#70: The Odyssey, by Homer. Translated by Emily Watson

The Odyssey and The Iliad were first set down on paper—or papyrus, or sheep intestine, or whatever it was—around 725 B.C., or, if you prefer the counterintuitive nomenclature, late in the 8th century B.C. But these works depict events that are supposed to have actually taken place about 400 years earlier. Though non-experts couldn’t distinguish the cultural norms of 8th century B.C. Greece from those of 12th century B.C. Greece, these were, as I learned from reading M.I. Finley’s The World of Odysseus, very different times. Homer was looking back on what he considered a purer, more exemplary time, much as Walter Scott was when he wrote about 12th century England in his 1820 novel Ivanhoe.

It's a wonder to me that we aren't more disoriented by the details of the story. Perhaps we're just able to ignore what doesn't make sense to us. Among the most valuable “gifts” that Odysseus and his fellow kings can confer on each other are women (because can you ever have too many?) and … tripods. The latter might put us in mind of photography, but originally these were devices for holding a pot over a fire. My guess is that they were valuable because they were made out of metal, a valuable resource in ancient Greece.

The version of The Odyssey that I read is a new translation by Emily Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Though the translation is in verse (iambic pentameter), it was not a difficult book to read. Watson’s language is mostly straightforward and free of archaic words and phrases. Had Watson rendered Homer with a lot of formal, old-fashioned English we would intuitively understand that she was using archaic English to convey the idea that we are looking far into the past. But the linguistic conventions of 18th century England don’t really get us any closer to 8th century B.C. Greece. So for the most part, Watson sticks to words that are in the average person’s vocabulary. In one passage I was even surprised to find the word “babysit.”

This approach worked for me, but by the same token I do not think I would enjoy a modern colloquial translation of, say, The Bible. I got to wondering why the two cases seemed so different. Though both The Bible and The Odyssey were composed in ancient languages, only the former is strongly associated with a particular translation—that is, the King James version. Most of us can quote various bits and recognize any number of passages from this translation. Along with Shakespeare, it is a foundation for eloquence and wisdom in the English language. You don’t have to be religious to be familiar with “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”

The Odyssey, by contrast, comes down to us as stories—as content rather than form. Our families have not been hearing passages from The Odyssey every Sunday for the past several dozen generations. Both books are full of religion, but in the case of The Bible, that religion, though it continues to evolve and mutate, is still in force, whereas the religion of The Odyssey has been consigned to the cultural ghetto that we call “fantasy and science fiction.” We have trouble even thinking of it as a religion. (Interesting mental exercise: what if Zeus and Athena were now being declaimed by shady online preachers and cynical politicians, and Jesus was a "franchise" for comic books and Hollywood blockbusters?) It’s hard for us to feel the force and relevance of Zeus and his gang, to understand how the ancient Greeks regarded the gods in their pantheon as they went about the daily business, but there is nevertheless a pretty clear continuity from the Greeks, to the Romans, to Roman Catholicism, which retains a substantial amount of mythological specificity, with its virtual pantheon of angels, archangels, and saints, to idol-free modern Protestantism. But the name “Zeus” does not signify anything remotely similar to what the name “Jesus” does to modern readers. Which brings to mind one of the more interesting episodes of the original Star Trek series.

But back to the translation. I like that Emily Watson’s version is free of the cultural baggage of 30 centuries. It’s stark and immediate. After I’d finished reading the whole thing, I searched online and found that I could listen to Ian McKellen reading all 24 books of Robert Fagles’ prose translation. In the past I’ve tried comparing different translations of, for example, Russian novels, and there is usually a fair amount of wording in common between translations. That wasn’t the case this time. Entire sections were shuffled and rearranged, so that my eye had to run backward and forward over pages of Emily Watson’s translation to keep my place as I listened to McKellen’s declamations. Two words would become ten or vice-versa. Without any knowledge of ancient Greek, I can’t be sure which translation aligns better with the original: Watson might have taken liberties to get the words to fall into tidy metrical patterns; Fagles might have inflated the language to heighten the drama.

But my sympathies are with Watson. Her version feels leaner and more eloquent. If I’d come upon Fagles/McKellen first I’m sure I would have been quite happy with that version. It’s quite… passionate. But Fagles wants to be sure that we’re impressed and entertained--he wants to give us a ripping yarn. So he plugs in an amplifier: where Watson gives us “Calypso, the great goddess,” Fagles gives us “Calypso, the bewitching nymph, the lustrous goddess.” Watson’s “men” becomes Fagles’ “comrades,” and Watson’s “told” is Fagles’ “harangued.” Those examples are all from the first hundred lines of the poem.

One significant difference is that the term that Watson renders as “slave” Fagles renders as “housekeeper” or “attendant.” I can understand both decisions: Watson wants us to understand the nature of the relationship without any extenuation, while Fagles wants to normalize it, to make it seem as natural as it must have seemed at the time.

As for McKellen, I have reservations, though he is very lively. His reads everything in an atta-boy go get ‘em sort of tone that seems to pat the hero on the back at every opportunity. As though to warm the hero up for us.

Like all but the most serious scholars of ancient Greece, I am essentially just a literary tourist in the world of Odysseus—we can be entertained, instructed, and amazed by The Odyssey, but our understanding of much of what the author is trying to get across is limited.

We root for Odysseus because he is unambiguously the hero of the tale, though we are never exactly comfortable in his company. We want him to return home and reclaim his position as husband of Penelope and king of Ithaca. But maybe we raise an eyebrow when the author praises him as a “sacker of cities,” and we wonder whether it would really be necessary to kill all 108 “suitors” who have taken up residence in his palace while he has been away for 20 years. That's a lot of dead suitors.

The word “suitors” makes us think of candy and flowers, but the suitors that Odysseus must content with are not the dainty sort. They are competing to marry Odysseus’ wife Penelope and to inherit his estate, a delicate matter given that he might not be dead.

Everybody knows that The Odyssey is an adventure story, with monsters (the Cyclops), witches (Circe), angry gods, shipwrecks, whirlpools, and sirens that lure men to the deaths. But what everybody might not know is that all this action is packed into just four of The Odyssey’s 24 books. The early part of the tale deals with the journey undertaken by Odysseus’ son Telemachus to find out whether his father is still alive after 20 years. Other books deal with Odysseus’ sojourn with a people known as the Phaeacians and his efforts to persuade them to send him back to Ithaca on one of their ships. In fact, Odysseus's naval adventures are over once he sets foot back in Ithaca in book 13, just past the halfway point in the story. Over the course of the last 11 books, Odysseus very carefully sets about to reestablish himself in Ithaca. This involves identifying loyal allies, planning and carrying out the slaughter of the suitors, and reasserting his role as father, husband, and king.

Though we really don’t understand all the various protocols, restraints, and dangers that Odysseus faces in these efforts, the details are never less than interesting. Whenever he first encounters someone who once knew him back in the day, he chooses to disguise himself (with help from Athena), typically as an old beggar, in order to scope out the situation. At first this stratagem makes sense, but by the time of his last such encounter, with his father Laertes, he has already slain the suitors and reclaimed his throne. At this point the impersonation feels more like a personality quirk than a precaution.

But Homer has all along been lauding Odysseus as a liar, and it’s never just a matter of being cautious, though that’s always an ingredient. Odysseus may just be a guy who just enjoys deceiving people, whether it’s by building giant hollow wooden horses or by pretending to be a beggar. What’s next for Odysseus? One task that we know is on his list is to go steal livestock to replace the animals that have been consumed by the suitors:

I have to go on raids, to steal replacements
For all the sheep those swaggering suitors killed
And get the other Greeks to give me more
Until I fill my folds.

The good old days really are here again.

A modern writer would find ways to put us on more intimate terms with his hero. But a modern writer would have recourse to all sorts of literary and psychological resources with which to do this. We have no trouble understanding the many technological advances that have occurred in the past 3000 years—everything from the printing press to electricity to internal combustion engines to nuclear power. But there has been a parallel set of storytelling advances as well: different kinds of metaphors and styles of irony and humor, for example. Modern writers have learned how to put us inside the minds of their characters, something we as readers have become comfortable with. Homer could no more give us Odysseus’ “stream of consciousness” than he could send him home in an airplane. Emily Watson does a good job of resisting the temptation to “help” Homer by making Odysseus more like us.

#69: Behave, by Robert Sapolsky

Robert Sapolsky writes like the experienced teacher he is—he’s knowledgeable, affable, and precise, at once informal and all business. In the acknowledgements we read that he worked up the material for this book in a “small seminar that I taught a few times.” According to Wikipedia, Sapolsky “is currently a professor of biology, and professor of neurology and neurological sciences and, by courtesy, neurosurgery, at Stanford University. In addition, he is a research associate at the National Museums of Kenya.”

I knew of Sapolsky from reading one of his earlier books, A Primate’s Memoir (2002). That book was both a summary of his experiences studying wild baboons in Kenya for many years, and also an account of his experiences living and traveling in Africa. I liked the way it combined science writing with a more general assessment of how the world is. I liked it so much that I gave copies to a couple of people—including my mother. When I asked her how she liked it, she wanted to know why I would think she would like a book about monkeys. My bad—she’s not fond of monkeys, apparently. I didn’t see any point in suggesting that baboons are a lot like people in many ways—ways that tend not to be flattering to our sense of being civilized, reasonable beings.

Sapolsky’s latest book, Behave, is another matter altogether, a daunting tome of over 700 pages. After finishing Behave, I retain my high opinion of its author, though I did have that “school’s out” sense of liberation when I got to the last page. Sapolsky aims high. His goal is to identify and describe—encompass—every factor that can influence a human being’s behavior, from discrete physical elements like neurotransmitters and hormones, on up through genes and evolution to such purely nonmaterial factors as empathy, language, and religion. He makes a convincing case that it’s most often the interaction between multiple factors that counts the most, just as it’s ecosystems, and not individual species, that matter most when you’re talking about sustaining natural environments on earth. The problem for me is that I think he was more determined to make an airtight case, backing up his assertions with copious evidence and citations, than he was to write a great book. I accept that, though I’d have preferred a great book.

The challenge in trying to understand human behavior is that there is no easy way to be objective, to stand outside ourselves, just as you can’t really describe an airplane while you’re flying in it. Sapolsky has one effective strategy for gaining a measure of objectivity—he knows of many cases where animals, typically primates, demonstrate behaviors that we think of as typically human. For example, there’s “stress-induced displacement aggression”:

Shock a rat and it’s glucocorticoid levels and blood pressure rise; with enough shocks, it’s at risk for a ‘stress’ ulcer. Various things can buffer the rat during shocks—running on a wheel, eating, gnawing on wood. But a particular effective buffer is for the rat to bite another rat. … Among baboons, for example, nearly half of aggression is this type—a high ranking male loses a fight and chases a subadult male, who promptly bites a female, who then lunges at an infant.

And then, to drive the point home:

Humans excel at stress-induced displacement aggression—consider how economic downturns increase rates of spousal and child abuse. Or consider a study of family violence and pro football. If the local team unexpectedly loses, spousal/partner violence increases 10 percent soon afterward.

Sapolsky looks hard to find the bright side. In discussing whether it might ever be possible for humans to become less aggressive and warlike, he tells of a particular troop of baboons that he once observed. The more aggressive males in this troop took to visiting a garbage dump behind a hotel, and, as a result of eating tainted meat, came down with tuberculosis and died. Without its most aggressive males, the troop became more cooperative and tolerant. Even after new males arrived to replace the casualties, this mellower behavior persisted. Sapolsky isn’t suggesting that baboons can become a more peaceful species. Their typical level of aggression is an appropriate adaptation to their environment. But he notes that “if baboons unexpectedly show this much social plasticity, so can we. Anyone who says that our worst behaviors are inevitable knows too little about primates, including us.”

Behave is full of studies—that is, Sapolsky tells us how people behaved when subjected to behavior studies by social scientists. For example, he cites one study that found that the percent of court cases where judges rule in favor of defendants drops from 65% first thing in the morning to 0% just before lunch, when judges are hungry and subject to “mental depletion.” After lunch, the rate of favorable rulings returns to 65%. This study was published in the authoritative and eminent “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.” Undoubtedly there is something to the finding. And yet—0%? If hunger and fatigue can affect us to this extent, how do we ever make it to 2:00 p..m. without all hell breaking loose?

Sapolsky’s standard practice is to describe experiments in which subjects are asked to do something or react to a situation while having their brain activity monitored. Sapolsky then tells us which areas of the brain were active and from that draws conclusions. For example, if the amygdala lights up, it indicates that the subject’s more primitive mind, having to do with fear and aggression, is involved. Whereas if neurons fire in the prefrontal cortex, it correlates with the rational mind, where tolerance and self-control originate. I kept imagining a kind of control room with a huge transparent three-dimensional model of the human brain, with different colored lights flashing in different areas. Sapolsky is rarely if ever skeptical about such studies. But how authentic can your behavior be when you’re hooked up to a brain scanner? Here’s a representative paragraph:

Enough is known about the neurobiology of religiosity that there’s even a journal called Religion, Brain, and Behavior. Reciting a familiar prayer activates a mesolimbic dopaminergic system. Improvising one activates regions associated with Theory of Mind, as you try to understand a deity’s perspective (“God wants me to be humble in addition to grateful; better make sure I mention that”). Moreover, more activation of this Theory of Mind network correlates with a more personified image of a deity. Believing that someone is faith healing deactivates the (cognitive) dlPFD, suspending disbelief. And performing a familiar ritual activates cortical regions associated with habit and reflexive evaluation.

Reading such passages made me edgy. (I think my amygdala must have been firing.) I have no grounds to dispute any of the findings, but I’m just not comfortable with such a mechanical perspective on human behavior. At some point, it becomes reductive. And it makes me worry about where such intricate knowledge of the brain might lead, what kinds of drugs and therapies might result.

Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.

That’s Hamlet, in Act 3 scene 2. So Behave was clearly not the ideal book for me. But I can’t say I didn’t learn a lot from it. For example, if I’m ever arraigned before a judge at 11:30 a.m., I’ll be sure to ask for an injunction. But I’ll bring a sandwich for the judge just in case.

#68: Outline, by Rachel Cusk

Sometimes you can find the essence of a book in a single passage. I had that experience while reading Rachel Cusk’s Outline.

The book is constructed as a series of conversations the unnamed narrator has with various people she encounters during a stay in Greece. We know that she has—or at least had—a husband and two sons back in England, but we do not know exactly what circumstances have brought her to Greece without them. We sense there has been some sort of a breach. What little we learn about her previous life is revealed as she carries on conversations with people she meets in Greece—she, as first-person narrator, never divulges anything about circumstances except in conversation with others.

These other characters are more than just mirrors in which we try to catch a glimpse of her story. In fact, we suspect that their stories are often variations of hers—that is, they are stories about relationships gone awry and difficult children.

Anyway, just before the passage that I want to discuss, the narrator has accepted the invitation of an older Greek man to spend a day on his boat. The woman is observing children as they dive into the water from a nearby boat:

I said that when my sons were the ages of those two leaping boys, they were so intimate it would have been hard to disentangle their separate natures. They used to play together without pause from the moment they opened their eyes in the morning to the moment they closed them again. Their play was a kind of shared trance in which they created whole imaginary worlds, and they were forever involved in games and projects whose planning and execution were as real to them as they were invisible to everyone else: sometimes I would move or throw away some apparently inconsequential item, only to be told that it was a sacred prop in the ongoing make-believe, a narrative which seemed to run like a magic river through our household, inexhaustible, and which they could exit and re-enter at will, moving over that threshold which no one else could see into another element.

But then there is a change:

And then one day the river dried up: their shared world of imagination ceased, and the reason was that one of them—I can’t even recall which one it was—stopped believing in it. In other words, it was nobody’s fault; but all the same it was brought home to me how much of what was beautiful in their lives was the result of a shared vision of things that strictly speaking could not have been said to exist.

I suppose, I said, it is one definition of love, the belief in something that only the two of you can see, and in this case it proved to be an impermanent basis for living. Without their shared story, the two children began to argue, and where their playing had taken them away from the world, making them unreachable sometimes for hours at a time, their arguments brought them constantly back to it. They would come to me or to their father, seeking intervention and justice; they began to set greater story by facts, by what had been done and said, and to build the case for themselves and against one another.

Cusk gives this account the stripped down mythical feel of a parable. Discord has erupted into an idyllic world. We are in Greece, after all. The passage moves us because we know that childhood can really be like that—we think of ourselves and our siblings in the long ago. But of course, childhood isn’t exactly like that because we don’t just one day step out of our imaginary universe into the cold light of strife and competition. Some strife and competition will have always been there, and the loss of innocence is intermittent and by degrees. Also, we gain as well as lose by growing up, and siblings who have lost their shared imaginary world may well find new reasons to be close in the world they share with everyone else. Cusk has selected and arranged the details to make it as affecting as possible. And no doubt the boys’ experience is meant to reflect a parallel development in their parents’ lives. That seems to be what Cusk is suggesting in the continuation of the passage:

It was hard, I said, not to see this transposition from love to factuality as the mirror of other things that were happening in our household at the time. What was striking was the sheer negative capability of their former intimacy: it was as though everything that was inside was moved outside, piece by piece, like furniture being taken out of a house and put on the pavement.

Negative capability, inversions, these concepts are at the heart of Outline. The narrator’s first conversation had taken place on the plane during her journey to Greece. Curiously, the last conversation in the book relates another passenger’s conversation on another such journey—it is told by the woman who will be taking over the narrator’s position as an English teacher in Greece. The new teacher has been listening to the passenger next to her talk about his life, and she experiences a rather strange metaphysical sensation:

He [the other passenger] was describing, in other words, what she herself was not: in everything he said about himself, she found in her own nature a corresponding negative. This antidescription, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her, for the first time since the incident, a sense of who she was.

Notice that the book’s title appears in the middle of that paragraph. Here’s the picture that I would have chosen for the book’s cover:

#67: The Year of the French, by Thomas Flanagan

If you follow the news at all, you know that we live in extraordinary times, that the events of the next few years will either continue the trend toward a distinctly fascist brand of populism or reverse it. But I wonder—did the fate of the world seem any less in the balance 10 or 20 years ago? And isn’t the political crisis as acute in, say, Southern Africa, or in Korea, or anywhere, really, as it is in the United States, though based on different events and circumstances? We might agree that a particular year is more significant than the one before or after it, or that one place on the globe is facing a more devastating crisis than another, but in the aggregate, I think most people usually see what’s happening in their here and now as nothing less than an inflection point in history. And while future historians will judge that certain times and places warrant more attention than others, the people living their lives tend to see their own circumstances as paramount. The smoke of our respective fires brings the horizon closer. Everything has led up to the present, and the future course will be set by what’s happening now.

By reading history—or an historical novel, as in the present case—we can drop ourselves into a time and place where the world has been turned upside down, and know how it might feel to be overwhelmed by circumstances completely unlike our own. In some cases we may find ourselves at one of the more famous loci of world history, as, for example, when we find ourselves in Moscow during the summer of 1812 in War and Peace. But just as interesting, we may find ourselves at a crossroads that was previously unknown to us, where peoples’ lives were wrenched out of their courses and where the powerless, at least for a time, become powerful and, in Yeats’ words, a strange and terrible beauty is born. Thomas Flanagan’s The Year of the French tells of such a crossroads. Strife between England and Ireland lasted for at least half a millennia and has flared into violence as recently as thirty years ago. The events of 1798, when a small French force landed in County Mayo in northwest Ireland and spearheaded an uprising that was intended to spark an insurrection across the whole of Ireland, was neither the greatest nor the least of the eruptions of that strife—I wouldn’t know exactly where to rank it, because I’m not especially knowledgeable about Irish history.

Poor oppressed peasants, along with more educated people inspired by the revolution in France, threw in their lot with the invading French army. It was exciting, it was glorious, it was just. But others, though in sympathy with the cause, understood that it was doomed, and that any Irish joining the cause would either be killed in battle or hanged afterwards as traitors to the British crown. With eyes open, they saw that the English army, even after it had been routed in an early battle, had an insurmountable advantage in resources and manpower. It quickly became a matter of how far the combined French and Irish forces could run, and how well they could hide.

I’d known about The Year of the French since it was first published in 1979 and I’d always had in mind to read it. It was republished by New York Review Books in 2004—an indication that it stood out even among first-rate historical novels of the time. Flanagan advances his narrative through a set of several characters, each of whom has a distinct perspective on the events. Some of these accounts are presented in the form of written testimony—for example, “From An Impartial Narrative of What Passed at Killala in the Summer of 1798, by Arthur Vincent Broome, M.A. (Oxon.).” Other accounts are presented in third-person narrative tending toward internal monologue as with Owen Ruagh MacCarthy, schoolteacher and poet (in Gaelic), who has his thoughts rendered in a manner reminiscent of James Joyce’s Ulysses:

It was full morning. The sun hung above the cornfields. To his left, a girl carrying water crossed the field. Seeing him, she paused. The heavy pails pulled at her arms. He shaded his eyes to watch her. Vivid, delicate, her features in profile cut the sky. Beyond her, pigs rooted in a cabin yard. Ballinamuck, the place of the pig. An ugly sound. Bogwater, lifeless and brown. He waited for her to turn her head, but she avoided his glance. Deceptive early autumn covered them, the silence of morning.

MacCarthy is a tragic character—he’s smart enough to know better, but gets caught up in the emotion of the uprising. He fails to appreciate the implications as he transitions from witness to participant. Well before the end he realizes that the uprising is doomed and strikes out on his own, but he is irresolute and too fond of whisky, and eventually the insurgents overtake him and he is present at the final battle at Ballinamuck.

All of Flanagan’s narrators are acute and articulate. Some, like, MacCarthy, are participants in the uprising. Others are witnesses who do not take part. Still others are loyalists—one is a British officer who serves as adjutant to the British commander, Lord Cornwallis, who in an earlier command had surrendered to Washington at Yorktown in 1783. What many of the English forces, along with the French general, Jean-Joseph Humbert, can ultimately agree on is that the Irish peasants who bring their primitive pikes to the uprising barely qualify as human. (Cornwallis, to his credit, does not subscribe to this view, though he does not bother to take issue when it is expressed in his presence.)

It’s interesting that Flanagan does not include one of these peasants in his cast of narrators. But we do not need that voice to understand how wretched the position of the Irish underclass was at the end of the 18th century. At that time, Ireland was a puppet state of Britain, with its own parliament in Dublin. Some of the well-educated Irish agreed with Cornwallis that it was time to abolish the Irish parliament, and make England and Ireland a single state. This was accomplished with the so-called Act of Union in 1801. The Irish state had been corrupt and incompetent, and Irish citizens had all the liabilities of British citizenship (e.g., hanging for armed opposition to the King), but few if any of the benefits. So these well-educated Irishmen reasoned that political union could hardly make their situation worse. They guessed wrong. Fifty years later, half the country died of starvation. I’ve read elsewhere that the potato famine was not just a natural disaster, that Irish farmers were required to continue shipping their agricultural products to England even as they starved.

It’s interesting to consider that when Thomas Flanagan wrote The Year of the French in 1979, Ireland was still in the midst of its troubles, with the newspapers full of bombings and hunger strikes. Today the situation has improved markedly, and it isn’t hard to believe that the troubles might actually be over at last. Which is a nice thing to think upon after appreciating the utterly hopeless situation of most of the people in this book.

#66: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, by Simone de Beauvoir

You learn as much about Simone de Beauvoir from the way she writes her memoir as you do from what she tells us about the first twenty years of her life (this is the first of four volumes of her autobiography). She was given the nickname Castor, French for beaver, by one of her friends at university, for two reasons: one, because Beauvoir sounds something like the English word beaver, but also because of her relentless diligence, her need to work work work. The nickname stuck. This book is a good demonstration of why: it’s a kind of snowplow of facts and information pushed ahead by her pen (typewriter, more likely): steady, workmanlike, and powerful. There are few if any jokes or digressions.

This suited me fine because I’m comfortable processing information in much the same way that de Beauvoir provides it. I like information intake. Writing that requires some additional mental processing (such as poetry or philosophy) isn’t quite as satisfying to my mind as direct accounts like de Beauvoir’s. I couldn’t always keep track of the many names and details, but I could appreciate the way she uses everyone she meets and everything she learns as fuel for her engine of a mind. That’s an awkward metaphor, but it captures the idea: she was furiously determined to make sense of the world and to make something of her self, and all her energies and resources were directed toward these ends.

Having made this point I suspect I’ve managed to make de Beauvoir sound robotic or joyless, but while I’m sure she was formidable and had no time for fools, she was also a passionate lively person with an enormous appetite for knowledge, experience, and, most especially, other people. Fortunately for those of us reading this book, she is a good enough student of human nature, and a good enough writer, to provide fascinating portraits of all the people who captured her imagination—I’ll quote liberally from one such portrait at the end of this piece.

In her youth, de Beauvoir was an academic star, claiming one prize after another until she found herself sharing classrooms at the Sorbonne with the likes of Claude Lévi-Strauss and John-Paul Sartre. Her family had started off rich but had then come down in the world, and her parents saw her education as an accomplishment that might appeal to a potential husband, like playing the piano. She was compliant with this view until she realized that the conventional rewards of a conventional life—children, a house, money—held no appeal for her. Education went from being a means to an end to being the key to her future.

It was never an easy path. De Beauvoir’s parents, like the parents of other young women of her class, managed their daughter’s life to an extent that seems outrageous to modern sensibilities. They screened her mail and ruled on what books she was allowed to read until she was 18. Her mother saw it as her ultimate duty to help her daughter find a suitable husband. De Beauvoir’s close friend Elizabeth Mabille (whom she knew affectionately as Zaza) waged a kind of war with her own mother. She was in love with a fellow student, but when he would not commit it left her with no recourse but to capitulate to her mother’s will in the matter. The struggle left her so exhausted that she succumbed to a fever and died; this episode comes at the very end of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. The implication is clear: for a woman of de Beauvoir's class in the 1920s, living life on one’s own terms required certain psychological and emotional resources, along with enormous strength.

The French title of the book is Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée. The word rangé translates as tidy, steady, or level-headed. This word captures a lot more of de Beauvoir’s personality than “dutiful,” especially since de Beauvoir becomes steadily less dutiful during the course of the book. But she never ceases to be steady and level-headed.

Though de Beauvoir was a serious and determined student who had the fortitude to spend entire days studying, her existence was far from monkish. She went to concerts, plays, and lectures and even developed a taste for drinking cocktails and flirting with men in cafés, though, during the period covered by this volume, she most emphatically remained chaste:

I frankly detested the Roman Catholic religion; watching Lisa and Zaza fighting for their lives against ‘this self-martyring religion,’ I was more and more thankful that I had escaped from its clutches; in fact, I was still contaminated by it; the sexual taboos still haunted me to such an extent that I longed to become a drug-addict or an alcoholic, but never for a moment did I contemplate sexual indulgence.

A reason to investigate subsequent volumes, perhaps, is to find out how and when she overcame this taboo.

But perhaps the finest thing in the book is de Beauvoir’s accounts of her numerous friendships. When de Beauvoir made a new friend it was as though she were taking the next step in her own evolution—she would catalog the person’s various qualities and traits, but she also had a way of adding their ideas and experiences to her own. She learned them, like books. I could cite many examples of this phenomenon, but my favorite was the one I was waiting for but wasn’t sure would be covered in this volume: her friendship with Sartre. I discovered it just 20 pages from the end—it was worth the wait. Here are some samples.

‘He never stops thinking,’ Herbaud had told me. This didn’t mean that he cogitated over formulas and theories all the time: he had a horror of pedantry. But his mind was always alert. Torpor, somnolence, escapism, intellectual dodges and truces, prudence, and respect were all unknown to him. He was interested in everything and never took anything for granted. Confronted with an object, he would look it straight in the face instead of trying to explain it away with a myth, a word, an impression, or a preconceived idea: he wouldn’t let it go until he had grasped all its ins and outs and all its multiple significations. He didn’t ask himself what he ought to think about it, or what it would have been amusing or intelligent to think about it: he simply thought about it.

= = = =

We used to talk about all kinds of things, but especially about a subject which interested me above all others: myself. Whenever other people made attempts to analyse me, they did so from the standpoint of their own little worlds, and this used to exasperate me. But Sartre always tried to see me as part of my own scheme of things, to understand me in the light of my own set of values and attitudes.

And finally:

He certainly had no intention of leading the life of a professional literary man; he detested formalities and literary hierarchies, literary ‘movements,’ careers, the rights and duties of the man of letters, and all the stuffy pompousness of life. He couldn’t reconcile himself to the idea of having a profession, colleagues, superiors, of having to observe and impose rules; he would never be a family man, and would never even marry. With all the romanticism of the age and of his twenty-three years, he dreamed of making tremendous journeys: in Constantinople, he would fraternize with the dock-workers; he would get blind drunk with pimps and white-slavers in sinks of iniquity; he would go right round the world, and neither the pariahs of India nor the monks of Mount Athos nor the fishermen of Newfoundland would have any secrets from him. He would never settle down anywhere, and would never encumber himself with possessions: not merely in order to keep his freedom of movement, but in order to prove how unnecessary possessions are. All his experiments were to benefit his writing, and he would sweep aside all experiences which would in any way detract from it.

No other passages in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter are as lyrical or as moving. I can’t claim to know that much about either de Beauvoir or Sartre, but it’s wonderful to think that two people could form such a mutually satisfying life partnership and at the same time enhance and amplify each other’s talents to such an extent.

#65: At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, by Sarah Bakewell

After reading Sarah Bakewell’s previous book, How to Live: or, a Life of Montaigne, I was hoping she’d follow up with something in a similar vein before too long. Montaigne had been someone I was curious about, and Bakewell’s book did exactly what I hoped it would do: it told me about who he was, and also about what makes him unique and interesting. One problem with innovators from earlier times is that it’s hard, without the proper guide, to feel the impact they made on their world. Montaigne introduced a way of thinking and writing that has since become familiar; so in reading Montaigne, or reading about him, it can be hard to recognize that he was the first to think and write as he did. I’m always wanting to bring up Elvis Presley regarding this notion: it’s easy for me to hear that Elvis was a good singer (though often of bad songs), but the oft-cited claim that he was “the first white man to sing like a black man” has never resonated with me, perhaps because I grew up in a world where Elvis’s example had already been copied by any number of other singers. I was born too late to hear Elvis as people heard him in 1955 and ’56.

I haven’t been as curious about Sartre and the existentialists as I was about Montaigne, at least not lately. Sartre was a big deal in the third quarter of the 20th century when I was in school; he has largely fallen out of fashion in this century. Back in the day, Sartre was a figure to be reckoned with—a philosopher who became involved in radical politics, a communist sympathizer with intellectual credentials, a real troublemaker. Early in his career, in the 30s and 40s, he’d written quite a bit of fiction—his short novel Nausea was a staple of comparative literature courses in the 70s. I’d read one of his novels and a book of stories, and enjoyed them quite a bit. At one point I purchased his magnum opus, the philosophical tract Being and Nothingness, but never had the fortitude to even open it. It might still be in a box in the basement.

So although I’d not thought about Sartre and existentialism for a while, the fact that Sarah Bakewell had written a book about them was enough to get me interested. It isn’t that hard to see what connects Montaigne to Sartre: they were both philosophers, more or less, but they were both known as much for the lives they led as for the books they wrote. I’m fascinated by philosophers, but intimidated by actual philosophy. As soon as I start reading about inquiries into the nature of being and the like, my eyes start to cross.

Bakewell is unlike me in that she has an appetite for philosophical texts, but I was pleased to read that she also feels that philosophers’ lives illuminate their work and vice versa:

When I first read Sartre and Heidegger, I didn’t think the details of a philosopher’s personality or biography were important. This was the orthodox belief in the field at the time, but it also came from my being too young myself to have much sense of history. I intoxicated myself with concepts, without taking account of their relationship to events and to all the odd data of their inventors’ lives. Never mind lives; ideas were the thing.

Thirty years later, I have come to the opposite conclusion. Ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so.

Precisely. Knowing about the person opens me up to wanting to know about their work. Though Sartre is definitely the presiding presence in Bakewell’s book, she name checks seven philosophers on the front cover of her book, and devotes a fair amount of space to each: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Jaspers, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Most of these names were familiar to me—all except Merleau-Ponty. Heidegger, Husserl, and Jaspers were German; the rest were French (with the appropriate caveat about Camus being Algerian French, a pied-noir). I get the impression that there can be no formal list of existentialists, any more than there can be any formal definition of existentialism. Bakewell takes this question on in her first chapter, where she provides a nine-point definition of existentialism. But she seems to regard this exercise as something of a chore:

…[H]ere is my attempt at a definition of what existentialists do. I put it here for reference, but by all means skip it and come if the need or want arises.

The notion that arose in my mind as I read the book is that existentialism is the opposite or “fate” or “determinism”: it’s the idea that the world is what we make of it. It’s freedom: the notion that life is a series of often difficult choices and that we are the authors of our own lives. Life is a wave to be surfed.

It’s true, some of us are more constrained in our choices than others; the people that Bakewell writes about certainly lived through times of difficult choices: the primes of these writers’ careers coincided with World War II, so you could say that their various theories about how to live were often put to very challenging tests.

The war was also the time when the philosophers Bakewell considers were most unified. In the late 40s and 50s, as communism became intellectually respectable (or fashionable) in Europe, rifts began to appear. You could either focus on the promise of communism—“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” according to Marx—or the reality of Stalinism. Sartre was drawn to radical positions, which aligned him for a time with Stalin, and later with Mao. While others would watch political conflicts carefully, awaiting the verdict of history, Sartre was determined to exercise his freedom of choice to influence and be part of history while it was happening. Near the end of his life he was asked to name his worst failing, and this is how he responded:

Naturally in the course of my life I have made lots of mistakes, large and small, for one reason or another. But at the heart of it all, every time I made a mistake it was because I was not radical enough.

But choices were difficult, and mistakes were inevitable. What was Sartre’s guiding principle? According to Bakewell:

Sartre had sketched the outline of a bold solution: why not decide every situation by asking how it looks to ‘the eyes of the least favoured’, or to ‘those treated the most unjustly’? You just need to work out who is the most oppressed and disadvantaged in the situation, and then adopt their version of events as the right one.

Bakewell connects this notion of looking at the world through the ‘gaze’ of the least favoured to various writers and movements in the intervening decades, from Frantz Fanon to James Baldwin—even Normal Mailer makes an appearance. The notion of “identity politics” is very much at the center of our culture and politics today, and it all leads back to Sartre. He didn’t just anticipate our world—he helped to create it. Is the world better for his efforts? Some would say yes; many would say no. I’m sympathetic to both perspectives. It might depend on where your gaze is situated.

At the opposite end of the spectrum from Sartre was Martin Heidegger. Heidegger is considerably less interesting to me precisely because he sought to maintain a barrier between his life and his work. I gather that Heidegger might be the most profound philosopher of the group that Bakewell considers, but I labored through the chapter where she explains his concepts and terminology. As for his life, there are two facts that stick in memory: one, that he had an affair with Hannah Arendt when she was his pupil in the 1920s, and two, that he had an early affiliation with the Nazi party that he terminated but never attempted to justify, excuse, or explain. Of course, these two facts amplify each other, because Arendt was Jewish and later wrote one of the most famous and provocative books about the holocaust: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Strange bedfellows, indeed. Arendt and Heidegger resumed their relationship after the war, though only through letters.

Sarah Bakewell’s books always leave me hungry for more. After reading her Montaigne book I plowed through the first volume of his essays. Volumes two and three still await. After reading this book, I went down to the basement and found the book of Sartre stories I'd read a few decades ago—its title is Intimacy—and re-read it. The stories are intriguing psychological portraits of rather extreme characters. The one story I still remembered after all these years, titled “The Childhood of a Leader,” is almost novella length, and describes how a pampered and confused child somehow blossoms into a fascist leader. The portrait is not entirely convincing, but I admire Sartre for at least trying to imagine how such a person comes to exist. What would Hitler have been like as a six-year-old or as a twelve-year-old? It’s relatively easy to point to the usual signposts: lack of empathy, torturing animals, and so forth, but it’s another thing to try to enter into the mind of such an individual. Sartre gives it a good try.

But from the group that Bakewell describes, the one who is most interesting to me as a writer is Simone de Beauvoir. Bakewell writes:

…[a]mong all the existentialist works, the one I am least likely to tire of is Beauvoir’s autobiography, with its portrait of human complexity and of the world’s ever-changing substance. It gives us all the fury and vivacity of the existentialist cafés, together with ‘a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert’—and all the rest of the exquisite, phosphorescent bloom of life, which reveals itself to human beings for as long as we are lucky enough to be able to experience it.

That’s how Bakewell ends her book, and that’s how I’ll end this post.

#64: Within a Budding Grove and The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust

I’ve just spent a little over 100 hours in the company of a young Frenchman in the years just before and after 1900. In other words, I’ve now reached the half-way point of In Search of Lost Time. For the most part, it’s a first-person account, so what we read is the unnamed narrator’s thoughts and experiences. What usually happens when you spend so much time looking over someone’s shoulder this way is that you slip into their skin to some extent. Literary transference. But that has not happened in this case—Proust is profoundly unlike me, to the extent that I am at various times bored, entertained, confused, and occasionally even a bit shocked by the way he sees the world. I was debating with myself whether this was necessarily a bad thing when I came upon the following quote from critic William Empson in a New York Review of Books article (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/26/empson-praise-ambiguity/):

The main purpose of reading imaginative literature is to grasp a wide variety of experience, imagining people with codes and customs very unlike our own.

Which makes sense, except that to some degree you also have to be able to connect with or empathize with a character if a book is to mean much of anything to you. It’s a balancing act for writer and reader. There has to be enough of a connection that your ego can stretch to cover the gap, but not so much that your imagination doesn’t have to work.

Marcel (as I’ll call the narrator, who is unnamed in the book) begins as a sickly child with a powerful imagination. He forms ideas about certain things—flowers, young girls, and aristocratic families—and then shares his impressions with us in great cumulonimbus paragraphs. You get the impression that he forms his view of the world from books and his own meditations, as many a literary child will, but to a greater extent than most. Here, for example, is what Marcel thinks as he observes two noble ladies—the Princesse de Guermantes and the Duchess de Guermantes (cousins by marriage)—at the theater. He is describing their clothing:

For my own part, I never doubted that their garments were peculiar to themselves, not merely in the sense in which the livery with red collar or blue facings had once belonged exclusively to the houses of Guermantes and Condé, but rather as for a bird its plumage which, as well as being a heightening of its beauty, is an extension of its body. The costumes of these two ladies seemed to me like the materialization, snow-white or patterned with colour, of their inner activity, and, like the gestures which I had seen the Princesse de Guermantes make and which, I had no doubt, corresponded to some latent idea, the plumes which swept down from her forehead and her cousin’s dazzling and spangled bodice seemed to have a special meaning, to be to each of these women an attribute which was hers, and hers alone, the significance of which I should have liked to know: the bird of paradise seemed inseparable from its wearer as her peacock is from Juno, and I did not believe that any other woman could usurp that spangled bodice, any more than the fringed and flashing shield of Minerva. And when I turned my eyes to their box, far more than on the ceiling of the theatre, painted with lifeless allegories, it was as though I had seen, thanks to a miraculous break in the customary clouds, the assembly of the Gods in the act of contemplating the spectacle of mankind, beneath a crimson canopy, in a clear lighted space, between two pillars of Heaven.

Nice outfits, apparently. Proust’s prose is the honeysuckle that ascends the trellis of the ladies’ haute couture. Both may be a bit overdone (sort of like that metaphor). This is about half of the full passage—it’s almost impossible to pull a succinct quote from Proust. Such rhapsodies make up a significant portion of In Search of Lost Time, and they can be strenuous.

After I had read dozens of pages devoted to Marcel’s fascination with one or another young girl, I would be a bit scandalized to discover that he eventually “falls out of love” with them at exactly the point when they begin to reveal themselves to him, despite not having passed through the expected intermediate phase of actually having a romantic relationship. I expected some interpenetration of consciousness, because that’s how I think about love. But the point at which women become real to Marcel is exactly the point at which his passion begins to recede.

He feels the collapse of his cloud castles as a kind of victory over his passions. Indeed we learn that this Marcel, so sickly and delicate, so likely to be overwhelmed by sensations, also becomes an habitué of brothels, though this information is related only in passing, for example to explain how he knows that the object of his friend’s obsession is in fact a prostitute.

Marcel’s love is a kind of visual stimulus that provokes an outpouring of elaborate prose, like the grain of sand that provokes the oyster. This extravagance seems a bit ridiculous in 2017, and I think it might have in 1900 as well, but maybe not in 1300, when knights in romances were going on quests to prove their worth to women they had only glimpsed from afar. And if there is irony or humor to be derived from the juxtaposition of stained glass windows and brothels, Proust doesn’t seem to be interested in exploiting it.

Each volume of In Search of Lost Time consists of a small number of extended episodes—in Within a Budding Grove there are two episodes: the first relates Marcel’s infatuation with a girl named Gilberte and his effort to become socially acquainted with her family. Really, he is as much infatuated with her parent as he is with her. They are Charles Swann and Odette (née de Crécy), whose love affair had made up the second half of the first volume, Swann’s Way. I was a bit surprised to learn that they are now married, since the earlier volume depicts the full course and eventual exhaustion of his infatuation with her. Proust leaves it to us to imagine how this transition was effected. The conception of a child may be relevant. Perhaps Odette had allowed herself to become pregnant for practical reasons.

The second episode is about Marcel’s season at the (fictional) beach resort of Balbec in Normandy, where he stays in a hotel with his grandmother. Here Marcel builds up his circle of acquaintance, meeting many of the characters who will populate the rest of the novel. There is Robert de Saint-Loup, the dashing military officer who doesn’t realize that his mistress is actually a prostitute. Robert pedigree is immaculate—at least on a par with the crowned heads of Europe. If Marcel’s notions of romance seem anachronistic, so too is his reverence for bloodlines:

But in Saint-Loup, when all was said, however the faults of his parents had combined to create a new blend of qualities, there reigned the most charming openness of mind and heart. And whenever (it must be allowed to the undying glory of France) these qualities are found in a man who is purely French, whether he belongs to the aristocracy or the people, they flower—flourish would be too strong a word, for moderation persists in this field, as well as restriction—with a grace which the foreigner, however estimable he may be, does not present to us.

The passage, with its Jamesian qualifications and elaborations, gets stranger and stranger:

Of these intellectual and moral qualities others undoubtedly have their share, and, if we have first to overcome what repels us and what makes us smile, they remain no less precious. But it is all the same a pleasant thing, and one which is perhaps exclusively French, that what is fine in all equity of judgment, what is admirable to the mind and the heart, should be first of all attractive to the eyes, pleasingly coloured, consummately chiselled, should express as well in substance as in form an inner perfection. I looked at Saint-Loup, and I said to myself that it is a thing to be glad of when there is no lack of physical grace to serve as vestibule to the graces within, and when the curves of the nostrils are as delicate and as perfectly designed as the wings of the little butterflies that hover over the field-flowers round Combray; and that the true opus francigenum, the secret of which was not lost in the thirteen century, and would not perish with our churches, consists not so much in the stone angels of Saint-Andre-des Champs as in the young sons of France, noble, bourgeois or peasant, whose faces are carved with that delicacy and boldness which have remained as traditional as on the famous porch, but are creative still.

This passage captures many of the weird crosscurrents the modern reader experiences in reading Proust. First of all it is as ornate and extravagant as a mediaeval cathedral. Secondly it is truly weird and rather homoerotic, though I’m pretty sure I could find similar passages describing female beauty. Thirdly it celebrates racial purity, though in the most discrete and indirect way. Many characters express anti-Semitic sentiments in In Search of Lost Time, typically in terms of taking sides in the Dreyfus affair. Marcel himself would seem to be a Dreyfusard—that is, in the not anti-Semitic camp—and Proust himself certainly was, but the currents of the novel flow both ways: to the extent that Marcel is under the spell of some count or princess, he partakes of their perspective, but as he begins to be disillusioned, he might undermine their pretensions, more by letting them ramble on idiotically than by commenting directly.

The third volume, The Guermantes Way, gives us Marcel’s obsession with the Duchess of Guermantes. His family has come to live in the “Hôtel de Guermantes—a hôtel in Paris is a sort of in-town chateau, large enough that various apartments can be rented out. But his family does not officially “know” the duke and duchess, so he is reduced, in order to be able to see her, to contriving to pass her on the street every morning as if by accident. This habit provides some potential for comedy that Proust doesn’t completely waste.

For a time Marcel is distracted from his infatuation by visiting Robert Saint-Loup at his military barracks outside Paris. Then he describes Saint-Loup’s peculiar relationship with his mistress, Rachel. This episode mirrors Swann’s infatuation with Odette in the first volume and also to some extent Marcel’s own various infatuations. The implication is that a woman is what you make of her and love is a kind of enchantment that blinds the lover to reality. Finally, there is a set piece on the illness and death of Marcel’s beloved grandmother, an episode rendered as finely as an extended death scene out of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.

But by page 500 or so we are back in the company of the Duchess of Guermantes. Marcel has gradually made his way up the ladder of Paris society, one drawing room at a time. He goes from encountering the duchess at the homes of others to eventually receiving an invitation to her own salon. He never tells us what sort of social capital enables him to become a regular at the very best gatherings, even as he assures us that no ordinary mortal without the requisite pedigree could possibly do so. Marcel exists in a very peculiar state—he is equal parts omniscient narrator and character, having characteristics of both roles but fully inhabiting neither. Thus we take his access to the highest levels of society for granted, without asking to see his credentials.

Of course, once Marcel is able to observe the duchess up close and converse with her, he no longer sees her as a goddess out of mythology. Instead he sees a woman with the skills and instincts (not to mention the pedigree) to position herself at the pinnacle of society. She is very well read with a good sense of humor, but also vain and insincere. Her husband the duke (first name: Basin) has long since devoted the majority of his attention to a string of mistresses, but he is still a connoisseur of his wife’s witticisms, and he feeds his prize show pony the requisite straight lines and takes care to explain the jokes for the benefit of anyone who might have missed the point. It’s as important for the duchess to be able to deliver an apposite quite from literature as it is for her to reject an invitation from the wrong person. Perhaps her greatest joy, though, is doing everything in her power to assure that one of her servants is prevented from having a few hours off to visit his girlfriend.

So that’s the world of Marcel, or at least the first 2400-odd pages or so. At this point I think it’s appropriate to take a break and consult some secondary sources—perhaps Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life. I can’t say I haven’t enjoyed Proust to a certain extent, but I’m pretty sure I’d have enjoyed the half dozen or so books I could have read instead in the same time at least as much. To this point, I’ve been strict about experiencing the text without consulting other sources, but I am sure that I will learn much—and be further entertained—when I dip into the ocean of content that has been created around Lost Time. There are works of literature, such as Don Quixote or Ulysses, that are best read in the light of what other skilled readers—critics, historians, philosophers—have learned and thought about them through the years. Interesting commentaries don’t just tell you what you did not or could not know about the original author’s mental universe, they can be creative works on their own terms, using the original text as a foundation to build upon. They are like 200-level courses, with the original text serving as the 100-level prerequisite. I’m ready to find out what I’ve been missing. Considering how bewildered I am much of the time as I read Proust, I'm sure to learn quite a bit.