#73: A Distant Mirror, by Barbara Tuchman

Barbara Tuchman would have us know that the second half of the fourteenth century was not the best of times in Europe. The bubonic plague first struck in 1350 and then reappeared every ten years or so thereafter. The initial episode eliminated about a third of the population of Europe. Incredibly, the plague is eventually upstaged in Tuchman’s book by the general bad behavior of the remaining population. It was a time of unending senseless violence and oppression. I had read A Distant Mirror many years ago and remembered being stunned by how swiftly and relentlessly the plague had cut down entire families, towns, and cities. But I hadn’t remembered the endless wars, feuds, battles, and campaigns that killed off many of the lucky survivors of the great pestilence. I think that must have been because the mayhem was so consistent, so widespread, so … ordinary. No individual or event stands out. Bad behavior is Tuchman’s great subject: people betraying, deceiving, and destroying each other. The plague stands out by contrast because it was not motivated by greed, treachery, or envy.

Ours is a more peaceful time because we have governments and laws that at least limit the amount of violence and brutality in the world. We may not feel that we live in the best of times, but consider how the great majority the world’s billions live their lives unmolested, with shelter and enough to eat. We have electricity and antibiotics. In the fourteenth century, Europe was transitioning to nation states, but was still controlled by royal families—and the Catholic Church. Thus you had various kings, dukes, popes, and cardinals plotting and making war against each other. To finance these campaigns, these worthies levied tax after tax on the merchant and peasant classes. The concentration of wealth was extreme, and much of it was put to use to ravage the very people who had funded it. Armies swarmed across the countryside, stealing the food of whatever towns and villages were in their path, and killing and raping many residents for good measure. In many ways, they treated their ostensible enemies better than they treated the townspeople who were unlucky enough to be in their way. High-ranking enemies were an economic resource who could be ransomed for substantial sums; many of them were likely blood relatives in any case and thus worthy of a certain deference.

Tuchman likes to give us lists, perhaps because this is the kind of information that makes up much of the documentary evidence that has survived for six centuries. Here is a short selection from a much longer inventory of the possessions of the Duc de Berry, a brother of the King of France and one of four such brother/dukes who controlled—or rather, owned—the majority of the country:

Berry was too absorbed in acquisition and art to be interested in war. He lived for possessions, not glory. He owned two residences in Paris, the Hôtel de Nesle and another near the Temple, and built or acquired a total of seventeen castles in his duchies of Berry and Auvergne. He filled them with clocks, coins, enamels, mosaics, marquetry, illuminated books, musical instruments, tapestries, statues, triptychs painted in bright scenes on dazzling gold ground bordered with gems, gold vessels and spoons, jeweled crosses and reliquaries, relics, and curios. He owned one of Charlemagne’s teeth, a piece of Elijah’s mantle, Christ’s cup from the Last Supper, drops of the Virgin’s milk, enough of her hairs and teeth to distribute as gifts, soil from various Biblical sites, a narwhal’s teeth, porcupine’s quills, the molar tooth of a giant, and enough gold-fringed vestments to robe all the canons of three cathedrals at one time. Agents kept him apprised of curiosities, and when one reported a “giant’s bones” dug up near Lyon in 1378, he at once authorized purchase. He kept live swans and bears representing his chosen device, a menagerie with apes and dromedaries, and rare fruit trees in his garden. He ate strawberries with crystal picks mounted in silver and gold, and read by candlelight from six carved ivory candle-holders.

It’s interesting to note how wealth in the fourteenth century took the form of discrete objects, rather than as a bank balance. When we read today that some software tycoon is worth a hundred billion dollars, it’s hard to relate that to what ordinary people have or to translate that into the objects that ordinary people want to buy: things like cars, houses, or boats. In this regard, Donald Trump, with his penchant for putting his name in gold at the top of buildings around the world, has more in common with the Duc de Berry than he does with Warren Buffet.

The underclasses who underwrote this extravagance were not unaware of how they were being exploited. There were frequent insurrections, against Berry and others like him. The people participating in these insurrections must have known that they would be slaughtered when they were put down, as they inevitably were. They participated because everything had been taken from them—there had nothing to put in the scales to balance their hatred. The Duc of Berry, at least, was less bloodthirsty than many of his peers: where they would set an example by burning or beheading defeated insurgents by the hundreds or thousands, he would spare the life of anyone who could afford to pay a hefty fine.

Berry is just one of a seemingly endless parade of bad people that Tuchman leads before us. An individual named Robert of Geneva provides a good illustration of fourteenth century realpolitik:

With the fury of a conqueror defied, Cardinal Robert determined to set an example by atrocity and found his occasion at Cesena, a town near the east coast between Ravenna and Rimini. When the Bretons who were quartered there seized supplies without paying for them, they provoked an armed rising of the citizens. Swearing clemency by a solemn oath on his cardinal’s hat, Cardinal Robert persuaded the men of Cesena to lay down their arms, and won their confidence by asking for fifty hostages and immediately releasing them as evidence of good will. Then summoning his mercenaries, … he ordered a general massacre “to exercise justice.” Meeting some demurral, he insisted, crying “Sangue et sangue!” (Blood and more blood), which was what he meant by justice. He was obeyed. For three days and nights beginning February 3, 1377, while the city gates were closed, the soldiers slaughtered. “All the squares were full of dead.” Trying to escape, hundreds drowned in the moats, thrust back by relentless swords. Women were seized for rape, ransom was placed on children, plunder succeeded the killing, works of art were ruined, handicrafts laid waste, “and what could not be carried away, they burned, made unfit for use, or spilled upon the ground.” The toll of the dead was between 2,500 and 5,000.

Robert of Geneva became known as the “Butcher of Cesena” and was later elected Pope Clement VII.

Wading through these decades of massacres, plagues, mad kings and debauchery was one Enguerrand VII, Sire de Coucy and Count of Soissons. Coucy was one of the richest men in France, and possessor of a mighty fortress 50 miles north of Paris. Skilled as both a soldier and a diplomat, Coucy was present at many of the century’s key events. For Tuchman, he stands in contrast to the general dementia of the time. Coucy was no saint, but he was intelligent and practical, qualities scarcer in the 1300s than saintliness. Most of the assorted dukes, princes, and counts of the day still put great stock by notions of chivalry that eschewed planning, prudence, and strategy. To their minds, a lord should always be at the front of the attack, the first into battle. This led to a lot of dead and captured lords—the King of France was even captured on one occasion by the English. What do you do with a captured king? You hold him for a king’s ransom, of course. Funds were raised by—what else?—new taxes.

I have not read other books by Barbara Tuchman, but I infer that a consistent theme for her is ironic contempt for the foolishness of powerful men. In The Guns of August, she wrote about the leaders of early 20th century Europe who started the First World War for no good reason. Another of her books is titled, plainly enough, The March of Folly. I think I would enjoy any of her books because ironic contempt, when done well, is extremely entertaining. But I suspect that just about any century, including the current one, could be savaged in this manner. Folly is everywhere, and in every one. We might not even be able to guess all the things about our times that will earn the contempt of our distant offspring, though we could at least get the list started for them.

Maybe a century like the 14th is what it takes to send civilization off in a new direction. Energy was no longer flowing effectively through the old channels—crusade, chivalry, feudalism. Church. Within a hundred years of the end of this century, ships would be sailing new oceans and both the Renaissance and the Reformation would be underway. I don’t know enough to draw the lines that connect the dysfunctional 14th century to the European rebirth, but I’m sure it can be done, in fact, it probably has already been done by somebody.

#72: Sodom and Gomorrah, by Marcel Proust

Reading Proust isn’t like reading anything else. It’s like having a roommate. And after reading the first three volumes of In Search of Lost Time last year, I was ready for a hiatus.

I wasn’t actually planning on reading the fourth volume, Sodom and Gomorrah, just yet, but when I picked it up last month, I saw that Part 1 was just 45 pages long. (Part 2 was the remaining 700-odd pages.) So I thought I could commit to that much at least and then see how things were going. As it turns out, they were going fine and I read both parts straight through. So you could say that I’ve moved back in, if only provisionally.

I had come to expect Proust to be quite obscure on sexual matters, but in Part 1 we observe his narrator observing an interlude between Baron Palamède de Charlus, a member of the illustrious Guermantes family, and Jupien, a tailor who lives in the same building as the narrator. The narrator had been occupied with botanical matters, watching the courtyard through a staircase window, “peering through the shutters … at the Duchess’s little shrub and at the precious plant, exposed in the courtyard with that assertiveness with which mothers ‘bring out’ their marriageable offspring, and asking myself whether the unlikely insect would come, by a providential hazard, to visit the offered and neglected pistil. “ But his attention is diverted when he notices Charlus and Jupien retiring to the back of Jupien’s shop for their own variation on the mating act—“of course, here the word fertilisation must be understood in a moral sense, since in the physical sense the union of male with male is and must be sterile…”

We never do find out what became of the ‘precious plant,’ but Proust does a pretty amazing job of cross pollinating the notion of sex as a natural and spontaneous part of life in nature with the particular constraints and proclivities of homosexual love in early 20th century France. Without outing himself, he manages to make a very eloquent case for the rightness of gay love, which must have required more than a little courage 100 years ago.

It’s never easy to find concise quotes in Proust because his discussions tend to expand and ripen over several pages, but here’s a passage where he is discussing a marriage between a rather masculine woman and a rather feminine man:

It was said at the Ministry, without any suggestion of malice, that in their household it was the husband who wore the petticoats and the wife the trousers. Now there was more truth in this than was supposed. Mme de Vaugoubert really was a man. Whether she had always been one, or had grown to be as I now saw her, matters little, for in either case we are faced with one of the most touching miracles of nature which, in the latter alternative especially, makes the human kingdom resemble the kingdom of flowers. On the former hypothesis—if the future Mme de Vaugoubert had always been so heavily mannish—nature, by a fiendish and beneficent ruse, bestows on the girl the deceptive aspect of a man. And the youth who has no love for women and is seeking to be cured greets with joy this subterfuge of discovering a bride who reminds him of a market porter. In the alternative case, if the woman has not at first these masculine characteristics, she adopts them by degrees, to please her husband, and even unconsciously, by that sort of mimicry which makes certain flowers assume the appearance of the insects which they seek to attract. Her regret at not being loved, at not being a man, makes her mannish. Indeed, quite apart from the case that we are now considering, who has not remarked how often the most normal couples end by resembling each other, at times even exchanging qualities?

Proust, in his role as naturalist, goes on to provide examples of couples who have either exchanged their nominal gender characteristics, or merged their separate characteristics into a single exotic hybrid. I could almost hear David Attenborough.

Baron de Charlus is the presiding presence in Sodom and Gomorrah, and he is a remarkable creation. When we first met him in an earlier volume he seemed quite forbidding—he invited the narrator to his home after offering to be his guide to society but then, when he arrived, insulted and threatened him for no apparent reason. But by the present volume, the narrator has gained a better understanding of the baron’s changeable nature, and he has opportunities to observe him as he moves through society. For example, he observes the baron exchanging meaningful glances with other “inverts” at a society event, even as the gentleman maintains his ostentatious pretense of heterosexuality. When the Baron gets an eyeful of the attractive young sons of a certain Mme de Surgis, he engages her in conversation though she would not otherwise seem of sufficient social status to warrant his attention. The scene becomes comic as less perspicacious onlookers comment on the baron’s suave ability put the moves on an attractive woman, even as he maneuvers to keep the sons in his line of sight as he talks to Mme de Surgis. But nothing is ever quite so simple in Proust:

For if everyone was pleased to admire in her sons the regal bearing and the beautiful eyes of Mme de Surgis, the Baron could taste an inverse but no less keen pleasure in finding those charms combined in the mother, as in a portrait which does not in itself provoke desire, but feeds, with the aesthetic admiration that it does provoke, the desires that it awakens.

Later in the book, the Baron has made himself the sponsor of an attractive young musician, Morel. Here the humor works on multiple levels. On one level, we see the Baron strenuously maintaining his heterosexual pretense, even as by this point literally everyone around him knows exactly what he is about. One another level, we see him trying to convince himself, and everyone else, that he is master of the situation, even as we easily see that Morel is a completely unscrupulous character who has the mighty Baron wrapped around his finger. Proust is able to expose the ridiculousness of de Charlus even as he displays a great deal of sympathy and even affection for him. This is, of course, exactly what Shakespeare did for Falstaff, except that Shakespeare did not put himself into the story as an occasional confidante of Sir John.

Surprisingly, Sodom and Gomorrah is pretty funny throughout. The narrator returns to the coastal resort of Balbec for the second half of the book, where at first he is haunted by the ghost of his grandmother, who was his companion on his first sojourn there and has since died. Eventually, though, he begins to go out into society, where he visits the Verdurins, who have rented a house in the country, and the Cambremers, who, as it happens, are the Verdurins’ landlords. Nominally, the Cambremers rank higher in society than the Verdurins, though Mme Verdurin is so fanatically devoted to nurturing her “salon” of mostly preposterous and second- or third-rate artists and intellectuals that by sheer energy she manages to repeatedly outmaneuver and upstage the Cambremers.

Here, amid a maze of allusions and asides, is Proust’s description of M. de Cambremer’s face:

M. de Cambremer bore little resemblance to the old Marquise [his mother]. He was, as she used affectionately to put it, “altogether on his father’s side.” For anyone who had only heard speak of him, or even of letters from him, of a lively and apt turn of phrase, his physical appearance was a surprise. No doubt you would grow accustomed to it. But his nose, in order to come and take up its crooked position above his mouth, had chosen perhaps the one oblique line, out of so many, that you would never have thought of tracing on his face, one that denoted a common stupidity, made even worse by the proximity of an apple-red Norman complexion. It is possible that M. de Cambremer’s eyes had preserved in their lids something of that Le Cotentin sky, so soft on those beautiful sunny days when the stroller is amused to see, halted beside the road, and to count in their hundreds, the shadows of the poplar trees, but those heavy, rheumy, badly drooping eyelids would have prevented intelligence itself from passing through. And so, disconcerted by the thinness of that blue gaze, you turned back to the big, crooked nose. By a transposition of the senses, M. de Cambremer looked at you with his nose. This nose of M. de Cambremer’s was not ugly but, rather, a little too beautiful, too strong, too vain of its own importance. Hooked, polished, shiny, spanking new, it was quite prepared to make up for the spiritual insufficiency of his gaze; unfortunately, if the eyes are sometimes the organ in which intelligence is revealed, the nose (whatever their intimate solidarity and the unsuspected repercussions of one feature on the others), the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity exhibits itself the most strongly.

This nose is almost a character in its own right, a distant relation of the schnozz in Gogol’s story titled “The Nose” (what else?) and of the nose of the great leader in Woody Allen’s Sleeper.

I don’t ever tire of Proust’s social observations; it’s when he’s discussing his own love life that I have trouble. Throughout Sodom and Gomorrah, he’s in a relationship with Albertine, the “seaside girl” he first met at Balbec in volume two. In some ways, their relationship has become cozy, and it gave me a certain satisfaction to see them snuggling together at one point in a railway car. But romance for Proust is always a matter of shadow boxing with himself, and he seems at times almost determined to find a reason to spurn Albertine. There is always a kind of void at the center of the narrator’s romantic obsessions: he sees his own emotions, and he sees the time and place of an encounter, but he does not or cannot even imagine the inner life of the other person. Here he is confronting Albertine after an acquaintance has suggested that she has been conducting a lesbian relationship with another of the seaside girls, Andrée:

Albertine, even before swearing to me that it was not true, expressed, like everyone upon learning that such things are being said about them, anger, concern, and, with regard to the unknown slanderer, a fierce curiosity to know who he was and a desire to be confronted with him so as to be able to confound him. But she assured me that she bore me, at least, no resentment. “If it had been true, I would have told you. But Andrée and I both loathe that sort of thing. We haven’t reached our age without seeing women with cropped hair who behave like men and do the things you mean, and nothing revolts us more.” Albertine merely gave me her word, a categorical word unsupported by proof. But this was precisely what was best calculated to calm me, jealousy belonging to that family of morbid doubts which are eliminated by the vigour of an affirmation far more surely than by its probability. It is moreover the property of love to make us at once more distrustful and more credulous, to make us suspect the loved one, more readily than we should suspect anyone else, and be convinced more easily by her denials. We must be in love before we can care that all women are not virtuous, which is to say before we can be aware of the fact, and we must be in love too before we can hope, that is to say assure ourselves, that some are. It is human to seek out what hurts us and then at once to seek to get rid of it.

This is about the extent of the “Gomorrah” side of things in Sodom and Gomorrah. There’s something quite profound in the way that Proust follows this convoluted psychological thread, but along the way Albertine is left in the dust. She is a necessary catalyst for his meditation, but a closed book to him nonetheless. The last line of the book gives us this declaration (spoken to the narrator’s mother): “I absolutely must marry Albertine.” This after he has been considering breaking off the affair altogether. To say that the factors contributing to this decision are obscure is an understatement. No telling how the matter will turn out, but I’m not anticipating that he’ll follow through on this intention.

* * * *

At times when reading the earlier volumes of In Search of Lost Time, I’ve found it difficult to understand why Proust should rank with Joyce, Woolf, and the other high modernists. But Sodom and Gomorrah has made me a believer. This book is unsurpassed in its own peculiar way, language and thought are melded together such than neither can be thought of as separate from the other. This is why quoting Proust is so difficult. No idea or thought is discrete, everything flows along like a wave that changes but never quite resolves. Proust’s writing is quantum in the sense that it is made out of discrete bits: words and ideas, yet it appears to the reader as something indivisible.

Amid such imaginative force, it was astonishing at a single moment in the book to discover the author undisguised, sitting in his dark room. The glimpse is uncharacteristically brief:

I, the strange human who, while he waits for death to release him, lives behind closed shutters, knows nothing of the world, sits motionless as an owl, and like that bird can only see things at all clearly in the darkness.

#71: The Long Ships, by Frans G. Bengtsson

The Long Ships is a great read—it’s like a great adventure movie, except that you get to know a lot about everyday life in 10th century Scandinavia. Reading this book immediately after reading The Odyssey, it belately dawned on me that both books are about sea-going adventurers in long-ago times.

The Long Ships was more purely entertaining because its author understood the minds and expectations of 20th century readers. Frans G. Bengtsson was writing in Swedish in the early 1940s. His book is about the fictional life and experiences of an individual named Red Orm. Orm (the “Red” is just for formal occasions) grows up on a farm in what is now southern Sweden, but is shanghaied by a Viking raiding party and quickly earns the trust of the sailors and becomes a full-fledged member of the ship’s crew. He sails with them to Spain where they are captured by Moors and then serve as galley slaves for a couple of years. Orm has a knack for making the best of situations—his full moniker could easily be “Lucky Orm.” By taking advantage of his opportunities he works his way up to being a member of a high-ranking official’s private bodyguard. In this capacity he participates in a raid on the Spanish town of Santiago de Compostela, then in Christian hands, where he ultimately finds himself in possession of a boat, a crew of compatriots, and a very large bell taken from the town’s cathedral. Recognizing his opportunity, Orm and his compatriots abscond with the bell, sail north, and eventually present it as a gift to King Harald Bluetooth of Denmark. A little digging around on the web reveals that the high-ranking Moorish official was a real person (Almanzor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almanzor) and that he did in fact lead a raid to Santiago during which the cathedral’s bells were captured. They were then melted down to make lanterns for the Great Mosque of Cordoba. The historical record says nothing about a Viking crew making off with the largest bell, but you almost expect to discover that that happened too. That’s how deftly Bergtsson weaves the experiences of his fictional hero into the actual events of 10th century Europe.

Orm goes on to have several additional adventures that I will not summarize here. He is a shrewd and wily fellow—like Odysseus—but he is also just an average guy who makes the most of his opportunities. He falls in love (with one of King Harald’s daughter, as it happens), makes friends, and deals with people and situations as best he can. Bengtsson shares Orm’s thoughts and feelings with the reader, and as a result we feel as if we know him. So we root for him and experience his victories and defeats vicariously. Because that’s how novels work.

Thinking back on The Odyssey, we never have any opportunity to get so chummy with Odysseus. His author (who may have been but was probably not an individual named Homer) is as much an advocate for his hero as Bengtsson is of his, but he has no interest in humanizing him, making him seem like a regular guy. This is neither a defect nor a choice—Homer was writing before the kind of characterization that Bengtsson employs had been invented.

This is not to claim that The Long Ships is a better book than The Odyssey. It’s a bit like the difference between a fine antique and a high-end reproduction of a fine antique. The original item ultimately has greater value, but the knock-off is probably preferable for everyday use. Your enjoyment of the newer object is not complicated by a need to appreciate its originality or understand something of the circumstances in which it was created.

But as different as these two books are, there are also similarities. Both Odysseus and Orm live in worlds without formal laws or government. When dealing with adversaries, they rely entirely on their own resources.

Odysseus needs to rid his home of the 108 suitors who have grown accustomed to whiling away their days in his palace. He doesn’t have the option of obtaining an eviction notice or a restraining order; nor can he just evict them single-handedly.

Orm’s domestic crisis occurs when a renegade force attacks his homestead while he is away on an expedition, killing several of his associates and making off with his daughter and his livestock. Orm is fortunate that he returns to his home the very day after this attack. Like Odysseus, he gathers a group of trusted allies, and with them he plans to track down the assailants and recover what is rightfully his. He plans a three-pronged attack with the primary thrust coming from the enemy’s flank—like Odysseus, he must take care to not be predictable.

It’s very satisfying to imagine dealing with those who have offended or harmed us in such a way. Think of all the movies, starring John Wayne or Clint Eastwood, where circumstances conspire to leave the hero with no other option than to make his own justice, with copious violence. The difference is that John Wayne and Clint Eastwood live in worlds where there should be a legal authority they can appeal to; typically (and, for the sake of the story, fortuitously) these authorities are absent, or turn out to be corrupt or ineffectual. On some level the implication is that relying on laws, lawyers, and law enforcement is for weaker, lesser mortals. Doing what other people tell you to do, obeying the damn government, constraining your own rights and priorities to accommodate due process of law, well, to hell with that.

In the worlds of Odysseus and Red Orm, there are neither governments nor laws, at least not written laws. We admire them because they refuse to be intimidated, but also because they are stronger and smarter than their adversaries.

Who can say if there were really such contented Vikings as Red Orm? Or if their contentment would be like his. We might as well ask what kind of jokes Charlemagne would have liked. We know lots of things about long-ago people, but we don’t know their everyday attitudes or what their interpersonal relationships were like. Because that wasn’t the kind of thing that those people thought it was important to record for posterity. So maybe the best policy is just to read The Long Ships because it’s such a great adventure story, and not too much about exactly which century Orm belongs in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The good old days really are here again.

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

#69: Behave, by Robert Sapolsky

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

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

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

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

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

And then, to drive the point home:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#68: Outline, by Rachel Cusk

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

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

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

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

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

But then there is a change:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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