#24: The Corn King and the Spring Queen, by Naomi Mitchison

The time: 200 B.C. The settings: The Scythian town of Marob on the west shores of the Black Sea; Sparta, Greece; and Alexandria, Egypt. We begin with Erif Der, the Spring Queen of the title. She is a witch. She marries Tarrik, who is the Corn King, and together they manage the seasons in Marob, from Plowing Eve in the spring to Midsummer Eve to the Harvest Play. Erif and Tarrik are presented as real people, with hopes, worries, and conflicts, but they are also gods who perform the rituals that assure the harvests and continued prosperity. Naomi Mitchison does her best to give us their world in their terms. So Erif’s magic is not presented as sleight-of-hand or hypnotic suggestion but as a real power, because this is how Erif and her tribe would have understood it.

But Erif’s witchcraft is neutralized when she travels by ship, down the coast of the Black Sea, through the Bosporus, to Greece. A stoic philosopher, Sphaeros, has shipwrecked in Marob and become friends with Erif and Tarrik. When Sphaeros departs for Sparta to answer the summons of his former pupil, King Kleomenes of Sparta, Erif and Tarrik go with him. The Scythians know that Greece is the center of the world—Tarrik even has an alternate Greek name, Charmantides, which he assumes like a formal suit of clothing when he must interact with sophisticated Hellenes.

Neither Erif nor Tarrik is completely at ease in their dual roles as leading citizens and gods. They have become a little bit self-conscious and can no longer completely turn off their Greek-ified rational minds when they assume their mythic identities.

I learned about The Corn King and the Spring Queen when I was reading Black Sea by Neal Ascherson. Here is how Ascherson described Mitchison’s book:

Naomi Michison’s astonishing historical novel The Corn King and the Spring Queen is concerned not with ‘otherness’ but with multiple identity—with culture switching. She introduces an elite of semi-Grecianised Scythians, living in the third century BC in a Black Sea village…. They still take the lead in the fertility rites which their tribe requires (the ritual death of the king, mass copulation the fresh-sown furrows )… but they also venture confidently into the Greek world.

I was impressed enough with Ascherson’s book that I tracked down a copy of Mitchison’s book online. Mitchison wrote The Corn King and the Spring Queen in 1931. A fascinating figure in her own right, Mitchison wrote historical novels in the 20s and 30s, science fiction in the 50s and 60s, and memoirs in the 70s and 80s. She died in 1999 at the age of 101. She was also a prominent social activist in Scotland as well as a good friend of J.R.R. Tolkien, for whom she proofread The Lord of the Rings.

Pushing further into The Corn King and the Spring Queen, we spend less and less time with the Scythians and more and more time with the Spartan king Kleomenes and his circle. Kleomenes seeks to restore the purity of Spartan society, and he pursues this goal by slaughtering the bureaucrats, elevating former slaves to full citizenship, and redistributing wealth evenly among all citizens. But just as Mitchison presents Erif and Tarrik on their own terms, she presents Kleomenes and his advisors without any apparent misgivings about his rather extreme methods. If 200 B.C. is a long time ago, so is 1931 A.D., when the idea of radical economic reforms and redistributions of wealth were not yet a red flag, so to speak.

Another remarkable thing about The Corn King and the Spring Queen is its depiction of sexual love between men as a natural and wholesome aspect of life. In Mitchison’s Sparta (as perhaps in the historical Sparta), older men took older adolescent boys as protegés—and lovers. As these protegés matured and came into full adulthood they typically transitioned into heterosexual relationships, though some seem to have transitioned more completely than others. Mitchison gives us no graphic descriptions of sex, heterosexual or homosexual, but she does give us a very frank and convincing sense of a different and less constraining sexual morality.

In The Corn King and the Spring Queen, Mitchison gives us a Tolstoyan canvas of wars and empires, friendships, romances, and adventures. Cecil B. DeMille could have made a great five-hour technicolor extravaganza out of The Corn King and the Spring Queen, only with a few rewrites to avoid any offense to the moral sensibilities of the moviegoing public.

#23: Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell

The gamble with a book like this is that it will be as weird, sinister, and original as the blurbs on the back cover promise. The cover art reminded me of exotic illustrations from early 20th century children’s literature—for example, the original illustrations for L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. I was hoping for something eerie and peculiar. Swamps, alligators, amusement parks—the setup was promising.

But the weirdness in Swamplandia! loses out to a more latter-day template for Young Adult fiction—the wounded family. The mother of the alligator-wrestling Bigtree clan dies of cancer, and the father and three children must each depart their watery Eden to find a lesser but more viable reality. It’s a fine book with some interesting parts, but it didn’t convince me. It tends to hug the shore instead of sailing off into the unfathomable.

#22: Black Sea, by Neal Ascherson

I could be entertained by a book that was about the Black Sea in the literal nautical sense, but I was glad to discover that Neal Ascherson’s subject was the Black Sea in the largest possible sense—this isn’t a book about a body of water so much as it is a history of the surrounding lands and people over the past three millenia. Ascherson is Scottish, and I have no idea how or why he came to be so passionate about the Black Sea region. But he combines a love for the region with deep and wide learning, and the result is this marvelous book.

In recent history, the Black Sea region is where Russians and Turks have clashed. But two thousand years ago there were no Russians, and what Turks there were were way off to the east grazing their ponies on the steppes of central Asia. The lands around the Black Sea were home to strange peoples and tribes such as the Scythians and the Sarmatians, known today only from footnotes in weighty history books.

And also the Greeks. During the Golden Age, Greek merchants established a string of outposts along the shores of the Black Sea. As much trading posts as colonies, these were places where the Greeks exchanged natural resources (grain, fish) for finished goods (jewelry). As such the Black Sea was the birthplace of imperialism, where the difference between “civilization” vs. “barbarism” first seemed to make sense.

Known as “Pontic Greeks,” the descendants of these settlers exist in small pockets to this day:

Apart from the cities, this rural Pontic society amounted to far the greatest concentration of Greek-speaking population in the Hellenic or Byzantine worlds--much more numerous than that of the Peloponnese. Constantinople finally fell to Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453, and Trebizond was captured by the Turks in 1461 after a siege of forty-two days. But the Pontic Greeks remained in their valleys and villages, and the monasteries clung to their wealth and most of their estates for many more centuries. Many people, including some of the great families of Trebizond, converted in a superficial way to Islam, but continued to speak Pontic Greek--a language which over the millennia had steadily diverged from the tongue spoken in the Aegean or in the capital of the Byzantine Empire.

Who did they think they were, in this pre-nationalist age? In the first place, they did not think of themselves as "Greek" or as a people in some way rooted in the peninsula and islands we now call "Greece." Sophisticates in Trebizond might address one another in the fifteenth century as "Hellenes," but this was a cultural fancy rather than an ethnic description. Outsiders, whether Turks or northern Europeans, referred to them and to all the inhabitants of the Byzantine Empire as "Rom" or "Rum" people, or as "Romanians"-citizens of the Roman Empire, in other words, who were also distinguished by their Orthodox Christian faith. Struggling with these categories, a Pontic Turk whose village had once been Greek told Anthony Bryer: "This is Roman (Rum) country; they spoke Christian here..."

The people of the Pontic valleys and cities themselves seemed to find identity in three things: in belonging to a place or patris which could be as small as a village, in not being Western (Roman Catholic) Christians, and in feeling themselves to be members of a polity which was so ancient, so sacred and superior to all others that it scarcely required a name. We call this community, weakly enough, "the Eastern Empire," or "Byzantium." That cannot convey the almost Chinese degree of significance which the "Rom" people attached to the Empire even long after it had been overthrown, as if it were the eternal essence of all political community in comparison to which other states and realms were only transient realities.

Tragically, most Pontic Greeks were expelled from Turkey in 1923 during an event known to diplomats as “The Exchange.” The Pontic Greeks themselves have a different name for it: the Katastrofe. Finding themselves relocated to the modern state of Greece, the Pontics discovered that 2500 years out in the hinterlands had substantially differentiated them from their long lost cousins. Really they are a people without a land, weeping in their trailers as they remember their Zion. But they are perhaps luckier than the Pontic Greeks who lived on the northern and eastern sides of the Black Sea, who eventually had to contend with Joseph Stalin. Uncle Joe didn’t really like folks who thought of themselves as different. I won’t go into details.

Pontic Greeks are one chapter in Black Sea. There is also a wonderful episode about politics and intrigue in 19th century Odessa, featuring the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz and the mata hari with whom he had a passionate affair. And another about Cossacks—I’d always wondered exactly what a Cossack was. Now I know. In Putin’s Russia they are making a comeback, filling the niche that the Hell’s Angels occupy in our part of the world. Complete with motorcycles.

These various excursions are unified by certain clear themes. One is the inescapable fact that these lands cannot truly be possessed. They can only be conquered and held for a few brief centuries. Where a current map shows only nation states like Turkey and Russia and Georgia, small remote enclaves of ancient peoples linger in remote valleys, taking on the religions and some customs of their current landlords, but retaining crucial traditions and differences. I'm glad that this is so.

Another is the corrosive and destructive power of nationalism. In the beginning there was romantic nationalism—the revival of ancient customs and languages. Kilts and bagpipes and epic poetry. Nothing wrong with all of that. But then there was the phase of redrawing the map to align with the newly revived tribal identities. And finally there was the third stage—getting rid of the outsiders. All around the world we see populations being separated, Muslims, Christians and Jews getting away from each other. Lands that once supported peoples of multiple religions and ethnicities are becoming ever more homogenous. Just look at Egypt, or Palestine, or India, or the Balkans. As a result, the world becomes a duller and more dangerous place.

#21: As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner

Faulker was just 33 years old in 1930 when he wrote As I Lay Dying while working nights at the University of Mississippi power plant. The Sound and the Fury had attracted some attention from the critics, but Faulkner was still largely unknown. He wrote As I Lay Dying in about six weeks, between October 29 and December 11, 1929. He felt he was at the height of his powers: “I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fall if I never touch ink again.”

The book tells of a family—the Bundrens: mother Addie, father Anse, and five children ranging in age from about 28 to about 8. As the book opens, Addie Bundren is on her deathbed, and after she dies, about 40 pages in, the remainder of the story deals with the family’s attempt to transport her corpse and coffin to the town of Jefferson for burial. Anse has promised Addie he would bury her “with her people” in the Jefferson cemetary, but a series of obstacles, delays, and setbacks stand in the way, the greatest of which is that the countryside has been hit by torrential rains that have washed out all the bridges.

You think of Faulkner as a modernist and you think James Joyce, “stream of consciousness,” and all that. And while there is consciousness aplenty in As I Lay Dying, it is also a highly visual, immediate, and intense book, one that I imagine would be very tempting to filmmakers—a quick check of imdb.com reveals that actor James Franco is currently working on an adaption.

Different characters take turns narrating the book in short chapters. We hear their thoughts but we also see what they see—Faulkner deploys his narrators almost as a director might deploy his cameras. Sometimes as one narrator leaves off another takes up the action, possibly even recapitulating the last line of dialog. It’s all rather splicey. Perhaps Faulkner was deliberately mimicking the stylized visual transitions of the movies.

It would be interesting to know how Hollywood would sell this story. There’s the heroic angle: “He made a promise, and now he will move heaven and earth to fulfill it.” But there are other angles. Anse Burden is a craven, self-pitying and stubborn character who is idle and incompetent on the one hand and too proud on the other to spare his children all kinds of pain and humiliation by just burying the old lady at the local churchyard. So maybe the tag line could be “His wife was already dead. Who else would he kill to get his way?” It all gets quite lurid and fantastical in places. The youngest child drills holes in the top of his mother’s coffin because he is not quite sure she is really dead and accidentially drills down a little too far. An ever-growing flock of vultures follows the Bundren procession as it struggles along, lured by the aroma. You could pitch it as a midnight movie and maybe ask Quentin Tarantino to direct: “Grotesque horror, outlandish humor, riveting action.”

As I Lay Dying is all these things and many more—each character has a secret, a mission, or an obsession. I had to read the book twice to become completely familiar with all these crosscurrents. The first time through I often didn’t know what was going on. The reader is definitely expected to do some work. It mostly all comes into focus eventually, though I could read the following paragraph 100 times and never figure it out:

When I looked back at my mule it was like he was one of these here spy-glasses and I could look at him standing there and see all the broad land and my house sweated outen it like it was the more the sweat, the broader the land; the more the sweat, the tighter the house because it would take a tight house for Cora, to hold Cora like a jar of milk in the spring; you’ve got to have a tight jar or you’ll need a powerful spring, so if you have a big spring, why then you have the incentive to have tight, wellmade jars, because it is your milk, sour or not, because you would rather have milk that will sour than to have milk that won’t, because you are a man.

I don’t think Bill was drinking milk when he wrote that.

The Library of America publishes Faulkners four to the volume, and I would gladly have plowed through Sanctuary, Light in August, and Pylon—except perhaps for the prospect of having to try to write something about them afterwards. I’ve noticed a spate of Faulker articles in recent weeks—John Jeremiah Sullivan (see the previous entry in this blog) wrote a piece about Absalom Absalom for the New York Times Magazine and the Daily Beast proclaimed Light in August “Faulkner’s Great American Novel”. There was an Oprah selection and there are rumors of an HBO miniseries. It’s reassuring that America has retained a taste for the ornery old cuss.

#20: Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan

This is a book of essays original published in various magazines. A few of the essays are purely personal—one is about the time his brother was electrocuted by a guitar amplifier and experienced a temporary personality change, another about how Sullivan allowed his house to be used as the setting for a TV show for a couple of years.

But the majority of the essays were likely the results of assignments, like: “Go see what this Christian rock festival is like,” or “Go talk to these guys who are exploring prehistoric Indian caves in Tennessee,” or “Go interview Bunny Wailer, the last surviving member of Bob Marley’s band.”

For either type of essay, Sullivan has wit, charm, and intelligence to spare. I cannot help but envy Sullivan’s writing. I want to analyze his sentences, the way a guitar player might want to play Jimi Hendrix’s solos over and over again at slow speeds. How does he do it? Here he is explaining why he felt the need to buy a house when his wife was eight months pregnant:

We lived in a one-bedroom apartment, the converted ground floor of an antebellum house, on a noisy street downtown, with an eccentric upstairs neighbor, Keef, from Leland, who told me that I was a rich man—that’s how he put it, “Y’er a rich man, ain’t ye?”—who told us that he was going to shoot his daughter’s boyfriend with an ultra-accurate sniper rifle he owned, for filling his daughter full of drugs, “shoot him below the knee,” he said,” that way they caint get ye with intent to kill.” Keef had been a low-level white supremacist and still bore a few unfortunate tatoos, but he told us he’d lost his racism when, on a cruise in the Bahamas, he’d saved a drowning black boy’s life, in the on-ship pool, and by this conversion experience, “came to love some blacks.” He later fell off a two-story painting ladder and broke all his bones.

Sometimes Sullivan writes in the pure third-person, as when he analyzes Michael Jackson’s life and times in a poignant and highly empathic essay:

Michael finds himself back in the old Motown building for a day, doing some video mixing, when Berry Gordy approaches and asks him to be in the twenty-fifth-anniversary special on NBC. Michael demurs. A claustrophobic moment for him. All that business, his brothers, Motown, the Jackson 5, the past: that’s all a cocoon he’s been writhing inside of, finally chewing through. He knows that “Billie Jean” has exploded; he’s becoming something else. But the animal inside him that is his ambition senses the opportunity. He strikes his legendary deal with Gordy, that he’ll perform with his brothers if he’s allowd to do one of his own solo, post-Motown hits as well. Gordy agrees.

More often Sullivan plays a role in these odd tales, either a supporting role or a starring one. In the first essay, the one about the Christian rock festival, he describes how he has had to rent a 29-foot motor home to attend the festival (“do you want to know what it’s like to drive a windmill with tires down the Pennsylvania Turnpike at rush hour by your lonesome, with darting bug-eyes and shaking hands?”). Once on site he bonds with a group of guys from West Virginia. Sullivan makes it clear that he is not now an evangelical Christian, but during the course of his story he reveals that he was one for a time in high school. His involvement with the West Virginians seems intended to prove, both to them and to us, that he is not some effete liberal snob come to rain contempt on the ignorant evangelicals. Almost instinctively, I was waiting for a bit of such disdain—maybe not in pure form, but perhaps admixed with bits of respect and bemusement. It isn’t that he isn’t able to admire bits of absurdity here and there, but overall the article is as much about Sullivan’s own quest for spiritual sustenance as it is about the seekers, hucksters, and crackpots he meets.

#19: Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

Genre fiction! But which genre, exactly?—that’s the tricky part. “Speculative fiction” is one term I’ve seen in a couple of places. But what exactly is speculative fiction?—I think it’s fiction that seems sort of like science fiction, but isn’t quite. I guess that’s an adquate category, except what fiction isn’t speculative—if it isn’t speculative, is it fiction? Stephenson’s books are chock full of science and are written with a pronounced scientific orientation, but they aren’t set in the future and they lack any of the obvious hallmarks of the science fiction genre—space travel, aliens, sentient robots that want to rebel against their human masters, etc. They’re genre fiction, but they’re not formulaic.

Here’s how I came to read this book. Two and a half years ago when we were living in Denmark an English-language bookstore opened in a neighborhood near us. Of course we were there the week they opened. But they only had maybe 85 books in the place and they were all $30 or $40 each. But we got to talking with the owners and one of them saw me looking at a 900-page Neal Stephenson novel with a very pretty cover. He said it was a wonderful book and guaranteed I would love it too. I wasn’t so sure but I wanted to be agreeable and we did want to support the venture, so I bought it. A few months later I picked it up and read it. I didn’t expect to like it, but I did. This was volume one in what is called “The Baroque Cycle,” set in the late 17th and early 18th century. Full of details about various scientists and scientific trends of the times—also full of adventure and entertaining characters. Over the course of a few months I purchased and read all three novels in the cycle—each about 900 pages long.

Cryptonomicon is set in the 20th century and was written before the Baroque Cycle, but its characters are the decendants of the characters in the Baroque Cycle, so it’s a kind of a prequel, except that it was written first (1998).

Same basic formula—a dollop of science education (mostly cryptography in this case), plus a cast of characters pursuing different adventures that eventually turn out to be related. About half the book is set during World War II; the rest in the “present day.” The present day parts funtion in part as a kind of advertisement for the wonders of technology circa 1998. It’s funny how dated this part of the book, which deals with internet technologies and entrepreneurship, now feels. It’s pre-Google! It doesn’t help that it’s written with a kind of gee-whiz “we are the techo-elite” kind of boastfulness.

But now that’s I’ve taken a potshot at Stephenson, I have to confess that I have been impressed and entertained by his books. They’re like big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas, full of glitzy special effects, clever dialogue and farfetched, intricate plots. Except they were written by one guy sitting in a room. A much better carbon footprint.

#18: The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes

The word “scientist” was coined at the third annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at Cambridge in 1833. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was among the attendees. At issue was what to call someone who works in the “real sciences.” Up to that point, “natural philosopher” was the preferred term for someone who attempted to learn and manipulate the laws of nature. Things were happening in Europe during the last decades of the 18th century and the first decades of the 19th century to make this new term necessary. Exceptional minds had always been able to see hidden realities, but now, during the so-called Romantic Age, science became a method, a profession, a systematic assault on the natural world. For the first time, it was understood that matter consisted of elements which could be identified. This was chemistry. The study of rocks revealed billions of years of earth history. This was geology. And the study of the sky revealed that space was essentially limitless and contained enormous collections of stars that we now call galaxies. This was astronomy.

Richard Holmes is known for writing biographies of poets from the Romantic age such as Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. I’d read several of his books and found him a congenial, well informed, and sympathetic presenter of these lives. I’m not really intrepid enough to read much poetry on my own, so sometimes I read biographies of poets as a way to immerse myself in the sensibilities of poets—and then maybe even go on and read a few of their poems.

In The Age of Wonder, Holmes reviews the history of British science from 1770 to 1830 through the lives of some of the leading natural philosophers of the day; most especially through two: astronomer William Herschel and chemist Humphry Davy. These names would only have provoked the faintest glimmer of recognition before I read this book. They were giants in their time but these names do not resonate like Isaac Newton or Galileo Galilei. There are many possible reasons for this, but one is that Herscel and Davy were not lone, exceptional geniuses, but rather members of a vanguard in the development of science, the foremost among many. Their lives are fascinating and complex but they were public men who cannot be separated from the fabric of their time.

Herschel was an astronomer who built his own telescopes and searched and mapped the skies relentlessly for decades. He was the first to really understand the sky in three dimensions and to grasp the overall structure of the universe. Along the way he discovered numerous comets and the planet Uranus, which he originally named Georgium Sidus in honor of the reigning monarch. Humphry Davy was a chemist, but more than that he was the personification of the idea of a “scientist” before the term existed. He experimented with inhaling gases and had a brief but intense flirtation with nitrous oxide that could almost have made him the Timothy Leary of his day. He became a charismatic celebrity who gave very popular lectures on new trends in science, and his very interest in a field, be it the isolation and identification of new elements or the development of batteries and the field of “electro-chemistry,” helped to speed its development. Davy’s greatest triumph was not only a scientific coup but a public relations coup as well. After a series of mine explosions in the north Midlands, Davy was asked to bring his skill on the problem and did so by inventing a new kind of mining lamp that would not interact with the methane gas in the mines. Davy discovered that a metal mesh around a lamp’s flame would prevent explosions. He was hailed as a national hero. The personification of science triumphant.

Davy’s fame did go to his head somewhat. In later years he was much disliked by younger colleagues who resented his unwillingness to share credit and acknowledge the contributions of others, among them his assistant Michael Faraday, who went on to succeed Davy as the preeminent public scientist of his day.

Almost two hundred years later, science has taken us to places that Herschel and Davy could not have imagined. Science has been weaponized and can create plagues and send “drones” to kill people from thousands of miles away. In The Age of Wonder, science poses a different threat, which is the increasing marginalization of God in the affairs of man. Some still hoped that science could find some evidence of the divine—an animating fluid that bridged the gap between chemistry and electricity on one side and mind and soul on the other. This was the debate that led to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1815. Would the secret of life fall so easily to science? And what is life without divine guidance?

I wonder if maybe the period that Holmes describes was the first time in the history of civilization that it was possible to consider one’s self an atheist. The first time it was possible to expect there to be a physical, materialist explanation for everything one could experience. Of course once atheism and materialism exist, then so does fundamentalism which is, among other things, a refusal to accept materialist explanations for everything we experience. As I write this, newspapers are full of news about the discovery of an elementary particle called the “god particle,” which also goes by the name of the Higgs boson. I’m sure there are millions of people—especially in America—who think this discovery proves the existence of God.