Brief lives: John Aubrey

Lytton Strachey’s essay on John Aubrey ends with a maxim about biographies that gains from coming from the pen of a man who wrote biographies small – Eminent Victorians – and large – Queen Victoria: “A biography should either be as long as Boswell’s or as short as Aubrey\s. The method of enormous and elaborate accetion which produced the Life of Johnson is excellent no doubt; but, failing that, let us have no half-measures; let us have the pure essentials – a vivid image, on a page or two, without explanations, transitions, commentaries or padding.”

Aubrey’s Brief Lives are an instance of the death of the author as, really, the-death-of-the-author. They were jotted down and left in a pile at his death; they were meant for Aubrey’s own use, but, as well, as research material for that renowned Oxford asshole, Anthony a Wood. Wood, being the grumpy and supercilious man that he was, even managed to censor some of the book by removing forty pages of material – a disappearance that is still bitterly resented by Aubrey fans. Wood, having no fans, has no defenders. Such is the judgment of posterity.

Michael Hunter, in an essay on Aubrey, notices that the fate of the entire Brief Lives has been oddly haunted by bad luck - jinxed. “There was a real Gresham's Law at work here, and things were made worse by an extraordinary episode around 1970, when a complete scholarly edition of Brief Lives, running to over 1,800 pages, was prepared by the Clarendon Press at Oxford but was never published. This was the work of an American scholar, Edward McGehee, and it got as far as page proof, its imminent publication even being announced in the Press's house journal, The Periodical, in spring 1972. In fact, however, the edition was suppressed..”

The idea that either monumental accretion or the essential anecdote can “capture” a life is, as even a biographer would have to admit, delusional. The great gaping holes in biographies are occasionally pointed to by psychoanalytically oriented biographers – there is no excremental chapter in most lives, nor alimentary, nor, for the most part, sexual chapter. How a person combs her hair, brushes her teeth, forgets, is embarrassed, angry, cold, tired – this is novelwork, not biographywork.

“The happiness a shoemaker has in drawing on a fair lady's shoe; I know a man the height of whose ambition was to be apprenticed to his mistress's shoemaker on condition he could do so.” Thus, in one sentence, Sir Thomas Badd is finished – even if, like all Aubrey’s lives, there are always more blanks for filling in. This was part of his method – leaving paper blanks in his lives, which he would then fill in later.

So much depends on an anecdote. The pure essentials are often the grossest accidents. Life is full of Freudian slips, and this is where the story comes in. Aubrey has a great eye for these stories, although perhaps it is more accurate to say that his method of vacuuming up gossip (one of his correspondents called him Mister Gossip) often results in intersections of fate and character that have that “too good” air – surely circumstance cannot be so tidy! For instance, this is Aubrey’s story of the death of Sir Francis Bacon.

“Mr Hobbes told me that the cause of his lordship's death was trying of an experiment: viz, as he was taking the air in a coach with Dr Witherborne (a Scotchman, physician to the king) towards Highgate, snow lay on the ground, and it came into my lord's thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt. They were resolved they would try the experiment at once. They alighted out of the coach, and went into a poor woman's house at the bottom of Highgate Hill, and bought a hen, and made the woman gut it, and then stuffed the body with snow, and my lord did help to do it himself. The snow so chilled him, that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not return to his lodgings (I suppose at Gray's Inn), but went to the Earl of Arundel's house at Highgate, where they put him into a good bed warmed with a pan, but it was a damp bed that had not been lain-in about a year before, which gave him such a cold that in two or three days, as I remember he [Mr Hobbes] told me, he died of suffocation.”

Among the deaths of the philosophers, surely this one ranks up there with Socrates’ death by hemlock.

One of Anthony Powell’s lesser known books is his life of Aubrey “and friends”. There are a great number of anecdotes in that book, and they make faster reading than many of the dinners recorded – those endless dinners! – in Dance to the Music of Time. Powell evidently saw a kindred spirit in John Aubrey. He was one of the great seventeenth century worthies – like Sir Thomas Browne and his friend, Robert Hooke – who are, in some odd way, representatives of a very English Dao.

post-war fascism: it's not mussolini, it is blowing up banks and railroad stations.

 

The American story about Meloni is this: once upon a time there was Mussolini. Then, there's Meloni! Now for a commercial break.

The laziness of the American press is not only about what they call the "post-fascist" party in Italy, Fratelli d'Italia, in the present, but the past of its progenitor, the MSI, with its ties to the CIA in the sixties and seventies, its ambition for a Greek like junta, its coup attempt, the Golpo Borghese, headed by Prince Junio Valerio Borghese ( a man whose skin was saved by James Angleton at the end of WWII, who saw in Borghese the kind of anti-Bolshevik strongman he liked), and their involvement in the "years of lead" - an involvement that cost the lives of hundreds of people. This far right terrorism got no play in the American press, because it contradicted the story that the real terrorists were those far lefties, and the story below that, which was the Communist Party of Italy was a threat to the whole system.

I wrote a long story about the intertwining of European fascists, American intelligence, and struggles in the Portuguese colonies in Africa - which were, oddly and not so oddly, in synch with rightwing terrorism in Italy. Here's a link to my story, Crossed Lives. When I wrote it last year, I did not expect it to be pertinent this year. So it goes.
Crossed Lives.

Antisemitism and the French intellectuals - 1920-1945

 In an article in Combat in 1938, the far right critic Thierry Maulnier made a stab at analyzing antisemitism. Unlike, say, Sartre's essay ten years later, Maulnier's does not start out from the premise that it is a deadly bigotry, but instead is a search for "reasonable antisemitism". He finally comes up with a core program founded on resistance to the "disproportionate power" of the Jews and their "irreducible heterogreneity".

It would be nice to think that Maulnier represented an aberration, an eccentric violence, like Celine's.

This isn't the case. In the first half of the twentieth century, a depressing number of intellectuals in France were raving antisemites. Maulnier was, in particular, in dialogue with Charles Maurras. Maurras is pretty much forgotten now, but in his day he had an influence in France and in the Anglophone world - he was considered a master by T.S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis's aesthetics definitely runs in parallel - an anti-modernist modernism. Albert Thibaudet, the great critic for the NRF, devoted almost a whole book to him in a series he called "Thirty Years of French Life" -published in the 1920s.

Thibaudet was a French liberal/social democrat. He has a cool way of showing how absurd Maurras's "philosophy" was - for instance, Maurras's insistence that the Bible is a "Jewish" book - and thus evil - while Christianity is a good thing in as much as it remains Catholic and monarchical. That Thibaudet felt Maurras was important enough to write a book about shows us how out of whack French intellectual culture was. .

It is depressingly the case that many of the minor but revered figures of the time turn out to be antisemites. Alain, whose small essays - Propos - were Pleiadized in two thick volumes, and whose teaching was legendary - Simone Weil was his pupil - is the latest case. Fifty years after his death, his journal for the thirties and forties was published, and it is full of admiration for Hitler and antisemitic shit.

Jean Grenier, Camus's teacher, published his journal of the war years and one finds a steady stream of observations about people who he considers "isrealite" (a word with a distinctly yellow star tinge), and not a word about the massacres of Jews, their transport to the camps, the theft of their property, the blowing up of the synagogues, etc. The man missed the mass murder under his very nose, but he does complain about shortages of meat.

The period's racists, except for Celine, have faded into the background, but their project of rationalizing hatred did result in arguments that are plastic enough to extend, today, to "illegal immigrants" in the U.S. and "moslems" in Europe.

One shouldn't extrapolate from the far right to public policies in France in the 1920s and 30s. France then was exemplary in accepting immigrants - 150,000 Yiddish speaking immigrants fled from pograms in Central Europe to France in the 20s, and around 80,000 from German speaking countries in the 30s. They were part of a massive movement of peoples - some 500,000 from Italy, 200,000 from Spain, hundreds of thousands of Poles. At one point in the thirties nearly a fourth of the population of Paris was from another country.

It was a cruel turn that this population was trapped when the Germans decisively defeated the French in 1940.

As Europe turns right - as for instance in Italy today, with the triumph of the right-far right - we should remember this history. Cause it is coming to get us. It was always crazy that the Cold Warriors played with the fascists - the fascist party in Italy, responsible for blowing up the Bologna train station in 1980 and the Milan bank in 1969 was in contact with the CIA, which at that time had very good relations with the Greek Junta - and they have come back in relation with the present rightwing ruler of Russia. It is as if we can't get over some collective neurosis.

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The Shock Show: Schiaparelli at the Musée des Arts decoratifs.

 

So I, too, a belated bellweatherer or maybe not one at all, made it to the Shocking show at the Musée des Arts decoratifs. Others went there – the young and the old, the models (there is always a fashion happening somewhere in Paris) and the wannabes – to see, perhaps, Dali. The surrealism is the emphasis of the show’s program, and was the vibe the reviewers picked up. Myself, I was in search of one of Schiaparelli’s biggest clients and supporters, Daisy Fellowes. Much to my surprise, even the famous shoe hat – which Daisy was the first and more notable fashion figure in the international smart set to wear – was purged of her presence. Instead, we have a photo of Dali’s wife, Gala, wearing a shoe on her head.

I was the more surprised at this as the Rezeptionsraum in fashion, which is a very Darwinian space – if you don’t sell to the uberwealthy and this isn’t the punky 1970s, you are done – is so imbricated with the design space that Fellowes, for instance, was offered, and accepted, a job as the editor of Harper’s Bazaar in Paris. There are few magazine editors out there with a 300 foot yacht, a magnificent villa on Cap Martin, another in Neuilly-sur-Seine, and a vast mansion in England – but there you go. That was Daisy Fellowes.

This show was clearly structured around a case of art envy. That means that the robes, hats, shoes makeup and perfume were treated solely in connection to the designer-artist. Meret Oppenheim’s fur bracelet or the lobster pendant for the odious Duchess of Windsor were treated as autonomous objects, while the genius of wearting clothes was barely touched on. This isn’t to say that there were no oblique glances at buyers. The house of Schiapareli proper shut down in 1954, but it was revived recently by Diego Della Valle. Schiaparelli found her shock in pink, whereas the new Schiaparelli folks find their shock in designing clothes influenced by strippers. Strippers are clever people – never underestimate the sex worker, and tip, people! – but the new Schiaparelli people are not clever enough to see that the stripper imaginary has to do with taking off the clothes. Thus, the bare and bump on the videos in the show miss the point,

The point, for a dress, a hat, shoes, is to be worn. The body is the soul of clothing. And just as the corpse’s decay from skin and bone to bone destroys the body’s living identity, the problem with clothing is that it is never the same on a dummy. Its aura is altered, radically. And fashion is aura, industrialized. It is a paradox worthy of a metaphysical poet that as the body is to the soul, so the clothes are to the body. In place of the real life of the gown or gloves, we have this closeted, this mausoleum life, where the ensemble becomes not a work of art, but the ghost of a work of art.

And thus I found the exit, after being pointed to it by several of the museum guards, and went out in the street and walked around – past the big Balanciaga boutique on 6 Rue Saint-Honoré – entertaining very Auden-in-19399sh thoughts.

hard hearts

 

“Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” King Lear asks about his daughter, Regan.

The phrase goes back to the Bible, of course. Kabad is the term in Hebrew for the canonical instance of a hardened heart. The heart in question is the pharaoh’s, and its hardening is, in part, the work of the Lord, not nature. In Exodus 9:12, it is written” And the LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh.” Franz Rosenzweig, the great Jewish philosopher, found an interpretation of the verse in a popular Yiddish religious book: “… whereever a person wishes to go, God helps him. If he wishes to be good, God helps him. If he wishes to be bad, God also helps him.” In the latter case, by hardening – making heavy – the heart.

There is something wonderful and terrifying in Rosenzweig’s trouvaille. It is akin to Leibniz’s theory that this is the best of all possible worlds, for that transforms evil in the world into a quality as necessary as the good for the world’s perfection. I can grasp this intellectually, looking down, as much as I am able, at the world, but from within the world, I can never accept this.

That the Lord helps the wicked is a disconcerting thought, but there are hints in the Bible that the Lord and the Good and Evil are in separate metaphysical compartments. When, in the first chapter of Genesis, God creates light, there is this comment: “And God saw that the light was good.” That seems to be a way of saying that when God created light, he did not know, beforehand, that it would be good. That light was good – and I’m in total agreement with the deity here – in this story gives us a glimpse into a certain experimental neutrality, there at the beginning.

This is an idea to play with, as Rosenzweig must have seen it. The idea that my desire to follow good is independent of God, just as my desire to follow bad is independent of God, deserves some consideration. Donne considers that the case that God might not forbid sin in his sermon on God’s “patience”, and gives his response, which is wonderful rhetoric but not such wonderful argument: “for every book of the Bible, every chapter, every verse almost, is a particular Duteronomy, a particular renewing of the law from God’s mouth, Morte morieris, Thou shalt die the death; and of that sentence from Moses’ mouth, pereundo peribitis, You shall surely perish; and of that sentence from the prophet’s mouth, There is no peace to the wicked. And if this obdurant sinner could be such a Goth and Vandal as to destroy all records, all written laws; if he would evacuate and exterminate the whole Bible, yet he would find this law in his own heart; this sentence pronounjced by his own conscience, Stipendium peccati mors est, Treason is death, and sin is treason.”

You can’t get away from the sentence, in Donne. The sentence runs after you; the sentence is written within you. And by sentences you die.

Baptist Morizot

 

There are philosophers who are also doctors, lawyers, and artists. Their philosophies are, one supposes, enriched by their side-vocations. Baptist Morizot is a French philosopher who is also an ethologist – the son of a veterinarian, he has studied both Spinoza and the ways of the wolf. Liberation summed up his work as a “philosopher-tracker” here:

“Baptiste Morizot, maître de conférences in philosophy at the University of 'Aix-Marseille, consecrates his work on relations between the human and living beings. WIth one peculiarity : he goes out when possible to do field work, as a “tracker philosopher”. In his book, On the Animal track, he recounts how, in following the traces left by the bears in Yellowstone, the wolves in Provence, the snow leopards of Kirghizistan or ever the earthworms in our apartment compost piles, he researches the quality of attention towards others that we have lost.”

This is a man who picks up where the late great Loren Eisley left off – but instead of a democratic humanism that separates the human against the “animal”, he wants to regain the hyphen – the human-animal. It is this which is “lost” – a loaded term.  Nostalgia will not shield us from the current drastic heating up of the earth, as Morizot knows. We know, from archaeology, that the human presence in a given territory coincided with the decline or extinction of “competitor” species. Think of the poor neandrethal! And the plenitude depicted on the cave walls.

However, Morizot’s great theme – the crisis in our sensibility, or what I would call the crisis  in the submerging of the human limit, the limit that once defined what we could do on this planet – is a great issue, both socially and philosophically. Last night, as with all nights, now, in Paris (until deep winter), I was bothered by mosquitos. Ten years ago, I do not remember such mosquitos. But now, they are everywhere, in the South of France – the tiger mosquito – and the North of France, to an extent unknown, as far as I can tell, one hundred years ago. The mosquito line in Europe used to begin in Rome, Which is not to say that mosquitos were unknown North of the line, but rather, they were not included among the natural vices – the lice, the fleas, the flies – that the Northern European worried about.

This is from Le Monde:

« The spectacular territorial expansion of the tiger mosquito has aroused growing anxiety. Originally from the forests of Southeast Asia, it has colonized, in the space of about twenty years, all the other continents except Antarctica. It is recognized by scientists today as one of the most invasive species in the world.

The maritime commerce in rubber tires and bamboo from Asia and the United States has played a determining rôle as the tiger mosquito was introduced into new continents, while trucks participated in its interregional distribution.”

The colonized colonize back – thus continuing the Columbian transfer, which once brought African mosquitos to the Caribbean and yellow fever to the Veracruz and New Orleans. Morizot laments the infantilization of our sense of the animal world – the side-by-side construction of factory hog farms and Peppa Pig. This, he thinks, has affected our dream-time and delayed our recognition (something that glimmers out from cave paintings) of our community with living things. I think he is right in as much as the collective sensibility is where things happen – where a certain degree of alienation (which Marx, in the German Ideology, defines in terms of bearability) becomes unbearable, for reasons no powerful muckety muck, policy dweeb or executive nudger will understand.

We are getting closer…

 

Eating the scroll

Something was started in the first three verses of Ezekiel 3: “Then He said to me, “Son of man, eat what you find; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel.”/
So I opened my mouth, and He fed me this scroll./
 And He said to me, “Son of man, feed your stomach and fill your body with this scroll which I am giving you.” Then I ate it, and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth. “
The theme of eating the scroll, the book, the document derives, in the West, from the prophets. This is a radical reworking of the sensual spell of the book, with its obsessive visuality, into that most intimate of bodily moments, eating. The line: “Then I ate it, and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth” is, to me, peculiarly moving. The scroll, the book, the screen on which I type these words, are all very dry. If they were not arid, they would not serve as platforms for letters. But the notion that the scroll’s dryness, which would make it repulsive, turns to something as sweet as “honey in my mouth” – this is a higher ideal than Mallarme’s notion of everything is meant to be contained in a book. That book is still high and dry; everything loses its savor. I prefer the scroll that is ingested and sweet.
Bob Dylan’s Eat the Document is a typically obscure reference – Dylan was a great reader of the Bible – to, perhaps, Ezekiel 3. But I think that the great meditation on Ezekiel three is contained in Unamuno’s “novella”, How to Make a Novel, which piles a commentary on a commentary on Unamuno by Jean Cassou, the latter of whom claimed that Unamuno’s genius was for commentary, that it was all, ultimately, commentary. To which Unamuno replied with a ramble about commentary that brought him to the truth of literature – that books are meant to be eaten.
“And the Letter we eat, which is flesh, is also the Word, which does not mean it is also idea, that is, skeleton. It is impossible to live on skeletons: no one can find nourishment from a skeleton. That is the reason I tend topause  at random in my reading of books of all kinds, among them the book of life, the history I am living, and the book of nature, and at every vital point.”
We gnaw around the bone. I do like the idea that some extract a skeleton from a book, and some eat it to find if it is like honey, or wax, or bitterness. I fear much of my own writing is wax. But I hope some is honey.