Morning Read:
Olive Oil
It is about half-past three in the afternoon, so far past morning that I’m tempted to schedule this for tomorrow morning. But who knows where we’ll all be tomorrow?
¶ La Rochefoucauld:
L’interêt, qui aveugle les uns fait la lumière des autres.
Interestedness, which blinds some people, enlightens others.
Better in French, where “interests” aren’t as detachable as they are in English.
¶ Chesterfield puts his finger on what strikes me as a pervasive distinction between the men of Anglophone and Continental upper classes:
These would be my pleasures and amusements, if I were to live the last thirty years over again; they are rational ones; and moreoever, I will tell you, they are really the fashionable ones; for the others are not, in truth, the pleasures of what I call people of fashion, but of those who only call themselves so. Does good company care to have a man reeling drunk among them? or to see another tearing his hair, and blaspheming, for having lost, at play, more than he is able to pay? or a whore-master with half a nose, and crippled by coarse and infamous debauchery? No; those who practise, and much more those who brag of them, make no part of good company; and are most unwillingly, if ever, admitted to it. A real man of fashion and pleasure observes decency: at least neither borrows nor affects vices; and if he unfortunately has any, he gratifies them with choice, delicacy, and secrecy.
Dr Johnson would have complained that the Continentals want candour.
¶ In Moby-Dick, two chapters of almost grotesque padding, even if the chapters themselves are not very long (the second one doesn’t fill a page). “The Advocate” argues that whalers “don’t get no respect.” The climax of this silliness is that whale oil is used to annoint monarchs.
But the only thing to be considered here, is this — what kind of oil is used at coronations? Certainly it cannot be olive oil, not macassar oil, nor castor oil, nor bear’s oil, nor train oil, nor cod-liver oil. What then can it possibly be, but sperm oil in its unmanufactured, unpolluted state, the sweetest of all oils?
Sorry, Herman, but it not only can be olive oil but is. Whale oil! The idea!
¶ Chapter XXII of Don Quixote is noteworthy for two things. First, our hero finds his helmet, in the guise of a barber-surgeon’s brass bowl. Second, as translator Edith Grossman lets us know in a footnote, he summarizes the plot of the standard chivalrous romance quite perfectly. When Sancho asks why they’ve got to poke about in Spanish backwaters instead of finding adventure in war, Don Quixote outlines the drill, which prevents him from trying to serve a king or an emperor until he can boast of many valorous deeds. Just as well!
Sancho is quick to note that, for his own sake, Don Quixote had better not abduct any fair princesses, because then he won’t be awarding any of his angry father-in-law’s fiefdoms to his faithful squire. I see that Sancho’s foil isn’t that he’s any wiser than Quixote, but only that he’s absolutely not a dreamer.
¶ I read a lot more of Squillions today than I meant to do. That’s because I fell into Coward’s correspondence with Enid Bagnold, author of National Velvet and The Chalk Garden, which Coward starred in in 1956. The “correspondence” consists of several long letters from Bagnold, and none from Coward. Will someone please remind Barry Day of the title of his book? It really ought to have been called, Noël Coward: A Life in Letters (and Chatty Antinote). There was also the now-famous letter to Edward Albee in which Coward makes this enviable claim:
I have enjoyed sex thoroughly, perhaps even excessively all my life but it has never, except for brief wasteful moments, twisted my reason.
¶ Today’s chapter of After the Edwardians is an elegant and engrossing composition on the popularity, in inter-War Britain, of puzzles and mystery novels. It crosses quite impalpably across the theme bridge of English Elegy to a discussion of the non-modernist painting of Stanley Spencer and John Piper. One would have liked a little more about John Cowper Powys.