Julian Barnes, “Something to Declare”

I tend to think of Julian Barnes as an all-English writer but I realize, that’s probably just because he used to rather famously play tennis with Martin Amis. (So very English!) But it turns out that Barnes is Francophone and something of a Flaubert scholar — ack, Flaubert’s Parrot, of course he’s a Flaubertiste. So Something to Declare is a nice little collection of various Francophilia subjects: tourism in France, the Tour de France, Henry James and Edith Wharton touring France, French food…. and in the kind of cleverness this book is full of, “French letters.” (A pun: you might not recognize that as an old-fashioned term for condoms.) Most of these pieces, in fact, are reviews for the usual suspects: The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Flaubert "dissecting Madame Bovary." He looms large in this book.

Well, cleverness about the French: how delightful! In a book like this there are going to be hits and misses and only because I am conscientious did I read all of the essay on Boris Vian, Jacques Brel and Georges Brassens,which was a waste of time because I don’t know what any of them sounds like. Ditto the essays on films I hadn’t seen. But when Barnes is writing about literary figures, that’s when the fun starts, because he treats Baudelaire and Mallarmé and George Sand and, yes, Flaubert as if they were friends who had just left the room.

For instance, I was especially entertained by the essay on Louise Colet, Flaubert’s mistress, a figure Barnes handles with both amusement and sympathy. Her writing — of course she wrote — was evidently overheated and bombastic, she herself always the heroine of the tale. Here’s how Barnes describes  Colet’s thinly veiled account of her affair with a celebrated poet (the character “Albert” in Colet’s novel, Alfred de Musset in history):

Musset was clearly unsafe in a cab at any speed, and as Flaubert sardonically reminded Louise, ‘Convention has it that one doesn’t go for a moonlight drive with a man for the purpose of admiring the moon.’ But Louise went for many moonlight drives with the poet. Musset would turn up drunk and imploring on her doorstep and — such being her reverence for glory — he eventually got into her bed.

One of the most engaging essays covers the correspondence between George Sand and Flaubert, who were literary friends in middle age. Barnes calls this a correspondence in which Flaubert manages “to attain both equality and difference.” They argued, they gossiped, they tried to hammer out the basic question of What Fiction Was For, and ended up on opposite sides of the question. Sand became “increasingly prone to giving Flaubert increasingly basic advice… She has told him to get married… she has told him not to be grumpy;… told him to eat properly, take walks, and do some gym…” Barnes straddles respect and irreverence in these essays. If this is the kind of thing you like, you’ll like it a lot.

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.

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?

Stacy Schiff, “Cleopatra”

I don’t read a lot of biographies, but if more of them were like Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra, that would change.

On the other hand, it’s hard to know how there could be more biographies like this, because what Schiff does is more or less turn the genre on its head, simultaneously pulling apart two thousand years worth of misinformation and re-constructing a new version of the Egyptian queen’s life, complete with rich and lively descriptions of the historical context and settings. I have never been particularly interested in the ancient world, largely because it seemed too alien. I could not get a purchase on it, so to speak. Schiff fixes that situation permanently with her sense-rich descriptions of settings: the flamboyant glory of Alexandria, the self-conscious rectitude of Rome, the insect-ridden swamp of Actium, where Antony and Cleopatra’s military strategy came unglued. Schiff on Cleopatra’s visit to Rome, a “provincial backwater” in the year 46: “It was still the kind of place where a stray dog might deposit a human hand under the breakfast table, where an ox could burst into the dining room. As displacements went, this one was akin to sailing from the court of Versailles to eighteenth-century Philadelphia.”

You can see the appeal: Schiff writes with graceful, wry authority, able to mobilize the ideal detail and the ideal quotation to make her point. Which is, to be crudely reductive, that history has distorted Cleopatra’s character. After all, the sources are Roman. Winners get to write history, so Cleopatra’s startling intelligence and competence — not to mention her immense wealth — are eclipsed by tales of her beauty and sexual sorcery. What, after all, do most of us believe about Cleopatra? That she seduced both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and later killed herself with an asp.

The true story is actually much more interesting. Cleopatra was not even Egyptian, for starters — the family of Ptolemies from which she descended was Greek in origin. She may not have been beautiful but she was certainly magnetic, extremely well-educated, and a brilliant linguist. Alexandria, the richest and most culturally advanced city on the Mediterranean (remember, the famous library was one of the wonders of the Western world) was the capital city of Egypt, which was in turn a vassal state to Rome. The Ptolemies were thus often called on to provide arms, men, and ships to Roman military efforts. The difficulty was deciding which Roman to back, as the Republic was politically unstable. Cleopatra supported successively  Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, and her support included not only the usual war matériel but also strategy, luxury, and sex. As Schiff says of Antony and Cleopatra, “As of the winter of 35 it is impossible to deny a full-blooded romance, if by romance we mean a congenial, intimate past, a shared family, a shared bed, and a shared vision of the future.” But Cleopatra had bet on the wrong man. Antony’s conflict with Octavian for control of the Roman republic ends in disaster. He commits suicide, messily, and Cleopatra follows suit using, sorry, plain old poison. This final section of the book lays out the inexorable progress of their tragedy in completely gripping fashion. It’s easy to see what writers like Plutarch and Shakespeare have seen in Cleopatra’s story, but for my money Schiff’s version is even more captivating.

Elif Batuman: “The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them”

Whooosh! That sound I hear is the flames taking hold as Elif Batuman burns her bridges, leaving academia behind — or so I thought. After writing The Possessed, with its hilarious accounts of graduate student cliques and academic conferences, how could she ever go back? I was certain, after snorting and giggling my way through this book, that it was a not-so-fond farewell. Yet I have to admit that I began to doubt this interpretation. For funny as some of it is, The Possessed is animated by a deep love of literature, and of Russian literature in particular. I am no great connoisseur of the Russian novel but even I can tell that Batuman has thought hard about those great old guys, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and Isaac Babel and Arthur Conan Doyle. (Yep. That’s what’s fun here.) And she cares about what they have to say. More, she believes firmly that literature can help us make sense of life, and she demonstrates how it has done so for her. The moment when she won me over completely was when she wrote, “I was at that time greatly under the sway of The Portrait of a Lady, a book in which one finds the following line :’ Afterwards, however, she always remembered that one should never regret a generous error.’ As a result I was constantly rethinking all my conservative decisions and amending them in favor of ‘generous errors,’ a category which surely included going to Samarkand to learn the great Uzbek language.”

Okay, that’s complicated. Let me back up. Elif Batuman is a very smart girl of Turkish descent who grew up in New Jersey. She learned Turkish at home, and Russian as a linguistics undergraduate. Somehow — she hardly seems to know how herself — she got sucked into Russian literature, and became a comparative literature graduate student at Stanford. The Possessed tells this tale, along with analyzing some of the books she read most attentively. The comic set-pieces are a conference on Babel (this is the one that had me laughing out loud on the subway and attracting way too much attention), another conference on Tolstoy at his home in Russia, and Batuman’s summer learning Uzbek in Samarkand. Her life intersects with literature, which in turn informs her decisions and the way she perceives the world, never more clearly than in the final section when she analyzes Dostoyevsky’s Demons (which used to be called The Possessed). It occurred to me, reading the last segment, that perhaps each narrative section of the book, which more or less tracks one literary work, mirrors that work,  but I’m too lazy to go back and check this theory. But I wouldn’t put that kind of tricky structure past Batuman, who in fact now teaches at Stanford.

Brenda Wineapple, “Sister Brother: Gertrude & Leo Stein”

I knew very little about Gertrude Stein before reading this — the famous Picasso portrait, Biography of Alice B. Toklas, “Rose is a rose is a rose,” and 27, rue de Fleurus in Paris about summed it up.

I did not know that she had a brother name Leo who was her most intimate connection for years. I didn’t know that he and she collected art together, or that eventually they simply stopped talking. Leo moved out of their shared apartment, and his later attempts to resume contact were rebuffed. He was dead to her. So here we have a wonderful work, combining Paris, art, literature, and family dysfunction. I could hardly have been more delighted.

Wineapple is an academic so the book is researched with phenomenal thoroughness (the footnotes made my head ache, just thinking about all the manuscript letters and journals she had to read). But she’s also a singularly effective and graceful writer so the deadly academic taint is nowhere present. Here’s a sentence from page 2, for instance, that I flagged: “Gertrude and Leo Stein lived among these canvases until 1914, arguing philosophy and psychology and art, reading, writing, painting, reflecting — in short, savoring the privilege of a sufficiently financed life.” Zingg! Beautifully phrased and remarkably discerning.

In fact, Wineapple’s psychological acuity is probably the crucial component of this book.  She is generous to both of her crotchety, difficult protagonists. She even has thoughtful comments on Gertrude’s baffling prose and her totalitarian, elbows-out approach to relationships. It’s a wonderful creative attitude, an example of “tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.”

But Sister Brother is also formed by a fine sense of drama. After all, it could be argued that these well-to-do, highly educated people did little besides go to school, buy paintings, and argue. What Wineapple manages to do is to make the arguments into what they clearly were for Gertrude and Leo — primal conflicts.

Valedictory sentence: “Leo died one year after his sister, the American failure par excellence who had never been able to bind curiosity to ambition and hurl them toward a single-minded objective.” Wonderful summation of what it takes.

Jane Mulvagh, “Madresfield: The Real Brideshead”

This one’s a little frustrating. Madresfield is a little-known English country house that served as the inspiration for Brideshead Revisited.  But part of what made it interesting to Mulvagh was its early history and the fact that the house has been lived in by the same family for hundreds of years. I suspect the book is actually a PhD. dissertation with pretty illustrations; there’s a lot of enthusiasm about the range of documents I could not quite share.

Lots of description of the countryside, lots of narrative about Elgar’s relationship with the family but the really juicy stuff doesn’t happen until page 277 when it transpires that the 7th Earl, father of seven, a devout churchman, was also bisexual and indiscreet.  Big scandal, exile to Europe, etc. Lots of collateral damage done to the children; Evelyn Waugh was a friend of one of the daughters. Hence the source of his inspiration.

Mulvagh clearly feels strongly about the house and grateful to the current chatelaine; one senses her discretion about the scandal and the emotional fallout.  She does make the point that the Lygon children, like Waught’s Flytes, were cast out of Eden as a result of their father’s misbehavior.  The girls couldn’t marry “well,” and the boys were troubled. Perhaps most interesting is the point made by David Cannadine in the Foreword, that the true inspiration for Brideshead was not “a Vanbrugh stage set, a palazzo fortissimo” but a moated manor house, hidden away in a foggy vale. I doubt, though, that this book is going to erase Castle Howard from my mind.

Albert Boime, “Art and the French Commune”

I haven’t really decided what to do about books that I read for work, but Albert Boime’s Art and the French Commune proposed such an interesting idea that I thought it worth sharing. 

By way of background, the French Commune was the short-lived radical government that ruled Paris between March and May of 1871, at the tail end of the Franco-Prussian War.  The official French government only reclaimed control of the city  by means of bloody and destructive street-by-street fighting.  The Palace of the Tuileries was burned, the mairies of most arrondissements were torched, and, famously, the Hotel de Ville went up in flames.  Tens of thousands of Communards were executed in reprisal.

Albert Boime’s thesis is that the Impressionists, who first exhibited together in 1874, used their new style of art to recover the image of Parisian public spaces as places of leisure and light where the classes could mingle.  And indeed, when you think about the goals of these painters – to depict everyday life in all its fleeting moments – you think Boime might be right.  He walks you through certain locales that had seen fierce fighting, and shows you canvases from a few years later… la la la, it never happened. A railroad bridge blown up in 1871 is intact in a Pissarro canvas from 1872.  Renoir’s famous Moulin de la Galette was a major arms depot during the Commune.  On and on. 

Boime’s irritation and disappointment in the Impressionists does weaken his argument.  Most of them sympathized with the left and he is angry that they appear to have bought into a national agenda of repression and erasure.  (The French term for this is “oubli” or forgetfulness: it came in handy repeatedly during the 19^th century.)  It makes him furious that Monet, in a painting of the Tuileries, manages to make the wreckage pretty.  Boime  doesn’t succeed in convincing me  that this was a concerted effort.  Those Impressionists could barely manage to exhibit together every few years.  I can’t see them actually agreeing on a strategy to wipe out the memory of a civic disaster.  But it is interesting, still, that these artists, each on a strictly individual artistic journey, all made paintings that reclaimed the sites of war as sites of civic pleasure.