The Jewel of Seven Stars

There is little in the way of evidence that we understand what this ancient civilization truly accomplished. We have disinterred tombs, deciphered a hieratic language of obscure characters and darker gods, and mimicked the Egyptians’ customs and designs endlessly in an array of films and media (to the last any self-respecting horror fan will attest). Yet what we haven’t understood so dwarfs our discoveries that pensive minds tend to consider a rather terrible alternative: the Egyptians were so far ahead of their age as to remain uncanny forever. Canopic jars, thurification that has proven irreproducible, astronomy that may be more accurate than we care to imagine, mummifying techniques never seen before or since – never mind the everlasting monuments that have symbolized the country in our imagination. For a number of reasons the Egypt of today has little in common with its glorious past, but one thing from which it has not strayed is its ability to enchant and attract. One of the prototypes of Egypt’s mysteries can be found in this seminal novel.

Our hero and first-person narrator is Malcolm Ross, a nice name for a nice fellow. He is a single London barrister, quite professional and Victorian in the sense that he feels a deeply rooted repulsion towards the easy virtues that men in his position routinely enjoy. What he wants is a wife, a goddess he can place upon a pedestal and focus his awe upon until his ghost departs. We learn these facts quickly but as sidelights to another tale. A certain Margaret Trelawny, a young, retiring, raven-haired beauty, calls upon Ross to help her tend to her father Abel, who just happens to be a wealthy, world-famous Egyptologist and also just happens to have fallen into an unexplained hypnotic stupor. Ross comes racing in heart and leg only to find a wicked scene: the explorer is unconscious, bleeding from an odd scratch on a bangled wrist, his room of Egyptian antiquities sealed from within; he also lies at a strange angle to a safe whose contents shall remain unidentified for most of our story. A physician, a couple of incredulous policemen, and a band of snooping household staff all combine for a plain body of voices and visions – not one being of any particular interest – yet as a whole they provide a fine chorus for what is essentially a romance cast against a Gothic landscape. In the face of upped precautions the next night the event repeats itself (with the added bonus of a catatonic nurse), at which point Ross, a hopeless Romantic to begin with, now comes to consider that something otherworldly may be the catalyst. The policemen wish to instill in Ross the notion of empirical proof; the servants are aghast at the poltergeist-like attacks and quit in droves. But Ross is in love (detractors may carp that the novel devotes far too many pages to hand-holding and unrequited affection) and nothing on earth or beyond could drag him away from the object of his obsession. That is, until the appearance of a frantic polymath by the name of Corbeck.

A leather-faced collaborator of Margaret’s father just arrived from an operose three-year excursion on his partner’s dime, Corbeck’s degrees and level of learning are so extraordinary as to broach the inhuman. After some debate on the theft of a set of seven Pharaonic lamps that Corbeck insists are unique, Ross is handed a 17^th-century Dutch travelogue on a tomb, a jewel, and a sinister mummy hand that guards that same jewel outside of its sarcophagus. The hand, you see, has seven fingers, and the jewel it protects contains the constellation of seven stars that appear to compose a sort of mandate from heaven. In time, we hear of a young and beautiful Queen Tera who inherits the throne as very much the envy of a theocratic cabal thirsting for power. We are regaled on stories of the Queen’s innovation and intelligence as our novel progresses, but that is not how the Dutch traveler van Huyn recalls an episode from his journey:

The fellaheen absolutely refused to enter the valley at such a time, alleging that they might be caught by the night before they could emerge from the other end. At first they would give no reason for their fear. They had hitherto gone anywhere I wished, and at any time, without demur. On being pressed, however, they said that the place was the Valley of the Sorcerer, where none might come in the night. On being asked to tell of the Sorcerer, they refused, saying there was no name, and that they knew nothing. On the next morning, however, when the sun was up and shining down the valley, their fears had somewhat passed away. Then they told me that a great Sorcerer in ancient days – ‘millions of millions of years’ was the term they used – a King or a Queen, they could not say which, was buried there. They could not give the name, persisting to the last that there was no name; and that anyone who should name it would waste away in life so that at death nothing of him would remain to be raised again in the Other World.

Ross reads on to find a fantastic sepulcher as well as the sorcerer in question – or at least, the curse that followed the desecrators and their loot. If you’ve seen a couple of mummy movies, the consequences of such greed will be quite clear to you.  As will the oddly parallel lives of Margaret and the much-beleaguered seven-fingered Queen.  

There are a few conclusions to draw about the novel that recommend themselves upon re-reading. We have the very distinct impression that our opening scene may not appear to be what it claims; we also comprehend that a human being who has willed herself seven digits cannot be holy. There is also the not nugatory matter of the novel’s two editions. The original, published to much vitriol in 1903, features an ending quite in keeping with the cataclysmic predictions of the forerunning chapters. It also contains a chapter omitted in the 1912 edition entitled “Powers – Old and New,” that holds forth elegantly and quite reasonably on the implications of the discovery at hand. While the ‘happy ending’ of the 1912 can at best be termed lamentable and at worst incoherent, the omission of the 1903 edition’s sixteenth chapter might be the more egregious sin. It is in this brief chapter that Ross, an introspective and overly sensitive young man, mulls history as a whole, its myths and its gods, the visions of artists who looked askance at the basic notions of divine power and glory:

The whole possibility of the Great Experiment to which we were now pledged was based on the reality of the existence of the Old Forces which seemed to be coming in contact with the New Civilization. That there were, and are, such cosmic forces we cannot doubt, and that the Intelligence, which is behind them, was and is. Were those primal and elemental forces controlled at any time by other than that Final Cause which Christendom holds as its very essence? If there were truth at all in the belief of Ancient Egypt then their Gods had real existence, real power, real force …. If then the Old Gods held their forces, wherein was the supremacy of the new? ….What was it that Milton saw with his blind eyes in the rays of poetic light falling between him and Heaven? Whence came that stupendous vision of the Evangelist which has for eighteen centuries held spellbound the intelligence of Christendom?

This is the precise reasoning of a Christian, but also of any monotheist gazing at the dynasties that allegedly yielded only one ruler who wished to believe in a single universal force. There is, anyway, something more than a little off-putting about gods with the heads of hyenas or birds. Not that you'd ever know that from all their modern acolytes. 

In Cold Blood

It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms. Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter's rough Colorado winds and hip-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks bristle, blaze. 

                                                                                                                  Truman Capote

We have all heard the story (we may have even seen the movie – true, there have been several, but only one stands out), yet in our jaded era, when news has devolved into a summary of the day's wickedest and corniest deeds, we may no longer think often about the Kansas night of November 15, 1959. We may no longer wonder what motivated two recent jailbirds to ignite a nationwide manhunt, or how close they were on numerous occasions to not fulfilling their evil scheme. We may also not remember the speedy trial and windy series of appeals, that these two men sat on death row, what was dubbed the Corner in Kansas, for four years before their hanging in 1965. And once all persons immediately involved in the Holcomb tragedy were deceased ("four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives"), one of America's finest prose works was finally printed to everlasting controversy and acclaim.

We begin in one of the westernmost regions of the Bible Belt, "that gospel-haunted strip of American territory in which a man must, if only for business reasons, take his religion with the straightest of faces." The residents of these quiet nooks, like the two-hundred-seventy-odd inhabitants of Holcomb, Kansas, are the direct descendents of those courageous souls who decided once upon a time that a covered wagon on a straight path of destiny was superior to a restricted semi-urban community of property owners. The irony, of course, is that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these lonesome prairie doves are now some of the most prominent landowners in their fiefdoms. One such squire is the eminently respectable Herbert Clutter. Clutter is the father of four, getting his only son and heir on the last try. His children are successful – the two eldest daughters have already married well and the youngest and the son are promising high school students – and his marriage has held up despite his wife's chronic infirmity, what some nowadays may choose to characterize as a violent pendulum between two distant poles – but we need not belabor the matter. Perhaps the mild disappointment of the Clutters' matrimony can be best summarized by a typical vista from the lonesome cliff that was Herbert's wife, Bonnie:

She knew 'good days' and occasionally they accumulated into weeks, months, but even on the best of the good days, those days when she was otherwise her 'old self', the affectionate and charming Bonnie her friends cherished, she could not summon the social vitality her husband's pyramiding activities required. He was a 'joiner,' a 'born leader'; she was not, and stopped attempting to be. And so, along paths bordered by tender regard, by total fidelity, they began to go their semi-separate ways – his a public route, a march of satisfying conquests, and hers a private one that eventually wound through hospital corridors.

Until the night of November 15, 1959, this unbridgeable gap – and it most certainly is unbridgeable – was the worst thing ever to have happened to Herbert Clutter and his immediate family. Alas, almost no one picks up In Cold Blood to learn about Herbert and Bonnie Clutter, their youngest daughter Nancy, or their only son Kenyon. No, readers have flocked to the novel for the better part of five decades because of two deadbeat thirtysomethings: Perry Smith and Dick Hickock.

Four lives – thriving, prosperous lives, albeit undescribed to us in anything except careful bromides – were ended on an unwilled miscalculation; two others, we are shown and told in monumental detail, are the knotty sums of long years of frustration, exclusion, and defeat. The defeated are Smith, a half-Cherokee, half-Irish "dwarfish boy-man" who loves playing the guitar and lifting weights, and Hickock, the sex-crazed check bouncer. Smith's childhood was wanton, hungry, and streaked with cruelty and misfortune; Hickock, on the other hand, was loved and never poor, if restricted by Puritan mores and an unyielding paterfamilias. Smith will compensate for his pain in the most natural way possible: he will seek to educate himself on the books he was never given (his highest education was the third grade) and become a knower of life; Hickock will make up for what he viewed as an iron fence around his stifled adolescent urges by slipping into statutory rape and kleptomania. Keen observers of human nature will immediately note how commonly such an odd couple forges a bond of, if not friendship, then mutual need. Indeed, towards the end of our terrible tale, Smith and Hickock will be joined on Kansas's death row by a similar, if even younger duo, whose motives are somewhat different ("We hate the world," they declare, after massacring seven residents of it) but whose identical demises will come only ten weeks later. 

Of our pair of evildoers, Hickock has far less to offer, but he will also bring up an interesting twist in his case that makes his lot seem – at least to him and a few misguided partisans – quite unfair. Regardless of Hickock's machinations this is without a doubt the Perry Smith show. Smith has rage within him, rage that has accumulated over a lifetime of a drunken, cowardly mother, a wild, destitute, and criminal youth, and an appearance that has always generated scorn and distance. Two of his siblings committed suicide and he has mulled over such an exit on countless occasions with no small amount of relief. The plot to rob the Clutters was supposed, however, to bring him happiness and money – two things Smith has never really had, and certainly not at the same time. But happiness is not really the fate of Perry Smith. And so, aboard a Mexican boat with a German captain during the duo's brief but exotic flight from the Kansas killing fields, we get a rather haunting portrait:

When Perry sang, Otto sketched him in a notebook. It was a passable likeness, and the artist perceived one not very obvious aspect of the sitter's countenance – its mischief, an amused, babyish malice that suggested some unkind cupid aiming envenomed arrows. He was naked to the waist. (Perry was 'ashamed' to take off his trousers, 'ashamed' to wear swimming-trunks, for he was afraid that the sight of his injured legs would 'disgust people' and so, despite his underwater reveries, all the talk about skin-diving, he hadn't once gone in the water.)

Smith's injuries date back to a motorcycle "crackup" – but we are not concerned with his well-being, his constant knee-rubbing that begins to resemble a wringing of the hands, or his aspirin-popping that begins to resemble the drugs so typical of the loser and recidivist. When an incarcerated Smith sees from his window cats "hunting for dead birds caught in the vehicles' engine grilles" and recognizes that "most of my life I've done what they're doing; the equivalent," we nod at this soft moment of self-awareness. Even if it is one of the very few.

The years following the publication of In Cold Blood were not that kind to Capote, who began to investigate bottlenecks and tumblers with the same vigor he once devoted to his semi-fictitious creations. But what of the problem of content? Art is necessarily about life; it may, like life, conclude in some form of extinguishment, like the snuffing out of a candle or its gradual guttering into the thinnest glaze of wax. But Capote's masterpiece is about the opposite of life, what we generally know as physical death but which, in this context, may be best understood as a study in extinction. Still, even solely on the basis of one "non-fiction novel" Capote must rank among the twentieth century's foremost prose stylists. Consider the asides: "Dick's anger had soared past him and struck elsewhere"; "His confidence was like a kite that needed reeling in"; "Mrs. Clare, an admirer of logic, although a curious interpreter of it"; "Her [Nancy's] eyes ... darkly translucent, [were] like ale held to the light"; "It was as though [Dick's] head had been halved like an apple, then put together a fraction off center"; "Tomorrow the aged Chevrolet was expected to perform punishing feats"; "Maturity, it seemed, had reduced her [Bonnie's] voice to a single tone, that of apology." Then there was the time a wounded, enlisted Smith hit it off with his nurse:

Sexual episodes of a strange and stealthy nature had occurred, and love had been mentioned, and marriage too, but eventually, when his injuries had mended, he'd told her goodbye and given her, by way of explanation, a poem he pretended to have written.

This magnificent snippet contains more artistic insight than an entire harlequin romance, and just as much plot. At another instance Capote refers to the greenest of the Kansas prosecutors as "an ambitious, portly young man of twenty-eight who looks forty and sometimes fifty" – and I am hard pressed to find a more dazzling portrait of genius amidst a museum of extraordinary exhibits ("I walked miles, my nose bleeding like fifteen pigs" may be a close runner-up). In the end, we are encouraged by justice because the crimes are the most unpardonable and merciless that man can commit. Yet what knowledge could have been gained during the "ideal apple-eating" season? Perhaps simply that of disobedience, neither first nor last. As Nancy stated of her beloved father, "I just want to be his daughter and do as he wishes." If only we all took such words to heart. 

Look at the Harlequins!

I cannot possibly remember when I first heard the term "harlequin romance" (childhood and adolescence occasionally baffle me with their echoes), but for a young person this is precisely the association that love might entail. After all, what adults do physically and emotionally must strike the earnest child as nothing more than silly and banal. Grass and pets and balls and schoolless afternoons and books and gum and games – these are what little boys and girls are made of; time is too long and its arms too outstretching to commit to something forever. True enough, coming of age turns into a sort of comeuppance for those lazy, hazy days lost to speculation and wonder, and almost all of us are better off for the learning. But let us not forget our amazement and imagination as they took root all around us. Let us celebrate the whims and lies of a life separated from the hard liberty of being grown up and responsible, when – as some fear on cold, lonely days – consequences are as drab as our reasons. So if the etymology of harlequin is indeed some kind of Germanic diminutive for little hell or devil, we would be even more anxious to enjoy this book.  

Our narrator and titan, it will be revealed in time, is a "certain Russian prince" by the name of Vadim Vadimovich. Vadim Vadimovich belongs to that now-doddering generation of émigrés who got out of Russia through a spinning back-door turnstile before Lenin and his crimson thugs busted through the main entrance (in time, as it were, to see only a pile of swirling dust). So was it then and now, somewhere in the early mist of the 1970s, little seems to have changed except the name plates at the Politburo. Princely refuge – after allegedly shooting a Soviet soldier who threatened rendition – is sought in England, then Germany, then France, then eventually, once some foul continental forces forego busting through doors altogether and start setting unwanted tenements to flame, to that awkward jumble of Puritanical pressures and Social Darwinism known as the United States. Whatever you wish to say about our dear Vadim Vadimovich, America is clearly too tame and bland for his tastes. And thinking back now, he recalls the seeds of his own ambition:

I actually believed even then, in my early twenties, that by mid-century I would be a famous and free author, living in a free, universally respected Russia, on the English quay of the Neva or on one of my splendid estates in the country and writing there prose and poetry in the infinitely plastic tongue of my ancestors: among them I counted one of Tolstoy's grand-aunts and two of Pushkin's boon companions. The forefeel of fame was as heady as the old wines of nostalgia. It was remembrance in reverse, a great lakeside oak reflected so picturesquely in such clear waters that its mirrored branches looked like glorified roots. I felt this future fame in my toes, in the tips of my fingers, in the hair of my head, as one feels the shiver caused by an electric storm, by the dying beauty of a singer's dark voice just before the thunder, or by one line of King Lear.

A better summary of Look at the Harlequins could not be furnished by any reviewer, which is necessarily part of Vadim Vadimovich's plan. There are women in his life as they are in every life, and he makes of them little use apart from their patterns for characters in his wondrous novels and poems. There is Iris Black, who would die young, Annette Blagovo, whom he would also kill off under rather different circumstances, Louise Anderson, the prurient Philistine widow of a fat poet and critic of infinitely greater trendiness than our poor Vadim Vadimovich (which means, naturally, that he will be forgotten as quickly as those trends), and a fourth, unnamed wife, who is a few decades younger than her master. With these forming with our prince a sort of love pentagon, we begin a march towards the present, a march that rapidly devolves into a hop, a skip, and a few more skips.

What is skipped? Plenty; a whole lot; in a way everything except his books, of which we get occasional quotes but more commonly nice, direct allusions (Vadim Vadimovich is a nice, direct prince), and his comments on the savagery of the world. He is so cruel to the women he loved that we scarcely believe he loved them at all. This includes his long-lost daughter Isabel (from Annette) who is said to be a remarkable genius. This daughter-genius then does something quite out of keeping with geniuses and good offspring: she elopes with a hippie type who then, in turn, defects to the Soviets, changing his identity along the way. It is truly a sad moment when Vadim Vadimovich and wife three lunch with only daughter and future son-in-law:

He was twenty-five years old. He had spent five years studying Russian, and spoke it as fluently, he said, as a trained seal (a small sample justified the comparison). He was a declared 'revolutionary,' and a hopeless nincompoop, knowing nothing, crazy about jazz, existentialism, Leninism, pacifism, and African Art. He thought snappy pamphlets and catalogues so much more 'meaningful' than fat old books. A sweet, stale, and unhealthy smell emanated from the poor fellow.

We have all smelled this odor, which I believe is closely akin to that of an orange left out for a week or two. Since classical music, philosophy, the Renaissance, and classical art tend to counterleague against the ignorance of the modernist trends smashed in the quote above (I will omit pacifism; there is absolutely nothing wrong with pacifism; although most pacifists do indeed emit the rotten orange smell for whatever reason), we have little more to do here but nod and sigh and hope that Isabel has enough genius to identify fraud as readily as her progenitor.

Those who know little about Nabokov's biography (one can imagine the casual reader deeming all of this a graceful farce) may be bored in the same way that people who crave action and adventure are easily dulled by time's thud. Those who do know something about Nabokov's life may think themselves in on the joke as some kind of exclusive club members, although such a conclusion would be just as misguided. The truth is that Vadim Vadimovich alone knows the truth and he knows it from the inside out, not the other way around, which is our circuitous route. Not a few gemstones limn (to use a popular critic's favorite and much-abused verb) this path: after almost being hit by a motorcycle, our narrator "ignored his roar of hate"; some friends "sat enjoying Martinis in the orchestra seats of a marvelous sunset"; a plain woman is forgotten as "the very insignificance of her appearance canceled the pursuit of a vague recollection"; Vadim sips on "the indifferent white wine [he] had the polite weakness to praise"; and "Annette would occasionally curb with an opaque, almost ophidian look, her mother's volubility." There are also a few details that really have no business being in a Nabokov book, including one so shocking that it must be a joke and a half, if not two jokes. Those harlequins sure are a burlesque bunch.     

Port Mungo

Many years ago in a graduate school far, far away, a visiting professor with decidedly limited English inflicted upon his first class's sensibilities a simple dichotomy: all novels are either historical or psychological. The manner in which he gurgled these words (I shall not reveal his provenance for any sum) as well as the hesitance he displayed in convincing us of this brilliant theory remain with me as an example of many things, one of which is that simple thoughts bereft of any subtlety or qualification often smack the nail into the board with astounding accuracy. In other words, a work of art may draw its power from within or without. You know all too well about the latter: the torrid wartime romance, with fates cloven as the battlefield expands and misunderstandings multiplied in the face of increasing danger, as all the while death and history conspire to keep two sweet lovers apart. With very, very few exceptions, most works tailored on this pattern are of a very thin and flimsy fabric. The protagonists love like any other couple loves, but we are supposed to find them infinitely more tragic because they may be killed at any moment and because history, that sentinel of sorrow, will hurt them as it has hurt billions of others. Yet the saddest events in one's life are always personal, always unshared, always unimportant to anyone except the sufferer. And private tragedies inform and steer every line of this novel.

Our narrator will be revealed slowly; that is to say, we know her as Gin Rathbone, a solitary Englishwoman and long-time New Yorker now in her seventies, but her motives for composition remain obscure. We also know before we are even informed that Gin is the type of person born to refract, not to shine. At first she may be seeking to vindicate her beloved brother Jack ("the most remarkable event of my life has been Jack himself"), now dead and forgotten by the artistic world whose adulation he once sought. A later reason develops somewhere towards the middle of the story, and we sense it is a mere contrivance for the sake of padded plot, a peccadillo but not a rarity in serious literature. Still, without this odd shunting the engine of our narrative remains decidedly cold. Cold until we find a young and unsung Jack Rathbone enamored with a mildly older woman by the name of Vera Savage. 

Vera, like Jack, belongs to that generation of souls that does not evince any tenderness towards its predecessors yet is consumed by an urge to ponder its own profundity. In short, the embodiment of the smug, ignorant modern artist. And while her portrait will be edited throughout the novel, stopping like some anti-Vera Expo at every stall of her defamation, her initial appearance is damning enough:

Jack liked the look of her at once, this was clear, and for this reason: she dressed like a prostitute. She stood there at the podium, a loud, bosomy woman in a tight dress and pancake make-up, one hand cocked akimbo on her hip and the other flapping the air as she spoke to us with a kind of hoarse nervous bravado, and I remember thinking her opinionated and not very clean, nor entirely sober. Her hair was the color of coal, her lips were scarlet and she had lost a tooth, whose absence lent her a distinctly menacing aspect when she grinned. What was it she talked about? Much of it I have forgotten; but I know she told us how pointless it was to attend art school, which raised a cheer, and then she spoke about inspiration, and how travel, drink, the colour black, bodies of water − passion − these were the sorts of things that inspired her. 

It is of no small coincidence that I too have been inspired by precisely these "sorts of things," as they remain key components of any Romantic's toolkit − but I digress. The description goes on to quote Vera, who seems so opposite to the plain, emotionless Gin as can only happen in fiction, that "a real artist would sooner let her children starve than work at anything but her art." As Port Mungo arrives at an explanation of its title, a dingy Central American backwater that inspires Jack to form the single-student school of "tropicalism" or "malarial," we begin to understand the basic dichotomy: we all have creative desires, but for the vast majority of us these will be quenched in the production of smaller beings who will become the vessels of our hopes. For someone who thinks himself able to add to the pantheon of great art, however, children seem too common, too unruly, and too unpredictable to appeal to his one-tracked mind.   

Yet this is precisely what a "real artist" would never do. A "real artist" may and should shirk a mindless job, the material pleasures of expensive food and clothing and luxury items, and the conformist ideas that proclaim that life is to be lived for the sake of instant gratification. Why? Because real art predicates only two things: beauty and pity. And to us there is nothing more beautiful and vulnerable than a child, any child, but especially one that owes its existence to our own seed. A child is the greatest work of art we can produce, because man is superior to his doodles, his tracts, and his tunes, and herein lies the tragedy of all artists. They cannot better nature in its mountains and canyons, even if perhaps that was never quite their ambition; yet a true artist gains his foothold when he realizes that a child's hair is more valuable than any book ever written, and the ripping squeal of a newborn baby more marvelous than any aria or sonnet. Such is, in essence, the main theme of Port Mungo, which has many dirty ideas and many dirty ways to imply those ideas without making them explicit. We get Vera's negligence of the couple's two daughters, Peg and Anna, both of whom will be separated from their parents, one for good and one across an ocean; Gerald, the eldest, most successful, and most genteel of the three Rathbone siblings, who steps in and makes a very important decision; Antonella, an Italian model for some of Jack's finer work; Johnny Hague, another white resident of the Mungo, Vera's sporadic lover, and, in a strange way, Jack's alter ego; and Eduardo, a sexually ambiguous and manipulative sculptor whose stealth somehow reminds us of our narrator. The action moves from England to New York and the Port with the retrospective sweep of a long-stifled confession. The only question will be the crime, and about that we are obliged to keep comfortably mum.    

McGrath's style is spiteful, gloomy, and fantastically crisp; it also harbors an insatiable curiosity for the reasons of the human soul, which are infinite. He lingers on the dark psychology that is never insinuated, however hard he may try, in Banville's mannerist fables, and such attention to our ticking impulses makes some of the revolting subject matter that inhabits his dark halls all the more amazing to visualize. I shall never forgive McGrath for a short story (also featuring the name Mungo) he once wrote about a priest in a style so magnificent that the abomination of its contents would convince even the staunchest non-believer of its infernal origins. But we can overlook the monotony of Port Mungo's alleged plot − rarely has such a beautiful shawl been wound about such bony shoulders − and revel in the polish and texture of this wretched little realm. I suppose it is amusing that the names Gin and Jack echo the alcoholism rampant throughout the novel, and that Vera is supposed to furnish the savage truth, the comeuppance. In this last respect, as opposed to many other facets of her chosen exile, she does not fail. In vino veritas, indeed.   

Praise of Folly

Nec aliud omnino est vita humana, quam stultitiæ lusus quidam.

                                                                                                 Desiderius Erasmus

Those of us who pursue wisdom for its own glorious sake have often been chastised for being far too serious to be good company – good company in the very modern definition of someone who is pointedly irreverent, somewhat silly, and somewhat dangerous. Although we should never let popular definitions get in the way of who we really are, a kernel of a basic, ungnawed truth persists: along the way to our private destinies we had better have some fun. Why fun? Isn't fun a purely relative term? Am I not absurd for spending my free time reading and writing when I could just as easily be snowboarding, grilling steaks, and drinking myself to Valhalla? Isn't that what hopelessly conventional fun is all about? Fun is indeed one of those few things that do vary from mind to mind, but the variation should not keep us from profiling its partner in crime, foolishness, because when we are not practical and efficient we are to one degree or another fools. An important corollary as we consider this famous book.

We begin with a disclaimer that, scholars assure us, was typical for the era and subject, although our work is anything but typical. "Since .... the time was hardly suitable for serious meditation, I decided to amuse myself with praise of folly," says Erasmus, who will soon yield the feather to Folly herself. The impetus for the book was a lovely summer spent in the company of this man of letters, a highlight of an English exile that comprised the happiest of Erasmus's life (the book's subtitle moriae encomium refers unsubtly to the creator of Utopia). While the ultimate aim of the treatise may not be immediately obvious, Erasmus and his maid-servant are in no rush to formulate either theories or conclusions. They live in a world apart, one equally distant from the vulgar odors of popular culture and the sublime scent of incense. That Erasmus was also a Catholic priest should not concern us: his goal is to comprehend his own human foibles, his daily urges not to do anything of any particular use to anyone. The hypothesis may not be particularly original, but its introduction has little in the way of the peers. And the slow, rambling display of folly in its myriad literary forms properly reflects what has plagued men of learning since time began:

Those who court immortal fame by writing books ... owe a great deal of me, especially any who blot their pages with unadulerated rubbish. But people who use their erudition to write for a learned minority and are anxious to have either Persius or Laelius pass judgment don't seem to me favored by fortune but rather to be pitied for their continuous self-torture. They add, change, remove, lay aside, take up, rephrase, show to their friends, keep for nine years, and are never satisfied. And their futile reward, a word of praise from a handful of people, they win at such a cost – so many late nights, such loss of sleep, sweetest of all things, and so much sweat and anguish.

The writers devoted to aesthetic perfection may indeed do all these things to themselves, but they can luxuriate in the development of their sensibilities: even if they do not erect anything of commercial success, they will always have their private reserves of flora and fauna of their own image.

Folly continues in the same vein as she irons the corners of her tapestry. We learn that she appeals equally to children and the elderly for "except the old man's wrinkles and the birthdays he has counted, they are exactly alike: white hair, toothless mouth, short stature, liking for milk, babbling, chattering, silliness, forgetfulness, thoughtlessness, in fact, everything." As it were, Folly can make a strong argument for being the alpha and omega of our terrestrial existence, since when "the time comes for [us] to depart this life, again like children, [we are] neither tired of living nor aware of death." Since childhood is our period of innocence and old age our period of solemn reflection and remembrance, it would be simplicity itself to take these years too seriously and squirm at their implications. But this is precisely what we should not do. Instead we nourish a few comforting superstitions in our hearts:   

Man's mind is far more susceptible to falsehood than to truth. If anyone wants an immediate, clear example of this he has only to go to church at sermon time, where everyone is asleep or yawning or feeling queasy whenever some serious argument is expounded, but if the preacher starts to rant (I beg your pardon, I mean orate) on some old wives' tale, as he often does, his audience sits up and takes notice open-mouthed.

If we did not know the context, the passage above might be catnip for the old, snarling agnostic who wishes to harpoon everyone's faith on the same skewer. There is nothing wrong with superstitions provided that we do not use them to account for everything under the sun (the same can be said, as it were, for science, as Erasmus indicates), but we are not talking about mere superstition. A believer may think less of folly because his God has never laughed; or he may think more of it because he can only find his attempts at knowledge ridiculous. Folly suggests that she is holy exactly for this second reason, and as the treatise progresses from encyclopaedic satire to ironic cavilling to stern moralizing, we become far more inclined to believe her.    

These days Erasmus and other humanists are read mostly by those who are forced to read them, which is both good and bad since so few would appreciate him for what he really is: a blissfully happy Christian apologist with a nasty sense of humor. In this way he is the direct ancestor of this gentleman of letters and this pundit of Catholic ideals.  While Praise of Folly may lose something in translation as a work steeped in the tradition and tongue of Rome, it boils and seethes at the right moments, producing an effect much like the lifting of those fogs that forever strive to cloud our judgments – and our judgment is clouded more often than not. We consecrate ourselves to nothing in particular and deem the whole matter a waste of breath and blood. Yet how are we to know the value of our other actions and thoughts – love, curiosity, nostalgia, friendship, regret, faith, atonement – if not for those odd moments of indigence? How are we to ponder the eternal if we cannot step back and curl our toes in the sumptuous brown earth? It is so very hard to forget that brown earth. It is so warm and solid, a museum to all the skeletons of all the generations that once walked upon it. And like so many of us think ourselves either God or mortal, something in-between may be most appropriate.