Countess of Carnarvon, “Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey”

Actually this post is a twofer, because I also just read Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember. Now why do you suppose I would read these two volumes back to back?

I’ll give you a minute.

Maybe if I add a photo of my passport?

Yes! You got it! I’m heading to  Highclere! Not only that — I’m going on a tour billed as “At Home with the Edwardians: A Tour of Downton Abbey Film Locations.” And I am the “Study Leader.” So I’m studying — hence Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey.  

I must admit I had avoided Lady Almina, largely out of envy, because this book outsells my own To Marry an English Lord and because its author, the Countess, gets to actually live at Highclere. But it was an entertaining and informative read. Almina Wombwell was the illegitimate daughter of Alfred de Rothschild. In a very sophisticated arrangement, her parents stayed together and Rothschild bankrolled Almina’s dowry as well as numerous subsequent expenses. The two appear to have been very happy together, which creates a challenge for the author. Much of the early part of the book is devoted to the running of Highclere, both upstairs and down; Carnarvon clearly had access to excellent records but even anecdotes about the castle’s inhabitants don’t quite add up to a story. Far more interesting was Almina’s devotion to medical care during World War I — she set up a rehabilitation unit at Highclere and later in London. And there’s fascinating material about her husband the Earl of Carnarvon’s Egyptian obsession. He bankrolled Howard Carter’s excavations in the Valley of the Kings, and the two opened King Tut’s tomb together. Almina was there. It’s quite a spell-binding moment, and Carnarvon does a great job with the historical context and the competing political agendas.

As for A Night to Remember, surely you remember those first moments of Season 1, Episode 1, when Lord Grantham takes up his freshly-ironed newspaper and reads that the Titanic has sunk? Evidently Walter Lord’s book about that event is still authoritative. He interviewed scores of survivors and put together a deceptively simple moment-by-moment narrative that makes for amazingly suspenseful reading, considering that we all know more or less what happened. It’s the fascination of the horror movie, when you see the monster creeping up on the campfire where all those innocents are cluelessly toasting marshmallows. Lord speculates that the Titanic tragedy still exerts fascination as a kind of precursor to the loss of innocence brought about by World War I. He doesn’t press the point, but the sinking of the unsinkable ship does make for an excellent metaphor. The assurance of the 19th century gives way to the jittery insecurity of the 20th — and all because we didn’t know what we didn’t know.

Will Schwalbe, “The End of Your Life Book Club”

I’m cheating here. Normally I don’t blog about a book unless I finish it, and my bookmark is stuck on page 292 of 326 in The End of Your Life Book Club. I just couldn’t face the chapter entitled “My Father’s Tears.” But that’s a compliment to Will Schwalbe; he made me care about his family. And I did know all along where this book was going. I just couldn’t go all the way with it.

Here’s the premise: in 2007 the accomplished and hard-working Mary Anne Schwalbe is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, for which there is no cure yet. The End of Your Life Book Club is about the books that Mary Anne and her son Will read during the last years of her life. It’s not in the least bit sentimental, but it is searing in places. It’s about life, love, and literature. The rhythm of chemo and checkups and dwindling strength, mouth sores and sleepless nights, good days and bad is interspersed with Will and Mary Anne’s discussions of a startling array of books. Will, who was at the time editor in chief of Hyperion Books, writes in the short first chapter, “Reading isn’t the opposite of doing; it’s the opposite of dying.”

Below, a random alphabetical slice from the list of books the two Schwalbes read and discussed during Mary Anne’s illness:

• Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
• The Haggadah
• David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter 
• Susan Halpern, The Etiquette of Illness 
• Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train; The Price of Salt; The Talented Mr. Ripley 
• Khaled Hosseini, The Kite Runner; A Thousand Splendid Suns 
• John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
• Christopher Isherwood, The Berlin Stories; Christopher and His Kind 
• Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat 

They read Ken Follett and Alistair MacLean and Rohinton Mistry, Solzhenitsyn and Sendak. Not everything is analyzed in detail but everything is taken seriously, on its merits. These are people for whom reading is as important as oxygen.

But one of them is dying. So braided into the literary discussion is Schwalbe’s thoughtful account of his mother’s courage and stamina as well as the nuts and bolts of that terrible cancer trajectory. They discuss books; they discuss death. At the end of the last oncologist’s appointment, when she has decided to stop treatment, Mary Anne signs a new Do Not Resuscitate form. Then the doctor says, “Do you mind if I give you a hug?”

It’s not a very hopeful sign when your oncologist gives you a good-bye hug — but that only went through my mind later. It was a hug of genuine sweetness and affection: two people comforting each other, like sisters parting before one left on a long trip to a distant land.”

That’s where I stopped. Maybe you’ll get through to the end. After all, there aren’t that many books about the life-and-death power of reading.

Bob Tarte, “Kitty Cornered”

Who reads cat books? Me, apparently.

Fred’s not so bad, it turns out.

Kitty Cornered was a gift from a lovely friend who must be extremely sensitive, because she gathered from the occasional faint protest that Beloved Husband and I were sometimes puzzled by our cat’s behavior. Really, we never complain about him. Not about the scars on our hands, or the electronic food box set to pop open at 2 a.m.  Certainly we never moan about his elaborate slimming diet or his equally elaborate beauty rituals (two brushes; bribery-fueled manicures).

And now that I’ve met the creatures in Kitty Cornered, I would never dare criticize  an 18-pound long-hair who sleeps 16 hours a day. You want cat trouble? Bob Tarte has cat trouble times six. He also has trouble with ducks, parakeets, and rabbits, but I could only concentrate on the felines. Some of this is laugh-out-loud funny, especially since Tarte is ready to throw his sense of dignity under the bus. Guess that’s crucial with six cats. He’s also clear about his emotional bonds with the animals, especially with the skittish, damaged Frannie whose integration into the household is the somewhat attenuated narrative arc of the book.

Does it get dull sometimes? Yes.

Did I read the whole thing? Yes. Willingly.

Will you like it? I think you can tell by now.

Caroline Moorehead, “Dancing to the Precipice”

Lucie Dillon de la Tour du Pin has been vaguely on my radar for a long time; her memoirs show up in  bibliographies when you’re reading about pre-Revolutionary Versailles, or for that matter, about the revolution itself — or even Napoleonic France. To write Dancing to the Precipice, Caroline Moorehead used Lucie’s memoir as a primary source, but the memoir takes us only up to 1814, and Lucie lived until 1850 — yes, her life spanned the reigns of Louis XV to Napoleon III (as president). For the later years, Moorehead refers to Lucie’s many letters. Throughout the book she provides not only historical context, but also the kinds of details I need to help me imagine history: weather, clothes, food, pastimes. For instance, in one of the happiest times of Lucie’s life, when she was farming outside Albany, New York during the Terror, she milked and made butter wearing a black and blue-striped woolen skirt, like the other Hudson County housewives.

Versailles: one of Lucie de la Tour du Pin's worlds

Sometimes, I’ll admit, I wished that I was reading just Lucie’s own words; Moorehead quotes liberally but her subject’s voice is necessarily diluted. And sometimes I had the feeling that the tale just goes on a little bit too long, but I think that’s an inveterate novel-reader’s complaint. Authors of biography don’t get to tidy up the long, uneventful years. Since I just finished the book, and it ends with many years of Lucie’s life becoming sadder and narrower, I have to make a little effort to reconstruct the exhilaration I felt in reading the first half.

Henriette-Lucie Dillon makes an ideal chronicler of her era. On the one hand, as a grand aristocrat, she had perfect access to the grandeur of her era. Daughter of a count, wife of a marquis, she served as one of Marie Antoinette’s ladies in waiting and frequented the salons of Napoleonic France. But she’s also appealing to our democratic age: despite her belief in the aristocratic system, she judges individuals and herself according to ideals familiar to us, like courage, humor, intelligence and lack of vanity. She can be grand, but she can also be funny. (Talleyrand, the arch-schemer who keeps recurring throughout her era, comes in for barbed admiration.) She adores her family and handles loss with enormous fortitude.

The most vivid part of the book, of course, is the first section when Moorehead and la Tour du Pin in tandem depict the years leading up to the revolution. Lucie looks back with hindsight on the splendor and waste and heedlessness and beauty and cultivation, while Moorehead adroitly follows the saga of the forces and characters who produced the revolution. (It was probably helpful that I’d read Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety.) Just one detail to whet your appetite: The Duc de Chartres, nephew of Louis XVI, was a wastrel prince who spent his days before the revolution in the Palais-Royal, and developed a system for rating all the women he knew. The available grades were “beautiful, pretty, passable, ugly, frightful, hideous, and abominable.” A bas les aristos!

Nathaniel Philbrick, “Why Read Moby-Dick?”

“There are no tricks — there is only enthusiasm.” That, according to my admittedly flawed memory, is legendary femme fatale Pamela Harriman’s explanation of how she managed to ensnare so many powerful men in her lifetime. My husband takes this to mean that men are pathetically easy to please, but I think the message is broader: eagerness to share your pleasure has powerful appeal. You could, if you wanted to be snarky, say that Nathaniel Philbrick’s Why Read Moby-Dick? is just a high-brow fan magazine. But you’d have to have a pretty hard heart to resist Philbrick’s ardor for what he calls “the greatest American novel ever written.”

Not white, not Moby, but a sperm whale

He starts — oh, very cleverly! — on December 16, 1850, a moment Herman Melville wrote into the novel, bringing himself to the foreground of the fiction as he composed the novel. This attention to Melville’s self-referential moment puts the struggling, sympathetic young author in front of us as he wrestles with this massive, unwieldy narrative. Then Philbrick moves back to give us some context, both for Melville and for the United States of America in 1850. This was the year the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, and Philbrick sees Moby-Dick as, among other things, a rumination on the toxic existence of slavery in the supposedly democratic United States. But he points out that the book is not an allegory: while mad Captain Ahab might see the great white whale as a symbol of the evil in the world, Nathaniel Philbrick draws our attention to Moby Dick’s detailed physical presence: “In the end he is just a huge, battle-scarred albino sperm whale, and that is more than enough.”

Well — yes and no. There’s a constant toggling back and forth in Philbrick’s book, between Moby-Dick and Melville, between the chronology of the fiction and the chronology of its author. But that reiterating shift in focus just mirrors Melville’s own disconcerting slipping among whales, THE whale, and “the whale” (standing in for something much larger). They are all interwoven, and Philbrick helps us appreciate how the liveliness and convincing quality of Melville’s imagined episodes function on several levels.

Philbrick comes to this material naturally: ten years ago he won a National Book Award for In the Heart of the Sea, which recounted the tragic 1819 voyage of the whaler Essex. This was the incident that provided the seed for Moby-Dick. Since then Philbrick has written on other big stories in the history of nineteenth-century America (Custer; the exploration of the American interior) and he has an easy authority with the subject at hand. Combine that with his elegant style, some acute literary analysis, and, yes, his enthusiasm, and you’ve got a delightful little book.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, “Between the Woods and the Water”

Between the Woods and the Water takes up exactly where Patrick Leigh Fermor left off at the end of A Time of Gifts; the first sentence reads “Perhaps I had made too long a halt on the bridge.”  (A reminder that beneath the lovely rambling quality of these books lies artful structure.) The bridge crosses the Danube, and PLF is about to enter Hungary for the first time, on Easter Eve. With no further fuss, he sweeps us into a brilliant celebration of Easter in the old cathedral of Esztergom, complete with all the elaborate vestments, military uniforms, and glamor  you could want. (Scimitars! Monocles! Egret feathers!)

Esztergom Cathedral, cars cropped from the photo

Is it my imagination, or is this volume more poignant than the earlier one? And if I’m right, is that because Leigh Fermor is writing nine years after A Time of Gifts? Could the bittersweet edge be that of a man looking back thirty-odd years? Or could it be caused by the knowledge that nothing is left of the sweet, lazy culture of the Hungarian aristocracy that took him in as a youthful wanderer? As our narrator says of his hosts, “Homesick for the past, seeing nobody but their own congeners on the neighboring estates and the peasants who worked there, they lived a backward-looking, a genealogical, almost a Confucian dream and many sentences ended in a sigh.”

Summer is all around Leigh Fermor as he travels across the Great Hungarian Plain on foot paths or roads bad enough to be almost impassable in a car. (This is 1934, remember.)  He is now a thousand miles from England and his mission — to reach Constantinople on foot — is still before him. He is still delighted by much of what he encounters: one host loans him a beautiful mount whom he rides across country for several days. He stops at a peasant’s cottage, the occupant brings him a drink, and, he writes “I sipped it slowly and thought: I’m drinking this glass of milk on a chestnut horse on the Great Hungarian Plain.”

I wonder if Leigh Fermor didn’t write this volume as a memorial of sorts. It’s not just about the aristocrats, but also about the topography, the language, the history, and the tremendous variety of people he meets. For instance, there’s the interlude with a family of Hasidic Jews from Szatmar, who study Torah by paraffin lamp in a remote logging camp. Everyone gets very excited when they read the Psalms together in a hodge-podge of German and Hebrew.

Patrick Leigh Fermor died last month. This book ends with the phrase “To Be Concluded” and I hope there are very complete notes somewhere, though only the most confident writer would dare to mess with PLF’s prose. Anyway, this is the kind of story that just doesn’t emerge organically from modern culture:

One [woman], extremely beautiful and with enormous grey-green eyes, was the daughter of a former Foreign Minister. (At the opera in Paris, where he was staying for the Peace Conference, a friend had asked him who someone — another Rumanian — had married; and he had answered, truthfully, ‘Une grue, hélas.’ ‘Alas, a harlot’ and a few moment later, a hand appeared from the next box, holding a visiting card from the husband in question; there was a duel with pistols and her father was shot through the stomach and spent the rest of his life in great pain.

I’m glad Patrick Leigh Fermor left us some trace of this world.

Asti Hustvedt, “Medical Muses”

One of the most fascinating areas of research for Leaving Van Gogh was the treatment of  mental illness in 19th-century France. Since the novel is set in 1890, it’s natural that I came across the titanic figure of that era, Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot. I even wrote him into LVG by having Dr. Gachet attend one of Charcot’s famous Tuesday Lectures. So Asti Hustvedt’s Medical Muses was a must-read for me, and a hugely satisfying one.

Charcot was one of the founders of modern neurology, and a pioneer in the discovery of the neurological causes of abnormal behavior or illness: for instance, what we call “Lou Gehrig’s disease” is sometimes still known as “Charcot’s disease” in France. But Hustvedt focuses here on Charcot’s work on hysteria, which at the turn of the century was held responsible for a number of mysterious symptoms like partial anaesthesias, paralysis, even the appearance of stigmata — none of which had a discernible organic cause.

Augustine Gleize, photographed at the Salpetriere to illustrate the stages of hysteria

This would be interesting, though abstract, if it weren’t that Charcot’s work at the famous women’s hospital of the Salpêtrière was carefully documented in records both verbal and visual — yes, there were photographs. Thus two of Charcot’s patients, Blanche Wittman and Augustine Gleize, became quite famous in their day. Hustvedt focuses on Blanche, Augustine, and a third woman, Geneviève Legrand, as a way of examining the fascinating, complicated, multi-layered phenomenon of hysteria.

OK, are you ready? Let’s do the sex part first. One of the key characteristics of hysteria, as defined by Charcot and his followers, was that the sufferers had attacks in the course of which they were not themselves, and sexual reverie was a frequent component. The patients at the hospital were all women, and many of them had suffered sexual abuse before arriving at the hospital. The photographs of the patients that illustrate various stages of the hysterical attack are often suggestive. The doctors, naturally, were all men.

Then let’s think about the theatrical element, especially involving hypnosis. An hysterical woman who had lost the use of her left arm — for no clear physical reason — might be hypnotized. When it was found that she could use that arm under hypnosis, it became clear that her paralysis was generated by her psyche. Imagine this fact being demonstrated in a theater, before an audience of physicians and journalists. Imagine hypnotized patients being pierced with pins and feeling no pain, or submitting to post-hypnotic suggestions.

Now look at women, and women’s undefinable complaints. Poor women, mad women, unclassifiable women, women who had sexual urges outside the marital framework.  Hustvedt even brings religion into the mix, since her third case study, Geneviève, was deeply religious. (There’s a remarkable chronological connection with the flourishing of hysteria and the cult of Lourdes.)

That’s a pretty combustible mixture. Hustvedt’s careful research and scholarly writing style tames it all, while the way she frames the narrative in the lives of these three women puts a personal face on many of the issues. The hysteria diagnosis went out of fashion shortly after Charcot’s death in 1893 but as Hustvedt points out, doctors are still puzzled by a variety of complaints — chronic fatigue syndrome, Gulf War syndrome to name only two — that cause suffering without being attributable to physical causes. We now have medications that can alleviate suffering but sometimes we don’t even know how or why they work. Not that different, perhaps, from 1890?

Elaine Sciolino, “La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life”

Elaine Sciolino has a bee in her bonnet.

Not literally, of course. But she’s struggling all the same, you can tell. What is it about those French?  The hot eye from the guys in the street, the sixty-something women whose lacy bras show through their blouses? The perpetual sense of sexual possibility, but even more than that, the priority that French culture places on pleasure? Can an American ever understand the impulse that produced, say, the castle of Chenonceaux, the chocolate éclair, and the cinq à sept?  (Translation: “five to seven,” or the hours during which a ritual infidenity may occur.) Sciolino, Paris correspondent for The New York Times, set out to research the question and La Seductionis her answer.

1796 illustration for "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" -- they've been at this for a while

I have to tell you right now that she does not produce a playbook. Nothing you can say or do will turn you into Maurice Chevalier or Brigitte Bardot, OK? In fact La Seduction is much better at description than at prescription. When Sciolino looks at the fate of France on the world stage, or the plight of the countryside, trying to show how the French impulse to seduce gets the country into trouble in the modern world, the focus wobbles. And when the author takes us on field trips to investigate the role of perfume, the enterprise feels like an extended feature for the travel section of your favorite newspaper. There are also personal-memoir segments that drag, even for a Francophile full of envy at Sciolino’s opportunities. (Notably, the dinner-party sequence at the end, which was certainly more fun to experience than to read about.)

But anyone who’s enjoyed time in France is aware of the phenomenon that so fascinates Sciolino, and it’s very enjoyable to read her terrier-like consideration of the process of seduction as it pervades everyday French life, especially her analysis of the sexual undercurrent in French life which is so very different from life in the U.S. (Note: the book has gotten some publicity from the Dominique Strauss-Kahn scandal, and Sciolino mentions DSK in several places as a legendary womanizer.)

In a way the book itself is another phenomenon familiar to the French — a mildly controversial proposition that can serve as a kind of mental plaything, entertaining and stimulating. Apparently we will never fully understand the role seduction plays in French life, nor will we be able to replicate it (nor, perhaps would we want to). But there are plenty of readers like me who are more than happy to spend a few hours mulling over the question.

Avi Steinberg, “Running the Books”

A friend sold me on this book by quoting the opening line: “Pimps make the best librarians.” The paragraph continues: “Psycho killers, the worst. Ditto con men.” What makes pimps stand out, according to Avi Steinberg, is “the love.” He then shifts into second person, making the reader complicit: “If you’re a pimp, you’ve got love for the library… You’ll find books you’ve always needed, but never knew existed. Books like that indispensable hustler’s tool, the rhyming dictionary.” Aha — of course I would need that if I were a pimp.

Avi Steinberg, prison librarian

Running the Books is Steinberg’s account of his two years as a librarian at Boston’s South Bay House of Correction. Steinberg, raised as an Orthodox Jew, a Harvard graduate whose previous job had been writing obituaries for the Boston Globe, stumbled into his prison gig at a low point in his life. As Running the Books makes clear, the job did not exactly solve all of his problems. But it did shed a bright light on a number of issues, some of which remain — as they should — baffling. For instance, is there room for compassion in a carceral environment? If there is, how can it be expressed?  How about this: what is the role of the written word in a prison? What is the role of narrative? What is the role of a library? And what are we to learn, if anything, from the tragic arcs of some of these characters’ lives? Steinberg, who spent his early teenage years in devout study of the Talmud (and who wrote his Harvard B.A. thesis on Bugs Bunny, thank you) can deploy a lot of fancy abstract thinking but doesn’t make the error of trying to solve this one for us.

He’s a good writer and a funny one, and his time in the library certainly gave him plenty of material. One great riff comes when he names the students in his creative writing class after Thomas Hobbes’ classic description of life in man’s natural condition: “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Sometimes he himself — weedy, mild-mannered — is the punch line of the joke. “‘Listen,’” his buddy Fat Kat tells him one day. “‘You might think you’re a badass. You are not a badass, my friend. You’re at best, a punk. So why don’t you just stick to being a librarian?”

I have to admit that I’m still a little bit confused by Running the Books. The structure is anecdotal and if it’s organized around themes, I didn’t grasp them. Maybe I need firmer guidance than most readers. I also sometimes felt that Steinberg was groping for narrative tension. His relationships with certain inmates provide episodes, but these relationships are going to be strained and fragmented at best. Sometimes Steinberg’s efforts to help an inmate are frustrated or cut short. Or they misfire. Or he misunderstands the context. Or misjudges the moral weight of his actions, as when he bends the library rules for a pimp. He rather enjoys this complicity, until an encounter outside the prison reminds him just what exactly it is that pimps do. Not, actually, a matter to take lightly.

But in a weird way, some merit of Running the Books resides in the errors it avoids. It’s not sentimental, it’s not voyeuristic, it’s not smug or preachy. Possibly, given the great wretched spectacle of American’s prison system, skirting those flaws is sufficient achievement.

Edmund de Waal, “The Hare with Amber Eyes”

I read much less nonfiction than I do fiction. I suppose I am always looking for a story, and nonfiction so rarely provides a narrative thread that I find appealing. But I’ve had Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes on order from Amazon ever since I read a review in The Economist months ago. The US edition subtitles this book, “A Family’s Century of Art and Loss.” Who wouldn’t want to read about that?

The actual “hare with amber eyes” is one of 264 netsuke, tiny carvings once used to fasten kimono and sashes in Japan. The book’s author, Edmund de Waal, inherited the entire group from his uncle Iggie Ephrussi. The collection was purchased in the 1870s by Iggie’s ancestor Charles Ephrussi, a great collector and sophisticate from a Russo-French family. De Waal, a prominent English potter, was fascinated by these captivating objects and their history, entwined with the history of his family. So fascinated that he found himself spending two years rustling through archives, chatting up genealogists, pacing around the palaces (literally) where his predecessors had lived.

the hare of the title, photographed by Martin Argles for the Guardian

Because of my interest in late-19th century Paris I would have loved this book anyway; Charles Ephrussi is reputedly one of the models for Charles Swann, as well as the collector who overpaid Manet for a beautiful painting of a bunch of asparagus. But de Waal is a wonderful writer, and he takes us on his journey, which is as much emotional as intellectual, without a trace of sentimentality. He manages to create characters out of the owners of the netsuke, and somehow layers their lives into his own. He remains present in the narrative, getting lost in his research (way too much time on wedding presents among the echelon of ultra-rich Parisian Jewish families of the era), trying to find an approach to the story that doesn’t feel hackneyed. Because he is thoughtful, he brings fascinating perceptions to the story, as when he ruminates over the performative aspect of taking netsuke out of a vitrine in a Parisian salon, to pass them to your guests. Because he is a craftsman, he has a special appreciation for their qualities, too: their size, their limited color palette, their humor.

He shifts tenses and points of view, slipping easily from the past tense to the present, sometimes addressing the reader. Usually I hate this but it’s very effective here, as when he creates a scene of his grandfather as a small child, playing with the netsuke in the Palais Ephrussi in Vienna. Oh, yes, Vienna, and it’s getting late in the twentieth century to be a Jewish banker in Vienna. The netsuke are casualties, but who can count little beechwood carvings when the damage to people is so extreme?

Yet there is a redemption of sorts. The netsuke, astoundingly, survive the war together and go back to Japan with de Waal’s uncle Iggie, a man for whom postwar Japan was the right place. They now live together in London, and de Waal’s children play with them.

One immense flaw frustrated me: there are no pictures of de Waal’s netsuke in this book, not even on the cover. It probably cost too much to reproduce them. But de Waal speaks of them with such authority and such affection and admiration that I felt thwarted. Fortunately you can see some of them here, and you will want to when you’ve read this book.