Morning Read:
Professions
¶ This morning’s chapter of After the Edwardians, “Revolutions, dispenses with Russia and the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in short order, the better to move on to the scientific upheavals that, gathering force as the Nineteenth Century ended, climaxed with the theoretical bang of Einstein’s celebrated theories of relativity on the eve of the Great War. (The audible bang would conclude the next war.)
It was a very long time before the implications of such ideas reached the public imagination, and could be adapted, with such terrifying consequence, for military or political purpose. But by the end of the First World War, scientists who had been away to fight returned to their laboratories to discover that they were quite literally in a different universe.
Wilson gets in a quick but not very sly poke at E M Forster, whose novels “had their unaccountable mid-twentieth-century vogue.”
¶ To call the very short eleventh chapter of Moby-Dick “queer” is to comment on the quality, not the presence, of its homoeroticism. Equally strange is the demarcation of this material in a separate chapter. It is really nothing but an introduction to the one that follows (in which Queequeg tells his story).
Be it said, that though I had felt such a strong repugnance to his smoking in the bed the night before, yet see how elastic our stiff prejudices grow when love once comes to bend them. For now I liked nothing better than to have Queequeg smoking by me, even in bed, because he seemed to be full of such serene household joy then. I no more felt unduly concerned for the landlord’s policy of insurance. I was only alive to the condensed confidential comfortableness of sharing a pipe and a blanket with a real friend.
“Serene household joy” — what’s for brunch?
¶ Hard though it may be to conjure, the corresponding chapter of Don Quixote is even thinner than Melville’s “Nightgown.” A bit of backchat from Sancho, followed by a recap of the “Golden Age” passages of Ovid’s Metamorphoses — now I really can’t wait to get my hands on the Spanish text — and wrapped up with a long love song sung by a goatherd. In short: authorial stalling. Perhaps because of my professional deformation, I detect a distinct if retrospective pong of desperate blogging: “Hey, folks, I’ve been really busy, but I’m still here, and I promise to post more really soon!”
¶ Squillions continues to puzzle. The few pages devoted to Lorn Loraine, Coward’s Gal Friday for decades, contain many verses but no letters. Then we lurch into the success of The Vortex, about which the only epistolary example on view concerns itself with the New York casting. Show me the letters!
¶ Chesterfield closes off another letter to Lord Townshend with a consummate diplomatic flourish that is worth ten Ciceros:
After so long a letter I will not trouble your Lordship with any professions of my gratitude for the past marks of your friendship, nor of my endeavours to deserve the continuance of it; I will only assure you that it is impossible to be with greater truth and respect
Your Lordship’s, etc
Inattentive readers may find this disingenuous, because Chesterfield seems to do exactly what he sets out not to do. In fact, however, the paragraph is a gracious mark of respect that does not “trouble” the recipient with “professions.” The success of the gesture makes me want to stand on my head with glee.