Mr. Fortune's Practice (#Mystery)

"How do you do these things, Fortune? You look only human, not to say childlike. Yet you have us all beat."

That's the Hon. Sidney Lomas, chief of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard. And friend to our hero, Reggie Fortune.

This is the second volume in the Reggie Fortune, detective consultant, series, and in this one he's a practically a regular at Scotland Yard. In the second (of seven) stories in this, he and Lomas are on a salmon-fishing vacation in Norway. 

In the first, 'The Ascot Tragedy', someone is murdered at the races, and it's clear the poison was administered in the royal pavilion. Fortunately the king wasn't there yet, but what a scandal!

In the second, 'The President of San Jacinto', while our hero is on that fishing vacation, Lord Carwell is murdered, and Carwell's cousin convicted. But when he gets back the beautiful actress Joan Amber asks him to take a look. Fortune had already had doubts about the case from what he read in the paper.

In 'The Young Doctor', we've got a second conviction and once again Fortune doesn't quite believe the evidence says what the prosecutor says it does. Did Dr. Horace Wilton actually steal those diamonds? 

'The Magic Stone' sees a talisman from Borneo stolen out of the British Museum. Then Lord Tetherdown, a famous collector of East Asian artifacts disappears. Connected? Of course.

Reggie Fortune goes to a country house party. Uh, oh! But not to worry: there's no sudden snowfall, the phone lines aren't cut, and nobody's even murdered. But it does seem some jewelry is stolen.

In 'The Leading Lady', Lomas and Fortune are again taking it easy, punting along a river in the countryside. They spot a lady's bag floating in the water; it belongs to well-known actress who they discover has disappeared. Do they need to drag the river?

Sir Humphrey Bigod falls to his death. The coroner's journey declares for 'death by misadventure,' but nobody's sure what happened. Then Dr. Emily Hall, medical officer at an orphanage, is murdered during a Christmas party fundraiser. 'Not a nice murder,' says Fortune. Then Fortune is summoned, in his role as an M.D., to look at a child with a bad stomach upset. It's not the flu, but arsenic. The story is 'The Unknown Murderer', but the murderer doesn't remain unknown...

Fortune is given to non sequiturs that prove to mean something after all: he reminds of Lord Peter Wimsey or Albert Campion; if you like that sort of detective, you'll like Fortune. I find him more tolerable than Wimsey, and not quite as off-the-wall as the early Campion. It works for me.

They're funny, but they can be a bit dark about the function of the law. There's those two mistaken convictions in this, and twice Fortune takes the provision of justice into his own hands because he fears the law won't provide it.

And that beautiful Joan Amber from the second case? In the last story:

"Mr. Fortune was much occupied in being happy, for after long endeavour he had engaged Joan Amber to marry him. The lady has said the endeavour was hers,..."

Pretty entertaining. I got this, together with the previous one, from Project Gutenberg. This came out in 1923, and I guess I've got a couple of years before Project Gutenberg can legally do the next one in the series. From here on to read more of them gets tricky...but I'm sure I'll try.

For the Vintage Mystery challenge:

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Man in Trench Coat: That picture on the cover will be from the last case, 'The Unknown Murderer' and that's Reggie Fortune himself in the trench coat.

Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery

'[an] editor...asked me to provide him with a more original piece of fiction. I might have refused, but there was murder in my soul, and here was an opportunity."

Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery of 1892 is one of the earliest locked-room mysteries. In his introduction, quoted above, he claims it's the earliest, but then his detective discusses the solution to 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', a clear predecessor. Let's just say it's early... 😉

Arthur Constant, an up and coming lefty politician, moves to the East End of London to get to know his potential constituents, is found murdered in his bedroom, locked from the inside, windows unbroken and locked from the inside, chimney too narrow for anyone to go down--you know the drill. How was it done?

And who'd want to do it anyway? (Because of course it wasn't suicide.) Arthur Constant was such a nice man, helpful to his neighbours, loved by his friends, etc. The only possible motive is that of a fellow labour leader Mortlake who may have thought Constant was after his girl, and the police soon fix on him as the murderer. 

There are two detectives on the case: Grodman, a former police detective, now retired, and writing his memoirs. He lives in the neighbourhood and is called to break the door when Constant's landlady gets worried. And Wimp, the detective who replaced him on the force, whom Grodman disdains as incompetent. (And Grodman may be right.)

I find it a bit astonishing how influential this is. Various possible solutions to unlocking the room are discussed, only to be dismissed; I swear I've seen all of those answers used in subsequent locked-room mysteries. And the type of the actual surprise murderer shows up in a few subsequent mysteries, too, but it would be spoilerish to say which. The book is on the Howard Haycraft/Ellery Queen list of the Cornerstones of Mystery, and deservedly so.

It's a pretty good read, too, though I did find it a little slow in the middle. It's also often funny. One of the suspects is a poet, Denzil Cantercot, forever talking about the Beautiful: "Life was very serious to him. He never wrote comic verse intentionally."

I got it from Project Gutenberg, but for a cover I used what seems to be the eBook Amazon sells. 

Vintage Mystery, Gold. A Town Scene: Stalking a murderer on the streets of East London.

That's eight! Completing the challenge, though it's likely I won't stop there.

Call Mr. Fortune by H. C. Bailey

"You look very young."

"I try to be."

It's Reggie Fortune delivers that snappy (?) comeback.

This is the first book in the series and our hero starts as something of a lazy dilettante. "At Oxford, at his hospital, he did what was necessary to take respectable degrees, but no more than he could help." Now out of school, the first story 'The Archduke's Tea' starts with his father, Dr. Fortune, delivering young Reggie a lecture. Reggie will be taking care of his father's medical practice while the father goes on vacation. And he'd better do it right. His first call is to a Continental archduchess living in the neighbourhood.

"She was a serene Highness of the house of Erbach-Wittelsbach, which traces its descent to Odin, and had an independent realm of nearly two square miles,..."

On the way there Reggie and his father's driver Gorton come across the body of a man killed in a hit and run accident. He looks a lot like the Archduke, but isn't. Is somebody trying to kill the Archduke? Of course they are. So who? The Archduchess? The brother-in-law? The two of them working in cahoots? And will the police actually be able to solve the case, or will the solution be squelched due to political pressure?

The second case 'The Sleeping Companion' has a similar setup: Reggie gets called in on a case in place of his father. A woman is having bad dreams. Why?

By the end of those two cases, though, Reggie is a dilettante no longer and knows this is what he wants to do. He hangs out his shingle in London as a consulting detective, and in the remaining four cases in this book, he's a professional. His medical background comes in handy. In the third case 'The Nice Girl', he's called in by Scotland Yard to investigate the death of Sir Albert Lunt, a businessman with lots of enemies.

Three more cases round out the book. One of the stories I thought weaker, but mostly they're pretty entertaining. As the Wikipedia article on H. C. Bailey suggests, Reggie's education and general demeanour--and maybe the name, too--put him in a class with Lord Peter Wimsey, but I found him less exasperating than Lord Peter. Wikipedia also says the stories are darker and more political, but that really only shows up in the last one of these, which does turn on government corruption. This is the only book of Bailey's I've read, but now I do plan to read more, and the second in the series, Mr. Fortune's Practice, also a collection of stories, is available from Project Gutenberg (as was this one) and is already downloaded to my Kobo.

Call Mr. Fortune came out in 1922, with the stories appearing individually in the year before that. So...

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Piece of Furniture: The picture on the cover above will represent the second story, 'The Sleeping Companion.' That's the murderer's hand creeping in at the side, while Miss Weston has been drugged and is sleeping in the chair.

The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

There's going to be some spoilerish things in this, so be advised.

Gabriel Syme wanders into the London suburb of Saffron Park, a 'place not only pleasant, but perfect.' 'It had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art.' Syme is himself a poet, 'a poet of law, a poet of order; nay, he said he was a poet of respectability.' He gets into a verbal squabble with red-headed Lucian Gregory, the established poet of Saffron Park, who is none of those things, but rather the opposite. (While at the same time, Syme admires Gregory's sister Rosamond, equally red-headed.)

Syme is also a detective, working for Scotland Yard. He was approved at joining by a mysterious man in a dark room.

Gregory proclaims himself a radical anarchist, but Syme accuses him of being a wannabe. Gregory refutes this charge by introducing Syme to a secret society, the leaders of which are named after the days of the week; at the very next meeting, to which Gregory takes Syme, Gregory expects to be elected the new Thursday. Sunday is the leader of this anarchist society.

Syme launches into a speech that results in his being elected the new Thursday. Aha, thinks Syme! I will now be Scotland Yard's man on the inside. But he has confessed his status as a policeman to Gregory, and sworn not to denounce him, so he has to figure out how to use his new insider-dom without breaking his vow.

At the very first meeting of the seven weekday leaders, Sunday announces one of them is a policeman. Yikes, thinks Syme, I've been found out already. But no, it turns out Gogol is also a policeman in disguise, and while Syme is mostly relieved he hasn't been detected, he's also a little ashamed he didn't do more. Gogol is escorted by thugs off the premises to some unspeakable fate.

On leaving that first meeting, Syme is pursued by another anarchist principal, the Professor de Worms. Does the Professor know Syme's a policeman? Syme tries to escape, but is eventually cornered by the Professor, who...reveals he's also a policeman. That makes three out of the seven. If only they'd organized!

I was perfectly ready to generalize after this, and yes, it quickly turns out six of the seven anarchist leaders are policeman in disguise. Is Sunday as well? 

Of course he is. (I have to say I saw that a mile away, or at least 90 pages away out of the 160.) But Chesterton handles it amusingly and suspensefully enough, and, in fact, Sunday is exactly that unseen policeman who first approved Syme's joining the force (and the other five policeman/anarchist leaders, as well.) The six pursue Sunday (or maybe Sunday is pursuing them) until a final recognition and no crime is actually committed, no dynamite thrown, the Czar not assassinated, even Gogol turns out to be alive after all.

It is Chesterton, and the name Sunday might be a clue. This is fairly early in Chesterton's career (1908), Father Brown is in the future, and Chesterton has not yet converted to Catholicism. Wikipedia tells me he was suffering a crisis of faith as he was writing this. Sunday is a deus absconditus. He tells his policemen, "You heard the voice in the dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in daylight I denied it myself." Sunday goes on to explain why he allowed this, and so the book is a kind of theodicy, a justification of God, and an explication of why there is evil in the world. Like all theodicies, I didn't find it very convincing myself...

But until it got there it was a pretty amusing thriller.

There are the usual Chestertonian provocations. Only someone who's meat-eating and beer-drinking can be a proper Englishman, and not a lowly anarchist. Well in fact, I eat meat and drink beer, and have no desire to be a proper Englishman, so this should slide right past me, but I admit to being bothered by it, a little. But it is Chesterton, so one has to either not read him, or not be bothered by that sort of thing.

Do I dare call it a crime book? Well, in the end, it is a bit more Piers Plowman than Bulldog Drummond, but it does start with a Scotland Yard man trying to prevent a murder, so...

Vintage Mystery, Gold, Two People.

I actually read it in a copy from Project Gutenberg, but found online the cover shown above which fits the book pretty well.

Sir Walter Scott's Count Robert of Paris

 "...let the devil of knight errantry, which has such possession of thee, take thee upon his shoulders, and carry thee full tilt wheresoever he lists."

Count Robert of Paris (1832) is a late novel of Sir Walter Scott's. It's set in Constantinople at the beginning of the First Crusade (1096-1099).

Hereward, a Saxon, fought at the battle of Hastings. His father was killed there. He believes his intended, Bertha, was slain during the chaos that followed. Hereward abandons England and takes a job as a member of the Varangian Guard, sworn to protect the Byzantine emperor, Alexius I Comnenus at the time. Which Hereward does, so successfully, he's called in for an interview with Anna Comnena, composing a history of her father's reign. 

And so he's caught up in palace intrigues.

The Byzantine empire at the time is caught between the rising power of the Seljuk Turks and new kingdoms in the Balkans. And then the knights of the First Crusade appear on their doorstep. Are they friend or foe? Will they attack Constantinople? (The Crusaders didn't sack Constantinople until their fourth trip through.) Alexius already has one Frank bandit/king in his dungeons, Ursel (Roussel of Bailleul) from an earlier war.

And one of those crusader knights is Count Robert of Paris. Robert is the son of William the Conqueror; Hereward's his enemy at first sight. Robert's the one that 'the devil of knight errantry' is about to carry off.

William the Conqueror did have a son Robert who did go on the First Crusade, but our Robert owes more to those tales of knight errantry, even to Don Quixote, than he does to the historical record. And his wife, Brenhilda (!) of Aspromonte, armor-clad and perfectly happy to joust in the lists, feels more like Orlando Furioso than anything historical. Though Scott is at pains to tell us there's an armor-clad female warrior by the name of Gaita in Anna Comnena's history (which I haven't read).

Robert behaves like a tool when he first gets to Constantinople, lounging on Alexius' throne, breaking ancient artworks. Alexius is irritated enough to throw Robert into prison even as he's doing all he can to move the rest of crusaders on their way. 

But there's a conspiracy on to overthrow Alexius. It's led by Achilles Tatius (Hereward's commander), Nicephorus Briennius (Anna Comnena's husband and so the emperor's son-in-law), and Agelastes, the aged court philosopher. Each of them imagines he's the one that will end up on the throne, and, while Alexius would let Robert go after a bit, the conspirators plan on using Robert as part of their plot. In addition Nicephorus has fallen into lust with the amazonian Brenhilda. 

You probably don't need me to tell you the plot fails. Scott isn't one to rewrite the historical record so blatantly, and Alexius' actual reign lasted until 1118. You probably also don't need me to tell you that beautiful Bertha isn't really dead, and that somehow she ends up in Constantinople, too. The cool-headed Saxon Hereward and the hot-blooded Norman Robert are forced to get along to sort this all out. Which they do.

One of the nice things about this novel is that it reminds that Scott can be funny. There's Robert, who, except for the fact that he can actually fight, could be Don Quixote. Hereward, Sancho Panza-like, is forever trying to get him to show some sense. There are couple of running gags: Anna Comnena's literary soirées bore everyone to tears, and Alexius is forever saying that if Anna doesn't want to lose her husband she should quit forcing him to listen to her read. Well, Nicephorus does decide he prefers Brenhilda. Also the emperor can never remember Hereward's name, generally settling on Edward after trying a few other possibilities.

Now, nobody would claim this as one of Scott's great novels. His prose style is what it is--generally feeling pretty archaic now--and his tendency to write overly fulsome dialog is definitely on display here. But if you're a fan...

Actual engraving of Scott's home hanging behind me as I type... 

...I think you'll enjoy it. Anyway, I did. 😉

From my Classics Club list and this year's Back to the Classics list.

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. 

R W Wood (#poem)

 

The Penguin. The Sword-fish.

We have for many years been bored

By that old saw about the sword

And pen, and now we all rejoice,

To see how Nature made her choice.

She made, regardless of offendin'

The Sword-fish mightier than the Penguin.

-R. W. Wood

Various byways led me to a discover The Norton Book of Light Verse (1986) edited by Russell Baker. My library had it! I have a few other anthologies of light verse already, and this one had a number of the usual suspects: Ogden Nash, Don Marquis, Dorothy Parker. Always fun to read them again. But it had a few I didn't know at all, and one of those Robert Williams Wood. (1868-1955) He was an important figure in optics, pioneering infrared and ultraviolet photography, according to Wikipedia. But he also wrote (1907) this book,... and for our purposes today... You can find it here at Project Gutenberg.

A couple more, while we're here:

The Clover. The Plover.

The Plover and the Clover can be told apart with ease,
By paying close attention to the habits of the Bees,
For, Entomologists aver, the Bee can be in Clover 
While Etymologists concur, there is no B in Plover.

The Parrot. The Carrot.

The Parrot and the Carrot one may easily confound.

They're very much alike in looks and similar in sound,

We recognize the parrot by his clear articulation,

For carrots are unable to engage in conversation.

 

The drawings are pretty amusing as well:

 

Daphnis and Chloe (#NovNov)

"Love is a god, my children; he is young, beautiful, and winged; and so he enjoys youth, pursues beauty, and makes souls take wing. Zeus has not so much power as he has; he rules the elements; he rules the stars; he rules his fellow gods--"

François Gérard's Daphnis and Chloe

And Eros looks out for his favorites, and that includes Daphnis and Chloe. 

Daphnis and Chloe are probably better known through painting these days than through Longus' original novella, which is kind of a shame. (Though the paintings can be a lot of fun!) I found the above painting with a bunch of other Daphnis and Chloe paintings here. A nice selection, and by no means complete--it's easy to find more, including a series by Marc Chagall.

But Longus is the originator of the story. Nothing is known about him, though it's assumed he lived on Lesbos, where the story happens. He probably wrote it around 200 A.D. It's a work of great charm.

At the very beginning the narrator sees a painting:

"I saw the most beautiful sight I have ever seen, in a grove that was sacred to the Nymphs: a painting that told a story of love."  

The narrator asks around, learns the story in the painting, and decides to write it down as an offering to the gods.

You can see why this appealed to painters.

We know from the start that Daphnis and Chloe are special: the slave goatherd Lamon finds Daphnis when his goat keeps running off to a thicket. Lamon investigates and discovers his goat suckling the infant Daphnis; next to Daphnis are tokens that indicate he was well-born: a purple cloak and a tiny sword. Lamon and his wife Myrtale decide to adopt the boy, but hide the signs of noble parentage. The name they give him, Daphnis, indicates a rustic origin. (And hopefully hides his true parentage.)

Two years later something very similar happens with an infant girl, except that the nurturing animal is a ewe. Her tokens are golden sandals and anklets. She's raised by Dryas and Nape (pronounced with two syllables) who give her the equally rustic name Chloe.

Flash forward to when Daphnis is fifteen and Chloe thirteen. Both adoptive fathers have a dream (which they don't communicate to each other) that their wards are meant to be out of doors herding where they will each be touched by the arrow of Eros. And so Daphnis and Chloe are trained in the arts of their respective herding specialties. And so the two of them are out in the fields with their sheep and their goats--and each other. And so...they fall in love. It's Chloe who falls first; Daphnis stumbles into a pit-trap dug for a wolf, he's fine, but muddy, and with Chloe nearby takes off his clothes to wash up in a spring.

"And that thought was the beginning of love. She didn't know what was happening to her: she was a young girl brought up in the country and hadn't even heard of anyone speak of love... 'Now I feel ill, but I don't know what my illness is; I feel pain, although I've not been injured; I feel sad, although I've lost none of my sheep; I feel hot, although I'm sitting in deep shade. How many times I've been scratched by brambles and I've not wept! How many times I've been stung by bees, and I've not cried out!'"

She's lost none of her sheep! And still!

Don't worry: Daphnis' turn comes soon enough. 

Oh, there's threats to their love: Dorcon, the cowherd, falls for Chloe, tries to win her over, then win over her adoptive father, and then finally resorts to more violent means. Pirates raid the coast, stealing the livestock, but see Daphnis and decide he would be the better prize. Daphnis inadvertently starts a war between Mytilene and Methymna, the two main cities on Lesbos, and Chloe is captured and carried off. Gnathon, the hanger-on of the estate's owner, falls in lust with Daphnis and persuades that owner to give him Daphnis as his personal slave.

All resolved most satisfactorily. But you never really doubted that, did you? And that's what you wanted all along, wasn't it? 😉

Even the villains, so long as they're named--Dorcon and Gnathon and one or two others--are redeemed, in their way, in the end. Though some anonymous pirates do die.

Anyway, like I said, ridiculously charming.

There's some lit-crittery things I could possibly say, about ecphrasis, or how each of its four chapters corresponds to a season, suitable enough for an agricultural poem, or how it derives from the twin fountainheads of Theocritus and Greek new comedy (Menander, later echoed in Plautus and Terence, and then Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors), but nah...

Oh, and while I'm not perfectly sure I should admit this: but, without leaving the house. I could come up with five different translations, and only one of them I found online. I've been quoting from Christopher Gill's, which appears in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, edited by B. P. Reardon. I'd previously read the story (I'm pretty sure) in a translation by Moses Hadas in Three Greek Romances (1953). It's not bad:

"A god is Eros, my children, young and handsome and winged. Therefore does he take pleasure in youth, and he pursues beauty and he endows souls with wings. He possesses greater power than Zeus himself. He rules the elements; he rules the stars; he rules his fellow deities;..."

W. D. Lowe renders in 1908. (I have it in an Ayer reprint):

"Love, my children, is a god, youthful, handsome, winged; and so his pleasure is in youth, his chase is beauty, his task to wing man's soul. None has such power, not Zeus himself. He rules the elements, rules the stars and rules his fellow-gods..."

I rather like this, especially 'to wing man's soul'.

My older Loeb edition, with translation by Stephen Gaselee in 1916, gives:

"Love, my children, is a God, a young youth and very fair, and winged to fly. And therefore he delights in youth, follows beauty, and gives our fantasy her wings. His power's so vast that that of Jove is not so great. He governs in the elements, rules in the stars, and domineers even o'er the Gods that are his peers."

That old Loeb not only has 'young youth'--argh!--but also changes the name of Dorcon (bad enough, but accurate) to Dorco, which I'm afraid just makes me laugh. (Hey you, Dorko!) It's not completely crazy: a Roman would likely enough translate the original Greek of Dorcon to Dorco in Latin, but it *is* just a wee bit unfortunate in English...

All these would appear to be out of print, though the Loeb series has a new version of Daphnis and Chloe with a translation by Jeffrey Henderson I haven't seen.

The novella is also available at Project Gutenberg, which is probably the easiest one to come by, in a translation by Rev. Rowland Smith:

"My young friends, he is a god, young, beautiful, and ever on the wing. He rejoices, therefore, in the company of youth, he is ever in search of beauty, and adds wings to the souls of those he favours. He has power far beyond that of Jove himself. He commands the elements, and he rules the stars, and even the gods themselves, who are otherwise his equals;..."

Whew...that's a lot of Love. 😉

Looking at my Greek text (I have one of those, too...) I see I was supposed to have read about a quarter of it in Greek for a class once upon a time. Based on some penciled-in vocabulary notes, it's possible I even did my homework...

Anyway, it's 50-70 pages depending on the edition, making it too short really to be a novel, but a little long for a short story, and so...

Also I've not managed to visit Greece yet this year:

"Apples do not give off such fragrance, nor do pears. But I'm frightened of kissing her. Her kiss stings my heart..."

Some clerihews by E. Clerihew!

 

Sir Christopher Wren

Said, "I am going to dine with some men.

If anybody calls

Say I'm designing St. Paul's"

     -o-

The younger Van Eyck

Was christened Jan, and not Mike.

The thought of this curious mistake

Often kept him awake.

     -o-

The intrepid Ricardo

With characteristic bravado

Alluded openly to Rent

Wherever he went.

     -o-

Professor Dewar

Is a better man than you are.

None of you asses

Can condense gases.

     -o-

John Stuart Mill

By a mighty effort of will

Overcame his natural bonhomie

And wrote "Principles of Political Economy"

Mill demonstrating a mighty effort of will

Until recently the only clerihews by E. C. Bentley I had read were ones found in various anthologies of light verse. Auden, who clearly likes them, has a bunch in his Oxford Book of Light Verse, for instance. But then I thought about the dates and realized that the first of his three books of clerihews, Biography for Beginners, might be available at Project Gutenberg. And so it was! And with illustrations by G. K. Chesterton. (Whom I didn't know could draw, but clearly can...) 

I had to look up James Dewar, but he invented the vacuum flask. 

Note: the index to Biography for Beginners is pretty hilarious, too. I don't know why Bentley has it in for Christopher Wren, but he clearly does.

Via Carol I came across this useful introduction to the form. 

Turns out clerihews are even more catching than I realized! 

The idea of publishing poem posts on Thursday originates with Jennifer at Holds Upon Happiness. Brona has some great animal prayer poems in an inadvertent teaser 😉 for Rumer Godden reading week.

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... 

 

Churchill's Novel

Churchill in 1895.
Not yet the bulldog
he became later.

Did you know there were two Winston Churchills? I didn't until recently. I was reading Mencken's A Book of Prefaces (1917) and he kept talking about Winston Churchill as a well-known American novelist. This threw me off. In the usual Mencken way, he referred to Churchill dismissively, as kind of a hack, though maybe not the worst hack. Really? I thought. Churchill? 

I knew Churchill's mother was American, but still this seemed odd. Some googling later and I realized there was an American Winston Churchill (1871-1947) who wrote a bunch of novels and was once upon a time more famous, and the Winston S. Churchill we all know wrote one novel, a Ruritanian romance, in 1897.

I'm a sucker for Ruritanian romances and Project Gutenberg was there for me.

In Savrola, A Tale of the Revolution in Laurania, General Antonio Molara is well on his way to becoming president for life. Five years earlier there was a revolution; Molara led it and seized power. Molara has no real intention of going away. But the country is growing restive and demands the restoration of elections. Molara agrees, but cuts the voter rolls in half, figuring if he can get rid of the wrong sort of voter he can still win an election. (Where have I heard that sort of thing?)

The Reform Committee comes to the presidential palace to register a formal protest but are dismissed with nothing. Savrola is the leader of the Reform Committee. Savrola is a magnetic figure, with a Europe-wide reputation; Molara needs to know just how close Savrola is to the people who are ready to pick up guns. Arresting Savrola would be bad publicity, possibly dangerous. He sends his wife Lucile, beautiful and lively, to flirt with Savrola and pick up what information she can. Just how far does Molara intend for his wife to go? Lucile assumes it's just to talk to the man.

Savrola knows who the men with the guns are--Strelitz is just across the border with his rebel troops itching to return--but he would prefer a more peaceful change of power. Lucile learns little, though, and returns impressed with Savrola. 

Events intervene.

Laurania is somewhere on the Mediterranean; the names are mostly Spanish-sounding or Italian. The country has a colony on the east coast of Africa, reachable only via the Suez Canal. A crisis precipitated by the U.K. means that the navy has to steam off to solve that. The navy is loyal to Molara; nobody's sure about the army. With the navy leaving, Strelitz crosses the border, and the revolution, against Savrola's wishes, begins. 

Churchill writes well about the house-to-house fighting in the capital; the siege of the palace is well-handled, I thought. Well, he was a war correspondent at the time. The politics are reasonably well thought out. The romance part of it was OK, but not as good. You can see the outlines of the triangle Molara/Lucile/Savrola in my description of the setup, but there wasn't much surprise there. The final ending of the revolution owed more to realism than romance. Anthony Hope (The Prisoner of Zenda, the original Ruritanian romance) has nothing to worry about. At the same time the politics showed nothing of the sophistication found in that novel set in Costaguana. 

Ah, well. Wikipedia tells me that Churchill wrote in a volume of his autobiography, "I have consistently urged my friends to abstain from reading it." He was doing himself a disservice--it's better than that. If you like the Ruritanian, Graustarkian, Orsinian, Fenwickian sort of story, the Lauranian isn't a bad addition.

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