What I Read on My Summer Vacation

 Oh, how I wish I'd "summered" at bookstalls in the Village, or browsed the vendors along the Seine, but as always I went home to see family in Pennsylvania, which of itself is no bad thing.  Still, of bookstores and browsing there was none.  (I always think I will somehow break away for an afternoon to Pittsburgh and go to a proper bookshop, but I never do.)

Instead, as I always do, I read what I brung with me.  I wouldn't normally bother reviewing this material here, as there was little enough of it and none of it needing another mention from me, but someone asked, so I'll just run through as quick as I can the books I read while away on vacation.  Call it my summer-book-report, late and in brief.

First would be the book that did not make it out of the airport.  By the time I'd boarded my connecting flight, I'd nearly polished off Maigret on the Riviera (1932).  I left him on the aeroplane to Pittsburgh.  This one was about as  representative a Maigret adventure as any I've read, both for crime and solution, though this one finds the detective more out-of-sorts than usual, as the old boy's not one for fun and sun.  For the very Parisian Inspector Maigret, there's something soporific about all that heat and calm blue water.  Presumably his discomfort is exacerbated by our hero wearing his trademark topcoat and bowler throughout, as I can picture him no otherwise.  And then there is the frequency with which this case leads him from bar to bar.  That may have done him no favours here either, though heaven knows, the Inspector can hold his liquor.  (Seems never to occur to the man to check his coat or hang his hat, let alone to not have a third brandy with or for his lunch.)  Anyway he's a bit slow on the up-tick this time.  Still, wherever he goes, he seems to find much the same sort of crime everywhere.  If Christie's Hercule Poirot finds insidiously complicated and ingenious murders everywhere he goes, Maigret tends to find the same sort of sordid and pitiable human frailty no matter the location or the  details of the crime.  Somehow, that seems very French, and very satisfying in  world-weary way.

The other Simenon I brought was The Clockmaker (also translated as The Watchmaker), one of his noirs from the Fifties, with an entirely American setting this time, presumably to allow for a certain faithful innocence in the protagonist -- not very French, that. This was not so much a crime novel as a punishment novel, in which the father of a 16 year old boy watches helplessly as his son's delinquency leads to all sorts of anguished inconsequence.  Very French after all, non?  (Simenon's fiction has been having something of a renewal of late, what with new translations and reissues from NYRB, etc.  I'm afraid I haven't been able to make much of his non-Maigrets, of which I've now read half a dozen or so.  I keep trying, but to me they all seem like rather anaemic Jim Thompson novels, or James M. Cain without camp.  Just a bit dull, frankly.  Not bad, you understand, but hardly the deathless masterpieces as which I've seen them repeatedly described.  Meh.  For me, Maigret makes much the same case with at least the comfortable jog of genre to keep things moving at an admittedly rather leisurely pace.) 

I read one Josephine Tey this time, her first, The Man in the Queue (1929).  It is easily the silliest book she ever wrote; silly plot, silly twist, silly deductions, ridiculous finale.  It's the first appearance of her Inspector Alan Grant, though not very memorable for that.  Better I should have read her masterpiece, The Daughter of Time (1951), or even Miss Pym Disposes (1946.)  Still.  Done.

One late (1961) Christie this time, The Pale Horse, (not a Marple despite a television adaptation as such, which I haven't seen, blessedly.)  Last year, I think it was, I took a Christie that proved to be linked stories featuring a most disagreeably supernatural character, "the mysterious Mr. Quin," and a bit of mystical frippery at the end that rather spoiled the whole for me.  Not at all my kind of Christie.  For me, Christie is the supreme practitioner of the ruthlessly logical thriller, after Doyle.  However ridiculous her plots, however absurd her murders or mad her murderers, they always operate within a rational universe.  As this latest one started with a seance and witchcraft, etc., I was steeling myself for disappointment; Dennis Wheatley and weak tea.  I need not have worried.  The Pale Horse proved ruthlessly true to form as a very professional Christie puzzle.

This was my first time with William Goldman's Princess Bride, the novel.  As I said elsewhere, I am not of the right generation to remember the movie as anything much but a harmless, tongue-in-cheek fairytale.  The book I liked better.   Harmless fun.  I will say, there's a particular style of straight, smart-ish philistinism in Goldman that is funnier when he's speaking as himself, the tough, downtrodden screenwriter in his various autobiographies. Here, the smart-ass frequently shaded into just... ass.

The best of the bunch this year, again turned out to be poetry and the surprising pleasure I had reading T. S. Eliot's poetry for the first time in years.  I did not remember it well and I was impressed anew with both the music and humor, neither of which would have been virtues I necessarily associated with the master modernist.  One possibility that has just occurred to me: I might not have appreciated poems like "A Song for Simeon," and "Ash Wednesday," etc., had I not recently read George Herbert.

Finally, I finished rereading Strachey's Eminent Victorians on the shuttle back to the airport and so had to buy myself something for the plane-ride home.  I settled on A John Le Carre, A Most Wanted Man, from 2008 but recently adapted into a feature film I haven't seen.  With a magazine or two, it saw me through the ride.  I finished the book sometime after I got home, when I remembered it in my bag and fished it out again.  It was quite good of it's kind, I thought, and good to see Le Carre keeping up with the times; this one involving a doomed Russian youth, but a Muslim now, trapped in the usual hapless schemes and spy-mess.  I would note Le Carre's writing is as indifferent to style as ever.  A Le Carre from just eight years ago, but for setting and bits of plot, might as easily be from the Sixties.  Neither his writing nor his outlook would seem to have been altered an inch by the passage of time.  Surely that suggests the chief limitation -- and perhaps the chief pleasure -- of a genre writer?  I mention this only because now John Le Carre has become venerable, he is regularly mentioned as a writer who has risen above his matter.  Not a bit of it.  What he does, he does supremely well, but what he does is write espionage thrillers.  I don't see that Len Deighton or John Buchan did it any worse, or thought any less deeply about either life or literature, yet their names seldom seem much in mind any more.  Curious business.

And there we are, I think.  I might have spent more than a mention on Strachey's masterpiece, but of that book I've nattered often before and will again to any who might listen.  Meanwhile, farewell, Summer!  The Fall is here.

Daily Dose

From Eminent Victorians, by Lytton Strachey

GENERAL GORDON'S PASSION

"There were moments when his passion became utterly ungovernable;and the gentle soldier of God, who had spent the day in quoting texts for the edification of his sister, would slap the face of his Arab aide-de-camp in a sudden access of fury or set upon his Alsatian servant and kick him till he screamed."

From The End of General Gordon

Daily Dose

From Eminent Victorians, by Lytton Strachey

HISTORIANS

"The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art."

The Better Part of Biography

Reading Adam Nicolson's new book, Quarrel With the King: The Story of an English Family on the High Road to Civil War, I had the unexpected pleasure of discovering a wonderful portrait of a favorite. I'm partial to favorites, royal. James the 1st of England was, for the most part, about as bad a character as was ever produced by a very spotty family. It is hard to find much in him that wasn't reprehensible, but I can't help being tickled at the way the old boy had with the boys, and how many. James Stuart had favorites as few had before or after him; promotions, fortunes, titles and lands, pearls, gems, suites and kisses rained down on each lucky, comely lad in turn, including, as it turns out, an Earl or two from the clan storied in Nicolson's book. There is a rather fabulous portrait, included in the photo-insert, of Philip Herbert, made Earl of Montgomery not long after, as Nicolson says "the royal eyes alighted on him." Philip is described, rather charitably, as having been "less complex" than his more accomplished older brother William, the Earl of Pembroke, herein described in no uncertain terms as no less than Shakespeare's "Mr. W. H.," but the kid brother did okay for himself, and looking at the painting of this pretty peacock, one understands the king's interest. He looks good. His elaborate costume and elongated figure can't distract from his obvious charms. Old King Goat had good taste.

I've always enjoyed the stories of favorites and mistresses, secret marriages, bastards made dukes, boyfriends made noble. One of the few advantages of the monarchical system, at least until the advent of constitutions and nosy parliamentary inquiries, would seem to have been in the chance for beauties to work their way up on their backs, without undue embarrassment to, indeed to the great enrichment of their friends and families. I've always enjoyed the history of successful gold-diggers.

Today, too lazy to roll out of bed and do better, I watched again John Madden's 1997 movie, Mrs. Brown, starring Judi Dench and Billy Connolly, as the widowed Queen Victoria and her all too faithful "ghillie" John Brown. Dench was, as ever, a wonder. With her rather small eyes and pert face, she looks nothing like the famously bug-eyed and beaky Queen, and yet she manages to make the formidable, even forbidding little reactionary come very much, and very sympathetically alive on screen. One not only pities Dench's Victoria, one actually comes to like her, and fairly quickly too, as soon, in fact, as Billy Connolly's delightful Brown arrives to enliven things with a wink and a bit of smart insolence. He looks quite fine in and briefly out of his kilt too, offering further visual evidence of John Brown's attractiveness, which seemed so to flummox the rest of the rest of the Queen's faithful.

The movie is a surprisingly moving, and chaste telling of the rise and fall of The Widow's favorite, and I've watched it more than once since it's release, each time with no less pleasure than the first. It is that good. It also proves a theory about the strange power of that odd little person, Queen Victoria, namely that whatever one may find distasteful in either monarchy or her personality, everyone writing about her sooner or later seems to love her. Biographers and cabinet ministers, historians and playwrights, for whatever reason, it seems even her harshest critics, on greater acquaintance, come to find her strangely sympathetic, not just pitiable for her unfortunate and neglected childhood, or the untimely end of her obsessively happy marriage and her long and wearisome widowhood, but genuinely likeable.

Lytton Strachey, perhaps the greatest and most famously acid historian of the great Victorians, on coming to Victoria herself, wrote another masterpiece, as unlike in it's way to his Eminent Victorians as day is to night. He may well have set out, in his Queen Victoria, as he had in his earlier book, to put all that was, by Bloomsbury's lights, awful in that earlier age, and as personified in the queen, down, for good and all. But, like so many before and since him, and even as he undid some of the stays in her stout myth, Strachey, by the end of his researches, and in the book he finally wrote, found a woman he truly respected, however violently he disapproved of her politics and piety, her temper and her empire, a woman in fact he seems to have ultimately found himself writing of as he did almost no one else: as a good example, in her weird way, as something of a heroine, at least in her own long and often unhappy life.

Every time I find myself, as I did today, distracted by a movie or television show featuring Victoria Regina, I take down Strachey's book and dip in here or there. My edition is wonderfully illustrated, with a brief introduction by Strachey's own great biographer, Michael Holroyd, and I inevitably read the whole last chapter, "The End," and stare at the last photos of the fat, sad little Queen in her pony-cart. Strachey closes his biography with a beautifully sentimental speculation, allowing the dying old lady to drift back, and back through her happy moments, ending where she began, in innocence. It is one of the most stunningly unlikely, and kindest, tributes in modern biography.

Strachey is, of course a favorite of mine, in a very different sense from that I was discussing when I started, and so, thanks to him, is old V. R. herself. Else, why would I watch her and read about her again and again, when there is so much I would rather and ought to do? Inexplicably, I find I like her. Go figure.