From the American Mercury 1927

This volume, published by Knopf on rag paper in a limited edition of 600 copies, collects several representative essays from H.L. Mencken's American Mercury magazine from 1927. The bonbon at the end of the meal is an editorial by Mencken imagining the fate of the first person who harnessed fire (killed by the religious authorities). There is an account of a gang's bank robbery by one of the robbers, advice on how to beat the stock market (think illogically), and a lament about the proliferation of laws in America. In this last piece, the author predicts the coming of an American Justinian to eradicate our plague of laws. Eighty years later, still no sign.

A Twist of Lemmon

Chris Lemmon's mostly affectionate remembrance of his actor father, Jack, suffers from a hackneyed style but wins points for its anecdotes. Lemmon, I think, was at his best as a desperate man. His performances in Save the Tiger and The China Syndrome will stand up for a long while. I never saw Lemmon in Long Day's Journey Into Night, but I can't imagine him coming within miles of Ralph Richardson in the 1962 filmed version.

Georgics

Virgil's Georgics benefits from being read aloud, and the verse translation by Smith Palmer Bovie suits that purpose, being, as a blurb puts it, graceful and musical. It is amusing or depressing, or perhaps both, that Virgil complains in this paean to nature and husbandry and farming that life just isn't the same as it was in the "good old days." For the modern reader, it is more than enough to enjoy the beauty of Virgil's song, but what stands out on closer inspection is the technique of transitioning from nature-loving to philosophy and political science. One of the most moving sections, a denunciation of war, comes at the end of Book One:

So once again the Roman battle lines
Clashed in civil war at Philippi;
The gods saw fit to fatten up once more
The plains of Macedonia with our blood.
And to those places there will come a day
When a farmer drives his curved plow through the earth
And strikes on Roman javelins worn with rust,
Or clinks an empty helmet with his spade,
And wonders at the massive bones laid bare.

Virgil can send chills down two thousand years.

Charlemagne

There is not a single bad sentence in Derek Wilson's biography Charlemagne. The book is a model of lucidity, clarity, and scholarship. Charlemagne "invented" Europe, really Western Christendom, through force of arms, force of will, and an evangelizing zeal. That his empire -- in its boundaries reconstituted as the European Economic Community in 1957 -- dissolved within a century of his death does not diminish his accomplishments, which in fact and in legend were to influence Europe for a thousand years. The emperor who could not write (but who could read) is shown to be a tireless advocate for scholarship and education. By modern standards a tyrant, Charlemagne emerges from Wilson's pages as a giant of civilization.

Ford Madox Ford

In my continuing effort to collect books published by Horace Liveright, I picked up the 1930 first edition of When the Wicked Man by Ford Madox Ford on eBay for $22. No dust jacket, but the cheapest copy online is $95, so I didn't do too badly. A nice copy in DJ runs $300. This edition precedes the English. Ford is someone I've not read, so I'm looking forward to getting the book. I've also been prowling for Knopf titles from the '20s. The books themselves, both Liveright and Knopf, are generally excellently made, with high-quality paper, a pleasure to hold. An eBook could never match the feel.

The Transposed Heads

I read somewhere that Thomas Mann admired Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha, and The Transposed Heads (1940) evokes that earlier fable. Both are set in India, both are written simply, and both are freighted with life lessons. Mann's story of two friends of different castes who desire the same woman has them changing heads, literally, as a device to explore the divided nature of existence and beauty -- physical versus spiritual. It is an elegant tale, not without humor even as it tells of beheadings and funeral pyres.

The Reformation

A few chapters in Patrick Collinson's history of the Reformation suffer from the enforced brevity of the Modern Library Chronicles imprint, especially the one on politics, which is a dizzying list of names, dates, and wars. The book is much better in its chapters on Luther, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, and the two at the end on the part played by ordinary people in the religious upheavals and the role of art. Ultimately, Collinson suggests the Enlightenment might not have been possible without the Reformation -- the Catholic Church, after all, didn't acknowledge Galileo was correct until 1992 -- but overall the feeling one has on finishing this book is sadness at the irrelevancy of it all. We are in a post-religious world now, for good or ill, and no matter how you dress up the disputes of the 16th century, they really don't matter a damn.

The Dignity of the Nation

Masahiko Fujiwara's The Dignity of the Nation was a bestseller in Japan in 2005, and reading the English translation by Giles Murray it is easy to see why. The book tells the Japanese what many of them must be longing to hear: that their traditional values are special, that the West is leading them astray, and that Japan can bring the world to a better day. But if there is scant respect here for Western notions of equality and freedom, there is also no ugliness or nationalism in Fujiwara's plea, which goes down with some gentle humor. The author jettisons logic, competition, and globalization in his championing of bushido, the ethics of the samurai. The tenets he outlines, benevolence toward the weak high among them, owe much to Christian ethics. The Japanese love of nature and its fragility, their "sense of pathos," and their love of nation are all being trampled by alien American notions, in Fujiwara's view. He writes to his compatriots, but outsiders might also benefit from standing back from the West's received truths and examining them with a fresh eye.

Stalin's Children

This memoir by Owen Matthews, born in 1971 to an English father and Russian mother, is at its best in its telling of the life of the author's maternal grandfather, Boris Bibikov, an upstanding and patriotic Soviet who ran a tractor factory in the 1930s only to be accused of Trotskyite tendencies and executed during the Terror. The harrowing tale of Bibikov's two daughters, separated by war but united in privation, who eventually, miraculously, reunite, is also well told. Matthews spends a good deal of the second half of the book on an account of his parents' efforts to reunite across the Iron Curtain, a half-decade epistolary love story that is heightened by extensive quoting from the letters. Matthews' own life, as a journalist in post-Communist Russia, is not particularly remarkable, but even in these sections, as he does in the rest of the book, the author sheds light on the Russian character. Matthews quotes Solzhenitsyn: "The line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" In a more prosaic sense, whenever I think of the Russian character, I think of the anecdote I read somewhere that if a Russian is late to an appointment, he will walk slower.

Pompeii

I came to Robert Harris's Pompeii via his novel Imperium, the story of the rise of Cicero. In this book, which covers several days surrounding the epochal eruption in 79 A.D., Harris similarly wears his erudition and research lightly and confidently. The story centers around an aqueduct engineer whose discovery of problems in the system leads him to the top of Vesuvius just as the volcano is preparing to blow. Both Pliny the Younger and Elder figure in the story, which includes plenty of period color and intrigue. The eruption itself consumes the last 100 pages, and Harris carries it off beautifully.

Year of the Big Books

The most memorable big book I've read is Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. Flicker, a hugely entertaining genre piece by Theodore Roszak, also comes to mind. But for some reason (laziness?) I've generally shied away from books that run much past 300 pages. I started reading a new translation of Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov tonight, and it got me thinking that New Year's might be a good time to dedicate myself to tackling some of the doorstops on my bookshelves. If everything was as entertaining as the first 38 pages (of 559) of Oblomov, it would be a snap. Here are some goals for the year (and I might also finish the half-finished, 814-page An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, with the bookmark still stuck where I left it at least five years ago):

◘ The Death of a President by William Manchester, 647 pages

◘ Arabia Deserta by C.M. Doughty, 1148 pages

◘ The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, 900 pages

◘ Kristin Labransdattar (trilogy) by Sigrid Undset, 1043 pages

◘ Complete Works of Rabelais, 841 pages

◘ Boccaccio's Decameron, 655 pages

◘ The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse, 520 pages

Why make a point of reading these long-form works? Because it is a revolt, a personal one but not meaningless for that, against all the technology-enabled gabble that assaults the senses. The Web is a sewer, and these books will keep me from wasting time down there, I'm hoping.