Harmonie

We bought a bunch of books at the Festival of Books held last weekend on the campus of UCLA. One of our purchases appears to the left: The Cosmographical Glass, Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe by a guy who knows one whole lot about Renaissance diagrams of the universe, Mr. S.K. Heninger, Jr. The picture on the cover — wrapping around the spine — shows one such diagram; a scheme of the heavens with a fairly weedy-looking Atlas in the center.

More like that await inside. The Cosmological Glass is a collection of hundreds of pictures snipped from books printed before 1700 the common thread of which is their attempt to visualize ideas of the universe, both ancient and new-emerging — Aristotle to Copernicus. Some illustrate different versions the solar system, heliocentric or wrongocentric; others gamely take on the entire cosmos. Still others, like the one below, try to show how the four elements — air, earth, water, fire — though separate and even antithetical are yet somehow bound mathematically. The math in this one is symbolized by the interlinking circles.

Heninger quotes a spellcheck-defying epigraph from a 1632 volume of Ovid about those elements:

Fire, Aire, Earth, Water, all the Opposites
That strove in Chaos, powrefull Love unites;
And from their Discord drew this Harmonie,
Which smiles in Nature.

The Cosmographical Glass was printed first in 1977 and brought out again in 2004. To this the newer edition Mr. Heninger adds a fresh forward. The last paragraph of the forward took me by surprise:

For cosmologists of the Renaissance, study of the heavens involved parallel inquiries, both theological and introspective, and led to the recognition of a providential plan. While I wish in no way to denigrate or deride the accomplishments of my own generation of cosmologists, I still must ask, where are they leading us?

The Cosmographical Glass
Renaissance Diagrams of the Universe
by S. K. Heninger
(Huntington Library Press, Paperback, 232pp.)

Surface Level

What? You haven’t read Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time? Oh. Well. Then you’ve missed bits like this:

Barbara used to say: ‘Eleanor should never have been removed from the country. It is cruelty to animals.’ She was also fond of remarking: ‘Eleanor is not a bad old girl when you get to know her,’ a statement unquestionably true; but, since human life is lived largely at surface level, that encouraging possibility, true or false, did not appreciably lighten the burden of Eleanor’s partners.

Snarky Barbara and unwinsome Eleanor, here mere teens, are only two of the dozens and dozens of struggling Brits who meet, part, meet again and part again through the twelve novels (collected in four volumes which Powell called “movements”) that together make one big ol’ story. Dance covers fifty years (1920s to 70s) in the lives of English literati, artists, financiers, politicos and what we’d now call “media figures.”

I guess Dance is very nom de cleffy for those in the know, but I’m not the least in the know and I still liked it. You’d like it, too.

A Dance to the Music of Time
First Movement
by Anthony Powell
(University of Chicago Press, Paperback, 732pp.)

A Dance to the Music of Time
Second Movement
by Anthony Powell
(University of Chicago Press, Paperback, 746pp.)

A Dance to the Music of Time
Third Movement
by Anthony Powell
(University of Chicago Press, Paperback, 731pp.)

A Dance to the Music of Time
Fourth Movement
by Anthony Powell
(University of Chicago Press, Paperback, 804pp.)

City of Books

We took a bunch of photos while visiting the
Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
on the campus of UCLA today.

You Are Here.

Eric Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar, the festival mascot,
appears beneath a directory.

✳

Throngs Descending a Staircase

See that noisy throng on the incline in the background?
They ascend and descend the Janss Steps in order to visit — or hurry away from — the vast encampment of splendid tents to which cunning booksellers, well-versed in the arts of enticement, lure the innocent.

✳

City of Books

Now we are at the top of the Janss Steps looking down.
That gleaming sea of booths below — looking as though a small cohort of booksellers had pitched camp, laying siege to UCLA — represents but one section of the vasty Festival of Books, and not even the biggest section.

✳

Peter, Paul and Mary with neither Paul nor Mary

Peter Yarrow sang Puff the Magic Dragon.

✳

The Dog

We met a dog.

✳

You Cannot Lie to the Caterpillar

Already footsore and sunburnt we made a quiet departure from the festival before we were forced to undergo enhanced interrogation.

❁

Les Comédiens

Scaramouche, Rafael Sabatini’s bestselling swashbuckler from 1921 (subtitle: “A Romance of the French Revolution”), fills all the reader’s “He laughed quietly and flicked a speck of dust off his lace cuffs” needs. André-Louis, our young stabby hero, does a lot of quiet laughing and speck flicking, imperturbable in the face of opposing swordsmen intent on puncturing him, because… well, because that’s what we the readers hired him to do. No Danny Kaye whooping and scurrying away from the fencing master. André-Louis does all the skewering here, highlighting his sangfroid with good mots beginning, “Ah, Sir! I do you an injustice to suppose a mere trifle, etc.”

Nor can the young gallant so much as ask the time of the many madamoiselles crowding his life without tossing in a dollop of “Ah! But your beauty is such that” blarney. But the chicks dig it. They actually expect to have their hands kissed.

Sabatini seems pretty proud of the plot he concocted for Scaramouche; and it is a doozy: the young, illegitimate law student André-Louis, raised as a son by Squire Allworthy… er, I mean the Lord of Gavrillac… becomes an outlaw, accused of sedition back when sedition meant something. He hides himself amid a band of travelling players — “comédienes” — assuming the part of the stock character Scaramouche — a swaggering bravado. From there he goes to become master of a Parisian fencing school and from there to a duelling member of the National Assembly — don’t worry; it all makes sense on the fly — from which lofty perch he confronts his rock in the road, le Marquis de La Tour d’Azyr, a supercilious aristocrat who murdered his pal and made André-Louis a fugitive and… ah, but that’s all plot stuff.

Me, I enjoyed the twisty plot well enough, but all those well-telegraphed surprises take a back seat to the historical novel goodies Sabatini packs in to give his hero a suitable stage on which to laugh quiety and flick specks of dust from his lace cuffs. Every room we enter is “overwhelmingly gilded with an abundance of ormolu encrustations on the furniture.” Indeed, if a character remains still too long he stands a good chance of himself being encrusted by with an abundance of ormolu. Mr. Sabatini encrusts with a lavish hand.

And if you have an appointment — a tryst, a duel, a dry ironic speech before the Assembly — why take a mere carriage when you can ride in 17th century Sabatini style? Get yourself a cabriolet, a chaise, a berline, a brougham, a surrey, a calèche, or — Hang the expense, man! — a “coach with its escutcheoned panels, its portly coachman and its white-stockinged footman.”

Great fun, if not quite so peppy as Sabatini’s other blockbuster from the twenties, Captain Blood. But, then, with a title like Captain Blood you’re already halfway there.

Scaramouche
by Rafael Sabatini
(W. W. Norton & Company, Paperback, 416pp.)

I.C.E., I.C.E., Baby

I saw The Visitor last summer in one of the few nearby cinemas that show films with no car chases. The movie was, well, okay I guess. Moving. Sweet. Wouldn’t press it on anyone. Still, when I thought the other day how the family might like a change of pace in Netflix selections — a movie made by grown-ups for grown-ups — I remembered Thomas McCarthy’s low-key tale about a grieving professor of economics who gets all tied up in the lives — and drum music — of a couple of illegals. I summonsed the red envelope. It arrived, we encouched, it spun. Credits. Lovely story. Touching.

But hard to recommend. From the minute you see the title in tiny white helvetica peeking coyly from the lower right of the black screen you begin to suspect — and when you hear the aimless solo piano notes plonking at odd intervals — well, from that moment you know what you’re in for and you must either switch at once to episodes of Frasier or prepare your mind to be… improved.

Because improvement — that other way movie makers treat their audience as children — is what’s on the table. How will you be improved? So many ways:

You will learn that Americans, no matter the race or ethnicity, are boors. The simpering white women above was so impolite as to tell Zainab the Senegalese Lady Artist that she herself had once been to Africa. The nerve! Maybe not so insensitive as clapping Zainab the Senegalese Lady Artist in chains, but, you know, it’s a slippery slope.

You will learn that Americans, especially but not exclusively white guys, are so uptight you can bounce quarters off their superegos. But — and here is where the Academy Award™ for lead actor Richard Jenkins comes in — they are teachable. Stick a djembe between a Puritan’s skinny shanks, give him a few words of instruction (“Don’t think.”) and stand back as the Florsheim shoes fly off.

You will learn, to your surprise, that the immigration authorities of the United States are too strict. Yes: too strict. Which explains why so few illegal aliens are here to play the djembes Americans won’t play.

You will learn that followers of Islam are joyful, artistic, open-hearted people in no way represented by that minority who explode. The only bang you can expect from these musical Muslims is the one they do on their drums all day.

It’s an actor’s movie, I’ll say that. The director is an actor and so are the cast members. Not the breath of a hint of a ghost of a weak performance. Even the student with the late paper. Even the elderly piano teacher. Even the guy from upstairs holding Sprinkles the Dog. Why, even Sprinkles toed the mark. The estimable Richard Jenkins, you may remember, came this close to grasping an Oscar statuette for his work in The Visitor, but the prize was snatched from his outstretched hand.

That’s okay. He’ll always have his djembe:

An Oddly Decorated Room

My college-age offspring, Mlle NiceWork, got a kick out of Jeremy Irons’ performance in the recent film, Appaloosa – also in the less recent Reversal of Fortune — and so I thought it would be fun for her if we dug up his breakout role in the BBC version of Brideshead Revisted.

And it was fun to see Mr. Irons as young Charles Ryder searching for love in Oxford, of all places, and in various nooks of the Stately Homes of England (more promising). Before playing the DVD, though, I sternly warned Mlle NiceWork, who had just read the 1945 Evelyn Waugh novel, that apart from serving as a sort of Classics Comics Illustrated visualization of the period (England between the Great War and the Even Greater War) the BBC TV series was all wrong.

My dim memory of the beloved mini-series — dim because of BBC-induced narcolepsy — was all too accurate: swell acting, instructive travel-documentary-style location shots, but the story, a pretty zippy one as Waugh tells it, ruined by having been BBC’d into an eleven hour Noh Theater performance.

In its printed form Brideshead Revisited contains not a wasted word. But the filmmakers managed to stretch it beyond Silly Putty tolerance with long lyrical scenes meant to evoke Languorous Youth, more gazing upon the Stones of Venice than even Ruskin could bear, and patience-testing shots lingering hungrily over Rococo sitting rooms — the ponderous whole weighed down still further with an oboe-intensive soundtrack that makes you wonder if it contains a subliminal layer urging you to quit smoking.

Worse, the filmmakers and scriptwriter John Mortimer reduced Brideshead to a boy/boy romance. Which is like reading The Dark Night of the Soul as a vampire novel.

The center of Brideshead Revisited, as revised by Granada Television, is missing.

Sure, they get the outline: Love-starved only child Charles Ryder looking for romance as an Oxford student in the twenties finds it in the person of a charming eccentric, Sebastian Flyte — but still more in Sebastian’s family of Catholic aristocrats — and even more in their vast hereditary country estate: Brideshead. Charles loves Sebastian in a schoolboy way, later loves Sebastian’s sister Julia in an adulterous way for a doomed while — but from first to last he loves the mansion, murals, gilt furniture, fountain, art nouveau chapel and all the environs of Brideshead .

Okay, so where is the center of Waugh’s great wartime lament? Sebastian’s youngest sister, fifteen year-old Cordelia, cajoles Charles into taking her out to dinner one evening. While eating happily and heartily, she describes how the economically reduced Flyte family is retrenching after the death of Lady Marchmain, under the aegis of the eldest son, Brideshead:

“They’ve closed the chapel at Brideshead, Bridey and the Bishop; Mummy’s requiem was the last mass said there. After she was buried the priest came in — I was there alone. I don’t think he saw me — and took out the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy water stoup and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary and left the tabernacle open and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn’t any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room.”

But I don’t suppose that meant anything to the executives at BBC, poor modern Brits.

Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh
(Back Bay Books, Paperback, 368pp.)

Atlas Snogged

I was gamely marching through Ayn Rand’s Big Book of Mottoes (aka Atlas Shrugged) when I was brought up short on page 108. Two of the main puppets, Dagny and Francisco, do their automatonic best to raise a blush by slipping off their morality play ID placards (Hers: “Rational Thinker.” His: “Untrammelled Will.”). Thus unencumbered, Miss Dagny and Don Francisco commence to scurry around nudely and violently in this steamin’ passage:

That summer, she met him in the woods, in the hidden corners by the river, on the floor of an abandoned shack, in the cellar of the house. These were the only times when she learned to feel a sense of beauty [!] —by looking up [!] at the old wooden rafters or at the steel plate of an air-conditioning machine that whirred tensely, rhythmically above their heads. She wore slacks or cotton summer dresses, yet she was never so feminine as when she stood beside him, sagging [!] in his arms, abandoning herself to anything he wished, in open acknowledgment of his power to reduce her to helplessness by the pleasure he had the power to give her. He taught her every manner of sensuality he could invent [!]. “Isn’t it wonderful that our bodies can give us so much pleasure?” he said to her once, quite simply [!]. They were happy and radiantly innocent. The were both incapable of the conception [!] that joy is sin. [Exclamation points of incredulity mine.]

The idea (or “conception”) that “joy is sin” evidently being one of those annoying Shackles on the Unfree Mind holding the rest of us plebians in thrall but which Fearless Iconoclast Ayn shatters with her Hammer of Individualistic Objectivism. Or is it the Fifteen Pound Sledgehammer of Unmodulated Interminable Polemics? They look so much alike.

Anyhow, that particular passage, so full of abandonment in abandoned places — the sort of Hefner tripe that in 1957 would have earned the panting blurbist’s stamp “candid” or “frank” — was my signal to abandon Rand. To be fair, I flipped through the remaining acreage of Ayn’s Bible in search of something, anything, like a novel, but, no, no, what follows is only a ceaseless parade of sloganeering that makes Mao’s Cultural Revolution look like School for Scoundrels. Here, for example, are some Words to Live By on page 565:

“But nothing can justify injustice.”

Hence the designation, eh, Ayn? But wait! Here’s another profundity from page 1012:

“But to think is an act of choice.”

You think?

I do. I think I’ll re-read Brideshead Revisited.

Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
(Plume Books, Paperback, 1192pp.)

When Novels Were Novels

On Christmas Day, back in the fraught year of 1914, Metta Hiley presented her Aunt May with this copy of Earl Derr Biggers’ bestselling mystery Seven Keys to Baldpate. You can see her beautiful calligraphic dedication here in my post about The Mystery Bookstore.

When I opened the book and discovered the elegant inscription, I hoped that Aunt May got a kick out of the comedy/mystery/romance back when she unwrapped it nearly a century ago. Now, having read Seven Keys to Baldpate for myself, I’m certain she did. The novel fulfills the three basic requirements of the comedy/mystery/romance genre: it is comic, mysterious, and romantic. Which explains why Baldpate remains in print long after the works of other big-time novelists of the day — Arnold Bennett, say, or Booth Tarkington, or even the esteemed Gertrude Atherton — crumble to dust in used book shops. I expect it will go right on entertaining generations yet unborn.

The story gives us one Billy Magee, successul writer of potboilers, retreating to rural, snowbound Baldpate Inn, the property of a college pal’s dad. Baldpate is a popular summer resort, but when Magee arrives it is empty, shuttered for the winter. Magee, a bit ashamed of his popular hackwork, seeks isolation for the composition of his magnum opus, a serious novel. Instead of seclusion, though, Magee finds himself in the middle of a melodrama involving a high-stakes political scandal, gunplay, star-crossed lovers, a safecracker, detectives and a crazy hermit tossed in for the fun of it.

Biggers has that Wodehousian knack for deliberately postponing plot resolutions just to keep the ball rolling — but somehow never making you impatient. You settle back and enjoy how, for example, he takes what a contemporary writer would render as “Mr. Magee walked outside in the dark” and turns it into:

“The justly celebrated moon that in summer months shed so much glamour on the romance of Baldpate Inn was no where in evidence as Mr. Magee crept along the ground close to the veranda.”

Our dull post-Hemingway, Strunk-and-White infected, current crop of fiction writers might tersely say: “She stared at him coldly.” Not our man, Earl Derr. No, he gives us:

“The lady had a glittering eye; she put it to its time-honored use and fixed Mr. Magee with it.”

Speaking of Wodehouse, I smiled at Magee’s alluding to Rime of the Ancient Mariner with a line which would become a standard of Bertie Wooster — and in this Woosterish context:

He paused and looked at Mr. Magee. “Have you ever stood, poised, on the brink of marriage?” he asked.

“Never,” replied Magee. “But go on. Your story attracts me, strangely.”

If you like P.G. Wodehouse (already in Biggers’ time doing nicely with his Psmith series) and are delighted rather than annoyed with plot complications tossed in merely to forestall the happy ending, you will get a kick out of Metta Hiley’s thoughtful gift to her aunt.

Seven Keys to Baldpate
by Earl Derr Biggers
(Dodo Press, Paperback, 248pp.)

Disassociation

NiceWork is bereft. The little review I’d planned for this space today ran into some difficulties when I took the book I was going to review — The Associate by John Grisham — and stuffed it into the recycle bag after having only penetrated to page 46. You can’t justly discuss a book of which you’ve read only the first 46 pages of its full 373, but then, I suppose a reader rebellion against a plot trick so cheap that it stops you dead in your tracks — well, that is a review of sorts.

Madame NiceWork, who gamely persevered beyond page 46 all the way to the end, assured me The Associate does not justify the veritable “it was all a dream” story cheat, and I choose to trust her judgment. You who have no idea of her rock-solid integrity need not be so credulous. Read it yourself. If you hurry you will find a nearly new copy of The Associate in the blue recycle bin by the curb on Mulholland Drive, L.A.. Pick-up is next Friday.

The Associate
by John Grisham
(Doubleday Books, Hardcover, 373pp.)