Category: Biography

Anka Mühlstein, Balzac’s Omelette (2010).

Good Reads meta-data is 231 pages, rated 3.38 by 184 litizens. 

Genre:  Non-fiction; Species: Gourmet.  

DNA: Gallic.

Verdict: Erudite, witty, and insightful. 

Tagline:  What, where, and when you eat reveals your identify.

Across the panorama of La Comédie humaine, Balzac uses food to evoke character, to establish atmosphere, to reveal social class, to suggest conventions, and more.  He is credited in these pages with being the first author to bring food and eating into fiction.  

The timing was right for this excavator of humanity to do so.  Prior to the French Revolution there were no restaurants (in our sense of the word). Dining was done at home, but the Revolution rendered unemployed ranks of chefs, pastry cooks, soup specialists, providores, butchers, gardeners, and the like who had ladened the tables of aristocracy, nobility, and royalty. From these ranks a couple of enterprising souls opened an eatery.  Prior to that coffee houses, which occasionally offered bread or biscuits, table d’hôte, inns, or street vendors were the only meals available to someone away from home.* 

The talkfest that the aftermath of the Revolution unleashed in Paris brought thousands of men to the capital, and they had to eat. There was the demand to be supplied by all those unemployed caterers. 

The word ‘restaurant’ comes from restore, and originally the nascent restaurants offered restoratives, that is, light meals to tide one over until the evening meal. But unlike the establishments mentioned above in a restaurant, one could eat at a time of choice and select what to order and only pay for what was consumed (not a fixed price), while sitting down inside. It was a culinary revolution that quickly developed.  

Balzac often describes meals but he seldom includes the menu, but rather concentrates on the manners and mores, the spectacle, the tableware, the candles, the ostentation or humility, the occasions, the aftermath, the subtexts, the verbal sparring, that is, he treats the meal as a mis-en-scene.  He himself had a vexed relation with food (like everything else), while in the throes of composition to generate income to defray creditors and buy food and wine, and, oh, pay some of the arrears in rent, he did but drink coffee.  He said it was fifty (50) cups a day, and ate very little, or nothing.  

Then when the cheque came in he would bust loose with a gigantic feast, inviting all and sundry, and a barrel of the best Bordeaux to mark his achievement. The result of this manner of living was the corpulent character we know from cartoons, though he despised his own fat he made no systemic effort to reduce his weight except for that coffee. There is a strain of self-hatred in him that shows in his novels.   

 No sooner would he recover from such an excess than the knock of the bailiff would drive him into another composition.  

*A table d’hôte at the time referred to to a boarding house meal, where a stranger might enter, and if a place was free, take a meal plonked down.  In such a case this stranger ate what was put on the table. Paid for it whether he ate it all or not and left.  The term today means a menu fixé for a fixed price. In an inn one ate at a fixed time, for a fixed price, and took what was offered. No choice. Inevitably stew of some kind.  

P.S. Street food — the crèpe — was more varied and available at all hours, but of course there was nowhere to sit, and one was exposed to the elements.  

Deborah Logan, The Hour and the Woman: Harriet Martineau’s “Somewhat Remarkable” Life (2002)

Good Reads Meta-data is 332 pages rated 0 by 0 litizens.

Genre: Biography

DNA: PhD

Verdict: Indeed, remarkable.

Tagline: Too much is not enough.  

First to the woman, then to the hour.  Martineau (1802-1876) was an influential writer in the Victorian Era.  In that age of reform, she was a REFORMER with the pen. The causes she took up often fell hardest on women, but not all of them.  She was a social analyst, social critic, and social advocate of a high order.  Later in life her admiring readers included Florence Nightingale, Queen Victoria, John Stuart Mill, and others of their like.  

Her Unitarian father owned a factory in Norwich and he encouraged his daughters as well as his sons to get educated.  When his factory later fell on hard times, to make money Martineau made and sold needlework, something she continued to do throughout life, donating the proceeds when she could to the causes, and also took up the pen. Her first foray was Illustrations in Political Economy, where she illustrated economic concepts with stories, combing fiction and non-fiction.  Efforts to secure publication of the first of these by correspondence failed, and she did not even think of using a masculine pseudonym, but rather she did what a man would do.  She went to London to argue her case with publishers face to face. It was difficult but it worked.  She found a publisher desperate enough to take a punt on an unknown writer, an unconventional mixed genre, a provincial, and a woman on a new subject.

The first exemplar was published, and….it sold every well. It was reprinted and distributed further.  That led to eleven more.  The result was more cash money than the family had ever seen, and set her on the a road she never left.  It also gave her a notoriety that was mixed, for publishing was men’s business, and the reviewers let fly with a barrage of ad hominem (or is that ad feminem) attacks that would please an internet troll today. These continued the rest of her life: personal, malicious, threatening, incoherent, ranting, and stupid fulminations.

She continued apace with other social questions, and when money and time allowed she travelled to the United States in the same year that Tocqueville did, 1835.  While he carried letters of introduction from the French government, he went as an ingenue looking for a key to the kingdom of democracy, she went as a social critic to observe the life of both women in this New Jerusalem and of slaves.  She found that women’s world was no different in the US than in the UK.  She also added abolitionist stripes to her colours.  (In the effort to emphasise Martineau, our author rather undersells Tocqueville. See his prophetic chapter The Three Races.)

While she promoted female emancipation, she did not advocate the franchise for women.  She thought that education and autonomy came first, then the vote.  If the vote came prior to social, intellectual, and moral emancipation, it would be manipulated by men who dominated women.  The arguments are clear and logical, but, well, impractical.  It is a variation on that recurrent nostrum: first utopia, then national health.  

She spend years battling the Contagious Disease Act which permitted the seizure of women on the grounds of public health (venereal disease) and imprisoning them.  That the government owned the bodies of women whereas it would never even consider a like possession of men, drove her pen into open warfare.  Not only was the Act wrong in itself, it was misused and abused to subjugate women. The cannibals had at her but she did not flinch.  Yes, there are contemporary resonances here, too.  (Strangely neither Martineau nor our author consider military conscription as a relevant comparison to this point.)  

If all this were not remarkable enough, she did it while enduring a debilitating handicap.  She became deaf at an early age, and thereafter brandished an ear trumpet, and later a walking stick, and suffered extended periods confined to a bed. Yet she soldiered on. (I wondered if this loss of hearing was related to her penchant for writing to communicate?  And how that related to learning French? But no answers did I find.)

This is a book about her life but it is not a chronological biography and rather assumes the reader knows the facts of her life – which I found on Wikipedia.  What it offers is a thoroughgoing analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of Martineau’s intellectual achievements and heritage piled high and deep enough for a PhD.  That means it is hard sledding to a casual reader like this correspondent.  I chose it because I knew her name as a forerunner of Sociology, and while that is here, it is not emphasised.  Did she compile data and present it, as Florence Nightingale did, or not remains unknown to this reader.  Or did she rely on polemic? She translated some of Auguste Comte’s doorstop books but how and why she learned enough French to do this, and whether it was cause or effect of her social interests remains befogged to me.  

The book is divided into 50-page chapters that wearied me, weak reed that I am, and the level of argument at times is as mystical as a priest reading entrails.  Finally, nothing is good enough for Martineau.  Previous writers who have praised her are arraigned for failing to praise her in the right way, for failing to praise her enough, for failing to praise her on time, and so on.  The compound of these features and their kin is overkill.   

She would certainly was a good subject for a ‘Great Lives’ program on BBC4 rather that some of the stand-up comedians that are so common on that once very informative program. That is where I was reminded of her, and that led me to getting this book. 

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A Meeting in Oea, or Concerning Plato (1970) by Aleksander Krawczuk 

Good Reads meta-data is 243 pages rated 3.38 by 21 litizens

Genre: fiction.

DNA: Ancient Greek.  

Tagline: It’s a long (winded) way to Alexandria.

Verdict: All trip, no arrival 

It is 150 A.D. when a near-sighted, round-shouldered, shuffling scholar leaves Carthage (Tunis) to go to the distant and fabled library at Alexandria, where he hopes to complete a biography of the divine Plato.  The trip does not go smoothly and Scholar becomes stuck in Oea (near Tripoli).  Travelling by the inland road he misses the shores of Tripoli.  

In his trials and tribulations Scholar finds solace in passages from Plato’s works.  He also describes some of Plato’s life, like the name of his mother, father, and sister, as well the brothers.  We learn the back stories of some of the characters whom he chose to name in his dialogues like Cephalus and Polemarchus.  Plato never married and sired no children it seems, though why is neither alleged nor suggested.   Indeed, there as much basic biography in this book as in Robin Waterfield’s book on Plato subtitled ‘A Life.’

I needed a map and Wikipedia to follow his path.  

Originally published in Poland in 1970 it might well have seemed to be social criticism then and there, though that is not immediately apparent to this reader.  

It is largely expository with little dialogue and no action to speak of.  The result is slow moving, but it does move, and at times is moving.  Those with short-attention spans need not bother.  

The resident Mechanical Turk at Amazon struck again because I had earlier searched for a biography of Plato, as in the Waterfield reference above. 

The author Polish was professor of Philosophy with other like titles.

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The Education of Henry Adams (1919) by Henry Adams.

Good Reads meta-data is 320 pages rated 3.64 by 4,669 litizens. 

Genre: Autobiography.

Verdict: Sprightly before sagging.

Everything is a learning experience in the life of Henry Adams (1838-1918), each twist and turn in life furthers his education about the ways of the world.  Though I began to worry when he reached his twentieth year there was no sign of interest in the ways of women.

Inheritor of a weighty family tradition with two presidents and innumerable other worthies, congressmen, governors, Ambassadors, young Henry Adams, as he calls himself, never felt equal to the responsibility of being an Adams of Quincy. Yet he had no choice but to try. This book records his participant-observation of his own life from boy to man. While it is sometimes introspective, it does not drip with the self-indulgent carping of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiography, The Confessions.  Having read very few autobiographies, put off by the aforementioned Rousseau, I cannot compare the book at hand to another title.  

Henry Adams had extensive schooling in the classics and languages, of which he makes light, and travelled in Europe before the U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) through France, Germany, and Italy in particular.  During the Civil War he served as the private secretary to his father who was the United States ambassador to Great Britain. Again he makes light of this service but it was crucial to keep Britain neutral despite the incessant lobbying of Confederate interests aligned with the English cotton industry. Moreover, many Brits wanted a weakened Dis-United States to reduce a  commercial rival, and a long, bitter, internal war was to be encouraged. The ambassador had his work cut out for him, and Henry Adams lent a willing hand whenever, wherever, and however he could.    

In the post-war Gilded Age Adams mixed with Secretaries of State, novelists like Henry James, and others of the great and good with his mixture of bonhomie and sarcasm. James used him as the basis for several characters in his novels.  

Many of the glosses on Education like those on – shudder! – Good Reads, take it rather literally. For such glossers the thesis is that his classics education fitted him for the Eighteenth Century with its languages and literature but not for the Twentieth Century with its science, mathematics, and technology. He certainly has some things to say about college education like this passage: ‘the lecture system … flourished in the thirteenth century. The professor mumbled his comments; the students made, or seemed to make notes’ (p 44). They would have learned more in discussion or by reading the books themselves but to get a degree the professor had to lecture and they had to listen.  

How little has changed with Zoom lectures.   

As salty as his comments are on education that subject is not the overarching theme of the book. The master narrative is the coming of the Civil War, the War itself, and the aftermath with all the accompanying financial, social, and political turmoil that ushered in the Twentieth Century. 

Near the halfway point the book skips the twenty years between 1872-1892 (the apogee of the Gilded Age), and does not mention at all his marriage and the illness and suicide of his wife, Clover Hooper, in 1885, who, while ill herself, had fallen into an inconsolable depression after the sudden death of her father.  The second half has none of zip or esprit of the first, and reads almost as though it were an assignment, perhaps self-imposed therapy after the death of his wife.  Yet it goes on and on about the people and personalities of Washington DC, none too minor, none too obscure to mention.  

By the way if you have ever tramped through Rock Creek Park in D.C. you may have come across the memorial Adams raised to Clover. I am pretty sure I did on the infamous occasion when I got lost there as darkness fell.

Taken as a whole the book is a thud. If only the first half, well it has something to recommend it in both form (zip) and content (the politicking of English neutrality). That achievement is numbed by the lifeless second half. 

Published posthumously, it is a title I have heard since Year Zero, but never turned a page of it, but then the Mechanical Turk at Amazon recommended it and I tasted the Kindle sample, found it lively, and more importantly I noticed that the Modern Library sometime in the 1960s placed it first in a list of the best one hundred works of nonfiction published in the United States in the Twentieth Century. That seemed to be quite an accolade, and from a source that I respected. Only later did I realise that all the top hundred books on the Modern Library’s many lists were – you guessed it – published by the Modern Library.  

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951).

Good Reads meta-data is 288 pages, rated 4.24 by 23,264.

Genre: fiction, autobiography .

Verdict: Zen.

The ageing Emperor Hadrian writes a long, reflective, meditative letter to his designated successor, Marcus Aurelius.  In so doing he rewinds the spool of his life from beginning to his fast-approaching end.  Through Hadrian, Yourcenar conjures worlds, plumbs the mysteries of life and love, and offers some hard-earned advice to Marc and over his shoulder to readers.

It seems effortless to read, smooth as glass and offering a depth of vision with a calm detachment.  It is no surprise then to learn in an afterword that she worked on this manuscript for more than twenty years to achieve this diamond finish.  The poet W. B. Yeats said revision made him a better person, or something like that. Marguerite Yourcenar must have been a truly excellent person to have spun this prose.    

Hadrian’s travels make up much of the book.  One long episode concerns his efforts to negotiate a peace with some Zealots in Israel. No matter how much he was willing to concede it was never enough for his interlocutor, Akiba, who preferred isolation, and finally eradication to – in Hadrian’s eyes – the slightest compromise. Hadrian describes him as dried, rigid, ignorant, wilful, narrow, bigoted, but listened to his harangues for eight days in an Olympic instance of patience. Seeing that Hadrian had not begged forgiveness for having been born and had not admitted his inferiority to him, Akiba gave up trying to save his soul and left. Worse came to worst. (Self-indulgent note: I came across more than one Little Akiba in university life, intransigent individuals who could not see a matter from any point of view but their own. Any other perspective was at best wrong, and more likely to be evil.  A Manichaean world view often seems attached to the PhD.)

That approach to negotiation as an opportunity to harangue others into admitting your superiority still seems to characterise much of domestic and regional politics in the Middle East.  The race is to the high ground, not to the common ground.   

There are lower key episodes on Hadrian’s difficulty in sleeping, his political marriage, the competition for his favour, his hopes for Marc, and more.  

Some of the wise words:  

Battles are not won with hate. Anger can make a man brave, but it also makes him stupid, tripping over his own feet. 

Good like bad becomes a habit and the temporary tends to endure, and that what is eternal permeates to the inside; over time the mask becomes the face.

Watching the season come and is constant travelling of the earth.

A book may lie dormant for years, even eons, yet upon being opened its marvels, abysses, and more are revealed to the reader alone.  

Friendship is a kind of choreography.

An ineffable current passes through a poet in creating a poem.

Libraries are a reserve against spiritual winters which recur.  

One of the many things to like about this book is that Hadrian, speaking of the past, uses the past tense. Oh, if even historians these days would do that instead of flattening the topography of time into the eternal present tense.  

Henry James, The Aspern Papers (1888)

Good Reads meta-data is 106 pages rated 3.71 by 5,042 litizens.  

Genre: drama.

Verdict: Intriguing.

Ambitious scholar learns that some letters by a dead white poet might be in the possession of an elderly woman in Venice, despite her frequent and loud denials. Writing a biography of this poet, Ambitious decides to go to Venice to test the hypothesis.  His approach is oblique. He will pose as a journalist looking for accommodation and rent a room from Dowager.

In the household, apart from the nearly invisible servants are Dowager and her naive, plain, and shy dependent Niece. Ambitious insinuates himself into the household and finds Dowager avaricious and Niece tedious, but needs must, however, he makes no progress and frets. He dare not raise the question directly with Dowager least she give him, not the papers, but the boot.  

Dowager sees through his ruse but likes the rental income, while Niece is flummoxed to have a man in attendance.  His own finances are draining away but Niece admits that there are papers and a cameo likeness of the dead poet, Jeffrey Aspern. That convinces Ambitious to hang on.  

One night thinking the Dowager bed ridden with illness, Ambitious steals into her private study and rifles her desk to no avail. Dowager catches him at it and faints.  He scampers and lies to Niece.

Dowager dies and Niece inherits. Do the papers exist or was that just bait? Will Niece now give him any papers that do exist? He has spent a lot of time with her ever so subtly trying to find a path to the trove and she being completely inexperienced takes that as a kind of courtship. She hints that were they to marry then the papers would be his.  It is one of those marvellous James scenes where the message is never stated but hangs in the air above the page.

In a neat role reversal Ambitious is surprised by the hint and scrams, roaming around Venice in girlish confusion, but concludes that the game is worth the candle and goes back to Niece the next day, perhaps to accept her offer, he is not sure, but being so close to the trove, which has grown in his mind in importance, spurs him on.  He learns that Niece, ashamed and embarrassed at her bold hint, assumed it would never happen and burned the papers which were numerous. Ambitious is stunned.  His efforts have led to the destruction of the very things he wanted to preserve.  

The end.

It is a sort of mystery story. Are there any papers to get? Why is Dowager so determined not to part with the papers? Will he or won’t he get the papers?  Did the confrontation over the desk precipitate Dowager’s death? Will he or won’t he marry Niece to get the papers? What will become of Niece when Ambitious leaves?

I read it for the insights into the mind of a biographer, Ambitious, and there is some of that to be had, and there are rich descriptions of life in Venice.  

Henry James was a great writer. The epiphany in Memorial Hall in the Bostonians has long stayed with me along with the drawing room scene in Wings of the Dove when a secret is revealed by posture. Added to that is the offered but not quite stated proposal in this story.  He was a maestro who could make the reader understand something without saying it.