Clearly — !

I’m talking about a dust jacket. It features the celebrity-author photograph by Annie Liebowitz and graces the newly-published edition of Notes to John, Joan Didion’s memoranda of meetings with a psychiatrist in 2000-1, when she, her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, about whose alcoholism and other problems Didion was consulting the psychiatrist, were all still alive.

If you slip the dust jacket off the book and flatten it out — no, if you glance at the front of the dust jacket for a moment and then do as I said, you’ll notice a contrast right away. There is light and color on the left half of the photograph. On the right, there is Joan Didion, sitting in what is presumably her home office, and you might be forgiven for thinking that the image is in black-and-white. On the part of the picture that appears on the rear of the dust jacket, there is a lighted lamp, whose ecru shade glows yellow, as does its empty-column glass base. This causes the blue-greens of the image on the computer screen to stand out, at least as color. Now that the whole of the desk in the window is visible, it is clearly littered with mildly colorful items, especially a porcelain bowl, painted with fish or dragons (or something), that I should like to know more about. These things, in the lamplight and alongside the computer, bring out the color in the author’s face and arms.

That’s it: the whole photograph — and it takes the whole photograph to do this — brings Didion, who died at the end of 2021, to life.

Or maybe not. Maybe celebrity photographer Annie Liebowitz just knows how to take pictures that look meaningful. Certainly it must be assumed that she did a little more than walk into Didion’s home office and snap her shutters. In the rear of the populated half of the photograph stands a starkly modern floor lamp that the photographer may have decided to turn off. Without its light, the room seems not so much bathed as rinsed in a chaste northern daylight arguably inadequate to the needs of elderly eyes.  Interestingly, the empty but lighted half of the photograph shows two crumpled tissues, one next to the mouse pad and one at the base of the lamp. These details suggest that Liebowitz is not an interior-décor photographer.

The impulse to catalogue what’s visible is almost irresistible to someone like me, who grew up on the 1963 Cloisters catalogue description (cribbed, I think, from the work of Erwin Panofsky) of what is now known as the Mérode Altarpiece, packed with such decodings as this: “The rays of the sun passing through the window give visual form to the popular medieval allegory of the perpetual virginity of Mary, which St Bernard explained thus…” Beauty takes a back seat to cleverness: catnip. But I resist.

The telephone behind Didion’s head does remind me of a poignant story. Shortly after my late wife and I moved into the last apartment that we would share (next door and up two flights from the one I’m writing in), a technician’s error cut the entire building’s landline cable; neither the building management nor Verizon would pay for the repair, and it was never fixed. That’s the story. Kathleen, very unhappy about this, went to the AT&T shop down the street and came home victorious. She produced a line that could be attached to the phone at her bedside. I tried to explain to her that it was not a landline; but simply a cable attached at its other end to a locked-in mobile phone. But it looked like a landline to her, and what’s more, it restored service to the chunky appliance that took up so much of her nightstand. The look and feel of a landline trumped the reality.

What is that curious box-like thing lying on the desk blotter? I think we can rule out a pack of cigarettes or a deck of cards. And what about that porcelain dish next to it? What is it doing in an office, in such proximity to a hanging-file cart? It is hard for me to imagine Didion writing about it; she did not take a professional interest in “things,” especially things of typically feminine interest. Why is the dish empty? Was it empty when the photographer arrived? Would Claude be able to recognize the pattern, so that I could shop for one like it at Replacements?

Who was in charge of this book? Who wrote the foreword and the afterword, both very brief, that bookend Didion’s notes? Who decided where footnotes were needed and then wrote them? Who chose Liebowitz’s photograph, which was not, we must remember, taken for the purpose. Joan Didion would not, I think, disapprove of these mystifications. I never met her, but I can imagine her impassive smile.

I don’t have a home office. I have never had one, to listen to me, although in two of our apartments in this building there was a room that some people, and even Kathleen at times, would refer to as such. I resisted with my preferred nomenclature: first (and for thirty years), called the Blue Room (upper case) after the color of the walls, and then, for much the same reasons, the rather smaller book room (lower case). That hanging file in the dust-jacket photograph: is it full of writerly drafts? Or do the folders contain contracts and other professional-business papers? I would find its presence, out in the open, very distracting. But let’s not go into how I keep my files. The important thing is that I have a better view from my desk, especially now that the leaves are out. Even in winter, the red brick but multiply-windowed wall of the building across 87th Street is screened by the branches’ nervily organic twists and turns.

As for my desk, what does it say about me? It says the same thing that every writer’s desk says, but with unusual explicitness. It says, almost geometrically, that I am not a person who does not notice or care what his desk looks like. But unlike most desks of any kind, it does little to remind me who I am. There are only two overt mementoes, and both are reminders of Kathleen: a photograph taken not long before I met her, and an important if unimpressive award of which she was the first recipient. Oh, and an eensy plastic spider.

Last week, I came across a piece by Sarah Lyall in the Times about an English mystery-writer, Janice Hallett — I hadn’t heard of her — who has much of spent of her life as a writer-for-hire, with a specialty in beauty-aid copy. When Hallett  tried her hand at screenplays, she was urged to write a novel. The result was a bit success in Britain. Intrigued, I ordered The Appeal, which came out in 2021. While I can’t imagine how it could be adapted for film, I am fascinated by Hallett’s successful overhaul of the classic Agatha Christie model.

As is the case with those great entertainments, not much can be said about The Appeal without spilling clues, so this will be brief. The first thing to note is that the omniscient observer, dribbling out details about the weather and the library wallpaper, has been dismissed, leaving us with a mass of first-person email and text. The unreliability of this evidence is palpable, as the smiling ironies of unwitting self-disclosure cavort like cherubs over the surface of suspicious testimony composed by people whose eyes have not really read what their hands have written:

Marianne: Stay safe, Joyce. Don’t get involved.
Joyce: I won’t. I’m on my way there now (128)

When another woman, the hyper-organized Sarah-Jane MacDonald, is obliged at one point to dictate a text while driving, the resulting garble is such fun to read — her son, Harley, is referred to as “Harlem” — that I hoped that Hallett would repeat the stunt. Later, Sarah-Jane replies to an importuning text by writing, “You were standing right here only moments ago. Why not just speak to me?” (218)

This stream of communications is produced by the members of an amateur theatrical company in the West of England, plus assorted friends and relations. Currently in production is Arthur Miller’s All My Sons. Hallett’s choice of play here is not insignificant, but it could really be anything, since it is gossip about casting and rehearsals that elicits the email, a topic that is presently joined by an awful crisis, the need to provide very expensive treatment for a cancer victim that inspires a crowdfunding campaign. Gossip’s virtuosity at converting unpremeditated “whoppers” into established truths will provide the attentive reader with more than enough amusement to forestall the tedium suspected by one of the more copious email writers, who says at the end that it must have been “boring to read so many words.”

When I wasn’t thinking of Jane Austen or Mrs Gaskell, I had Wilkie Collins in mind. In The Moonstone, Collins gave the world the unforgettable creature, unforgettably named as well, of Drusilla Clack, whose misapprehensions about the welcome of her proselytizing almost make her bearable. More than a few of the contributors to The Appeal would die of congestive blushing if they could read the novel through our eyes. Better yet, they might die of shame at having quite literally walked onstage naked.

To corral the morass of inputs, Hallett has framed them in a series of chats between two young lawyers, or “clerks,” who have been assigned by their boss to read it all with fresh eyes. The boss (a QC) has come to have second thoughts about the conviction in a case that he prosecuted a while back, and he has chosen to test his hypothesis by distributing the evidence in select tranches. There is a good deal of information that he withholds from his juniors at the start, but in the end their agreement with his hunch shows that the evidence supports a more compelling conclusion than the easy, obvious one. Nothing is more satisfying — this hasn’t changed since Christie’s day — than having figured out who done it before the final pages. The cover of my paperback edition urges you to try. So do I.

Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, by Richard J Evans, is a useful book. Reading it, I thought of it as a sort of Plutarch’s Lives of the Nazis. In the ordinary course of reading history, we are obliged to compose, in our own mind, the full story of each leading player’s career (in this case, from 1918 to 1945), as it unspools alongside all the others’ lives. Here, conveniently, we are given a set of detached, complete biographies that does the job for us. There are 22 chapters, covering 24 lives. The chapters are grouped in four sections: The Leader, The Paladins, The Enforcers, and The Instruments. (Two of the chapters in the final section are split between two subjects.) The seasoned reader will be familiar with all or most of the names in the first three sections. The characters singled out as Instruments are meant to be representative: thus Karl Brandt stands in for medical doctors who rationalized atrocious experiments by claiming that their victims were not human, and Leni Riefenstahl sees herself as an artist who intended no one any harm, notwithstanding intense collusion in the creation of the Reich’s image — the mistress of the Wagner festivals at Bayreuth, the composer’s daughter-in-law, Winifred, could have served the same purpose.

The Leader, Adolf Hitler, gets about a fifth of Evans’s attention; while most biographies here range between fifteen and  twenty-five pages, Hitler’s goes on for a hundred. It functions as a pocket history of the rise and fall of the Reich at its core. Unappeasable resentment and uninhibited violence were its perpetual engines, always churning behind appearances, such as the hearty revival of the Fatherland and the pretended normalization of diplomatic engagements; and activities, such as the bold (or rash or reckless) conduct of the war and the methodical extermination of undesirable people. Given Hitler’s complete lack of capacity for painstaking planning, the core was bound to explode sooner or later; Evans is very clear: after 1941, Germany was at war with enemies that, owing to their vastly superior resources, it could never hope to defeat.

It is interesting that almost everyone in Hitler’s People comes from what in English is called the lower middle-class but is more appropriately thought of as the petite (or petty) bourgeoisie, educated but neither professional nor academic. This class was particularly bedeviled by the hyperinflation of the early Twenties and the loss of respectability (or caste) that it threatened. In any case, education did nothing to inspire Nazi sympathizers to transcend the sentimental nationalism that was humiliated by the peculiar outcome of World War I. There were a few semi-plausible aristocrats among the Paladins and the Enforcers, such as Ribbentrop and Papen, but no workers. Workers, drawn on the whole to the Left, could not compete with the Nazis’ pretenses to cultural vitality; it has not been forgotten that Hitler and his entourage drew great strength from their prim distaste for the experimental and the outré. Theirs was a regime of insufferable Babbitry.

I have two quibbles with Hitler’s People. The minor one is with the book’s lack of an independent time-line, a handy list of the the inflection points to which Evans refers again and again, such as the Kristallnacht of 1938, This would save the reader a fair amount of repetition and a good deal of authorial heavy-breathing. It serves no purpose to be reminded that these events, which range from the Reichstag Fire to the Wannsee Conference were horrific and/or had horrific consequences.

My major quibble is not unrelated to the minor one. There is a lot of scolding in this book. This is tedious of course, but also questionable. Human-rights violations may be unconscionable, but in the context of war, who is to say that their perpetrators are punishable? Several conflicts in the world today suggest that such violations may be tools to victory, or at least to quiescence. Ever since the dawn of Western imperialism, European minds have been addicted to imposing their provincial mores on the rest of the world, as if channeling a “greatness” of ancient Greek and Roman thought that often turns out to be spurious. I find that it behooves the historian who would influence intelligent minds to curb the impulse to sermonize.

As I say, though, Hitler’s People is a useful book, and genuinely useful books are as rare as great ones.

Ordinary Human Failings is an ingenious novel that masks its significance in its format. It starts out with what seems to be the makings of a sensational tabloid story, and its narrative framework follows  the attempt of journalist Tom Hargreaves to extract that story from the family that’s likely to be responsible for it. His efforts consist of sequestering the family at a comfortable but out-of-the-way hotel in North London, and plying them with drink (if they’ll have it) until they tell him what he wants to know. But they never do, while at the same time the murder charge at the heart of the whole thing evaporates. Tom is left with nothing; there is no sensational story. Instead, there is the actuality of weakness and disappointment — and hope. too — as the members of the clan tell their stories, which are far from malignant, and only too human.

There are four people in the Green family, although the youngest, ten year-old Lucy, has been brought into police custody as the possible, indeed likely, murderer of a three year-old girl living in the same council estate. There is Carmel, Lucy’s mother. There is Richie, Carmel’s half-brother. And there is John, the father of both of them. In the background lurks the ghost of Rose Green, whose recent death appears to have deprived the others of the family’s cohesion.

The blighting of Carmel’s teen-aged hopes is the reason for the family’s living in London. Rose brought her daughter over from Waterford to obtain an abortion, but by the time she discovered that Carmel was pregnant, it was too late to do anything about it. Carmel refused to return to Ireland, so Rose summoned her husband and stepson.

We learn that Carmel was not foolish to fall in love with a thoughtful and good-natured young man who nurtured her intelligence. Hers was not  the tale of the silly girl seduced by a villain. No; it is not that old story. Rather,

It felt to them both that she had skipped some essential moment. She had gone from never having a boyfriend, only a few tepid kisses with nobodies, to the strange emotional sophistication she seemed now to inhabit. She had missed in a pivotal stage of agonizing and awkwardness which usually characterized early liaisons, straight to the strikingly adult  frankness she was addressing him with now. (68)

She studies for exams at his flat.

She sat up in his bed with the books in her lap and cupped her hands to shield her eyes from his body. His body lay the other way, feet up beside her and head and dangling off the edge of the mattress. He held a novel aloft to read from. They had come to this arrangement to minimize the chance of them distracting one another. When she suggested that she just study at home if they weren’t going to really be together on these nights, he looked offended and she loved him for it. She knew herself why it was worth it, why they couldn’t waste the chance to be near each other even when they couldn’t speak or touch. (72)

But however nice, he is not extraordinary; he jumps at the chance to take a better job in Dublin, and he leaves her shortly before she finds out that he has also left the worst sort of souvenir. The new life inside her becomes the tomb of all her shining hopes.

The stories of her half-brother, Richie, and her father, John, are not so heartbreaking, but both have been struck by disappointments so severe that they have simply given up any plans for doing more than getting through the day. Richie, as a weak but not insensible drunk, has been his own disappointment.

The year elapsed and still nothing happened to suggest a course of action. He was surprised that no event had occurred to shape the future, but not unduly alarmed. (121)

John has been more than disappointed — shocked — first by an industrial accident that cost him the use of an arm and then by the desertion of his first wife. It does not take long for Tom Hargreaves to outrage him.

That was what sex had done to him, to his life, to his family. And now this newspaper fellow sat there wanting to shoot the breeze about how it all worked? He was asking and asking about Lucy’s father, asking about Richie and Carmel sharing a room. What was he getting at? They shared a room because there were only the two bedrooms. He tried to explain the layout of the house to him, he was telling him facts about the condition the place was in when he first bought it, he was saying he would love to get back over to it, and he spoke this way until he was asleep and snoring. (171)

What makes these stories interesting rather than pathetic is the tellers’ awareness of consciousness, which is often an uncertainty about how far it reaches, both in themselves and in the other members of the family, or, in Tom’s case, plain awareness of other people. Again and again, they are aware of not knowing how far consciousness, their own or another’s reaches.

Here is Carmel:

She realized with a spark of quick shame that she did not have an intuitive sense of what level of cognition Lucy was operating under when it came to such matters. (108)

Here is Richie:

That system lasted a while, until he had been in London a year and it became clear that the fresh start had been no such thing and none of his attempts to make a life for himself had been, or were going to be, successful. (101)

Here is Tom:

He wanted to approach Richie in the spirit of peers, lads together, but didn’t know what his levels of sensitivity were. (111)

And Tom with Carmel:

She told him, astonishing herself, speaking things aloud she never had before, things she had scarcely even thought in the privacy of her own head before.

He listened as she described the way that her mind had split neatly in two between what actually was, and what she was capable of tolerating, and how the false part had taken over and dominated the other for those months. There were details he didn’t understand, logistics, about how she could take steps to hide her body from others to conceal the situation while also not actually acknowledging the situation to herself. (178-9)

What these characters do seem to know is that they do not know where their awareness — call it cognition, if you will — shades into true consciousness. “Self-consciousness,” and “self-awareness” are inadequate terms, because they involve self-alienation, self-departure, in the way that people try to leave themselves during trauma in order to escape terrible pain. The terrible pain in Ordinary Human Failings is that of being surrounded by intimates who are actually strangers, starting with oneself. This is the root of the fictional enterprise.

At the end, Tom Hargreaves gives up on his story and sends the family away. They return to their native Waterford, where it is possible to find out what they need to know, or at least some of it, and the catastrophe that propelled the family out of Ireland can be redeemed within it.

The young American, Silas Q Scuddamore, is in a spot. In his bedroom at a hotel in Paris, he has discovered a corpse. Luckly, a doctor is lodging in the next room, and the doctor comes up with a plan. The plan is smooth but all the same somewhat hard to believe. Scuddamore protests:

“Alas!” said Silas, “I have every wish to believe you; but how is it possible? You open up to me a bright prospect, but, I ask you, is my mind capable of receiving so unlikely a solution? Be more generous, and let me further understand your meaning.”

I had to put down the book at this point — Robert Louis Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights — to savor this extraordinary passage. Not so long ago, I would have joined the rest of the world in dismissing Silas’s outburst as overwritten Victorian mush — or gush, if you prefer. In my old age, however, I am reduced to raptures as ridiculous as the prose, which begs, begs on its knees, to be translated into Italian and set to music by Vincenzo Bellini. In doing so, I mean to laugh with, not at, Stevenson, whose eyes twinkle through the words. Com’è possibile? indeed.

I am not here to recommend reading the tales in this collection, which comprises Stevenson’s earliest fiction, but I will say that they all have the effervescence of virtuoso improvisation. You can feel Stevenson making things up as he goes along, gambling that he’ll be able to tie things up at the end. Indeed, this is what saves the tales from camp. And if his tying things up at the end is a bit brisk and even rough-edged, you don’t mind, because he is already bundling you off to the next tale, which will if nothing else recount the further adventures of Florizel, Prince of Bohemia and his faithful companion, Colonel Geraldine, knights of derring-do and virtue in the London of Jack the Ripper.

I don’t think that I should ever have come across the New Arabian Nights if I hadn’t read about them in Camille Peri’s new book about Stevenson and his wife, Fanny Van De Grift, an American from Indianapolis. Their improbable attachment, which involved literary collaboration in a second collection of tales, the New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, began outside of Paris and ended, as I think most people know, in Samoa. They married when Fanny was 40 and Louis (as Peri calls him) ten years younger. Louis’s writer friends were not keen on Fanny, to say the least, and she has come down to us as a headstrong drag on Stevenson’s already precarious health. In John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the two of them, she can easily be mistaken for a heap of carpet in the background. Sargent was obviously attracted to Stevenson, and Peri’s description sparkles with innuendo:

Louis, in his customary velvet jacket, paces away from [Fanny] in long strides, twisting his mustache and looking at the viewer as if suddenly caught in midthought. Between them, a door opens onto a dark hallway, suggesting tension. One senses that Sargent would have liked Louis to continue walking off the canvas and out of the domestic scene. (282)

The picture was painted at Skerryvore, the country house that the Stevensons rented outside of Bournemouth. Bournemouth was something of a seaside spa and it was hoped that the air would be good for Louis’s health. He was thought to be tubercular; in fact, he seems to have suffered from bronchiectasis. No big difference, given that his particular treatment for pulmonary hemorrhaging was relentless chain smoking. I’d always supposed that it was his respiratory affliction that killed him, but in fact he died of stroke. One way or another, the cigarettes got him. The amazing thing is that he lived to be 44.

Stevenson grew up in the prosperous New Town of Edinburgh, the only child of a lighthouse engineer who hoped to be followed in his profession by his son. All that came of this was the fictional shipwreck near Erraid, an islet off the Isle of Mull, in Kidnapped, an event that occurred more than a century before the erection of an actual lighthouse there by the Stevenson firm. Louis appears to have been a born writer, but of what was the question. His early inclination was to journalism, and if his work in this line did not contribute to his immortality, it honed his penchant for calling spades spades; his account of crossing the Atlantic in the company of Scottish emigrants in steerage was deemed to be unpublishably frank. Nonetheless, as the little excerpt quote above shows, Stevenson was writing at a time when literary English was suffering from paroxysms of theatricality. Stripping the language of Victorian grandiosity would become the true subject matter of most advanced English prose, particularly that of American fiction, throughout the following century. What saved Louis from unreadability was his choosing boys as his target audience. Treasure Island, begun in 1883, is told in a style that derives its power from undercurrents instead of eruptions; the preposterous indulgences of the New Arabian Nights (1877-80) have been put on a serious diet. The first draft was read to Lloyd Osbourne, the surviving son of Fanny’s first marriage.

While the adventures in Stevenson’s life were mostly imaginary, Fanny’s were all too real. She married Sam Osbourne, a bounder in the making, as a teenager, and followed him to the silver mines of Nevada, where the living was not easy; among other achievements, Fanny learned to make her own furniture. When Sam gave up silver for the law, the couple moved with their children, Belle and Lloyd, to San Francisco, where Sam continued to move around on his own. After about twenty years of his feckless infidelity, Fanny decided to take her children, of whom there were now three, to Europe, so that she could study art. (This voyage entailed a second traversing of the Isthmus of Panama; only upon her return to San Francisco could she avail herself of the new transcontinental railroad). She returned to California, although she had met and fallen in love with Louis in France — their meeting at Grez-sur-Loing, in the Fontainebleau forest outside of Paris, was as unlikely as any Western exploit — because Sam would not give her a divorce. Louis eventually followed her there. When Sam finally changed his mind, Fanny and Louis married, and spent their honeymoon at a mining camp in Silverado.

Peri argues that Fanny devoted her life to taking care of Louis, and her case is persuasive; what made it seem unlikely at the time must have been Fanny’s resemblance to Annie Oakley, the Girl of the Golden West, and Barbara Stanwyck all rolled into one little woman. Although petite, Fanny was basically, a tough broad, and even if she liked nice things, she never had the patience for ladylike airs. She and her second husband had formidable tempers and engaged in a good deal of basically companionate shouting.

The architecture of A Wilder Shore is superb, and the long, copious tale is well told. But there is a great deal of unimportant speculation: “The desolate Nevada wilderness that Fannie saw from the stagecoach must have seemed almost unearthly, with its dry lake beds and desert seas dotted by sagebrush and squat piñon pines.” (18) Amid these must-haves there is the occasional purple patch, not nearly as lovable as Stevenson’s:

But his strength had lifted her from the emptiness that must have felt like it would last a lifetime. She could not let him die now. She was guided not only by love, but by her firm belief that the world had not seen all that Robert Louis Stevenson had to give. (166)

Aside from A Child’s Garden of Verses — I was lucky enough to grow up with the delightful Golden Books edition, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen — I read no Stevenson until I was in my seventies. I had no buckles to swash in. I gasped for the air of consciousness, which was not to be found in the company of men. I read the Hardy Boys but would have preferred the Nancy Drews. I found happiness with Jane Austen in my teens. Austen would teach me that, regardless of the marriage plots, it is that quality of the  writing that determines the excitement. A lifetime of following her advice (via the enormous respect that Henry James had for the creator of Jekyll and Hyde, would finally take me to Stevenson, whom I would discover to be a surprisingly great writer, and not just a raconteur anticipating Conan Doyle or Joseph Conrad. I am grateful, however, to Camille Peri, for having introduced me to the New Arabian Nights, in which the ghost of Bugs Bunny lurking in the shadow of Stevenson’s muse has free play.