A Caricature

A Quick Review

Oliver Cromwell by John Buchan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


John Buchan was a gentleman.  Yes, yes, he was an MP, and eventually Governor General of Canada, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir PC GCMG GCVO CH, etc., etc.  Very respectable, all that, if not specially meaningful to the common American reader, such as me.  Be that as it may, as something of an anglophile and a devoted reader of English history, I can certainly appreciate a gent.  I say again, John Buchan was a gent.

The breed, so far as I know, is all but extinct -- and most ways that's probably just as well: colonialism, The British class system, fox-hunting; a mixed bag at best.  It could likewise be pretty convincingly argued that gentility, for want of a better term, did nearly as much harm as good to English literature.  (Think of Anthony Trollope on sexual "incontinence" or Kipling or Churchill on "fakirs.")  At his best though, the English gentleman of letters, or even as here the Scot, tended rather charmingly to judge mankind not as monsieur might, by the crease in his pants, but rather by his "bottom"; here suggesting gravitas, the way he sat a horse, spoke to subordinates, behaved in the company of ladies.  So it seems, the Lord Protector was a gentleman.

I might have foreseen this from reading Buchan's Julius Caesar, who even more surprisingly proved to be -- yup -- a gentleman, much otherwise misunderstood.  Say what you will about the historical accuracy of this perspective, it does make for a not unpleasant atmosphere of good humoured fair play.  Not quite the same thing as objectivity, obviously, or even even-handedness, so much as an even-tempered, even genial style, tempered by a very genuine sympathy for both subject and history. 

Here then is Cromwell as the leader of men, yes, but awfully good about horses too, you know.  Cromwell, it must be admitted, was a rather bloody conqueror of Ireland -- bad form -- but never really so bloody-minded as has been made out elsewhere.  Not really, no.  Just the one ruthless massacre, just at the start, and we have his letters home to tell us he did come to feel very bad about the slip.  And domestically, it's well worth saying, he kept more heads on shoulders than he took off, or jolly well might have done.

I'm not really being fair.  Buchan was, first and foremost, a thoroughly accomplished writer, a novelist of very real gifts.  His prose is always smooth, his curiosity and care both obvious and satisfying.  I can't fault his scholarship, which seems certainly to have well met the standard of his day and profession.  His is an eminently readable and well-made history, very much in the tradition of Macaulay and the great Victorians who so clearly influenced both his style and his outlook on life.  He's neither stuffy nor stiff, and I can't remember a book about Oliver -- as he sometimes endearingly calls this least endearing of men -- I've enjoyed reading more.

Reading this book set me to at least browsing in Carlyle's impossibly heavy edition of Cromwell's letters, and that was well worth doing too -- if abandoned immediately after concluding Buchan's history.  (If I was never quite convinced of Cromwell's basic goodness and simplicity of heart by either author, it certainly wasn't for want of effort on the part of all involved.)

How then does Buchan's Cromwell read compared to those before and since?  I'd have to say that even the serious student of the period could certainly do worse.  Here at least is a model of narrative efficiency, good humour and sympathy.  When was the last time a contemporary historian exhibited that sort of restraint and emotion, ladies and gentlemen?



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Quick Review

Witch Wood by John Buchan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had never read Buchan, and would never have thought to start with an historical novel, but Witch Wood proved to be an excellent experience. Think Sir Walter Scott with an ever so much lighter touch. Indeed, the setting here, though not the story, is the same as Scott's Montrose. (And, yes, the great general does make a rather splashy cameo in Buchan's book.) But where Scott's older Tory sensibility saw only heroics and tragedy, John Buchan's 20th Century telling sees the religious civil wars in Scotland as an unremitting disaster for all parties, and uses a small mystery from a chronicle of the period, to describe the conflict from many angles. Buchan nonetheless is a latter day Romantic still, and the master evidently of ripping yarns, so there's great good fun, adventure, swordplay, and whatnot as well. The Scots vocabulary can be a bit daunting -- the edition I read from the mid 1970s weirdly translates about every sixteenth word or so -- but this same language can also be delightful; as in "fernietickles" for freckles.

I'd happily read this one again. A good sign, that. Means I'll be looking out more of Mr. Buchan, hereafter.

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Daily Dose

From Witch Wood, by John Buchan

YON

"Yon was him in the kirk the day, yon body with the fernietickles and the bleary een."

From Chapter XVI, The Witch Hunt

Daily Dose

From Witch Wood, by John Buchan

DAFT GIBBIE

"Daft Gibbie, too, had become a partisan. He would dog David's footsteps, and when spoken to would only reply with friendly pawings and incoherent gabble. He would swing his stick as if it were a flail. 'Sned them, sir,' he would cry, 'sned them like thristles.'"

From Chapter XV, Hallowmass

Quick Review

Some Eighteenth Century Byways, And Other Essays by John Buchan

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Charming biographical essays by the author of The 39 Steps. Who knew? I'm sure loads of people did, or do, but I certainly didn't. Turns out, the much decorated author was a quite accomplished man of letters in the best old sense. A much traveled and sophisticated gentleman, Buchan is also Scots to the tips of his fingers, and so much of the interest here is in his view of his true country's past, and something like his own. This collection, for example, includes a fairly acid portrait of Charles Stuart, the Second of England, but also a delightful, and forbearing short biography of an earlier, noble Buchan, a noted eccentric and something of a pest to the great Sir Walter Scott.

This was an Espresso Book Machine reprint of a Google book -- inexpensive, and a very nice, clean text.

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Daily Dose

From Some Eighteenth Century Byways and Other Essays, by John Buchan

CHARLES II

"He starved the Navy to adorn his mistresses."

From Charles II

Pumpin' Paper

Some time back, around November I think, I finally started using goodreads as a reading diary. For any what don't know, yes, it is a social network for book nerds, but it is also an excellent and easy system for tracking one's reading and or keeping lists. I love lists. I pretty much live to make lists. No, that's wrong. Better say, lists allow me to function above my more natural state of paralytic distractibility, and general flibbertigibbetry. Now, generally speaking there is almost no context when a declaration like the one I'm about to make does not actually suggest it's exact opposite, but you will just have to trust me this time when I tell you that I do indeed read a lot. Potentially a pretty meaningless measurement, I know, and entirely subjective, but it suits my purpose here because when I tell you, according to my latest updated list on goodreads, right now I'm "currently reading" eleven books, even to me, that sounds like a lot. Don't be impressed though, even if you want to be. I'm not trying to make any claim for myself beyond maybe having just enough upper-body strength to lift all the books in that little list without straining a wrist. That's about all that means. (Thus my embrace of the vagueness that is measured by "a lot.")

The eleven books on that "currently reading" list constitute a meaningful set only in so far as these are the books I have been reading, on and off, for the past three months or so without yet having finished any of them. The books I finished in this period have already come off the "currently reading" list and been moved -- by instant computer magic -- to the "read" list. That list, which is already ridiculously large for reasons I'll explain soon enough, already forced me to start another list of my own creation called "abandoned." I've added four books to date on that one, each with an explanation/brief review, with the idea of warning off like-minded readers, if any, from bothering with those titles. (I'm trying to be a responsible participant in the goodreads community, rather than just a snark. Honest.) Now the reason my "read" list has grown to such ungainly size is because I've discovered the time-wasting fun to be had "voting" on other people's posted lists, of, say, "The Best Books of 1989" and or because I've created and posted a few public lists of my own -- not that anybody's noticed yet -- of things like "The Best Books to Read Aloud to Grown Ups" and "Classic American Narrative History." Only too late did I learn that goodreads etiquette frowns on the practice of adding titles to my general "read" list long after the fact. This, it seems, is looked on by the community rather like Mormons making posthumous baptisms among the "Gentiles," or as just plain ol' bragging. My thinking was that I didn't want to vote for something in, for example, a list like "The Best Books of 1989" without people being able to see that I was voting only for books that I had myself read. Besides, using another feature of the site which suggests other titles I might like to read based on all my other lists, marking those as "read" that I did not intend to read again anytime soon, I didn't have to see those books pop up again as suggestions for future reading. The other option was to mark these books as "not interested" which would not be true. I was interested. I read 'em. Thus my "read" list has become, well... bloated and frankly boastful looking.

I'm not bragging, or rather if I am, it's only because I don't have the option, or the time to annotate each and every book marked as "read" with a full review and or a confession of just what I might mean by marking each as such. I haven't explained giving all the Agatha Christies I could remember basically a couple of stars in the rating system because I barely remember one from another, just that I once read Agatha Christie -- as one should -- as one eats Goobers, by the fist-full. Additionally, in my buzzy little brain, it makes more sense to mark the Oxford Illustrated Dickens in twenty volumes as "read" before adding it to my "favorites" list, even though I have yet to read The Mystery of Edwin Drood because I've been saving it to read multiple endings some day, or all of the volume of Reprinted Pieces because I think of it as a dippin' book rather than a-sit-down-read. I want to recommend the Oxford Illustrated to others, but I don't need to provide all the details of my reading therein, I felt, in order to do so.

The one rule I've made for myself so far is that I do not mark anything as "read" unless I read the whole thing, or put it on my "abandoned" list-- unless the individual edition is an anthology, like the great Library of America series, in which case, again I particularly want to recommend these excellent books to a wider readership as representing the best available editions of most American classics, again, without appending to each book yet another subset of what I have or have not read in each.

Makes sense to me, anyway. My muddle, my lists, darling.

To return to my subject proper, however indirectly, my "currently reading" list -- or "shelf" in goodread speak -- allows me to chart my progress in each book I'm reading by number of pages read, which conveniently then works out for me the percentage of the whole I've read of each book, and even makes a useful little barchart of this under each title. Cool. What it also has unexpectedly done for me is to remind me that I have a lot -- there it is again -- that I have started reading, still intend to finish, and might otherwise forget in my enthusiasm to start new books almost every goddamned day. I work in a bookstore, you know. Can't be helped. That though is what I'm considering just here, that habit.

A couple of days back, I posted something here about the stack in my bathroom. None of those books, please note, have I listed on goodreads as "currently reading" Why? Because in the first place, so far as I can remember, there isn't anything currently in that stack that I haven't read already and or that I intend to read again straight through. As I already tried to explain, those books now serve a slightly different function as part of my library, and at least in part that stack will always be something into which I may dip when caught, not to be too vulgar about it, with my pants down. My "currently reading" shelf is reserved then for books I have every intention of finishing someday, if not soon, then, well... someday. I've made my "abandoned" shelf into a bin, so I don't want to put anything there that I will ever pick up again. I haven't moved anything off my "currently reading" shelf until I could honestly mark it as "read." And so the list of the books I'm "currently reading" now numbers no less than eleven titles. Bespeaks a problem, that, or rather it might if I saw it as being any such thing to try to read eleven different books at roughly the same time. I don't.

I don't because I have come in recent years to believe sincerely that this is not only something like the way I have almost always read as an adult, but also the best way for an adult with the means to do so to read. There are good people, people much brighter and frankly possessing much better brains than mine, reading I should think far more difficult or in some other way worthy books I may or may not ever read, for whom such a system, if so it may be called, would suggest nothing but chaos and confusion. I can see that. I've know some brilliant people, devoted and serious readers the lot of them, who read one book, end to end, and down to the notes and the note of the typeface on the last page before picking up another. Some of the people whose opinions on books I most respect read this way. I never have nor could I if I wanted to. I do not read, or think, in such a straightforward and productive ways. I have the utmost respect for well-organized minds. I will, when pressed, admit to a burning envy of such brains as that. (Just think of the discipline of that!) Because I think my reading is done without answering to anyone but myself, I do not see the reason why I should not read, of an evening whatever I wish, and owning so many books, and having access through my job to so many more, I can not now imagine ever again reading just one book until it's done, though I do do that still, very, very rarely. It reflects on the quality or interest of what I'm reading not at all to say I read a book straight through. Yes, I might read a play or a graphic novel in a sitting. Seems likely considering the brevity of the actual text in such books as that, but even there there's nothing to say I need do it just that way or that I will. But by and large, I read just as I want; Trollope tonight and Pope's letters tomorrow. I might be distracted, as I am just now, by a novel by John Buchan about a Puritan preacher in a pagan wood, or by a biography from 1959 of the DuBarry by the charming American narrative historian, Stanley Loomis.

All goodreads has done by tracking all this for me has been to remind me that while the way I read may not be just as others do, it does not seem to have been an unproductive way of reading. In fact, goodreads actually has the perfect system for suggesting not only the connections between the books I'm reading and the books I've read and the books -- oh, so many -- that I have yet to read, but also the connections I may never have noticed from one book to the next in just the books I'm reading now.

I reread Walter Scott's Old Mortality recently. That's what made me take note of the Buchan book, Witch Wood when it came in used recently. I've never read Buchan, even his most famous novel, The 39 Steps. Since the Buchan that came in to me is set in much the same history as the Scott, that seemed a perfect book to try. You see? And that, having whetted my appetite for a bit more history, made me make note of the pretty little volume of Loomis when it came in and take it with me to lunch where I read the first forty pages with very real pleasure. (I find lunch hour is better suited to history, most days, than to fiction, at least any serious fiction, like the James that, yes, I am also "currently reading.") Not to belabor a subject I have no doubt already pummeled all the juice out of, but just by way of one last example from the shelf, reading the Buchan made me pick up Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables again after having read the first two thirds of it on last summer's vacation, just because Puritanism had, all unwittingly, become something of a theme for me in recent days.

I said that none of this was meant to be bragging. If I could say honestly that reading or rereading any of the books mentioned was being done to any purpose other than to entertain myself, then I might, I think, be justly suspected of putting on the dog a bit. Come to that, just mentioning that I'm reading Henry James for pleasure might sound like chest-thumping of an even worse kind. I get that. If however I can in anyway convey how little I will make of any of this reading beyond whatever nearly incoherent gassing I might do about it here, I think that should answer at least something of the accusation of either over-seriousness or snobbery on my part. I recognize that not everybody would willingly read any two of the nearly dozen books I have metaphorically open before me tonight, but that isn't to say, I would hasten to add, that there aren't a legion of readers, and many among my own small circle of acquaintance who wouldn't, without breaking much of a sweat, be able to speak, or write, or even just think about these books, or appreciate them more or understand them better than I do.

Whenever I read better books, and I find myself compelled as I get older to read better books to exclusion of even those books I might once have read with real pleasure, I don't think it is snobbery that motivates me now so much as impatience. I haven't time for much else. I spend embarrassing amounts of my time consuming other kinds of culture, and much of it of embarrassingly inferior stamp, and with no less pleasure for that, but reading now seems to me something I prefer to do with only the best books -- mostly.

And as for that accusation of snobbery, a word I've had hung 'round my neck since boyhood, I feel obliged to say just here that I do not think it fair. When I read books well above my education and sophistication as a child, I did so from the sincere conviction that I was compensating for my origins in a home without books, schools that did not aspire to much, and a society, I mistakenly thought, where getting on meant being better read than than I knew myself to be. By the time I'd kenned just how wrong I was about all of this -- save maybe my largely worthless schooling -- it was too late for me, which is to say too late not to understand at least a little of what made one book better than another. That, it seems to me, is probably how one comes to the habit of reading better books anyway, no? By reading good and bad and learning to recognize why one is better than the other. As for this habit now so established that most of what I read might be described as classic or whatnot, I think it more accurate to say I read mostly the books I trust to be worth the time I can spare them when not giggling with my husband at silly people bouncing into mud-puddles off big red balls on idiotic reality-TV nonsense like Wipe Out. (Come on! Big red balls!! It's funny!)

The list-making, shelving or whatever one might properly call it that I now waste endless stray hours doing on goodreads would doubtlessly be better spent writing or working here, or even doing something really productive like, say yard-work, or trying my hand at knitting or writing poetry again (shudder) but I can't really find it in me to begrudge myself. It does feel like I might yet learn something about myself from all this compiling and classifying and noodling away at goodreads.

You should see the size now of my groaning "to read" shelf!

And look at the steadiness of that wrist!