BIOGRAPHIES: 'A-F'

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams --

Sitting with my lunch in the Pentagon courtyard during my 1965 summer job, I read The Education every day. I was 22 and got through about 3/4 before going back to school. I remember only two things about it: (1) I thought it was difficult but very good and (2) the idea of using "education" as the theme seemed like a neat idea.

But it is not surprising that I remember nothing else about it. This is a book for middle aged or even old men. (Adams says that it is meant to help young men, but few young men would read it.) It has a somewhat vague style, the vagueness chiefly appearing in Adams's narrative of incidents and inevitably in service of his "education" conceit. His observations are otherwise specific and illuminating. This is true not only of the history which he recounts having wandered through (e.g. his recollections of Palmerston, Russell, and Gladstone while he served with his father in England during the Civil War) but also of the more personal subjects, such as his place in the world as a manque Bostonian and Adams.

Still I wonder how much to believe of his self-descriptions. He says he is an 18th Century man born in the 19th and forced to live into the 20th. Objectively true, I suppose, but it does have the sound of another device. Similarly, he says he hated formal education and gives a few quotidian examples (an attempt to play hookey as a grade schooler, finding Harvard useless for practical purposes), but it always sounds something like a contrivance to justify his title. And yet each of these incidents presents almost accidentally a wonderful snapshot of something else. In the case of the hookey incident, he recalls his tantrum being interrupted by "the President" (his grandfather) coming silently downstairs, taking him gently by the hand, and walking him to school more than a mile away without ever saying a word.

At Harvard in the 1850s he developed a friendship with Rooney Lee, Robert E.'s oldest son, and finds in him more of Lighthorse Harry than he does of his father. Absolutely none of the book sounds like name dropping, but Adams's actual encounters with "names" is fascinating, though most of them are no more than passing glances: Zachary Taylor, Garibaldi, Swinburne, Darwin, Lincoln, etc. Of all these, the saddest to me (because it sounds accurate) is Grant. Adams is credible about Grant because he is not overtly contemptuous of him, though by the same token he is clearly unable to make anything sensible of him either. He gives Grant credit as a general, which it seems to me anyone must if he is to criticize Grant for his presidency. But beyond the expected dubiousness about Grant's ability to evaluate his advisers, Adams sees a primitive man, not subject to being judged on grounds of intellect or probity. He affects resignation to this as the natural but unexpected result of the war and the passage of time. But Adams also allows himself to recall George Washington and to reflect on what he thinks was to have been expected. Adams is convinced that he is not a snob, and yet here is snobbery[1]. Adams’s view of Grant resembles the contemporary academic world's disdain for Eisenhower and Reagan. (Snobbery is an Adams family trait, of course. C.F. Adams, his father, has been quoted sneering at Abraham Lincoln, his boss.)

Another word about the vague style: I am certain that it is an affectation, but there is something else about it too. The last quarter of the book periodically sounds like the tedious manifestos that old men sometimes write when the ebbing of their intellectual vigor coincides with their conviction that the grand synthesis has occurred to them. This is why I say that the book is for old or middle aged men and not the young men Adams thinks he is writing for. Here is a sample:

"What one did -- or did not do -- with one's education after getting it, need trouble the inquirer in no way; it is a personal matter only which would confuse him. Perhaps Henry Adams was not worth educating; most keen judges incline to think that barely one man in a hundred owns a mind capable of reacting to any purpose on the forces that surround him, and fully half of these react wrongly. The object of education for that mind should be the teaching itself how to react with vigor and economy. . . . [E]ducation should try to lessen the obstacles, diminish the friction, invigorate the energy, and should train minds to react, not at haphazard, but by choice, on the lines of force that attract their world. . . . No doubt the teacher is the worst criminal, but the world stands behind him and drags the student from his course. Only the most energetic, the most highly fitted, and the most favored have overcome the friction or viscosity of inertia, and these were compelled to waste three-fourths of their energy in doing it."

Endnotes

1. Russell Kirk, who is nothing but his admirer, still calls Adams "the most irritating person in American letters."

Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling --

This biography was published many years after it was written, for reasons explained in the introduction by Robin Birkenhead, the author's son. Apparently Kipling's daughter had originally authorized the work, but refused to permit its publication after she had read the proofs, saying it was not publishable. This is so perplexing to young Robin that he spends many pages analyzing what could possibly have been the problem, concluding that there must have been something or other that deeply offended the daughter. The effect of including this material at the outset, however, is to animate the reader to pit his judgment against that of the daughter and decide whether the whole project is damaged goods -- not an auspicious way to begin reading.

In time, this distraction passes and the reader comes to judge the book on its own merits. Whether biography is a meritorious endeavor at all, of course, is a question that has always troubled me, mainly because I have yet to develop a strong point of view about what makes a successful biography. It cannot be hero-worship, since scoundrels are often more interesting than saints. If it is history, biography is an odd way to look at it (though autobiography might be able to make a case for itself). When it comes to the biography of a man of letters, a reader expecting to encounter some literary criticism is not usually disappointed, but the "life" is often the dominant part of the book. So without having yet found the basis for a satisfactory generalization, I can at least say about me and this book in particular that I read it too soon.

That is to say, apart from The Jungle Books, Captains Courageous, and Kim, I have not yet read enough of Kipling -- by which I mean his countless short stories and poems -- to make the background of their creation meaningful to me. Lord Birkenhead on several occasions reminds us of their author's "genius" and on others of his bad taste and crudeness. What can I do with such judgments other than bring them unwillingly to my later reading of the works themselves? Meantime, though the confusion might be mine, I believe the author discusses some correspondence between Kipling and Theodore Roosevelt in the 1930s, toward the end of the author's life. But, as Roosevelt died in 1919, it would have been after his life. As I say, it may have been my own inattention. (Central, January 2006).

James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson —

In my life I have had three great teachers, one in high school, one in college, one in law school. What a surprise it was to meet my high school teacher in the middle of this superb biography. If she gave Johnson credit for the following warning, I do not remember it, but I do remember the warning: "Read over your compositions, and whenever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out." It was she who added, "for it is inevitably in bad taste."[1]

As for Boswell’s overall effort, leaving aside reference works, few books of merit can be pulled off a shelf and read at random starting at virtually any page. Not that this is what we look for, but here is such a book. It has no organization except a fairly dependable chronology. There are no chapters, divisions, parts, or anything of the sort. It is 1200 pages of unbroken text which pretty much consists of a succession of brief incidents, conversations, extracts, etc. which went to make up Johnson’s life. This is because, Boswell says,

"Instead of melting down my materials into one mass, and constantly speaking in my own person, . . . I have resolved to adopt and enlarge upon the excellent plan of Mr. Mason, in his Memoirs of Gray. Wherever narrative is necessary to explain, connect, and supply, I furnish it to the best of my abilities; but in the chronological series of Johnson’s life, which I trace as distinctly as I can, year by year, I produce, wherever it is in my power, his own minutes, letters, or conversation . . . ."

Elsewhere, Boswell calls this "almost superstitious reverence." But would we care much today about Samuel Johnson were it not for Boswell?

Before reading this book, what I knew of Johnson was that he seemed to be a pious version of Oscar Wilde, with a dash of Shaw thrown in when it came to his evaluation of Shakespeare. But a great man of letters who fearlessly criticizes Shakespeare should be listened to, shouldn’t he? Well I was happy to find that William Hazlitt, whose Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays I was looking at simultaneously while reading Boswell, put his finger right on it:

"We have a high respect for Dr. Johnson’s character and understanding, mixed with something like personal attachment: but he was neither a poet nor a judge of poetry. He might in one sense be a judge of poetry as it falls within the limits and rules of prose, but not as it is poetry. . . . Let those who have a prejudice against Johnson read Boswell’s life of him: as those whom he has prejudiced against Shakespeare should read his Irene. We do not say that a man to be a critic must necessarily be a poet: but to be a good critic, he ought not to be a bad poet. . . . Dr. Johnson’s Preface to his edition of Shakespeare looks like a laborious attempt to bury the characteristic merits of his author under a load of cumbrous phraseology, and to weigh his excellences and defects in equal scales, stuffed full of ‘swelling figures and sonorous epithets.’ . . . Dr. Johnson’s general powers of reasoning overlaid his critical susceptibility. All his ideas were cast in a given mould, in a set form: they were made out by rule and system, by climax, inference, and antithesis: — Shakespeare’s were the reverse. Johnson’s understanding dealt only in round numbers: the fractions were lost upon him. . . . To him an excess of beauty was a fault; for it appeared to him like an excresence; and his imagination was dazzled by the blaze of light. His writings neither shone with the beams of native genius, nor reflected them. The shifting shapes of fancy, the rainbow hues of things, made no impression on him: he seized only on the permanent and tangible. . . . He was a man of strong common sense and practical wisdom, rather than of genius or feeling."[2]

This is better than anything that I have drawn about Johnson from Boswell’s Life, though to Johnson’s credit Boswell notes that following Irene "Johnson was wise enough to be convinced that he had not the talents necessary to write successfully for the stage."

As for Boswell’s book, it is, to paraphrase one of the countless anecdotes that make up the work, a visit with the giant in his den. Boswell only met Johnson in 1763, after the Dictionary had been published and Johnson was well into middle age. The first several hundred pages of the Life, therefore, recount more than the first half of Johnson’s time on Earth, all of which was spent outside the presence of Boswell, who was only 22 when the two were first introduced. Thenceforth, in all of the aspects of Johnson brought to our attention, we see a complex man of intellect and genius growing old, but never mentally feeble.

We have, for example, Johnson’s efforts on behalf of Rev. William Dodd, an embezzler who was famously hanged for his peculations, his genuine regard for some English Roman Catholics whom he encountered in Paris, his hospitality to a snappish blind woman whom he housed until her death, etc. More important, in the process we also come to love him as Boswell did.

This is not to say that I was not periodically irritated by Johnson’s disdain of serious things (e.g. the American Revolution), his apparent tendency to bully debate opponents[3], and his general and periodic obstinacy when crossed. But Boswell’s brief for the defense easily carries the day — generally by using Johnson’s own words and countless acts of charity and generosity. Compare the elderly Johnson who told Boswell that if he had no duties, "I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman," to this glimpse of him in his youth at Oxford:

"[H]e was generally seen lounging at the College gate, with a circle of young students round him, whom he was entertaining with wit, and keeping from their studies, if not spiriting them up to rebellion against the College discipline . . . . "

But how we change. In 1772 Boswell mentioned the expulsion of some Oxford students for being Methodists and publicly praying.

"JOHNSON. ‘Sir, that expulsion was extremely just and proper. What have they to do at an University who are not willing to be taught, but will presume to teach? . . . . I believe they might be good beings; but they were not fit to be in the University of Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.’"
Johnson’s wife, considerably older than he, is described as

"very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks, of a florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by the liberal use of cordials."

Johnson’s own physical appearance and mannerisms were apparently quite odd.

"[W]hile talking or even musing as he sat in his chair, he commonly held his head to one side towards his right shoulder, and shook it in a tremulous manner, moving his body backwards and forwards, and rubbing his left knee in the same direction, with the palm of his hand. In the intervals of articulating he made various sounds with his mouth; sometimes as if ruminating, or what is called chewing the cud, sometimes giving a half whistle, sometimes making his tongue play backwards from the roof of his mouth, as if clucking like a hen, and sometimes protruding it against his upper gums in front, as if pronouncing quickly under his breath, too, too, too . . . . Generally when he had concluded a period, . . . he used to blow out his breath like a whale."

When visiting a friend, Hogarth

"perceived a person standing at a window in the room, shaking his head, and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner. He [Hogarth] concluded that he was an ideot, whom his relations had put under the care of [his host], as a very good man."

And his discourse was equally pronounced. Boswell says that Johnson saw every conversation as a contest to be struggled with and won. "Everything about his character and his manners was forcible and violent." Speaking in reference to legal contests, Johnson reminded Boswell,

"Testimony is like an arrow shot from a long bow; the force of it depends on the strength of the hand that draws it. Argument is like an arrow from a cross-bow, which has equal force though shot by a child."

Boswell was absolutely convinced that Johnson’s influence on the English language was one of his signal contributions:

"His sentences have a dignified march; and, it is certain that his example has given a general elevation to the language of his country, for many of our best writers have approached very near to him; and, from the influence which he has had upon our composition, scarcely any thing is written now that is not better expressed than was usual before he appeared . . . ."

Of course this is ancient history now and Hazlitt’s observations quoted above are closer to the modern view of Johnson’s style. Nevertheless, Boswell’s memory of what Johnson said during conversations must have been remarkable -- he assures us that it is of "the most perfect authenticity" -- and it is clear that he often would sit down at the conclusion of many an interview simply to record what he had heard. In this he took Johnson’s advice to another friend: "It is a rule never to be forgotten, that whatever strikes strongly, should be described while the first impression remains fresh upon the mind." Hence we get such minute exchanges as this:

"I asked him whether, as a moralist, he did not think that the practice of the law, in some degree, hurt the nice feeling of honesty. JOHNSON. ‘Why no, Sir, if you act properly. You are not to deceive your clients with false representations of your opinion: you are not to tell lies to a Judge.’ BOSWELL. ‘But what do you think of supporting a cause which you know to be bad?’ JOHNSON. ‘Sir, you do not know it to be good or bad till the Judge determines it. I have said that you are to state facts fairly; so that your thinking, or what you call knowing, a cause to be bad, must be from reasoning, must be from your supposing your arguments to be weak and inconclusive. But, Sir, that is not enough. An argument which does not convince yourself, may convince the Judge to whom you urge it; and if it does convince him, why, then, Sir, you are wrong, and he is right. It is his business to judge; and you are not to be confident in your own opinion that a cause is bad, but to say all you can for your client, and then hear the Judge’s opinion.’ BOSWELL. ‘But, Sir, does not affecting a warmth when you have no warmth, and appearing to be clearly of one opinion, when you are in reality of another opinion, does not such dissimulation impair one’s honesty? Is there not some danger that a lawyer may put on the same mask in common life, in the intercourse with his friends?’ JOHNSON. ‘Why no, Sir. Everybody knows you are paid for affecting warmth for your client; and it is, therefore, properly no dissimulation: the moment you come from the bar you resume your usual behaviour. Sir, a man will no more carry the artifice of the bar into common intercourse of society, than a man who is paid for tumbling upon his hands will continue to tumble upon his hands when he should walk in his feet.’"

Later he is quoted as saying,

"No Judge, Sir, can give his whole attention to his office; it is very proper that he should employ what time he has to himself, to his own advantage, in the most profitable manner. . . . No man would be a Judge, upon the condition of being totally a Judge. The best employed lawyer has his mind at work but for a small proportion of his time: a great deal of his occupation is merely mechanical."

As Johnson was so eminent in his time, particularly in literary circles, Boswell’s recollections also provide interesting observations on Johnson’s contemporaries. Goldsmith, for example, is said to have been a man whose mind

"resembled a fertile, but thin soil. There was a quick, but not a strong vegetation, of whatever chanced to be thrown upon it. No deep root could be struck."

Johnson on religion:

"Always remember this, that after a system is well settled upon positive evidence, a few partial objections ought not to shake it. The human mind is so limited, that it cannot take in all parts of a subject, so that there may be objections raised against any thing. There are objections against a plenum, and objections against a vacuum; yet one of them must certainly be true."

For all of his piety, all of his life Johnson was seriously afraid of death, a theme that Boswell visits repeatedly in the book:

"His mind resembled the vast amphitheatre, the Colisaeum at Rome. In the centre stood his judgement, which like a mighty gladiator, combated those apprehensions that, like the wild beasts of the Arena, were all around in cells, ready to be let out upon him. After a conflict, he drives them back into their dens; but not killing them, they were still assailing him."

This morbidity could not have made Johnson’s final years very comforting, since his letters at the end are pretty much all devoted to descriptions of his ailments. And yet he remained independent. Old men, he warned Boswell, must always guard against being put to nurse. "Innumerable have been the melancholy instances of men who in their latter days have been governed like children." So it is poignant when Boswell recalls their last parting one evening when Johnson exited their cab "and without looking back, sprung away with a kind of pathetick briskness."

Endnotes

1. Actually, even Boswell has Johnson attributing the observation to another.

2. Boswell’s defense, as usual is respectful. "Johnson, by candidly admitting the faults of his poet, had the more credit in bestowing on him deserved and indisputable praise; and doubtless none of all his panegyrists have done him half so much honor. Their praise was like that of a counsel, upon his own side of the cause; Johnson’s was like the grave, well considered, and impartial opinion of the judge . . ."

3. If his gun misfires, one of his friends remarks, he just beats you with the butt end.

Ernle Bradford, Paul The Traveler --

It may be that no mortal man was ever more influential than Saul of Tarsus. Born to a Jewish family in a provincial backwater in Syria, he studied the Mosaic law under as a Pharisee under Gamaliel and was a citizen of Rome, a novelty to one so situated. His youth, what is known of it, was disputative and angry. And then, unaccountably, he took up the cause of a tiny sect of Jewish laborers from Jerusalem (whom he had originally persecuted with a criminal fervor) and transformed it into the civilized world’s dominant ethical and spiritual force.

For the narrative of his life, however, there is virtually no place to look outside the Acts of the Apostles and the letters that the man himself wrote to his converts under his adopted name Paul. From the standpoint of his mission, that record, spare and eloquent, is entirely adequate. Ernle Bradford’s telling of his life is therefore like many of Bradford’s other works, less of a biography than a travelogue in sepia. I picture Bradford, who calls himself a sailor-scholar, as something of a Flying Dutchman, sailing perennially from port to port in the Mediterranean and putting in as necessary from time to time long enough to visit the libraries and to write a new book just to keep the who venture afloat for another year. If this sounds like criticism, I really do not intend it as such. Like Paul himself, Bradford is an itinerant of the most intrepid sort and yet living by the word. He gets by the slight historical data by doing what he and few others can do – namely, he tells us with some authority what was likely.

In describing Paul’s midsummer departure to Macedonia, for example, Bradford is certain that

"the Meltemis were blowing, those winds from the north that are almost the only winds in the Mediterranean that even approximate to the trade winds of the great oceans. They could be expected to blow from between north-west and north, reaching force six or seven, usually falling away towards evening . . . . [A]ncient sailing-ships were not well-designed for this kind of work. The destination of the boat which they were going to join was Neapolis, a Macedonian port lying something over 100 miles to the north-west of them, dead in the eye of the prevailing wind. It is probably that by the route they finally took the distance was about 150 miles. . . . There was no need to use the longboat to give them a pluck out of the harbor for the wind was . . . northerly."

And on Paul’s later departure from Greece,

"The vessel would most probably have turned west to come under the lee of Euboea, the long fish-shaped island that gives protection against the northerly winds of the Aegean. Paul’s coaster would undoubtedly have had oars as well as sails, for the passage between Euboea and the mainland of Greece would have been practically impossible for a ship dependent on sails alone. In the Euboea channel he would have seen the roaring tide whose streams can run as much as seven or eight knots. . . . He must have heard as they passed the Bay of Aulis how it was here that the Greek fleet bound for Troy had had to wait for a favorable wind."

Bradford also furnishes other footnotes for the historical browser. He sees Herod the Great as a master builder, comparable to Solomon and Augustus, who doubled the size of the Temple in Jerusalem, making it one of the most splendid buildings in the world. Paul’s mission, he says (echoing others), was incalculably advanced by the fortuitous murder of Caligula and election of the scholarly and "comparatively benevolent" Claudius as emperor during Paul’s lifetime.

Throughout this chronology of the life of a uniquely sweet but contentious man, Bradford keeps focus on Paul’s repeated and voluntarily undertaken hardships. Time and again he went willingly where he knew he would be beaten and possibly killed. His message to his fellow Jews was particularly unpalatable: the messiah whom they awaited had already come and was but a pathetic carpenter’s son who had been ignominiously crucified between two thieves beneath a sneering Roman inscription, "King of the Jews."

In fact, Bradford goes on to hypothesize that Paul’s own hatred of the Christians, before Damascus, may have stemmed not only from their shaming their nation and its God by proclaiming such a plebeian but also endangering their security as a people by speaking of their "king" when everyone knew that the only king was the Roman emperor who had a heavy hand in dealing with rebels. But unlike Lenin or Socrates, two roughly similar personalities to whom Bradford expressly compares his subject, Paul lived a life of charity and could say "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love."

And so he is St. Paul.

Ernle Bradford, Hannibal --

I doubt that this book breaks any new ground, but as a layman I am unfamiliar with the ground anyway. Bradford admires Hannibal, and who wouldn't? He spent about 10 years in Italy, completely cut off from his base in Carthage and Spain and was never defeated by the Romans in the entire period. The book also re-tells the anecdote about one of my heroes when I was a practicing defense lawyer, Quintus Fabius Maximus, who, on being appointed the Roman commander, determined that the one thing that Rome should not do was to engage the Carthaginians. He counseled delay, which was certainly the right policy, and for his efforts the Senate gave him the title Cunctator, "the delayer."

Ernle Bradford, Julius Caesar: The Pursuit of Power -- Bradford always does a workmanlike job in repackaging the materials available to all. I do not recall any special insights here, but the narrative is strong. The one reflection that does stick in my mind is Bradford's observation that Caesar may have been ready to die when he did -- not disillusioned, exactly, but a man with nothing else to prove.

Anthony Bridge, Suleiman The Magnificent, --

A routine biography, most interesting for its historical details -- e.g. its depictions of various Turkish struggles in Hungary. One thing that is not particularly available is a rounded portrait of Suleiman himself.

Richard Brookhiser, Founding Father: The Rediscovery of George Washington --

Flexner's 4-volume biography of Washington is the definitive effort and Brookhiser does not intend this essay to be a challenge to it. Instead, he calls it a "moral" biography, not in the style of Bennett's Book of Virtues, but with the same intended effect. As a result, the factual content, such as the routine debunking of Parson Weems, the Sally Fairfax tale, etc., is derivative and foundational only. Brookhiser's chief objective is to point out Washington's incomparable character traits for those who are ready to see them. His two most important sections are one that spells out the significance of Washington's role as president of the Constitutional Convention (in which many historians give him a back seat to Madison, Hamilton, and virtually every other delegate who expressed a point of view) and one on the meaning of fathership. The whole book is short, but still has a padded feeling notwithstanding the intelligent points it makes.

Claude Brown, Manchild In the Promised Land –

Claude Brown’s account of his life beginning with his childhood on Harlem streets in the 1930s may as well be called his “biography.” Actually though – although I have no reason to doubt its biographical framework – the book may as well be a novel, since no one could remember dialogue in such detail and in the engaging rhythm that Brown gives it.

Indeed, Manchild In the Promised Land frequently reminded me of a specific novel, Huckleberry Finn, to the extent that like Huck, the young nine- to fifteen-year old Brown often muses laconically and ingenuously about the strange practices of adults. This comparison of the two narrators is just my own, however, and is probably saying more than Brown intended. It’s true that Brown is content to present his father as abusive and dangerous and his own childhood outside of the tormentor’s house as free and preferable. But the precarious life of a feral child in rural Missouri in the 1830s can hardly be compared to the menace faced by a black street urchin in Harlem in the 1940s.

As a boy, young Claude Brown (Sonny to his family) – even crediting the inevitable idylls of childhood – was always in great peril, not just for his skin, but for his soul. He was a thief, a liar, a fighter, and a regular inmate of New York’s juvenile court system. He was surrounded by criminals, prostitutes, and drug addicts. And it seems he must have spent as much time in reform school as he did as a truant on the streets of Harlem [1]. This life – including the incident which opens the book in which the boy at age 13 is shot in a quasi-criminal caper – is what makes the book so interesting and authentic. And yet unlike Huckleberry Finn, Brown eventually takes his story beyond individual incidents into his growing realization that he must rescue himself and that it would be best not to get a “sheet” (felony).

His success at making this point is adequate – portrayed, as is the whole book – through various incidents involving his own moves, profound or skeptical things he said to people along the way, and the fate of many of his friends from childhood. The fact that the book is difficult to put down is evidence of Brown’s skill at an editor of such disjointed material. His tentative entry into non-criminal maturity (and close observations of Harlem even after he has moved out) is obviously the reason Brown wrote the book. Yet these later sections which comprise about the last quarter of the book, though of vital importance for him, are much less engaging for the reader. I imagine that in writing such a work it is hard not to strive for meaning, the message here being something like “You can never really leave Harlem.” But even if true, that is a modified cliche, unsatisfying because it was always latent on every page. Better, perhaps, is the somewhat defensive remark made by one of his childhood friends (and co-criminal):

“All of us, believe it or not, we were nice guys. Maybe that was our trouble, that we were afraid because we were such nice guys. I guess that’s what this maturity thing is about, growing up and being able to face being what you are.”

As I have suggested, I can’t really believe that this remark was ever made, but I do believe that it reflects Brown’s thinking.

ENDNOTES

1. Harlem is the “promised land” of the title. Brown’s ironic point is that for depression-era migrants to New York like his parents, it was always preferable to the wretched south and so they would simply refuse to recognize many bitter realities. But for him who suffered those realities, it turned out to be a promised land as well. Strange.

Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini —

My first reading of this picaresque autobiography was in college about 30 years ago. On a second reading, I find myself far less admiring of the author than he is of himself.

Cellini apparently never forgot a compliment -- and never forgot to embellish it, a trait that becomes tedious long before the book is over. Furthermore, the other side of this coin is that he similarly never forgot or overlooked an insult, real or perceived, with the result that although a papal patron supposedly said of him that as a great artist Cellini was "above the law," I can say that by his own admission Cellini was also a murderer, and a multiple one at that.

What is troubling is that there appears to be some accuracy in the pope’s observation. A man of violence, brutality, and boundless self-righteousness is now thought of as a colorful rogue who was an above average artist to boot — and all of this because he chose to brag about himself in an exciting, unadorned memoir of his countless scrapes and fancied accomplishments. For a reader in the late 20th Century, therefore, the narrative is maddingly compelling. Cellini was born in 1500 and grew up as an artist in Florence, the city of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Medici, with the latter two of whom he had personal intercourse. His violent young life could have been that of one of the young supporting thugs in Romeo and Juliet - am irony, since he aspires to Dante and not Shakespeare, who lived a generation after him.

Winston Churchill, My Early Life: A Roving Commission --

For some people, and Churchill is certainly one of them, it eventually becomes a bit irrelevant whether or not their tales are exactly true. (I also include Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain in this category). At least one of Churchill's anecdotes told in this book (and on other occasions) concerns his capture during the Boer War in South Africa by Jan Smuts who supposedly got instructions on the spot from General Botha not to kill him. But Toynbee relates a revealing companion story in Acquaintances (q.v.) and adds that in his own view Churchill's recollection could not have been correct. Smuts, however, evidently heard the story throughout his life and never denied it. From this I gather that all three, Churchill, Smuts, and Toynbee, have verified the story in their own way, and that Smuts in particular probably agrees with my irrelevance theory. Who can argue, after all, with a man who was famous for his deeds in virtually every decade of his very long life?

Winston Churchill, Marlborough: His Life and Times, (Commager ed.) --

As noted, I read the Commager condensation (which I think won some sort of prize) and not the entire 6-volume set. Even so, this was not light reading. I gather that Marlborough's reputation before this effort was chiefly based on an earlier, highly-critical biography by Macauley. Not having read that work I cannot say for sure, but it appears that Churchill fairly presents the criticism -- e.g. Marlborough's desertion of James II in favor of William of Orange, certain embarrassing contacts with Louis XIV, and even his wife's imperiousness and presumption vis-a-vis Queen Anne -- before demolishing or excusing virtually all of it. But though the tendentiousness is interesting, at the end of the day Churchill is so good chiefly because of his familiarity with men of power and influence and his obvious relish in describing a battle.
Joseph Conrad, Mirror of the Sea -- It has always surprised me how fascinating a maritime novel can be, given that the sea is featureless. The reason, of course, is that the features worth remarking upon do not concern the landscape. This book is not even a novel, but an autobiographical account of Conrad's life at sea. There is one chapter which I consider the ne plus ultra of good writing: his comparison of the west wind ("a great barbarian") to the east ("a cruel prince"). It would be impossible to paraphrase such a magnificent passage.


Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea.

"The sea has never been friendly to man. . . . Faithful to no race after the manner of the kindly earth, receiving no impress from valour and toil and self-sacrifice, recognizing no finality of dominion, the sea has never adapted the cause of its masters like those lands where the victorious nations of mankind have taken root. . . . The ocean has no compassion, no faith, no law, no memory."

Joseph Conrad was the perfect novelist. I can't even explain why I believe this so ardently. I don't have the words. The best word I have ever come up with is hypnotic. That's not quite it however, because although hypnotic does suggest that the tangible world which Conrad creates is always vaguely obscuring some other world just behind it, or on the border, or remembered, or something[1], it also makes him sound ethereal or mystical and not the craftsman and writer who night upon night created three-dimensional characters, recognizable situations, using verb tenses, quotations marks, the shifting of time, etc., etc. Novel-writing must be among the most demanding of solitary of mental adventures. And with Conrad there is always the tincture of sadness.

And yet The Mirror of the Sea is also not a novel. It is a memoir, "a very intimate revelation," first published in 1906. This date is after virtually every one of the Conrad novels and novelettes that I have read and been transfixed by. But it is drawn from the earliest part of his adult life which began long before publication of his first works of fiction most of which rely on this period which commenced in his teenage years and lasted approximately two decades.

After those 20 years at sea, he felt the obligation which few of us can ever realize, of making himself "understood" about what "others may call a foolish infatuation." Such familiar words are inevitably applied to every love story and The Mirror of the Sea is a love story, infused with love of the sea, of ships, and of the peculiar labors of mariners[2]. Seafaring, he says, is an "accumulated tradition, kept alive by individual pride, rendered exact by professional opinion, and, like the higher arts, it is spurred on and sustained by discriminating praise."

These judgments of seamen and their toils are about "the moral side of an industry" — industry, meaning "bread-winning" in the hands of craftsmen working as a team. Such men will develop a love for their growing skill which, even once attained, must continuously be enlarged. In time, the knowledge comes to embrace honesty and grace, acquires tradition, to be "kept alive by individual pride . . . [and] rendered exact by professional opinion." It is the mystique of men who work in concert for years, perhaps a lifetime. This is a "bread-winning industry" beyond even flawless efficiency, "almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art — which is art."

And but for seafaring, I ask, where else can this fraternal vocation be found? Perhaps in a cloisters, or a performance company like an orchestra or chorus. But men at sea have struggles of a peculiar challenge, not least of which is life preservation. This is Conrad territory: the intersection of life, death, and poetry.

Though it is a memoir, in only a few places does Conrad actually recount specific events of his own life at sea. Those passages are brief and tend to crowd toward the end of the book. That is where, for example, he recalls some of his earliest experiences as one of four young men questionably plying their own boat in the inland sea, the "cradle of oversea traffic and of the art of naval combats." There is a genuine story here, an escapade, really, just the right size for a memoir. But this tale launches him on a dilation about Ulysses, then causing him to meditate on "the pleasure lake of the Roman Caesars," and eventually to the futility of more recent maritime battles like Navarino. Elsewhere, he tells of how he lost his naivete about the deceptive benignity of the open ocean when on a beautiful day his vessel comes upon and rescues nine wretched men adrift on a hulk which sinks beneath them even as they are being pulled off.

Once, he says, on a strange shore he came upon "a black and youthful Nausicaa," but withdrew unseen. He gives a particularly poignant (because unemotional) portrait of an alcoholic first mate now come on hard times. He takes us to the most remote and unpopulated ends of the earth like the Kerguland Islands, Cape Agulhas, the Gulf of Syrta, gives detailed sketches of the London and Sydney docks of the late 19^th century, recalls brawls during lengthy layovers, remembers the rare disoriented captain, and throws a passing glance at the lurid but impassive figureheads adorning each vessel.

            Such interludes are fascinating and, well, hypnotic, but overall they are background to Conrad's wider, often mystical, observations about life at sea. In fact, The Mirror of the Sea begins quite differently from any biography. As though we ourselves were novice mariners, once past the ambiguities of "departure" and "landfall," he starts out with some of the grammatical rules of the vocation, preparing for what is to come and how to understand it in the glorious, pungent idiom of those who practice it. He disparages, for a small example, all lubberly journalistic references to "casting anchor" (the correct expression is "let go!" for no one ever "cast" an anchor). There follow several paragraphs exposing the fatuousness of supposed "casting," culminating in this pleasing metaphor:

"The getting of your anchor was a noisy operation on board a merchant ship of yesterday — an inspiring, joyous noise, as if, with the emblem of hope, the ship's company expected to drag up out of the depths, each man all his personal hopes into the reach of a securing hand — the hope of home, the hope of rest, of liberty, of dissipation, or hard pleasure, following the hard endurance         of many days between sky and water."

On every page, the effortless simile, metaphor, and even personification in the writing conjure something indefinably concrete about whatever the author has turned his eye upon: a mariner's tools, the seas, the winds, and of course ships. Ships at dock are like a restless "flock of swans"; then they are "hopeless prisoners" muttering angrily at their unwonted restraint. They are also faithful creatures. "There are good ships and bad ships, comfortable ships and ships where, from first day to last of the voyage, there is no rest for the chief mate's body and soul." A new vessel preparing for her maiden voyage is "diffident,"

"lying very quiet, with her side nestling shyly against the wharf, . . . intimidated by the company of her tried and experienced sisters already familiar with the violences of the ocean and the exacting love of men."

"[B]ut to look at a sailing-vessel with her lofty spars gone is to look upon a defeated but indomitable warrior. There is defiance in the remaining stumps of her masts, raised up like marshal limbs against the menacing scowls of a stormy sky; there is high courage in the upward sweep of her lines towards the bow . . . ."

Obviously Conrad's world was one of sailing ships, a "perfection of build, gear, seaworthy qualities, and ease of handling," increasingly jostled by steamers but still dominant in their fascination and romance. The seaman of those sailing days lived with a preternatural intimacy with his vessel, learning her personality and sharing her moods. And it was always this way – at least until the age of steam. If shown illustrations of even ancient sailing vessels, a mariner of Conrad's generation would look upon them "without a feeling of surprise  . . . . For those things, whose unmanageableness, even when represented on paper makes one gasp with a sort of amused horror, were manned by men who are its direct professional ancestors."

Modern times will come, of course, impelled by the dubious quest for speed, meaning profit. And yet a wooden, copper-sheeted vessel, the old hand confides, surely surpasses an iron ship which after a few weeks will lag "as if she had grown tired too soon." There is a note of weariness in the author's glance at the future. "The seaman of the future shall be not our descendant, but only our successor," no matter how future ships are designed[3]. The design of modern ships has also forced collateral change, at the quays and docks, for instance. The inevitable regret (and accompanying contempt) provokes passages like the following about how the new ways have affected stevedoring, once a skilled labor, now a "labour without a skill."

"The modern steamship with her many holds is not loaded within the sailorlike meaning of the word. She is filled up. Her cargo is not stowed in any sense; it is simply dumped into her through six hatchways, more or less, by twelve winches or so, with clatter and hurry and racket and heat, in a cloud of steam and a mess of coal-dust."

"Ships do want humouring. They want humouring in handing; and if you mean to handle them well, they must have been humoured in the distribution of the weight which you ask them to carry through the good and evil fortune of a passage. Your ship is a tender creature, whose idiosyncrasies must be attended to if you mean to come with credit to herself and you through the rough-and-tumble of life."

"If you remember that obligation, . . . , she will sail, stay, run for you as long as she is able, or, like a sea-bird going to rest upon the angry waves, she will lay out the heaviest gale that every made you doubt living long enough to see another sunrise."

Finally, although the repeated images of clashes, struggles, combat, and outright war with nature dominate this book, I could not even begin to suggest the magnificent passages describing the winds. No wind is the same as another.

"Some cling to you in woe-begone misery; others come back fiercely and weirdly, like ghouls bent upon sucking your strength away; others, again, have a catastrophic splendor; some are unvenerated recollections, as of spiteful wildcats clawing at your agonized vitals; others are severe like a visitation; and one or two rise up draped and mysterious with an aspect of ominous menace."

For me it would be enough to know that ships are menaced and tormented and threatened by the winds of the ocean. Conrad cannot let it go at that. He gives us every detail from the shrieking of the wind, to the roaring of the ocean, to the groaning of the ship, to the silence or cacophony of the sailors. Indeed, these winds are not simply "personalities," the greatest of them are monarchs. 

His personification of the West Wind (a "furious, benignant and splendid" barbarian) and his brother the East Wind ("impenetrable, secret, full of wiles") could never be fairly summarized or abridged. It is a tour de force that can hardly even be suggested. It must be read in its original, word for word. Surely it is the strongest writing ever put on paper about the deep-water sea.

            And I also give the last word to this master of the sea and of the written word:

"All the tempestuous passions of mankind's young days, the love of loot and the love of glory, the love of adventure and the love of danger, with the great love of the unknown and vast dreams of dominion and power, have passed like images reflected from a mirror, leaving no record upon the mysterious face of the sea."

---

[1] A ship reported "missing" by the Shipping Gazette "has disappeared enigmatically into a mystery of fate as big as this world, where your imagination of a brother-sailor, of a fellow-servant and lover of ships, may range unchecked."

[2] When he reflects on the little Mediterranean balancelle he sailed on as a youth in the Mediterranean, he writes, "The Tremolino! To this day I cannot utter or even write that name without a strange tightening of the breast and the gasp of mingled delight and dread of one's first passionate experience."

[3] And yet steamers, too, will become disabled and some day evoke compassion from any mariner.

Frederick Douglass, Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass --

After having read the Narrative, I later read the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, an expansion of the former, written over the 50 years or so following publication of the Narrative. It is clear why the Narrative remains the more popular work. Obviously it is shorter, but the chief difference is the change in tone.

The portions which Douglass added later are dull not only in comparison to the early account of the author’s own bitter slavery and his resistence to it, but also because the mature Douglass slips into the equanimity and smug cadences of a successful man of the world — which of course is what he became. But writing as a youth, Douglass is not only wise, but urgent. He rarely exaggerates (though one of the book’s most vivid passages — a two-hour (!) fight he has with a "slave breaker" -- seems a bit unlikely), and has the good sense to keep the focus almost entirely on the facts and implications of slavery as he lived it. We learn virtually nothing else about his personal life and even are surprised toward the end of the Narrative when almost in passing he mentions his new bride.

I can also say that Douglass’s observations on servitude got me thinking about more recent events. The radicals of the ‘60s apparently believed that "the worse things get, the better they get," meaning that the more oppressed people feel, the closer they are to commencing the revolution. But this is not what we witnessed in the late Soviet Union and not what Douglass believes.

"Beat and cuff the slave, keep him hungry and spiritless, and he will follow the chain of his master like a dog, but feed and clothe him well, work him moderately and surround him with physical comfort, and dreams of freedom will intrude. Give him a bad master and he aspires to a good master; give him a good master, and he wishes to become his own master."

There is one respect in which Douglass’s fame (based on the success of the Narrative) enlivens the later portions of his story. He came into the company of famous people and has left a record of his impressions. Of Disraeli, for example, he said

"He had nothing of the grace and warmth of Peel in debate, and his speeches were better in print than when listened to — yet when he spoke all eyes were fixed and all ears attent."

(This seems at variance with the charming raconteur who Maurois tells us so bewitched Victoria.) He gives first-hand observations of people like William Lloyd Garrison, Daniel O’Connell, John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and plenty of others. Though he acknowledges Lincoln’s racial prejudice, it is of no moment to Douglass.

"Had he put the abolition of slavery before the salvation of the Union, he would have inevitably driven from him a powerful class of the American people and rendered resistence to rebellion impossible. Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined."

It can also be said that Douglass was generous to others in a way that would not be tolerated by many black activists today. (A late-in-life meeting with his former master whom he had exposed -- and made famous -- in the Narrative sounds much like one of those battlefield reunions of enemy soldiers for whom the event has mellowed into nostalgia and for whom enmity for each other has completely evaporated.) This quality appears over and over in the book, and seems to me to be more genuine than the self-satisfied memoirs of a comfortable man of the world whose reputation cannot be altered. How would Thurgood Marshall, who toward the end of his life took to calling the Constitution a "flawed" document, react to this comment by his equally brave (and more eloquent) predecessor:

"After a time, a careful reconsideration of the subject convinced me . . . that the Constitution of the United States not only contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but, on the contrary, was in its letter and spirit an antislavery instrument, demanding the abolition of slavery as a condition of its own existence as the supreme law of the land. . . . Those who could not see any honest reasons for changing their views, as I had done, could not easily see any such reasons for my change, and the common punishment of apostates was mine."

And if Marshall would not have treated Douglass as an apostate for such sentiments, how would W.E.B. DuBois (and the countless others who have criticized Booker T. Washington as an "uncle Tom") have reacted to this passage:

"What I thought of as best was . . . a series of workshops, where colored people could learn some of the handicrafts, learn to work in iron, wood, and leather, and where a plain English education could also be taught. . . . We needed more to learn how to make a good living than to learn Latin and Greek."

By the end of the Life and Times, Douglass has become an old poop resting on his considerable laurels, justifying his behavior in small matters (especially his ambassadorship to Haiti), and filling up space with travel anecdotes (he found Nice expensive). Reading it is not really worth the effort, but no one with the time should skip reading the Narrative.

Richard Ellman, James Joyce -- This is considered one of the Twentieth Century's finest literary biographies and I had the advantage of reading the revised edition, which purportedly contains 100 new pages of material.

There is no doubting that Ellman has had access to copious raw material and that he uses it to good effect, but there remains for me the nagging question of why literary biographies are useful at all. This is not to say that a Joycean scholar like Ellman must not have had a marvelous time figuring out the antecedents for Gertie McDowell, Leopold Bloom, etc. But the notion that one cannot know the author without knowing his private life has always offended me a little bit. Of course some authors (e.g. Mailer) are really little more than their own publicity, and this may be partly true of Joyce. Still I am no less embarrassed reading his private correspondence with his wife now that they are long dead than I would have been the day it was written. Does it make the published work better to know these things? It cannot.

If Joyce cannot be understood without this and similar biographies, it means to me that he has failed in his only mission. And this is slightly different from abjuring literary criticism. If the critic is a better detective than I am, and only uses the evidence from the text, I delight in his efforts and interpretations. But otherwise we slide too easily into some sort of Freudian idea that the author was destined to write in a certain way because of things over which he had no control. In short, that he is no artist.

Anyway, I did read the biography and learned -- to no surprise, I guess -- that Joyce was supremely arrogant and offensive as a young man, that for the most part other men of letters (especially Yates and Pound) were exceedingly indulgent of him because of his genius, and that he deliberately generated the enigmas and puzzles of Ulysses to vex and confuse "professors" for hundreds of years to come. Finally, toward the end of the book we learn that when Joyce died in Zurich (of a duodenal ulcer), it was determined to do an autopsy. Ellman has included every single word of it, down to the quality of the Joycean pancreas and the repulsive appearance of his intestines. Is there no privacy at all? And then (like Ellman, no doubt) I remembered Bloom in his outhouse and Stephen picking his nose. In fact, there is no privacy in Joyce's world and he would have delighted in this extensive catalog of his corpse. (Central February 2006.)