The Little Professor

Questions that we may have answered at some point

At the end of his blog post reflecting on the closure of the U of Missouri Press, Frank Donoghue asks, among other things, "Have the monographs that university presses produce become so costly that individual scholars can’t purchase them?"

Er...yes?

Surely we know this by now?

Let's take a trawl through my ever-growing Amazon wishlists (which primarily exist to remind me of books to ILL, not buy, because...well, see Donoghue's question).    I'd love to own volume seven of the Cambridge History of Christianity, but I'm somehow unenthusiastic about paying $257 for it.  Alan Harding's book on the Countess of Huntingdon's Connexion retails for the low, low price of $199.  If I want to ask What Is a Lollard?, I'll need to shell out $125 (or, right now, $121.43).  The study of nineteenth-century archaeology requires me to excavate $175.  A brief monograph on Novel Professions will still set me back $119.95.   At $89, sinning turns out to be financially as well as morally costly.  Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.  Oxford and Cambridge tend to be the biggest culprits among the university presses--it's hard to get your hands on a hardback monograph from either of them for less than $100, although they'll occasionally lowball a more commercial title; their paperbacks regularly retail for anywhere from $40-$60.  (To be fair, some university presses, like Chicago and Princeton, can be relatively reasonable.) Presumably, those legendary academics who earn $200K per annum (the .0025?) can afford to turn out their pockets for a new university press monograph; the rest of us, whose earnings are not quite so stratospheric, will stick to secondhand purchases or the magic of ILL.  If university presses want individuals to purchase their monographs, then perhaps they need to price said monographs accordingly?

The Summer of the Royal Visit

Reading Isabel Colegate's The Summer of the Royal Visit (1992) put me in mind of Suzanne Keen's Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction, in which Keen argues that such romances narrate "the recovery of discovery of 'the truth,' a quasi-historical truth that makes sense of confusion, resolves mystery, permits satisfying closure, and, most importantly, can be located."¹  On the surface, at least, Colegate's short neo-Victorian novel fits Keen's model: the rather self-abasing narrator (the very first lines: "Let us just think for a moment then who I am.  No one much" [3]) is a widowed former history teacher turned researcher in the local archives, who alternates between "peering at card indexes and trying to read old copies of the local newspaper on scratched microfilm" (4) and wandering through the city and its environs.  Using this fictionalized spa town as the core of the tale, the narrator spins a multiplot account of the various do-gooders, architects, clergymen, and con(wo)men converging on this city in the late nineteenth century.  Besides the space, two events unite these very disparate characters: the competition to build a new hotel and a very brief visit by Queen Victoria.   In turn, the city's ever-mutable space links the narrator to his characters, along with his genetic relationship to one of his major players, his grandmother Charlotte Moore.  Although the narrator has textual authority for significant passages of his tale--the aforementioned newspapers, but, more importantly, the diary of unhappy local clergyman Stephen Collingwood--it is not, in fact, altogether clear that what he wants or offers is "the truth," and he constructs his story so as to rule out much in the way of "closure" (let alone of the "satisfying" variety).

The narrative works mostly by association, frequently seguing from one character's POV to another's as a given encounter ends; in effect, the plot proceeds by chain links.  This associativeness works in the narrator's present as well, as the tale either emerges from his movement from place to place or, conversely, sparks a moment of reflection.  Because the narrator does not remain submerged, as it were, but frequently resurfaces--at first keeping his voice out of the Victorian sequences, then eventually entering into them to offer more direct commentary--the reader never loses sight of just how much he needs to fill in his documentary gaps.  Paradoxically, his access to nearly everyone's POV highlights the fictiveness, rather than the historicity, of a good chunk of his project.²  As he explains near the end, "I found I could be a better historian if I allowed myself, just for myself, to tell stories" (215).  In a sense, we overhear (to use John Stuart Mill's turn of phrase) the novel: it becomes the narrator's private riff on the publically available documents.  To put it differently, Colegate crafts the illusion that the novel has no designs on the reader.  Our narrator's self-deprecation, his interest in history as primarily a source of personal pleasure ("the springs of joy" [200]), suggests that his passions are purely antiquarian--one of Walter Scott's frame narrators meandering about in the twentieth century. 

However, the actual plot rubs harshly against this vision of storytelling as good, clean escapist fun.  Although the overall tone is quietly ironic, the vaguely Cranford-esque atmosphere³ contains within itself a much darker antiquarianism, embodied by the mysterious fixer Caspar Freeling and his interest in the Druids.   (Which is not to say that the narrator's passion for the past lacks its own problematic quality: it's hard not to suspect that he has more passion for the past than for his late wife, whom he rarely mentions and always in a tone of mild bemusement.)  Caspar's cod-Druidism--as Collingwood perceptively notes, "'[h]e would have to invent it'" (23)--seems at first entirely Dryasdustish, what with his convictions that the local Circus had been deliberately built "on the site of a former Druid circle" (36).  But then, an article about Druids crops up, rather incongruously, as part of wealthy Marianne Hanbury's masochistic request for sex with Freeling (53).  This moment, which seems to class Freeling's Druid obsession under the "quietly ironic" rubric, turns out to foreshadow something much uglier: this apparently mutual play with class differences and sexuality recurs in the actual point of Freeling's Druid reenactments, which is to prostitute working-class children to upper-class men.  One of Freeling's customers, political reformer Herbert Tranmer, moans to Collingwood that "'[i]t was the meetings, the ritual, the dressing up, it made it all seem unreal, that's to say possible, the impossible was possible'" (179).   Antiquarian costume drama turns out to conceal one of the worst forms of human exploitation.  (One thinks of Charles Stross on steampunk.)  The pleasures of neo-Victorian fantasies may not, after all, be quite so innocent.   Intriguingly, Freeling's self-exculpatory vision of his own self-making, "a series of superimposed and more or less merging histories, each created to meet the needs of the moment, each convincing because he himself believed in it" (186)--stories that may be more "fiction" than "history" (186)--anticipates the narrator's own pleasure in storytelling.  The primary difference, it seems, is that Freeling (again to borrow from Mill) intends his stories to be heard, not overheard. 

Despite Stephen Collingwood's unpleasant discussion with Herbert Tranmer, the narrator in his own voice betrays no particular moral investment in the outcome: nothing happens to Freeling, who tries to burn his boy and girl prostitutes to death, or to any of the men involved in his ring (although Tranmer feels guilt, at least for a time), whereas Stephen Collingwood dies trying to rescue Freeling's exploited children.  There's no poetic justice involved; in fact, some characters disappear entirely from the narrative frame, like Marianne Hanbury, about whose afterlife the narrator can discover nothing.  It's as though once they've exited this regional space, both they and their actions simply cease to matter very much.   At most, such behavior excites the same kind of mild irony from the narrator as the racism of several locals when faced with the Indian wife of Collingwood's landlord.  The coziness with which the novel ends--the narrator's grandmother, who did not run away with Collingwood, quietly going home with her children--suggests that in the end, the past boils down comfortably to this humble, inconsequential domesticity.  Or is this fantasy of a resuscitated marriage (semi-aware husband and guilty wife, making up) the alternative to the narrator's own marriage, which seems to have been primarily characterized by miscommunication or noncommunication? Is this past, whether heard or overheard, really all that disinterested? 

¹ Suzanne Keen, Romances of the Archive in Contemporary British Fiction (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2001), 14. 

²  I'm a little more skeptical about the narrator's claims to "credibility" than is Tatjana Jukic: "From Worlds to Words and the Other Way Around: The Victorian Inheritance in the Postmodern British Novel," Theme Parks, Rainforests, and Sprouting Wastelands: European Essays on Theory and Performance in Contemporary British Fiction, ed. Richard Todd and Louisa Flora (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 84n7.

³ It may not be an accident that Cranford is one of the few Victorian works to get name-checked. 

In which I analyze my allergy to Sherlock

Many years ago, I came across a quotation from the pianist Charles Rosen, in which he said something to the effect that if everyone else loved something that bored him, he concluded that the fault lay with himself and not with the something.  I am attempting to put that philosophy into play with Sherlock.  Because...it took me two days to get through the season finale, which I found badly plotted, implausible, and, in general, deeply uninteresting and uninvolving.  (At least it was not as badly plotted as The Hounds of Baskerville, which took A. C. Doyle's one outstanding Sherlock Holmes novel, put it through a mandolin, and then drowned it in a Thousand Island dressing of conspiracy theories.)  But everyone else (well, except for Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt) loves Sherlock; ergo, it must be me.  So. 

Perhaps we can start with things I don't find objectionable:

The acting.  Cumberbatch and Freeman are doing excellent work with what they're given.  They have strong chemistry, fine dramatic chops, and solid comic timing; moreover, they tend to leave the scenery relatively unchewed (which cannot be said for Jeremy Brett's later episodes, unfortunately).  

Neo-Watson and revisionist Lestrade.  Martin Freeman's Watson is very much in the post-Burke and Hardwicke (er, that's not to be confused with Burke and Hare) mode, which is to say that he's in possession of little gray cells and reasonably willing to give Holmes what for.  In other words, this is a further nail in the coffin of the Nigel Bruce Watson, which is all to the good.  I'd have to say that the series' Lestrade (at least what we see of him) is one of its more interesting features: it's unusual to have a Lestrade around who is not a) primarily there to look useless, b) sneaking around looking like a small and unpleasant rodent, and c) obnoxious comic relief.   (Doyle's Lestrade eventually warmed up to Holmes and Watson, but this one seems to have arrived there much sooner--at least, he's already on a first-name basis with Watson.)

The meta.  I've said more than once that this series foregrounds its status as an adaptation, as it is loaded with nods not just to the canon, but to fan expectations developed from other adaptations.  It's practically the grand sum of all pre-existing adaptations, remixed with healthy doses of contemporary TV detective conventions and CSI-style editing.  (As Lestrade so kindly pointed out to us in the finale.)  In some ways, the series has also been parodying both tabloid celebrity culture and some of the less appealing aspects of fan culture (of the sort liable to wind up on Fandom Wank).  I'm an English professor, so I'm programmed to have no objections to all things meta.

However.

I think it's perhaps here that's also the rub for me.  As I said in my review of A Scandal in Belgravia, this series is far less original than it seems to think it is.  Take, for example, the plot of the series finale:  Moriarty appears to be quite familiar with the late Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, and possibly Nicholas Meyer's The Seven-Percent Solution as well.  Reflections on Holmes and Watson as a romantic couple, or at least a bromantic one, have been floating around for decades--see Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.  (On the professional publishing side, St. Martin's has published at least one novel with a [repressed] gay Watson, and of course there's a lifetime supply of Holmes/Watson fanfiction.)  Holmes as full-blown jerk, as opposed to bohemian gentleman, owes quite a bit to House. Irene Adler has been developing grand passions for Holmes since goodness knows when.  (I'm quite fond of Holmes and Adler as the proud mama and papa of Nero Wolfe, myself.)  And, of course, Moriarty as invasive killer weed is inescapable--doesn't everything have to go back to Moriarty?    Etc.  After decades upon decades of Sherlock Holmes parodies, pastiches, and revisions, it's not shocking that the series keeps retreading old ground.  It's just that it's not necessarily very interesting, either.  For lack of a better way of putting it, while the series likes to wink at itself and the Sherlock Holmes mythos, it doesn't want to do anything too harsh or too outlandish to it. (We get The Last Sherlock Holmes Story without its major twist.)  It doesn't probe the limits or moral implications of the legend (Michael Chabon, Mitch Cullin), or offer anything go-for-broke outrageous (Neil Gaiman), let alone real parodic play (Kim Newman).

Moreover, Lestrade's joke about CSI reminded me that Sherlock seems to be borrowing some of that series' least entertaining and/or remotely believable plots.  It's a criminal mastermind obsessed with the series lead! Who constructs weirdly overwrought schemes!  And then engages in "deep" mind games with the object of his affections (so to speak)! Which he finishes off with the sort of long speech that is supposed to sound profound, but which makes the audience wonder why the detective/CSI doesn't just shoot him/throw him off the roof/cold-cock him/forcefeed him hot peppers and be done with it! Of course Moriarty is Holmes' criminal double; we've known this since "The Final Problem."  But surely there are better, more economical ways of putting this doubling into action? (I once again nudge the reader in Dibdin's direction.  Or even Newman's.  We could even go back to Doyle, while we're at it.) 

To me, then, there's just too much deja vu involved (or, perhaps, deja lu).    I feel like I ought to be enjoying this series much more than I am.  But, so far, I'm not. 

 

 

 

 

 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Helen Humphreys, The Frozen Thames (McClelland and Stewart, 2007).  Collection of short-shorts about exactly what it says on the title: days when the Thames froze over, from the twelfth century to the late nineteenth (with an epilogue by Virginia Woolf).  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Robert Bellarmine, On Natural and Spiritual Authority (Liberty Fund, 2012).  Three controversial works by St. Robert Bellarmine, a leading figure in the clash between Protestants and Catholics during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; more about Bellarmine here.  (Liberty Fund)

Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer

Wesley Stace's third novel, Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer, is simultaneously a kunstlerroman, a historical novel, and a novel about both biographical interpretation and the writing of biography.  Its genealogy ranges from Nabokov's Pale Fire (which Stace has acknowledged is an important influence) and James' The Aspern Papers to more recent efforts like Susan Schomberg Schaeffer's Poison, Gilbert Adair's Love and Death on Long Island,  and Kate Christensen's The Great Man. (Adair's enthusiasm for this novel is rather muted.)  The novel begins at what initially seems to be the end: a newspaper report announcing the murder-suicide of composer Charles Jerrold; his wife, singer Victoria London; and his wife's lover, Edward Manville.   In its conclusion, the report quotes music critic Leslie Shepherd, who "blamed Jessold's alcoholism and obsessive nature, declaring the murders an unnecessary tragedy, one that would inevitably tarnish the composer's legacy" (2).  Shepherd's last words, needless to say, deliberately oversimplify what turns out to be a far more complex situation, even as they also prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.  In what follows, Shepherd seeks to untangle Jessold's increasingly elusive character, the relationship of his music to early twentieth-century history, and his own role in Jessold's construction--and destruction.

The novel actually consists of two narratives: the lengthy memoir (it's half the book) that Shepherd draws up for the detectives investigating the murders, and Shepherd's corrective account, written after his wife's death (and prior to what the novel implies will be his own suicide).  Both narratives are preoccupied with the problem of an authentically "national" English music, with the Big Bad in both cases being Germany and its composers.  This quest for one true Englishness foreshadows the novel's other problems--to what extent can the arts (especially the musical arts) be interpreted as an expression of national identity, let alone personal problems? Contrariwise, to what extent do the arts emerge from only one muse, as it were? Shepherd initially bonds with Jessold over bouts of English folk-song collecting, which Shepherd invests with a racialized, post-Romantic aura of authenticity: "'Folk-songs have a biological appeal.  We must shake off the dead hand of foreign influence'" (44).    Shepherd, who does "not care for the pastoral itself" (25), is appropriately but ironically named: he fetishizes the oral culture of the countryside, which he captures, prints, and disseminates for more elite audiences, but England's rural spaces have little effect on him.  Despite his attempt to literally naturalize folk-song ("biological appeal") as part and parcel of a pure English nationhood, he has no Wordsworthian affinity for nature.  Moreover, his fantasy of English purity runs athwart of Jessold's skepticism, which discounts the need for a narrow, bordered nationalism--"'we are an Empire'," leaving aside the question of "'Great Britain'" (45)--and dismisses overtly nationalist arts as, effectively, kitschy cliches (45).  Jessold's arguments owe something to the "True-Born Englishman" tradition, which insists on the country's cultural and ethnic heterogeneity; to be purely English is a contradiction in terms.  Even Shepherd has to uneasily concede this problem: Handel and Mendelssohn, after all, can both be classed as an "honorary Englishman" (205), while, nearer home, his patron Lord Walmsley is an Anglicized (and Anglicanized) Lithuanian Jew, whose daughter (and Shepherd's wife) Miriam seems entirely English.  Jessold's own supposed "English" masterpiece, the opera Little Musgrave, is sparked by an English folk-song and by a story about the (real) double murder committed by Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo and by his exposure to German experiments in atonality and, at least in some measure, by his own personal life.  Cultural, personal, and national boundaries signally fail to converge.

In chasing after pure Englishness, then, Shepherd fails to pay attention to the permeability of artistic borders.   But he also unwittingly engages in the same kind of reductivism that characterizes the sensationalist writing of his (sort-of) rival Banter, whose biography of Jessold relentlessly reads the composer's work "through the lens of the murders, and through that lens only" (244). Inconveniently for Shepherd, Banter was inspired by his own postmortem dissection of Jessold, which narrated "a chain of events that led directly from that evening at Hatton [when Shepherd told Jessold Gesualdo's story] to the murders" (219).  (The Gesualdo story lands us in Pale Fire territory, as Kinbote claims to have done something similar to spark Shade's poem.)  As little as Shepherd wants to admit it, both approaches define the plot of Jessold's life in terms of a single event: Banter retroactively diagnoses every composition as an expression of an essential personality flaw that ultimately manifests in the killings, whereas Shepherd begins from the end (much like the novel) and then seeks to reconstruct the narrative that produced it.  Significantly, Shepherd's account centers himself--the turning point in Jessold's career, that is, is Shepherd's dramatic retelling of the Gesualdo murders (which, he fails to acknowledge, shares Banter's sensationalistic impulses).  Both accounts assume that Jessold can, in fact, be explained; they are, for all intents and purposes, intended to reduce Jessold to some easily-digested soundbite, no longer enigmatic.  The problem, as the reader no doubt expects, is that both authors only partially understand the man in question.  Banter has almost no access to Jessold's private papers and letters; Shepherd doesn't know all the ins and outs of the actual composition of Little Musgrave (and much remains mysterious, even after he is somewhat enlightened).  For that matter, the reader only partially understands the man in question. Not only does Shepherd withhold some extremely important information in the police memoir, but also it's impossible to locate the "real" Jessold in Shepherd's often self-serving tale. 

In his afterword, Stace acknowledges that his novel addresses some of "the pitfalls of biographical criticism" (386), although he doesn't stipulate which ones he has in mind.  Jessold, who will be done in by biographical criticism, instinctively understands its appeal, as the figure of "war poet" Josh Cradleless suggests.  (The novel's website, appropriately enough, represents the fictional Jessold as a real composer.)  One way of thinking about how biographical criticism, historicism, and "national character" (to use that once-popular phrase) play out in Charles Jessold are as forms of violence, both figurative and literal.  The sound-bitism I described in my previous paragraph uses explanation to first contain, then displace the disruptive Jessold from polite English narratives of music history.  The moment that Charles Jessold becomes "the murderer," he becomes essentially inaudible as a composer; Banter's true-crime narrative, for example, overwrites Jessold's compositions with the sounds of gunfire.  Jessold's music, Shepherd complains, became "completely unrevivable" (247).   Similarly, Shepherd's own obsession with the Englishness of English music turns out to be inseparable from Lord Walmsley's wartime propaganda.   Both Banter and Jessold try to "pin" their subject, rather like a butterfly.  There's a rather Wordsworthian "murder to dissect" vibe going on in the way in which both authors try to decompose Jessold and/or music in general.  

Of course, there's the mystery of the murder itself, which leads me to some major spoilers (although I imagine that most of Charles Jessold's readers will figure out at least some of what's what relatively early on).  Head below the fold.

This Week's Acquisitions

• Katie Roiphe, Still She Haunts Me (Dial, 2001).  Historical novel about Lewis Carroll's relationship with Alice Liddell, especially as funneled through the photography sessions.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Carsten Jensen, We the Drowned, trans. Charlotte Barslund and Emma Ryder (Houghton Mifflin, 2011).  A family saga covering approximately a century's worth of the history of Danish maritime island Marstal.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Connie Willis, All Clear (Ballantine, 2011).  Second half of Willis' duology about time-traveling historians researching the London Blitz.  (Barnes & Noble)
• China Mieville, Railsea (Ballantine, 2012).  It's Moby-Dick! But with trains.  And, um, gargantuan moles.  (Amazon)
• William M'Gavin, The Protestant, 2 vols. (Edwin Hunt, 1833).  1500+ pages (in small print!) of M'Gavin's anti-Catholic journalism & other writings.  Electric Scotland has an overview of M'Gavin's career.  (eBay)
• Ciaran O'Carroll, Paul Cardinal Cullen: Portrait of a Practical Nationalist (Veritas, 2009).  Biographical study of the most influential figure in nineteenth-century Irish Catholicism.  (Amazon)

Bring up the Bodies

If Anne Boleyn appears on the scene, the reader frequently wants to know: does the novelist find her guilty, or innocent? Victim, plotter, or some combination of the two? In Hilary Mantel's sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies, these questions prove entirely irrelevant.  We have no access to Anne except through Cromwell's POV, and Cromwell's primary motivations in this novel are serving his king, who wants Anne gone, and serving his own need for vengeance against those men who mocked his beloved former employer, Cardinal Wolsey. "'All the players gone,'" one character remarks, neatly summing up the plot's outcome, "'All four who carried the cardinal to Hell; and also the poor fool Mark who made a ballad of their exploits'" (400).    Readers familiar with the scholarship on Anne will recognize traces of it quietly surfacing and subsiding--Retha Warnicke's suggestion that Anne might have been persecuted as a witch, for example, which appears as one of the manifold reasons for bringing down the queen.  But Mantel's Anne remains tantalizingly out of reach.  The Constable of the Tower, William Kingston, is puzzled by her willingness to receive the Eucharist, for "surely she would not do [...] if she were guilty?" (392); Cromwell, meanwhile, keeps seeing things like "knives" when he looks at her (38).  This opacity about Anne's beliefs, motives, and ultimately acts never comes clear.  We are not even allowed to hear Anne's self-defense, in which she demonstrated that some of the charges against her were chronologically impossible.  In the end, though, Anne herself does not matter.  Cromwell's ability to weave an airtight fiction about her does. 

In that sense, this novel--leaner and tauter than Wolf Hall, but also talkier, now that Cromwell is no longer young--is far more openly self-aware about itself as a historical novel than its predecessor.  Relatively early on, Henry VIII tells Cromwell, with considerable self-satisfaction, "'I can do as it pleases me [...] God would not allow my pleasure to be contrary to his design, nor my designs to be impeded by his will'" (58).  Bring up the Bodies juxtaposes the monarch's fantasy of perfect free agency, of living in a self-driven plot entirely aligned with the divine "will," with Cromwell's intricate plotting--in both senses of the term [1]. For Henry VIII, the monarch's "pleasure" is inextricable from history's unfolding, for all intents and purposes is history.  He need not be self-conscious about himself as a character in God's providential story, for what he does can only be what God wants, and vice-versa.  In practice, the king is less of an independent agent than he believes.  ("If he wants a wife, fix him one," the spirit of Wolsey mutters in Cromwell's head. "I didn't, and I am dead" [67].)  It is the job of his servants to think in terms of making and remaking the king's reality, and Cromwell is the novel's chief artificers, always fixated on human beings as both storytellers and characters.  "It's interesting, George Boleyn's version of his life" (60), Cromwell reflects (with some irony) at one point, aware that he, too, figures as an apparently passive figure in someone else's tale.    But even though Cromwell's POV is necessarily limited, he comes far closer than the king to the state of omniscient narrator: after all, "[t]he affairs of the whole realm are whispered in his ear, and so plural are his offices under the Crown that the great business of England, parchment and roll awaiting stam and signet, is pushed or pulled across his desk, to himself or from himself" (71).  It is Cromwell who can see the farthest into past, present, and future, who can admit to himself that the Princess Mary is "the future" (89), and who, much more ominously, can pick up a fleeting insinuation from George Boleyn's sinister wife that will "affix itself and adhere to certain sentences of his own, not yet formed" (96). 

And here the past grows malleable, for, far more than the king, Cromwell makes history.  Although Cromwell thinks her as almost his own double--"[e]verything she does is calculated, like everything he does" (204)--Anne Boleyn's fatal mistake, in fact, is to believe that she is equally capable of doing the same.   "'Since my coronation, there is a new England,'" Anne tells Cromwell.  "'It cannot subsist without me.'"  To which boast, Cromwell silently replies, "Not so, madam [...] If need be, I can separate you from history" (110).  Anne imagines herself part of the modern national body, a kind of new Eve in a revitalized (Protestant) English paradise; Cromwell, whose day-to-day work is all about modernization, sees history as something constantly in flux, amenable to careful handling.  Sometimes, these changes are merely a shift in perspective, as when Cromwell learns that his abusive father saved him from criminal prosecution; how, he repeatedly muses to himself, should he re-envision their relationship, under those circumstances? Or should he? At other times, though, the past can be deliberately reworked.  Both he and Anne are the constant subject of unfortunate rumors, but Cromwell can afford to be amused by the accumulation of increasingly fantastic tales about his deviltry, none of which can be marshaled into a coherent story.  The same is not true for the rumors about Anne. "What is the nature of the border between truth and lies?" somebody wonders (perhaps Cromwell, perhaps a different narrator).  "It is permeable and blurred because it is planted thick with rumour, confabulation, misunderstandings, and twisted tales" (159).  Cromwell's ability to make a desirable past, as it were, derives from his ability to operate precisely in this liminal space.  "Of course, it never happened," he cheerfully tells someone about the king's apparent death in a jousting accident (173).  The king believes that his "pleasure" and God's will coincide perfectly; Cromwell, making no such grandiose claims for himself, tells stories that will appear real enough to suit present needs.

There have been debates about the ethics of historical fiction since historical fiction has been around.  One could argue that Cromwell models exactly the kind of narrative that opponents of historical fiction have always denounced: the sensationalized tale of private crime, mucking about with the images of history's heroes.  Cromwell thinks to himself at one point that "[i]f he acts against Anne he hopes for a cleaner way" (223), but the narrative he puts together is unavoidably dirty.  Anne's relationship with Harry Percy, revised once to suit the king, Cromwell now revises again to suit the king in a very different way (251); Anne's cousin Mary Shelton "does not know what she has witnessed" when Anne quarrels with Henry Norris, but Cromwell hears "treason" (260); Anne's brother George visits Anne in private, and Cromwell finds a "'crime against nature'" (267).  As I said in the beginning, it makes no difference at all to the narrative if any of these things are true.  Cromwell understands verisimilitude: from the wispiest of evidence (the charge of incest explicitly derives from things neither seen nor heard), he can craft a fine realist narrative that certainly appears to refer to the world beyond itself.  If obvious referents do not immediately present themselves, then he can force them into being.  Thinking of Mark Smeaton, Cromwell observes that "[i]f he told the truth about Anne, he is guilty.  If he lied about Anne, he is hardly innocent" (282); every possible option rebounds to the benefit of the particular tale he wants to tell.  Cromwell takes guilt and innocence, unanchors them from commonsensical notions of their meaning, and reframes them.  As he pithily sums it up to himself, "He needs guilty men.  So he has found men who are guilty.  Though perhaps not guilty as charged" (330). However, the tale will be to the audience's liking; the king will buy.    Buying, of course, means real-world effects: Cromwell's fiction becomes historical reality, at least until it is eventually unpacked, some centuries down the road. 

Here, though, is where things break down.   Cromwell prides himself that he is essential: "Let them try to pull him down.  They will find him armoured, they will find him entrenched, they will find him stuck like a limpet to the future" (406).  And yet, what the reader hears at this moment is Anne Boleyn, insisting on her organic oneness with the new England.  Cromwell the storyteller is not, after all, omnisciently telling his own tale; he cannot hear the echo that predicts his coming destruction, any more than he registers the greater significance of his own admission that he and Anne are very similar.  A novel's narrator may aspire to figurative godhood, but Cromwell turns out to be a limited point-of-view, in more ways than one. 

[1] Although she doesn't develop the point, Frances Wilson puts her finger on it when she suggests that "his job was to edit Henry's plots: to erase his queen, cancel his inconvenient daughters and terminate those chapters in the narrative which were getting tedious."

The Hebrew's Daughter

We haven't had any religious poetry in a while, so let's turn to W. Henry Ludlow's The Hebrew's Daughter, A Fragment of a Jewish Tradition, in Five Cantos (comp. 1852; pub. 1854).  This appears to have been Ludlow's only foray into the world of any sort of verse--that he was willing to put before the public, at least.  As the poem's title suggests, it participates in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition of "fragment" verse, poems whose purportedly mangled forms echoed the contemporary fascination with ruins; certainly, ruin, in both its figurative and literal sense, turns out to be the poem's order of the day.  Ludlow tries some cautious experiments with rhyme and meter, writing primarily in iambic tetrameter couplets but sometimes veering from trimeter to pentameter (especially in the big storm scene) or breaking out into triplets, quatrains, and envelope rhymes.  Not surprisingly, the poem's formal technique is not thrilling.  But for those interested in Jewish subjects in Victorian poetry, this poem is interesting for two reasons: its reworking of the Shylock mythos and its subversion of the by-then conventional Jewish conversion narrative. 

First, the plot.  Elam has a daughter, Zillah, for whom he seeks a possible guardian after the death of her mother.  The mother in question was a secret Christian convert who tutored Zillah in the basics, and so, Zillah "was led more faith to place,/On Christian oaths, than do her race" (10).  This turns out to be a problem when Elam temporarily decamps.  Alas, Elam had refused a loan to a supposed Christian, Hun; in revenge, Hun seduces Zillah (words only, no action), then locks her up in prison until one of his followers finally decides that this is really not quite the thing.  Elam, who returns to find himself sans child, threatens Hun with a scary magic spell, then takes off for the Holy Land.  Zillah also takes off for the Holy Land.  And so does Hun, who is, dare we say, not feeling so great about himself.  Due to divine intervention beyond our control, Zillah and Hun are shipwrecked; Hun, continuing to not feel so great, rescues Zillah (who, understandably, runs away very fast once she sees his face).  After much stereotypical wandering and lamenting, Zillah finds her father on the brink of death, obtains his forgiveness, and--after he repents of cursing Hun--watches him die in peace.  Then...she goes insane, leaving us with Hun sadly watching over her, hoping "to see once more arise/The light of reason in her eyes!" (59)

As this plot outline suggests, Ludlow begins by using Shylock to structure his plot: Elam, who embodies the Law, is the money-lending father; Zillah, who embodies Love, is his Christian-tending daughter; Hun is the Christian in need of cash.  The legalistic Jewish father and the emotional Jewish daughter are par for the course in fictions about the Jews.  Most often, the former symbolically gives way to the latter, with the tyrannically masculine Law superseded by the rule of feminized Love.  In that sense, the Shylock plot and the conversion plot are always bound up in each other.  Ludlow further emphasizes that link with another familiar figure from conversion narratives, the secret Christian convert: the deceased mother (in the Shylock plot, she generally is) had "taught her, ere she died/The creed of Jesus crucified," with the proviso "not to let her Father see/Her to the Saviour bend the knee" (10).  Zillah thus exists in an ambiguous space, Jewish in public but Christian in private; further ambiguity arises from that allusion to "her Father," which immediately refers to Elam but, more problematically, also suggests God the Father, whose Son she does not openly avow.   As a result, the symbolic transition from Judaism to Christianity, from paternal Law to maternal Love, stumbles badly.    This deliberate narrative botch gets only worse once we consider Hun, about whom "nothing certain was there known" (9), and who enacts the Shylockian conversion romance only to lock Zillah up in a Gothic tower. Neither secretly-Christian mother nor nominally-Christian lover can conduct Zillah to Christian community.

Instead, Zillah's chunk of the plot takes her back to the father's Law.  Meeting him once again, she confesses her sins at his request, and is forgiven for her "disobedience" (52).  Yet here the abortive conversion plot rears its head again, for Zillah finds no rest in this paternal forgiveness.  Although Elam is allowed a "good death" once he retracts his curse against Hun, Zillah's agony over her sin leads to fantasize that all of nature condemns her as his "murderess" (55), and all that is left of her is "reason's wreck" (55).  What are we to make of this? Zillah's mental collapse resonates tellingly with the state of Judaism in the rest of the poem, and it is here that we see how the poem's fragmentary form embodies its attitude to post-Christian Jews.  Like so many others, Ludlow relies heavily on the complaint as the dominant mode of Jewish utterance: Elam, for example, sadly asks why Jerusalem's "children roam/In foreign lands as if they hated home?/Why did our God forsake our chosen land,/And let his temple fall by heathen band?" (48)  Similarly, the insane Zillah bursts out into a hymn that, even as it promises that the Jews shall one day be restored, nevertheless sobs along with "Judah's daughter's ever weeping" (58).  Even before the tragedy plays out, Zillah and Elam are already part of the band of Jews who "wander far,/Nor have they now a guiding star" (5), and this vision of eternal exile and dislocation recurs in Ludlow's repeated descriptions of both Zillah and Elam as physically and/or mentally "wandering."  As wanderers without guidance or goal, both Zillah and Elam seem eternally condemned to life without a fully-developed narrative arc.  Zillah's strange in-between state as disobedient Jew but not-quite Christian further underlines the incompleteness in which these characters live; it is no accident that their apparently cyclical return to the Holy Land is merely yet another reminder that they have been displaced, with no right to enter Jerusalem.  In that sense, Zillah's return to her father and the Law he represents is equally fragmented: she can neither re-enter her first spiritual "home" nor transition to the Christian community putatively associated with her mother.  Well before 1890s psychological theory, Ludlow makes "madness" the understandable outcome of such a shattered, "wandering" existence [1].

Despite the poem's title, Zillah winds up exiled from the conversion plot.  It is Hun, the villain, who dedicates his life to protecting the mad Zillah as what appears to be self-imposed penance.  And it is Hun who is on the receiving end of the poem's finger-wagging moral: "I pity all whose mental strife/Was such as gall'd Hun's later life;/Remorse of those who late repent,/Is heaviest of punishment" (59).  Yes, says the reader, but isn't he rather better off than Zillah? Elam, the staunch Jew who finally repents, is saved from pain at the last moment; Hun, the professed Christian turned real Christian, repents and spends the remainder of his life undergoing what we are to assume is divinely-ordained agony; Zillah, who abandoned her faith and tried to return, is left to a suffering she cannot possibly interpret.  The Christian may get the poem's last word, but "bad" Christians who abuse their faith also, by extension, bear the weight of the poem's moral condemnation. 

[1] On which see Carol Margaret Davison, Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 145-46.

 

Random top ten lists are random

I love lists.  Newspapers also love lists, because they elevate their sites' hit counts.  Take, for example, this list of "The 10 Best Historical Novels," which is the sort of thing guaranteed to make someone like yours truly prick up their ears (focus their eyes?).  It may have been designed to be deliberately irritating.  Or, alternately, it merely exemplifies the inherent bizarreness of any such list--only ten novels? From the entire history of the historical novel? Across the globe?  Aside from a brief foray into Russia for War and Peace (which, if one has to make this kind of list, belongs there) and Italy for The Leopard (which probably also qualifies), the list sticks to British, Irish, and American novels.  Which are, ahem, all in print, and possibly available from the Guardian's online bookshop.  (I winced at the sight of Wolf Hall, which is a fine novel, but seems to be in here primarily for promotional purposes.)   Except for W&P and The Leopard, any one of these novels could easily be swapped for something else, and quite possibly something better: Manzoni's I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed), Stendahl's Le Rouge et Le Noir, Shusako Endo's Silence or The Samurai...I could go on (but won't).  Moreover, these novels all fit relatively neatly into the traditional paradigm of historical novels set fully in the past, seeking to avoid all but "necessary anachronism": ergo, no Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, no A. S. Byatt's Possession, no James Robertson's The Fanatic, to give three totally random examples.  In other words, this list seems to assume a definition of "the historical novel" that it never really states, even though "the historical novel" is an exceptionally fluid category.  Magical realist historical fiction (e.g., Gabriel Garcia Marquez...)? Science fiction/fantasy historical fiction (e.g., Octavia Butler...)?  Gothic historical fiction (e.g., Sir Walter Scott, whose absence from this list is pretty eye-popping...)? 

But perhaps the list will sell some good books, so there's that. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Eleanor Sleath, The Nocturnal Minstel; Or, the Spirit of the Wood (Ayer, 1971).  A volume in Ayer's big reprint series of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Gothic.  Overview here; a biographical essay about the little-known author here.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Holt, 2012).  Second volume in Mantel's planned trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, featuring things going rather badly for Anne Boleyn.  (Amazon)
• Johannes V. Jensen, The Fall of the King, trans. Alan G. Bower (Minnesota, 2012).  New translation of Jensen's famous historical novel about a young man coming into the orbit of King Christian II; originally published 1900-01.  Jensen won the Nobel Prize in 1944.   (Amazon)
• The Old Brown Coat and Its Owners (RTS, 1830[?]).  Teensy-tiny (it's about four inches tall) Christian it-narrative about, yes, a coat.  (eBay)
• William Heyen, Diana, Charles, and the Queen (BOA, 1998).  Cycle of approximately three hundred short poems (two quatrains apiece, various rhyme schemes) about exactly what it says in the title, by one of my former colleagues.  (Free)
• W. R. Ward, Early Evangelicalism: A Global History, 1660-1789 (Cambridge, 2006).  An international history of efforts leading up to the explosion of evangelicalism as a modern force in the late eighteenth century.  (Amazon [secondhand])