, but gives a strong sense of the way the book (I suspect) came into being for Dillon. He had a sad and (what has fortunately, in the West at least, become) a rare childhood: he was orphaned at twenty. His mother died when he was fifteen after a long bout with a painful disease, scleroderma; she was also afflicted by depression. Then his father died of a heart attack five years later. So when he started thinking about memory as a topic, it's understandable he might not want to include an examination of his own. But what memories do any of us have more readily available to examine?

So he centers his study of memory around his memories of his own childhood, and of his parents. There are five organizing areas in the book, hooks that memory often gets hung on: the house he grew up in, the things that survived his parents, photographs of his parents, their actual bodies, and revisiting the places associated with his childhood. What does it mean to look at a photograph of one's parents together before one was conceived? What can you say about them, though knowing them well, but not in that moment?

Dillon is forthright about his own battles with depression, and 'The Dark Room' alludes more to that than to the process of making photographs. He writes with deep reference to other literary investigations of memory, with Augustine's Confessions and Proust being particularly important, but also Joe Brainard's I Remember, Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, Virginia Woolf, Sebald. A fascinating investigation.

Then I went back to Essayism. Dillon takes the word from Musil's The Man Without Qualities. The title of chapter 62, in the Sophie Wilkins translation, reads:

I remembered Essayism as a wonderfully insightful book about the glories of reading essays, sometimes (and especially for Dillon) a melancholic pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. And it is very good on a number of essayists. When I first read it, I was so overwhelmed by his (judicious, but real) praise for Palinurus' (Cyril Connolly's) impossible masterpiece The Unquiet Grave I immediately went and reread that. He was equally good, I thought, on Sontag, on Sir Thomas Browne, on Elizabeth Hardwick, on Montaigne. Less time was spent--but still it was quality time-- with Didion, Benjamin, Barthes, Cioran, Gass. For instance he says of first volume of Sontag's diary, (from when she was a teenager and in her early twenties) that it is 'quite endearing in its pretension.' Which is exactly what I thought when I read it, though without the wit to phrase it so well. He was so good I wished he'd told me about essayists I already loved, Hazlitt in particular.

I remembered from that first reading there was an autobiographical component as well, but it was only in reading it immediately after In The Dark Room that I realized how important that was to its conception. That old black dog had been hanging around again and Dillon needed to work. For Dillon, essayism, to essay, to look closely at things and write about them, is a crucial part of maintaining who we are. Good thoughts for a blogger.

I think both of these are very good. Essayism is a little more outward-looking, and I prefer it, probably for that reason, but In The Dark Room is also very good, and especially if your tastes run more to autobiography or memoir.

I also have a copy of This Little Art by Kate Briggs and I'm hoping to read it this week. I earlier read Flights and actually as a Fitzcarraldo book; it was later released by Riverhead (Penguin) and the Fitzcarraldo isn't distributed here anymore. I liked it, but it did occasionally make me squeamish, I admit. I very much liked Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of Dead, but read that in the Riverhead hardback and didn't blog about it.

Thanks to Kaggsy for the great idea of hosting this!

Side note: I'm forever fascinated by the vagaries of my spellchecker. Didion and Barthes are famous enough that my spellchecker approves. Cioran and Gass, enh, not so much. I think of Palinurus as a pretty important character in the Aeneid, as well as being Cyril Connolly's pseudonym, but that's not good enough. Aeneas himself checks out OK, unsurprisingly. Anchises yes, but Achates, however faithful he might have been, no.

Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One's Own (#CCSpin)

I have to admit to being a bit surprised by A Room Of One's Own. Though I hadn't read it before I sort of thought I knew all about it. (To an ancient Greek, this is called hubris.) What I thought (in advance): In order for a woman (or anyone, really, but women were very much less likely to have it) to become a writer five hundred pounds a year and a room of one's own was needed.

And the essay does make that argument, it's true. But it still surprised me, stylistically I guess. I'm not that well-read in Woolf by any means. But the novels I've read--To The Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando--are complex, difficult in their language, and deep. Her essays--I've read the Common Reader series--on the other hand, are leaner in their language, full of sparking ideas, and deep. I don't know, I expected this to be like the Common Reader series. But it was neither one nor the other--neither fiction nor essay--exactly.

The initial occasion for the essay was a two-night talk on the subject 'Women and Fiction' Virginia Woolf gave at two women's colleges at Cambridge in October of 1928. She then rewrote the talks as a single essay which was published, in both the U.K. and the U.S. a year later, and is the text in this volume. But she refers several times in the printed essay to the occasion of the talks and starts her essay by saying what her hosts and audience likely mean by 'Women and Fiction' is not what she will address.

What surprised me was the almost fanciful, the fictional, aspect of her essay. The introduction appropriately quotes Woolf herself from The Pargiters, "I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction." And so she does here. Woolf supposes a sister of William Shakespeare named Judith, equally talented, and how her purported career as a writer would go. (Short answer: not well.) The essay more stops and starts, circles around its argument with its fictional conceit, and demonstrates more by example than by any close-reasoned progression. I'd say it was closer to Orlando, than to anything in the Common Reader volumes. In short, the truth here is important, and she is writing fiction.

My edition (shown above next to Hubert) is the Penguin, and also includes Three Guineas, which I haven't read. It contains a pretty good, though not brilliant, introduction by Michèle Barrett.

Two other things I did notice: Woolf writes at one point, apropos of the British Library catalog: "Why are women, judging from this catalogue, so much more interesting to men than men are to women?" I hate to argue with Virginia Woolf, and I certainly know nothing about the state of the British Library catalog in 1928, but I doubt that's really true. Her basic point, that men want to control women in that time, (we'll ignore for now whether anything's changed or not) I don't doubt: but that's (alas) not the same thing as really wanting to know anything about them. I think she's confusing two different activities here. At some point I might write about men writing about women in fiction, contrasting that with women writing about men. It's a thing I've been thinking about.

The other is that Barrett includes a footnote explaining the name Coleridge: "Coleridge: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), poet and essayist." Really, I thought? A reader of Virginia Woolf will need to be told such basic information about Coleridge? There is no "Shakespeare: William Shakespeare (1564-1616), poet and playwright." But then I decided Barrett was probably right. These days I can imagine this book assigned to incoming college students--possibly high school students--students so young they don't yet even know who Coleridge is. What would Virginia Woolf herself have thought about this turn of events? I have to imagine she would be shocked Coleridge was no longer a household name, and she herself was read first. So: maybe the world has changed.

This was my book for the Classics Club spin #22. I finished the book a couple of weeks ago, but between traveling to California and just generally being slothful, here I am writing this post at the last possible minute...

Cambridge Introduction to Melville

"I shall have a fine book of travels, I feel sure; and will tell you more of the South Seas than any writer has done--except Herman Melville, perhaps, who is a howling cheese."

-R. L. Stevenson, in a letter to Charles Baxter

 I came across that quote (via Holbrook Jackson's The Anatomy of Bibliomania) and it sent me down a Google rabbit hole in order to decide what the heck Stevenson really thought of Melville. (A howling cheese? If somebody called me a howling cheese, I think my first instinct would be to slug them.) But it seems Stevenson only meant good things about Stevenson by that quote.

At least that's what Kevin Hayes says in The Cambridge Introduction to Herman Melville. ("It means something similar to the proverbial phrase, 'to take the cake.'") Also Stevenson compares the Master of Ballantrae in that novel to Captain Ahab--The Master of Ballantrae comes out in 1889, when Melville's reputation is probably at its lowest, yet Stevenson knows his works well.

Overall I can't say I particularly found the Hayes book helpful, though; on Moby-Dick itself Hayes seemed too taken with the idea of the double or Doppelgänger. Old Ishmael telling the story of course has a relation to young Ishmael living the story, but it doesn't strike me as useful to refer to them as doubles. When Hayes calls Ahab and the whale doubles he has a better, though still not entirely convincing to me, argument. Your mileage may vary. 

Still there were a few fun things. One of the contemporary reviews said this of the chapter 'The Whiteness of the Whale':

It 'should be read at midnight, alone, with nothing heard but the sounds of the wind moaning without, and the embers falling into the grate within.'

I'm sure I didn't succeed in doing that, but it sounds good. The next time I read the book. Also 'The Whiteness of the Whale' was Sergei Eisenstein's favorite chapter in the book.

I also learned about Giorgio Federico Ghedini, an Italian composer who died in 1965. His best-known work is the Concerto dell'Albatro, which includes spoken text from Moby-Dick. For classical music fans, here it is from Youtube: (the spoken word part is in the third movement beginning around the 17th minute.)

I previously shared elsewhere in a slightly abbreviated form, this quote from Hayes:

"Moby-Dick demands readers who are unafraid to confront the strange and the unusual, those willing to use their minds, if not their palates, to face the mysteries of existence as reflected through an epic whaling quest."

Aw, shucks. You shouldn't have. You really think so?

And Hayes' final words on Moby-Dick?

"Moby-Dick is the greatest book in the history of the English language."

So now you know.