Category: Book Review

Noah Webster (1758-1843) has shadowed me through life. In reading rooms, office desks, library shelves, legal offices, conference halls, spell-checkers, and seminar rooms, wherever I have gone there I found a direct line back to him on the spine of dictionaries. This Webster is that Webster, the dictionary man.

How and why he became that is a story I could no longer deny myself. He grew up in western Connecticut when it was the frontier. He was the bookish middle son. The family decided to see to his education, while the other children stayed and worked the farm. Off he went to a common (public) school where the emphasis was on discipline (secured by rod and whip). Not even the brutality he found there could quench the intellect within and at sixteen he entered the local church school, Yale.
At the time church and state were united in a Tea Party dreamworld. Taxes were paid at the local church which doubled as town hall and government offices. Yale was little more than a Calvinist secondary school for parsons, and it was funded by those taxes paid at churches. There was no religious toleration. Those who were not Congregationalists were, however, free to move west.
The taxes Great Britain imposed on the thirteen American colonies to pay for the expense of defending them in the French and Indian War of 1754-1763 were punitive, and precipitated the Revolutionary War 1775-1783 (in which the colonist reputiated their sovereign debt to England). Webster’s father had been a militiaman in the French war and during the Revolutionary War, Noah Webster joined a student brigade which marched around but found no English redcoats. However, the Revolution fired him with patriotism for the new world in the making.
He took up teaching children to read upon leaving Yale, and apprenticed to a lawyer for a career in law. That changed when in late 1783 his travel to a cousin’s wedding took him through an encampment of the recently victorious Continental Army of the United States. He, youthful idealist, was thrilled to see and meet the men who had created this New Jerusalem.
What he found was Babel. The men were at odds with each other over scarce provisions, ragged clothing, three-years of back-pay eroded discipline, and — what was worse — was the cacophony of languages. He heard Swedish from the men of Delaware, German from Pennsylvania, Dutch from New York, Welsh from Maryland, Irish from Massachusetts men, Scots from others, French from the forest men of Maine, Spanish from a few from the Caribbean, Italian was also to be found. All of these were further divided into dialects. If anything, English was just one of the plurality of languages.
The language barriers within Americans made prospects for productive cooperation unlikely, and it soon became his lifelong ambition to unite the States with an American language. He formed this ambition at twenty years of age, and stuck to it. The result is on the shelf, Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary. (‘Merriam’ because when he died the brothers Merriam, long-time friends, neighbours, and admirers of Noah, bought the copyright from Noah’s widow, as a way of insuring her financial security. Part of that agreement was keep the name ‘Webster’ on it.)
My copy.
The division, conflict, unproductive confrontations that he saw in the army camp were mirrored and enlarged among the victorious colonies which were held together by the so-called Articles of Confederation (1776-1789) which had only a congress meeting briefly twice a year. Each state was a law and nation unto itself. Pennsylvania and seven other states had a state army. At the borders of each state tariffs were levied. Since the British had not surveyed more than one hundred miles inland in most places, there were disputes about western borders that were settled by the gun. Each state issued its own coins and bank notes, ran a postal service of sorts. Some levied visa charges for visitors from other states. A murderer could flee across a state border and most likely escape pursuit or apprehension. I said fourteen states, and not thirteen, because Vermont seceded from New Hampshire.
For Webster to secure copyright for his first book meant that fourteen state legislatures had to enact copyright legislation and he then had to secure fourteen separate warrants, each with slightly different conditions. In this state of confusion, there were those who thought returning to British suzerainty would be preferable. Some of these were diehard Tories and others just wanted order and stability.
All of this division stimulated Webster to redouble his efforts. H travelled to nearly every state capitol, selling his book as he went, and lobbied first for a copyright law and then to secure copyright for his book(s). Doing so was hard, expensive, and took him away from home for months at a time. It also made him a national figure, with personal friends in every state.
He was innovator in every respect, As a teacher he thought school was to teach children to read and write, not simply to beat them into submission. He pitched his lessons at the level and world of his five and six year olds, striving to make learning fun, interesting, relevant, and easy. He was very successful at it. He set up his own school and parents who wanted their children, both girls and boys, to learn subscribed to it. He prepared his own teaching material and these became the three books: The Speller, The Grammar, and The Reader. Each was American in each and every way.
To make spelling easy and fun he simplified it, by dropping silent letters, like ‘u’ in most occurrence of ‘ou’ or the unpronounced double ‘l’ in traveller or the double ‘g’ in waggoner, and matching sound to letter by using the ‘z’ extensively. He dropped many, many other silent letters, so that ‘give’ became ‘giv’ and the same for all words with an unsounded terminal ‘e.’ He also tried to change existing spelling to match sound so that some instances of the letter ‘c’ became ‘s’ or ‘sh’ which certainly have made English easier to learn. English, in part because of its polyglot origins, has many silent letters and varieties of letter sound values. And he thought American English had to be learned, and it would be better for being distinct from British English and for being rational in the spirit of the Enlightenment. He was an admiring reader of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Adam Smith, and their ilk.
He likewise inventive in grammar, dropping the Latin cases which had theretofore been used to teach English grammar. Reader, when was the last time the ablative was necessary?
The reader, aimed at young children, was entirely home grown. Gone were incomprehensible British essays about the Astronomer Royal, or legal disquisitions on the Welsh marches, and in came essays about the New England forests, thanksgiving with the native indians, and paeans of praise for the stalwarts of the Revolution. He made an exception for the poetry of William Wordsworth.
No publisher would touch his work. It was too novel, untried, and untested. He borrowed from his family and paid for the first edition of The Speller himself. Five hundred were printed, and by the end of the year 5,000 had been sold. He set the price low to make it accessible and he invested the income in The Grammar, and so it went. Throughout his life he made enough money to live and support his family, but nothing more.
He was a publisher’s dream author. He travelled the country for weeks and months at a time, selling the books in person to every churchmen, legislator, lawyer, judge, and school teacher he could find. During this period he also found time to argue for a stronger national government and that won him friends among the emerging Federalists (and enemies among others). Indeed in the Constitution of 1789 some of his ideas were embodied, and others he proposed were deleted. Chief among those embodied was a strong central executive, the President, and among those rejected were universal manhood suffrage, female equality, and emancipation the slaves.
Noah Webster.
Much of the middle of the book is a summary of American history in the turbulent period from 1789 to 1830. Reading it reminded me of how well educated I had been, there along the Platte, because I knew most of it in broad: Citizen Genet, the undeclared naval war with France, the Jay Treaty, Thomas Jefferson’s ascendence, and so on. Webster was constantly in the fray, opinionated, pompous, self-righteous, and often right. He saw unity as the only path to survival, and advocated a strong central government.
He moved to New York City to found first a magazine and then a newspaper, both of which failed at personal and professional expense. He then revised his school books and went on the road to sell them. Finally at about 40 he sold the rights to his books, rather than face another round of travel, and started on the dictionary that made him immortal. He also worked with his cousin Daniel Webster (he of the devil in the Ambrose Bierce story) to enact the first copyright legislation in the United States.
He worked on the dictionary singlehanded for 20+ years and compiled 70,000 entries, far in excess of its only rival, Dr Johnson’s (which I am proud to say adorns our shelves). To study the etymology of words Webster learned German, to go with the French and Latin he had. In time he traced words through dozens of languages. He travelled to London and Paris when he was 60 to research in libraries there. It was a Herculean labour. The result was pure Noah Webster. Definitions, examples, the etymology was slanted to reflect his Calvinism, American patriotism, and Anglo-Saxon heritage.
It was difficult to find a way to publish this whopper. He did finally manage to do so with financial support from John Jay (of the Federalist Papers), and it was an immediate commercial and critical success. He had long since modified his efforts to reform spelling on rational grounds and moderate his zeal for being a know-it-all. The two volume work that resulted was hailed far and wide.

Since the veneration for Dr. Johnson and his dictionary had prevented any new dictionary in England for two generations, Webster’s was taken up there with enthusiasm. For a time more copies of Webster’s Dictionary were sold in England than in the United States, despite the explicit American character of Webster’s from the title page on. In a 1917 court ruling the name Webster on a dictionary passed into the public domain and anyone may now use it. Only Merriam Webster dictionaries trace directly back to Noah.
Nearly all the men who led the Civil War had learned to read and write from Webster, the tireless advocate of unity. Jefferson Davis had once in the Senate explicitly praised Webster and his speller. Only those who were self-educated, like Abraham Lincoln, had escaped Webster’s influence. Even a century and a half later, I grew up in the world of words he created. In high school Webster’s Dictionary was on the shelf. In college, purchasing a copy of Webster’s Collegiate was required. In graduate school Webster’s Enlarged was necessary to write that dissertation. When I started teaching I acquired the current edition. Regrettably I cannot trace the genealogy of the spellchecker to be sure but I hope it goes back to the brothers Merriam and from them to Noah.
Remarkable, energetic, and a polymath, Webster was many things. He was also arrogant, a know-it-all, a man who loved the sound of his own voice, a micro-manager, someone who did not understand the word ‘no’ when applied to him. He must have been a very high-maintenance individual. He also ha[ed the Constitution, fathered the copyright laws, founded Amherst College, taught a nation to spell, and brought forth that dictionary (and its many imitators that use his name) that remains a gold standard today.
Harlow Unger
Harlow Unger is the author of twenty-three books, most on individuals and themes from this same period in American history. There is a considerable body of research behind the book. That said, I found it hard to read – the prose oscillates from inscrutable to leaden to transparent, with too much of the first and not enough of the last. The emphasis is on Webster the patriot, as in the subtitle, and not on his personality or his dictionary. There is little of the inner man to be found in these pages. Nor is there much about how he went about the process that created that lasting testament, the dictionary. Those years occupy a small part of the book. Of course, no book can do everything, and I learned a lot from it. My thanks to the author.

This book from a major New York City publisher has had a big push. It pops up on web sites, newspaper review pages, NPR programs, and more.

I took the bait, remembering how much fun reading ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ (2003) by Lynn Truss was. Inspired by reading that I tried Jacques Barzun’s ‘Simple and Direct: A Rhetoric for Writers’ (2001), and it, too, was entertaining and enlightening, but much heavier going, and at about page 50 I cut Jack loose. It was too much! It was like getting an assignment back from Miss Moses in junior high school drenched in the Red Sea of ink flooding over each page. (The name has been changed to protect the guilty.) She did not know when to quit and neither did Jack.
In ‘Between you & me’ the usual suspects appeared in the lineup. Among them were the evil twins Who and Whom, the hyphen, and the serial comma.
Who is on first? That is the nominative case. To whom did I give the keys? That is the accusative case (aka dative case). Got it? The doer is nominative and the done to is accusative. With me? It gets more complicated with noun groups and compounds, but I left the train before that. Their cousin, possessive case, Whose is best left for the advanced course.
The hyphen is just too hard for me. Compound nouns seldom take it but the words rendered as a compound adjective must. The boarding house fell down. But the boarding-house fire was bad. See? Sort of, but not for long. It turns out Herman Melville’s whale was Moby Dick but his book about Moby Dick was Moby-Dick. Sit down and think about that. Then there is breaking words over lines with hyphens. Is it at the first syllable. the first pair of consonants, or at the first meaningful break? Eng-land or En-gland or Eng-land. Two out of three? Grammar does not accept such populist methods of decision-making (or is that ‘decision making’).
My favourite is the serial comma which I learned way back in Hastings on the Platte to call the Oxford comma; so called because it was prescribed by the Oxford University Press, which was regarded along the Platte as the highest court for punctuation, though patriotism required Noah Webster’s spelling. The Oxford comma is that one before ‘and’ at the end of series, as in ‘eats, shoots, and leaves.’ This by the way illustrates one of the features of John Stuart Mill’s rule-utilitarianism. That last comma is not always necessary but it is best to include it because it is too time-consuming to decide if it is needed in this or that instance and that decision may be mistaken. Just follow the rule, and include it.

I have enlivened many dinner parties by bringing up the Oxford comma, discovering that some people invest much of themselves in that little squiggle, the ‘,’ and their cool, detached, and cynical demeanour slips entirely when it is bruited. People who yawn at important topics like man’s inhumanity to man, spitting by baseball players, or coal-seam gas, roll-up their sleeves for Indian wrestling when the serial comma is mentioned. (I feel free to say ‘man’s’ inhumanity to ‘man’ in the masculine since men are the principle culprits.) Defending the serial comma, I have alienated some guests who went away muttering never to return!
Back to Norris, there was a very informative and amusing aside on Noah Webster’s several efforts to create an American language, stimulated in equal measure by his patriotism and rationality. No less a figure than George Washington encouraged him in that endeavour. He had successes and he had failures. The ‘ou’ passed out of most American use and he made the ‘z’ do a lot more work than it did across the Atlantic, and, animated by the egalitarian spirit, he called it by its right name ‘zee’ and not that snobbish ‘zed.’ If it looks like a zee, acts like a zee, sounds like a zee, then call is ‘zee.’
Webster’s failures may outnumber his successes. His multiple efforts to match sound values to sight did not always carry the day, e.g., ‘cloke’ for ‘cloak’ and many of the same ilk died in the pages of his lexicography. I have resolved to read a biography of this Webster (and maybe one day Daniel Webster, too).
It was also an eye-opener to learn that any dictionary can take the name of Webster, and several have. But an heir to Noah always bears the name Merriam because the brothers Merriam bought the rights from the widow Webster when Noah died, and that company has continued to publish it. A dictionary titled ‘Internationl Websters’ or ‘Websters New’ is unlikely to have anything to do with the founder, Noah. I turned to my reference shelf and was glad to see that mine is a Merriam. I am now armed against such infiltrators in the future.
There was also a poignant moment when Norris quoted from a hand-written letter Jacqueline Kennedy sent to Richard Nixon in reply to his note of condolence when Jack was murdered to show how emotion is conveyed by punctuation. More importantly, to this observer it confirmed once again that Jackie was a higher being.
Emily Dickinson haunts the pages. Her poems, written privately like a diary, have presented editors and analysts a lifetime of challenges since she relied almost exclusively on the dash (—) for terminal punctuation, sometimes straight and level, sometime upward ascending, and sometimes downward descending, and some times wiggly. That combines with her very poor penmanship has created the space for many learned seminars to interpret her intentions and how best to convey them. When I read her poems (Saturday mornings at 8:00) I was unaware of that (and much else). Signing up for a class that met on Saturday at 8:00 am seemed like a good idea when I registered one semester as an undergraduate, so I did. By 9:00 am I would have knocked off another credit and have the day ahead. That was the plan. The reality was that it never seemed like a good idea on Saturday morning at 7:00 am.
I was impressed by the many editorial stages through which a ‘New Yorker” manuscript, once accepted, passes en route to the glossy page. The effort is great; the division of labor is elaborate; and the care is microscopic. Yet the product is largely ephemeral compared to the hubris that creates it.The elephant brings forth the mouse, a phrase I learned in Thailand when visiting Chulalongkorn University, meaning a great effort for a small result.

The difference between copyediting non-fiction and fiction was most interesting. It presents many challenges that have never crossed my mind when reading William Faulkner or John Updike. The details are many but perhaps the best illustration is that difference between the spoken and written language. That difference is a tension in fiction, whereas in non-fiction it is a rule. The imperative in fiction is let the author’s voice sound. Updike must sound like the prissy perfectionist and Ivy-League graduate he is and Faulkner must sound like the uneducated backwoodsman he is. But, yes there is a ‘but’ coming and it is a sizeable one, another thing I never considered.
If it appears in the ‘New Yorker’ does that henceforth make it right? If the magazine publishes one of Faulkner’s malapropisms, e.g., ‘most all’ for ‘almost all,’ will that cause its lemming-like readers all use that neo-logism? That the responsibility the ‘New Yorker’ bears in its self-assigned role as arbiter of United States English. [Sound of fife and drum.] Believe it or not, Ripley, decisions over punctuation at the ‘New Yorker’ are made against that national standard, and authors like Richard Ford have been subjected to editorial correspondence of some volume arguing over commas, what else?
By the way, getting that hyphen in ‘neologism’ above was a head-on struggle with automatic correct. Norris comments more than once on the habit of autocorrect to change things it ought not to change and the struggles at the ‘New Yorker’ to devise an in-house system to let it be itself. Regrettably nowhere does she discuss how it is that autocorrect got like that. Is it nature or nurture? Would remediation help?
I found no discussion of the relationship of quotation marks to punctuation, an old pet peeve of mine. I solved years ago, inspired by Mr Lloyd in high school, by opting for what I now know to be a Millian (as in John Stuart) solution by putting the punctuation inside the quotation marks to keep it tidy. I see this is common in North American publications and seldom seen in British publications. The lucky ones will not know what I am talking about.
Like all pedants I have bones to pick. Norris uses direct address, ‘you,’ frequently. Ugh. She also goes to considerable lengths more than once to use the F-word. Most of all there is that title. No, the ‘me’ is right in the accusative, but what about that ampersand? She spares not a word for ‘&’ which I revile in anything but grocery lists. The dentist says I grind my teeth, well I know why! Really, I expected better of the ‘New Yorker!’
I have treated all this with amusement but inside, I am very glad that someone takes the language seriously enough to work that hard at it. Why? Because most people do not, and the people I have in mind are authors and editors, not just teenagers who cannot be bothered.
There was a time when even Disney films cared about the language. Who can forget that touching scene in ‘The Lady and the Tramp’ (1955) when the latter explains to the former that a ‘dog lover’ without a hyphen is a dog. I remember this vividly because Miss Moses was overjoyed after it opened at the Rivoli on Second Street. She positively glowed, unlike the glower that was the norm on Monday mornings, Tuesday mornings, Wednesday… [etc.] and that was so unusual there was much comment among we grammarians, mostly by stolen glances and wrinkled frontal lobes, and some pinching to see if this was reality or a dream.
Mary Norris
Like most books rooted in the ‘New Yorker,’ it is snappy, breezy, and a 60-page article puffed up into hardcovers. While the meandering introduction is easy to read, I did not see the point of the recollection of dairy work, nor was it clear to me from the start what the purpose of the book was, though Norris is an amusing and informative companion for trip, the destination was never named.
In the absence of a higher purpose I read it as a memoir of her life and times as a copyeditor for the slickest of the slick magazines. The lustre of the ‘New Yorker’ will never dim in my eyes because it published Hannah Arendt when no other magazine would. Credit William Shawn with that.

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) has many claims to fame, but this book is mainly and obsessively concerned with one of his claims to infamy as a betrayer of Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth who overreached himself. Essex was patron to Bacon’s client. It is a study of the formation and transmission of Bacon’s reputation with periodic rehabilitations and denunciations.

Insofar as the book is a study of Bacon’s reputation, there are comparisons to Niccolò Machiavelli. Like Machiavelli’s contemporary Thomas More, Bacon was both a scholar and a politician, as was Machiavelli. For all three of these men the ease with which erroneous assertions become fact by repetition is remarkable and once realised causes me to wonder what else in received option is equally erroneous.
To blacken Bacon’s name takes only a few words. To rebut and refute that assertion takes many pages to detail context, to infer intention, to shift testimony of eye-witnesses and so on. Believe me, Nieves Mathews is just the woman for the job of filling pages, though she complains more than once that she has too few pages to do the material justice. I took these asides to be references to the publisher’s insistence that the book end … sometime. She complains that Ignatius Donnelly’s book on Francis Bacon was too short to do justice to the subject. Too short at 900+ pages! See what I mean?
Essex is well known to anyone with even a slight knowledge of Queen Elizabeth. He was an attractive young man who captured the Queen’s interest and held it, despite some appalling behaviour. His indiscipline combined with hubris of considerable proportions such that he put himself forward for all manner of things, and he got some of them. He was promoted several levels above his competence. Thus was he sent to Ireland as the head of an army to quell the fractious Irish. For most of that campaign, at great expense to the public purse, he disported, drank Ireland dry, left no wench go unmolested, wrote piteous letters to the Queen lying about his noble efforts on her behalf, and knighted seventy (70) of his drinking buddies. That escapade alone, and it was not unique, gave his enemies ammunition for a lifetime.
Bacon counselled moderation to this wastrel with a patience that bespeaks the lack of alternatives. Bacon was Essex’s man and he did his best to help him. Of course, Essex knew no bounds and when his plot against the Queen foundered Bacon was safely clear of the fallout. Like many others in politics, Essex contended that his plot of seize the Queen was to protect her from others with sinister designs on her. Perhaps because even the dim Essex realised Bacon would not play, Essex made no effort to involve him in the plot. Or, more likely, Essex regarded Bacon as unimportant. None of the copious correspondence produced as evidence against Essex named Bacon as conspirator. Nonetheless he was guilty by association in the minds of many then and since.

The story is not as clear-cut as summarised above. There have since been apologists and historians who see in Essex a victim of other forces. In that light, Bacon figures as a false friend who either betrayed Essex by revealing the plot, did too little to stop Essex’s mad scheme, or did too little to reconcile the Queen him. For the Essex-apologists Bacon’s treason to Essex is proven by fact that Bacon survived the drama and Essex did not.
Bacon’s reputation as a savant and public servant was sound for two hundred years until Baron Macaulay (1800-1859), wrote a hundred page essay on him, while resident in Calcutta during his tenure on the Indian Supreme Court. That got my attention because this same Macauley made a valiant attempt at about the same time to rescue Machiavelli’s reputation.
Back-and-forth through these 592 pages Mathews refutes every word Macaulay wrote and some he thought of writing but did not and still others he might have written. It is as thorough as a very expensive legal brief and just about as interesting to read. She is not one to summarise evidence when it can be paraphrased in full over pages and pages.
Macaulay started an anti-Bacon trend which she details from sources I never heard of but then I did not know his reputation had ever been blackened. She quotes letters to editors from literary magazines in 1891 to prove the point. Did I say ‘obsessive’ above? I did. It is. The thoroughness is that a PhD dissertation but it is not that, as I discovered when I tried to find out more about the author. For that see below.
Every card has been played against Bacon, she says, including the speculation that he was homosexual. My, my another comparison to Machiavelli who was accused of this practice by some plotting his downfall.
She also has a chapter on Bacon’s reputation in France, Germany, and Italy. No stone is left unturned. Among these enlightened Continental people he has long been recognised as a savant without equal.
‘I know of no other Renaissance writer who is so regularly vilified,’ said Brian Vickers (qv., p. 406). Brian should get out more. Try Machiavelli.
I did love her description of a Penguin edition of Bacon’s ‘Essays’ as aimed at discouraging students from ever reading them with the many derogatory things said of the man and his work in the editor’s preface. There is a student’s guide to Plato that is similar. Its editor, an Oxbridge don of high repute, is so plainly bored with Plato that he ends up making him boring. Penguin editions are cheap and available, but they are not always the best.
Overall this book is combative, sometimes polemical, but the subject matter saves it. Bacon was an interesting man and so were his times. Though it remains a mystery to me why Yale University Press published it. There are many mysteries out there, Scully. Another is the gentle review in the ‘American Historical Review,’ which went so far as to praise the writing style. Sometimes one suspects that reviews have not read all the way through a book.
Bacon’s claims to our attention are many. Along with several others he has been granted title to the plays and poems to which William Shakespeare put his name. Others have credited him with writing most of the works attributed to Michel de Montaigne, and still others say he wrote ‘Don Quixote’ in his spare time. True. He held two major public offices in the turbulent world of the Tudor and then Stuart courts: Attorney-General and Chancellor of the Exchequer. In addition, he served in parliament for many years. He articulated the scientific method, or at least, empiricism as a foundation for science, including particularly experimentation. His personal private secretary for some time was Thomas Hobbes, that giant of political theory. His personal physician was William Harvey. He knew a lot of big brains. Moreover, Bacon’s 40-page book the ‘New Atlantis,’ gave rise to cult of the Rosicrucians. However, some readers will be disappointed to know that he has nothing to do with the food of the same name.
The Child Bride gave me this book for Christmas some years ago. I tried to read it then and found it hard going. Feeling guilty after leaving it to ripen on shelf, when my eye fell on it recently I took it up to try again. Hard going. It is a specialist monograph based one extensive research into the time and place written without concession to an avocational reader (me), and the prose is leaden. Still it did get me thinking about Francis Bacon.

The author’s full name is Nieves Hayat de Madariaga Archibald, Mrs. Mathews (1917–2003). This from the Wikipedia stub: ‘She was also deeply influenced by the works of Immanuel Velikovsky. In her earlier years, 1956, she wrote a crime novel, ‘She Died Without Light’. She was inspired to do the Bacon book by Chandra Mohan Jain (1931-1990), also known as Acharya Rajneesh from the 1960s onwards, as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.’ Her guru told her to do it. If Velikovsky is unknown, my advice, is to leave it that way.

The volume offers a selection of this prolific writer’s oeuvre, poems, essays, plays, short stories, excerpts from his novels, forwards and prefaces he wrote for the books of others.

Warren (1905-1989) wrote one of the best novels ever, especially for political junkies, ‘All the King’s Men’ (1947); three or more times butchered by Hollywood, it remains evergreen despite the assaults by the Tinsel Town pigmies.

The opening of that novel strikes an hypnotic chord in which the rest of the story unfolds. Marvellous.
Most of the items in this collection were composed between 1940 and 1965. He was Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress in the 1970s and his greatest fame lies in that world, poetry, amply vindicated by the poems included in this volume, each a small study of nature or humanity.

Like many others of the South his greatest challenge was the obvious one of slavery past and racism present. As an undergraduate he defended segregation, as did his professors and peers at Vanderbilt University, including that other remarkable Southern poet, Allen Tate, but Warren grew out of it and quickly, unlike Tate. Warren’s short monograph ‘Segregation’ (1956), included between these covers in its entirety, offers his personal bildungsroman along with penetrating insights into the manifold evils segregation spawned. Though this account lacks the hellfire and brimstone of his comrade William Faulkner’s many denunciations of the racism, being more cerebral and measured, yet it strikes hard, sure, and deep. His reference to the remark attributed to a Southern plantation wife says it all, but so succinctly and so swiftly that I had to read it twice to get it. ‘Mr. Lincoln freed me of slavery and I thank him for it.’ (Either you get it or you don’t.)
Among the pleasures in this volume is a short but layered appreciation of the nineteen novels of William Faulkner. Faulkner’s many failures and weaknesses, on Warren’s telling, were essential to Faulkner’s astonishing successes and strengths. The man was whole and so is his work, and that is how we must take it.
The same themes run through his commissioned monograph ‘The Legacy of the Civil War’ (1961), included here. There is too much in it to summarise but to this reader the most striking passage is when Warren asks readers to imagine Robert E. Lee shaking hands and congratulating the strutting Southern governors of the 1950s and 1960s barring children from schools, encouraging baying crowds of Bible-grasping gorgons to shout abuse at girl scouts, licensing hissing mobs to burn churches, sanctioning lynch parties, ignoring rape and pillage for sport, and praising masked men hiding in the dark.
A close examination of pictures from the March on Washington in 1963 will show Warren there on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial come to give his own thanks.
He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work, living most of his latter years in New England, no longer welcome in his homeland, and it shows in the poetry.
In a classroom at Yale University where he taught for years.
The wonders of nature and humanity remain many and varied, but the sense of loss and disconnection is but palpable.
A callow undergraduate, I heard him recite some of his poems and the memory has since remained bright. There are some short excerpts on You_Tube.

Listening to John Stuart Mill’s autobiography reminded me of a story by Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), a pioneer in existentialist fiction and philosophy in Spain. That name by the way is Basque and though ‘Unamuno’ clearly means ‘one world’ it is not from any known language. In this as in other ways, he was one of a kind. He wrote fiction, poetry, drama, and essays.
Miguel Unamuno in 1925.
When Mill talks about losing faith in unified and theoretical solutions to human problems, it echoes Unamuno’s story ‘Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr’ of the eponymous priest who loses his faith in God and yet continues to minister with continued dedication to ease the lives of his parishioners. It is a very moving story of self-sacrifice, told in a slow and subdued manner over sixty (60) pages. The scene in the confessional when he, the priest, confesses to the young penitent Angelica his loss of faith is remarkable. Readers will long remember Don Emmanuel and his daily struggle to act as though life has meaning.
The second story is ‘The Madness of Doctor Montarco’ which is social criticism, and daring for the time and place. Montarco is a fine physician and as a pastime he writes and publishes in newspapers and magazines ever more farfetched stories which we might label as fantasy or science fiction. His patients begin to doubt his ability and reliability because of these stories, despite the evident fact, attested to by other doctors, that he is treating them very, very well. The patients lose confidence in him and desert his practice, and as this happens the stories he writes become ever more bizarre and disturbing to readers, until he finally enters an asylum to live out his remaining days a confused and broken man. It is a story about the fate of those who do not conform to the narrow channels of the Catholic and conservative society of Spain which rejects this re-born Don Quixote. This is a twenty (20) pages story.

The title story is a short novel of 176 pages, ‘Abel Sanchez’ in which Unamuno tells anew the tale of Cain and Abel in contemporary Spain circa 1930. It is a marvellous study of the jealously, envy, and madness of Don Joaquín (Cain), another doctor, who hates his best friend Abel Sanchez for all his apparently easy success in life and love, and Joaquin plots his downfall. I read the first sixty (60) pages in a gulp. Abel is a painter whose work acquires much recognition and financial success and leads to his marriage to Joaquín’s cousin, Helena who had earlier refused Joaquin’s proposal. He, the man of science, who saves lives is shadowed by this frivolous artist and trumped by him at every turn. Yet such is Unamuno’s artistry that Joaquín is largely a sympathetic character, as are Abel and Helena. That is the tragedy, there are no villains here and yet there is destined to be a collision.
By the way all three of these works were put on the Index Librorium Prohibitorum, forbidden to Catholics.
The tattered copy I read was an undergraduate text from my college days for which I paid $1.25 in 1967. I have read and re-read it several times since.
The dictatorship of Primo de Rivera exiled Unamuno to the Canary Islands from when he escaped to live just across the border in France. HIs writings were considered incendiary, including the works of fiction above. He returned when the Popular Front government took office in 1936, though one can hardly describe him as a liberal, a socialist, a communist, or an anarchist. He was a staunch Catholic but one who could see the reality behind the curtain. In any event when the Civil War came he denounced it very publicly from the lectern in Salamanca where he was rector of the university with members of the junta sitting in the audience and on the stage while he spoke. It must have been electrifying to see this hunched and weary old man challenge the Goliaths in their gold braided uniforms and sidearms. He was nearly lynched on the spot.
Passing through an angry mob of Nationalists.
He died a few weeks later. Federico Garcia Lorca was murdered even earlier that year, he being another genius of Spanish letters. There are now monuments to both of these writers, but none to the men who killed them.

Reading Nicholas Capaldi’s biography put me in mind of John Stuart Mill’s ‘Autobiography’ and I found I had it on Audible already, so the rest was easy, well not quite. See below.
Although his voice was a clarion for social equality and personal responsibility, generations of students have since been taught to despise him as a progenitor of evil liberalism. Sounds odd I know but since the 1970s jaded intellectuals have made careers biting the hand – liberalism – that feds them, having insufficient imagination to do anything creative themselves. When these pygmies are long gone, John Stuart Mill’s books will still be read; that will be the judgement of history.
Mill started to write the ‘Autobiography’ when he a nervous breakdown early in life and then went back to it later. In addition, Harriet Taylor had a hand in editing it. Many PhDs have been earned trying to figure out when Mill wrote portions of it, and what Taylor took out or put in. The Audible version I listened spared me this detail.
The early chapters are a description of the childhood of this prodigy with an emphasis on his father’s method of educating him. It is exhausting to listen to the account, the more so knowing, as he must surely have himself known in retrospect, that most of it was meaningless. Prodigious, yes, but not lasting or meaningful. He may have read in Greek Plato’s ‘Apology’ at five years of age, but he did not understand it. So, too, with much else in this force-fed education, which was all work and no play everyday for years on end.

One unintended consequence of this gruelling education was that Mill was a Galaxy-class nerd. He grew up in a hothouse that he seldom left until he was a late teenager when he went out of the house to go to the East India Company where he worked for his father. He was in his father’s shadow for much of his life everyday, socially, intellectually, morally. It is painfully apparent to an auditor of the ‘Autobiography’ that Mill had no friends. He had peers; he had colleagues; he had associates; he had debaters and opponents. But he had no friends, which he as much as says more than once. Part of the reason for that is that he had no interests but the unforgiving logical analysis of important matters learned from and constantly reinforced by his father. This is not the person to sit next to at dinner. He could debate the great issues of the day but he could not make small talk, or show any interest in pictures of a seat-mate’s children. A cold fish, I would guess. Ready to beat you to death in argument and inept in passing the butter. That he never played any boyish games meant he had zero physical dexterity, hence the comment about the butter.
Chapter Five (5) is superb. In it Mill reflects on his many and varied experiences, and knocks off some bon mots as only he could. He paraphrases Thomas Hobbes’s remark that ‘When reason is against a man, he retaliates by being against reason’ which made me think of all those deniers (climate change, Catholic Church pedophilia, Holocaust, etc.). I listened to this while walking the dog, pushing pedals at the gym, or taking the train, so I could not take notes or mark-up the text.
HIs conclusion in this chapter is that political theory is best confined to a few principles which would allow inferences to be drawn in particular circumstances, rather than trying to lay down a set of single ideal institutions. Like Miguel Unamuno’s story about Don Emmanuel, Mill lost faith in a singularly unified theory and recognised the inescapable influence of context. (Unamuno’s story made an impression upon me, Don Emmanuel is a village priest who loses faith in god. Read it.) Under the influence of Alexis de Tocqueville, Mill wanted the deductions to be based on facts, hence I referred to inferences above.
John Stuart Mill, London, The Embankment
Likewise, Mill concluded that perfect political institutions were of no value in themselves. The underlying social order was decisive. The most perfect political institutions would be hollow shells unless the society valued and embraced them for their purposes. To make a comparison, the church may be full, but do they really believe? Did they act like Christians everyday, or only for a couple of hours on Sunday?
Mill once fancied himself ‘a reformer of the world,’ but during his depression, he asked himself this question: If all the material and moral ideals he espoused were realised in the world, would he then be happy? No, he answered. He concluded that happiness if not an end in itself, but rather a by-product of purposeful activity. Both trip and arrival are important.
There are some odd things about the ‘Autobiography’ to be sure. Mill never mentions his mother though there are many, many references to his father who died when Mill was thirty (30). It would seem his father had those nine (9) children all by himself. James Mill was a formidable fellow but he was no hermaphrodite. While there are only a few early references to Mill’s work for the East India Company. Yet Mill specialists have some strange stories about his habits at work.
This review affords an opportunity to correct some errors I made in the review of Capaldi’s biography. It was not Bentham that introduced Mill to poetry. Several peers led him to poetry. I also said he was called a Mechanical Man, not quite, but rather a Manufactured Man by some who found the analytical engine of his mind artificial and inhuman.
I found this Audible reading to be unsympathetic. It sounded almost mechanical, phrases of equal length and inflection followed one another without regard to the content. Perhaps that is partly a fault of Mill’s writing style, which is replete with dependent, relative, and embedded clauses with asides and comparisons which makes it precise but it has no flow.
Not quite easy I said, because Audible kept dropping out, asking me to log in again, resetting the book mark, and so on. None of that is easy when using the iPhone while dog walking. No doubt I brought this on myself, somehow. But it was annoying, and a lesser man might have quit.

Savonarola (1452-1498) was a critical figure in the history of the city of Firenze (Italia). Born to a comfortable family he learned Latin as preparation for a career in law or medicine. But a dream when he was twenty (20) convinced him to renounce the world and take orders in a Dominican monastery. His sleep then, as throughout his life, was troubled, perhaps by ulcers, speculates Ridolfi. In this troubled sleep he feared for his immortal soul because, well, he was a young man and his thoughts often turned to young women.

Giro never did anything by halves. He left home at night leaving a letter behind and entered the Church never to leave. Thereafter he had little contact with his parents or siblings. Then his apocalyptic thoughts turned from himself to all mankind.
Though well educated he had a thick accent from his region, Ferrara, north east of Bologna. This marked him as an outsider wherever he went. He was holier than thou and was sent from place to place by his Order (Dominican) trying to find a place where he fitted in, did something useful, and was content. He had few chances to preach but when he did the message was repentance. He was assigned to a monastery in Fiesole just outside Florence. This building is now part of the European Universities Institute where I spent a semester once upon a time.
With his Ferreranese accent, his gloomy message, and his blunt manners he did not fit into Florentine society at the birth of Renaissance where the emphasis fell on elaborate manners, rich clothing, refined tastes in religious art, sensual music, and optimism about the future at the time of Lorenzo il Magnifico (a conventional honorific that was descriptive in this case). After a brief residence, Giro was sent away on other duties, but he later returned. In the meanwhile he had an epiphany, being called by God to scourge the world of sin, he said. A big job for one humble monk but he shouldered it. He began to preach with a newfound confidence, speaking slowly and in simple phrases, though always in Latin, he denounced arbitrary taxes that deprived humble people of the means of honouring god by giving alms. He denounced those who lavished money on useless trinkets, i.e., fine clothes, paintings, sculptures, etc. in the city where Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were hard at work, and Filippo Brunelleschi had made that great dome.
Statue of Savonarola in full flight, Ferrara.
His populist message found a constituency and his sermons attracted ever more auditors. Lorenzo tried to get him re-assigned elsewhere but the letter was lost in the Italian postal service where millions have followed them. (I got my letter of appointment to EUI about ten months after I returned from my tenure there. Thank goodness for faxes in those days). Larry then tried hiring some competition, and brought in some other, more showy, and acceptable preachers to no avail. He also tried to coax Giro into a more reasonable approach by asking a few local intellectuals to befriend him, which they did and both were won over by Giro’s sincerity and intellect. Hmm. He finally tried money but Giro gave it to charity. Then, considering it all small potatoes anyway, Lorenzo ceded the field.
In Milan Il Moro had invited the French King Charles VIII to support his rule, and Charles found Italy congenial. There was no match for the French army and King Charles, like some many other later tourists, found the shopping excellent. His army would appear, and whole towns and cities would surrender everything to him, gold altar pieces, oil paintings, rich silks, musical instruments, tapestries, fur coats, chests of gold, and a good number of women. He shipped home tons of boodle to stock up the Louvre.
Spain had a matrimonial alliance with Naples and soon enough these two incipient nation-states fought out their war in Italy over the next generation. The micro Italian city-states made shifting alliances with each other and France or Spain as seemed opportune. Venice watched with one hand on the sword, while the Pope in Rome schemed and plotted in hyperdrive. Cesare Borgia supported by his father, the Pope, seized his opportunity to create a kingdom in Romagna. Think of Afghanistan today, that is the picture.
When Charles appeared near Florence, Piero de Medici who had succeeded Lorenzo set a record in the speed of his surrender thus forever sacrificing the support of Florentines who, being traders, expected him at least to bargain. Charles was not at all sure that Piero could deliver the goods, and bided his time. Then the Signoria sent a delegation of four to plead with the king to spare the city. Because of his perfect Christianity, Savonarola was one of the four. He found common ground with Charles by appealing to his Christianity and Charles spared the city. Giro was hailed as a hero. It is more complicated than that but it seemed to everyone that Giro had saved the day.
Giro had also had visions and predicted the future a few times, and enough happened to make the predictions credible. His direct line to God seemed very real. No wonder then that on occasion his sermons would attract 15,000 people. He was a celebrity by word of mouth. Crowds would gather to watch him walk between buildings, hoping that by proximity some of his divine grace would come to them.
During a calm period, the elders of Florence asked his advice (remember that direct line to the divine) on government. He suggested a process of generating and evaluating alternatives that results in three constituent bodies. What is impressive is that he suggested a process and did not simply say do this or that.
He also counselled moderation and clemency when hot heads wanted to exact vengeance on the followers of the Medici. His many enemies, including Medici loyalists, tried to trick him into making more prophecies but he proved astute in not biting. His oracular statements were few, making them all the more mysterious and remarkable. His fame spread throughout Italy. A Venetian ambassador was instructed particularly to observe and report on his activities.
Savonarola seems to have established some kind of relation to King Charles VIII of France during the latter’s several Italian campaigns, which Giro used to protect Florence. This elevated his status still more, but not with the Mediceans (though King Charles was reserving his options by tolerating the current Medici pretender in his entourage).
Factions in Florence rejected Savonarola’s castigations and threats of damnation and petitioned Pope Alexander VI (Borgia) to reassign, recall, criticise, and finally excommunicate him. The Pope went through the motions at first but did not follow through, until…. King Charles threatened Rome again, then the Pope tried to coerce Florence into joining the Venetian League against France and if it did, then he would tolerate Savonarola. If it did not, he would excommunicate him. This see-sawed for a while and further divided opinion Florence.
The executive of the Florentine government was elected every two months, and it oscillated both as to the emphasis placed on Savonarola and its support for him. In June the executive petitioned the Pope to recall Giro, and two months later another, new executive proposed his sainthood. Back and forth it went.
Meanwhile, Savonarola – becoming more extreme and apocalyptic – challenged believers to sacrifice their most precious belongings at Lent, not just forgo their use (say by draping statues or turning paintings to the wall which had sufficed previously). This happened in two successive Lents. The second time the pyre of goods (silk clothes, paintings, statuary, musical instruments, sheet music, books, manuscripts, etc) was so impressive than the Venetian ambassador offered 20,000 gold ducats for it, but Savonarola refused. That is an enormous sum. He must have been biding for the city of Venice because no individual had that many gold ducats. Earlier Giro might have taken the dosh to succour the poor, widows, orphans, cripples, the sick, but he had become more and more obsessed with symbols in the mystified world he inhabited.
His sermons also become more hellfire and brimstone, and he became much more agitated, voluble, and loud when he preached and began to pound the banister on the pulpit in castigating his congregation. In the streets there were clashes between his supporters and opponents resulting in injury and death. When King Charles VIII lost a couple of battles, Giro’s big brother friend no longer intimidated his local opponents.
The Pope’s efforts to discipline Giro got nowhere, but he wanted Florence, perhaps the richest city in Italy at the time, on his side and against the French. The last card was to threaten to excommunicate all of Florence. While many Florentines individually might have agreed with Giro that the Pope, being irredeemably corrupt, had no divine mandate to do this and laughed it off personally, it also meant an interdict on Florence so that no Christian would trade and do business with it. That is, it threatened the livelihood of the city and the fortunes of those who thrived on trade and business, which was most of them. That was serious!
Savonarola was also increasing erratic, even rejecting as evil sinners those who tried to help or protect him.
The Pope finally took more enegetic action, but the Signoria beat him to it. Savonarola was arrested and tried as a heretic, tortured repeatedly over several weeks, until brought to a point where he would confess anything, which he did. He was then hanged and burned in a public spectacle in the Piazza della Signora, where we many tourists have admired the replica of Michelangelo’s David. In all likelihood Niccolò Machiavelli, about 28 at the time, saw this. He has a few words to say about unarmed prophets later in ‘Il Principe.’
Giro published a lot of his sermons, and his acolytes acted as amanuenses at times and wrote his words down. To true believers he was a saint in all but name, and they spread his fame. Visitors to Florence looked at the art work and at Giro. He was also a prodigious letter writer and many remain.
Martin Luther was at it up north during this time, and he is the obvious comparison. Giro was less interested in denouncing the corruption of the Papacy than in saving souls by abnegation. He was also less egotistical than Luther, at least as portrayed in Erik Erikson’s biography ‘Young Man Luther’ (1958).
There is no doubt that Ridolfi’s sentiments lies with Savonarola. He smooths over some of Giro’s behaviour which I have read about in other studies of the time and place, e.g., he minimizes the bonfires of the vanities at Lent. Giro really whipped believers up to do this, and he encouraged them to break into public buildings and private houses and steal valuables to be burned, and no matter how much was burned it was no enough.
These days Giro is known to many tweeners as a character in Assassin’s Creed. To find out more about that, ask any 12-year old boy.
This English translation is minus the footnotes, though the text makes many references to sources and archives, these cannot be traced with this edition.

In which Skid tells the story of his life, or a part thereof, to our nameless narrator who is trying to finish his second, long over due, novel, i.e., Basilières’s alter ego. Though a work of fiction it has some of the layout of nonfiction. There is a preface, and the text has footnotes that supplement the dialogue. The setting is contemporary Toronto.

Skid’s efforts are hindered by a Lem, a shape-shifting monkey from three hundred (300) years in the future. Yep! Lem tries to convince Skid that he is needed in the future. To do that Lem pops up at very inopportune times. Lem does that, pops up.

In the Preface our deuce Basilières makes it clear that he has laboured under expectations for a second novel since his marvellous first one (‘Black Bird’ in 2004), and that he had given up but would pass along this story from his friend Skid. Skid works in a bookstore and lusts after the female employees and customers, but being a terminally inept nerd he gets no further.

It sounds rather like Basilières himself, who works in a Toronto bookstore….
When a writer, or anyone else for that matter, speaks of the expectations – demands – of customers I am reminded of that Stephen King story ‘Misery’ about the writer trapped by a fan and chained to typewriter to produce more stories, and getting whacked by a baseball bat if the stories are not up to standard! Whack!

Michel Basilières

Some authors are one book authors, I have heard, and perhaps that applies here. Sympathise as I do for the angry and demanding god Expectations, the novel bears no relation to the exhilarating Black Bird. I am turning the pages through it in honour of that first novel. Let’s hope, however, that getting A Free Man out might stimulate Basilières to stick to the keyboard, and try again.

Jules Romains, ‘Men of Goodwill’ is the longest novel ever, running to twenty-seven (27) titles. Yes, 27! They have all but disappeared. Few libraries have the whole set, and finding a set to purchase was a long chase for me. They appeared in an English translation in the 1930s. Each volume contains two novels, apart from the last.
In this, volume 1, there are two novels: ‘The Sixth of October’ and ‘Quinette’s Crime.’

Romains’s description at the start of Paris awakening, stirring, moving on a working day is wonderful. He was a believer in some kind of collective consciousness in crowds and he sees this in patterns, recurrences, and actions and reactions on streets, in the Metro, on buses, in employees clocking in, bicycle riders at a traffic light, trucks backing into loading docks at les Grand Magazins.
Monsieur Quinette spontaneously hides a murderer and involves himself in the crime for no other reason than boredom, and because he is, he thinks, so much smarter than anyone else. He misleads the police, extracts the dosh, but finds Leheuday, the murderer, a thug and a loose cannon. He decides to off Leheuday, nick the dosh, and perhaps take Leheuday’s rather dim girlfriend, while leading the police on a merry dance. Deciding is slow work and his last scenes with Leheuday are interminable. But in the end, bang, bang, and he is dead.
It takes Quinette both volumes to shoot Leheudey who murdered an old women in the opening pages. In another of the several threads started in these opening volumes, the students Jallez and Jerphanion meet and they continue through the remaining volumes I think.
Jalllez and Jerphanion become friends, and the Minister of State Gurau discovers a plot against him. He is another who thinks he is smarter than those around him.
The street scenes are well described. The interior monologues of Quinette and Gurau are well done but they go on too long.
Jules Romains, who broadcast for De Gaulle from New York.
The whole 27 volumes together comprise an encyclopaedia of Parisienne life — the high and the low. It reads rather like an encyclopdia, earnest, accurate, detailed, and bloodless. Still the characters are differentiated in manner and speech as part of the ethnography of types and the descriptions of Paris are cinemagraphic.

An espionage thriller from a master story teller who conjures an atmosphere of melancholy from a few lines. Most of the story takes place in grey drizzle with characters who get by on 1500 calories a day, wearing paper thin coats in the unheated rooms of Occupied France in early 1942. They are Jews, bystanders, communists, socialists, citizens, refuges, unionists, journalists who get caught up in each others’ schemes, some petty, some heroic.

The fear, the deprivations bring out the best and worst in people. Pretty Victorine in the travel agency sucks the Jews dry and then turns them in the Gestapo. A gendarme leaves the back door open while he goes to sharpen his pencil and the suspected resistant walks out.
The communists of FTP trust no one, certainly not each other. Students do half-baked, stupid things and get killed. These martyrs inspire others to do more stupid things, and so it goes. German reprisals grow in scale and scope. Life is the one, the only thing that is cheap and readily available.
Grim.
The prose is laconic and spare. In this oppressed world no one has the time for long winded perorations, or for second thoughts. There is no food and hardly any clothing to describe. It meets the Elmore Leonard test. If it is there, then it is important. What is not there is unimportant.

I have read a few of his titles before, but I do find them so melancholic and so grim that there is little pleasure In reading them. It is clear that nothing good is going to happen. And nothing good does.