#92: Magnificent Rebels, by Andrea Wulf, and The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald

I’d never heard of the writer who went by the pen name Novalis until I recently read about him in two quite different books.

The first book was Magnificent Rebels, by Andrea Wulf. The subtitle is The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self. Wulf’s magnificent rebels all lived in or near the university town of Jena, in Saxony, in the 1790s. Some of their names were familiar to me, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller; but most were not, including the Schlegel brothers (August Wilhelm and Friedrich), Caroline Schlegel (August Wilhelm’s sometime wife and partner in translating Shakespeare), and Novalis. If you are German, or if you have studied German culture, these names would probably be as familiar to you as Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley are to me.

In Wulf’s words,

Magnificent Rebels recounts one of these strangely magnified and exciting moments in history when a cluster of intellectuals, artists, poets, and writers come together at a particular time and place to change the world. In this, the Jena Set resemble other influential groups: the North American Transcendentalists, for instance, comprising Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne and others, who lived in Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century; similarly, the Bloomsbury Set that coalesced in early twentieth-century London and included Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Vanessa Bell and John Maynard Keynes; or the modernist circle of Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920s Paris.

As a baby boomer, I might also want to nominate the Beat Generation of Kerouac and Ginsberg, or the British Invasion bands of the mid-1960s.

Romanticism is a slippery concept—it was the foremost creative trend during the early 19th century, but you can appreciate the paintings and the poems and symphonies that are labelled “romantic” without understanding what differentiated these works from what came before or after. But like the Renaissance three hundred years earlier, the Romantic movement caused a series of creative and philosophical detonations in Germany, France, and England.

One obvious spark was the French Revolution of 1789-1794. Wulf notes that “the French Revolution proved that ideas were stronger than the might of kings and queens.”

I’ve learned, partly from Wulf, that another, less obvious impetus was the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, who posited an absolute barrier between the objective world and our subjective perception and understanding of that world. This idea encouraged the young writers of the Jena set to see the world as their personal domain: information and experiences of all kinds were equally meaningful and valid, from dreams and infatuations on through to scientific facts.

At the crest of the Jena wave, in 1798, the Schlegel brothers began publishing a periodical they named Athenaeum. Novalis contributed hundreds of short pieces he called variously Pollen or Fragments to Athenaeum.

It was here, on the pages of the Athenaeum, that the term ‘romantic’ was coined and first used in print in its new literary and philosophical meaning. … When August Wilhelm [Schlegel] had asked his brother to send him an explanation of the word ‘romantic,’ Friedrich had replied that it was impossible because it was two thousand pages long. In the Athenaeum, he managed to summarise it in one, albeit long, fragment that spread over three pages:

“Romantic poetry is a progressive, universal poetry. Its aim isn’t merely to reunite all the separate species of poetry and put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetoric. It tries to and should mix and fuse poetry and prose, inspiration and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature; and make poetry lively and sociable, and make life and society poetical; poeticise wit and fill and saturate the forms of art with every kind of good, solid matter for instruction, and animate them with the pulsations of humor…”

Novalis was 26 when he began publishing in Athenaeum, and he had been living what can only be described as an accelerated life. Four years earlier, he had fallen in love, more or less on sight, with 12-year-old Sophie von Kühn. Their respective families, not to mention Miss von Kühn herself, were initially taken aback by the strangeness and intensity of this passion, but it remained entirely chaste and proper, and eventually an engagement was agreed upon. Wulf sees Novalis’s headstrong passion as evidence of an almost supernatural precocity—even as he was courting Ms. von Kühn, Novalis was studying and writing at a demonic pace. Like Rimbaud, he was a kind of freak of nature. He had already learned Greek and Latin and “could absorb a book in a quarter of the time it took his friends, and then recite its contents months later.”

He regarded the ordinary with wonder, and the unusual with acceptance. He slept little and worked hard. Novalis claimed never to be bored and whatever he studied or learned, he did so with enthusiasm—be it studying philosophical books, reading poetry or clerking with a magistrate and tax collector to learn about administration and management in preparation for work at the family-run salt mines. Everybody agreed there was something magical, intense and almost hypnotic about him. Women and men alike fell for him. He ‘electrified me,’ one woman said, and another admirer admitted that ‘few people in my entire life have left such a deep impression.’

We can never know how grounded in reality Novalis’s passion for Sophie von Kühn was, because less than a year after they first met, she fell ill with tuberculosis and then died barely a year after that in 1797, two days after her 15th birthday, after undergoing a series of horrific surgeries.

Novalis himself succumbed to tuberculosis before his 30th birthday, after publishing a moderate amount and writing (but not publishing) two novels. It took the world a while to catch up to how much Novalis had accomplished in his short life.

It’s easy to understand Wulf’s interest in Novalis since he is one of the central characters in her story. What inspired Penelope Fitzgerald is not as obvious, though the astounding white-hot intensity of Novalis’s life is certainly a thing to marvel at. Her novel The Blue Flower presents episodes from Novalis’s life during the time he was courting Sophie von Kühn.

Fitzgerald was a British writer of the late 20th century who wrote short, rather elliptical novels, initially about episodes from her own life but later about subjects seemingly plucked from the air—like Novalis. Another of her books, The Beginning of Spring, is set in 1913 (pre-revolution) Moscow and deals with an English print shop owner along with his staff and family.

If you are inclined to believe that a novel about Novalis’s peculiar and doomed love for Sophie von Kühn would be somber and heartbreaking—well, you would be right about the heartbreaking part, but Fitzgerald is essentially a comic writer, and she plunges into Novalis’s world and makes it seem simultaneously outlandish and convivial.

I first read The Blue Flower a couple of years ago before I had any idea who Novalis was; it was only after reading Wulf’s book that I went back and re-read it with a new understanding of how she tried to come to terms with the way his mind worked.

Fitzgerald portrays Novalis—at this point in his life still just Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, Fritz to his family and Hardenburch (for whatever reason) to Sophie—as a somewhat absurd figure. She recognizes that he is exceptional, but she also recognizes that he is 22 years old and that none of his friends or family really know what to make of him. His head is in the clouds and his feet are anywhere but on the ground. He is sensible of his responsibilities as the eldest son of a penniless noble family, and has no reservations about following in his father’s footsteps as a mine inspector for the local jurisdiction. (So, OK, maybe his feet were sort of on the ground.) But he is prone to rather strange spells of exaltation, or inspiration, or perhaps just mild insanity, as when, upon arriving at a house where he is to be a lodger, he conducts himself thusly:

Fritz arrived on foot, a day after he was expected, and at a time when Coelestin Just was at his office. ‘The Long-Expected is here,’ said Rahel [the mistress of the house] to Karoline [another resident]. She herself remembered him very well from Wittenberg, but was distressed to see him so dishevelled. ‘You find the exercise healthy, Hardenberg?’ she asked anxiously as she brought him into the house. Fritz looked at her vaguely, but with a radiant smile. ‘I don’t know, Frau Rahel. I hadn’t thought about it, but I will think about it.’ Once in the parlour, he looked round him as though at a revelation. ‘It is beautiful, beautiful.’

‘It’s not beautiful at all,’ said Rahel. ‘You are more than welcome here, I hope that you will learn a great deal and you are free, of course, to form whatever opinions you like, but this parlour is not beautiful.’

Fritz continued to gaze around him.

‘This is my niece by marriage, Karoline Just.’

Karoline was wearing her shawl and housekeeping apron.

‘You are beautiful, gracious Fraulein,’ said Fritz.

‘We expected you yesterday,’ said Rahel, dryly, ‘but you see, we are patient people.’ When Karoline had gone out, as she very soon did, to the kitchen, she added, ‘I am going to take the privilege of someone who met you so often when you were a student, and welcomed you, you remember, to our Shakespeare evenings, and tell you that you ought not to speak to Karoline quite like that. You did not mean it, and she is not used to it.’

‘But I did mean it,’ said Fritz. ‘When I came into your home, everything, the wine-decanter, the tea, the sugar, the chairs, the dark green tablecloth with its abundant fringe, everything was illuminated.’

Of course, Hardenberg’s most consequential such flight is when he sees twelve-year-old Sophie von Kühn standing at a window and decides immediately that she is to be the Beatrice to his Dante.

Fitzgerald had acquired a great deal of knowledge about how people lived in the German state of Saxony in the 1790s, and is continuously amazing us with the details. Who knew, for instance, that families only washed their linen once or twice a year (fortunately, they seemed to own quite a bit of linen)? Or that the way to preserve cabbages over the winter was by burying them in sand? And the menus! How about a selection of soups:

…one made of beer, sugar and eggs, one of rose-hips and onions, one of bread and cabbage-water, [and] one of cows’ udders flavoured with nutmeg.

The speciality of the annual Tennstedt fair was

Kesselfleisch—the ears, snout and strips of fat from the pig’s neck boiled with peppermint schnaps.

So we have Hardenberg/Novalis’s strange nature, the surprising details about life in 1790s Germany, and last but not least, the peculiar nature of the large Hardenberg family itself: Fritz was the eldest surviving, but as of the time of the events depicted, the Freifrau was still producing children—I’m not sure of the exact count, but there must have been at least eight living at this time.

The next youngest boy, Erasmus, is stunned when he learns of Fritz’s devotion to Sophie von Kühn, and makes the journey to her home to see for himself. He is initially not impressed:

‘Fritz, I have seen her, yes, I’ve been to Grüningen! I talked to your Sophie and to a friend of hers, and to the family.’

Fritz stood as if turned to ice, and Erasmus called out, ‘Best of brothers, she won’t do!’

He threw his arms round his so much taller brother. ‘She won’t do at all, my Fritz. She is good-natured, yes, but she is not your intellectual equal. Great Fritz, you are a philosopher, you are a poet.’

‘Who gave you permission to present yourself to Grüningen?’ asked Fritz, so far almost calm.

‘Fritz, Sophie is stupid!’

‘Mad, Erasmus!’

‘No, I’m not mad, best of all Fritzes!’

‘I said, who gave you permission—‘

‘Her mind is empty— ‘

‘Better silence’

‘Empty as a new jug, Fritz’

‘Silence’

Somehow Erasmus eventually comes around to an appreciation of Sophie’s charms, which we learn when he asks her older sister if she can procure for him a lock of Sophie’s hair:

‘A very small quantity, to put in my pocket book, close to my heart … You know, I did not understand her at first, but suddenly it came to me why my brother had the words “Sophie, be my spirit’s guide” engraved on his ring.’

It’s not clear whether Erasmus has actually fallen for Sophie or is just succumbing to the ‘electrifying’ force of his brother’s personality. In any case, Sophie greets his request with a laugh which Erasmus does not understand until he is later informed that her illness has rendered Sophie bald under the stylish cap she is wearing. The ring in question, by the way, can be viewed to this day at the Municipal Museum in Weissenfels, Germany.

Then there is the matter of one of the younger Hardenberg children, six-year-old Bernhard who, after overhearing news about the progress of the revolution in France while hiding under the table, emerges to predict the fate of the French king: ‘They will cut of his head, you will see.’

Like some of his siblings, and like most of Fritz’s friends in Jena, Bernhard (usually referred to as “the” Bernhard) is a supporter of the French Revolution, if a bit more sanguine than most.

It might seem at times that Novalis, the precocious intellectual of Wulf’s book and Fritz, the headstrong young scion of the Hardenberg clan in Fitzgerald’s, are almost two different people, but in fact both characters are present in both books. Here he is mediating alone in a churchyard in The Blue Flower:

The external world is the world of shadows. It throws its shadows into the kingdom of light. How different they will appear when this darkness is gone and the shadow-body has passed away. The universe, after all, is within us. This leads inwards, always inwards.

The entire Hardenberg clan were destined to become shadows in a very short time. Fitzgerald gives us the detail in an afterward:

At the end of the 1790s the young Hardenbergs, in their turn, began to go down, almost without protest, with pulmonary tuberculosis. Erasmus, who had insisted that he coughed blood only because he laughed too much, died on Good Friday 1797. Sidonie lasted until the age of twenty-two. At the beginning of 1801 Fritz, who had been showing the same symptoms, went back to his parents’ house in Weissenfels. As he lay dying he asked Karl to play the piano for him.

...

The Bernhard was drowned in the Saale on the 28th of November 1800.

George was killed as First Lieutenant at the Battle of Smolensk in 1812.

#91: Indigenous Continent, by Pekka Hämäläinen

In The Martian Chronicles, a 1950 novel by Ray Bradbury, humans have settled Mars—not the airless rock we know from science, but a mythic place, complete with an Arizona-like climate, pink skies, and breathable air. The settlers are middle class Americans, as Bradbury chose to understand them in 1950: good-natured unassuming folks who want nothing more than a modest house and a garage with a car. There had been native Martians when the settlers arrived, but they were wispy, insubstantial beings, and they more or less dwindled away over the course of the book. No human dispossessed or committed any violence against the Martians, but by the end of the book there were only ghost Martians, along with a few scattered artifacts and ruins.

Even as a kid I understood the parallels with the settlement of the western United States—or at least the sanitized version of that process. We had tamed and settled a continent, and now we were ready to start colonizing space: the next frontier—as per Star Trek, the final frontier. What was central to this myth was the assumption that we had taken what was free for the taking. If you were planted in front of a TV in the 1960s, like I was (when you weren’t reading Ray Bradbury), Indians were as notional as Bradbury’s Martians.

But we knew there had to be more to the story. Like many of my peers, I’ve always been fascinated by Native Americans, and about their interactions with Europeans. Spanish, French, and English invaders and settlers all went about occupying the new hemisphere in different ways: the Spanish conquered, the French traded (and tried to convert), and the English plowed their way westward. But always, and especially in the case of the English (as they morphed into Americans), the standard histories and stories assumed something called “manifest destiny”: the imperative of pushing the Indians out of the way. Ours was the superior civilization, and the weak always vanquish the strong. How could we share the continent with Indians as partners when they had no organized governments, no towns or cities, no industries or currencies to oppose to our well-defined culture?

Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent is history-from-the-other-side that attempts to scrape off centuries of prejudice and presumption from the history of North America. What we think we know, even after decades of revisionism, is still contaminated by ignorance and chauvinism.

The Indians understood exactly what was at stake. They were not easily or quickly vanquished. As late as the 1870s, 380 years after Columbus and just 150 years before today, there were viable Indian nations—the Lakotas in the northern plains and the Cheyenne in the southern plains—who maintained a working economy and sufficient military capability to keep Europeans at bay. But centuries of realignment, negotiation, and adaptation finally failed these nations as railroads, the telegraph, and successive waves of settlers broke the resistance once and for all. What’s hard for us to understand is that this result was obvious to absolutely nobody until it happened. Once it did happen, the preceding 380 years were recast as prologue, part of an inevitable process. Nobody in 1650, 1750, or even 1850 made any such assumption.

Hämäläinen emphasizes the word Indigenous, with a capital I, to assert the potency of native societies as they confronted the various European empires. Here is an early example, describing events in the American southwest in the 17th century:

Spain had a momentous head start in the colonization of the Western Hemisphere, but North American Indians had brought Spanish expansion to a halt: in the late sixteenth century, there were no significant Spanish settlements on the continent—only petty plunder regimes. North America was still essentially Indigenous. The contrast to the stunning Spanish successes in Middle and South American was striking: how could relatively small Native groups defy Spanish colonialism in the north when the formidable Aztec, Inca, and Maya Empires had fallen so easily? The answer was right in front of the Spanish—the decentralized, kinship-based, and egalitarian political regimes made poor targets for imperial entradas—but they kept missing it because the Indigenous nations were so different from Europe’s hierarchical societies. They also missed a fundamental fact of Indigenous warfare: fighting on their homelands, the Indians did not need to win battles and wars; they just needed not to lose them.

Hämäläinen’s concedes nothing to assumptions of European superiority.

From the 16th century to the latter part of the 18th century, there were never just two sides to any conflict. The English and the French, and to a lesser extent the Spanish, were at least as concerned with vanquishing each other as with vanquishing Indians, and they negotiated and traded with Indian nations to create necessary alliances. This is how the Indians were able to obtain the guns and other tools they needed to remain viable.

Spanish and French strategists had envisioned their colonies as imperial launchpads that would facilitate further expansion, but that goal proved elusive for both empires. Colonists could do very little in North America without Native support and consent—a constraint that drove them to radically recalibrate their ambitions. The early-eighteenth-century lower midcontinent became a world of flexible alliances, malleable identities, and imperial failures. Colonies founded as imperial power centers morphed into Indigenous resource domains. As in the pays d’en haut decades earlier, imperial ambitions were diverging from reality in the lower Mississippi Valley.

The Indians, in turn, allied or warred with each other as their priorities dictated. The Iroquois, based in what is now upstate New York but with dominion over an empire stretching from Quebec in the north to Illinois in the West and the Carolinas in the South, were particularly formidable. The Iroquois established their confederacy of five tribes in the decades just before the appearance of the Europeans and remained a power until the late 1700s—quite a run. (I’ve been fascinated by the Iroquois ever since my seventh-grade class spent a semester learning about them from a book titled The Great Tree and the Longhouse. The nuns seemed to relish the gory details of Jesuit martyrdom.)

The X factor was disease—a topic often backgrounded in triumphalist narratives. Throughout Indigenous Continent are passages describing how one tribe or another would lose 50 or 80 percent of its population due to a smallpox epidemic. Colonists suffered too, but there was an inexhaustible supply of new immigrants to restock their settlements.

The Iroquois met mass death by waging “mourning” wars on neighboring tribes:

The Iroquois had driven thousands of people into the west, gaining a vast domain in their wake. It was the first large-scale western expansion in early American history. But this did not put an end to the warfare, which only seemed to escalate as the Iroquois’s enemies dispersed. The explanation was at once simple and unique: the Iroquois needed people more than they needed territory. They needed captives to replenish disease-ravaged populations, mend fractured lineages, alleviate pain through vengeance, and restore the spiritual vitality of their communities.

When Iroquois warriors returned with captives, the clan mothers would sort them:

Those chosen for literal adoption went through a “quickening” ceremony in which they received the name and social role of a deceased Iroquois. These people—known as we-hait-wat-sha—or “a body cut into parts and scattered around”—were adopted into clans, became full-fledged members of the Iroquois League, and were obliged to defend it in battle, even against former kin. The ritual adoptees [a second category] were slotted into Iroquois families as “uncles” or “nephews.” Their faces were painted red and black, and they were allowed to give a feast and recite their war honors before being executed. Condemned captives were tied to a stake, and their new relatives took turns to “caress” them with firebrands. Women cut up the corpses and boiled the pieces in kettles so that the Iroquois could absorb the prisoners’ spiritual power. The Iroquois aimed to dismantle “their nationality,” to prop up their own.

I found myself rooting for and admiring the Iroquois despite the astonishing violence that they perpetrated. If you’ve never read much history, you might think we live in violent times, but in fact what we would call genocide was business as usual for most of human history. The Iroquois, like most Indian nations, were moral people who played by a certain set of rules. But torture and death were part of their world, and if we insist on imposing our standards on them, or on any historical group sufficiently different from us, we become blind to what their lives were like. It was never senseless violence. It was … appropriate violence? Appropriate for them, anyway.

Slavery was another component of life in early North America. But as originally practiced, it was not based on racism. In the 17th century there was all sorts of variations: Indians enslaving other Indians, whites enslaving Indians, Indians enslaving Africans, Africans enslaving other Africans. It was an economic strategy: people were a resource. In a not untypical passage, we read how the Comanches raided down into Mexico for the specific purpose of capturing people to tend their horses:

The horse herds of the four allies had exceeded Comancheria’s carrying capacity, forcing a difficult choice: either reduce their herds or expand again. The Comanches did not seek war, but they could not accept smaller herds; the Comanches’ individual and collective power hinged on horse wealth. The Comanches turned south and went to war with Mexico for horses, grass, and captives. Raiding, already a major enterprise, was about to become an industry. The Comanches carried scores of Mexican captives into Comancheria to tend to their growing horse herds. Slavery became a substantial institution within the Comanche world, but it was not rigidly structured or managed. A large number of slaves were eventually adopted into Comanche households. They were called kwuhupus, “my captives.”

That sounds like a practical strategy; it almost sounds charming. No doubt it was generally not very charming for the kwuhupus, but nor was it tainted with hatred or racism. It’s interesting to consider the progression of events in North America: first slavery without racism, then slavery with racism, and finally racism without slavery.

No event so devastated the prospects for Indian nations in North America as much as the American Revolution—or rather the outcome of that war. After 1776, it was no longer possible for the Indians to play one empire off against another. The Americans were not restrained by any grand strategy, or by a monarch in Europe who could set limits on what was permissible. Over time, the Americans grew ever more confident of their strength, and ever less willing to negotiate or share the land they coveted. Thus began the years of Indian “removals,” of treaties torn up before the ink dried, and ultimately of mass slaughter.

The last-ditch effort of the Indians was to become as much like the invaders as possible:

Facing a program of state-sponsored ethnic cleansing, the southern Indians knew that retreating from U.S. aggression spelled dispossession and defeat. Americans recognized only one kind of civilization—their own—which meant that the Indians needed to embrace a version of that civilization if they were to survive as independent nations. The result was not only newspapers and plantations, but revised racial thinking. The Cherokee leader Guwisguwi already lived in a two-story home, had an estate of several orchards, and owned nineteen Black slaves and a ferry.

But it was all for naught:

The Cherokees were ready to engage in nation-to-nation talks with the U.S. representatives but their cause proved futile. The Georgia assembly demanded that John Quincy Adams remove the Cherokees, and when he refused, the assembly denied Cherokee sovereignty.

These days, public gatherings in Seattle, where I live, are often preceded by a statement like the following:

We acknowledge that we are on the traditional and ancestral lands of the Nisqually people, or “Squally-Absch.” Squally-Absch means “People of the River, People of the Grass.” Nisqually people have inhabited and stewarded these lands Since Time Immemorial.

These declarations tend to make me uncomfortable, not because they aren’t true, but because they change nothing. If alien settlers ever do arrive from outer space, we shouldn’t expect to be treated any better than we treated the Indians. They might be willing to acknowledge that we were here first, though.

#90: The Books of Jacob, by Olga Tokarczuk

At the end of a positive but somewhat perfunctory review of The Books of Jacob in the New York Times, Dwight Garner writes

The Books of Jacob rarely touches the emotions. No page, for me, turned itself. A word from Finnegans Wake came to mind: thunderslog. I don’t mean to dissuade. As with certain operas, I’m glad to have had the experience — and equally glad that it’s over.

I can sympathize with Garner, a man who makes his living reviewing books. The Books of Jacob, which is a novel by the way, follows a large group of people over a large swath of Europe for several decades in the 18th century, running to just short of 1000 pages. It’s not cryptic or elliptical or gnomic, much, but it makes substantial demands on a reader’s time and energy. I experienced none of Garner’s impatience for two reasons: One, I was already something of a Tokarczuk fan after reading two of her earlier novels, including Flights. Two, I had no deadline, and tend to enjoy novels that capture the experiences of a large cast of characters living through tumultuous times while hewing closely to the historical realities of those times. I have no problem with devoting a month of my reading time to such books. For me, the two books that I’ve read in the past decade that best match this description, and that gave me a great deal of pleasure, were Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety (which I rate higher than her justly celebrated Wolf Hall trilogy), about some prominent people during the French Revolution, and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, about people from different ranks of Soviet society during the siege of Stalingrad during World War II. (The links are to my blog posts on these books).

The story that Tokarczuk tells is really many stories, but the main one is of a group of acolytes who cohere around a Jewish trader from Wallachia, now part of Romania, in the decades after 1750. The map of Europe looked very different in those days, with Poland stretching from the Baltic all the way to the Black Sea, where it shared a border with the Ottoman Empire, which then encompassed most of the countries that we now call the Balkans (Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, etc.). The story opens in Podolia, which was then part of Poland but is today in Western Ukraine.

The trader’s name is originally Jakub Lejbowicz, but he takes the name Jacob Frank as his fame and influence grow. He is proclaimed to be a messiah, but we come to understand that this word doesn’t have quite the apocalyptic significance for the people in this book that it has today. For one thing, there could be more than one messiah, and in fact, Jacob is the third in a series, the first being a man named Sabbatai Tzvi who had lived a hundred years earlier. The majority of Jews in Eastern Europe (the so-called Pale of Settlement) looked upon Tzvi’s followers skeptically, as a kind of cult.

When we first glimpse Jacob Frank he is living in Turkey, about to be married. Most of his friends and colleagues are followers of Sabbatai Tzvi.

They don’t even hide it, and openly proclaim their Messiah without fear of prosecution here in Turkey, since the sultan tolerates different religions as long as they do not get too intrusive. These Jews are already somewhat acclimated to their new home; they have even grown slightly Turkish in their aspects, and their demeanor is free.

The Books of Jacob is a mostly realistic novel, so there is nothing mystical about how Jacob becomes their new messiah, which isn’t to say that the process isn’t mysterious. His initial stakes are charisma, intelligence, and good looks. The time and place are fortuitous: his associates are of a passionate and rebellious nature, steeped in the Kabbalah. They conceive of themselves as “Anti-Talmudists,” meaning that they reject the body of laws, observances and prescriptions that define mainstream Judiasm.

I should stop at this point and say that The Books of Jacob is not a book specifically about Jews or Judiasm. Tokarczuk, as her name indicates, is not Jewish herself, and her book is really about the interplay of people and events in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, and about how religion can become politics, and politics can become religion. The scale, as in the best historical fiction, is both microscopic, dealing with the fates of dozens of individual characters, and macroscopic, dealing with events that affect nations. There are various non-Jewish characters, most of whom stand at the periphery of the action and contribute a perspective on the larger events. Father Benedykt Chmielowski, for one, is featured in the novel’s opening scene and then reappears every so often. Tokarczuk gives us flirty but discrete excerpts from the letters he exchanges with a poet named Elżbieta Drużbacka. They discuss their own concerns, only occasionally commenting on larger events. I was mildly surprised to find that Tokarczuk did not invent either of these seemingly minor characters. Perhaps an educated Polish reader would be expected to know them.

Jacob and his followers start out in Smyrna (a town in Turkey today known as Izmir) and end up in Offenbach am Main, near Frankfurt, 40 years later. The action tends in a northwesterly arc, and as they move toward the intellectual heart of Enlightenment Europe, Jacob and his crew evolve from a voluptuous free-loving gang into a rigid, insular community with power and money conflicts. This progression might remind us of any number of “cults” in modern times but the difference is that Jacob and his advisors are able to shrewdly negotiate with and play off the secular and religious powers of their day. They are renegades, outsiders, but they figure out how to form strategic alliances and remain viable, and even to thrive, for a very long time.

Jacob, like Sabbatai Tzvi before him, is persuaded to convert to Islam early on, while living in Turkey. This might seem to mar his credentials as a messiah, but Jacob shrugs it off as a necessary expedient—it earns his group the protection of the sultan. Later on, after returning to Poland, he takes this stratagem to a new level by offering to convert to Christianity in exchange for a protected status for his ever-growing sect. The middle third of the book details the alliances and maneuvers that follow upon this offer. To the Catholic clergy in Poland, the offer has considerable appeal. For one thing, it would earn them credit for bringing perhaps tens of thousands of souls into the bosom of Mother Church. For another, it would exasperate and weaken the influence of the unconverted “Talmudic” Jewish majority. After a celebrated disputation against the traditionalist Jews in the cathedral in Lwów (Lviv in modern Ukraine), the conversion proceeds with mass baptisms.

According to Tokarczuk, Jacob Frank is no more a Christian at heart than he was a Muslim or, for that matter, a Jew. He claims that his mystical tradition speaks of a trinity and offers this to the clerics to demonstrate the sincerity of his conversion. In reality, Frank’s religion doesn’t seem to care much about metaphysics. But conversion is a double-edged sword for the Frankists, because while it buys them the support of certain highly-placed clerics (one of whom inconveniently dies at a crucial moment), it cuts them off from the protection that a deeply rooted established religion might afford. The moment of conversion is the high-water mark for Jacob Frank’s cult.

Frank plays the role of messiah quite well. He’s good at his job. The only other messiah that I know anything about was Jesus, and it’s impossible to guess what his process might have been. How should a messiah behave? Jacob Frank speaks to his assembled followers every night and assembles a committee of highly educated former rabbis to work for his cause. He also has in his fold a man who goes by the name Moliwda who is actually a Polish count named Kossakowski. Moliwda has been living in Greece and is fluent in several languages. He serves as a sort of minister or ambassador for the Frank party.

Tokarczuk fills in the details of her story with various letters and journal entries written by Frank’s would-be apostles. I don’t know how many of these interpolated documents are historical, but I’m beginning to understand, after a few internet search sessions, that most probably are.

What are we to make of Jacob Frank? Is he a good person, an important person, a profound person? Or is he just the unwitting nucleus of a kind of phenomenon that tends to occur in some form or other from time to time in human history? We enjoy his early successes and the camaraderie of his group, much as we might wish we had been at Woodstock in 1969 or in Haight Ashbury in 1967 (such, at least, are the demi-Edens that I grew up with). Then we look on sadly as he eventually grows old, feeble, and fractious. His children disappoint him and his disciples betray him.

Tokarczuk does not judge, and she does not allow us to do so either.

What makes The Books of Jacob so fascinating, and so challenging, is that it is a dispatch from a world that most English-speaking readers never knew existed. We know so little of the world, and we make such a fuss about the few people and events we do know a little bit about: Julius Ceasar, Henry VIII, Abraham Lincoln. It can be salutary to change the channel and tune in a time and a place that are otherwise blank in our experience, even if the copious details happen to make a book reviewer weary.

# 89: Everybody: A Book About Freedom, by Olivia Laing

A few years ago I read about something called ASMR: “autonomous sensory meridian response.” Wikipedia defines it as “the subjective experience of low-grade euphoria characterized by a combination of positive feelings and a distinct static-like tingling sensation on the skin…. most commonly triggered by specific auditory or visual stimuli….” If you search for ASMR on youtube, you can find thousands of videos, the majority featuring some attractive young woman speaking in a low, solicitous voice as she rattles jewelry or pretends to perform an eye exam or give a haircut. The common denominators are soft, sibilant sounds and close proximity. One ASMR video reenacts a TSA patdown.

These videos are intended to provoke an ASMR reaction in the viewer. They suggest something midway between a paid fetish experience and a mother putting her child to bed. But when I first read about ASMR, I knew that I had experienced it. Yes, reader, I have experienced low-grade euphoria. My ASMR experiences have been brief and unremarkable, to the extent that I never paid them any mind except while they were happening. For me, ASMR is sensual, but not sexual, so the gender of the person causing it is not significant. The videos don’t work for me both because I find them ridiculous and infantilizing, and because the person is not actually interacting with me. The sensation is as Wikipedia describes: a pleasant tingling on the skin, encircling the head like a wreath.

Science can do little with ASMR because it’s evanescent and impossible to measure, a physiological will-o’-the-wisp. That elusiveness would not have fazed Wilhelm Reich, who would have understood ASMR to be a manifestation of what he called orgone energy: the life force. Reich’s life and work are discussed at length in Olivia Laing’s Everybody: A Book About Freedom.

Reich ‘discovered’ orgone energy during the summer of 1940, as he vacationed in Maine:

Gazing at the sky over the lake one night, he thought he saw something flickering between the stars. Suddenly, he realized that the life force he’d been searching for was everywhere, a radiant energy that hummed and buzzed amid the grasses and flowers, the colour of St Elmo’s fire. He’d been standing in it all along, ‘at the bottom of an ocean of orgone energy.’

In the 1920s and 30s, Reich had been a leader of the psychoanalytic community in Vienna and Berlin, a favored protégé of Sigmund Freud. Over time he diverged from Freudian orthodoxy on two points. First, through his interaction with working people at a free clinic, he determined that societal conditions played as much of a role in psychic health as family history. He joined the communist party and proposed that psychoanalysis and communism were complementary:

Both psychoanalysis and communism were full of potential for understanding human unhappiness and expanding human freedom, Reich thought, but each had major blind spots. The problem with psychotherapy was that it insisted on treating the individual as if their pain occurred in a vacuum, unmediated by the society they inhabited or the politics that governed their lives. As for Marxism, it failed to recognize the importance of emotional experience, not least the trouble caused by shame and sexual repression, especially to women.

If psychic health was a societal matter, that made it a political matter as well, and Reich’s convictions led him to play an increasing public role in 30s Berlin, even as the Nazi regime was expanding its reach to control all aspects of public life. He founded the very unlikely sounding “German Association for Proletarian Sexual Politics” and became “a prominent, passionate figure in the city, lecturing crowds of thousands.”

The Freudian orthodoxy was to steer clear of politics. In retrospect, not the right choice, though it doesn’t seem there was any right choice available under the circumstances.

The other point on which Reich diverged from Freud had to do with pleasure. In Berlin between the wars there was much sexual pleasure of all kinds to be had. But Reich, by touching his patients (something Freud had avoided since early in his psychoanalytic career) noticed a different kind of physical pleasure that seemed to serve a therapeutic purpose:

Over the next decade, he developed a revolutionary new system of body-based psychotherapy, drawing attention to the characteristic ways each patient held themselves. ‘He listened, observed, then touched, prodded and probed,’ his son Peter later recalled, ‘following an uncanny instinct for where on one’s body the memories, the hatred, the fear, were frozen.’ To Reich’s surprise, this emotional release was often accompanied by a pleasurable rippling sensation he called streaming…

Sounds a lot like ASMR.

Reich came to America in 1940 and the remaining 17 years of his life were a disaster. He invented something he called the orgone accumulator, which was essentially just a windowless box with a chair in it. His idea was that if you sat in an orgone accumulator, you’d receive a therapeutic dose of orgone energy. Laing does not explain whether Reich tried to offer any scientific evidence for how the orgone box was supposed to work or if he proposed any mechanism for measuring orgone energy. What’s remarkable is how a parade of prominent mid-century cultural figures became orgone enthusiasts, at least for a time: J.D. Salinger, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer. As late as 1993, Kurt Cobain was photographed sitting in William Burrough’s personal orgone accumulator.

Reich became a kind of cult leader, albeit not one bent on amassing personal power. He also became increasingly detached from reality, doing nighttime battles with flying saucers in the New Mexico desert and inventing a cloudbuster, a machine that purportedly shot some sort of energy into the sky to produce rain. He died in prison in 1957 after the Food and Drug Administration decided he was peddling quack cures. They rounded up every available copy of his many books and burned them: “the only nationally-sanctioned book burning in American history.”

Laing’s book is not a biography of Reich, though he is the most prominent of a collection of writers and artists that she uses to make her argument, which is that the human body, as it experiences sex, illness, or imprisonment, can be used to trace the histories of various liberation movements in the 20th century. She notes that the specific characteristics of the body you’re born with, such as its sex organs and the color of its skin, go a long way toward defining the parameters of the life you will lead:

To be born at all is to be situated in a network of relations with other people, and furthermore to find oneself forcibly inserted into linguistic categories that might seem natural and inevitable but are socially constructed and rigorously policed. We’re all stuck in our bodies, meaning stuck inside a grid of conflicting ideas about what those bodies mean, what they’re capable of and what they’re allowed or forbidden to do. We’re not just individuals, hungry and mortal, but also representative types, subject to expectations, demands, prohibitions and punishments that vary enormously according to the kind of body we find ourselves inhabiting.

Laing describes herself as “nonbinary” (though she is married to a man and uses she/her pronouns), and she seems exceptionally receptive to artists and writers who share her sense of the body as a decisive factor in either their imprisonment, be it literal or psychic, or their liberation. In Reich’s case, it was both. Laing looks for a way to integrate the insightful thinker and reformer of Reich’s European years with the unbalanced visionary of his final decades in America. It’s an Icarus-like story—someone who dared so much, ventured so far beyond the safe limits of an established school or discipline then being broken on the limits of his own psychic endurance and on the forces of cultural repression, which were considerably more potent in 1950s America than they were in 1920s Berlin. The US Government prosecuted Reich for making claims about the therapeutic value of orgone therapy—that it could cure everything from cancer to the common cold, as one magazine article claimed—but Reich’s undisguised belief that orgone energy was also sexual energy undoubtedly contributed to the ferocity of the government’s campaign.

The ideas in Everybody are Laing’s own, yet she ingeniously develops them out of biographical snapshots of various writers and artists that have influenced her. She introduces them one by one, and then continues to call on them throughout the book. The ability to orchestrate so many voices so artfully is worthy of a skilled dramatist. The list includes Susan Sontag, Malcolm X, Christopher Isherwood, Angela Carter, Andrea Dworkin, and the Marquis de Sade. What’s remarkable about the book is not so much what she has to say about any one of these figures, so much as the way she blends and recombines her ideas about them to make her points. Particularly interesting is the way she includes visual artists—Ana Mendieta, Philip Guston, and Agnes Martin—in her exposition. What is often challenging about visual art is grasping the ideas and emotions that propel it, but Laing is utterly convincing as she integrates her understanding of the work with what she has learned about the artists’ lives and struggles and with the times and places where the work was created.

Everybody is a difficult book to describe or summarize, maybe because it looks at relatively familiar people from a completely unique angle, always brimming with insight and empathy.

One final curious fact about Wilhelm Reich: British pop star Kate Bush found a copy of the book that Reich’s son Peter had written about his father in a bookstore and was so taken with the story that she wrote a song about Reich, called Cloudbusting. She even made a video of the song, with Donald Sutherland as Reich and herself (in short hair and overalls) as Peter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllRW9wETzw

It’s strange and lovely, just like Olivia Laing’s book.

#88: Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk

Flights is an enigmatic book. It’s quite readable and even rather charming, and yet when you finish it you’re not quite sure what you just read. If you turned it upside and shook out its contents, you’d find about 10 longer stories, embedded within a substrate of shorter meditations, anecdotes, and philosophical reflections. What you would not find is a plot.

What holds the book together in lieu of a plot is a set of themes, subjects, and preoccupations, as well as a distinct personality, a hyperaware, mildly ironic, playful tone. Some of the shorter sections are in the first person, and so it’s easy to think you’re getting to know Olga Tokarczuk as you read the various meditations and anecdotes. I think it might be unwise to make such an assumption. What I know about Tokarczuk is that she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2018, also that Flights won the International Booker Prize. Her latest novel, just published in English this year (2022) is titled The Books of Jacob—it’s a 900-page affair depicting the life of an 18th century Polish Jew who claimed to be the messiah.

One of the longer stories in Flights is about a man who loses his wife and child while vacationing on a Croatian island. The two get out of the car for a bathroom break in the middle of nowhere and just disappear. He looks near and then far, eventually calls the authorities who comb every inch of the island, but they find nothing. Days pass. There is no logical explanation. Either they fell into a hole somewhere or managed to cross the island on foot and escape on the ferry. Or maybe they were abducted, or swam away and drowned. The man’s experience is akin to what it feels like to lose your keys and then search you house, checking the likely places multiple times and the unlikely places at least once. Your logical mind tells you they must be in one of these places, but nevertheless they are not.

Much further on in the book we find the sequel to this story: the man is now back home in Poland, and his wife and child are with him. We don’t learn exactly how or where they eventually showed up, but we understand that the wife has offered no explanation for their absence, refusing even to acknowledge that something extraordinary has happened. This proceeds to drive the man mad; he believes she knows exactly what happened to her and is just concealing this information from him. He tries haplessly to discover the truth—asking a child psychologist to hypnotize his three-year-old son, for example, or following his wife while wearing a disguise. This ends badly when she recognizes him as she turns an aisle in a clothing store. He has a hoodie pulled up over his head:

“What are you doing here?” she says. “Do you have any idea what you look like?”

Then her eyes soften, a moment later a kind of haze comes over them, and she blinks. “Jesus,” she says, “what is going on with you? What is wrong?”

Eventually the wife and child leave (this time in a more conventional way) and the man sets out to return to the island, his only clue the Greek word Kyrios (κύριος), which he had found scribbled in his wife’s notebook.

He looks the word up in a Greek-Polish dictionary. He believes it must hold a key to the mystery because what has happened must have a meaning, and it must be possible for him to discover that meaning by sifting through the available evidence.

The various definitions of Kyrios that he finds are vague and non-overlapping. For example: “in good measure, moderation, correct relations, attain an aim, overmuch, the appropriate moment, a suitable time, a nice moment, a convenient occasion, …” The list goes on and on; we read over the man’s shoulder, trying like him to find relevance.

The English-language Wikipedia entry for Kyrios is similarly long, complex, and multifarious. At one point is says that “Kyrios defined the relationship between Jesus and those who believed in him as Christ.” Does that help? No.

The word appears in another of the stories, in this case the final one, about an elderly scholar of Ancient Greek history and literature and his younger wife. They are touring the Greek Isles by ship. They have gone on this tour for five years running; the man is paid to deliver daily lectures on the places they visit. He is becoming senile but can still pull himself together to deliver rousing lectures. It’s a poignant and rather tender story. The wife is a scholar as well, and muses that she might take over the lecture gig after her husband passes:

Karen had come up with the idea, to talk about those gods who didn’t make it into the pages of the famous, popular books, those not mentioned by Homer, then ignored by Ovid; those who didn’t make names for themselves with drama or romance; who weren’t terrifying enough, cunning enough elusive enough, who are known only from fragments of rock, from mentions, from the little extant from burned-down libraries. But thanks to that they’ve preserved something the well-known gods have lost forever—a divine volatility and ungraspability, a fluidity of form, an uncertainty of genealogy. They emerge from the shadows, from formlessness, then succumb once more to looming darkness. Just take Kairos [i.e., κύριος], who always operates at the intersection of linear, human time and divine time—circular time.

This is all very provocative, and as we read it we think back to the poor husband riffling his wife’s purse and finding this word scribbled in her notebook. But is there a deeper mystery to uncover here? I don’t know, but the implication is that to work too hard to solve the mystery is a fool’s errand.

Several of the stories deal with scientists who specialize the preservation of human tissues, in recent centuries through plastination, which is “a technique for the preservation of biological tissue that involves replacing water and fat in tissue with a polymer (such as silicone or polyester) to produce a dry durable specimen for anatomical study.” (Stay with me here.) Tokarczuk does make the interesting point that the exploration of inner space, the identification of the various organs and the ways they work together, has been as important as the exploration of our planet’s nether regions, or of the stars and galaxies. It obviously has less appeal for most people because it involves the dissection of corpses. In Flights, this is not a problem.

One of the tissue preservation stories is told from the perspective of Philip Verheyen, who was an actual 17th century Flemish surgeon, anatomist and author. Tokarczuk highlights one of Verheyen’s claims to fame, which was the discovery and naming of the Achilles tendon. She also makes much of the fact that he lost part of one leg in early adulthood, and experiences severe “phantom pain” in this missing extremity. His anguish is both physical and metaphysical; he has preserved the amputated limb and in his desperation takes it out of its liquid preservative, lays it below the remaining part of his leg, and sticks pins in it to see if there is any correspondence with the sensations he feels. There is not.

As in the story of the Polish tourist, there is something missing which must be accounted for, but which nevertheless cannot be accounted for. There is also Greece again, in the person of Achilles. Various such threads are woven throughout Flights. The ship that the Polish tourist and his family take to the Croatian island is named Poseidon; so is the tour boat that the elderly professor and his wife are on. The word panopticon appears multiple times in the book. This word can be defined either as “a circular prison with cells arranged around a central well, from which prisoners could at all times be observed” or as “an optical instrument combining the telescope and microscope.”

Flights is the opposite of an Agatha Christie mystery, where the details are marshalled toward a specific revelation. The details here are like ants in an ant colony, each seeming directionless but forming a definite pattern. If you enjoy the journey—the wit, the erudition, the excursions into odd moments in scientific history, the weaving together of coincidence and paradox—then you will enjoy Flights, though there is, for me at least, a faint aftertaste of exasperation. Tokarczuk has a way of approximately juxtaposing details, characters, or events in such a way that the reader's mind tries to bridge the gap, the way an electrical pulse jumps from one neuron to another. Tokarczuk is interested in what meaning feels like, not in a particular meaning.

In closing, I would like to mention that one of the stories is about a ferryboat captain named Eryk who seems to speak entirely in quotations from Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab; the one that tipped me off was “Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.” One morning Eryk veers from the monotony of his twice-daily crossing route and points his boat toward the open sea. The passengers are irritated at first, but then bemused. As the story ends, the narrator informs us that she herself was “on the deck of that ferry.” Call her Ishmael.

#87: Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell

I might never have picked this book up if it hadn’t been for the title. Hamnet was the name of William Shakespeare’s only son, who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1585 and died there eleven years later. Nothing is known of Hamnet Shakespeare beyond these dates; indeed, little is known about the life of his father, either, beyond such administrivia as deeds, real estate purchases, and a lawsuit or two. We know that in his will he left his “second-best bed” to his wife, Anne Hathaway. We pick over these scant details because of the extraordinary impact of his writings—we speculate and extrapolate compulsively, and have been doing so for centuries. But the man himself is completely absent from his work. He creates people, inhabits them, but they are not him. This drives us a bit mad because we’re not comfortable with writers unless we can see the life and the work as two halves of a whole.

Maggie O’Farrell has written a book that plays off this unsatisfiable curiosity in a striking way. It fills the void, creating a story for the Shakespeare family in Stratford, but for the most part avoids the trap of trying to bridge the gap between Shakespeare’s works and his life.

The playwright is a secondary character in O’Farrell’s book, and neither his first nor his last name is ever mentioned. She designates him at various points according to his function in her story: first he is “the Latin tutor,” later he is “Agnes’s husband.” Shakespeare’s wife is in fact identified as Agnes in her father’s will, and O’Farrell might prefer this name because it disconnects her in the reader’s mind from the (presumably) older wife of the standard narrative.

Agnes is, in fact, the central character in the story. She comes from a prosperous family that owns a large farm just outside of town. The Shakespeares, by contrast, are a family in decline, owing to the disagreeable temper and unscrupulous dealings of the family patriarch, one John Shakespeare, a glovemaker. Agnes, with her “sizeable dowry,” might otherwise be beyond the reach of John Shakespeare’s son, except that she has a kind of taint, inherited from her deceased mother:

She has a certain notoriety in these parts. It is said that she is strange, touched, peculiar, perhaps mad. He has heard that she wanders the back roads and forests at will, unaccompanied, collecting plants to make dubious potions. It is wise not to cross her for people say she learnt her crafts from an old crone who used to make medicines and spin, and could kill a baby with a simple glance. It is said that the stepmother lives in terror of the girl putting hexes on her, especially now the yeoman is dead. … She is said to be too wild for any man. Her mother, God rest her soul, had been a gypsy or a sorceress or a forest sprite.

Agnes does, indeed, possess special gifts. She is able to look into the soul of a person by taking their hand and pressing her fingers into the muscle between the thumb and the forefinger. She can also see into the future, both her own and others’, though not flawlessly or in detail. She might know how a person’s story, or her story, will end, without know how the end will come about. These gifts do not make her fantastic or all-powerful, they just make her a bit different, a bit dangerous. She also has medical talents of a more conventional nature, being proficient in the use of herbs and plants.

In a way, we share Agnes’ gift of foresight, because we, too, know how the story will end, but not how this end will come about.

When Agnes first takes her future husband’s hand, she sees

…something of which she had never known the like. Something she would never have expected to find in the hand of a clean-booted grammar-school boy from town. It was far-reaching: this much she knew. It had layers and strata, like a landscape. There were spaces and vacancies, dense patches, underground caves, rises and descents. There wasn’t enough time for her to get a sense of it all—it was too big, too complex. It eluded her, mostly. She knew there was more of it than she could grasp, that it was bigger than both of them.

So there they are, the collected works, seen through a glass, darkly. By endowing Agnes with certain gifts, and by allowing this vague glimpse into the destiny of her future husband, O’Farrell has levelled Agnes up, made her as interesting and as powerful a character as the glover’s son. She is at the center of Hamnet, and holds the reins of the narrative. Her husband, of course, has an equal importance, an equal gravity, but it is occluded, present in the narrative largely by implication.

The fame and mystery of Shakespeare has allowed Maggie O’Farrell to write a book about an otherwise unremarkable family in small-town England in the latter part of the 1500s. She could have written about such a family without invoking Shakespeare, but it is unlikely that as many readers would have been drawn to it. And though O’Farrell doesn’t try to bring Shakespearean language into her story, or to draw parallels between events or themes in the plays and events and themes in her story, we are inevitably more curious about Agnes and her family than we would be if we didn’t know she was Shakespeare’s wife. It makes me think of certain Bible “epic” movies from the 1950s, like 'The Robe,' where Jesus is implied but never brought into view. I remember a scene where the main character, maybe Victor Mature or Charlton Heston, finds himself in a crowded street scene where we see the sandals of a man passing by, dragging a cross.

But while we at least we know some details of Jesus’ life and of what you might call his frame of mind, Shakespeare could have been any kind of person. O’Farrell’s Shakespeare is a decent, rather ordinary husband and father. The central event of the book is the death, from plague, of his son Hamnet. By this point, about two-thirds of the way through the book, we have come to know Hamnet as a lively, curious, but unremarkable 11-year-old. We have also come to know his twin sister Judith, his older sister Susanna, his grandparents, and his uncles and niece. These people are all in the historical record, but O’Farrell fills in their outlines, making them all unique and interesting.

Hamnet’s death is doubly a shock, both because it happens so suddenly and because it had been Judith who had first been stricken by plague, and thus had been the focus of everyone’s concern. For Agnes there is the further shock that she had not had any premonition of the event.

O’Farrell renders all the characters and events in Hamnet in simple, elegant language that evokes the everyday world of 16th century town life in England. She is particularly effective in rendering the effect of Hamnet’s death on the various family members:

The younger uncle, Edmond, had wept, tears blurring his sight, which was, for him, a relief because he found it too painful to look into the still features of his brother’s dead son. This is a child whom he has known and seen every day of his short life, a child whom he taught to catch a wooden ball, to pick fleas from a dog, to whittle a pipe from a reed. The older uncle, Richard, did not cry: instead his sadness passed over into anger – at the grim task they had been bidden to do, at the world, at Fate, at the fact that a child could fall ill and then be lying there dead. The anger made him snap at Edmond whom he thought wasn’t taking enough of the boy’s weight, not holding the legs as firmly as he should have done, by the knees and not the ankles, fumbling the job, messing it up.

I don’t consider myself a soft touch, but I felt a strong emotion as I read about how Agnes washed her son’s body and sewed him in a shroud (that is, bedsheet).

Inside Agnes’s head, her thoughts are widening out, then narrowing down, widening, narrowing, over and over again. She thinks, This cannot happen, it cannot, how will we live, what will we do, how can Judith bear it, what will I tell people, how can we continue, what should I have done, where is my husband, what will he say, how could I have saved him, why didn’t I save him, why didn’t I realise it was he who was in danger? And then, the focus narrows, and she thinks: He is dead, he is dead, he is dead.

I don’t know if O’Farrell was thinking of King Lear when she wrote this—I’ve been claiming that she doesn’t draw parallels between events or themes in the plays and events and themes in her story—but it’s hard not to think of Lear’s last speech, where he is trying to comprehend the death of his beloved daughter Cordelia:

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life
And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never.

Agnes’s husband is away with his acting company when Hamnet dies, and his return, early one morning as the family is preparing the body for burial, is another affecting scene. Because O’Farrell has presented the author’s marriage as a happy one (contradicting the conventional wisdom suggested by the “second-best bed”), she must give us a reason why the husband and wife have lived apart for so many years. For this, she invests her Shakespeare with a kind of claustrophobia of small-town life and family matters:

And the smell of leather, of whittawing, of hides, of singed fur: he cannot get away from it. How did he spend all those years in this house? He finds he cannot breathe the sour air here, now. The knock at the window, the demands of people wanting to buy gloves, to look at them, to try them on their hands, to endlessly discuss beading and buttons and lace. The ceaseless conversation, back and forth, over this merchant and that, this whittawer, that farmer, that nobleman, the price of silk, the cost of wool, who is at the guild meetings and who isn’t, who will be alderman next year.

It is intolerable. All of it. He feels as though he is caught in a web of absence, its strings and tendrils ready to stick and cling to him, whichever way he turns. Here he is, back in this town, in this house, and all of it makes him fearful that he might never get away; this grief, this loss, might keep him here, might destroy all he has made for himself in London.

And so, a few days after his son’s funeral, he returns to London. Agnes stays in Stratford. But this is hardly a satisfying way to end a novel, and so O’Farrell invents a final episode, which finds Agnes traveling to London for the first time in her life after she hears that her husband has had the temerity to write a play whose title is nearly the same as her deceased son’s name. She arrives at her husband’s lodging, but is told to look for him at the theater. There she joins the crowd entering the theater. The performance begins. She recognizes her husband through his disguise as the ghost of Hamlet’s father:

She thinks: Well now, there you are. What are you up to?

As if her thoughts have been beamed to him, from her mind to his, through the crowds – calling out now, shouting warnings to the men on the battlements – the ghost’s head snaps around. The helmet is open and the eyes peer out over the heads of the audience.

Yes, Agnes tells him, here I am. Now what?

Because of the circumstances of her arrival, she had not even known up until this point that the play she was watching was, in fact, Hamlet. Then the title character appears:

It is him. It is not him. It is him. It is not him. The thought swings like a hammer through her. Her son, her Hamnet or Hamlet, is dead, buried in the churchyard. He died while he was still a child. He is now only white, stripped bones in a grave. Yet this is him, grown into a near-man, as he would be now, had he lived, on the stage, walking with her son’s gait, talking in her son’s voice, speaking words written for him by her son’s father.

…

He has found this boy, instructed him, shown him, how to speak, how to stand, how to lift his chin, like this, like that. He has rehearsed and primed and prepared him. He has written words for him to speak and to hear. She tries to imagine these rehearsals, how her husband could have schooled him so exactly, so precisely, and how it might have felt when the boy got it right, when he first got the walk, that heartbreaking turn of the head. Did her husband have to say, Make sure your doublet is undone, with the ties hanging down, and your boots should be scuffed, and now wet your hair so it stands up, just so?

It's a brilliant and affecting scene, like so many in Hamnet. While still under its spell, I went and found my old Riverside Shakespeare and sat down with the text of the play, and was almost surprised to discover that Hamlet was about a million and one things, but that a father’s love for his dead child didn't seem to be one of them. It’s not that O’Farrell has given us a faulty interpretation of the play; rather, it’s that she’s given us an alternate universe where her interpretation is the only one that matters.

#86: The Master, by Colm Tóibín

The Master, by Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, dramatizes various events from the life of author Henry James (1843 – 1916). The first chapter is titled “January 1895” and the last is “October 1899,” so Tóibín mostly shows us James as a man in his 50s, though in many chapters we find James thinking back on episodes from earlier in his life. The chapters could as easily have been titled according to the persons they concerned themselves with, from the author’s parents, to his siblings, to friends and relatives who played important roles in his life. So the chapter titled “March 1899” could as easily have been titled “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” as it mostly concerns the woman novelist who played an important but enigmatic role in James’s life just before the period of time covered in The Master.

As I started reading The Master, I’d half forgotten that I already knew quite a bit about the life of Henry James. In my graduate school days I’d taken a course focusing on his work, and in the years following, I’d tackled many of his novels and stories. My momentum was arrested as I began to realize just how much James had written—22 novels and over 100 stories, along with plays, autobiographies, and travel writings. I was never going to be able to swallow James whole. I had also started on Leon Edel’s five-volume biography of James, and had gotten through the first three volumes when I had a conversation with a friend and fellow student and informed her of this undertaking. Just then another student walked up and my friend said something like “He’s reading the five-volume biography of Henry James!” This was no doubt meant at least somewhat admiringly, but to my ears at that moment it was as though she’d said “He’s counting all the squirrels in Central Park!” I still haven’t tackled volumes four and five.

You might think that the life of a sedentary author who never married would not make for a good story, and certainly many people would agree with that assumption. Many of the same people would find James’s novels similarly lacking in dramatic content. Cormac McCarthy (who I have previously cited as disparaging “magical realism” in my post about Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666) has no use for writers who don’t "deal with issues of life and death," among whom he specifically mentions James and Proust (see Cormac McCarthy's Venmous Fiction. (Cranky guy, that Cormac.) Conversely, someone who does find James’ novels interesting might also find his life to be so as well. It has its mysteries, triumphs, and tragedies, like most lives; indeed, the scale of his triumphs and tragedies is more in line with the experience of the average reader. I think we want to read about both exceptional lives and ordinary lives; I do, at least. Maybe the ultimate accomplishment is making an ordinary life seem exceptional. In any case, many of the episodes that Tóibín depicts were as familiar to me as events from the news of bygone years. Here was the peculiar spiritual crisis of James’s father, Henry James, Senior: his so-called “vastation.” And there the tragedy of his brilliant and fearless cousin Minny Temple who died of tuberculosis at 24. Minny inhabits many of James’ heroines, most prominently Milly Theale from Wings of the Dove, with whom she shares her initials and her tragic early death.

One of my favorite chapters from The Master is the last one, in which James copes with an extended visit from his brother William (who was the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience and quite famous in his own right) and his wife and daughter. The brothers have never gotten along quite so well: William, the older, is judgmental and high strung, while Henry avoids confrontation but smolders with resentment at the “advice” his older brother frequently offers. It’s a very believable dynamic and quite relatable to those of us who grew up with siblings. William’s wife Alice helps to soothe relations between the brothers, and William’s daughter Peggy, age perhaps 11 or 12 at this time, delights her uncle as she discovers—and devours—the novels of Dickens during her stay, as well as her uncle’s best known novel:

…his niece suddenly asked him if he intended to write a second volume, a sequel, to The Portrait of a Lady. She told him that she had, less than one hour before, finished the book. Henry told her that he had written the book twenty years earlier and had long forgotten it: he did not think he would write a sequel to it.

“Why did she go back?” Peggy asked [referring to the book’s heroine, Isabel Archer, and her decision, at the end of the book, to return to her duplicitous husband].

…

“It is very difficult for anyone in their lives,” Henry began, “to make leaps into the dark. Isabel’s going to Europe from Albany, leaving all her family behind, and then against everyone’s advice and her own better judgement marrying Osmond, were leaps into the dark. Making such leaps requires us to be brave and determined, but doing so may also freeze any other possibilities. It is easier to renounce bravery rather than to be brave over and over. It could not, in her case, be done again. The will and the nerve needed for such actions do not come to us often, any of us, least of all Isabel Archer from Albany.

Apparently he had not completely forgotten the book. I doubt if any such conversation ever actually happened, but I certainly wish it could have. The internet doesn’t have much to say about Margaret (Peggy) James, except that she was born in 1887 and died in 1950.

Tóibín also does an excellent job of suggesting how James’s experiences in the world might have gotten his imagination started on various writing projects. Thoughts and ideas contributing to the composition of The Turn of the Screw, a ghost story and one of James’s best known and most frequently anthologized tales, originate in “a story he had heard (from the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less) about young children, left to the care of servants in an old country house, through the death, presumably, of parents. The servants, wicked and depraved, corrupt and deprave the children: the children are bad, full of evil to a sinister degree. The servants die (the story vague about the way of it) and their apparitions return to haunt the house and children.”

That’s actually a sketchy summary of the tale James eventually wrote. Crucially, it is missing the main character—the governess who is hired to take care of the children, and who can never quite be sure if the supernatural presences she witnesses are real or not. The reader shares the governess’s uncertainty and adds to it an additional uncertainty about the emotional and mental stability of the governess herself. She is a young woman all alone in a difficult and ominous situation. She is under strict orders never to contact the children’s father, under any circumstances. What a strange injunction—it’s like something you’d find in a Kafka novel. How could she not be under a tremendous strain?

The rest of the chapter where James hears the Archbishop’s story, titled “March 1895,” could have been titled “Alice James,” because it mostly has to do with Henry’s sister, who is also named Alice. The subject of much scholarly interest and of an acclaimed biography, Alice James was an invalid who died in her early 40s. Tóibín suggests that her malady was actually a kind of extended existential crisis, the result of being unable to engage her intelligence and force to the life choices available to a woman in the 1880s. It’s not that it couldn’t be done—witness George Eliot—it’s that it could only be done a very emotionally secure woman with the necessary support. Alice’s nervous susceptibility, her obligations to family, and other factors doomed her.

As James is developing his idea for a ghost story about orphan children, Alice has just died. Tóibín suggests that James has infused her spirit into the character of his governess, her sense of being alone against the world. The ghost story is a good one, but as originally conceived, the people in it are ciphers. Alice was a real person with a complex and tragic combination of traits. The skill of a novelist like James was to blend an interesting story with the essence of a real person.

Tóibín clearly admires James in many ways, but he sees one major flaw in his hero and illustrates it in multiple instances: it is James’ cowardice; specifically, his unwillingness or inability to come to the aid of people close to him in their hour of need. He does not answer the summons when his cousin Milly is ill with tuberculosis and expresses her wish that Henry could show her Rome. She had written him: “Think, my dear, of the pleasure we would have together in Rome. I am crazy at the mere thought. I would give anything to have a winter in Italy.” Henry chooses not to take the hint. Years later, he is visited by his old friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, who also knew Milly when they were young. Holmes probes James on the matter:

“Do you ever regret not taking her to Italy when she was ill? he asked. “Gray says she asked you several times.”

“I don’t think ask is the word,” Henry said. “She was very ill then. Gray is misinformed.”

“Gray says that she asked you and you did not offer to help her and that a winter in Rome might have saved her.”

“Nothing could have saved her,” Henry said.

Henry felt the sharp deliberation of Holmes’ tone, the slow cruelty of it; he was, he thought, being questioned and judged by his old friend without any sympathy or affection.

If only in his writing, James does take Isabel Archer, one of Milly’s avatars, to Rome, with dubious consequences. Whether that is by way of making amends there is no way of knowing.

He does not answer the summons on another occasion when his novelist friend Constance Fenimore Woolson is depending on him to visit her in Venice during the winter of 1894. Henry and Constance have shared a strange kind of intimacy, meeting in various countries and taking accommodations near each other from time to time. Their intimacy is characterized at least as much by what they don’t say as by what they do. They are both guarded to an extraordinary degree: she, Tóibín suggests, by an exquisite vulnerability, he by an almost instinctive shudder of horror at the notion of a romantic alliance, particularly with a woman. Henry agrees to meet her in Venice, but then is put off when letters from a mutual acquaintance in Venice suggest that Woolson has been alluding to some sort of alliance with James. He does not come, and Woolson, confronted by this desertion (among other factors) commits suicide by throwing herself from the balcony of her hotel. Henry receives word of her death in a telegram:

One afternoon in January he was working quietly when Smith put a telegram on the mantelpiece. Henry must, he later thought, have left it there without looking at it for an hour or more, being engrossed in his writing. It was only when he broke for tea that he moved absent-mindedly to the fireplace and opened the envelope. The telegram informed him that Constance was dead. His first response was to go to Smith and ask him calmly for tea; he then returned to his study and, closing the door and sitting at his desk, he studied the telegram which had come from Constance’s sister, Clara Benedict, in the United States. He knew that he would have to go to Venice and wondered now from whom he should enquire about the details of her death. He drank the tea when it was brought, and then he went to the window and frantically studied the street outside as though some distant detail there, some movement, a sound even, might help him to a full realization of what had happened or might erase such a realization as it slowly dawned.

Henry is as composed as ever during this episode, except for that single word, frantically, that somehow forces its way into the paragraph and serves to indicate the emotion he is trying to master. He knows that his decision not to go to Venice was at least in part intended to punish her for suggesting that an alliance between them has existed; he also knows that she understood this intent, and that she has found a way to punish him in turn.

These are not the only episodes in which Tóibín shows James dealing with a difficult situation by just not showing up. But they are the most prominent such episodes, and they also serve to demonstrate James’s aversion to even the idea of a heterosexual relationship, or any open display of emotion. The difficulty is that he does love both Milly and Constance. He just cannot show his love. Nor can he explain himself. So he writes their lives into his books instead, summoning the passion that is not available to him in real life.