Category: Henry James

Laughing at fascists

“I will have free speech at my meetings,” the statuesque teenage heiress Eugenia Malmains insists, in Nancy Mitford’s 1935 novel Wigs on the Green. Eugenia, a fascist, has been interrupted mid-harangue by her nanny, who thinks Eugenia is disgracing herself. Eugenia proceeds to threaten her nanny with violence: “Now will you go of your own accord or must I tell the Comrades to fling you out?”

From time immemorial, the rage of fascists has styled itself as more-grown-up-than-thou, but in feeling-tone it in fact more closely resembles that of teenagers—grandiose, spirally, counterdependent. If only we lived in a world where it was safe to believe that it was just as harmless! And if only the right little old lady could be found to tug every fascist down from her washtub. Further deflating fascism’s pretensions in this particular case: In Mitford’s novel, Eugenia is seen largely through the eyes of two gold-digging cads, Jasper Aspect and Noel Foster, who don’t take her politics very seriously (“batty” is the word one of them uses) because they regard her not as a person but as an opportunity to marry into the moneyed aristocracy.

“Oh! I think that’s all a joke,” a middle-class woman in the novel protests, when her left-wing bohemian-artist friends upbraid her for being swept up in the fascist excitement. But what kind of a joke is it, exactly? Some of the novel’s humor takes advantage of fascism’s abrupt rhetorical extremes. On several occasions, Eugenia calls for “jackshirt justice,” i.e., beatings or worse, but when a flapper heiress wants to ditch a husband who has grown tiresome, Eugenia insists on the sanctity of marriage. “Well, well, what a governessy little thing it is,” Jasper observes. Even from the distance of nearly a century, Mitford makes clear how hackneyed and familiar fascist language was, much as it has become to us in the past few years. “Let me see, where had I got to—oh! yes,” Eugenia resumes, once she has surmounted her nanny’s interruption:

Patriotism is one of the primitive virtues of mankind. Allow it to atrophy and much that is valuable in human nature must perish. This is being proved today, alas, in our unhappy island as well as in those other countries, which, like ourselves, still languish ‘neath the deadening sway of a putrescent democracy. Respect for parents, love of the home, veneration of the marriage tie, are all at a discount in England today, society is rotten with vice, selfishness, and indolence.

Viktor Orban could do no better. An idealized past? Check. A hearkening back to patriarchal morals? Check. A jeremiad against sexual sophistication? Check. Scorn for democracy? Check. Fetishization of patriotism and strength? Check. Not to mention indignant cries of “free speech” at even the mildest interruption.

Even the great replacement theory, as it is now called (aka racial purity, as it was known then), puts in an appearance, a few scenes later. When Jasper makes a casual reference to beautiful women and their lovers, Eugenia reproves him: “Under our régime, women will not have lovers. They will have husbands and great quantities of healthy Aryan children.” Also familiar is Eugenia’s persistent dunning of her audience. Fundraising may be done to MAGA followers by text message today but in the early 20th century, it had to be inflicted in person. “You are asked to pay ninepence a month, the Union Jack shirt costs five shillings and the little emblem sixpence,” Eugenia says, to almost everyone she meets, in almost every scene in which she appears.

Is it okay to laugh at all this? Humor has become suspect lately, because of rightwingers’ strategy of using it to normalize racist and misogynist ideas—dodging them past the moral censors under cover of unseriousness. It is true that Mitford plays Eugenia’s calls for violence, for example, for laughs only. Eugenia is always talked out of her momentary enthusiasms—her nanny is not actually ever beaten up—so her talk never has consequences, and the danger remains hazy.

Confusingly, if one turns to Mitford’s letters, one finds her claiming that her mockery of fascism was meant, of all things, fondly. The inspiration for the book, it turns out, was the avid fascism of two of her sisters, Unity and Diana. Unity signed letters, “Heil Hitler,” and wrote home swoonily from Munich about conversations with the Fuhrer, and Diana was to marry Oswald Mosley, the leader (or “Leader,” as he was styled by his followers) of the British Union of Fascists—a political party that Nancy, too, for a while joined, as Charlotte Mosley explains in her introduction to the 2010 (pre-Brexit, pre-Trump) Vintage paperback edition. Having written a novel satirizing her sisters’ fervor, Nancy faced some tricky family diplomacy. She boldly told Unity that the novel was “about you” and assured her that the portrait was so attractive that “everyone who has read my book longs to meet you.” At the end of another letter to Unity, however, she took the opposite tack and drew a caricature in which Unity’s head is labeled “bone” and her heart “stone,” while one of Unity’s hand holds an object labeled “rubber truncheon,” and a foot is shod in what is described as a “hobnail boot for trampling on jews.” Yikes. There’s nothing so openly anti-Semitic in Wigs on the Green, but the ugliness of the caricature reveals that in 1935, at least, Nancy either didn’t understand that the brutality in fascist rhetoric was eventually going to be realized, or didn’t much care so long as it looked as though the violence was going to be inflicted on people outside her family’s social circle.

By means of flattery and kidding, Nancy seem to have succeeded in jollying Unity out of being offended by the novel’s satirical portrait. Diana, however, was not so easy to placate. In an effort to appease her, Nancy removed nearly three chapters about “Captain Jack,” a character modeled on Oswald Mosley. (In the novel as published, the character appears only off-stage.) Far from arguing that her humor cuts fascism down to size, as a modern antifascist reader might hope, Nancy tried to convince Diana, in a letter written on 18 June 1935, that humor like hers couldn’t possibly do fascism any harm:

Honestly, if I thought it could set the Leader back by so much as half an hour I would have scrapped it, or indeed never written it in the first place. The 2 or 3 thousand people who read my books, are, to begin with, just the kind of people the Leader admittedly doesn’t want in his movement. . . . I still maintain that it is far more in favour of Fascism than otherwise. Far the nicest character in the book is a Fascist, the others all become much nicer as soon as they have joined up. But I also know your point of view, that Fascism is something too serious to be dealt with in a funny book at all. Surely that is a little unreasonable?

Appeasement seems not to have worked. After the novel’s publication, Diana kept Nancy at a distance for years.

The awkward truth seems to be that Nancy was to some extent complicit with fascism when she wrote Wigs on the Green, thanks to family ties, personal history, and, to put it politely, thoughtlessness. But she went on appreciate fascism’s threat more keenly. In 1940 she wrote to the Foreign Office that Diana, though a British citizen, should be imprisoned as a Nazi sympathizer, and Diana was in fact imprisoned. In 1943, Nancy wrote again, to urge the government not to release her sister yet—she was still too dangerous. Half a dozen years after the war, she told Evelyn Waugh she was ruling out a reprint of Wigs because humor about Nazis, including her own, couldn’t at that point be in “anything but the worst of taste.”

Is it tacky that I enjoyed her disowned novel anyway, even though (because?) we’re currently living through a resurgence of fascism? Much of the book’s humor is Waughian: comely young heroes and heroines, some of them sickeningly rich, have spines too weak to resist louche and alcoholic pleasures; practically the only devoir they can manage with rigor or regularity is the application of face cream. The fascism in the novel could almost be incidental, if the contrast between the Jazz Age demoralized irony and fascism’s grotesque earnestness weren’t so perfect. As Nancy suggested in her 1935 letter to Diana, her crowd is what fascism defined itself against: dissipated, cosmopolitan, promiscuous. Despite Nancy’s attempts to butter up her sisters in private, it’s clear who she sides with in the novel: the hopeless sophisticates are us, and the fascists, them.

Maybe what I enjoyed was that the novel allowed me to visit a time before fascism was world-historical—before it had murdered so many people that it had to be taken seriously. In the world of Wigs, it still seems as if, were you to point out with sufficient perspicuity how laughable fascism is, its devotees might blink a few times and walk away, wondering what they had been thinking.

The worst possibility is that humor about fascism is a sort of sundial of history. A big question weighing on me lately is where we are in the cycle—toward the end or still only at the beginning? What if I’m able to laugh at Mitford’s novel now because we’re only at the dawn of the current outbreak, and some day, when its shadow has lengthened, I, like the author, won’t be able to find it funny any more?

Readings

“. . . to live like a soldier but not as a soldier, figuratively but not literally, to be allowed in short to live symbolically, spells true freedom.” —Thomas Mann, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence-Man

“The art of life, of a poet’s life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.” —Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, 29 April 1852

“I think she regarded my career as akin to a religion she didn’t understand but would of course respect.” —Siobhan Phillips, Benefit, describing how a scholar of English literature feels she is perceived by a former classmate who has gone into consulting

A kiss is but a kiss now! and no wave
Of a great flood that whirls me to the sea.
—George Meredith, Modern Love

“She neither embroidered nor wrote—only read and talked.” —Henry James, “A London Life”

“And so for me the act of writing is an exploration, a reaching out, an act of trusting search for the correct incantation that will return me certain feelings whenever I want them. And of course I have never completely succeeded in finding the correct incantations.” —Thom Gunn, “Writing a Poem,” Occasions of Poetry

“. . . so I went on leisurely, as a trifling man does, sometimes writing a sentence—then taking a turn or two—and then looking how the world went, out of the window . . .” —Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

“You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.” —Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey

“. . . for beauty with sorrow / Is a burden hard to be borne . . .” —Walter de la Mare, “The Old Summerhouse,” in Reading Walter de la Mare, ed. William Wootten

Infinitely fine

In 1910, Henry James published an essay titled “Is There Life After Death?”

Probably not, is the answer he starts with. For one thing, a lot of people don’t even seem to care whether they have immortal souls. “How can there be a personal and a differentiated life ‘after,’ ” he sniffs, “for those for whom there has been so little of one before?” The consciousnesses of people who don’t care about their souls are almost certainly too boring to need to be preserved. In James’s opinion, in fact, it’s not clear why such people exist even once, unless they do so for the same purpose “slugs and jellyfish” do, to provide “amusement” and to represent “wealth and variety” for others in the universe who are more spiritually inclined.

This is divinely snobbish, but as a logical argument, hard to take very seriously. James goes on, however, to raise a more substantive objection to the afterlife: materialism. Science teaches that “we are abjectly and inveterately shut up in our material organs,” he writes, and most people’s experience confirms this. As we get older, we become more and more aware of the limits and compromises that our bodies inflict on our minds, and in the end, we are forced to acknowledge that “even at our highest flights of personality,” we are “the very stuff of the abject actual.” Our hopes and passions turn out to be “but flowers sprouting in that eminently and infinitely diggable soil.” Perhaps the most dismaying confirmation comes when we observe that people “die piecemeal.” After a certain age, most of us become aware of the encroachment of partial death even in ourselves. And if it’s possible for our personality to decline “by inches”—in my own case, the ability to recall people’s names is fast becoming a lost cause—it’s hard to sustain a belief that the mind is ineffable, and hard to resist the conclusion that mind is just an effect produced by “the poor palpable, ponderable, probeable, laboratory-brain.”

Then there’s the paucity of ghosts. This sounds pretty eccentric, as arguments against the afterlife go, but hey, we’re talking about Henry James. What he cares about is personality, and what is a ghost but the essence of the personal? In his nonfiction, it turns out, James doesn’t believe in ghosts, however persuasively he may have written about them in his fiction. (He admits he finds mediums and trances interesting, but only as evidence of the personalities of the mediums.) In James’s opinion, no one has ever come back from death for a visit. Which to James’s mind, more or less proves that no one continues to exist as an individual person after death. Because: No one came back? Really? No one? Could the afterlife be so overwhelmingly interesting that absolutely no one who gets there is willing to spare a moment to check in on the people they used to care so much about? If another world does exist, could the border between it and our world be so impenetrable that none of the greatest and bravest souls who ever lived can figure out a way to cross it, even briefly? And even if we the living are relatively speaking very boring, and even if the obstacles to returning are very high, isn’t a universal failure to come back just incredibly rude?

We think of the particular cases of those who could have been backed, as we call it, not to fail, on occasion, of somehow reaching us. We recall the forces of passion, of reason, of personality, that lived in them, and what such forces had made them, to our sight, capable of; and then we say, conclusively, “Talk of triumphant identity if they, wanting to triumph, haven’t done it!”

If you’re dead to the appeal of society to that extent, then, in Henry James’s opinion, you must really be dead.

In the second part of his essay, however, James changes his mind. He writes that the change began for him with a suspicion that he wasn’t quite sure about the afterlife, after all. He felt he needed to investigate by “trying to take the measure of my consciousness”—only to discover that it wasn’t at all clear that consciousness could be measured, that it had a beginning or an end. Mind seemed to him to be at least as large as the world that contained it, any angle of which it could observe and reflect, at will. “The more and the more one asked of it,” James writes, “the more and the more it appeared to give.” It seemed capable of giving more, in fact, than James thought he could come to the end of in the course of even the longest lifetime. His work as a novelist, in particular, brought this home to him:

. . . it is above all as an artist that I appreciate this beautiful and enjoyable independence of thought and more especially this assault of the boundlessly multiplied personal relation (my own), which carries me beyond even any “profoundest” observation of this world whatever, and any mortal adventure, and refers me to realizations I am condemned as yet but to dream of.

If consciousness is infinite, how can it come to an end? Once we’ve been given a taste of eternity, to yank it away would be, James writes, “a practical joke of the lowest description.” Fate couldn’t possibly be so “vulgar.”

I wish it were true that the universe couldn’t possibly be vulgar, but I’m not sure. I have to admit, however, that writing has sometimes brought me to a similar sense of consciousness as limitless. Writing about life is a strange activity. You take a portion of life that you have lived, and you spend a second portion remembering and re-experiencing the first, in order to create a representation and share it. Life goes on while you are doing the re-experiencing; life runs away, in fact. And the ratio of the second portion to the first, it soon becomes clear, may be any number. To write my first novel, I drew on a year of my life; the writing itself took more than five years. There are hours that it would be easy for me to spend months writing about. It has often happened that I’ve spent a day writing in my journal about the day before. Mathematically, this incommensurability is suggestive. Any set that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with one of its subsets can be shown to be infinite. As a corollary, therefore, since you can spend as much of your life as you want thinking about as brief a stretch of it as you’re interested in, life must be infinite. It can always be described more thoughtfully, more carefully. There is no limit to how much attention you can pay. Which doesn’t mean, mathematically speaking, alas, that it doesn’t or can’t have a beginning and an end. The moments in a life could be like the points in a line segment, which begins at A and ends at B but can be subdivided to any fineness.

It’s suggestive, too, though in a darker way, that the practice of writing, once capable of convincing James that the soul was eternal, looks likely to become an activity that very few humans will still do at any length, a decade or so from now, thanks to the advent of generative artificial intelligence.

Notes, 2018

“Je voyais tout en noir avant les élections, je vois tout en noir depuis.” [I saw everything black before the elections, I see everything black since.] —Ernst Renan, quoted by Henry James in a letter to William James, 14 March 1876

I dreamed there were two new hobo symbols, one for “You already know everything I need for you to know” and one for “Felonies.”

“I sat without stirring and gazed, gazed with effort and perplexity, as though I saw all my life before me, as though scales had fallen from my eyes. Oh, what have I done! my lips involuntarily murmured in a bitter whisper.” —Turgenev, “A Tour in the Forest”

“Is treatment, in particular bad treatment, ever given to a person?
“No. It is always meted out.
“Is anything else ever meted out?
“No. The only thing that is ever meted out is treatment.” —Myles na Gopaleen, The Best of Myles

“I heard Émile Zola characterize his [Droz’s] manner sometime since as merde à la vanille [vanilla shit].” —Henry James, reporting Zola’s diss of Gustave Droz in a letter to Thomas Sergeant Perry, 2 May 1876

What could Bitcoin possibly be good for other than money laundering and tax evasion? There’s an op-ed in the NYT today that maintains that it will help the poor with their banking and help the Federal Reserve manage the money supply. Surely these are the last things on earth that it would ever do—the things that it is least likely ever to do even accidentally. Governments refuse to allow gift cards that are dischargeable in multiple currencies, so it is inconceivable that they will not eventually be obliged to criminalize cryptocurrencies.

“To fear being ridiculous—is not to love truth.” —Turgenev, “A Correspondence”

equipollent (adj.): possessing equal power, identical in meaning

The two narratives are not equipollent.

—Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: The Limits of the Market

“It appears that my stuff has been over the heads of the readers. Imagine their stature!” —Henry James to Arthur George Sedgwick, 29 September 1876

“I believe fully, in spite of sneers, in interpreting the French Revolution by anecdotes, though not every diner out can do it.” —Emerson, journal, August 1849

“Eizenstat famously rebuked [Alfred Kahn] for publicly suggesting that rising inflation could result in a ‘very serious depression.’ Kahn responded by continuing to issue warnings of inflation-induced depression, but with the word ‘depression’ replaced with ‘banana.'” —Stephanie Mudge, Leftism Reinvented

At first depression seems to make one’s vision of the world sharpen. After all, narrowing the aperture for light increases the depth of field.

punnet (n.): small, light basket for strawberries, mushrooms, etc.

But there is a much more overwhelming sense of the strange beauty of tiny moments, such as [Oliver] Sacks’s response when Hayes dropped a punnet of cherry tomatoes on the kitchen floor (“How pretty! Do it again!”).

—Alex Clark, reviewing Bill Hayes’s Insomniac City in the TLS, 16 March 2018

semibreve: a whole note (under this terminology, a half-note is a minim, a quarter note is a crotchet, and an eighth note is a quaver)

The vaults and arches seem really to swing above you in great semibreves of rhythm.

—A. S. G. Butler, Recording Ruin

rani (n.): a Hindu queen, a rajah’s wife or widow

She had been there, unrememberingly, before, when she was small enough to ride in a backpack, little ranee on a jogging elephant, her view of the paintings relieved by the back of her father’s neck.

—Alan Hollinghurst, The Sparsholt Affair

“I don’t want to do so difficult a thing as dying without any chance of applause after having done it.” —Edward Thomas to Gordon Bottomley, quoted in Edna Longley, ed., Annotated Collected Poems

“The high, thin nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips opened and closed smoothly, like a beautiful little circle of leeches.” —Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country, trans. E. G. Seidensticker

shaw (n.): a thicket; the strip of trees or bushes forming the border of a field

. . . a law
Which was of old when one, like me, dreamed how
A thousand years might dust lie on his brow
Yet thus would birds do between hedge and shaw.

—Edward Thomas, “February Afternoon”

stook (n.): a shock; a group of twelve sheaves placed upright to support each other as the grain dries and ripens

The wheat, tawny with ripeness, had been cut and stood in tented stooks about the fields.

—Iris Murdoch, The Bell

“You make me want to bound about you and about the idea of you like an excited dog.” —Iris Murdoch to Michael Oakeshott, 4 November 1958

“One more step, and he would bid the dying gladiator be comforted by the stanzas of Childe Harold.” —Edward Thomas, critiquing the aestheticized “spectatorial attitude” of Walter Pater, quoted in Edna Longley, ed., Annotated Collected Poems

cagoule (n.): a thin waterproof hoodie

Both were swaddled in layers of fat, shiny nylon—what Alan now thought of as engorged cagoules.

—James Wood, Upstate

Believing in the Kool-Aid does not make it a good idea to drink it.

“Compared with a true artist’s conscience, Tamerlane is tenderhearted.” —Walter de la Mare, foreword to Edward Thomas’s Collected Poems (1920)

Butterflies must sometimes wish they could go back to being caterpillars.

thrawn (adj.): perverse, contrary, cross-grained, ill-tempered

He had some bread and cheese in his pocket, and this he began furtively to toss to the dogs, singling out for his favors those that seemed most thrawn in appearance.

—Gavin Maxwell, The Rocks Remain

“Inside the hall, the faces of the students and the lecturer were equally indistinct, which made everything somehow mystical, like eating a bean jam bun in the dark.” —Natsume Soseki, Sanshiro

What does it say about me that when I play fetch with the dog indoors, instead of saying, “Fetch,” I say, “Bring me the head of John the Baptist.”

Philosophy is a representation in language of what it is like and what it means to be in the world. Therefore it will always be impossible finally to distinguish it from literature and it will never be finished.

daedal (adj.): inventive, ingenious; rich, variously adorned; complex

. . . all the living things
that dwell within the daedal earth.

—Shelley, “Mont Blanc”

“And my relatives, moreover, were beginning to feel that this oldness in him was abnormal, excessive, shameful, and the sort of thing bachelors deserve, as do all those of whom it seems that the great day that has no day after is longer than it is for others because for them it’s empty, the moments in it adding up, from morning onward, without ever having to be divided later with children.” —Proust, Du côté de chez Swann

Listening to Nina Simone, I realize that I miss hearing people ask God to damn something.

How far away is Joan Didion from the character in Play It as It Lays who talks about “third-string faggots”?

Oh, ’tis a joy divine on summer days
When not a breeze is stirring, not a cloud,
To sit within some solitary wood,
Far in some lonely wood, and hear no sound
Which the heart does not make, or else so fit
To its own temper that in external things
No longer seem internal difference.
All melts away, and things that are without
Live in our minds as in their native home.

—Wordsworth, fragment 3 from the Christabel notebook

solatium (n.): a sum of money given to make up for loss, inconvenience, or injured feelings

The master in Osaka (Okubata’s older brother) had given him a modest solatium upon his being disinherited, and he had been eating into his capital ever since.

—Junichiro Tanizaki, The Makioka Sisters

To revisit the past is to say good-bye to it again, which is unbearable.

“Is it possible that any editor should endure any inconvenience without meditating an article?” —Trollope, Phineas Redux

A friend’s counsel to Phineas Finn, after he is slimed by Quintus Slide, the 19th-century version of an internet troll: “I don’t see what you can do. You have encountered a chimney sweeper, and of course you get some of the soot.”

Humans vs. AI: Our disadvantage is that we’re all essentially programmed the same, but we’re building many different AIs. There’s only one kind of “us” to be figured out, but every day someone puts together a new kind of “them.”

Arthur Russell sings in the key of heterosexuality with the same acceptance of generic constraint that ABBA sings in the language of English. One’s appreciation is in both cases heightened by the awareness that it isn’t natural.

“In a world where we are all transparent—unable to deceive each other—it might be rational to deceive ourselves about rationality.” —Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons

“She began crying and laughing. This conflict of tears and laughter always reminds me of the flickering and spluttering of a brightly burning candle when one sprinkles it with water.” —Chekhov, “The Privy Councillor”

“It feels ominous to drive through West Texas with a clean windshield. Road trips always used to be accompanied by the incessant splatter of death. . . . The absence of insects seems to be part of a general diminution of life.” —Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas

clout (adj.): cloth, rag

But whenever did a pan or a clout—when kept clean and tidy—refuse to do its duty, or rebel against its lady?”

—T. F. Powys, Unclay

Music continued for a decade or two after it ended, but unless you already knew the provenance of one of these later songs, you couldn’t figure out when it had been recorded. You couldn’t even write an algorithm that could figure it out. The songs were already outside of music’s history.

After one has learned to manage the isolation and poverty, there is still the challenge of writing itself.

slane, or slean (adj.): a long-handled spade, with a wing or two wings on the blade, used for cutting peat

The men-folk were going to the turf-bogs with their sleans on their shoulders.

—Patrick Kavanagh, The Green Fool

barm (vi.): mix with yeast or leaven; rise in froth or fermentation

The porter was beginning to barm in bellies.

—Kavanagh, Green Fool

creel (n.): large wicker basket

The pot of potatoes was turned out on a creel.

—Kavanagh, Green Fool

Bassani captures perfectly the way that the mere visibility of a victim or former victim spurs in a fascist (or a fascist-leaning bystander) the impression of being unfairly attacked.

The word “mother” is always to some extent in the vocative.

The sonorous, etymologically spurious second “o” in the word “reportorial” is the reason one likes to say it so often.

“Be nice,” the man growled to his dog.

limber (n.): detachable, two-wheeled forepart of a gun-carriage, used for transporting ammunition

“And also, your honour, Artemyev got drunk yesterday, and the lieutenant ordered him to be put in the limber of a spare gun-carriage.”

—Chekhov, “The Kiss”

“And certainly this doesn’t mean that M. Legrandin was insincere when he thundered against snobs. He was incapable of knowing—on his own, at least—that he was one, because we only ever know the passions of other people, and insofar as we manage to know of our own, it’s only from others that we’re able to learn it. On us the passions only act in a secondary way, through the imagination, which substitutes for primary motives intermediate ones that are more decent. Legrandin’s snobbery never advised him to go see a duchess frequently. It charged his imagination with making this duchess appear to be arrayed with all the graces.” —Proust, Du côté de chez Swann; the passage also seems to describe the operation of unconscious racism

“The ferocity of the financial crisis in 2008 was met with a mobilization of state action without precedent in the history of capitalism. Never before outside wartime had states intervened on such a scale and with such speed. It was a devastating blow to the complacent belief in the great moderation, a shocking overturning of prevailing laissez-faire ideology. To mobilize trillions of dollars on the credit of the taxpayer to save banks from the consequences of their own folly and greed violated maxims of fairness and good government. But given the risk of contagion, how could states not act? Having done so, however, how could they ever go back to the idea that markets were efficient, self-regulating and best left to their own devices? It was a profound challenge to the basic idea that had guided economic government since the 1970s. It was all the more significant for the fact that the challenge came not from the outside. It was not motivated by some radical ideological turn to the Left or the Right. There was precious little time for thought or wider consideration. Intervention was driven by the financial system’s own malfunctioning and the impossibility of separating individual business failure from its wider systemic repercussions. Martin Wolf, the Financial Times‘s esteemed chief economic commentator, dubbed March 14, 2008, ‘the day the dream of global free-market capitalism died.'” —Adam Tooze, Crashed

“I once heard a filmmaker say that in order to be truly creative a person must be in possession of four things: irony, melancholy, a sense of competition, and boredom.” —Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry

“He who undertakes anything, thinking he is doing it out of a sense of duty, is deceiving himself and will ruin everything he touches.” —Auden, The Prolific and the Devourer

There is a charm in solitude that cheers,
A feeling that the world knows nothing of;
A green delight the wounded mind endears
After the hustling world is broken off,
Whose whole delight was crime—at good to scoff.
Green solitude, his prison, pleasure yields,
The bitch fox heeds him not; birds seem to laugh.
He lives the Crusoe of his lonely field
Whose dark green oaks his noontide leisure shield.

—John Clare, “Solitude”

Notes, 2014

Maybe the conception of a novel has to come during the dying of a year—a new world created out of the sorrow of losing the one you’re in.

No one will share an e-cigarette, so the habit will die out. Also, if one is allowed to smoke them inside, they’ll be deprived of cigarettes’ other great attraction: the pretext for a break outdoors.

“People are like butterflies. . . . But a butterfly under a magnifying glass is a monster.” —Jiří Mucha

“If there had been many of us and we could have found each other out, there’s no knowing what we mightn’t have done.” —Kate Croy’s disreputable father, in Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

All things are busy; only I
Neither bring honey with the bees,
Nor flow’rs to make that, nor the husbandry
To water these.

—George Herbert, “Employment (I)”

Why does the dog follow the vacuum cleaner around with such a stricken look?

The god Internet is hungry, and demands to be fed with a master key to all Brooklyn-literary-scenester romans-à-clef.

About halfway through Wings of the Dove one catches a distinct whiff of The Sacred Fount: Can Milly be cured by fucking?

“Something whispers us that we have no right to make a mock of calamities like these, or to turn the truth of things into the puppet and plaything of our fancies.” —Hazlitt, on King John

My one hope is that when civilization finally starts to dissolve, there will be a few weeks when I can get away with bringing my dog to the movies.

The beginning of corruption is when one is given a secret.

Is it possible to have meaningful oversight of a secret organization without compelling it to reveal the truth about itself to people it doesn’t necessarily trust?

You may my glories and my state depose,
But not my griefs; still am I king of those.

—Shakespeare, Richard II

“Let greatness go, so it go without thee.” —Isabel to Richard II, in Samuel Daniel, Civil Wars

“I am Richard II, know ye not that?” —Elizabeth I

“I tried just awfully hard. But that’s the fascinating thing about art, anyhow; that good intentions and praiseworthy industry don’t count a damn. If they did, it wouldn’t be much more interesting than bookkeeping.” —Willa Cather, Letters

“If you should marry the handsomest, and most accomplished and superficially agreeable man in the world, you little know the misery that would overwhelm you, if, after all, you should find him to be a worthless reprobate, or even an impracticable fool.”

“But what are all the fools and reprobates to do, aunt? If everybody followed your advice, the world would soon come to an end.”

—Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

“. . . and my hair—only my hair, nothing else—looked drunk.” —Dickens, David Copperfield

“And you are one of the fortunate ones who can?” said Miss Ridley, using a dry tone.

“I am one of the unfortunate ones who do. That is how I should put it.”

—Ivy Compton-Burnett, The Present and the Past

bonze (noun): a Japanese or Chinese Buddhist teacher

How strange Untermensch looked, small and dark, gripping his briefcase, the sign of the undefeated intellectual, and looking in his eagerness like some bonze of an unknown religion, approaching the source of his devotion!”

—Penelope Fitzgerald, The Golden Child

beriozka (noun): a hard-currency shop in Russia, during the Communist era (like Tuzex shops in Czechoslovakia)

Everyone else had gone, during the two days they had just spent in Leningrad, to the berioska shop, and had bought themselves a large fur hat with ear-flaps.

—Fitzgerald, The Golden Child

auguste (noun): a circus clown wearing ill-fitting clothes

“Incidentally, in the interests of accuracy, I did not appear as a clown, but as an auguste, who does not speak.”

—Fitzgerald, The Golden Child

ait (or eyot) (noun): a small island in a river

But what struck me most was, that, from the time they began to congregate, forsaking the chimneys and houses, they roosted every night in the osier-beds of the aits of that river.

—Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne

cere (noun): the skin at the base of a bird’s beak

Its cere and feet were yellow, and the circle of its eyelids a bright yellow.

—White, Selborne

He was old enough that sometimes, at a distance, he mistook the yoke in the wires of an Iphone headset for a crucifix.

cassone (noun): a large Italian coffer, to hold a bride’s trousseau

She was standing by herself, looking at the painting of a mythological subject on the cassone.

—Penelope Fitzgerald, Innocence

It was late capitalism again, so late that the children of the rich had given up the wish to be artists of anything but retail.

“. . . the smug laboratory of her afterthought . . .” —Henry James, The Golden Bowl

mort (noun): a large amount, a great deal

“We have had a mort of talk, sir,” said Mr. Peggotty to me.

—Dickens, Copperfield

“The moment was to come—and it finally came with an effect as penetrating as the sound that follows the pressure of an electric button.” —James, Golden Bowl

“The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed.” —G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

“There were times when lust felt like a kind of idealism.” —Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer

A category: people in the city whose names you aren’t expected to know and who don’t know yours but who recognize you and whom you recognize.

“I belong to an unfortunate generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both.” —Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard

“Nothing could be decently hated except eternity.” —Lampedusa, Leopard

America promises never to torture again unless it feels like it has to.

“I am not a young man in a novel.” —Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

poke (verb): to aim one’s gun at a moving target, rather than swinging and firing

The necessity of wasting no time and of killing with certainty had a terrible effect upon the shooting, making me poke out of anxiety.

—T. H. White, The Goshawk

eyas (noun): a young hawk, not yet fully trained [it’s etymologically the same word as the French niais, but it swapped its n with the indefinite article, the way an eft and a newt did]

It must have been a family, the parents and two or three eyases already well grown but not yet driven out.

—White, Goshawk

vinaigrette (noun): a bottle or box holding a sponge soaked with smelling salts

Apparently the presence of a clergyman of the Church of England in her morning-room was consolation enough, as though, like some moral vinaigrette, he had but to be filled by a bishop, introduced, unstoppered, and gently waved about the room, to diffuse a refreshing atmosphere.

—Sylvia Townsend Warner, Summer Will Show

spinney (noun): a small clump of trees, planted or preserved in order to shelter game birds

. . . the portrait of grandpapa Aspen, . . . paused on the brink of his spinney and listening with contemplative pleasure to the footsteps of the poacher within.

—Warner, Summer Will Show

Other people’s flowers

Here are a few quotations that I copied into my notebooks, in some cases as long as four years ago but in one case as recently as last week:

It is as though an orange tree refused to flower for fear of committing a sin.

—Stendhal, On Love

The traditional British struggle with macaroni brought her down sharply from tragedy to farce.

—Elizabeth Bowen, The Hotel

And even though the tall giraffes were tough,
And even though the tough giraffes were tall . . .

—dream poem of John Chamberlain, cited by Edmund Wilson

"But it was nice while it lasted," Charlie said. "We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible, with a sort of magic around us. . . ."

—Fitzgerald, "Babylon Revisited"

If it's important to be sublime in anything, it's surely in evil.

—Diderot, Rameau's Nephew

"Mais quoi! Toujours le roman! Hélas!"

—La duchesse de Sanseverina, La Chartreuse de Parme

We made no more provision for growing older, than we did for growing younger.

—Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

In that same spirit of improvement, which was so busy everywhere, I could discern something like a shadow, that showed it was not altogether of that pure advantage, which avarice led all so eagerly to believe.

—John Galt, Annals of the Parish

He was not a particular person, but a sample or memento—reminding one of certain "goods" for which there is a steady popular demand.

—Henry James, The Reverberator

Historical-mindedness is so much a preconception of modern thought that we can identify a particular thing only by pointing to the various things it successively was before it became that particular thing which it will presently cease to be.

—Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers

I remember when I was abroad, the trees, and grass, and wet leaves, rustling in the walks of the Thuilleries, seemed to be as much English, to be as much the same trees and grass, that I had always been used to, as the sun shining over my head was the same sun which I saw in England; the faces only were foreign to me.

—William Hazlitt, The Round Table

With bloudy mouth his mother earth did kiss,
Greeting his grave . . .

—Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene

Part of our existence lies in the feelings of those near to us. This is why the existence of someone who has lived for days during which man was merely a thing in the eyes of man is non-human.

—Primo Levi, If This Is a Man

You see Englishmen, here in Italy, to a particularly good advantage. In the midst of these false and beautiful Italians they glow with the light of the great fact, that after all they love a bath-tub and they hate a lie.

—Henry James, Letters

A pleasurable feeling of blind love,
The pleasure which there is in life itself.

—Wordsworth, "Michael"

I could observe, in little pieces, as it were; but as to making a net of a number of these pieces, and catching anybody in it, that was, as yet, beyond me.

—Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers but fading seen.

—George Peele

I regard the march of history very much as a man placed astride of a locomotive, without knowledge or help, would regard the progress of that vehicle. To stick on, somehow, and even to enjoy the scenery as we pass, is the sum of my aspirations.

—Henry James, Letters

It is the ongoing—i.e., the "becoming"—of the world that produces its sadness. If the world stood still at a felicitous moment there would be no sadness in it.

—Thomas Hardy, Early Life, qtd. in Aaron Matz, Satire in an Age of Realism

I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.

—Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Around the World