Morning Read:
A Social Smoke
¶ In After the Edwardians, A N Wilson considers the Great War as an expression of the lust for destruction that colored the thinking of the Vorticists and the Futurists. He quotes the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, killed at Neuville Saint Vaast in 1915, aged 23:
The war is a great remedy.
In the individual it kills arrogance, self-esteem, pride. It takes away from the masses numbers upon numbers of unimportant units, whose economic activities become noxious as the recent trade crises have shown us.
When artists are misanthropes, a state of emergency cannot be far off.
¶ In Moby-Dick, after a “social smoke” or two with his new cannibal friend, Ishmael finds himself bound by the Golden Rule to join Queequeg in idol-worship. This chapter must have been a terrible headache to innumerable headmasters over the years — a worse one, perhaps, than the chapter’s final image:
Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg — a cosy, loving pair.
¶ Although nothing much happens in Chapter X of Don Quixote, there is a very funny moment when Sancho, amazed to learn of the miraculous balm that his master has read about in Fierabras, declines prospective honors, kingships, &c in favor of making a fortune by bottling the concoction. The idea of making money at peaceful arts is so taboo that Don Quixote doesn’t even scold. He just says, “Be quiet, my friend.”
¶ The Letters of Noël Coward is so unlike other collections of letters in my library that it has taken me a very long time to grasp what ought to have been obvious: this is a biography told with letters. Such biographies used to be standard, especially biographies of statesmen, whose (not very reliable) papers could be liberally quoted so as to give the project a scholarly gloss. There is at any rate a great deal more Barry Day in this book than I expected to find, given the title. The letters of Noël Coward are often few and far between. At the same time, the notion that this book is about the letters seems to allow Day to leave matters unmentioned by the letters in the shade. In today’s reading, there remained much to be learned about the relationship between Coward and his sometime American manager, Jack “Baybay” Wilson.
¶ Cracking open the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Lord Chesterfield’s Letters, I find the new earl petitioning for a Garter. To Lord Townshend he writes,
… and I am sure every body will agree that I can never have it so advantageously for myself, (especially in this country [the Netherlands] as at a time when it must be known to be entirely owing to your Lordship’s friendship and recommendation.
That’s courtly life for you: influence is everything, and, aside from the prince, no man stands on his own. We have at least come to feel ashamed of such machinery.