Be Serious, Now

Reading seriously is something one usually does only when required. Textbooks, for instance, even or maybe specially in subjects one may not find inherently interesting, as I remember it, require a kind of concentration seldom experienced elsewhere in life. Most work, even work we undertake with enthusiasm, seldom requires the same intensity of focus necessary, for me at least, to do even a simple equation involving fractions. I pored over an algebra text in the seventh grade with all the sweaty devotion of sinful monk at as prayerbook, and ended as nearly convinced of Hell. But seriousness is not necessarily a matter of necessity. It is not always what we need to know that makes us take up a book, or a subject, looking to exhaust the thing before we are through. Some of the most serious reading that I have done in my adult life I did to no better purpose than to know more about something about which I was already reading but really needed to know nothing at all. Literary biography has often been for me just such resource, but it is by no means the only direction in which my more serious reading usually takes me. In fact, I consider the reading I do most serious, and what I'm reading most worthy of being read seriously, when I can not seem to read what I want without reading other books in support, as it were, of what I can not stop reading. Sounds a little nutty, I know.

The argument is made that the greatest literature exists as a thing discreet not only from tradition and precedent, but in much modern critical theory, as independent even of its author, the very existence or possibility of whom, the theorists of this school would happily deny on every page, after that on which their own name appears. Another school holds that there is no such thing as a discreet unity in any single piece of art and that every book, by any author, is in fact nothing more nor less than the point at which all the forces of art and society and language happen to snag at a moment in time. This sort of thing is taken very seriously, as I understand, if only by those with an interest in seeing to it that no one reads anything that isn't accompanied by exegesis, as that, after all, is what such folks primarily read nowadays amongst themselves and sadly the only thing they seem to be able to write. I can think of one revolutionary character, with a book out just this year, who has even convinced himself that not only can no other writer exist without him, but that he is in fact entitled do away with other people's names altogether and just publish whatever he happens on as entirely his own, and would do, had he not been forced by his publisher's recalcitrant lawyers to append an index to his commonplace book.

Obviously, I do not subscribe to any of this theoretical vaudeville, or find it very entertaining. I can in fact think of few things other than Regnery Publishing or the Christian Science Reading Rooms that have actually contributed less to sum total of human happiness than The Norton Critical Editions of the classics, and they at least have the full text of the books they would sink.

But I am not such a hermit and autodidact as to think I can or ought to read what I read, great and little, without benefiting often as not from the reading others have already made of the books I choose to read. Critics, and biographers, historians and philosophers -- though that last, as a class of person, tends to talk past me -- may be eagerly sought by me even if only to help me read a romance. I doubt very much that most of these writers had someone like me much in mind when they set to their subjects, or ever envisioned their ideal reader as an all but anonymous bookseller with, for instance, a taste for Dumas, and a spotty education in, say, French history. Nevertheless, I have a history, reading historical romance, of wanting more history as I read. Stands to reason. Dumas makes me want to know what he knew and whatever else I might about the people he brings to such vivid life in, for example, The Forty-Five.

I am so old, and so old fashioned, that simply checking Wikipedia does not seem sufficient to satisfy my curiosity, so now and again I will pause while reading an historical novel, just long enough to pick up other related books; the actual history of the period, biographies of the major players and the like. I can end up fairly far afield, doing this, but for the most part I tend to stick to what's relevant to the narrative before me. Sir Walter Scott, when I read his Quentin Durward, made me curious enough to find Paul Murray Kendell's Louis XI: The Universal Spider, which was just as much fun as it sounds. Dumas' The Two Dianas tells the story of Diana de Poitiers, the great love of Henri II of France, and her daughter, Diana de Castro. Having already read at least one full length biography of Catherine de' Medici while reading Dumas' Queen Margot, and attempting Marguerite's own memoirs, I took on The Serpent and the Moon: Two Rivals for the Love of a Renaissance King, by Her Royal Highness Princess Michael of Kent, as a supplement to the "Dianas." The two rivals in that last history being Catherine de' Medici & Diane de Poitiers, and the Princess being a legitimate descendant of dear Diana, the reader may imagine how well Catherine comes out in that one. But then, even when her earlier biographer attempted to rehabilitate the old girl, it was with many a caveat, as I remember. Dumas of course, even with his usual sympathy for his villains, casts Catherine as perhaps most poisonous of the whole nest of Valois vipers.

Reading The Forty-Five, just as our friend Chicot set off for Navarre, what should come across the desk but Henry of Navarre: Henry IV of France, by one Lord Russell of Liverpool. The book was brief enough that I started it the same day and finished at lunch the next. Nothing much as literature, Russell's book did review at a happy clip the life of this great king, just when I wanted reminding of the facts. Learned one or two along the way as well. (Just an aside, but I did not know they had Lords and such like in Liverpool.)

Years ago, when I was still trying to like his brother Thomas, I discovered Heinrich Mann and his honking great masterpiece, Young Henry of Navarre & Henry King of France. I realized reading the little biography by Russell, that what I knew of this man I came by through first Mann, and then Dumas. Turns out, both were pretty good about their history. (Rather tempts me to reread the second volume of Mann's novel again, as we also just acquired, presumably from the same source, the second book in both the Overlook paperback and hardcover. Hmmm... )

Where all this leads of course is to an ever longer line of books I might read. Vidal's Burr led me to Washington Irving and on and on, Stevenson and Macaulay sent me after the Stuarts, and now, again, Dumas has me chasing after not only Henri IV, but as of today, the Guises, another pack of wonderfully awful aristos. Martyrs & Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe, by Stuart Carroll, tempted me as far as the third chapter so far. (Who could resist? There was a massacre in the very first chapter!)

This then is what I usually mean when I make reference to my "serious reading." I don't mean the kind of reading done by what we used to call, when I was in school, a "grind," but rather the kind of reading that excites curiosity, mine anyway, the kind of curiosity that is not satisfied by just the book that inspired it. Such a book need not, as I mentioned, be historical romance. Finally reading, with happy astonishment, a novel by Beckett after years of avoiding him, sent me after biographies, memoirs, criticism, and finally the first volume of Beckett's letters before I'd exhausted, for now, my enthusiasm. Don't even want to think about how many books I've now read about Dickens, or Dr. Johnson or Charles Lamb, just to name the most obvious favorites.

Just now then, I find myself seriously interested in a period and place otherwise only redeemed for me because the times were Montaigne's. (And that, I'll save for next time.) What matters now is how good it feels to be reading a romance, and reading it, as it seems, more seriously than I've read anything much in ages.

This is not something that would be possible, please note, without the wonderful synchronicity of books, old and new, bookstores and the careful avoidance of any actual responsibilities. Ah, joy.

Reading Dumas Again...

Reading Dumas again, I'm reminded how a great artist -- because that is what Alexandre Dumas, père, was, a great artist -- says what he means to say by whatever means he may choose or take up of necessity or in keeping with the fashion of the times, and in whatever medium, or genre, or material that may be, finds not only the way but the reason to make art. Unlike Hugo or Balzac, for whom I suspect the reason came first, Dumas might almost be said to have become an artist because, being poor and finding he was suited to little else, but being being ambitious, and clever, he took to writing for want of other opportunities. In this, Dumas is more like Dickens than either Hugo or Balzac, for both of whom the writing of fiction was always mixed with the politics of their time, with philosophy, and poetry and the traditional preoccupations of serious young men determined to make, not only art, and a reputation, but their mark, and ultimately to not only influence but change the world around them. For Dumas, like Dickens, writing was first a way to make a living, to make something from nothing, to make a reputation yes, but also a popular success. Both became immensely popular, and both became rich, and the nakedness with which they both pursued this worldly success has been used ever since to indict them both as being inferior artists. It's perfectly true that both popular novelists relished their popularity, and the money it made them, but that doesn't mean that either had nothing very important to say, or that they did not ultimately come to say things that were not necessarily popular. Each man, having found that he might do very well indeed by way of writing novels, found he might also, by the same means, without actually compromising his popularity or his income, or his principles, say exactly what he thought. If Dickens, almost unable to help himself even so early as the second half of his first great success, The Pickwick Papers, could not keep from being angry, and expressing that seriousness that marked him out as more than just a comic writer, and in so doing make his eponymous little retiree not only go to jail, but see it as it was; filthy, corrupt, a tragedy and a shame, and be changed by the experience, so too Dumas, the supreme romancer, was never satisfied that his heroes should win and their enemies lose. Everyone loses in Dumas. If not now, then later, if not life, then love, if not everything, then what matters most. Not even in the greatest revenge ever written, does the Count of Monte Cristo sail away without regrets. At peace? Perhaps, but off he goes, none the less. Do we know why?

That's what makes Alexandre Dumas, père, the greatest romancer, greater even than his master, Walter Scott. There are questions in Dumas for which he has no answer.

Dumas wrote romances for a number of reasons, not all of them noble I suppose, and he used a whole factory of hacks and researchers to produce his books. A recent film biography produced in France created controversy, not only by casting the great Gérard Depardieu rather than a black actor to play the novelist, who was a direct descendant of a Caribbean slave, but by showing something of the shabby way Dumas sometimes treated his collaborators. I haven't seen the film, which I don't think has ever been released here, so I can't speak to the accuracy of the portrait, or Depardieu's performance, or the controversies that the film created. What I've read of Dumas' biography does suggest that he was subject to a certain and persistent racism, used by his critics as just one more way to attack him, and that while the writer was extremely proud of the memory of his father, a Napoleonic general and son of an aristocratic Frenchman and an Afro-Caribbean Creole of mixed French and African ancestry, Dumas seems seldom, at least in his novels, and the memoirs I've read, to concern himself much with race; either his own or as a topic to explore. He did write one short novel, Georges, with a protagonist of mixed race, but the subject didn't seem to interest him much, if at all, even that one book aside. Dumas was a Romantic and well as as the supreme romanticist, and as such it was always the individual, as hero and antagonist, in love, war, intrigue, and most supremely in dialogue, that speaks to him and for whom he speaks most eloquently. Gascon or Parisian, king or commoner, black or white, even, somewhat surprisingly for a man and a writer of his time, man or woman, for Dumas, any human being, every human being, is a story, a history, heroic and cowardly, weak and strong, but never simply one of many, and never banal. I don't think, for all his patriotism, all his pride, that Dumas really believed much in nations, or even peoples. Dumas believed in Dumas. Recognizing his own moral complexity, his own character, he invested nearly every character he wrote, historical or invented, with something of the same contradictions he found in himself. He relished his own, rather ruinous humanity, and saw no reason to deny even his villains something of his own humor and generosity, just as he always invests even his greatest heroes something of his own weakness and pride and lack of sobriety.

I've just read Dumas' portrait of Henri of Navarre at his court, well after he escaped the Valois, and before he claimed France as his kingdom. It is an astonishingly good likeness, as I understand it, but it is more than just a portrait of a king in a small kingdom who would go on to become the great king who restored France. For Dumas, there is greatness in Henri, but we do not see it in him, as indeed did not most of his contemporaries, until it can be proved. Indeed, even Chicot, Dumas' brilliant portrait of an exceptionally perceptive and able man, hobbled by loyalty to an inferior prince, Henri's brother-in-law, Henri III of France, fails to fully appreciate the King of Navarre until he is bested by him, and comes in fact to love him. It is an amazingly deft and believable transformation that Dumas makes, of both men, and dangerous, not only in the exciting context of the story, and history, but as a bit of narrative. The reader presumably knows more than either man what will happen next, and yet Dumas still surprises. Chicot, one of Dumas' supremely clever men, is outfoxed and kept from escaping the hospitality of provincial Navarre, not by force, but by ruthless good manners. The king, thought to be something less than a soldier, and even rumored to be a coward, does not cease to be a coward in battle, when he undertakes to make war. He shakes with fear. Chicot sees this just as we do. Like Chicot, the reader may well be astonished to see Henri of Navarre, rather than deny his terror, admit it, even shame himself with it, and not so much overcome it as use it to force himself to continue, and to triumph. Chicot, the great friend of the Valois king, as great a cynic as he is loyal, while he will not betray his master, admits freely that he has met a better man in Henri of Navarre, and pledges his friendship, should he ever be free from his obligation to the house that has never brought him anything but disappointment and grief, but which he will not abandon.

Dumas' genius is in not only his adventurous story-telling, or the plots he took from history and the hands of his collaborators, but in his dialogue, which is unmatched for it's telling character, it's wit and it's magical facility for being both very like what what may or must have been said by the people in the time of which he writes, and better, probably, than anything a witness to these scenes would actually have heard. Dumas was first a playwright, and so he was at his best as a novelist, taking the highly theatrical settings of French history, and the conventions of romance, and elevating both by giving voice not only to the character of his characters, so to say, but to all the complexities with which conversation at its best might be made by exceptional men, moving in and making history.

Dumas does something we now longer accept in our history; he makes great men say great things, not in speeches, but between themselves. The advances in technology and the disappearance of privacy for even the leaders of nations has sadly proved how unlikely it is that princes and generals and politicians ever spoke this well. And yet, the magic of romance, and what Dumas, like Shakespeare, understood perfectly, is that we want men and women not only to do great things, but to be greater than just their deeds. Again like Shakespeare, Dumas knew that it is not always the winners who are the most eloquent witnesses of events, that it is not always good that wins, or the best who survive. But Dumas believes even in his fools and his failures, in his murderers and his assassins as much as his heroes, and believes they all deserve a hearing, and at their best. So reading Dumas, must we. It is glorious to be in such a world, if only in a book!

As for Dumas putting his name to other writers work, he may well have done. The Two Dianas, set in the reign of Henri II, and so set just before the Valois novels I'm finishing now with The Forty-Five, is now widely assumed to be almost wholly the work of another. What I have read is that even Dumas most regular, and possibly most misused collaborators were nevertheless quick to point out that whatever they did, it was Dumas who took it and made it into literature, by whatever means or magic. (One has only to read some of the unauthorized sequels to his Musketeers, like The Son of Porthos, to which Dumas contributed nothing, to appreciate how necessary his genius was to elevate the material to something more than sentimental melodrama.)

What Dumas gave his books was not just life, as great novelists do, but joy, as only the greatest artists understand. It isn't just the adventure, the victories or the defeats, it isn't just the romance of love and politics and honor and war, it is the joy of it all, and in spite of it all, of living, that one knows best perhaps in Dumas. Say what you will of Alexandre Dumas, he had as much or more to say about that than almost anyone else I can name in literature, or life.

Daily Dose

From A History of France, Andre Maurois

HENRI IV

"His sparkling eyes, his arched nose, his square beard, his Gascon accent, his delightful character and even his love-affairs soon became popular."

From Chapter VII, How Henry IV Rebuilt France's Unity

Daily Dose

From Henry King of France, by Heinrich Mann

NOTHING

"When a man fears nothing, he is bidding farewell to life, as Henri had discovered in his own person. When had his fears begun to fade? He could no longer tell. He merely knew that the fight in which it was his lot to fall was by no means the last, and after him it would spread further than if he had been there."

From In La Rochelle