Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore

Avenge the patriotic gore,

That flecked the streets of Baltimore.

-from Maryland, My Maryland 

(former state song of Maryland) 

Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore (1962) looks at U.S. literature written by authors affected by (and affecting) the Civil War. It starts with Harriet Beecher Stowe, "the little lady who brought us this big war," according to Lincoln, and her Uncle Tom's Cabin, and ends with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who died in 1935, having retired as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, but who'd been wounded at Ball's Bluff, left for dead at Antietam, wounded again at Chancellorsville. 

But it's not a history of the Civil War and its aftermath like other histories. There's little discussion of military campaigns or economics--there are other books for that. Grant's memoirs, as well as Sherman's and Mosby's all feature, but Wilson discusses their prose style, not the battles. He writes about stories and myths as such, the myth (and he certainly thinks it is mostly myth) of the Southern Gentlemen or the nobility of the Lost Cause.

One of the great things about the book, though, is exactly that analysis of prose. Wilson suggests that the Civil War affected the style of American writing, that before the war, the influence of Sir Walter Scott was strong in the U.S., as everywhere in the world, but that the need to communicate quickly in wartime meant a new spareness came to the fore. Grant's dispatches feature, and Wilson makes a fascinating comparison between the speeches Edward Everett (once the most famous orator in the U.S.) gave at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery and that now better known--and much shorter--one that begins, "Four score and seven years ago,..." (which, I don't know about you, but I had to memorize in high school.) In the long run, maybe, this leads to Hemingway, however you might feel about that.

Many of the figures he writes about are obscure, and even some that aren't, were best known for something other than their writing. Sure, Grant's and Sherman's memoirs are ensconced in the Library of America now--and Grant's memoirs at least, I think, are great, and now I want to read Sherman's--but I don't think they were so celebrated as literature in 1962. If you think about who now are judged the major figures in U.S. literature in the period, you might come up with Mark Twain, Emily Dickinson, Henry and William James (those James boys), Henry Adams, Walt Whitman.  They're all mentioned, but none of them get a chapter. Frederick Douglass doesn't even get a mention. Wilson might say he wanted figures who saw the effects of the war first-hand: Twain was a two-weeks cavalryman, before deciding to heck with it and going to California; the two older James brothers were discouraged from serving by their father, and didn't, though the two younger brothers did, and Wilkie James was seriously wounded; Henry Adams was in London, serving as secretary to his father, the ambassador to Britain. An important role, but away from the fighting. Only Whitman was close to the action, serving as a nurse to the Union Army.

But it's also true, I think, Wilson just likes to search out lesser-known, but fascinating figures. He writes in The Shores of Light, "There are few things I enjoy so much as talking to people about books which I have read and they haven't." And I don't think he was fibbing... There's a great chapter on the diaries of Southern women, another on the philosophy of Alexander Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy. (Stephens was anti-slavery, and initially against secession, but felt strongly the South could, that United States was a compact of states and not an indissoluble Union.) There's a chapter about the novelist John De Forest, who's known now (if at all) as the originator (more or less) of the idea of the Great American Novel. (I highly recommend Lawrence Buell's The Dream of the Great American Novel). A chapter on poetry discusses Melville (well-known, though less as a poet), Sidney Lanier (known somewhat?), and Frederick Tuckerman (scarcely known at all, but what Wilson quotes makes me want to find his work). If you're interested in reading about obscure writers (and, ahem, you *are* reading my blog at the moment 😉) I think you just might find the book to your taste...

One other thing has to be mentioned, though, and that's the introduction. It's weird. If you look at the Wikipedia article on the book, and follow up the references there, Henry Steele Commager's contemporaneous New York Times review or David Blight's article in Slate for the book's fiftieth anniversary, you'll see the introduction (of 30 pages) gets as much coverage as the rest of the book (nearly 800). Wilson was seriously pacifist at this time and got into tax trouble in the 50s--he refused to pay taxes that would support the nuclear arms race (Henry David Thoreau gets a couple of mentions in the book, though he's already dying by the start of the Civil War) and Wilson attacks Lincoln from the Left in the introduction, objecting to the suspension of habeas corpus, and considering him equally imperialist with Bismarck and Lenin. Umm. Because of the introduction, Wilson is sometimes viewed as pro-Southern, though I don't think that's true. He didn't count Reconstruction a success, but that's hardly an unusual point of view.

Now everyone reads the past in light of present events, though perhaps we shouldn't, and I myself can't help but think that seven Southern states, at least, seceded when they had no conceivable source of grievance against Lincoln--he hadn't even been inaugurated yet. They lost an election and refused to acknowledge it.  (Why is that in my head these days? I'm sure I don't know.) In any case the introduction seems to have colored interpretations of the main body of the book, but I think it's best ignored. The book mostly appeared as a series of New Yorker articles in the ten years preceding their collection into a book; the introduction was written at the end when Wilson was squabbling with the IRS. The main body of the book doesn't actually seem to me to affirm the thesis stated in the introduction.

I took it along as topical reading on our recent trip to Washington, D.C. We went to see Lincoln's Cottage in northern D.C. on the grounds of the Old Soldier's Home:

The admission fee included this cool (?) bookmark, which I of course had to then use for the book...

The house just to the left of center is Lincoln's getaway cottage.

From my Classics Club list, good for November Non-Fiction, and distinctly inappropriate for Novellas in November...

The Jena Set

"Listen, this good old Jena really is a den of murderers after all. You have no idea how everyone gossips about everything behind your back, even the people you wouldn't expect."

-Letter from Caroline Schlegel to her husband August Wilhelm Schlegel, 5 May 1801

That's a little strong but there is a lot of gossip in Andrea Wulf's new book Magnificent Rebels about the figures of what she labels the Jena set. At the time (1795-1806) Jena was an important German university town near Weimar. The gossip includes: Who's sleeping with whom. Who's feuding with whom. Who's pro-Napoleon and who's not. Who's dying and who pulls through.

But they're people worth gossiping about, with Goethe the best known. He's the old man of the group, 46 at the start, respectable, though not entirely, since he's living with, and not yet married to, Christiane Vulpius. There's a boatload of Friedrichs, and Wulf conveniently provides a Dramatis Personae, because among those Friedrichs are Schiller, Schlegel, and Schelling, plus one (Friedrich von Hardenberg) whose name fortunately doesn't start with 'Sch', and better known as Novalis anyway. Poets, translators, philosophers. Kant is an early booster, and Hegel a late addition to the group. 

At first there's harmony. They start magazines, philosophize together, read each other's poetry. Goethe and Schiller edit each other's work. Goethe arranges for Johann Fichte a job as professor at Jena; his lectures become enormously popular. Later Goethe is equally instrumental in getting Friedrich Schelling an appointment as a professor of philosophy. It's Friedrich Schlegel who popularizes the word Romantic in its modern sense, from the French word 'roman', meaning a novel.

Wulf is most interested in Caroline Schlegel. (Her name through most of the book. At the start she's the widow Böhmer; near the end, after a long affair with him, she marries Schelling.) August Wilhelm Schlegel is her second husband, and the two of them are responsible for what Wulf says are still the standard translations of Shakespeare in German. But the affairs, the literary feuds, the short tempers, begin to tell. Fichte is fired from his professorship for atheism. The Schlegels and Schiller end up in a bitter feud over editing and won't talk to each other, though Goethe attempts to mediate. By 1806, the year of the Battle of Jena, where Napoleon decimates the army of Prussia and its allies, most of the principals have already left town. The town itself is battered. But their legacy lives on, propagated by figures who write books about them, such as Madame de Staël and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

A pretty fascinating crowd in its own right, but especially fascinating if you're a fan of Penelope Fitzgerald's delightful The Blue Flower.

And of course I then had to reread it. It centers around the poet and novelist Novalis, but ends in 1797, when Novalis' fiancée dies of tuberculosis. Most of the same figures appear, though. 

"Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history."

  "...What did they talk about?"

"Nature-magnetism, galvanism, animal magnetism and freemasonry."

"I see the fault in Fichte's system. There is no place in it for love."

"If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching."

"But I have, I can't deny it, a certain inexpressible sense of immortality."

All sayings of Novalis in the novel and I suspect based on his writings, though only the first (which serves as the epigraph) is given a citation. It's funny and touching. A great novel.

Novalis himself dies in 1801, at the age of 28, also of tuberculosis.

Marc David Baer's The Ottomans

Continuing this year's voyage around the Black Sea...

Marc David Baer's The Ottomans, is a history of the Ottoman empire from its founding by Osman I (dates slightly approximate, but he died close to 1324) until its demise at the end of World War I. They aren't always represented as some of history's good guys, but Baer, a professor at the London School of Economics, is pretty sympathetic. The book was short-listed for this year's Wolfson Prize, but didn't win in the end. But that wasn't revealed before I put it on my library's hold list.

Osman I (though his story seems to be at least partly mythical) led his band of Turkish herders from central Asia to a spot on the Anatolian plateau southeast of Istanbul. They elbowed out whoever was there and created a small state, but initially did not conquer a city, nor found one. They pastured their herds on the uplands in summer and in the valleys in winter.  They had already converted to Islam, but retained some of the ways of their animistic ancestors. (Relative equality between the sexes, for example.)

They had the virtues of where they came from: good horsemanship and good bowmanship. But they were too small a band and too powerless to have much impact at first. At least according to Baer, though, they were fortunate in their choice of location. The Mongols were retrenching a bit; Byzantium was weakening; the Seljuk sultanate of Rum, the main power on the Anatolian plateau, collapsed in the early 1300s. The Black Death came, and because the Ottomans had not yet founded cities, they weathered it much more readily than their city-inhabiting neighbors. 

This set them up for their period of expansion: the Balkans, the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Mecca and Medina in 1517, the first siege of Vienna in 1529. Baer observes that at this time, the Ottomans are technological leaders: they're early adopters of gunpowder, muskets, and more famously, siege cannons. 

Baer is also impressed with their governance structures. He emphasizes their tolerance, though he's careful to distinguish this from true egalitarianism, which existed exactly nowhere at the time. (And we won't talk about now either.) You could be Jewish or Christian and advance; top positions were reserved for Muslims, but if you converted you could be from anywhere, not necessarily a Turk, and it didn't matter. When the Jews were kicked out of Spain and Portugal (1492) they were welcomed into the Ottoman empire for their skills. The grand vizier was often a Christian convert, sometimes one taken as a child and educated (though also enslaved) by the Ottoman state. This created a class loyal to the state, that advanced by merit, both in the military (the Janissaries) and in civil governance. Local aristocracies could complain, but couldn't wangle their incompetent children into positions of power.

This lasted pretty well through the reign of Suleiman I, who was in charge 1520-1566. While the maximum geographical extent of the empire came later, religious zealotry and nationalism began to cut into a system that had worked well. The other powers around them also caught up with the Ottoman expertise with gunpowder.

One of the interesting motifs for me was how much the Ottomans saw themselves as the true inheritor of the Roman empire. This is not as odd as it might seem. The Byzantines considered themselves the successor of the Roman state, called themselves not Byzantines, but Romaioi. The Ottomans now held the Byzantine capitol. Suleiman I, roughly contemporaneous with Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, felt equally the inheritor of Rome. (And as we know, the Holy Roman Empire "wasn't holy, wasn't Roman, and wasn't an empire"--Voltaire.) The area called Rome, or Rum, or Rumelia moves around. One interesting bit of trivia I realized is the poet Rumi, born in what is now Afghanistan, and who died in what is now Turkey, and who wrote mostly in Persian, is actually, according to his name, the 'Roman.'

Succession had always been a problem among the Ottomans. One son, generally the eldest, rushed back from the provinces where he'd been stationed to the capitol upon the death of his father, got the reins of government in his hands, and had all his male siblings killed. The army, in the form of the Janissaries, was involved, and once they'd gotten a taste for king-making, couldn't be easily dislodged. This was an unfortunate 'Roman' trait: the Praetorian Guard also didn't do the Roman empire any good in its latter days either.

Baer also feels the Ottomans failed in not making the transition from a warrior state to a peaceful trading state. They stood athwart major trade routes and could have done so. A strong faction continued to feel the true Ottoman was the warrior Ottoman. (Their term was gazi.) But the empire had gotten about as big as it could. The first siege of Vienna failed in 1529 because the supply lines were too long, but they had learned nothing from that at the time of the second (in 1683) which was a considerable disaster for the Ottomans. From here on in they're also butting up against the expanding Russian empire.

Various attempts at reform were tried and failed: concentrate on commerce not war, reduce the sultan to figurehead and let bureaucrats run things, religious zealotry, benevolent autocracy (a la the later Hapsburgs). It's Tsar Nicholas II, just before the Crimean War, who first calls the Ottoman state the 'sick man of Europe.'

The last attempted reform movement is a Turkish nationalism. The Young Turks (none of whose founders interestingly was a Turk: two Kurds, an Albanian, a Circassian) reduce the sultan to a figurehead and are more or less in charge during World War I. Baer is distinctly not sympathetic to them, but then their goal is to reduce what had been, at least at times, a successfully multi-ethnic polity to a state defined by one's race. His discussion of the Armenian genocide makes for very painful reading.

It also means Baer's not especially positive about Atatürk, though he's mostly outside the scope of the book. Atatürk (born in Thessalonica, but of Turkish parents) isn't directly implicated in the Armenian genocide, because he's busily organizing the defence at Gallipoli, but the Young Turks are his natural allies, and Atatürk, given the opportunity, refused to condemn the genocide after the war.

Anyway, a pretty fascinating history. Baer knows his stuff, provides an interesting perspective--emphasizing how European they were, especially appropriate for the European Reading Challenge 😉--and wants us to think differently about their history. (Based on the footnotes, I think there may have been a little war going on with the late Bernard Lewis.) I have to say, though, the writing was no better than adequate. There's the occasional misuse of words, but more notably a tendency to repeat. It was indeed interesting that no sultan completed the Hajj in all the years of the empire, or that it wasn't until 1520 and the conquests of Selim I that the empire was Muslim majority, but he tells us both those facts three times in different locations and in more or less the same words. Baer himself has to take the primary blame (that is, bear responsibility...?) for any sloppiness, but the book is from Basic Books, supposedly an imprint for quality books for the general reader. They ought to provide better editing. Maxwell Perkins, where did you go?

The Black Sea: A History

"There is a deep landlubber bias in historical and social research. History and social life, we seem to think, happen on the ground."

A couple of years ago I read Charles King's Midnight at the Pera Palace (looking at 20th-century Turkey though the lens of a luxury hotel/night club in Istanbul) and liked it a lot. More recently I read his Gods of the Upper Air (about American anthropologists, such as Franz Boas and Margaret Mead) and liked it, though a bit less. I didn't manage to blog about either. 

But then, in a moment of idleness, I was looking through Charles King's back catalog and checking what my library had, and there was this volume: The Black Sea: A History. We've all been thinking about the Black Sea far more lately. I thought I should check this out. (Both literally and figuratively.)

The volume begins by discussing why we should consider the Black Sea a unit; it's often not these days; the countries involved are divided under Russian studies or Balkan studies or Near Eastern studies. He makes a good case, but I have to say I wasn't necessarily engaged with that question. Then he discusses the geography and geology of the region, which was pretty fascinating. Good harbors, which products were available for trade, where and when the fishing was good are all hugely important questions to anyone near the sea. 

But that's all pretty quick. Then we're on to the history. As I said once before, any history that can conceivably start with Herodotus ought to do so, and the historical part of this one does, too. One of King's recurring motifs is that the Black Sea is an inland sea for somebody--or it's not. Is it a place of trade or of conflict? For the Greeks, it seems, at least in the early years, it was an inland sea, with a number of Greek colonies trading with their respective hinterlands, but in fairly regular communication with each other and the Greek homeland. Most of the Greek colonies were of Milesian origin. But already by the time we think of as high classical Greek civilization (5th-4th century B.C.) this was falling apart. Alexander's ascendancy didn't last long, and none of the successor kingdoms dominated the sea.

Nor did the Romans. Their inland sea was, of course, the Mediterranean (Mare Nostrum) and the Black Sea was the frontier, where they fought against states they bordered on the east: Pontus, Parthia, Armenia.

It was closer to an inland sea for the Byzantines at their peak, but never quite. Italian city states--Venice, Genoa--pick up a fair amount of the trade and maintained entrepôt of their own. And by the later years of their empire the Byzantines controlled very little of the Black Sea littoral.

But then the Ottomans, after they took Byzantium (1453) again held the sea under one power. Some of the states on the Black Sea were tributaries and not directly part of the empire, but for roughly 300 years after the fall of Byzantium, the Black Sea was an Ottoman lake, and trade was relatively free and easy. 

Eventually the Ottoman empire grew weaker--and the Cossacks came on the scene. The Cossacks were perfectly happy--and perfectly capable--of conducting piracy on the sea in addition to their raids on horseback. But by themselves they weren't able to dominate the Black Sea. But their piratical successes were one of the things that revealed the increasing weakness of the Ottomans. The Russians took note.

The latter history of the Black Sea is story of the conflict between Russia and Turkey over control of the Black Sea--and the efforts of other players, the British, the French--to keep one party from dominating. The Crimean War, among other conflicts, was the result. Among the results of the Crimean War was an attempt to de-militarize the Black Sea.

The book comes out in 2004 and at that time King was optimistic. There were new environmental initiatives to counteract years of neglect and damage. "[C]onflict among the states of the Black Sea zone is now virtually unthinkable." [p.240] Alas. As Yogi Berra may (or may not) have said: It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

Still, it's a pretty fascinating book, even if it needs updating. If you've read his other books you'll know, King likes anecdotes and uses them well. There's some good stories in it and it's pretty readable. And especially now, worth reading.

As King notes in the beginning, six countries currently border the Black Sea; if you counted the countries in the Black Sea drainage area, there are 22 possibilities. Out of all those choices, I guess I won't pick the most obscure... King is a professor in the foreign services school at Georgetown, and at least at the time of this book held the Ion Raţiu chair in Romanian studies. Romania is important in the book, I need to keep up my Romania streak, and so...Romania it is! for the European Reading Challenge.

Memoirs of Mme. Vigée-Le Brun (#ccspin)

"I will begin by speaking of my childhood, which is the symbol, so to say, of my whole life, since my love for painting declared itself in my earliest youth."

Elisabeth Vigée was born in Paris in 1755 to Louis Vigée, a provincial portrait painter who encouraged her love of painting. "I made a picture by lamplight of a man with a beard...When my father saw it he went into transports of joy, exclaiming, 'You will be a painter, child, if ever there was one!" 

Unfortunately he died when she was twelve, and her mother remarried a jeweller, who did not encourage her, but did take any money she made as a painter. "I detested the man."

To get out of her hated stepfather's house, she married the art dealer, Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun, in 1776. Le Brun encouraged her painting, but now her husband took all of her money instead of her stepfather. He was a successful enough dealer--later he was instrumental in making the Louvre into a public museum--but he was also a compulsive gambler, and no amount of money could do much to keep him afloat.

She was, however, starting to succeed in a big way. She painted Marie Antoinette, and the queen liked the portrait, so there were several more, also the king, with or without the children. 

In a few years though, being Marie Antoinette's preferred portrait painter was not particularly a recommendation with the public. She threw a toga party, and there was a rumor going round that it had been financed by the state to the tune of twenty-thousand francs. (She claims she spent fifteen and used a few old bedsheets. Since my idea of a toga party is more Animal House than Trianon, I guess I believe her...)

Self portrait

As the Revolution began to get hot, she decided to leave France. In 1789, the royal family was arrested, and she fled with her daughter (but not her husband) to Italy. It was the beginning of thirteen years of exile. She was abroad ostensibly to study the great masters of painting--and she did--but it was also safer. After Italy, she went to Vienna, to Saint Petersburg, to Moscow, to Berlin. She was commissioned to paint Catherine the Great (and did paint her granddaughters) but Catherine herself died before the portrait was begun. Only in 1802 was she able to safely return to France. She made later trips to England (which she didn't much like) and to Switzerland.

She wrote these memoirs in the later 1830s, when she was in her early 80s, her husband and daughter both dead by then. They're pretty fascinating, though it's true (and occasionally exasperating) that she never met an aristocrat she didn't like. I've seen her paintings in various museums.

The memoir is available on Project Gutenberg, translated by Lionel Strachey, the brother of Lytton. I first learned of its existence from Mudpuddlesoup. 

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine

Serhii Plokhy's The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine is a history both of the land occupied by the contemporary nation of Ukraine, but even more of the people who are Ukrainians. It covers 2500 years ending with 2020 in the revised edition. (The revised edition came out in 2021.)

Especially now it made for a pretty fascinating read.

The history begins with Herodotus, which any history that justifiably can ought to do. 😉 The area was not then inhabited by Slavic speakers, but Cimmerians and Scythians, who spoke Iranian languages. Plokhy also makes use of Procopius' history, to discuss the area's relation to Byzantium, but he mostly moves over this period pretty quickly.

Slavic speakers first move to the area as part of the migrations caused by Attila the Hun. (5th or 6th century.) As the power of the Huns wanes, a new state, Kievan Rus' is established covering most of what is now Ukraine, Belorussia, and European Russia. Kyiv is the capitol. The nobles, led by the Rurikid dynasty, are a mix of Vikings and Slavs; the people, mostly Slavs. It reached its political apex under Yaroslav the Wise (978-1054).

It seems the word Rus' (the basis of Russian) comes (via the Finns) from the Swedish word 'ruotsi' used to describe the Vikings as the 'men who row.' 

Yaroslav partitioned out the kingdom to his three eldest sons. Plokhy compares this division to that of Charlemagne. Like Charlemagne, Yaroslav did it to prevent inheritance squabbles among his sons, and it succeeded about as well as Charlemagne's attempt did. (That is, not at all.) New successor kingdoms were the result. These fought among themselves and tried to work with their more powerful neighbors (the Khazars, Byzantium). The word Ukraine first appears in the historical record at this time (in the 1180s). Then everything was swept away by the Mongol Horde in 1240. This was the beginning of differences between the various east Slavic states though none of them exactly correspond to three current ones. (Belarus, Ukraine, Russia).

Two east Slavic vassal states are formed in the aftermath of the Mongol invasion. One is Muscovy, with its capital Vladimir (near Moscow) and is the area around Moscow. The other, Galicia-Volhynia, was centred in Kyiv but moved its capitol to Kholm (now Chełm in Poland) and occupied the area of what's now western Ukraine and eastern Poland. The two vassal states received different treatment; the Muscovy state, closer to the Mongol heartland was more oppressed; the Kholm state was allowed a looser rein. 

In 1323 the last male heirs (grandsons of the founder) of the Galicia-Volhynia dynasty died. The Mongols were a bit weaker. Galicia was taken over by the Polish kingdom; Volhynia by the Lithuanians. 1386 marks the beginning of the joining of Poland and Lithuania in a commonwealth. But the administration of the two areas remains separate. Plokhy thinks this is the beginning of a separate identity for Belarusians and Ukrainians. 

The Cossacks begin as a sort of peasant rebellion in what is now eastern Ukraine, but in 1648 Bohdan Khmelnitsky creates a state (the Hetmanate) out of Polish-Lithuanian lands in what is now eastern Ukraine. Plokhy doesn't play down the pogroms that have left Khmelnitsky as little more than a swear word in Jewish history, but he did create a sort of Ukrainian state. But by 1780 the Hetmanate had been absorbed into Russia. Western Ukraine is split between Austria-Hungary (Lviv) and Russia (Kyiv) during the partitions of Poland.

There's an attempt to set up a new Ukrainian state in the immediate aftermath of World War I, but it doesn't last, doesn't really even get on its feet.

Plokhy discusses the state of education in the Ukrainian language in the various jurisdictions as one of the formative elements of a Ukrainian identity. The ability to use one's native Ukrainian in a public setting comes and goes at the political whim of the various powers. For instance, Austria-Hungary at one point trying to beat back Polish nationalism allows schools to use Ukrainian. Later to placate the Poles, Ukrainian is no longer taught. 

Plokhy makes a good case for a Ukrainian identity, which is, of course, like anybody else's, only strengthened by persecution. In the 19th century a number of nationalities were finding their feet; Plokhy does suggest that the Ukrainians were a little late in finding theirs, though they did not really have a state of their own at any point in the 19th century.

I felt like I learned a lot from the book, especially in the time frames that were more obscure to me: the Middle Ages in Slavic lands. Looking at Plokhy's list of publications on Wikipedia, (he's now a professor at Harvard) it's clear one of his real interests is the formation of Ukrainian identity, and I found that the most interesting part. 

This is a book for a non-specialist reader. (Like me!) It reads well, but it does cover 2500 years in 360 pages, so there are a few places where it felt a bit thin--World War I, for instance. Still. Full of fascinating and timely and suddenly--unfortunately--much more important things to know. Recommended.

Kate O'Brien's Farewell Spain

 "...and in any case, say only [blank] were fighting this war it is being fought for an issue which is everyone's immediate concern everywhere. It is a war waged by the forces of militaristic absolutism against democracy."

You might guess from the title above that the nationality I've blanked is 'Spaniards', and that the time of its writing in early 1937, and of course it is. But it resonates.

Kate O'Brien (1897-1974) was an Irish-born novelist. She worked as an au pair in Bilbao, Spain, in the early 20s, and fell in love with the country. She had come back as a tourist in 1936 and this book, half travelogue, half angry lament that the republic is under attack is the result. As she's writing it, late in 1936 and early 1937, it's not clear who will win, but, of course, in the end it was Franco and the nationalists, and O'Brien was denied entry to Spain until 1957 because of this book.

But half the book--probably more, actually--is travelogue, and witty and amusing travelogue at that:

"But it is no good. The cathedral is on your conscience. You paid good money and took some trouble to get here to see it, and you can sit in a café anywhere. Ah, turismo, what a slave-driver you are!"

O'Brien arrives by boat in the north. She visits Santander, Compostela, Salamanca, Ávila:

"All the rest of the town [Ávila] is lovely. It slithers carelessly about the sides of a golden hill and west and south down to the Adaja. It is placed high, but far away on every side the cold points of mountains fence its landscape in."

O'Brien is quite taken with Saint Teresa of Ávila, and went on to write a book about her. (She had been raised Catholic, but was agnostic as an adult.) She gets to Madrid, by then under attack from the Nationalist forces, though it hasn't yet fallen. Her final stop is Burgos. The edition I have is a Virago reprint from 1985 with illustrations and an introduction by Mary O'Neill, her life partner.

I've never read anything else by Kate O'Brien (have you?) and I quite liked it. She's best known as a novelist, I think. I'm going to have find other of her books.

I read it now because we're going to Spain soon for a little over two weeks. (Yay!) This was the trip we'd planned for two years ago, but then had to cancel at the last minute. We'll mostly be in the south (Córdoba, Granada, the Alhambra) so, in fact, the book didn't do much to prepare me, but that's OK, but it was still pretty good...

It's nice to be able to go somewhere again.

And not only is this a place I want to go visit, it is a place I'm actually going to go visit!

Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle

"[These writers] break down the walls of the present and wake us to the hope and exaltation of the untried, unsuspected possibilities of human thought and art."

The six main writers of Wilson's Axel's Castle are W. B. Yeats, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. So, you know, a pretty serious bunch. For Wilson, these are the representative Symbolists and his book is a study of 'imaginative literature of 1870 to 1930'. 

The book first appeared as a series of articles in The New Republic before coming out in book form in 1931. Keep that year in mind because it's crucial to Wilson's read of these authors.

What is Symbolism? "It was the tendency of Symbolism...to make poetry even more a matter of of the sensations and emotions of the individual than had been the case with Romanticism..."

Or:

"...the symbols of the Symbolist school [unlike the cross for Christianity or the Stars and Stripes for the USA] are usually chosen arbitrarily by the poet to stand for for special ideas of his own--they are a sort of disguise for these ideas." 

The book is full of sharp and unexpected insights on his subjects; on Proust, for instance: 

"These latter scenes, indeed, contain so much broad humor and so much extravagant satire that, appearing in a modern French novel, they amaze us....it seems plain that Proust must have read Dickens and that this sometimes grotesque heightening of character had been partly learned from him."

Not what one thinks of when mentioning Proust, and yet it's true. 

But it is 1931. Is this the literature the world needs? Wilson doesn't use the phrase art for art's sake, but maybe art should also be a bit for society's sake? He says Valéry's and Eliot's criticism is engaged in 'an impossible attempt to make aesthetic values independent of all other values.' He finds The Vision--Yeats' attempt to create a universalizing set of symbols--unserious and unhelpful, not to metion Yeats' experiments in automatic writing. He quotes disapprovingly, twice I think, Eliot's declaration from his essay 'For Lancelot Andrewes', that he is "a classicist in literature, an Anglo-Catholic in religion, and a royalist in politics." Wilson is distinctly none of those things.

I also found this on Valéry amusing:

"...one cannot help rebelling against what appears to be Valéry's assumption that it is impossible to be profound and to write as lightly and lucidly as [Anatole] France did."

A goal I suspect dear to Wilson's heart...

After the crash on Wall Street in 1929, Wilson was drawn to Communist ideas, though never becoming an actual Communist. But he did travel to the Soviet Union in the summer of 1935; once there he was put off by the increasingly totalitarian atmosphere, and certainly would have nothing to do with the Soviet Realist idea of art for politics' sake. Wilson doesn't fully construct his middle ground in this, and probably it can't be precisely defined. But technique matters and engagement matters, too. For that the book is applicable now as well, but maybe that's a perennial question. I do find it a very great work of criticism.

And one I tried to read before...at some point in my 20s I started this, but the only authors I'd then read were Yeats (whom I didn't know well) and Eliot (whom I knew only a little better). I thought, well, before I read this, I should read some of these authors. Now, (ahem) a few years later..., it was time to try again. One of Karen's categories this year was 'Classic on your TBR the longest'. Is this absolutely the one? I don't know, but it's been there a long time...

"What!" says Humpty, "I need to read all those books just to read the one?"
Well...maybe not entirely...

Reading the fatuous policeman: Edmund Wilson's Shores of Light

He arrives full of excitement and high expectations; eagerly he gets to know everybody who is writing, as he already knows everything they have written. He rushes about from one group to another. He attends all the literary teas, the publisher's luncheons, the theatrical openings, the miscellaneous drinking parties. And he brings to it all his shrewdness, his audacity, his humor, his extraordinary memory and his undiscourageable enthusiasm for literature. He makes us feel, as we read this record, that there is something really important in the air, that the work of all these people is interesting, that their opinions deserve attention.

Edmund Wilson's The Shores of Light came out in 1952, but it's largely a collection of his literary journalism in the 20s and 30s.  It's a fascinating history of the American cultural scene of the time. That quote above is from Wilson's review of Burton Rascoe's A Bookman's Daybook, but it could have been about Wilson himself.

Wilson really was in the center of everything. He was the managing editor of Vanity Fair for two years starting in 1920 (he was only 25!) and then later the literary editor at the New Republic for five years. He reviews the first publication of 'The Waste Land'. He's reading André Malraux in French before Malraux has appeared in English. He's involved in the controversy over James Joyce' Ulysses. (Demolishing the criticism of the New Humanist critic Paul Elmer More.) He's praising Hemingway and Dos Passos when those authors are nobodies.

Still, on the whole, I wouldn't go to this book for actual literary criticism, especially in the earlier sections. There's better literary criticism out there. Wilson himself wrote better criticism--I'm reading Axel's Castle at the moment. Think of this as history or chronicle. As I noted earlier, he's not very good on Willa Cather. He writes a series of columns about the state of American poetry that are simply swingeing takedowns and not very insightful: [of Robert Frost, for example] "I find him excessively dull, and he certainly writes very poor verse." 

But the book was assembled in the fifties, and he's aware of his limits. In a footnote to one of those poetry assessments, he notes:

"Maxwell Bodenheim [the Chicago, later New York poet] described me in some such phrase as 'a fatuous policeman, menacingly swinging his club.' In rereading this essay...I have sometimes been reminded of this."

Wilson later told his future biographer Lewis Dabney that he didn't really learn to write until about 1925. This is...kind of true, and represents about a quarter of the book. It's interesting to see him get better in something approaching real time.

The book is at times touching. It's framed by essays written in the 50s, the first, at the death of Christian Gauss, the Princeton professor whom Wilson had studied under; the last, at the death of Edna St. Vincent Millay, which was especially good, remembering life in Greenwich Village in the 20s--Wilson had proposed to Millay at the time, but she turned him down. (I also learned from Dabney's biography that Wilson lost his virginity to Millay, which may have added a little extra poignancy to his recollection.)

Willa Cather aside, Wilson is actually quite good on female authors, praising them, but also treating them seriously. Millay, in particular, who is, of course, a major poet, but also Louise Bogan, Elinor Wylie, Edith Wharton.

The book can be paired with Wilson's The American Earthquake, a similar collection of his journalism covering the 20s and 30s, but on political topics. I read that a couple of years ago. Two 800-page books, representing a mere fragment of what he wrote in the period. The man kept busy.

Also there was this, amusing for bloggers:

"I have recommended lenience toward reviewers who use the books they are supposed to be reviewing as pretexts for expressing themselves; but only in cases where their articles--what happens comparatively rarely--are interesting in themselves. There is no excuse at all for an uninteresting review that tells nothing about the book. The reviewer, at the very least, should be expected to supply information. The retelling of the story of a novel, the summary of an historical or philosophical book, the selection of representative passages and the attempt to communicate the quality of a poet, is the most boring part of the reviewer's business, but it is an absolutely essential part."

And it left me with a bunch of new books I want to read. What more can a book about books do? 

Two literarily-engaged figures with large heads

I got Lewis Dabney's Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature (2005) from the library to go with this; I've only read it so far through the period in question, but I will finish it. That's where I got the skinny on Wilson and Millay. Dabney also edited the Wilson Library of America volumes. 

The biography is pretty good, but editing, even, it seems, at a prestige publisher like Farrar, Strauss, is a lost art. The phrase 'shores of light' as Wilson tells us, comes from the Latin 'in luminis oras'. Wilson got it from Virgil, (Georgics, Bk II.47) though it appears a few other places as well. In Virgil, it's a comment about the heliotropism of plants; prosaically I might translate the line: "On their own plants grow toward light sources." Wilson romanticizes the line a bit in a poem he wrote (I'm quoting the end of his poem which appears in the essay on Millay):

    My stubborn heart to-night
Divines the fate of souls who have not died,
Buried in sullen shadows underground--

That reach for ever toward the shores of light.

I guess that's his sense of New York artists in the 20s and 30s.

Well and good. But Dabney quotes the tag twice, once as 'ad liminas oras' and once as 'in liminas oras', neither of which are what Virgil wrote and also not what appears in my beat-up Wilson paperback. They're not even good Latin. Argh!

I'm willing, possibly, to let Dabney slide on this: editing and typesetting are no longer processes over which authors have much control. In any case FSG should have done better. But then Dabney calls Robert Service an 'inspirational' poet! I'm not sure I'd even want to meet the folks for whom 'A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon' was inspirational. And anybody who found 'The Cremation of Sam McGee' inspirational would be just downright creepy. 😜

The Shores of Light was the first book of the year for me, though it took me a week to write about. A good start! How's your reading year going?