ill-advised

BOOK: Pius II, "Commentaries" (Vol. 2)

2008-05-24T20:21:00.001+02:00

Pius II: Commentaries. Vol. 2: Books III–IV. Edited by Margaret Meserve and Marcello Simonetta. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 29. Harvard University Press, 2007. 0674024893. xxvi + 421 pp.

This is the second volume of Pius' autobiography; see my post about Vol. 1 from a few years ago.

Book III

Pius invites various European rulers to a congress in Mantua, hoping to persuade them to organize some kind of latter-day crusade against the Turks, who meanwhile are making good progress in the Balkans — having recently captured e.g. Constantinople, they are now making inroads into Bosnia and Serbia, and it seems clear that Hungary is likely to be next on their menu. Anyway, Pius doesn't get quite the response he may have been hoping for. Many of the princes he'd invited are too busy fighting amongst themselves, or too afraid of possible revolts or conspiracies against their rule to leave their countries for any length of time. So when Pius arrives at Mantua, few of the other supposed attendees are there, and even his own cardinals keep complaining about the hot and humid weather and looking for excuses to leave. It is only after much waiting, prodding and some diplomatic efforts on Pius' part that he collects a decent assembly of princes (or at least their representatives), though even then several of the major ones (e.g. France and England) are missing. Among the attendees is Francesco Sforza, the duke of Milan, and Pius includes a short biography of him in this book (3.15–19) — Francesco and his father together form an impressive rags-to-riches story.

He also includes a short overview of Venetian history (3.26–30) before the point where the Venetian delegation belatedly arrives to his congress. You can see that he isn't terribly fond of Venice and its politics. “But in a republican regime nothing is sacred or holy. A republic is a soulless thing and does not fear the fires of hell. The Venetians exiled many of their doges, blinded some, and put others to death; [. . .] they are an uncompromising nation and enforce their laws with stringency.” (3.29.1.) Which is in a way a very nice and clear statement of Pius' own political preferences: I guess he would prefer to deal with a monarchy, where the pope would have better chances of exploiting, for the benefits of the papacy, the monarch's fear of eternal damnation. And he would prefer to deal with a nation of servile sheep than with people who stand up for their own interests. The things he criticizes about the Venetians are in fact, from the present-day point of view, some of their greatest virtues.

On the positive side, he does include a few enthusiastic paragraphs about the city itself, praising its commerce and prosperity, the magnificent shipyards and the splendid buildings, etc. (3.30.2–3).

Pius has a very high opinion of his position as the pope, and is in no doubt that he is above any and all secular rulers. He comments thus on the establishment of Charlemagne's empire: “then the pope of Rome — the true Vicar of Jesus Christ, to whom God the Father gave universal power on heaven and earth — transferred possession of the universal empire from the Greeks to the Germans in the person of Charlemagne” (3.28.1). What amazing and utter arrogance!

Anyway, eventually the congress of Mantua finally begins and Pius includes a few chapters about the progress of the discussions. The attendees agree that the Christian countries must step together for a war against the Turks; that the ones closer to Turkey (especially Hungary) should provide soldiers, while the ones farther away (e.g. Italy) should focus on providing the money (because it would be difficult to transport enough soldiers over such a distance); and that the Turks should be attacked both by land and by sea (with the latter effort being led chiefly by Venice). See e.g. 3.34, 3.47.

The Venetians, however, refuse to make any firm commitments, let alone sacrifices, for this cause, and demand huge sums of money for their participation in the war (3.35). Pius' annoyance is palpable, and he's seething with the sort of contempt which a person with ideals but no money rightfully feels for people who have plenty of money but are unwilling to use it for any good purpose: “The Venetians are never ones to embrace a grand project. They are merchants by and large who care only for profit. The very idea of a glorious deed that can only be achieved at a cost repels them.” (3.35.4.) Interestingly, Pius continues: “They feared that if was were declared against the Turks, their Eastern trade, the very basis of their livelihood, would dry up” — I was surprised by this, as the impression I had from J. J. Norwich's History of Venice (but it's been years since I've read it, so maybe my memory is quite inaccurate) was that it was precisely the presence of the Turks that was causing the Venetian's Eastern trade to dry up. For as long as the weak Byzantine empire existed, the Venetians had many privileges there and were able to do business there with great profit; but the Turks, on the other hand, were quite brutal and didn't care much for trade with Venice. Besides, the presence of the Turks required Venice to plunge into a series of costly (and ultimately unsuccessful) wars in which they had to defend their various Aegean islands from the Turks. In short, the impression I had from Norwich is that the Venetians had a lot to gain from any defeat which the Turks may incur, and they knew it and often pestered other Christian states for help against the Turks (‘we're the bulwark of Christianity, yadda yadda yadda’).

Another problem that Pius had with the Venetians was due to sexual incompatibility. You see, he had a foot fetish that they regrettably didn't share: “even though they saw the ambassadors of kings and of the emperor himself, and mighty princes, too, all prostrate themselves for some time after kissing the pope's feet, they themselves, either out of innate arrogance or with the boorishness of a race of fishermen, would rise at once.” (3.35.8.) He goes on to complain about their arrogance, which struck me as somewhat rich since, as we saw above, Pius was not exactly a meek sheep himself.

Pius is also annoyed with the French, who are more interested in bickering with other Christian countries than in his anti-Turkish war (3.37–40). Chapter 3.40 is entitled “The worthless French legation, concerned only with its own grievances, offers absolutely nothing for the crusade” :))

England was busy with the Wars of the Roses at the time, and Pius describes some of the Church's diplomatic involvement in English affairs (3.41–42).

Book IV

This book was somewhat less interesting than the previous one, because a lot of it deals with the usual regional-level warfare that the history of Renaissance Italy is so full of. The papal state, of course, was inevitably one of the players in this warfare, so Pius couldn't afford to ignore it. We get no further news about the war against the Turks that has been agreed upon at the end of book III — either it will be forgotten altogether or we'll get to hear about it in some later book. Anyway, the French are assiduously interfering in Italian affairs once again, and the very same Italian statelets who had solemnly agreed, at Pius' congress just a short while ago, to help and support each other, are back at each other's throats.

A more interesting part of this book deals with Pius' creation of new cardinals (4.9–11). The usual number of cardinals at that time was just 24 (translator's note 23, p. 390). All sorts of rulers importune the pope with names of their favourite candidates; he also discusses the matter with the existing cardinals, who do not favour the creation of new cardinals, presumably because the influence of the old ones would decrease a bit with this. But apparently Pius needed, or at least wanted, to obtain their consent, so there is a fair amount of haggling before they finally agree on the number and names of the new candidates. I was surprised by the fact that the old cardinals insisted that, if he is going to name any new cardinals at all, he must also include among them his nephew (who was barely legal at the time :) namely 21 and had just recently been made the archbishop of Siena); Pius protests that this nephew is too young for a cardinal, but eventually yields to their pressure anyway. This was in 1460; much later, this nephew himself became a pope (Pius III), and ruled for a grand total of 26 days.

There's an interesting rant about the contemporary mercenaries, listing familiar complaints: “The modern Italian soldier is a faithless thing: he treats war like a business and prolongs each campaign to keep his profits flowing. Bloodshed in battle is rare;” etc. (4.13.1). Once again Pius seems honestly surprised that people selfishly look to their own interests, rather than to his own :)

There's also a pleasantly salacious episode of incest, corruption and bureaucracy, involving a certain French nobleman named Jean of Armagnac, who wished to obtain a papal dispensation that would allow him to marry his sister and thus legalize their incestuous relationship: “His parents had died while he was still a youth, leaving him with a single sister with whom he went too far in his demonstrations of affection until, at last, passion overcame him and he seduced her.” (4.19.2.) His other excuse was that he was too poor to provide him with a dowry which would enable her to marry a man of their rank, and surely you aren't suggesting that he should marry her off to a mere commoner? :) (4.19.1, 4.21.2.) Anyway, in the efforts to obtain his dispensation, the poor count gets into the clutches of corrupt bishops and papal scribes who fleece him in a manner not unlike that of the modern-day Nigerian scammers. His complaints eventually reach the pope, whom he approaches in an honest belief that a dispensation has actually already been granted to him by the previous pope, and that the problem is just that corrupt officials refuse to send it to him (4.19.11). The pope, alas, is not amused, sends the said officials to prison and issues a stern rebuke to the count, ordering him to never see his sister again, to fast on Fridays for a year, and to join the up-coming war against the Turks (4.21.6).

There's an interesting description of a musket in 4.25.5. I guess that personal firearms were just beginning to establish themselves at that time, and Pius was not assuming that his readers are familiar with them. It's a good and clear description, and he even gives the composition of gunpowder.

There's a very amusing anecdote in 4.32.4–8. A middle-aged woman requested an audience with the pope, complained that a certain priest is trying to seduce her, and requested Pius to tell him to stop. “The pope was astonished by this tale. But then he recalled a story by Boccaccio, in which a woman falls in love with a young man and, unable to find any other way to tell him of her passion, asks her confessor to chastise him for annoying her”; eventually the man “realizes what she is after, and finding the way to her house, satisfies her passion. The unsuspecting confessor, in trying to prevent sin, had only encouraged it” (4.32.6). In light of all this, Pius refuses to cooperate: “ ‘My lady, you are very cunning, and far bolder than the woman in Boccaccio's tale. She made her confessor a pimp, but you want the pope to serve your passion. [. . .]’ ” (4.32.7.)

Miscellaneous

I was surprised by this passage in 3.27.5: “In the year 870 he [= the Venetian doge Orso Participazio] sent the emperor at Constantinople a present of twelve bells, said to be the first ever seen in Greece.” Can it be that there hadn't been any bells in Greece until then? I find this quite incredible. This web page for example says that bells were known e.g. in ancient China and are mentioned in the bible; how could the Greeks have ignored them?

He says in 3.27.7 that around the year 1000, “the people of Hadria met the Venetians in battle at Loreo and were utterly destroyed; and so the remnants of that famous city which gave its name to the Adriatic Sea fell into ruin.” I have only recently noticed that the Adriatic sea is named after this town, so I'm always curious to hear more about it, but the thing that surprised me here is that according to the wikipedia, Adria still exists and has approx. 20000 inhabitants nowadays. Perhaps it was rebuilt after Pius' time?

Another thing that surprised me is this passage about how the Bretons originated in Britain and were driven from there by the Angles: “The Bretons sailed to the continent and settled between the Gascons and the Normans.” (3.36.4.) What surprises me is that the Angles invaded Britain in the 5th century, and the Normans settled in Normandy only in the late 9th or 10th. So unless the Bretons endured Anglo-Saxon occupation for 400-500 years before finally deciding to leave, they cannot have settled between the Gascons and the Normans, because there weren't any Normans there yet.

At some point, Francesco Sforza “sent the pope three marvellously fat bulls which had been raised on a regime of turnips, warm water baths, daily grooming, and beds of clean straw. [. . .] The meat tasted wonderful; everyone swore they had never tasted anything better.” Sounds like a medieval version of Kobe beef (= beer & daily massages). :)

From 3.47.3, where Pius discusses why some countries won't help in his war against the Turks: “Scotland [holds out no hope], lying as it does in the farthest reaches of the ocean. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway are also too remote to send soldiers and they have no money to contribute, for they live on fish alone.”

“Italian custom is such that bastards often succeed to power” (4.8.3.) Alas, it's the same everywhere! :)) But I don't know whether the pun is present in the original Latin as well; quite possibly it only works in English. Anyway, the direct reference is to Federico of Urbino, who really was a bastard.

Pius visits the baths at Petriolo (4.16.3): “The pope stayed here for twenty days, having warm waters poured through a pipe over the top of his head; the doctors said that this would be good for his health because his brain was too moist.” :))

On a fortress that was conquered by bribery: “What they say is true: no fortress is impregnable if a donkey laden with gold can climb inside.” (2.25.9.)

Among the bits of advice that Pius gives to the citizens of Siena: “Keep an account of your exports and imports; a state that buys more than it sells is in poor shape indeed.” (4.34.2.) Heh, try telling that to the Americans :)

Conclusion

This was certainly a very pleasant read and I'm looking forward to the remaining volumes of Pius' autobiography.

BOOK: DellaNeva (ed.), "Ciceronian Controversies"

2008-05-17T18:39:00.002+02:00

Ciceronian Controversies. Edited by JoAnn DellaNeva, translated by Brian Duvick. Translated by G. W. Bowersock. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 26. Harvard University Press, 2007. 0674025202. xxxix + 295 pp.

Apparently, this was a debate that attracted great interest among 16th-century humanists: when you are trying to develop your (Latin) writing style, should you imitate just the best writer(s), or should you be more eclectic and allow yourself to be influenced by other good writers as well, trying to take what is useful from each of them in turn? In practice, the ‘best writer’ always turned out to be Cicero, who was widely agreed to be by far the best Latin author for such purposes — hence the word Ciceronian in the title.

This book contains eleven pieces on this subject, mostly from the 16th century, ranging from short letters just a couple of pages long, to formal treatises of 15 or 20 pages. Even those that were originally written as letters were clearly intended to be seen by more people than just the initial recipient, and many were published and reprinted several times during the 16th century, so that later authors were able to read them and refer to them in their own contributions to the debate. The editor also wrote a fairly long introduction, in which she points out, among other things, a number of other authors who participated in this controvery but are not included in this volume. The pieces included here are all by Italian authors, but the debate was also very lively outside Italy, and many authors from Germany, France, the Low Countries, and elsewhere joined in on the fun; one of the best-known contributions was a book titled Ciceronianus by Erasmus of Rotterdam (p. viii).

I didn't find this to be an uninteresting book, but all the time while reading it I couldn't help feeling how very remote this whole 16th-century controversy seems from the things which appear important to me as a person who likes to read books nowadays. The very purpose of writing seems to have changed. To us nowadays (or to me at any rate) rhetoric seems a rather marginal and obscure subject; most of us (myself included) don't have any familiarity with rhetoric as a formal discipline, and rare is the occasion where the use of rhetorical technicalities, flourishes and embellishments would seem to be called for, either in speech or in writing. I doubt that either the politicians or the diplomats nowadays have much use for rhetoric of the sort that Cicero and the humanists studied and practiced; the lawyers perhaps still do, though surely not as much as back then.

In fact I personally tend to think of rhetoric as a somewhat morally dubious practice — isn't its whole purpose to enable the author to make an impression on the reader with the style rather than the substance of his writing? If used as just an ornament, it would be superfluous but tolerable; but all too often, I'm afraid, it was (or still is) used as just a better class of lie, as something to dress up the lies of a lawyer or a politician so that his audience will swallow them more easily. It's the tool of the demagogue, the door-to-door salesman, and the manipulative TV host. What use will an honest novelist or writer of nonfiction nowadays have for the rhetorical practices such as e.g. those mentioned in this book — such as maintaining a notebook with useful phrases, speech openings, etc. that you have picked up from earlier authors during your studies (5.14, p. 105); or counting the number and length of syllables in your text to verify its rhythm (8.13, p. 161)? I was especially surprised by this last thing — I would expect that sort of things from a poet, but not in prose. Not that I object to it, but surely most readers, myself included, wouldn't even notice; and if the rhythm became too noticeable in a piece of prose (as opposed to poetry), it would seem funny.

Anyway, by contrast with all this, it's made evident again and again in this volume how important rhetoric was to the authors included in this volume. They were of course well aware of the whole ‘style vs. substance’ thing that I mentioned above; it's just that many of them consciously chose style rather than substance (see the interesting discussion in the editor's preface, p. xxiii). Indeed the main reason why they are so obsessed by Cicero as a model of style is the fact that he was the most celebrated Roman orator. Either they aren't particularly interested in other types of writing, e.g. novels or works of history, or they think that even for these other things it is still a good idea to learn your style from Cicero's speeches, court pleadings and the like. But I suspect that for the most part they really weren't that interested in these other types of writing.

Of course I don't blame them for that; many times in the ITRL books and elsewhere I've read how valuable a skill it was at that time to be able to compose perfect Latin speeches — diplomats, ambassadors, papal secreteries, chancellors of state, they all seemed to find this immensely important at the time. Frankly, as a materialist and a bit of a cynic, I wonder how true this really was; surely, what matters most on the diplomatic stage is to have a strong army and a solid economy to support it; if you have that, rhetorical flourishes are superfluous, and if you don't have it, then no amount of rhetorical skill will prevent your more powerful neighbours from trampling you. But anyway, there seems to be no doubt that rhetoric was really important to the authors included in this book, and that for them good writing inevitably meant writing founded on the principles of rhetorics such as you might learn by studying Cicero and similar authors.

Another thing that stems from this whole fixation with rhetoric is the idea of imitation. Neither of the two sides in this controversy was in any real doubt about the fact that you have to imitate earlier authors, the only question was how much to imitate (can you lift entire phrases from classical authors? entire sentences?) and whether to imitate just Cicero (or Virgil if you're writing verse), or other authors as well. I wonder if authors nowadays still get advice like this? My impression is that nowadays, originality is much more important than imitating the example of earlier authors. Indeed I often feel that we worship originality too much nowadays, so that authors try to be radically different from previous ones at all costs, even if it leads to works that are largely unreadable and incomprehensible (see e.g. the vast majority of 20th-century literature :]). But at the same time I think the 16th-century authors in this book went too far in the other direction, i.e. recommending imitation but hardly ever encouraging the fledgling writer to try developing his own original voice. They do mention originality, but recommend it only after you've spent several years in the apprentice work of imitating Cicero and company. Incidentally, the editor's preface says (p. x) that “the prized literary virtue of ‘originality’ ” formed in the Romantic period.

Given all this, both sides of the controversy seemed so remote from my interests that the disagreements between them appeared to me far smaller than the similarities, although I guess it didn't seem that way at all to the actual participants in the controversy :) Some of the authors in this book defend the Cicero-only side of the debate, others defend eclecticism, and a few at the end attempt to conclude the debate with some kind of synthesis. I personally felt that the arguments of each side had some merit, and I was sort of saddened to see that they went to the trouble of working up a whole controversy out of this, when they could have simply found a happy middle ground which presented itself naturally enough.

The Ciceronians would say that Cicero is by far the best Latin orator and stylist, so why imitate somebody who's merely second best when you can learn from the best source? The eclecticists say that, even if Cicero is the best writer, there are still many valuable things to be found in the other authors, which it would be a pity to spurn just because these authors as a whole are inferior to Cicero; and besides, some of these authors may suit your own innate style and temperament better than Cicero (3.26, p. 39); and besides it may be just plain too difficult for a beginner to imitate Cicero, so it may be better for him to start with slightly less good authors until he gains experience. The Ciceronians then answer that this would just ruin his not-yet-formed taste (4.23, p. 71), and that following multiple authors rather than just Cicero will either make your own style a mixed-up mess of disparate influences (4.15, p. 61), or you won't be able to tell what is good in other authors and what isn't, so you'll end up following their errors and not just their good sides. The eclecticists answer that the Ciceronians do the same, except that they end up following Cicero's errors rather than somebody else's; and they further say that an imitator who is too faithful ends up being laughable, like a monkey that is aping a man (1.1, p. 3). The Ciceronians answer that no, we aren't trying to be like a monkey aping a man, but like a son that resembles his father (2.2, p. 9); etc., etc.

Fortunately, since these are all very cultivated people busily attending to the principles of rhetoric, we are spared the full-scale shit-slinging flamefest that would no doubt have ensued if this debate were going on nowadays on the usenet or in the blogosphere :) Those authors who try to find a middle ground tend to converge towards the idea that a student should follow chiefly Cicero in his first years, but after he has formed his taste and gained some experience, he can also study other authors.

Incidentally, I'm curious to what extent this whole emphasis on imitating ancient authors (or, in some few cases, modern ones too — this is recommended by one or two authors in this volume) is a consequence of the fact that these humanists were all trying to write in a foreign and dead language, namely in Latin, rather than in their native one. It is, after all, notoriously difficult to write well in a foreign language, and cases when an author manages to turn out really great literature in a foreign language are few and far between. The fact that Latin was also a dead language surely made matters only worse. I wonder if the humanists also talked so much about imitation when developing their Italian writing style, or were they content to do the sensible thing there and rely on their native ear for the language? And is the reason why these debates on imitation seem so irrelevant to me nowadays simply because nobody seriously tries to write in dead languages anymore? The idea that you should study and imitate just Cicero's works for a few years before you can even consider looking at other authors seems so completely outlandish nowadays — can you imagine such advice being given to somebody who is trying to write in English now? Whom would you recommend in the same way that Cicero was recommended in the case of Latin? The very idea that a new writer should form his style on the basis of just one particular earlier author, no matter how famous and respected, seems utterly preposterous nowadays.

There are a couple of amusing anecdotes in a letter by Gianfrancesco Pico (a nephew of the better-known philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola), poking fun at instances of excessive reverence for old works of art and literature just because they are old. He mentions certain letters of Cicero that were widely praised, but when a modern writer tried to pass them off as his own, with minimal changes, critics founds a number of faults with them (3.20–21, p. 33).

Another funny anecdote from a treatise of Celio Calcagnini: he mentions (8.6, p. 153) “those depraved gluttons who spat on the most exquisite dishes at the feast of Dionysius of Syracuse so they could gorge themselves without rival and keep the other feasters from the same dishes out of disgust.” But really, this problem is easily remedied — if somebody has already spit into a dish that you fancy, you have to just spit into it yourself as well, and you will have spoiled his fun just as much as he has spoiled yours.

A very interesting endnote about the etymology of ‘plagiarism’ (p. 266, n. 58): “Literally, the word [plagium] was used to refer to kidnapping and only by extension (and rarely) to literary theft. The more common rendering of this idea both in antiquity and the Renaissance was furtum.” Clearly offended writers have a lamentable tendency to employ this kind of ridiculously hyperbolic terminology — first they compare plagiarism to kidnapping, and later they compared an unauthorized republication of a work to capturing a ship, i.e. piracy. I think it's rather offensive to the real victims of kidnapping and piracy, which are rather more grim and serious crimes than plagiarism and unauthorized reprinting of a book.

To conclude, I don't doubt that this is a very good book for someone interested in this controversy. I was particularly impressed by the large amount of effort that the editor clearly spent on this book; there's a long preface, a note on the text, and a long bibliography, with lots of information about the progress of the controversy in the 16th century, and about other people and writings involved in it. There are also lots of footnotes pointing out the sources of various metaphors and other rhetorical elements that appear in the writings. Anyway, all of this is undoubtedly very interesting for the right sort of reader; but for me, reading this book reminded me once again of what Arthur Quiller-Couch once wrote: “Of all dust, the ashes of dead controversies afford the driest.”

BOOK: Leonardo Bruni, "History of the Florentine People" (Vol. 3)

2008-05-10T19:42:00.001+02:00

Leonardo Bruni: History of the Florentine People. Vol. 3: Books V–VIII. Memoirs. Edited and translated by James Hankins with D. J. W. Bradley. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 27. Harvard University Press, 2007. 0674016823. xxv + 477 pp.

[Continued from Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.]

The preface contains a very interesting discussion about Bruni's use of his sources. “Bruni became the first historian in Western tradition to compose a history based extensively on sources in government archives.” (P. xviii.) His political position as the chancellor of Florence gave him wide access to the city archives. Another major source for his work were various late-medieval chronicles, especially that of Villani. “[M]any students of Western historiography [. . .] have written off Bruni's History as a mere reworking, in sub-Ciceronian Latin, of Villani's far more detailed, vivid and entertaining vernacular chronicle.” (P. xix.) So maybe that would be an interesting thing to read, but it seems that only parts of it have been translated into English.

Book IX

The first part of the book tells about the great civil discord that arose in Florence in 1378. It started among the more notable part of the citizenry, with one side abusing certain laws to prevent the other side from obtaining political office (9.1–3), but soon the lower classes got involved too: they “began to hold nocturnal meetings and to discuss how they might lay claim to offices for themselves; and in the end they agreed to seek a guild of their own in the city and a place on the priorate” (9.4). Apparently membership in a guild was necessary to participate in politics, and was beyond the reach of the poor. These demands of the poor seem entirely reasonable to me, but Bruni is of course consistent with his well-known pro-middle-class bias and shows no sympathy for them. Neither did the city authorities at the time, with the result that the “mob” rose in armed revolt and seized power for itself (9.4–5). Unsurprisingly, the rich found themselves targets of violence and plunder in the process, and Bruni just can't stop sympathizing with them and condemning those no-good plebeians: “This state of affairs can stand as an eternal example and warning for the city's leading citizens that they should not allow civil unrest and armed force to come down to the whims of the mob” (9.6). Sadly, the lower classes were pushed out of politics again a few years later, in 1381; “the two new [guilds] that had recently been added, comprised of the humbler sort of workers, were abolished” an an uprising of their members “was easily suppressed” (9.45).

In 9.23 Bruni mentions the leader of a group of German soldiers as “Guilielmus Filibachius”, which the English translation gives as “Guglielmo Filibach”. I wonder if he wasn't really a German himself, Wilhelm rather than Guglielmo?

A plague epidemic struck again 1383 (9.57). Everyone who could afford it tried to escape from the city, and the authorities started to fear that it would fall into the hand of the plebeians again, since only they would be left. “So a law was passed forbidding Florentine citizens from leaving their homes” but, unsurprisingly, it didn't really have much of an effect. But in principle, I like the idea, not because I'd be worried at the prospect of a city falling into the hands of the poor, but because by forcing the rich to share in the natural disaster that affects the rest of the population, you increase the chances that they will be willing to do more for the prevention and management of such disasters, and that would of course benefit everyone in the long run. For example, it is well-known that a few years ago, when the hurricane flooded New Orleans, the poor were stuck in the city while the middle and upper classes ran away in time. Perhaps they would have done more to make sure that the levees are maintained well if they had known that they would be prohibited from leaving the city in the event of such a disaster.

On the subject of foreign affairs, this book didn't interest me very much. There's a lot of bickering involving various Hungarian potentates, among others King Louis and a relative of his, one Charles, and also the Frenchman Louis of Anjou; both of the latter two claimed the kingdom of Naples from Queen Johanna. Towards the end of this book, a new villain arises, Duke Giangaleazzo of Milan, who goes to considerable length to pick a quarrel with Florence and a war between Florence and Milan finally breaks out at the end of the book.

An interesting note by the translator (note 3, p. 413): “It was illegal in Florence, as in other late medieval city-states, to discuss in private changes to the constitution; this was considered tantamount to sedition.”

Book X

This book is entirely about the war with Milan, which took place in the years 1390–1. As usually, the details of campaigns, sieges etc. didn't interest me very much. The Florentines try to engage all sorts of mercenaries — the Englishman John Hawkwood is the commander of their forces (10.6), but they also hire Germans (10.12) and Frenchmen (10.31). The mercenaries (unsurprisingly) don't always turn out to be entirely reliable, and may e.g. simply decide one fine day to return home since they aren't getting paid as much as they think they should be getting.

There are a couple of nice speeches in 10.21–27, with the ambassadors from Bologna, unable to bear the costs of the war any longer, asking their Florentine allies to let them conclude a separate peace with Milan. Florence didn't reply very kindly, and apparently Bologna not only stayed in the war but pursued it more vigorously thereafter (10.28).

Books XI and XII

Nothing terribly interesting here either, I'm afraid. A bewildering amount of fighting is still going on, as usually, with much of it still involving Giangaleazzo, the Duke of Milan. Towards the end of the book he starts feeling that he's about to die and, since his children are still very young and it would be several years before they can really lead a country on their own, Giangaleazzo tries to hastily secure a peace so that his heirs would find themselves in stable enough conditions and could somehow manage to weather the rest of their minority. However, he died before a peace treaty could actually be concluded, and the resulting situation was a great reversal of fortune for the Milanese (12.45–7).

One of the problems of using mercenaries in war is that during periods of peace, they aren't getting paid and might therefore turn into robbers. This has already been mentioned in book VIII. Here in 11.1 Bruni describes how the Florentines and the Milanese, when signing a peace treaty, explicitly made provisions that the mercenaries should be discharged in small groups, so that they wouldn't form robber bands. Unsurprisingly, this did not altogether prevent the occurrence of mercenaries-turned-robbers (11.7, 11.17).

There's an interesting description of the splendid games that were organized in Florence in 1392 to celebrate the birth of the French king's first son (11.5). The event featured “an equestrian battle with arms and equipment, representing a real battle in the form of a contest.” Bruni is clearly very proud that his city set up such an event and his enthusiasm is infectious: “Particolored vestments gleaming with purple and gold covered their armor. The only thing that distinguished the contest from true battle was that they fought with blunt swords” (11.5).

An amusing if undiplomatic statement, said by the condottiere Giovanni da Barbiano to a Florentine ambassador in 1395: “ ‘How arrogant you are, you Florentines! Nowadays nobody in all of Italy can fart without you sticking your noses in. [. . .]’ ” (11.28.) I suspect there was a grain of truth in that. But then this is often the case for great powers.

Bruni describes a touching religious phenomenon which occurred in the year 1399: “The entire population everywhere put on white clothing and, after performing certain pious rites, long columns of people dressed in white made their way, with incredibly fervid devotion, to neighboring cities, praying with suppliant cries for peace and mercy. [. . .] A pilgrimage would last around ten days, and the food was generally bread and water. [. . .] Access to foreign towns was free [. . ..] There was a tacit truce between enemies. This movement lasted nearly two months, during which city populations would set out for foreign cities and other populations would come into theirs. There were marvelous expressions of hospitality everywhere and kind welcome.” (12.1.) He also mentions this movement in his Memoirs, ¶23. Of course, it is not hard to guess how the whole thing ended: “So long as religion occupied peoples' minds, no one gave a thought to the perils of war, but one the fervor of the Bianchi movement had passed, those minds returned one more to their earlier concerns.” (12.3.) And so war continued.

Memoirs

This is not a part of The History of the Florentine People, but a separate work. As the title suggests, it covers the period that Bruni experienced personally, and it is also focused a bit more towards things in which he was directly involved, e.g. during his career as the pope's secretary, and later as a politician in Florence, where he held various important positions in bodies such as the priorate and the ‘Ten of War’. The memoir begins in the late 14th century (so there is a bit of overlap with the History) and ends in the year 1440 or so.

Although Bruni says several times (¶107, 114) that he isn't going to go into too much detail because this is a memoir and not a history, he still provides quite a bit of detail about warfare and the like — the same things that had already failed to interest me while reading his History. But the proportion of other, more interesting things is greater here than it was in the History. In the History, you of course can't help noticing what a turbulent era it was, with wars going on practically all the time; but from the way they were presented there, it was easy to feel somehow detached from them and forget that in the end each war makes a mess out of the lives of a huge number of individual people. Here in the Memoirs we see a few glimpses of how Bruni was affected by the various commotions that he had lived through. For example, during one of the wars in the late 14th century, Bruni and his father were captured and imprisoned by the Florentine exiles: “Because I was a child I was not kept with the other prisoners but was kept secure more appropriately in one of the bedrooms. In that bedroom there was a picture of Francesco Petrarch, the daily spectacle of which kindled in me a passionate enthusiasm for his literary pursuits.” (¶16.) He also found himself in personal danger during certain commotions in Rome, at the time when he was employed by the pope (¶34).

He mentions an interesting change in Italian warfare that occurred during his lifetime: “the Italians had completely recovered the use of arms” (¶22), i.e. enough good Italian mercenaries were available that they didn't have to hire foreigners as they had been used to do in the past. But to me it seems more problematic that you are hiring mercenaries, not that the mercenaries in question are foreigners. That they are foreigners is a problem only if they aren't really ordinary mercenaries but are actually the soldiers of some strong foreign ruler that may use this as an excuse to start interfering in your affairs (and this certainly was a problem in renaissance Italy).

As a welcome change from war, politics and diplomacy, the memoir also contains a few paragraphs about Bruni's studies, especially his enthusiasm to learn Greek (from Manuel Chrysoloras, a refugee from Byzantium and one of the first Greeks who started teaching Greek in Italy; ¶24–6). He also mentions a plague epidemic which struck Florence in the year 1400 (¶27).

Another interesting thing that Bruni mentions were the efforts to reconciliate Western and Eastern christianity — a big delegation came from Greece, including even the Byzantine emperor, and after several months of negotiations with the pope the two sides finally came to terms and agreed on a union of the two churches (¶105). However, I guess that not much came of these efforts in the long term, as the catholics and the orthodox are still quite firmly separate rather than united.

Conclusion

Although I found a reasonable number of interesting passages and factoids in these three volumes (as my posts above show), yet I cannot deny that I found the work as a whole quite a boring read. This is the sort of low-level history that I'm just not interested in — there's too much detail, too many things that don't really have any long-term importance, and it's written in such a way that it's too difficult to follow the big picture as you read (assuming there even is a big picture in the mess that is Italian renaissance history).

Now, before you dash off that comment telling me that I'm stupid for not recognizing the immense and obvious importance of Bruni's History — please, spare yourself the trouble of doing that, as I already know all this quite well. I know that I'm not really the target audience for this book, I know that I'm missing the point, I know that the fact that I found the book boring is as unsurprising as it is irrelevant, and I don't for a moment entertain any illusions that my impressions of this book (and that is all that these blog posts really are) should have any weight whatsoever. And I certainly don't hold the fact that I was bored by this book against Bruni, or anyone else involved in producing it. In fact, as far as I understand the translator's prefaces, Bruni was in fact at the forefront of the historiography of his time, and his ability to use and synthesize a large and diverse amount of written sources is a step forward in comparison with the work of earlier historians, chroniclers and the like. There's nothing wrong with Bruni's History, I'm just not the right reader for it.

P.S. The ITRL is like a goddamned hydra. Just as I finally manage to read one three-volume history of an Italian town, they promptly being publishing another one: Pietro Bembo's History of Venice (Vol. 1, Vol. 2 — with Vol. 3 to follow before long, I guess). Who knows, maybe I'll enjoy it better than I did Bruni? Hope dies last :)

OMG medicinski fenomen!

2008-05-04T09:48:00.002+02:00

Saj sem že večkrat slišal, da so bili Habsburžani zaradi večstoletne tradicije porok med bližnjimi sorodniki malo čudni, ampak tole je pa res že od sile: ženska je rodila 50 let po svoji smrti!

Ah, diskretni šarm nekrofilije...

[Vir: Nedelo, 4. maja 2008, priloga Odprta kuhinja, str. 9.]

P.S. Mimogrede, podoben podatek, torej da je bil Franc Jožef sin Marije Terezije, sem slišal pred nekaj tedni tudi na radiu — mislim, da na Valu 202. Najbrž je težava v tem, da poznajo naši polpismeni novinarji od cele habsburške dinastije le dva vladarja, namreč Franca Jožefa in Marijo Terezijo. Ker si očitno zlasti za slednjo ne predstavljajo pretirano natančno, kdaj je živela (18. stoletje je že tako daleč nazaj!), je pač naraven sklep ta, da mora biti ona njegova mama. Zmedo v glavi jim še poveča dejstvo, da je Marija Terezija dejansko imela sina s podobnim imenom, namreč Jožefa II.

P.P.S. Če sem prav štel po Wikipediji, je bil Franc Jožef v resnici njen prapravnuk.

BOOK: Leonardo Bruni, "History of the Florentine People" (Vol. 2)

2008-05-03T19:29:00.003+02:00

Leonardo Bruni: History of the Florentine People. Vol. 2: Books V–VIII. Edited and translated by James Hankins. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 16. Harvard University Press, 2001. 0674010663. xii + 584 pp.

This is the second of three volumes of Bruni's History — see my post about the first volume. This second volume covers the period 1311–1378. Just like in the first volume, much of the story focuses on details of warfare, which I didn't find very interesting; but the parts that deal with politics, and the occasional bits of economics and ‘odd news’, were interesting enough.

Book V

This book mostly deals with warfare, which I unfortunately didn't find very interesting — there's plenty of detail about battles, troop movements, etc., but I never cared much for military history. Much of this fighting was against the noted condottiere Castruccio Castracani, who managed to get the Florentines into a very tight spot on a few occasions (see e.g. 5.107, where he besieges Florence and ravages the surrounding countryside, causing famine and an outbreak of disease).

An interesting political move that appears twice in this book is the idea of handing over the power over the city, for a limited period of time, to an external ruler, hoping that he will defend it using the resources of his other domains. Thus the Florentines invited King Robert of Naples for five years in 1312 (5.18–19), to protect them from the emperor Henry VII. They drew up a detailed agreement defining what the king would be required, allowed and not allowed to do (5.19). Later, in 1326, they invited his son Charles for a period of ten years (5.115, 5.120, 5.122). These things seemed to work well enough for them, but I'm really surprised in a way that they dared to do such a thing — when you invite a foreign ruler to govern your state for a few years, how can you make sure that he will leave at the end of the agreed-upon period?

Another very interesting political idea is that of sortition, which Bruni says was introduced in Florence in 1323 (5.80). This is an alternative to elections. Candidates were nominated by certain political bodies, and from among these candidates the winners were chosen by lot. I have always been a keen enthusiast for assigning political offices at random rather than by elections — that seems to be the surest way to prevent a corrupt class of politicians from forming itself. If I understand correctly, in ancient Athens they used to assign almost all offices by lot, except maybe the generalships. And the Venetian republic used several turns of sortition during its fiendishily complicated process of electing the Doge (see J. J. Norwich's History of Venice, ch. 12, p. 166).

Incidentally, there's an interesting translator's note about sortition in volume 3 (note 6 to book 9, p. 413): “The names of eligible candidates for office were written on slips and placed in leather bags; when the offices became available slips were extracted, in principle randomly, from the bags. [. . .] The system was famously corrupt”.

A funny passage from 5.103, with Castruccio's army on the outskirts of Florence: “Castruccio set up his battle line before the gate, but when no one came out to meet him he turned to devastation, burning all the villas and buildings on that side of the city. He set up a racecourse between what was normally the city jail and Peretola. First the cavalry, then the infantry, then the prostitutes ran it. Silken favors were given to the victors in each of the contests.”

In 5.48, Bruni describes the specifications regarding knights' armour (in 1317): “a cervèllaire, a crested helmet, a cuirass, greaves, and armor on the arms and legs, all of iron. This provision was made because it appeared that light armoring had been a source of harm to many men in the late unhappy battle.”

Book VI

Most of this book is again warfare between Florence and the neighbouring cities, which I didn't find terribly interesting. On the subject of internal affairs, there was an interesting episode in 1342–3, when a certain French nobleman named Walter of Brienne (also a claimant to the crusader title of Duke of Athens) managed to briefly seize control of Florence. Initially they themselves invited him as a leader, to help them overcome a period of civil discord (6.110). Gaining a reputation as a political and military strongman, he started conspiring to obtain “untrammelled lordship over the city” (6.112). This gives Bruni another excuse to air his pro-middle-class enthusiasm: Walter “thought that the nobility would be completely on his side, subject as they were to harsh laws and disocntented with their legal position; any oppressed element in a city will always be ripe for revolution. He thought it would be no trouble to bring over to his side the poor, the workers, and that whole rabble; for he knew they had no interest in honor or liberty./ There remained the middle classes. His whole difficulty lay with them.” (6.112–3). He proceeded to punish harshly the real or imagined crimes of various notable middle-class politicians (6.113), which won him even more support among the rabble (6.114); finally he called a general assembly of the inhabitants and got the crowd to proclaim him the ruler of Florence (6.115–6). However, his rule was brief, he soon became unpopular and was eventually besieged in the citadel of Florence by the rebellious populace (6.125), who finally forced him to abdicate (6.128).

An amusing metaphor from 6.7: “The poets say that opportunity has hair in the front and is bald from behind: when it approaches you, you can seize it, but if you let it pass, it offers you no purchase afterwards.” Here Bruni is quoting the speech of a certain Pino della Tosa. The translator's note says that the quote is from “ps. Cato, Distichs (apud Phaedrus, fab. 5, 8)”.

An example of chemical warfare from 6.83: “There grew in that place a herb with an exceedingly bitter juice. [. . .] the droops collected the herb, carried it to the river bank, crushed it and threw it in the water. The juice was carried downstream to the enemy camp, where it infected the water with a foul and horrible taste so that it could be used by neither man nor horse.” I wonder what kind of herb it was. I'm somewhat surprised that this approach worked — I would naively expect that huge quantities of a herb would be necessary, and anyway the foul water would soon flow past the enemy's camp and they would then have fresh water again.

This sentence is perhaps a nice summary of Bruni's interest in history: “In the year following the peace, I find nothing of record that the city did.” (6.90) Thus, as there was no fighting in 1339, he only devotes one paragraph to it, whereas years in which wars were going on get pages and pages of detailed descriptions of campaigns, battles, and sieges.

He seems to have a belief in portents and auguries. In 1339 “there were numerous foul auguries portending future disasters. The tower of the Palazzo Vecchio was struck by lightning, as also were the walls of the city and the gate on the road to Bologna” (6.90). And the next year there was a comet (6.91), followed, appropriately enough, by an epidemic of pestilence soon afterwards :) Maybe his interest in portents is due to the fact that he found such things in ancient historians, and felt that he had to follow their example? I remember that e.g. Suetonius rarely fails to mentions comets and the like before the birth and death of his emperors.

He mentions a census taken in 1339; “the number of citizens living inside the city was 90,000” (6.90). I'm not sure if he means all inhabitants, or just those with some particular political status of citizens. But the purpose of the census was to plan for the approaching famine (due to a poor harvest), so I imagine that they counted all people. Anyway, next year the pestilence killed 16,000 of them (6.91). And then in 1348 a plague epidemic killed 70,000 more (7.37). Either some of these numbers are wrong or the city was almost empty after the plague.

He mentions a classic case of a bank run in 6.105. This was in 1341, and due to political reasons numerous French customers of Florentine bankers “wanted their money back at the same time. They were thus forced to deafault, with an incredible monetary loss to the city.” He mentions another bank run in 1345 (7.25).

Book VII

The initial part of this book is again more interesting and describes various constitutional reforms that the Florentines experimented with after they got rid of Walter the tyrant. Formerly the nobility had been quite barred from many political positions, on the assumption that they are powerful enough anyway (due to their wealth, family alliances, and client/patron connections) and certainly don't need any extra influence that political positions would undoubtedly confer upon them. Well, now they decided to remove these prohibitions, partly because of a sense of fairness and partly because the nobility had also helped in the process of removing Walter from power (7.3). However, soon afterwards they saw that the power of the nobility is growing too big and a minor civil war later the nobles were removed from politics once again (7.14). However, not all the aristocrats were actually rich and powerful, and some of the poorer ones voluntarily gave up their titles and joined the plebs so that they could continue to participate in politics (7.14).

I must say I was rather intrigued by these ideas about the explicit removal of the aristocrats from politics. I can't help wondering how something equivalent could be made to work nowadays to reduce the power of the plutocracy. Even if we disregard the question of who exactly should belong to the proscribed class (which isn't as clearly defined as the medieval nobility; but we could always introduce a threshold on income and/or wealth), there remains the question of how to effectively prevent the rich from exercising political power. It wouldn't be enough (though it would certainly help) to just forbid them from voting and from running for political office. After all, there aren't many plutocrats in your typical parliament nowadays either — most politicians aren't multimillionares, don't own or run big companies, etc.; actually most of them are the sort of upper-middle-class people that Bruni always champions in his History as the class who should have the main (or even exclusive) role in politics. The political power of the plutocrats nowadays is much more indirect; they are able to manipulate the opinion, both of the public and of the politicians, through propaganda, think tanks, a horde of lackey intellectuals, etc., and they can furthermore influence the politicians through donations, campaign contributions, and probably through other indirect means all the way up to and including plain corruption. Anyway, the problem is that I can't think of any simple and effective rule that would really prevent all these things, short of directly forbidding all agitation for the political ideas that benefit the plutocratic class. And in fact I'm surprised that the simple prohibition of the aristocrats from holding political offices was sufficient in the 14th century. OK, one imagines that in an era before mass media, the aristocrats weren't in as good a position to influence the opinions of the masses as the present-day plutocrats are, who own newspapers and TV stations that can easily manipulate with millions of people. But even in the 14th century, surely it must have been possible to influence the opinions of the politicians, either through bribery or some milder form of corruption.

In this book, Bruni also describes a few other notable mid-14th-century events that are neither politics nor warfare, e.g. a terrible plague epidemic in 1348 (6.37): “more than 70,000 people inside the city died of the disease [. . .] The countryside was entirely emptied out and practically deserted.”

Later this book turns to warfare again and the rest of it I didn't find terribly interesting. The Florentines make war on some of the adjacent cities again, and there's also some fighting in other parts of Italy; even the King of Hungary joins in on the fun. Another notable enemy of the Florentines in this book is one Pier Saccone Tarlati, lord of Arezzo; given how prominent he is here in Bruni's history, I was suprised to see that the Wikipedia hardly mentions him, and he doesn't have an article of his own yet, not even in the Italian Wikipedia. See 7.81–90 for an interesting description of the siege of Scarperia, a small town allied to Florence.

One of those rare passages where Bruni mentions the economy rather than just wars and politics appears here in 7.23. The state, finding itself unable to repay the debts it owed to citizens who had lent it money, yet not wanting to default on these loans, found “a middle course [. . .] The names of those to whom payment was owed were written down [. . .] and an annual return of five per cent from the public fisc was established.” Later this approach was used more and more widely: “Whenever the state needed funds, the citizens paid a contribution and received annual pensions in repayment thereof.” The funds collected in this way were called ‘Monte’, i.e. mountains. “The citizens can buy and exchange Monte credits among themselves [. . .] their price increases or decreases in relation to time, investor confidence and yield.” (6.23) All of this sounds very similar to modern-day bonds. One thing I'm not sure about is what exactly the 5% per year return meant — was it just the interest, with the principal itself still being repaid at some later date? Or would the principal never be repaid, but you'd be receiving your 5% p.a. indefinitely? Or did the 5% p.a. also cover a part of the principal, so that eventually all the debt would be repaid? Or, worst of all (for the lender/bondholder), would you simply receive 5% of the principal for e.g. 20 years, so that you would be effectively giving an interest-free loan to the state? (Well, even that's still better than if they simply defaulted on it... :))

Another rare bit non-war-or-politics material: “a wolf entered the Porta Collina at midday and ran freely through the city. [. . .] it was pursued with hunting cries until at last it went out another gate and was killed on the Via Pisana” (7.26). This was in 1345; Bruni seems to regard it as one of the auguries that foretold the next year's famine.

Book VIII

More warfare here, much of it with Pisa. There are a few interesting mentions of mercenaries, mostly Bretons and Englishmen but also French and Germans.

Bruni says in 8.53 that Florentine merchants did a lot of business in England, and as a result a number of English mercenaries offered their services to Florence first, and only joined its enemies in Pisa when it turned out that the Florentines weren't interested in hiring them.

The celebrated Englishman John Hawkwood is mentioned several times in this book.

Bruni mentions Breton mercenaries in 8.98 as “that most ferocious of peoples”. I remember that Biondo Flavio also mentioned them in his Italy Illuminated. Apparently they really had quite a reputation.

The translator doesn't hesitate to use the word booty in its traditional meaning. Thus the English are “seizing booty everywhere” in 8.59 :) There is also plenty of booty in Vol. 3 (11.62, 11.66, 12.33, and Memoirs ¶9); but perhaps my favourite instance is from 12.40: “The enemy captured the camp along with incalculable booty.” :)

An interesting episode from 1353 highlights the risks of employing mercenaries (8.3). “As there happened to be at this time a respite from the wars”, the mercenaries were out of their jobs and decided to turn to pillage and robbery instead. They were practically a whole army, i.e. a force to be reckoned with.

Incidentally, the translator says (note 80, p. 564) that mercenaries “usually fought on a yearly contract that paid them from the beginning of the campaigning season in May until the following winter, when they would return to farming.” But what sort of farming can you do during the winter? No wonder they took up brigandage instead :)

There's a nice oration in 8.99–106, in which the Florentine ambassadors are asking the pope to stop hostilities against them. They didn't manage to persuade him, though.

[To be continued with Vol. 3.]

Burn, baby, burn!

2008-04-28T22:16:00.000+02:00

From an eBay auction currently in progress:

COMPLETE POETICAL WORKS OF ROBERT W SERVICE (SINGED)

[. . .]

HELLO THIS BOOK IS IN VERY GOOD CONDITION FOR ITS AGE I FOUND IT AT A ESTATE SALE ITS DATED 1921 AND ITS SINGED AND HAS THE ORIGANOIL BOOK COVER ON IT THANKS FOR LOOKING SHIPPING IN THE US IS 10.00 DOLLARS OUT OF THE US IS 14.00 DOLLARS AND UP DEPENDS WERE YOUR AT THANKS

Mmm, nicely basted with oregano oil, then singed :)

P.S. How on earth did a person as illiterate as this get into the business of selling books on eBay?

BOOK: G. R. Elford, "Devil's Guard" (cont.)

2008-04-26T19:57:00.003+02:00

George Robert Elford: Devil's Guard. London: New English Library, 1973. (First ed.: New York, Delacorte Press, 1971.) SBN 450013367. 349 pp.

[Continued from last week.]

More of Wagemueller's political ideas

He also has a very annoying tendency to refer to the Viet Minh as ‘terrorists’ — he uses this term pretty much interchangeably with ‘guerrillas’. Apparently then this regrettable inflation of the use of the word ‘terrorist’ is not just a characteristic of the present Bush regime but goes back much farther in time. Anyway, I think it's silly to regard the Viet Minh as terrorists — they were a perfectly decent guerrilla force, leading a perfectly ordinary guerrilla war. Terrorism consists of acts of violence against innocent people, carried out with the purpose of intimidating the population of a certain area (or a part of that population). If, on the other hand, you are simply killing foreign soldiers and colonial administrators that are occupying your country, this isn't terrorism but a perfectly ordinary struggle for national liberation. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with terrorism, of course — it depends on its goals; in most instances it's entirely reasonable — but I'm annoyed at this silly blurring of the distinction between the words ‘terrorists’ and ‘guerrillas’.

He doesn't hide his admiration for the way that totalitarian systems can impose an illusion of order. After praising WW2-era Japanese maps of the Indochinese peninsula, he rants on: “There was good order in Japan — as there used to be in Germany. The French housekeeping was nothing but a giant whorehouse from maps to machine guns. Nothing ever functioned properly. Not even the water closets.” (P. 107.)

The communist press

Wagemueller often whines about the fact that the communists have much better PR than their enemies. See e.g. pp. 91, 250. His French commanding officer, colonel Houssong, approves of Wagemueller's methods but says (p. 179–80): “Your methods might pass occasionally and locally, but they would never survive for a week on any large scale. I know that your Heinrich Himmler would have settled the Viet Minh problem a long time ago with Zyclon-B (poison gas used by the Nazis in the extermination camps) and the crematorium but France is supposed to be a democracy. The terrorists are firmly entrenched in the world's opinion as resolute heroes who are fighting a modern military power with bows and spears, striving only for independence and human rights. No one has ever protested against any Viet Minh outrage, although I could show them a list of thirty thousand civilians slaughtered by the Communists in cold blood. All the same when we execute a terrorist with the blood of a hundred people on his hands, the execution is headlined even in America, let alone Europe and its Communist press, as another French war crime. Whenever we touch a filthy killer, there are demonstrations and protests. They would even call us Nazis, Wagemueller.”

It's a pity that Wagemueller and Houssong don't draw the obvious conclusions from these observations. The communists get better PR because they are in fact fighting for a good cause. It's the French that are the morally bankrupt side in this war. Despite what Wagemueller says on p. 78, it was not the Viet Minh who started this — no Vietnamese communist had ever attempted to colonize France. No, it was the French who started it, more than a hundred years earlier, when they began interfering in Indochinese matters.

And the other conclusion that they should have drawn is that if you want to seize another nation's land you should take care to exterminate (or assimilate, but that's more difficult) its previous inhabitants. Since this is obviously a horrible thing to do, it's far better to not seize other nations' lands in the first place. But whatever you do, don't just proclaim that they're a colony of yours, set up a handful of bureaucrats and officers and then whine when the local population starts shooting at them. It's tiresome, annoying and the imperialist tends to lose in the long term anyway.

Also on the subject of communist PR, Wagemueller complains that the communists had a habit of rearranging the corpses of their dead so as to make it seem that the French had murdered innocent civillians, which of course made for great propaganda photos (pp. 249, 265). And, eventually, it was communist PR that led to the international pressure that caused the French to disband Wagemueller's unit (pp. 347–8; “ ‘SS marauders in the French Foreign Legion massacre innocent civilians,’ the Communist press screamed. [. . .] And what the regiments of Ho Chi Minh could not achieve in five years the international Communist fifth column accomplished in five weeks. We were ordered to return to Hanoi.”)

Miscellaneous

There are also a couple of rants about the conditions in postwar Germany, pp. 16, 331–2.

Chapter 12 is interesting — Wagemueller and his men organize a ‘panel discussion’ with a captured communist agitator (whom they subsequently release), to argue for and against the merits of communism in front of a group of simple Vietnamese villagers. But I must admit that I wasn't particularly impressed with either side in this debate. The communist agitator mostly contents himself with trotting out lots of tired over-the-top communist propaganda and repeatedly pointing out that his opponents are colonialist imperialist murderers. Wagemueller's side mostly content themselves with pointing out that their opponents are communist murderers and that communism has already degenerated into tyranny in the Soviet Union and in China.

But, surely, it's all so simple — there's no very good reason why communism should necessarly descend into tyranny. In my impression it has historically usually done that because of the presence of external and/or internal enemies. If it wasn't for that, no tyranny would really be necessary. You just have to point out to the peasant what proportion of his income is seized by the rich landowner, and point out to the worker what proportion of his income is seized by the capitalist and the factory bosses; once they realize this, the vast majority of the people will support land reform and a nationalization of the economy, and that's pretty much it. No tyranny required. At the very worst you might have to kill the rich classes, but that's just a handful of people (especially in a country with huge inequalities in wealth, such as Vietnam no doubt was at the time), and nobody is going to miss them. Once that is over with, there's no very good reason why everyone wouldn't be able to get along just fine, and everything would continue pretty much the same as before the revolution, except that it isn't necessary to feed a class of parasitic capitalist exploiters any longer, so that a lot more stuff is left for everyone else.

Chapter 14 is also very interesting — Wagemueller is interviewed by a group of French journalists and takes the opportunity to advocate the use of his Nazi methods (“We met guerrillas in Russia. When they gave us too much trouble within a specific area, we carted off the entire male population to Germany. Two days later there was no terrorist movement in the district.” (p. 277)) and indulge in yet more anti-communist rantings and general geopolitical bloviation (pp. 278–81).

Here's an example of a particularly rich anti-communist rant from p. 78: “Genocide is a Communist specialty. Even Hitler's extermination camps were modeled after Stalin's death camps in Siberia.”

He brags on p. 109, commenting on a successful move against the Viet Minh: “encirclement had always been a German specialty.” Yup, it worked marvellously at Stalingrad... :)))

Bibliographic history

Incidentally, this book is somewhat hard to get at an affordable price. I found this somewhat surprising; after the first hardcover edition (NY: Delacorte, 1971), there were a number of trade paperback printings (Dell in the US, and New English Library in the UK), the last of which were published as late as 1988. So one would expect that there should be plenty of copies of this book; and yet apparently there is such a shortage of copies and such a high demand that secondhand copies on eBay are actually attracting bids in the $50–$100 range, and you can see copies for sale for as much as £100 on ABEbooks.com, Amazon and similar sites; I suppose someone eventually buys those as well. I'm surprised that it doesn't get reprinted in larger quantities if there's so much interest in it. There was a new printing in 2002 by Hailer Publishing, but as far as I can tell, this is also out of print and secondhand copies on ABE aren't really much cheaper than those of the earlier paperback copies from the 1970s and 80s. I managed to buy my copy on eBay for just $14 — it was buried in a lot of 17 military paperbacks and I guess that the seller didn't know that it's potentially worth much more, nor did any of the people interested in this book notice it mentioned in the auction description.

Conclusion

What to say at the end? This wasn't a particularly edifying read. I suppose that military fiction is a well-established genre, but this is the first book of that sort that I've read, so I can't say how it compares to other books in that genre. I've found it interesting as a novelty, but I don't think I'll be wanting to read more in this genre. It was sort of interesting to read about various military techniques, tactics, and tricks; I don't care much about warfare, and until now I've always read about it from a large-scale perspective, rather than on the level of a smaller unit such as the one described in this book. But sooner or later it would probably get boring to read more about people wading through the jungle and committing atrocities upon each other.

Another aspect in which this book is interesting is as a plausible speculation about how a diehard anti-communist zealot and ex-Nazi such as Wagemueller might have seen the first Vietnam war. But, again, Wagemueller is such an unlikeable character that one doesn't particularly care to read more about him. Elford later wrote two sequels to this book (Recall to Inferno, 1988, and Unconditional Warfare, 1991), but I doubt I'll read any of them.

All in all, buying and reading this book was a positive experience for me, but if I had paid $50 or $100 for it, rather than $14, I would consider it a disappointment.

ToRead:

See also this blog post about the book — a longish appreciation of the book by someone who, alas, thoroughly shares Wagemueller's ideology and approves of his methods. I do find it amusing, though, to see a Portuguese so keen on Nazism and white supremacy — I don't doubt that your typical WW2-era German Nazi would regard the Portuguese as seriously racially inferior to himself :))
Elfort wrote two sequels to The Devil's Guard, (Recall to Inferno, 1988, and Unconditional Warfare, 1991), but I doubt I'll read any of them.
F. Spencer Chapman: The Jungle is Neutral (London: Chatto & Windus, 1949). Memoirs of a British officer that had fought with Malay guerrillas against the Japanese during the WW2. Mentioned here on pp. 83–4.
Jean Lartéguy: Yellow Fever. A 1965 novel that also takes place in Vietnam but at a later point in the war (1954). See this page. But where I first heard of this book was in George Adams' delightful Great Hong Kong Sex novel (1993).

Komu bo zavdala?

2008-04-21T20:16:00.001+02:00

Kakšni čudaki se odločijo poimenovati dišeče robčke po slovanski boginji smrti? In ali dišijo po mandljih? :)

Idealno darilo za nadležne hipohondre, ki vas s svojim smrkanjem in kašljanjem spravljajo ob živce :)

BOOK: G. R. Elford, "Devil's Guard"

2008-04-19T19:44:00.001+02:00

George Robert Elford: Devil's Guard. London: New English Library, 1973. (First ed.: New York, Delacorte Press, 1971.) SBN 450013367. 349 pp.

I first heard of this book a few weeks ago, mentioned among the endnotes in Perry Biddiscombe's Werwolf. The author, G. R. Elford, says in a preface that the book is based on a manuscript given to him by one Hans Wagemueller, who had been an officer in a Waffen-SS anti-partisan unit in Russia during the WW2 and later joined the French Foreign Legion, for whom he fought in Vietnam. Elford supposedly met him in some unnamed small Asian country, which might be Nepal from the description given in Elford's introduction (pp. 12–13). The rest of the book is Wagemueller's first-person account of his five years of very brutal warfare in the jungles of Vietnam. Supposedly, Elford didn't change anything substantial except for the names of the people involved (including Wagemueller). However, see the Wikipedia page about this book, as well as and this article; there seem to be good reasons to consider this book to be a work of fiction rather than as possessing much of a factual basis.

The plot

There isn't very much of a plot here, really — the book is rather picaresque from that point of view. In the first chapter he describes how, at the end of the WW2, his unit was stranded in Czechoslovakia and decided to fight their way to the U.S.-occupied zone in Germany rather than surrendering to the Czechs and Russians. Once they get into Germany, the unit disperses and Wagemueller eventually reaches his native town near the Swiss border. Apparently there exists a well-established organization for smuggling fugitive Nazis into Switzerland, although he is deliberately vague on the details. Soon afterwards he ends up joining the French Foreign Legion and, after a bried period of training in North Africa, is sent to Vietnam.

There the commanding officers, impressed by the performance of Wagemueller and other Nazi veterans, eventually agree to form a separate battallion consisting only of these Germans. The rest of the book then describes various episodes from their fighting, and the individual chapters could be rearranged almost arbitrarily without really making any difference. In the end, the notorious reputation of his unit leads to protests in the international press and the French decide to disband it some time in 1952.

The leading character

The main thing that makes this book interesting, I guess, is Wagemueller's attitude and character. He retains many of the Nazi opinions that presumably influenced him in the years before and during the WW2: above all, there's his extreme, blunt, brutal hatred of communism; additionally, there's his appreciation of brutality and aggression in warware, and the contempt for the sort of things that the Nazis used to call ‘false humanitarianism’. He also agreed “that Germany needed Lebensraum” (p. 15). He doesn't, however, seem to be terribly keen on the nationalist and racist ideas that had formed such a major part of the Nazi ideology. For example, in the few passages where he refers to his WW2 activities as a ‘partisan hunter’ in Russia, he justifies them on the basis of the fact that these were guerrilla insurgents and communists, but not on the fact that they were Russians. And he's getting along just fine with the French, whose Foreign Legion he entered just a few years after the end of the WW2.

Well, of course it's also possible to see these things as a kind of adaptation and self-justification in the face of the new circumstances after the war (cf. pp. 42–5). And he does have a tendency to dehumanize the Viet Minh (i.e. the Vietnamese communist guerrillas): “ ‘the mechanized hordes of a space-age Genghis Khan.’ If there was a spark of truth in the Hitlerian credo about the existence of superior and inferior races, we met the real subhumans in Indochina.” (P. 11.) “They aren't human”, p. 293. “They are not human. . . You are killing sharks, rats, bacteria. . . [. . .] I regarded the Viet Minh as the real prototypes of the Hitlerian subhumans.” (P. 299.) “Deprived as they are my troops would sooner rape a female gibbon than some of those tribal wenches with their betel-stained gums and withered skin infected with tropical ulcers and festering insect bites.” (P. 261.) “ ‘Those guerrilla bitches [. . .] they aren't human’ ” (p. 295). He often points out their short stature and slight build (p. 257), presumably because this makes them seem more subhuman in comparison to his stalwart German comrades, and it makes it easier to regard them as vermin (“those ratlike little Red gnomes in Indochina”, p. 299).

But he always hastens to rationalize his contempt by referring to the atrocities committed by the Viet Minh (“The Viet Minh kills only to spread terror and to intimidate its victims”, p. 299), both against the French and against the Vietnamese civillians when the latter weren't sufficiently cooperative with the communists (pp. 134–5).

And, admittedly, he doesn't show contempt towards those Vietnamese civillians who really stayed out of the war, nor against the really primitive tribal peoples that apparently still lived in the remoter parts of the Vietnamese jungles at the time (“With some effort and by using at least as many signs as words, Noy succeeded in making contact with a female human being from the Stone Age”, p. 343); when a Vietnamese collaborator joins his unit and makes himself useful as a guide and interpreter, Wagemueller speaks of him in the highest terms (pp. 187–8); he goes out of his way to help a young biracial (Anglo-Chinese) refugee (pp. 112–26); he is supportive of the relationships between some of his comrades and three Vietnamese nurses from their battallion, and even goes so far as to perform an unofficial wedding ceremony for one of these couples (much as a captain on a ship would) when it turns out that no priest can be found in their corner of the jungle (pp. 221–5); and he absolutely refuses to tolerate the idea of men under his control raping native women (pp. 221, 294–6). He has a pretty good opinion of himself as a German officer and a man of honour, and makes a point of keeping his word in circumstances such as e.g. when they promise to release a captured Viet Minh guerrilla fighter (whom they otherwise tended to kill) if he provides them with information (pp. 133, 286).

At the same time, these few good characteristics of his are more than outweighed by his all-round brutality and inhumanity in warfare. His only concern seems to be whether a method works. He observes that while the Viet Minh ignore the principles of civilized warfare, the French regular army doesn't and, as a result, it isn't doing well in the war at all (p. 183). His own unit, however (consisting mostly of ex-Nazi soldiers like himself), is quite successful in its military objectives because it doesn't hesitate to commit against the Viet Minh the same sort of atrocities which the latter performs against the French or against recalcitrant Vietnamese civillians. Wagemueller often rationalizes his unit's atrocities by saying that it was just ‘a tooth for a tooth’, as the Viet Minh had started it (pp. 78, 84, 99, 126–7).

There are a couple of quite graphic scenes in which Wagemueller and his men torture captured Vietnamese guerrillas to obtain information (pp. 127–33, 286–7). On p. 133 Wagemueller's men freely admit they couldn't take the sort of treatment that they were dealing out to the captured guerrillas: “ ‘[. . .] How long do you think you would have stood up to what he was getting?’ ‘Me? I would have pissed you between the eyes in the first five minutes [. . .]’ ‘You would have given us away all right.’ ‘Given you away? [. . .] I not only would have told them everything but would have helped them to put the rope round your neck, Karl.’ ” (P. 133.)

They have a standard practice of killing captured guerrillas rather than taking them as prisoners (pp. 86, 150, 273; sometimes they go out of their way to make the executions extra brutal and painful, pp. 110–111, 262). Sometimes they kill civillians too, if they seem to be guerrilla supporters or if they are found to possess weapons (pp. 259, 263). He cites with approval an instance of a former Gestapo torturer who ends up working for the French secret police in Indochina, not despite but because of his Gestapo experience: “ ‘[. . .] Boys,’ he chuckled, ‘they have everything that belongs to the trade at Hué. Only the Fuehrer's picture is missing from the walls.’ ” (P. 79.)

Wagemueller's anti-communism

I guess what annoyed me most about Wagemueller was his annoying tendency to rant against communism all the time, and his unwillingness to consider the deeper underlying causes of the war. He is firmly convinced that communism doesn't work and that it invariably degenerates into tyranny of the sort that could have been observed in the Soviet Union under Stalin or in China under Mao. He is also convinced that communists are aggressive and are trying to conquer the whole world, and that his fighting in Vietnam is just a continuation of the same big war against communism that he had already fought in Russia during the WW2 (“the same enemy wearing a different uniform”, p. 12).

But he apparently never takes the trouble to ask himself what are the sources of communism — where does its strength come from, what makes it appealing in the eyes of its supporters? The answer, of course, is poverty, inequality, and exploitation. The way to prevent the spread of communism is not by fighting it but by abolishing its causes. Of course, he's probably one of those people who think that inequality, poverty and exploitation are unavoidable and natural parts of society and the economy.

He observes, probably quite accurately, that most of the Vietnamese guerrillas against whom he fought didn't really know or care much about communism. The party leadership did, but they were just in it to seize the power for themselves. What they used to attract support among the people, however, was to advocate the distribution of land and the property of the rich (this was the way to win support among the poor peasantry), and to call for the independence from the French (this won them supporters among the urban middle classes); pp. 274–5. Wagemueller even admits that the French regime in Indochina was corrupt and that Ho Chi Minh had been supported by the allies during the war in order to fight against the Japanese, then he was betrayed by them after the war when they allowed the French to return and ignore the Vietnamese demands for independence (p. 76).

Now it's obvious from this that the French could trivially prevent the spread of communism in Vietnam by carrying out land reform, introducing a welfare state, and then getting the hell out of there, rather than being goddamned colonialist bastards and occupying a country where they had no right to be in the first place. And that, I guess, is the main reason why I felt like such a Viet Minh sympathizer while reading this book: they were fighting against a foreign power that was occupying their country. Basically, whatever atrocities the Viet Minh had committed during the war, I cannot really consider any of that to have been their fault. The French should never have been in Vietnam in the first place, and in that case this war would probably never have occurred at all.

[To be continued in a few days.]

OMG Latest Theory Fashions

2008-04-14T21:59:00.002+02:00

I was browsing around eBay, searching for secondhand books as usually, when I noticed an ad for ‘Latest Theory Fashions’. Naturally my first thought was that somebody is poking some well-deserved fun at fashionable postmodernist nonsense or something of that sort.

However, I was a bit disappointed. It turns out that Theory really is a fashion brand name. And this stuff ain't cheap — they want $200 or more for a pair of pants! :)))

Well, I guess that's the sort of thing that upper-middle class hipsters and latte liberals like to wear while arguing about the latest postmodernist theories :)

BOOK: Leonardo Bruni, "History of the Florentine People" (Vol. 1)

2008-04-12T20:31:00.007+02:00

Leonardo Bruni: History of the Florentine People. Vol. 1: Books I–IV. Edited and translated by James Hankins. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 3. Harvard University Press, 2001. 0674005066. xxiv + 520 pp.

This is a history of Florence, mostly covering the period 1250–1400 (Bruni wrote in the early 15th century). It consists of twelve books, of which this volume contains the first four.

Book I

For me, Book I was the most interesting part of this volume; it's about the history of Florence in the ancient times and in the early middle ages. Although he says that the city was only founded in the time of Sulla, who gave the area to his veterans to settle down in, the region was previously inhabited by Etruscans, and Bruni seems to be quite keen on the Etruscans — much of book I talks about them, their reputation for learning (“Livy says that he has sources to show that Roman boys, before the period when they were given instruction in Greek literature, were commonly taught Etruscan literature”, 1.20), their struggles against Rome, etc.

Unlike many Renaissance authors, who seem to have been quite fond of the Roman empire, Bruni seems to have preferred the republic: “If one considers the savagery of Tiberius [. . .] the fury of Caligula, the insanity of Claudius, and the crimes of Nero with his mad delight in fire and sword; if one adds Vitellius, Caracalla, Heliogabalus, Maximinus and other monsters like them who horrified the whole world, one cannot deny that the Roman empire began to collapse once the disastrous name of Caesar had begun to brood over the city.” (1.38) And later in the same paragraph, when enumerating the crimes of the emperors in yet more detail: “Caligula, the successor of Tiberius, killed just about everyone!” :))) “Nero [. . .] made such a slaughter of patricians [. . .] that when he died the artisan class was beginning to fear for their lives” because they saw that “the tradesmen were all that was left for him to rage at and ravage” (ibid.).

I'm definitely glad to see finally somebody agree with my belief that switching from republic to empire was a disastrous move for Rome. When reading Gibbon's history of the decline of Rome, I was positively impressed that the empire managed to survive as long as it did, given the abysmally poor qualities of most of its rulers.

Anyway, after these initial pages about the Etruscans, Bruni then practically skips over most of the period of the Roman empire and hurries into the late antiquity when the area was overran by a number of ‘barbarian’ invaders: Huns, Goths, Vandals, Langobards, Franks. He then skips a few centuries again and ends the book with the death of Emperor Frederick in 1250.

As I've already written in an earlier blog post, one thing that often annoys me in the work of Renaissance Italian authors is their tendency to refer to the ancient Romans as ‘we’, as if renaissance Italy and ancient Rome were one and the same thing. So from that point of view I was glad to see Bruni identify just as much with the Etruscans as with the Romans, but nevertheless there's an instance where he says “our forces” (1.48) referring to the Roman army under Stilicho (late 4th century AD).

Book II

The rest of this volume (and I suspect that volumes 2 and 3 will be much the same) proceeds at a much slower pace, and I didn't find it as interesting as the first book. But for Bruni, this latter period, the last two centuries before his own time, seems to be what he is the most interested in. After Frederick's death, the ‘people’ of Florence took over the government of their own city, and it's from that point onward that Bruni is really interested in their history — it isn't called “The History of the Florentine People” for nothing. I was somewhat disappointed to learn that he used the word ‘people’ much differently than we do nowadays — he really only means the middle classes, while the poor people should be kept away from political power at all costs (p. xix). So for him, when he says that the people took over the power, he really just means that it was no longer in the hands of a monarch or of the aristocracy.

(Now admittedly, this fact that the ‘people’ excluded the lower classes did have its good sides. For example, in the incessant party struggles between Guelphs and Ghibellines and the like, he frequently mentions that when one party gained control of the town, they would expel the members of the other party and typically also seized their assets. But it seems that these things mostly affected just the ‘people’, not the lower classes, for whom this change of masters didn't necessarily mean much. Bruno actually comments explicitly on this fact, saying that the lower classes cannot be relied upon in these party struggles because to them both parties are much the same (2.63) and “[t]hey considered the exiles their fellow-citizens no less than those who were staying inside the walls” (ib.).

Anyway, once the ‘people’ of Florence started to govern themselves, they were seized by an apparently insatiable appetite for glory and power, and embarked upon an endless series of wars against more or less every nearby town and city they could think of. A few times in the beginning part of book II, it really seemed almost as if they had directly asked themselves every year “whom are we going to wage war against this year?” Numerous conflicts also raged elsewhere in Italy at the same time, with the pope, one or two members of the Hohenstaufen imperial family, and the French king Charles (invited into the country by the pope) all trying to assert or reassert control over various bits of territory. The Florentines were mostly on the side of the guelphs, i.e. the opponents of the emperor's authority over Italy.

Book III

Most of the events described in Bruni's History aren't really momentous enough that they would be still widely remembered today or be considered as having a big influence on later periods. In book III, the only event there that had I heard of before reading Bruni's history are the Sicilian Vespers, i.e. the uprising of the Sicilians against the tyrannous rule of the French king Charles. They invited king Peter of Aragon (in Spain) to intervene, convincing him that he had a good claim on Sicily, owing to the fact that he was the son-in-law of the last German emperor who had controlled Sicily before Charles. Peter did manage to drive away the French, and Sicily then passed under Spanish control; but it's a sad thing when you have to invite one foreign master to drive away another one — I wonder how much happier the Sicilian people were after this change.

Anyway, Bruni doesn't use the term ‘vespers’ to refer to the uprising, nor does he imply that they started at that time of the day (3.64); but he does describe a curious sequence of events that directly precipitated the uprising, namely “the Palermitans were holding a festival outside the city when the French came up to check them for weapons, and on that pretext began fondling the breasts of their women”; a riot ensued and turned into a large-scale rebellion. It seems that people (well, men) will never learn — first Tarquin the Proud was driven out of Rome because his son raped a Roman noblewoman, and now the French lose Sicily because they just can't leave the local women alone.

Actually, there's another familiar event in book III — in the quarrels between Florence and Pisa, Bruni mentions Count Ugolino (who was a notable figure in Pisan politics) several times, and briefly describes how he was eventually imprisoned by his enemies and left to starve to death (3.88), an event which was the basis for the celebrated passage in Dante's Inferno (canto 33).

Book IV

This book talks more about internal affairs of Florence than the previous ones, and there's a bit less warfare, especially in areas far remote from Florence. There are a few interesting paragraphs about various institutional reforms carried out in Florence in the late 13th and early 14th century, with a view to curtailing the influence of the nobility and strengthening the position of the ‘people’ (4.26–34). The strength of the nobility was partly due to the fact that each noble family could rely on a large network of supporters, friends, clients, allies, who would defend its interests even by violence and thus enable it to defy even the public magistrates, to say nothing of being able to trample an individual commoner with impunity. An interesting measure was passed to deal with this situation: the commoners were organized into twenty companies, each person belonging to one of them; then, if he was threatened or abused by some member of the nobility, his entire company was required to come to his aid: thus “each commoner had many more allies to avenge his injuries than anyone from the great families” (4.80–82).

But most of this book deals with party strife in Florence, which I didn't find very interesting. The Guelph party disintegrates into two factions, the Whites and the Blacks, who promptly begin to regard each other with as much hatred as the Guelphs had previously shown for the Ghibellines (and vice versa).

An amusing strand of story that runs throughout this book are the popes' rather amusingly unsuccessful attempts to get these bickering politicians to calm down and stop quarrelling. A steady stream of papal legates trickles into Florence and other cities, all of whom, after accomplishing nothing, promptly leave in a huff and place the city under an interdict (4.53, 4.65, 4.85, 4.96). The poor legates just couldn't get anybody to take them seriously: when another legate threatened the city of Cesena with an interdict, he found that “the city had long since grown used to such measures and had contempt for them” (4.101).

Incidentally, Dante is mentioned several times in this book; Bruni always refers to him as “the poet Dante”, but otherwise doesn't say anything about his literary work; all these mentions of Dante are due to his involvement in political activities. Bruni also mentions Petrarca's father in 4.83.

Conclusion

I'm afraid this is mostly history of the sort that I'm not terribly interested in — the sort that gives history its bad reputation as a boring topic. What Bruni describes consists almost entirely of war and diplomacy (but mostly war) with a bit of politics thrown in occasionally as well. He hardly ever mentions anything outside these areas (for example, he mentions a comet in 2.84, seen for three months in 1264; but Bruni promptly connects it with his preferred topics by describing the important political and military events which the comet apparently foretold). There's another comet in September 1301 (4.62). He also mentions floods several times (3.19, 3.60, 3.86), and the collapse of a wooden bridge “under the weight of a crowd that had gathered there to watch a spectacle” (in 1303; 4.86).

Of course one shouldn't blame Bruni for his focus on war, diplomacy and politics; in his time, historians weren't interested in such a wide range of things as now. He even says explicitly (4.16): “history has two parts or limbs, as is were—foreign and domestic affairs—and it should be understood that domestic conditions are as important to comprehend as foreign wars”.

And as far as war-and-diplomacy type of histories go, I don't see any good reason to complain against his. He tells the story coherently enough, he has clearly studied lots of sources, and he even tries to enliven his narrative by including bits of speeches every now and then. And partly his choice of topics may be influenced by the fact that his work was also intended to be as a kind of official history of Florence, sponsored by the city authorities (p. xi), so it would be natural that he would focus on the sort of things that politicians are interested in and like to brag about.

Miscellaneous

In 1.14 Bruni mentions that the Adriatic sea is named after the town of Atria.

He says of the time of pope Leo, mid-5th century AD: “in those days popes presided with humility and holiness, not with the intolerable arrogance that has crept into the pontificate today” (1.58).

A curious phrase in 2.13: “The Florentines (they said) had conquered the city [of Volterra] by the will of the gods”. This war took place in 1254 — I was surprised that neither the Volterrans nor Bruni thought the mention of the plural gods a bit blasphemous.

At some point (in 1261), the Ghibellines were, by dint of luck in war, in a position to seriously contemplate the idea of completely destroying Florence (traditionally a Guelph stronghold). A certain Farinata, a Ghibelline from Florence, was outraged at this idea and shot it down in a good speech (reported by Bruni), but what I found particularly amusing was this passage (2.71): “ ‘But let me ask you what it is that you hate. The city itself? But what wicked acts have walls and houses ever done? [. . .]’ ” So I was inspired to draw an example of a house involved in the indisputably wicked act of street mugging:

At some point (in 1266), the Florentine state tried to mend the quarrels between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines by encouraging marriages between people from two different parties (2.110). On the one hand, this approach seems charming in its naiveness; but at the same time, one cannot help being horrified at the idea — how could anybody have seriously expected such marriages to be stable and well-functioning? I'm afraid they did this by assuming that the wife either has no political ideas of her own (thus doesn't mind being married to a husband from the opposite party), or that she's little better than a piece of furniture anyway and her political opinions can be completely ignored. Anyway, I guess nobody will be surprised to hear that this policy did not succeed in bringing the two parties closer together.

There's a charming story in 4.11 about how news of the Florentine victory in the battle of Campaldino (11 June 1289) reached Florence miraculously: “there came a great pounding on the doors and a messenger's voice was heard [. . .] But when the author of the tale was sought for, no one came forward, so the story collapsed as an empty and unproven rumor. Yet on the following night when the true report at last arrived from the army [. . .] it was discovered that victory was achieved in the very same hour it was announced to the sleeping priors. This seems marvellous, but we have read of this happening in other places, too.”

Translator's note 59 to book 4 (p. 502): “The word expeditio used by Bruni here is a common humanist equivalent of passagium, the barbaric medieval word for crusade.”

[To be continued with Vol. 2 and Vol. 3.]

BOOK: Perry Biddiscombe, "Werwolf!"

2008-04-05T19:58:00.001+02:00

Perry Biddiscombe: Werwolf!: The History of the National Socialis Guerrilla Movement 1944–1946. University of Toronto Press, 1998. 0802008623. xi + 455 pp.

Werwolf was the Nazi effort, in the last years of the WW2 (and immediately afterwards), to conduct guerrilla warfare activities in the areas no longer under Nazi control. It wasn't particularly successful, which is probably why one doesn't hear about it all that much nowadays. Anyway, I was curious to learn more about Werwolf, and when I saw that a whole book has been written about it, I eventually ordered it from amazon and read it.

It's a good and thorough book, and I have no real complaints about it. I did, however, find that I'm not really that interested in Werwolf — the book is fairly detailed, and most of the time I didn't really find it all that interesting to read. But if I disregard the things that I wasn't interested in, such as about details of its bureaucratic organization or specific Werwolf operations in this or that part of Germany, there still remain a lot of interesting things that I did learn from this book.

The Werwolf wasn't a particularly strong movement, nor all that well organized. This is due to several reasons. First of all, suggesting that a movement such as this should be organized means that you consider it likely that at least some German territory will become occupied by the enemy at some future point, at least temporarily. Few people in Nazi Germany dared to suggest this as it might get them prosecuted for defeatism. In 1944, when the German situation in the war finally got bad enough that they started setting it up, it was already getting a bit late. The new organization didn't have any sufficiently influential backers to compete for resources and recruits with other institutions such as the army, the SS, or the Volkssturm.

Another reason is in the way that German leaders tended to think of guerrilla movements. They mostly saw them as something that exists in addition to a regular army and helps it (p. 277), and as a result the Werwolf wasn't set up in a way that would focus on its survival after the complete collapse of Nazi Germany.

Additionally, for a guerrilla movement to function, it needs some support from the local civillian population, and in many parts of Germany this support was rather lacking (p. 71). After Germany had been occupied by the allies, any guerrilla activity would just make the allied occupation harsher, cause reprisals etc. Many Germans just wanted to get along somehow with the occupiers and weren't happy to see the ‘werewolves’ destabilizing the situation. Nor were matters helped by the fact that the Werwolf's targets were often not just allied occupiers but also Germans who hanged out white flags or accepted administrative positions under the allied administration. In some parts of Austria the locals took active steps to neutralize the Nazi guerrillas and make sure that the area would come under allied occupation with a minimum of fuss (pp. 183–4).

But perhaps most importantly, a guerrilla movement needs hope in its eventual success, and after the end of the war it soon became clear to more or less everyone that there weren't any chances of resurrecting the Nazi regime, so there wasn't much point in prolonging any guerrilla activity (p. 280).

“Hitler and his cohorts had confidently assumed they were building a state to last a millennium; no preparations were made for defeat [. . .] the party was woefully unprepared for defeat, either organizationally or psychologically” (pp. 133–4).

Miscellaneous

It's interesting how things repeat themselves. The Germans, when setting up their Werwolf organization, studied various anti-German partisan movements that had been active during the war (pp. 12–13). The allies, when trying to suppress Werwolf after they had occupied Germany, studied how Germans had suppressed those movements during the war (p. 257).

Many members of Werwolf were teenagers, people who had been too young to be drafted into the army but had spent their entire lives under the pressure of Nazi propaganda, so they were perhaps one of the few remaining groups in which the dying regime could find a few fanatical defenders (pp. 68–9). For many, “Werwolf warware was a kind of extended rebellion” against their parents (p. 72). Thus many a youngster in a Werwolf uniform may have been just a somewhat psychologically scarred child or adolescent, which sometimes led to funny situations: “in Halle, an elderly woman disarmed two sixteen-year-old Werewolves, stripped them of their uniforms and clad them in bathrobes, and then buried their bazookas in her backyard” (pp. 71–72). “At Minden [. . .] young HJ-Werewolves emerged on the rooftops at night, whence they disturbed the sleep of British soldiers by howling.” (P. 75.)

In the spring of 1945, the “drowning regime also arranged the ruination of the nation's cultural treasures” to match “the destruction of the material basis of the Reich” (p. 43); in compliance with this, “teenage fanatics” blew up a large cache of artwork from the Berlin Museum (p. 44).

In some instances, Werwolf leaders used the government's money to set themselves up as businessmen in order to have a basis for their organization's postwar activities (pp. 80–81). But this sometimes assumed a rather hilarious aspect: “Lohel and company wasted their time with amateurish plans to support subversive activity through bee-keeping, selling hand-made crafts, and running a travelling puppet show” (p. 82).

Hypocrisy is always amusing. When the war started going really badly for them, the Nazis started organizing their civilians into the Volkssturm militia organization, and soon became worried that the allies would regard the Volkssturm as irregular partisans to whom various humane requirements of the Hague conventions need not apply — this, of course, is the same position that the Nazis had taken regarding the anti-German partisan movements in the areas they had occupied during the war. Anyway, as the Volkssturm was being set up, Nazi propaganda promptly started to emphasize that it would be a disciplined formation, not a partisan movement; and “the Germans were also careful to apply the Hague Convention to members of the Polish Home Army captured in the Warsaw Uprising, and they became increasingly lenient with prisoners taken from Yugoslav Partisan formations [. . .] German units in action against guerrillas were told to stop describing the enemy with pejorative expressions” (p. 120).

Werwolf also had a radio broadcasting station, which was more or less entirely under Goebbels' control. “[T]he Propaganda Ministry admitted in mid-April [1945] that ‘we know little or nothing of what is happening in these [occupied] areas,’ [. . .] Goebbels himself was the first to admit, at least privately, that Werwolf Radio's output was not actually the news, but ‘the news as it should be.’ In fact, the propaganda minister personally dictated many of the station's fictional reports” (p. 140). “Goebbels himself wrote much wild-eyed copy for the station”, which “far surpassed the regular propaganda in which Goebbels's authorship was openly acknowledged. This was a great psychological release for the propaganda minister who, after being muzzled since 1934, was finally able to vent his own brand of leftist extremis.” (P. 141.) “In line with Goebbels's opinions, Werwolf radio found the war almost immaterial compared with the fact that a pan-European, anti-bourgeois revolution was under way.” (P. 142.) “Only Werwolf Radio had sufficient gall to refer to the situation in April 1945 as a ‘victory.’ ” (P. 143.)

In early 1945, the Nazis made some not very effectual efforts to establish ‘redoubts’ in the Alps. “[T]he Alps were overrun by an influx of military and civilian bureaucrats — which the Bavarians and Austrians called contemptuously ‘the northern invasion’ [. . .] ‘I never knew there were so many staffs and so few fighting troops,’ noted a bewildered gas-station attendant” (p. 180). This reminds me of a rumour I've heard about Chiang Kai-shek, namely that when his army finally retreated to Taiwan after losing the mainland to the communists, it had more generals than ordinary soldiers :)

After the war was over, the few Werwolf guerrillas and similar characters who hadn't yet been mopped up by the allied forces quickly tended to lose interest in active guerrilla fighting, and were mostly content to just try to avoid getting caught. “The Carinthian hills were also a temporary home to a polyglot assortment of Axis collaborators and allies, most of them seeking to escape vengeful pursuers back in their homelands [. . .] Many such bands were mounted, and the damage done to pasture meadows by their horses was a considerable factor hindering recovery of the economy in rural areas of southern Austria.” The allied “anti-partisan patrols rarely found themselves involved in gunplay. ‘In the summer weather,’ remembered one British officer, ‘[such forays were] more of a pleasure than a business,’ and they provided endless opportunities for sightseeing and hunting.” (Pp. 189–90.)

In some areas, the Werwolf also dabbled in poisoning, e.g. leaving poisoned drink in locations where Soviet soldiers would find it; they carefully selected a poison with a delayed effect, to make sure that a number of enemy soldiers would drink it before anybody became suspicious about it (p. 211).

The author lists many instances where the allies treated Germans, either civilians or Volkssturm and Werwolf members, rather more harshly than I can really approve of. See e.g. p. 161 and the whole of chapter 7. The British seem to have been the most gentlemanly of the four major allied powers (p. 257); the Americans and the French were significantly harsher, and the Soviets were absolutely infamous (“when the Red Army slashed its way across the frontiers of eastern Germany, its personnel were overtaken by a frenzy of bloodlust and a savage craving for destruction”, p. 269). Also fairly disagreeable were the policies of the Czech authorities in the Sudetenland after they resumed control of the area in 1945, and which eventually led to the wholesale expulsion of the German minority from the country (pp. 226–244). But, of course, I cannot really blame the Czechs for that; if little else, although this sort of expulsion would of course be unacceptable nowadays, I'm glad that they (the Czechs, Poles, etc.) took this opportunity to do it back then when it was still possible, otherwise there'd still be all these German minorities all over central and eastern Europe, and it would hardly be reasonable to expect them to ever assimilate.

On p. 231 there's a very interesting paragraph about “the experience of an SS counter-insurgency company, which was stranded at Reichenberg, some 200 miles behind Soviet lines. [. . .] the SS and some German Army dissidents decided to launch a desperate trek to the west. After a final battle with a nearby Soviet unit, the SS group destroyed their tanks and artillery, and resolved to break through by using only their light weapons. Seven weeks of fighting and walking followed. In the course of this odyssey, the SS company plundered a Czech village, liberated more than twenty German POWs from a forced-labour detail, wiped out four Soviet and Czech patrols who had the misfortune to cross their path, and overran numerous enemy checkpoints and blockades. At the height of the summer, they finally reached the Bavarian Forest, where they quickly captured several members of an American patrol, and then just as quickly released them. After a final bivouac near Cham, the group broke up, with each member resolved to reach home on his own. There were only 42 survivors from a band that originally numbered 360.” This is quite an amazing story, enough so that I decided to look at the endnotes to see where he'd picked it up from (this book is very thoroughly documented, but most of the endnotes are quite boring and I didn't try to read all of them). Well, he cites “George Elford, Devil's Guard (New York 1988), 15–48” (p. 389, n. 88). This seems to be quite a fascinating book; see its wikipedia page; but there seem to be very serious concerns about how much of it is fact and not just fiction; see also this article. I'm surprised that an otherwise carefully documented work of history such as this one casually cites a suspect book such as the Devil's Guard without any comments as to its reliability. But anyway, I'm not complaining — I'm glad that this fascinating title has been brought to my notice.

ToRead:

Hermann Löns: Der Wehrwolf (1910), “a romantic saga about seventeenth-century guerrillas on the Lüneburg Heath” [. . .] “the basic book of the folkish movement, and its sales were rivalled only by Hitler's Mein Kampf” (p. 13). It seems to have been translated into English as Harm Wulf (Minton, Balch & Company, New York, 1931).
G. R. Elford: Devil's Guard. Mentioned here on p. 231 (see above). This book was first published in 1971 in hardcover (NY: Delacorte), and reprinted by Dell several times in paperback, one printing as late as 1988. Anyway, since then there has apparently been so much interest in the book that these twenty-year old mass-market paperbacks cost absolutely ghastly sums on ABE — well over $100. I'm surprised that the book doesn't get reprinted again and again if there's so much interest in it. In 2002 there was another printing by Hailer Publishing, but this also seems to be out of print and secondhand copies no cheaper than those of Dell's earlier editions.
Anyway, I was very lucky to find on eBay a lot of 17 military paperbacks with a buy-it-now price of $14, and it included the Devil's Guard — I guess the seller wasn't aware of how rare and valuable it is, nor has any of the people who are bidding $50–$100 on other Devil's Guard auctions noticed it. I guess they just search through the auction titles, not the descriptions. So, I bought the whole 17-book lot for $14 and asked the seller to just send me the Devil's Guard and keep the other books, to save on shipping costs. It arrived yesterday. I'm so happy — one of the best deals I've ever gotten on eBay.
Nikolai Tolstoy: Victims of Yalta (London, 1979). Sounds interesting. Mentioned here on p. 379.

BOOK: Lorenzo Valla, "On the Donation of Constantine"

2008-03-22T21:04:00.000+01:00

Lorenzo Valla: On the Donation of Constantine. Translated by G. W. Bowersock. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 24. Harvard University Press, 2007. 0674025334. xvi + 206 pp.

The Donation of Constantine is a forgery, probably made around the year 800; it claims to be an edict of the Roman emperor Constantine, in which he transfers his authority over the western part of the Roman empire into the hands of the then pope, Sylvester. In the middle ages and the Renaissance, popes occasionally tried to use this forged document to bolster their claims to temporal power. Eventually a 15th-century humanist, Lorenzo Valla, wrote a short treatise in which he thoroughly demolishes the claims for the authenticity of the Donation. In addition to Lorenzo's treatise, this book also contains the text of the Donation itself as an appendix.

This was quite an enjoyable read. Lorenzo writes in an interesting style, parts of the book read like a speech, parts like a dialogue or a courtroom trial, and parts like a delightful rant. The use of the various standard rhetorical techniques, which was so greatly appreciated by both ancient and renaissance authors, often leaves me cold, but not in this book, where they are deployed judiciously and in moderation.

As for the contents, Lorenzo attacks the Donation from several angles and demolishes it so thoroughly that it's difficult to imagine how anybody can ever have taken it seriously in the first place. He points out how unimaginable it is that an emperor such as Constantine would simply give up half of his empire just like that; how pope Sylvester, who was not a power-hungry worldly pope like those of the renaissance, wasn't the sort of person who would accept such a donation anyway; how, even if the text of the Donation was authentic, there is no evidence that the actual transfer of power ever really took place; how, even if the actual transfer of power really had taken place, there is then no evidence that would explain how Sylvester or his successors eventually came to lose the control over the western Empire that Constantine had supposedly granted them.

I must admit that there's another thing that really surprises me about the Donation, namely: even if it were authentic, so f**king what? I mean, just try to imagine what this must have looked like: it's the year 1400 or so, and some feeble bearded old pope comes up with this 1000-year old piece of sheepskin proving that his predecessor of a thousand years ago was invested with the rule over the western Roman empire. Obviously, the German emperor, the kings of France, Spain, and England, and the two dozen or so petty Italian princelings will, upon hearing this joyous news, hasten to acknowledge the pope as their temporal liege-lord and master and start acting as his nice obedient little satraps (to use a word that the author of the Donation was so fond of; see below), right? Yeah, I didn't think so either. Did anybody on the papal side seriously believe that, even if the rulers of western Europe were to acknowledge the donation as real, that this would have any effect on their policy? People aren't going to care whether something gave you control over a territory a thousand years ago unless you can also back up your claims with an army now, in the present time. And if you can do this, then the thousand-year old claim isn't all that important anyway; at best it can be the icing on a cake.

Lorenzo also criticizes the text of the Donation from the point of view of language as well, pointing out many examples of strange, infelicitous or even outright wrong usage of the Latin language, things which you wouldn't expect in a document written in Constantine's imperial chancellery but which perhaps aren't too surprising in the work of some half-illiterate 9th-century cleric. This is the sort of thing that is hard to translate into another language, I guess, and I must say that the translator is making a very valiant effort to try to reproduce in English the same sort of contrast that Lorenzo points out in the Latin original, i.e. the difference between the clumsy text of the Donation and what you would expect in a genuine, well-written imperial edict. Despite this effort, I couldn't help feeling that some of Lorenzo's arguments in this section of the treaties don't make that much sense in the translation; I imagine that to really appreciate them, one would have to read the original. Occasionally I also felt that Lorenzo was fulminating against phrases that could have been legitimate — there isn't always just one correct way of saying something.

But anyway, many things do come across in the translation nevertheless, e.g. when Lorenzo points out how the author of the Donation is clearly trying to bluff his way through the details of things with which he is unfamiliar (e.g. the imperial and papal regalia, §§49–51), and how he is trying to cover up his ignorance by writing in a style so pompous and overblown that it's just silly (§§43, 53, 55). Lorenzo also points out concrete examples of words that weren't yet in use in Constantine's time; one of the more blatant examples is how the Donation refers to certain Roman officials as “satraps” (§42). According to the translator's note on p. 190, this word started to be used in this way only in the 8th century. But I must say that even this amazes me — Rome and Persia had been at each other's throats for a thousand years, and then the Romans go and borrow a term from the Persians, as if they couldn't come up with their own word for some kind of provincial governor? It makes about as much sense as if the Americans decided to refer to their state governors as gauleiters from now on :)

A pleasantly bizarre factoid from the translator's notes (p. 193, n. 101): “the elder Pliny (Nat. Hist. 26. 8) reports that in Egypt elephantiasis patients were put in bathtubs warmed with human blood.”

All in all, I liked this book a lot and it's certainly one of the most interesting ITRL books I've read so far.

BOOK: Ivan Sanderson, "Invisible Residents" (cont.)

2008-03-15T19:20:00.001+01:00

Ivan T. Sanderson: Invisible Residents. London: Tandem, 1974. (First ed.: NY and Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1970.) SBN 426138805. 254 pp.

[Continued from last week.]

Miscellaneous

“[A] ridge 50 miles long by 15 miles wide rose 2¼ miles overnight in South Atlantic in 1924” (p. 22). He cites “Zodiac, staff magazine of Cable and Wireless, Ltd., October 1923; Daily Mail, 22 August 1923; Evening Standard, 28 August 1923.” I don't know how reliable these newspapers are, but I doubt that such a thing is possible. But I am very impressed that he fished out such obscure articles about obscure events, and all that in an age without Google and similar search engines :)

“[D]uring the past year, as of writing this [. . .] we now do have a working plane [. . .] that can go into and come back out of water.” (P. 58.) That would be very cool, but I have no idea what he's talking about. I've never heard of any such thing. He also mentions this on p. 98: “not merely on the drawing board, but in fact, as reported in Popular Mechanics. It is also thought that a prototype of such a plane, named the ‘Flying Fish,’ was built by the Douglas complex for, and on the specs of, the O.N.R.”; the first one supposedly crashed but the next model, after some adjustments, “performed as required”. In a footnote, he cites Popular Mechanics, September 1967, pp. 114–5.

I found chapter 6 to be particularly interesting. It's about a small artefact found in Colombia, dating from the pre-Columbian period. It could be representing a (quite unusual) fish or insect, but it could also be a delta-wing airplane. (“[T]his bloody thing does not look like any kind of known animal but it does look astonishingly like some kind of small airplane,” p. 92.) Sanderson showed casts of the object to various aviation experts, who say that it does look like an airplane but also differs in some important details from what a real plane would have to be shaped like (“Perhaps it is an artist's ‘impression’ ”, p. 92).

Another very interesting chapter is ch. 7, about underwater ‘lightwheels’: long and slowly rotating rays of light underneath the water, emitting from a common centre and their tips suddenly terminating at a certain distance away from the centre. See e.g. p. 107 for a description, written by one Comdr. J. R. Bodler (USNR). Sanderson also cites a proposed explanation of the phenomenon by one Dr. Wally Minto, who suggests that underwater sound waves may be activating the bioluminescence in certain kinds of plankton (pp. 115–7); but it isn't clear what could be causing such sound waves.

In ch. 9 he mentions examples of airplanes whose pilots found that they had covered a distance in an amazingly short period of time. He concludes that this cannot be explained just by strong tail winds, because meteorological stations on the ground would have detected these winds as well; thus perhaps “the planes slipped into areas wherein time ran slower” (p. 162). Oh dear. I think it's much more plausible that some unusual wind-related phenomenon is at work than that time somehow slows down in a certain area...

He mentions his ‘vile vortices’ several times without clearly explaining them, as if he assumed that the reader already knows them (pp. 134, 147, 151); but then in ch. 11 he describes how he got to define them. They are conveniently located around the world so that, if you also count the poles among them, you get the vertices of an icosahedron. And this despite the fact that he says “I don't like such neat patterns emerging in anything in nature; it looks far too much as thought somebody had got the idea first, and then tried to fit the facts into it. You can fit almost anything into almost anything else if you try hard enough” (p. 165). This is amazing — he is aware of all this, and yet he pursues his ridiculous vortex theory?!

An instance of amazing honesty: “[T]here is as of now totally insufficient evidence even for the existence of these vortices, per se.” (P. 177.)

He claims that in the Bermuda Triangle and a few other areas, the number of disappearances is unusually large, even if you take the amount of traffic into account (pp. 166–7); that's interesting, if it's really true.

Apparently the surface of the ocean is not perfectly level, but forms ‘depressions’ in some areas: “There is even a story, which I have been trying for four years to have confirmed or disproved, that some old freighters sold to Japanese scrapyards had failed to make the grate up the slope out of one of these patches and had to be helped out by ocean-going tugs.” :))))

In the last few chapters of the book, which try to present theories and explanations for the unusual events described earlier in the book, he has an annoying tendency to devote space to half-kooky ideas recently proposed (recently from the point of view of when he was writing the book) on the fringes of physics. The problem is that undoubtedly dozens of such ideas are proposed by physicists every year, with most of them soon discarded or forgotten, so that it's silly to take one from the last year and hint, in your paranormal book, that this one may turn out to be the explanation behind your paranormal phenomena. In practice what is more likely to happen is that in five years nobody will remember that theory anymore. Have you ever heard of Dr. John Carstoiu and his “Gravity II” (p. 173)?

“[T]here is currently considerable speculation as to whether there may not be a sort of counter-time that flows fromour future to our past” (p. 179). I don't doubt that there has been such speculation, but where? Among drug-addled new-age kooks?

“There is a theory that disturbs many geomorphologists. Briefly stated, this is to the effect that the earth is really a sort of vast crystal and is trying to adopt a tetrahedral form — namely, a three-sided pyramid with an apex at the Antarctic and a flat triangular base around the North Pole.” (P. 186.) ROFLMAO!!! I don't doubt that it disturbs the geomorphologists. They are probably laughing so hard that they cannot get any work done :)

I wonder if the book originally had a section of plates between pp. 192 and 193. It looks as if something has been cut out at that point.

He has a silly obsession with the idea that it's better to build underground than above the ground (or above the ocean floor, if you're a mysterious but advanced underwater civilization), presumably because above the ground you are more exposed to the elements (such as “vile currents (winds)”, p. 196 — he sure was fond of the word ‘vile’ :)). But why does he pretend not to notice how much more difficult and expensive it is to dig rooms from the bedrock than to put up walls and a roof above the ground?

One of the obvious problems with his idea that there's a super-advanced underwater civilization that we're mostly unaware of is of course that civilizations in general have a tendency to make themselves noticed. He suggests: “why it should not be so far in advance of us technically that we would neve have even noticed it until we started to develop a few really sensitive gadgets” (p. 199); earlier on the same page he emphasizes that, since life first evolved in water, there has been much more time for advanced species to evolve in the water than on dry land: “we have only just now achieved this after some 300 million years. What might intelligent entities, having had more than twice as long to evolve [in water] [. . .] have achieved?” But I think this line of arguing is completely implausible. Surely nobody doubts that (unless we destroy our civilization with some kind of ecological disaster or nuclear war or something of that sort) we will colonize the oceans in a few thousand years' time, let alone in 300 million years. Thus, if an advanced aquatic civilization had evolved that had 300 million years head-start on us, it would have colonized dry land long before our ancestors had ever even climbed the trees, much less came back down from them.

He makes a good point on p. 203: “It has always seemed strange to me that almost everybody not only believes in, but almost casually accepts, the existence of a Universal Power, God, [. . .] without a single iota of the sort of concrete evidence for His existence that they so clamorously demand before they will even ‘believe in’ anything as concrete as a lake or sea monster.” (P. 203.) But actually, it doesn't seem so strange to me. A person's beliefs aren't guided just by truth and evidence, but also by the consequences of those beliefs. Believing in the existence of lake monsters doesn't help you much, but believing in some kind of god might provide you with consolation and a sense that at least somebody cares about you and has this chaotic and messy world of ours under control. At least that's what I imagine that the good sides of believing in a god might be, although of course I don't know for sure, seeing as I don't believe in any myself.

A touching, and hilarious, glimpse of the good old days when it was believed that artificial intelligence was just around the corner: “We have ‘invented’ devices that we call computers. Some of these, such as those, for instance, developed by Drs John C. Loehlin of the University of Texas, Kenneth M. Colby of Stanford, and the Gullahorns of Michigan, are now already not only ‘thinking’ but developing personalities and showing characteristics such as we call emotions.” (P. 216.) ROTFLOL :))))

He suggests that, as our technology grows more and more complex, people are less and less able to really understand it: “Soon machines will be teaching the next generation of our species [. . .] Might it not be that at least some OINTs [= other intelligences] are so far ahead of our present status that they have completely lost controls of themselves and just plain given up thinking [. . .]? Take poltergeists, for instance. [. . .] the ‘work’ they do is, at least according to the record, 100 per cent stupid, mischievous, and for the most part both logical and insane.” (P. 217.)

ToRead:

Sanderson's Abominable Snowmen, a book about the yeti, sasquatch, and similar legendary beings.
Apparently Jung wrote a book the UFOs: Flying Saucers, A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (NY: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1959). (Mentioned here on p. 244.)
Sanderson says on p. 127 that a radio commentator named Art Ford “has now spent many years investigating” the case of Flight 19, “and he has run into some really very extraordinary and disturbing facts concerning the affair. His book on the case is to be published shortly” — however, I couldn't find any such book mentioned on the web, nor in the LOC catalogue. I did find several web sites mentioning that it was Ford who reported that the Flight 19 leader, Lt. Taylor, was heard to say things like “They look like they're from outer space — don't come after me.” This perhaps gives us a hit of what Ford's book is probably like, if he did get around to publishing it.

BOOK: Ivan Sanderson, "Invisible Residents"

2008-03-08T20:56:00.003+01:00

Ivan T. Sanderson: Invisible Residents. London: Tandem, 1974. (First ed.: NY and Cleveland: The World Publishing Co., 1970.) SBN 426138805. 254 pp.

Sanderson was a biologist and wrote several popular-science type books about zoology, but nowadays he's chiefly remembered for his interest in paranormal subjects. Probably the first time I've heard of him was when I read Berlitz's The Bermuda Triangle, which mentions Sanderson's theory that the Triangle is just one of twelve “anomalic regions” (Sanderson's phrase — he was quite fond of unnecessarily using words that end in -ic), situated around the world at regular intervals; he calls them “vile vortices”, and the whole thing is of course just as silly as this name would lead you to believe.

The only thing I've read by Sanderson before this book was a short article of his that was included in Mysteries and Monsters of the Sea, a collection of articles from the Fate magazine. I was rather disappointed by that book as a whole, and Sanderson's article (“Sea Serpents and Whachamacallits”, from January 1964) didn't particularly impress me either.

Anyway, I recently bought Invisible Residents very cheaply along with about 20 other books about paranormal topics, which explains the recent predominance of such books on this blog :)

The basic idea of this book is that there must exist a very advanced (and hitherto unknown to us) civilization living at the ocean floor (or even beneath it, pp. 84–5, 196). The main argument in favour of this theory are the supposedly numerous sightings of UFOs coming into or out of the water, and of unidentified submarine objects exhibiting patterns of behaviour beyond the reach of human technology. Just like with UFOs, I of course cannot quite believe such an incredible claim, but I'd be curious to know what these sightings (if they really occured as they are reported here) were all about; he tells a few interesting stories along the way, and he has a very peculiar style of writing, quite unlike any other paranormal author I've read so far. All of this taken together has made this book quite a pleasant and charming read.

His style

His unusual style is perhaps partly a result of his British origins; in addition, he comes across as a highly irritable person who doesn't mince words when he is annoyed, which he is much of the time :) The other paranormal authors I've read so far (not very many, admittedly) come across as calm and bloodless in comparison, even when they are *trying* to be lurid and sensationalist.

“I will not bore you with a reiteration of the so-called ‘flying-saucer’ nonsense, as it is now extant in more books and papers than I would care to enumerate.” (P. 15.) “The term ‘flying saucer’ is an abomination, preposteriously facetious, false, and irrelevant.” (P. 16. His complaint seems to be that they are hardly ever really saucer-shaped. He also complains against the term “UFO’: “that they ‘fly’, as we know flight, is rubbish”, p. 16.) “Heyerdahl is a perfectly splendid fellow [. . .] but he clings to an outmoded orthodoxy in a manner that is incomprehensible.” (P. 33.) “One does not wish to be grossly impertinent, but one is constrained to ask just what the heck is the matter with all the classes of skeptics, stuffed shirts, and other experts? [. . .] These two items are highly obnoxious to just about everybody, quite apart from the professional skeptics and other assorted clowns.” (P. 37.) “This list, while vey impressive, is frankly a crashing bore” (p. 42). “[M]y greatest delight is teasing stuffed-shirted experts” (p. 67). “[L]iterally hundreds of (from a mechanical point of view) obscene objects were reported” (p. 71). “The following may sound disreputably ‘cloak-and-daggerish’ and infuriate the stuffed shirts” (p. 77). “There is somethign dashed rum going on here” (p. 120).

Much of the time this ranting style is quite pleasant. One thing that annoyed me, however, was that he often jumps, for no very obvious reasons, between this very personal, very irascible authorial “I” and the sort of impersonal “we” that you wouldn't expect to find elsewhere than in an academic text or a royal proclamation. If he wanted to maintain a calm, detached academic tone, he would have to use “we” throughout the book and avoid venting his spleen on every other page. Therefore it was hard not to feel the use of the “we” as more like a pompous quasi-royal “we” (this feeling is further strengthened by curious constructs such as “[a]n old personal friend of ours”, p. 34; “I thought that this might be due to our having become bored with the whole UFO bit at that time — and indeed we personally did”, p. 68), which started to get on my nerves fairly soon. (Eventually it transpires that he had founded a “Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained”, pp. 164, 169, so presumably the “we” refers to him and other collaborators from this society.)

He also clearly enjoys taking swipes as “officialdom” and its helplessness and cluelessness when it comes to UFOs and similar phenomena. See pp. 17, 19, 67.

“taking the proverbial ungulate by its frontal protuberances” (p. 78) :))

He has an annoying fondness for words ending in -ic, such as “gravic” (p. 169) and “gravitic” (p. 175) — why the heck is ‘gravitational’ not good enough for him?

He cites quite a lot of sources, much more than is usual for paranormal books, but they are mostly to publications like the Flying Saucer Review, books by other UFOlogists, and newspaper articles. On p. 69 he mentions something from the New York Times, but doesn't provide an exact reference.

He says that he isn't interested in just piling together lots of facts: “It is not the ‘what’ that interests me but the ‘how’ and even more, the ‘why’ ” (p. 134). I agree in principle, but in subjects like this one, if you list the facts thoroughly and scrutinize them really carefully, you might have some kind of ground to sand on; but if you insist prematurely on proceeding into ‘how’ and ‘why’, you'll end up with nothing but yet another bullshit paranormal theory.

Interesting paranormal occurrences

Some of the more interesting of the unusual or paranormal occurrences mentioned in the book:

A ship listening for signals near the bottom of the sea, for the purposes of testing long-range underwater communications, caught the signal that had been transmitted to it during the course of experiment, “and then a repeat of the signal followed by a strange code which the computers are still trying to break” (p. 37); i.e., “ ‘something unknown’ ” picked up the signal and then “began transmitting its own signals on the same wavelengths” (p. 38). I hope they made sure that it wasn't just some kind of echo or random noise or something of that sort.

“For two weeks [in 1960] the Argentine Navy did everything in its power to track down two unidentified submarines detected in the Golfo Nuevo” despite the assistance of the U.S. Navy experts, equipment “and apparently uncounted tons of xplosives, the mystery subs eventually just went away, still unidentified” (p. 57). “And every nation owning so much as one submarine could well deny any complicity, because they all knew perfectly well that none of theirs could withstand the pounding these did” (p. 59).

Sanderson cites Vincent Gaddis' report about a cargo ship, the Ourang Medan, which sent out SOS messages ended by “All officers including captain dead [. . .] probably whole crew dead [. . .] I die” (p. 141). Rescue ships arrived in a few hours and found all crewmembers lying about the ship, dead, including the radio operator, “his lifeless hand still resting on the transmitting key. ‘Their frozen faces were upturned to the sun [. . .] the mouths were gaping open and the eyes staring.’ ” Soon afterwards a fire broke out on the ship, the rescue party left and minutes later, the ship exploded and sank (pp. 141–2). An excellent story, even if it isn't true — see the Wikipedia page, which casts some doubt on the whole incident.

His life

Sanderson seems to have had quite a colourful life (see the article about him in the Wikipedia), and glimpses into it appear every now and then in the book. “I was admonished in my youth by one of the most awesome personalities I have ever met, one Chief Ekumaw of the Assumbo people of the northern Camerun, in West Africa, to remember always that the proper place to begin a story is at the beginning.” (P. 28.)

Apparently he worked “as a counterespionage agent for a navy” during the war (p. 125): “My jurisdiction covered a considerable area of tropical seas [. . .] I was responsible for numbering thousands of craft in the area”.

“I was virtually brought up on the sea and lived for many years on my own schooner” (p. 138).

“I spent many years collecting animals in Africa, the Orient, and South America [. . .] a sting ray over six feet in width [. . .] turned up in a river that had been inhabited [. . .] for centuries [. . .] but nobody had ever seen anything like it before.” (Pp. 197–8.)

[To be continued in a few days.]

BOOK: Richard Winer, "The Devil's Triangle" (cont.)

2008-03-01T18:50:00.000+01:00

Richard Winer: The Devil's Triangle. New York: Bantam Books, 1974. (First ed.: Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1972.) 0552094307. 336 pp.

[Continued from last week.]

More examples of healthy skepticism

Winer often mentions events that could easily become classic mysterious ‘disappearances’ if it hadn't been for the presence of some witness, due to whom we know what happened. The implication, I guess, is that many of the mysterious disappearances may have similarly mundane reasons, just that there weren't any witnesses around at the time. This is again a fine example of Winer's preference for sober rather than paranormal explanations. See e.g. pp. 54–55, describing how the crew of a ship, the Discoverer, saw in 1971 a cargo plane plunge into the sea nearby, and no debris or oil slick was found in the area (just one of the chunks of beef that the plane had been carrying): “Had the Discoverer not been present when the Connie [i.e. the Super Constellation plane] went down, there again would have been another chapter added to the legend of the ‘Triangle of Death’.” (P. 55.)

Similarly, when the Sno' Boy vanished in 1973, it turned out that it was badly overloaded with both cargo and passengers, it was caught in a storm, and plenty of debris was eventually found — hardly a mysterious Triangle disappearance (p. 66).

The 53-foot Ixtapa disappeared in December 1971; only a piece of its cabin was found a few days later. “One UFO buff went so far as to say, ‘Spacemen had to remove the cabin in order to get at the hiding crew.’ [. . .] But by far the greatest number of boating men [. . .] adhered to the opinion that the yacht had been run down by a ship that kept going because her crew was completely oblivious to the accident./ Suppose the boat that found the Ixtapa's cabin top had reached that location just a minute or two later when total night had decended upon the area? Or if her course had been just a few yards farther away in either direction leaving the wreckage engulfed in darkness?” The cabin top would probably not have been found, and “more fuel would have been added to the legend of the ‘sea of lost ships.’ ” (Pp. 90–91.)

Writing about the Marine Sulphur Queen, Winer concludes: “There was nothing mysterious or supernatural—simply an industrial explosion at sea.” (P. 136.) He cites, as an example. another similar accident, that of the V. A. Fogg: “Had it been the ‘Devil's Triangle’ and not the Gulf of Mexico where the V. A. Fogg was lost, she would certainly have been listed as another strange disappearance.” (P. 136. In fact it was listed as such even so, e.g. by J. W. Spencer, Limbo of the Lost, pp. 122–5.) But the V. A. Fogg sunk in shallow water, on a short course, and a pilot had reported seeing smoke in the area where the ship was supposed to have been lost. As a result, its wreck was soon found: “It was obvious that the V. A. Fogg had exploded and sunk within second. A number of bodies [. . .] were recovered.” (P. 138.) But the same event had occurred in Bermuda Triangle and if nobody happened to see the smoke, the wreck would be “resting in thousands of feet of water [. . .] beyond the reach of divers or most sonar scanning devices” and she would be listed as another mysterious Triangle disappearance (p. 138).

In the section about the Teignmouth Electron, which was found abandoned after its owner and captain committed suicide, Winer adds a very good remark: “What if Donald Crowhurst had taken his tape recorder and logbook with him when he decided to end it all? His disappearance would be labeled as another great unsolved mystery of the sea. If the facts concerning other ‘ghostships’ were discovered, would they too prove to be the results of earthbound causes?” (P. 179.)

Similarly he mentions the curious story of the Gulf King V, a fishing ship whose captain went berserk one day; the crew eventually escaped from the ship and were picked up by sister ships soon afterwards. But, Winer adds, if things turned out just a little bit different, we would have another perfect Bermuda Triangle mystery at our hands. If, for example, the crew had escaped at night, or when the other ships were too far to find them, they might have drowned; the deranged captain might have ended up somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, and, driven mad by hunger and thirst, would perhaps jump into the sea himself — and the ship would be discovered some time later, in seaworthy condition and missing all its occupants for no obvious reason (pp. 196–7).

He also complains about the sensationalism with which the events in the Bermuda Triangle are often treated. For example, when he wrote a few articles about it for the Saga magazine, the editors changed his titles “The Devil's Triangle: Part I” and “Part II” into “Bermuda Triangle — UFO Twilight Zone” and “The Deadly Bermuda Triangle Flying Saucer ‘Space Warp’ Domain” (pp. 198–9). He also complains about the phrase ‘Bermuda Triangle’ itself: “If a geographical designation is to be applied to the name, it should refer ot the area where the most happenings have taken place—the ‘Florida-Bahama Triangle.’ ” (P. 199.) But it seems clear that ‘Devil's Triangle’ is his preferred term, and this, if you ask me, is just as silly and sensationalist as ‘Bermuda Triangle’ — even more so, in fact.

He also criticizes J. W. Spencer for his silly theories about UFOs kidnapping people, planes and ships in the Triangle, and for the errors in his account of the sinking of the V. A. Fogg (p. 198).

Incidentally, Winer does not categorically reject the possibility of UFOs, but he maintains a skeptical attitude towards them (p. 208). Regarding their supposed involvement in the Triangle events, he says that “certain magazines and writers have exploited that hypothesis” (p. 209) but responsible UFOlogists haven't, and they in fact say that the level of UFO activity in the Triangle is not unusually high (pp. 209–10).

Miscellaneous

Chapter 2 contains an impressively lurid description of what it must have been like when a hurricane sunk a group of Spanish ships in the Caribbean in the early 16th century. “Those who opened their eyes into the wind-driven rain had their eyeballs splattered out of the sockets. Clothes were ripped away, and bodies were masses of torn flesh as though they had been lashed and beaten by King Neptune's own master-at-arms. Mouths that opened to scream spewed forth blood instead of words. Cargoes shifted. Vessels capsized. Men were crushed. Others drowned. Those dying prayed to live. Those living prayed to die.” (Pp. 27–8.) It seems clear that if Winer's paranormal writing hadn't taken off, he could still have made a good living by writing horror stories :) But I wonder if a hurricane really would have had all these effects. Anyway, the point of this chapter, I guess, is to emphasize how easily ships may ‘disappear’ in that area for perfectly natural reasons.

A couple of interesting ‘firsts’ mentioned in the book: the first steam-powered ship of the U.S. Navy to disappear in the Triangle was the tug Nina, en route from Norfolk to Cuba, in 1910 (p. 66). The first known aviator to vanish in the Triangle was one Herbie Pond, a rumrunner, in 1931 (p. 33).

I was interested to read (p. 69) that the U.S. Navy still uses a few wooden ships (or at least did use them when this book was written, in the 1970s), namely minesweepers: “As long as magnetic mines are used in warfare at sea, the navies of the world will utilize these wooden vessels.”

There's a curious story on pp. 156–7. Supposedly, one night in February 1935, a number of hotel guests at Daytona Beach, Florida, saw an airplane crash into the sea very close to the shore. The coast guard was alerted, but no traces of any wreckage were found, and it turned out that no planes were reported to be missing in that area at that time. If the story isn't totally made up, I really wonder what causes this sort of mass delusion.

Winer also mentions the Ellen Austin, whose crew sighted an abandoned ship in 1881 and put a prize crew on it. The two ships were later separated by a storm and after a while the Ellen Austin found the derelict again, but sans the prize crew. A new prize crew boarded it, and despite many precautions, a couple of days later the two ships lost contact again and neither the derelict nor its prize crew were ever seen again (pp. 164–5). There's an interesting section about this case in Kusche's book (pp. 52–3); Kusche found that all mentions of this case eventually trace back to a 1944 book, The Stargazer Talks by one Rupert Gould, who didn't mention his source of information about this story. Furthermore, he didn't mention the second prize crew and its disappearance, so the later authors (like Winer) who mention this must either have had some other source of information or they simply made the thing up. So this part of Winer's book does seem somewhat less than perfectly trustworthy. There really ought to be some kind of law that would prohibit the publication of books about the Bermuda Triangle unless they cite their sources very pedantically :)

In his account of the Deering, Winer says that the message in a bottle, which suggested that the ship was a victim of pirates, had been proven to be authentic. Supposedly the wife of the Deering's captain had the message analyzed by handwriting experts, who found that the note was written by one Henry Bates, the ship's engineer (pp. 169–70). But Gian Quasar in his considerably more extensive story of the Deering, on his website, says that the message was actually a forgery, written by the man who claimed to have found it; he admitted this at some point and it turned out that he had hoped his ‘discovery’ of the message would help him get a job at a local lighthouse.

He mentions a curious thing he'd noticed one day while filming underwater: “maybe a hundred feet across, possibly seventy-five, but no less than fifty feet in diameter. It was perfectly round. Its color was a deep purple. It was moving slowly up toward us. At its outer perimeter there was a form of pulsation, but there was no movement of water. As we started for the surface, it stopped its ascent. Then slowly it began to descend into the blackening depths.” (P. 202.) I'm not quite sure whether to believe all this, but it sure sounds scary :) He suggests it may have been a gigantic jellyfish (p. 203).

There's a brief discussion of the ‘Devil's Sea’ near Japan on pp. 210–1, but it's unimpressive, just a rehash of the familiar claims about it; Kusche's account of the Devil's Sea (pp. 231–9 in his book) remains by far the best I've read so far.

Conclusion

Overall, I quite enjoyed this book and I think I like it better than those by Berlitz, Jeffrey, Spencer and Quasar. If I had to recommend you just one book about the Triangle, I wouldn't know what to say; but if I could recommend two, they would be this one and Kusche's The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved.

ToRead:

This book says on p. 223 that Winer “is writing his second book, entitled Cyclops, an in-depth study” of that ship's disappearance; but I can't seem to find any mention of it on ABE.
He does seem to have written several further books on more or less paranormal subjects, however: The Devil's Triangle 2 (1975); From the Devil's Triangle to the Devil's Jaw (1977); Haunted Houses (1979); More Haunted Houses (1981); Houses of Horror (1983) Ghost Ships (2000).
Vincent Gaddis: Invisible Horizons. Mentioned here e.g. on p. 35 in relation to the disappearance of five (out of seven) fighter planes near Kindley Field in late 1944, one year before the Flight 19.
Joshua Slocum: Sailing Alone Around the World. Mentioned on p. 127.

BOOK: Richard Winer, "The Devil's Triangle"

2008-02-23T18:24:00.001+01:00

Richard Winer: The Devil's Triangle. New York: Bantam Books, 1974. (First ed.: Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1972.) 0552094307. 336 pp.

When I saw the super-lurid blurbs on the front and back cover of this book (a dinky trade paperback, of course), I expected it would be a typical Bermuda Triangle volume, with emphasis on sensationalist coverage of the disappearances and probably with lots of efforts to explain them as the workings of this or that paranormal phenomenon. And the publisher's blurb on p. i cites the “Danger like dagger now” from the Raifuku Maru case, which seems to have been apocryphal, to judge by the description in Larry Kusche's The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved. [Winer suggests that the ‘dagger’ may have been the crew's effort to describe a waterspout, which they might not have seen before; p. 78.]

Anyway, I was very pleasantly surprised. The book strikes an impressive balance. It describes the events in the Triangle in an interesting and fairly detailed way, but without falling into excessive sensationalism; and it never espouses any paranormal theories about the Triangle, and in fact the author always makes an effort to point out possible natural explanations, even in cases where such explanations admittedly seem unlikely. Unlike J. W. Spencer, who wrote soberly most of the time but then mentioned matter-of-factly that it must all have been due to UFOs that are kidnapping the planes and boats, Winer here really doesn't seem to be defending any paranormal theory about the Triangle. This is about as sober a book as one can write unless one decides to become a hard-core debunker (like Kusche) dead set on explaining away each and every case as something unremarkable. See e.g. p. 10 for a nice statement of Winer's moderate but open-minded skepticism. And on p. 53: “without doubt, the greatest single cause [of plane disappearances] is running out of fuel after becoming lost or disoriented. [. . .] And if a pilot is lost, how does he radio the position where he is ditching?”

Flight 19

The first chapter is about Flight 19 and contains some interesting things that were new for me (or maybe I'd forgotten about them if I'd heard them already somewhere else). He cites a letter from Lt. Cox (the Wikipedia page about Flight 19 refers to him as Fox — I'm not sure which is correct), a pilot who communicated with Flight 19 for a while soon after they first reported being lost; Cox says quite refreshingly that “there is no mystery at all”, just a “chain of unfortunate events and plain human frailty” (p. 10).

Winer also cites a very interesting letter from Melvin Baker, a radio operator at Port Everglades who was in contact with Flight 19 throughout that fateful afternoon (pp. 12–16). Baker describes his efforts to estimate the position of Flight 19, by changing the power of his signals and testing at which point the planes became unable to hear him. However, he was unable to convince Lt. Taylor, the leader of Flight 19, to follow his directions: “I think that I never convinced him that I knew what I was doing. I pleaded with his superiors at the Lauderdale NAS [Naval Air Station] to please issue him orders to fly by my signals. They would not come on the air. They did not ever come on the air. [. . .] He finally told me he was going to change course, which he did. [. . .] The leader became more faint by the second. [. . .] He continued on in the same direction and went to his fuel exhaustion.” (Pp. 15–16.)

Baker also says (p. 14) that he and Taylor switched to the emergency radio frequency, but the rest of Flight 19 probably didn't; this might explain (p. 18) why people listening to the other plains thought that one of the other pilots took over the command of the group. From Kusche's book I had the impression that Taylor never switched to the emergency frequency, so I'm somewhat confused about what exactly the facts are about this.

The Cyclops

Chapter 5 is about the Cyclops and is wonderfully detailed, more so than in any other Bermuda Triangle book that I've read so far. However, I still think that Gian Quasar's account of the Cyclops is a bit better. Winer writes (p. 115) that the Cyclops was last heard of one day after it left Barbados, when it exchanged radio messages with some other ship and reported that the weather was fair. However, Quasar writes that “[i]nvestigation by the Navy did turn up that Cyclops was seen two days after she left Barbados. This is not commonly known. A British patrol boat on 2 occasions sighted her far off course, both on the 5th and 6th of March, and guided her back.” But Winer also has a few details that I don't remember from Quasar's account, e.g. that the Cyclops was seen leaving Barbados in a southern direction initially (as reported by the son of the British consul there, whom Capt. Worley of the Cyclos had visited during his stay on Barbados); pp. 113, 117.

Winer also mentions a few amusing coincidences regarding the name Cyclops. “It was ascertained that the Cyclops never reached Germany” (as some people had speculated); “[h]owever, a more thorough examination of the archives did reveal the name Cyclops. Far up in the North Atlantic, a U-boat commanded by a Lieutenant Doenitz, who would one day become Hitler's grand admiral, sank a Britishs hip with all hands: her name was Cyclops.” (P. 117.) I really like it how he writes this so dramatically, as if it had anything at all to do with the Cyclops that disappeared in the western Atlantic :) And later, in 1941, when the Cyclops's sister ships, the Proteus and the Nereus, disappeared (probably sunk by German subs): “once again there was mention of the Cyclops. In January, 1941, off Cape Sable in the North Atlantic, a British ship was torpedoed and sunk, taking all ninety-four aboard down with her. The ship's name was Cyclops.” Well, I guess the message is clear. Don't name your ships Cyclops, folks, or if you do, at least make sure that you insure them well and don't travel on them personally, and that there isn't a major war going on!

Joshua Slocum

There's a short chapter about the disappearance of Joshua Slocum (ch. 6), the first man to single-handedly sail around the world. He mentions an excellent tall tale from a book by Slocum. At some point during his solo voyage round the world, Slocum became sick to the point of delirium, and what is worse, a storm started at the same time. “He passed out. Sometime later he awakened. [. . .] he saw, to his astonishment, a man at the helm holding the Spray on a steady course in spite of the turbulence of the sea. The man was dressed in clothing of centuries past. The stranger introduced himself as being a member of Columbus's crew, the pilot of the Pinta. He said that he had come to guide Slocum's ship that night.” (P. 127.) The next morning, “[t]he strange helmsman was nowhere to be seen. [. . .] The sails that he [= Slocum] had been too sick to furl were sill set and pulling. They should have been ripped to shreds. [. . .] the Spray had made a good ninety miles right on course during the night. Only a helmsman could make that possible.” :)))

Incidentally, it appears that Slocum could not swim (p. 128).

The Witchcraft

Winer also mentions the well-known case of the Witchcraft, which disappeared one night in December 1967. The two men on board had sailed about a mile away from the shore to watch the lights of Miami. At some point the owner radioed that his propellers had struck something under the water and he would need a tow back to the shore; but when the Coast Guard came to the location of his boat just 18 minutes later, the boat and its occupants was nowhere to be found. Winer reports one or two curious details that I don't remember seeing in other versions of the story. In particular: “After being fully cooperative with the press throughout the first five days of the search, the coast guard suddenly refused to release any information as to exactly what was radioed by Burrack during his first and only message. A coast guard spokesman said only that Burrack sounded like he was in an ‘unusual’ situation. A coast guard legal offucer said they were not at liberty to divulge the information.” (P. 143.) “Burrack's last words, or at least the last ones that the coast guard released, were, ‘It's pretty odd. I've never seen one lie this!’ ” (P. 147.)

Now admittedly it's also worth pointing out a few things from Larry Kusche's much more skeptical portrayal of the case (The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved, pp. 200–2): “in reality, the weather was rather rough”, not really calm as it's usually said to be in the Triangle legend; and “[t]he boat was not at a specified location, as the Legend goes, but was supposed to fire a flare to show the Coast Guard where it was”; should this fail for any reason, e.g. if the boat had been swamped by water, “[o]n a dark night with the sea ‘whipped into a carpet of white foam’, the chances of finding a white boat in an unknown location would be almost nil” (p. 201). And: “Many of the statements attributed to the Coast Guard and the Navy in accounts of the Bermuda Triangle mystery have proved to be untrue in the cases where accident reports are available. Unfortunately, no such report is available for this incident” (p. 202). Incidentally, Kusche doesn't mention the Coast Guard's supposed reluctance to divulge more information, but he does mention claims of some Triangle authors that the Coast Guard supposedly said that “the boat was ‘presumed missing, but not lost at sea’ ” (p. 202).

Incidentally, Kusche spells the owner's name “Burack” rather than “Burrack”. He cites several newspaper articles about the case, so I would guess that he got the spelling right and that Winer's version is perhaps less trustworthy.

[To be continued in a few days.]

Shake that ass!

2008-02-01T20:28:00.000+01:00

Here's an auction bound for the anals annals of eBay hilarity:

Shakespeare Ass Facsimiles 11
'Work for Chimny-sweepers

Imagining an ass so filthy that it requires the attention of a chimney-sweeper is left as an exercise for the reader :)

BOOK: J. Allen Hynek, "The UFO Experience"

2008-01-27T22:33:00.000+01:00

J. Allen Hynek: The UFO Experience: A Scientific Enquiry. London: Corgi Books, 1974. (First ed.: Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1972.) 0552094307. 336 pp.

Introduction

Prof. Hynek was an astronomer who is nowadays chiefly remembered for his interest in UFOs. I don't remember when I first heard of him, but I suspect it must have been on some UFO-debunkery type of web site, for I remember that the writer of that web site went out of his way to imply, between the lines, that Hynek wasn't much of an astronomer and, presumably, that his interest in UFOs was just a way of compensating for his lack of scientific ability, and thus his work in UFOlogy isn't worth taking seriously.

That was several years ago. I wasn't ready to entirely accept that web site's point of view, but nevertheless, when I now started reading this book by Hynek, I approached it with a certain caution, waiting all the time when the wacky stuff would make its appearance. But, remarkably enough, it never did. I found this book to be impressively sober, measured, balanced, carefully considered — much more so than I would have dared to expect from a book about the UFOs. I don't know if his later work on the subject of UFOs is more wacky than this book, but if it isn't, I cannot help but conclude that Hynek is being unjustly maligned by the radical anti-UFO crowd.

Hynek's association with UFOlogy

As is well known, the first big waves of UFO sightings in the late 1940s made enough of an impression on the authorities that the U.S. Air Force started an official investigation into the phenomenon, mostly with a view to finding out whether the UFOs presented a threat to U.S. security (p. 212; e.g. if they should turn out to be a Soviet secret weapon). These investigations went through several changes of names (Project Sign, 1947–9; Project Grudge, 1949–52; Project Blue Book, 1952–66) but somewhere relatively soon along the way, the Air Force pretty much lost interest in these matters.

It became clear that the sightings were not due to a Soviet secret weapon, or indeed to anything else obviously hostile, and by establishing that, the Air Force felt that it had done its job and didn't have to keep on scratching its head in an effort to find out what the sightings were actually caused by (pp. 213, 216). At the same time, due to increasingly lurid coverage of the UFO phenomena in the press, the idea of studying the UFO sightings seriously had quickly lost whatever tiny amount of respectability it may have initially possessed. Thus, the Air Force investigators eventually stopped their efforts to seriously study the UFO sightings that were being reported to them, and were content to just ridicule and explain away each sighting as quickly as possible, e.g. by concluding that the observers really saw Venus/a meteor/an airplane/a baloon/etc. and mistakenly thought it was something unusual (such as a flying saucer); p. 219. “[P]articularly puzzling” cases “were frequently evaluated as ‘Unidentified’ and put aside. The objective had been attained: the UFO had been identified as ‘Unidentified’.” (P. 220.)

Hynek's association with these projects started when they hired him as an external scientific consultant for Project Sign — they anticipated that many UFO sightings were actually misidentified astronomical phenomena, so they wanted an astronomer to help them evaluate the reports of the sightings. This book, The UFO Experience, is based on Hynek's observations during the course of these projects, and ultimately on his disappointments with the way these investigations eventually turned out.

The message of this book

Basically, the main message of this book is that, in Hynek's opinion, the UFO sightings are a subject worthy of a proper scientific investigation (and not of being simply ridiculed and ignored, which is how most scientists tended to treat them), and that they weren't being given this treatment by the Air Force's Project Blue Book.

I entirely agree with the first half of this message — in my opinion, even if it would turn out that the UFO sightings are nothing but misidentified baloons, hallucinations and outright lies, this would still be a subject worth investigating, simply because the sightings are so numerous and attract such attention on the part of the public. Regarding the second half of the message, the part about the problems with the way Project Blue Book and related efforts functioned (or rather failed to function as it should have), I of course don't have any other information about these projects, but I see no obvious reason to doubt Hynek's claims here.

They certainly seem convincing enough. As far as I'm concerned, the only people whom I'd expect to dislike the book would be the hardline debunkers who want to simply treat the subject of UFOs with ridicule and are determined to laugh at every other approach to this subject, no matter how careful or unbiased.

Criticism of Project Blue Book

In several places in this book, Hynek points out problems with the way the Air Force's UFO investigations were organized. (See ch. 11 and appendix 4, containing Hynek's detailed criticism of Project Blue Book, which he wrote for Col. Sleeper from the US Air Force.)

The Blue Book staff was too small and usually lacked scientific training (p. 312); and it had to spend too much of its time on public relations and too little on actually investigating the reports of UFO sightings. Some problems were due to the strictly hierarchical organization of the military.

For example, typically a project such as Blue Book would be led by a relatively low-ranking officer who was chiefly interested in promotion and/or retirement (pp. 232, 327). Once it was clear to him that the higher-ups regarded the whole UFO business as ridiculous and weren't interested in seeing it investigated seriously, he naturally tended to discourage rather than encourage his staff from investigating the UFO reports seriously — why should he risk his promotion by annoying the people higher up in the hierarchy?

Additionally, since the officers involved with Project Blue Book were all relatively low-ranking ones, they had little influence when it was necessary to work with other parts of the air force (“a captain cannot command a colonel or a major at another base to obtain information for him”, p. 227; see also p. 328).

The Blue Book investigators often neglected to gather more data about their sightings (p. 221), e.g. by interviewing witnesses (such interviews might provide valuable additional details about the sightings), or did so only after a considerable delay; they rarely visited the locations of the sightings personally; when talking to witnesses, their tone often left no doubt of the fact that they thought the whole matter inane and that in their view the witness must have been imagining things, or making them up (“ ‘Tell me about this mirage you saw’ ”, p. 135).

And: “obvious cases of misinterpretation [. . .] Blue Book would take some pains to establish for the record;” but cases “which were open to question and contained the possibility that something ‘genuinely new and empirical’ might be contained in it, were treated with little or no interest.” (P. 139; see also p. 222.)

The project also worked in an unnecessary atmosphere of secrecy, even though many of the UFO reports didn't contain any sensitive military information (p. 216). They didn't even let Hynek, their own scientific advisor, browse through their files — he was allowed to receive a UFO report after requesting it explicitly, but how to learn that the report existed in the first place was entirely up to him. Similarly they refused to let him make copies of the reports on their xerox machine (p. 311).

The Blue Book team initially classified many cases as “possible/probable aircraft/balloon/etc.“; but later, when compiling their statistics, they simply counted such cases as if they were definitely identified — as if classifiers such as “possible” didn't imply a considerable amount of uncertainty! (P. 313.) Similarly, for some cases they concluded that insufficient data was available; but they didn't count these among the unidentified cases when compiling their statistics (p. 315). This allowed them to brag to the press that as little as 5% (or less) of their cases remained unidentified (p. 315–7).

Another thing which Hynek emphasizes several times is that an individual UFO sighting can always be somehow explained away as a fluke, an error, a hallucination; but when you get lots and lots of similar reports, patterns start to appear and they aren't explained away so easily any more. He suggested that they should store some information about the sightings in a computer for easier analysis (this sort of thing would be called data mining nowadays), but such suggestions were “summarily turned down” by the air force (p. 229), nor was the Condon committee much more welcoming (pp. 248–9). (He calls again for more statistical analysis on pp. 269 and 280.)

“So certain is Blue Book of its working hypothesis [i.e. that nothing unusual is going on behind the UFO sightings] that it reminds one of the doctor who was so certain that all abdominal swellings were the result of tumors that he failed to recognize that his patient was pregnant.” (P. 321.) :))

Criticism of the Condon report

The air force's involvement with UFOs officially ended with the Condon report, published in 1968, which investigated less than a hundred UFO reports (out of thousands that were available in the Blue Book files) and concluded that nothing about them suggests that the subject is worthy of further study. Here in The UFO Experience, Hynek includes some fairly serious criticism of the Condon committee and its work (ch. 12).

Had they studied a larger number of cases, and not just recent ones, patterns would become evident, which their approach overlooked (p. 242). They didn't discard, from their sample, cases that are easily explained as misidentified astronomical or meteorological phenomena; while, of course, the interesting thing for a UFO study are only those cases that *cannot* be easily explained in this way (pp. 242, 253–4). They downplayed the number of unexplained cases, e.g. by “playing down or ignoring what was unexplained and playing up possible explanations even when the detailed analysis all but rules them out” (from a paper by W. T. Powers, p. 260).

Hynek even includes a letter of resignation from one of the committee members, Mary Louise Armstrong, indicating that Bob the project coordinator was doing a very poor job and wasn't really interested in investigating the UFO cases seriously.

In several places in the book, Hynek mentions how unfortunate it is that, with the termination of the Air Force's projects, there is no central place to which people could submit reports of their UFO sightings. He says that with some colleagues they will be accepting such reports for purposes of scientific record (pp. 72–3, 270) — well, soon after the publication of this book, he took these efforts a step further and founded the Center for UFO Studies, which is apparently still active.

Here's an example from pp. 103–4, Hynek's somewhat exasperated summary of the conclusions of a certain Project Blue Book report: “the observers were reliable, the radar operator was competent, and the object couldn't be identified: therefore it was an airplane. In the face of such reasoning one might well ask whether it would ever be possible to discover the existence of new empirical phenomena in any area of human experience.”

Hynek's classification of UFO sightings

Anyway, apart from these things, the main part of this book presents Hynek's efforts to analyze the UFO sightings that reached him during his years of involvement with the Air Force's projects. After discarding the sightings that could be explained as planets, meteors, airplanes, etc., there still remained a nontrivial number of reports that weren't so easy to explain. To these he tried to assign a “strangeness rating”, measuring “the number of information bits the report contains, each of which is difficult to explain in common-sense terms” (p. 42) and a “proability rating” (measuring how likely it is that “the reporters could have erred” in their claims, depending on what we know about them and about the circumstances of their sighting; p. 43). In the remainder of the book he focuses on sightings with a sufficiently high probability rating; for example, most of the time, he deliberately excludes reports that involve just one witness rather than several, no matter how reliable the single witness in question is.

In terms of content, he divides the sightings into distant and close encounters. The distant ones can be summarized as either “nocturnal lights” if seen at night, or as “daytime discs” if seen during the day; additionally there are some radar-only sightings, but he ignores these because it would be too difficult to assess their reliability.

For close encounters, he describes the now-classic division into close encounters of the first, second and third kind — if I understand correctly, this is in fact the first book where this division was employed. First kind means that the UFO was just observed; second kind means that some physical consequences were also noted (e.g. car breakdowns seem to be especially common, but he also mentions scorched areas of vegetation, p. 165, and even landing marks, p. 167); third kind means that occupants were reportedly seen in the UFO. (He treats this latter group, close encounters of the third kind, with great skepticism, especially reports of contact with the aliens, which he says invariably come from lunatics.)

He then dedicates a chapter to each of these different groups of sightings and describes a few typical examples. One thing that I find particularly commendable is his emphasis on “hard” data, i.e. things such as how quickly the UFOs moved, and in what direction; how large they were, what color, what shape, what sort of lights did they have, etc.

There's a particularly amusing case of a close encounter of the first kind on pp. 130–4; on April 16, 1966, a UFO was seen by several people in Ohio, including several members of the Portage County police department, some of whom even chased it in a car “at speeds sometimes as high as 105 miles per hour” (p. 133).

Of the close encounters of the third kind, the one that I find the most interesting involved a missionary and a number of natives on Papua New Guinea on June 26–27, 1959 (p. 186). Hynek also includes an appendix in which Donald Menzel argues that the whole thing could be explained as a misinterpretation and a sighting of Venus, but Hynek points out several problems with Menzel's argument (p. 191).

Conclusion

In the conclusion of another case of the third count, Hynek says: “We are not, of course, justified in concluding [. . .] that real humanoids were seen. As in other aspects of the entire UFO phenomenon, the call is clearly for more study.” (P. 196.) See also pp. 242 and 247, where he makes it clear that UFOs do not have to mean that we are being visited by extraterrestrial intelligences; and, above all, we don't have enough data to either prove or disprove the ET hypothesis (p. 274). I'm emphasizing this to show how sober this book is: Hynek doesn't commit himself to any pro-alien views, he just argues that the UFOs as a phenomenon merit a closer study. This is also the main message with which he ends the book (ch. 13 and the epilogue).

ToRead:

Jacques Vallée: Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers. Mentioned here on p. 196 as discussing the resemblance of aliens (as described by people in encounters of the third kind) to the ‘little people’ of various kinds, found in the folklore and mythology all over the world.
John Fuller: The Interrupted Journey. Mentioned on p. 197; it's about the case of Betty and Barney Hill, one of the first famous contactee/abduction cases.
Charles Bowen (ed.): Humanoids: A Survey of Worldwide Reports of Landings of Unconventional Aerial Objects and Their Occupants. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1969. Mentioned on p. 205.
David Saunders, Roger Harkins: UFOs? Yes!. Mentioned on p. 263 as containing “[t]he membership of the [Condon] committee and an illuminating history of its two-year existence”. Saunders was fired from the committee by Condon.
David Branch, Robert Klinn: Inquiry at Redlands. A close encounter of the first kind, seen at Redlands, California, 4 February 1968 (pp. 321–2).

BOOK: Donald Keyhoe, "Flying Saucers from Outer Space"

2008-01-05T19:27:00.000+01:00

Donald E. Keyhoe: Flying Saucers from Outer Space. London: Tandem, 1970. (First ed.: NY: Henry Holt & Co., 1954.) 256 pp.

I first heard of Keyhoe some time ago when I found an e-text of his 1950 book, The Flying Saucers Are Real, on the sacred-texts.com web site. Apparently its copyright had not been renewed and it ended up in the public domain. I found it readable enough (if not terribly exciting), so when I recently noticed Keyhoe's Flying Saucers from Outer Space for sale cheaply on eBay, I decide to give this second book a try as well.

Flying Saucers from Outer Space is very much a sequel of The Flying Saucers are Real; they are both written in the more or less the same style and use the same investigative approach. Keyhoe keeps on tirelessly running around and interviewing people from various governmental agencies, chiefly the Air Force; he is constantly pestering them for more information, asking them to release documents and reports, etc. Many of these conversations are then reported practically verbatim in this book, in a suitably colloquial 1950s style with a sprinkling of military lingo here and there. Thus it isn't so much a story of ‘these are the facts about the UFOs’ but rather ‘this is how I investigated the UFOs’. I found this style of writing rather boring and I couldn't even be bothered to remember who exactly his interviewee is at any given point.

The gist of the story is that Keyhoe has no doubts that the UFOs are flying saucers from outer space, and he's trying to find out how much the Air Force and similar agencies know about them, and how they intend to present this information to the public. He finds that the opinion in these agencies is divided; some people there believe that the UFOs are flying saucers, others believe that they are just optical illusions; and those who believe that these are saucers then disagree among themselves as to how much of this should be told to the public, and how, so as not to cause a panic. Throughout most of the book, the upper hand clearly belongs to the side that wants to downplay the flying saucer theory and to reassure the public that nothing unusual is going on. However, at the very end (ch. 14), the Air Force sends Keyhoe's publishers an official statement that practically amounts to admitting that the UFOs are from outer space (p. 244). Keyhoe ends the book with an epilogue calling upon the government to honestly share its knowledge of the UFOs with the public and to step up its investigation of this phenomenon.

The UFO incidents described in this book are mostly fairly sober, as far as such things go — no lurid abductions and the like; most of the cases involve UFOs (of various shapes and sizes) that were observed by pilots and often also by radar operators. From the radar sightings, it was sometimes possible to estimate their speed, which could go up to 10,000 mph; the accelerations were likewise very impressive and well beyond the reach of human technology. It would seem that the UFOs have a particular interest in military facilities, especially nuclear ones.

Keyhoe also includes some discussion about what the intentions of the UFOs may be. He presents several possible explanations without quite committing to any of them (which I think is commentable): they may be hostile, and reconnoitring for an attack; they may be friendly, trying to assess the situation before making contact; they may be looking for a planet to colonize, perhaps because their own is becoming uninhabitable; or they may be merely disinterested observers, just trying to see how humankind is progressing technologically.

An interesting reminder of how strong the cold-war paranoia was in the 1950s appears in Keyhoe's epilogue (p. 246), where he mentions, as another argument in favour of informing the public of the extraterrestrial origin of the UFOs, the possibility that the Soviet Union (which would soon “be able to stage a mass A-bomb attack”) “[b]y starting false rumours of Russian saucer attacks, they might cause stampedes from cities, block defence highways, and paralyse communications just before an A-bomb raid”!

All in all, I found this book fairly boring and didn't particularly enjoy reading it, mainly because of the style — a long series of interviews, press conferences, and UFO incidents. In a way it's nice to be able to follow Keyhoe just as he is investigating these things, but I personally am really not that interested in the course of his investigation, just in the results.

For me, the best thing about its book was that it mentions many sober UFO sightings. I still think it's unlikely that we are being visited by extraterrestrials, but I nevertheless cannot help wondering what is the explanation behind the sightings described here. Surely they cannot all be explained away by hallucinations, optical illusions and deceit.

Anyway, before buying this or any other Keyhoe book I suggest that you take a look at the free on-line text of his Flying Saucers are Real to find out if you enjoy his style.

BOOK: Larry Kusche, "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved" (cont.)

2007-12-30T20:10:00.000+01:00

Lawrence David Kusche: The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved. London: New English Library, 1975. 252 pp.

[Continued from last week.]

Bill Verity, a solo sailor, is sometimes reported as having disappeared in the Triangle near Puerto Rico. However, it turns out that he was merely blown off course by a hurricane, and turned up a few weeks later in San Salvador. Kusche even spoke to him by phone (p. 212). Similarly, the cabin cruiser Jillie Bean ‘disappeared’ in 1970, was sought for three days, not found — and then it sailed into port, the three crewmembers “were in no trouble and had no idea they were being sought” (p. 214). In short, anything unusual that happens in the area of the Triangle is quickly blamed by some authors on the supposed paranormal phenomena inside it (p. 230).

There's an chapter on the sinking of the tanker V. A. Fogg in 1972. It turns out that the tale was much embellished in the telling, but in this case the events were recent enough that Kusche was able to find out the truth directly from the people who were involved in the discovery of the ship (p. 225). Another interesting example is the sinking of the twin ships Norse Variant and Anita in 1973. They would have been perfect Triangle material if it hadn't been for the inconvenient fact that one of the crewmen of the Norse Variant survived and explained what happened (“a 40- by 40-foot hatch cover had been ripped off by the storm” and the ship sank in five minutes); p. 226.

There's also an interesting chapter on the Marine Sulphur Queen. Although the disappearance has not been definitely explained, there certainly seems to be no shortage of possibilities of explosion and structural failure (pp. 177–83).

The 63-foot fishing boat Sno' Boy sunk in unexplained circumstances in 1963. However, the event becomes a little less mysterious when we learn that on board the ship there were 55 people (the ship was intended for seven), not to mention 19 tons of ice :))) (p. 185).

Airplane-related cases

Pro-Triangle accounts of airplane disappearances often emphasize the fact that no debris has been found. But in several of these cases it turns out that the search started relatively late, because it took a while before the plane was missed at all; besides searching cannot be done at night, which sometimes causes yet more delay. Sometimes pilots of small planes neglect to file flight plans (where they would have to state the expected time of arrival, and a search would then be started as soon as the plane became overdue). And in the case of the passenger plane Star Ariel, flying from Bermuda to Kingston, the pilot told the Bermuda air traffic controller very early in the flight that he would be communicating with the Kingston air traffic controller from then on; Bermuda said OK, but Kingston never heard from him (p. 148). The problem is that Kingston didn't expect to hear from him until much later in the flight anyway, so that it was hours before anybody noticed that Star Ariel wasn't radioing its hourly position reports as it was supposed to. Even when the search eventually started, nobody had any clear idea of where along its course to look for the plane. Other cases of planes where the search started late were a Martin Marlin in 1956 (p. 165) and a KB-60 in 1962 (p. 172); however, in neither of these two cases was it possible to determine what exactly happened to the planes, so that in a way it wouldn't be fair to say that these two cases are “solved”. Something similar can be said of several small planes that disappeared in January 1967 (p. 199).

The chapter on Flight 19 is wonderfully detailed. In Kusche's view the whole event is rather mundane; a number of little things went wrong, all of which combined to result in the accident as we know it (p. 118). “Taylor [the leader of the group] had transferred to Fort Lauderdale not long before the flight” and wasn't yet quite familiar with the area; he couldn't decide whether he was west or east of Florida; “as a result he changed direction a number of times” (p. 115); he also stubbornly refused to change his radio frequency to 3000 kHz, although this would considerably improve the chances of successful communication with the ground stations (pp. 108, 115); the weather was also deteriorating throughout the afternoon (pp. 105, 116). “The dilemma was not that the men couldn't tell in which direction they were going, but rather that they couldn't decide which direction was the proper one to take.” (P. 116.) At some point the ground stations were able to compute the approximate position of Flight 19, but weren't able to report it to the pilots; first there was a delay because of a broken teletype machine, then the planes were no longer responding to messages from the ground (apparently they couldn't hear them, even though the ground stations could still hear the conversations between the planes); p. 110.

Regarding the Martin Mariner that disappeared as it went to search for Flight 19, Kusche points out that “Mariners were nicknamed ‘flying gas tanks’ because of the fumes that were often present, and a crewman sneaking a cigarette, or a spark from any source, could have caused the explosion.” (Pp. 116–7.) In the transcripts of the conversations quoted by Kusche, there isn't any sign of the statements commonly attributed to the Flight 19 pilots by the pro-Triangle authors (along the lines of “We don't know which way is west. Everything is wrong . . . strange . . . we can't be sure of any direction. Even the ocean doesn't look as it should!”, p. 99).

Miscellaneous

There's an extremely interesting chapter on the “Devil's sea” — an area near Japan with supposedly similar characteristics as the Bermuda Triangle. Kusche found that all mentions of the story in the West trace back to a handful of New York Times articles from 1952–55. He then made extensive enquiries in Japan and little by little found a mundane enough explanation for the whole thing. One ship was sunk by underwater volcanic activity (p. 233); several other ships were small fishing vessels and, as was common in those poverty-stricken years soon after the war, they were in poor condition and tended to lack radio equipment, so that disappearances all around Japan were nothing unusual (p. 234). The term ‘Devil's sea’ is almost unknown in Japan and seems to be a local appellation for a certain area of the sea (location and size not very clear); pp. 235, 237. “The story is based on nothing more than the loss of a few fishing boats twenty years ago in a 750-mile stretch of ocean over a period of five years. The tale has been reported so many times that it has come to be accepted as fact.” (P. 239.)

Finally there's a chapter about Ivan Sanderson's “Vile Vortex” theory, i.e. the idea that there are twelve “anomalic regions” around the world, one being the Bermuda Triangle, another the Devil's Sea, the others located around the world so as to form the vertices of an icosahedron. Kusche's debunking of this ridiculous bullshit is truly a delight to read (p. 242). “The writings that tell of the Vile Vortices show that the researchers first ‘suspected’ where the areas were and that evidence of any kind of ‘incident’ had ever occurred in the area was proof that it was ‘anomalous’. [. . .] All the parts, assumed or ‘proven’, were then joined to form the corners of equilateral triangles, and the creators marveled at the ‘orderliness of Nature’. ” (P. 242.)

Conclusion

All in all, this was a very, very interesting book. It was great to see how many of the events commonly mentioned in the Triangle lore actually have fairly probable everyday explanations. It was also amusing to see some examples of how the peddlers of the paranormal often treat the reports of anything even remotely unusual within the Triangle, inflating and embellishing and obscuring the stories beyond all reasonable bounds. And, finally, it was also very interesting to see that some few events nevertheless remain mysterious and quite unexplained. This, of course, does not mean that there must be any paranormal phenomenon at work behind them; it does, however, mean that these are the cases that are the most deserving of our attention and curiosity. So for me perhaps the greatest value of a book such as this one is that it helps you separate the really unexplained events from the ones that are only presented as such by the unscrupulous (or naive) promotors of the Triangle.

ToRead:

Rupert Gould: The Stargazer Talks (1944). Mentioned here on pp. 52–3 (“Gould was a skeptical and dilligent researcher who made authentic attempts to solve the mysteries that he encountered”).
Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall: The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. Mentioned on p. 208. Crowhurst was participating in a sailing race but his boat, the Teignmouth Electron, was eventually found abandoned. It turned out that he had been cheating during the race and, realizing that this would certainly be discovered, he ended up committing suicide.
Gian Quasar's criticism of Kusche's book: link 1, link 2. Quasar later wrote his own pro-Triangle book, Into the Bermuda Triangle, where he peddles paranormal theories no less shamelessly than Berlitz, but at the same time he seems to have made honest and very thorough efforts at collecting archive material related to the various Triangle incidents, so I am inclined to think that there is some merit in his criticism of Kusche (although he is perhaps sometimes too hard on him).

BOOK: Larry Kusche, "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery - Solved"

2007-12-22T19:35:00.000+01:00

Lawrence David Kusche: The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved. London: New English Library, 1975. 252 pp.

Introduction

Among the better-known books about the Bermuda Triangle, this is (as far as I know) the only skeptical one. Kusche's main message is that most of the incidents that are often described by pro-Triangle authors as mysterious and unexplained (and presumably in need of a paranormal explanation) turn out to be not quite so mysterious if you look at the known facts closely enough. The pro-Triangle authors, according to Kusche, often overlook (or perhaps wilfully ignore) facts that would make the events less mysterious, and they often copy their stories from one another (possibly also embellishing them in the process) rather than doing their own research from their original sources.

This book is divided into a number of short chapters, each of which discusses one particular Triangle-related incident. Kusche first describes each event as it has been presented in the pro-Triangle literature; then he shows extensive excerpts from original reports of the event: sometimes newspaper articles, sometimes reports of official bodies such as the navy or the coast guard. (I was especially impressed by the huge amount of effort that he clearly must have spent in searching through old newspapers — sometimes he was rewarded with some interesting facts, but sometimes he sadly has to conclude that after searching through half a year's run of a certain newspaper he couldn't find any reports of this or that missing ship.) Anyway, based on such reports and newspaper articles, he is often able to conclude that the event has been substantially misrepresented by the pro-Triangle authors and that it is not quite so mysterious as they have made it appear to be.

I enjoyed this book a lot; it's a very pleasant antidote to the typical pro-Triangle authors, who tend to have much less patience for studying (and citing!) original sources. However, it still seems to me that the title of the book is a bit of an exaggeration. He doesn't really provide a solution for all the accidents described here. For some he is simply content to show that the event cannot have possibly occurred anywhere in or near the Bermuda Triangle. This shows that some pro-Triangle author was clearly very sloppy to have discussed it, but the accident itself may remain relatively poorly explained (e.g. the Freya, which was found abandoned on the Pacific coast of Mexico, pp. 56–7). Likewise, he mentions the case of a British transport plane, which disappeared in 1953 and is sometimes associated with the Triangle; the event actually happened 900 miles north of the Triangle, and although the exact cause is unknown, it is known that weather was bad and it may have been a perfectly ordinary accident (p. 155).

Unexplained events

For some events he wasn't able to find any good explanation whatsoever. For example, the chapter on the Mary Celeste concludes that “today the fate of the occupants of the Mary Celeste is still as much a mystery as the day the ship was found deserted at sea” (p. 44). It's true that at least he presented a good thorough overview of such facts as are available, and thus the chapter about the Mary Celeste was still quite interesting and well worth reading; but nevertheless this particular event remains an unsolved mystery.

Likewise he says on p. 59: “The fate of Joshua Slocum and the Spray is truly a mystery of the sea.” But he at least mentions some reports that neither Slocum nor his ship were in as good a shape as on some previous voyages; solo sailing is a risky sport, and he may have finally had an accident the likes of which he had been successfully avoiding all the time until then.

On pp. 76 he says: “The story of the Carroll A. Deering is unique in maritime history, and it can truly be said that the more that is learned about it, the more mysterious it becomes.”

“The disappearance of the Star Tiger thwarts all explanation as each of the suggested solutions seems too unlikely to have occurred. It is truly a modern mystery of the air. [. . .] In any case, whatever happened to the Star Tiger will forever remain a mystery.” (P. 132.)

Another case that remains a mystery is the disappearance of a Super Constellation plane belonging to the U.S. Navy, with 42 people on board, in 1954. Kusche includes two newspaper articles, but neither he nor the Navy seems to have formed any concrete idea as to what exactly happened to the plane (p. 158). The disappearance of a C-119 plane in 1965 is likewise unexplained (p. 193).

Kusche mentions the yacht Connemara IV., found abandoned in 1954, but doesn't provide any explanation what exactly happened to its crew. However, he says that a hurricane passed through the area.

The nuclear submarine Scorpion disappeared in 1968; it was later found, but the cause of its sinking was not ascertained. Kusche mentions two other disappeared submarines on p. 206. But admittedly these are hardly Triangle-type incidents; there's no reason to assume that anything else than accidents are involved here.

The disappearance of a the 338-foot freighter El Caribe in 1971 does not seem to have been adequately explained either.

There are also some cases, especially older ones, where he wasn't able to find first-hand reports about an accident, usually because the mentions of that accident in the pro-Triangle books are so brief and don't contain enough details. See e.g. pp. 54 (the Lotta, the Viego and the Miramon), 83 (the Stavenger), 216 (the Elizabeth — this one is fairly recent, in 1971). The disappearance of a Piper Apache airplane over Nassau in 1962 seems to have been invented out of whole cloth, as Kusche found when he wrote the director of civil aviation at Nassau Airport (p. 173).

Criticism of pro-Triangle authors

An interesting example of how the pro-Triangle authors copy from one another is the story of a drifter found by another ship, the Ellen Austin. Kusche found that all mentions of this event can be traced back to a 1944 book, The Stargazer Talks by Rupert Gould (p. 52). Kusche wasn't able to found any earlier information about the ship, and Gould doesn't report where he got his information either. So this event remains a mystery, but at least the reader can have a better perspective of the current state of our knowledge about it.

In several cases it turns out that the weather was worse than one would imagine after reading about those cases in the pro-Triangle books. See e.g. pp. 80 (the Cotopaxi), 81 (the Suduffco), 135 (the disappearance of Al Snider), 154 (the Sandra), 169 (the Revonoc), 201 (the Witchcraft).

Some interesting ship-related cases

The chapter on the Cyclops is very interesting. Kusche proposes a possible mundane explanation for the ship's fate: there exist reports of a heavy storm near Norfolk, the Cyclops' destination, just around the time when the ship would have been nearing that port. This might very well explain the ship's disappearance (pp. 66–7). Regarding its sister ships, the Proteus and Nereus, which disappeared in 1941, the most likely explanation seems to be that they were sunk by German submarines (p. 95).

There's an interesting if very short section on the Japanese ship, Raifuku Maru, which is often said to have sent a very weird request for help by radio, something along the lines of “It's like a dagger! Come quick!” (P. 77.) Kusche cites a more sober report: the ship was battered and sunk by a heavy storm; its mayday message turns out to have been “Now very danger. Come quick.”; the ship that heard the message reached the Raifuku Maru before the latter had sunk completely; however, it wasn't possible to rescue any of its crew. At any rate there doesn't seem to be much of a mystery left in this story. See also this page for more details. Incidentally, even if the “dagger” version of the text is real, it isn't necessary to resort to any paranormal explanations for it — it may be simply an error in translation. If serious Japanese companies after sober reflection come up with the stuff that you see on engrish.com, surely we can excuse a distressed and overwhelmed radio operator on board a sinking ship for producing a slightly garbled message.

There's an interesting chapter about La Dahama, which was supposedly found drifting and crewless by another ship (the Aztec), towed into port, whereupon the finders learned that several days earlier, yet another ship (the Rex) saw La Dahama sink and had even rescued its crew. Well, the newspaper reports found by Kusche explain this mystery in a much more mundane way: “The passengers on the Rex did not watch the yacht sink, they left it in a ‘sinking condition’ in a calm sea. The captain said the boat would not float more than two days, but the water was so still that it lasted at least five days, when it was discovered by the Aztec.” (Pp. 88–9.) But I wish that La Dahama's captain had left a note somewhere in his cabin, before transferring to the Rex; just a couple of lines saying “we're all moving to the Rex, bound for such and such a port” — surely he had enough time for that, and then there would never have been any mystery about it at all.

[To be continued in a few days.]

BOOK: J. W. Spencer, "No Earthly Explanation"

2007-12-15T19:14:00.000+01:00

John Wallace Spencer: No Earthly Explanation. New York: Bantam Books, 1975. (First ed.: Phillips Publishing Co., 1974.) x + 179 pp.

Introduction

A few weeks ago I read Spencer's Limbo of the Lost, a book about the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle (see my post about it). I thought it was a fairly good book, as far as pro-Triangle books go; Spencer wrote quite soberly, always emphasized the facts and didn't waste much time on discussing silly paranormal theories (unlike e.g. Berlitz in his Bermuda Triangle).

However, Spencer also left no doubt of the fact that he believed that the incidents in the Bermuda Triangle are connected to UFOs. His main idea was that aliens must be regarding humankind as a kind of subject of a scientific study, one that they want to observe but otherwise leave it unaffected. This is why they make no clear and official contact with governments, but on the other hand they do occassionally kidnap a few people and a ship or an airplane for their research purposes.

Of course all of this is perfectly bizarre, but in Limbo of the Lost Spencer mentions it just briefly and very matter-of-factly, as if this was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Anyway, I saw that he later wrote another book, No Earthly Explanation, in which he discusses these UFO theories of his at greater length. After the good experience with Limbo of the Lost, I didn't hesitate to give this other book a try as well.

Unfortunately, I was greatly disappointed. I was looking forward to seeing what sort of yarn he would spin to justify his claims about UFOs and the alien activity, but in this book I found nothing of the kind. It's little more than a mixture of dogma, unsubstantiated claims and irrelevant scientific facts.

One of the strengths of Limbo of the Lost was its emphasis on facts and details about the incidents in the Bermuda Triangle; I was hoping that here he would present notable UFO-related incidents in a similar way, but in fact only the first chapter (pp. 1–38) focuses on these things. And even here I found that the bare relation of facts was just barely enough to keep me interested.

Touched by His Noodly Appendage...

Things take a turn for the worse in the next chapter, where Spencer turns out to be a staunch creationist. He bluntly rejects the theory of evolution in just a few sentences (pp. 40–1), using the sort of half-baked ‘arguments’ that were undoubtedly already laughed at during Darwin's lifetime, let alone now. He describes his position as ‘divine evolution’: “through special creation each species or organism was originally created independently by God. Through the process of evolution, at a specific, proper moment in time, every basic life-form was specially created.” (P. 40.)

“The entire theory [of evolution] is composed mainly of gaps loosely woven by broken sequences. Most scientists are aware [i.e. Spencer is implying that most scientists disagree with the theory of evolution!] that new species of life and nearly all new categories suddenly appear without any lead-up by known gradual evolution.” (P. 40.) “Changes to certain life forms do occur but they never produce new structures such as feathers or horns. Mutations like color, length, and shape have been noted but extra legs, wings, or other structural changes have never been observed. To the best of my knowledge, not one scientist has come forward with fish eggs about to hatch into amphibians; a reptile growing even one feather; an ape or monkey that gave birth to a primitive-type man.” (Pp. 40–1.)

Really, this is so silly, so unsophisticated; I don't really care much for the creationism-vs-evolution debates, but I don't doubt that these things have progressed considerably since e.g. Darwin's time. A kind of evolution works in the sphere of ideas too, after all; under the pressure of the defenders of evolutionary theory, the creationists have been obliged to resort to ever more intricate and subtle (though undoubtedly still just as wrong as ever) arguments. But anyway, what I'm trying to stress is that in Spencer's book there is none of that sophistication; his creationism is just creationism 101, and I do not see how it can hold any interest whatsoever for a present-day reader. But this is not the main reason why this part of the book disappointed me; if I wanted to read good evolution-vs-creationism debates, I would pick up some other book anyway, or maybe I should have gone and read the talk.origins newsgroup; the big disappointment for me here was the fact that Spencer was a creationist at all. In Limbo of the Lost, as well as in many parts of No Earthly Explanation, he gives the impression of being a reasonable, science-minded person, but here in this chapter he writes like a dogmatic with a downright medievally closed mind.

Hilarity ensues

Unlike some creationists, however, Spencer is not of the ‘young Earth’ type. He agrees that the Earth is approx. five billion years old, and includes a perfectly decent section about “dating techniques” (in geology, not in romance :); pp. 46–47) and an overview of the geological history of the Earth (pp. 48–54, interspersed with passages from the Genesis, selected and arranged so that they seem to agree with the findings of geological science) and the evolution of hominids (pp. 55–60). These last two things contain a few real gems, such as: “Some people believe an absurd story about birds evolving from reptiles, that the earliest type of primitive birds were really flying dinosaurs which throughout the centuries developed feathers./ The major flaw in that theory is that following the appearance of the first birds, the next forty-five million years in the bird's evolutionary process are lost.” (P. 52.)

And: “The highest order of life to develop so far in the animal kingdom is a different tpye of mamal, ‘primates’ that live in trees. Prior to this creature all mammals gave birth to their young through an egg-laying process. Primates are born alive through a structure called the ‘placenta’ and are cared for by the mother until the offspring are strong and wise enough to take care of themselves.” (Pp. 53–4.) In the immortal words of a famous webcomic artist: dear sweet mother of god, noooooo! *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*

He cites two anthropologists who say that they have no idea where the Cro-Magnon man came from, and merrily concludes that “with the foregoing factual information provided it is quite obvious that man, alone and unaided, could not have undergone such a transformation, that is, to jump the evolutionary span from late Homo erectus and Neanderthal man to Homo sapiens sapiens. Therefore, the only logical explanation is that beings from some other advanced civilization outside of this world, who had much earlier evolved into Homo sapiens sapiens, came to this planet with the sole intent to assist Earth man in compressing the evolutionary scale by millions of years, probably through interbreeding.” (P. 59.)

Oh, yeah. The super-advanced aliens popped into their saucers and travelled billions of miles just to help us lonely benighted earthlings get it on in some hot interplanetary man-on-alien action. Yup. Quite obvious. It doesn't get much more logical as that. “Honey, this is not what it looks like — this lady in my bed is an alien who's come all the way from Planet X495Z27, and we were just compressing the evolutionary scale — why are you getting so worked up over a little thing like that?”

(P.S. Diagonal copulation comes to mind... :])

Yet another ancient astronaut theory

In chapter 3 he suggests that the aliens also influenced the next big step in the progress of humankind, namely the rise of the first civilizations (p. 62). He describes the early history of Sumerian, Egyptian, Indian and Chinese civilizations, and falls into the familiar trap of claiming that the Egyptian civilization mysteriously sprung into life fully-formed and advanced (p. 64). How little has changed since the days of Donnelly! Except that he blamed it on Atlantis, and Spencer blames it on the aliens.

Another fine example of the rigorous style of argumentation that is such a strong point of this book: “How could the ancient Chinese discover and develop a medical procedure as complex as Acupuncture without the benefit of a higher education and the research facilities of a medical university. The answer is — they could not; but we know they did... but how?” (P. 70.)

And, on the Indus valley civilization: “They communicated by writing as indicated by a small amount of written material that was found. The strange part is that twentieth century scholars are still unable to decipher their writings.” (P. 70.) Holy fucking shit! How much more obtuse can he pretend to be? He admitted in the previous sentence that the amount of material is small; besides, we know next to nothing about the language, and the closest probably related language that we do know is a distant cousin 2500 years later than the Indus valley culture. It would be strange if the Indus valley writing had been deciphered; that it hasn't been is normal. See the interesting book Lost Languages for more about the decipherment of ancient writing systems.

And the grand finale on p. 71: “Twentieth-century scholars continually uncover evidence that certain people of pre-historic times were taught a high degree of scientific information. This is the only way it could have happened because the people of the day were not capable of the kind of accurate examining and separating of ideas that educated men and women of today possess./ The instructors may have been an inter-stellar team of scientists whose assignment was to provide the necessary information so that civilization on Earth would get underway. The evidence that such information suddenly existed is very impressive and the aliens had to have exercised prehistoric man's intellectual powers beyond his natural abilities.”

It is hard to resist picturing an alien babe from planet X495Z27, curling up with Spencer's book to get a sense of how far humankind has progressed intellectually since the days when they helped us skip a few steps on the evolutionary ladder. On seeing the quality of his arguments, she would probably slap her forehead and think “I slept with Zog the caveman 10000 years ago for *this*?”

Chapter 3 ends with a table of the world's most populous countries, some projections of future population (assuming 2% growth per year: 6,4 billion in 2000, 12 billion in 2073 — IIRC it was a very popular topic in the 1970s), and some Spengleresque remarks about the rise and fall of civilizations.

To bolster his claims that aliens have been involved with humankind since ancient times, Spencer describes some of the usual ancient sites for which it is often claimed that they cannot have been built by ‘primitive’ people: Stonehenge, the Easter Island, Tiahuanaco (p. 78: “High on a plateau, 30,000 feet above sea level in the Andes mountains of Bolivia” — ROFLMAO!!!!), Silbury Hill.

And on p. 75: “The evidence is very strong that Earth has been visited over many centuries by at least one, technically superior civilization. Engraved marks on bones, designs found in caves, paintings and prehistoric space junk tell us part of the story.” I cannot help being impressed by this casual reference to prehistoric space junk, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world :)

He claims that in a few instances, bones of anatomically modern people have been found in layers more than two million years old. “A logical theory expressed by many scientists is that the remains could be those of extraterrestrial scientific observers, some in family groups, who were stationed on Earth millions of years ago.” (P. 83.) You really can't make this shit up. However, I personally prefer the theory that they were really all just a bunch of hobbits who reached southeast Africa on the run from the witch-king of Angmar...

The Bermuda Triangle

Chapter 5 connects his UFO theories to the Bermuda Triangle, saying that the alien scientists are “sampling” people and their equipment (ships, airplanes) on an occassional basis. Well, at least he took the trouble to explicitly reject the other commonly suggested Bermuda Triangle ‘explanations’ (Cayce-style radiation from the sunken Atlantis; magnetic aberrations; space-time warps; giant waves; giant squid; etc.).

On pp. 98–9 there's an interesting description of a possible UFO sighting by Thor Heyerdahl's Ra II expedition (a bright light on the horizon, acting unusually). I read Heyerdahl's book The Ra Expeditions quite some time ago, and I don't remember whether this sighting is mentioned there or not.

Space Exploration

Much of the second half of the book (chapters 6 through 8) contains information about the universe (especially the Solar system) and about space exploration. In stark contrast to the creationist and UFO bullshit I've mentioned above, these things are quite sober and reality-based. (There are still a few weird passages here; he's quite sure that faster-than-light travel will eventually become possible, p. 114; and he promises to prove that “life on Earth is part of a tremendous universal plan and not just simply the result of a rare disease that attacked only Earth”, p. 127; as far as I can tell, he doesn't prove anything of the sort. On p. 144 he talks of a quasar “some 10-trillion light years away”, but surely if the universe is 13 billion years old, nothing can be more than 26 billion light-years away from us...)

I'm not exactly a space-exploration buff, but these chapters were nevertheless not uninteresting to read. Spencer talks about the various space missions that have been done until then (the Pioneer 10, for example, had just recently passed by Jupiter), and even discusses some of the plans for the near future; for example, the Space Shuttle was just on the drawing boards at the time when he was writing his book (p. 164). It's always interesting to see how people in the past saw the future, especially those parts of the future that have already happened by now. “Man is expected to land on the surface of Mars by 1980. However, a trip of this kind is based on the development of a reusable Space Shuttle [. . .] Between 1980 and 1990 NASA is planning over seven hundred test flights with the Orbiter.” (P. 165. Alas! as we know, the Shuttle program didn't go quite so well as it was originally planned...) Anyway, much of this part of the book is a perfectly decent example of popular-science writing about space exploration, and Spencer doesn't even plug his UFO-related theories all the time.

His sections about the Solar system are also in the same vein; the only exception perhaps is that he devotes an unusual amount of attention to discussions about whether this or that planet or satellite could support life or not. In some instances he seems unreasonably optimistic about the possibilities of life, but I'm not sure if this is because of his pro-UFO bias or because of the fact that much less was known about those planets in 1974 (when he was writing that book) than known now. See esp. p. 131 on Mars.

Still, although these chapters about the Solar system and space exploration are interesting, it isn't particularly clear whether they say anything in support of his idea that technologically advanced aliens are visiting Earth and kidnapping people and their machinery. These latter things he simply asserts (as we saw earlier) and pretends as if there was no need to prove them or even provide some additional arguments in their favour. This was really a disappointment; it's as if he was satisfied with just preaching to the already-converted, and as if he was hoping that, as long as he simply brazens it out, people won't be bothered by the lack of arguments supporting his views.

There's a crazy paragraph on p. 150: “Most all creatures on Earth, with the exception of certain insects, aquatic, amphibian, and microscopic life, are basically the same with respect to anatomy.” [Excellent, he just discarded like 90% of all species in one fell swoop, pretending that it's nothing :))] “To prove my point, allow me to select a cross section from the animal world. On one end of the spectrum take the elephant and giraffe and on the other, man and a Mexican Hairless dog.” [Great, now he implicitly discarded birds and reptiles, and even within the mammalian order he didn't exactly kill himself trying to get a maximally diverse sample...] “With the obvious exceptions all four creatures are basically the same; one head, two eyes, [etc., etc.]” [Hardly surprising after he limited himself to mammals.] “Despite the fact that the various species of earth life evolved independent of each other, the similarity apparently holds true and yet there is no logical scientific earthly explanation.” [Ah, no *earthly* explanation. Uncle Darwin must have been an alien! And Spencer gets bonus points for blithely ignoring the fact that the species he listed very much did *not* evolve independent of each other...] “There is no evidence or logical reason to believe that the inhabitants of any other planet would not resemble earth life. The only difference would be their position in the scientific and technological evolutionary scale.”

Now, don't get me wrong — I think that exobiology is a perfectly worthwhile pursuit, although it belongs perhaps more to speculation than to science; but anyway, to go about it in such a ham-fisted way is simply ridiculous. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if alien life forms did indeed resemble those on the Earth in some ways. The eye, for example, is something that has evolved on Earth several times independently, so it's clearly a very useful thing that could very well evolve elsewhere as well. I'm guessing that a nerve system would be another good candidate.

Conclusion

The book doesn't have any very clear conclusion. The UFO sightings continue, space exploration will also continue, and Spencer clearly hopes that, after all his hand-waving throughout the book, he has managed to get the reader to somehow believe that these two things have got something to do with one another and that the book has managed to prove some sort of point. (But it hasn't.)

What to say at the end? I'm fairly new to the UFO genre, so I can't really judge how this book compares to others in the same genre, but I very much hope that the others are better rather than worse :) Regardless of whether you are a UFO believer or, like me, just read these things for entertainment (and as an alternative kind of science fiction), I can't really recommend you to read this book, except if you don't mind the risk of being disappointed, just like I was.

ToRead:

We see that Spencer's theory in this book is a close relative of the ancient astronaut theory. I intend to eventually read a few books by the grand master of the AAT, von Däniken — I hope that they aren't quite as bad as this one. I know, I know — you can't prove a mistaken theory; but at least you could try to put up a decent fight...
Spencer mentions Ralph and Judy Blum's book Beyond Earth — Man's Contact with UFOs, which also sounds potentially interesting (p. 107). Apparently it was published by the same company that also published Spencer's books, and of which he was the owner.

BOOK: James Nelson, "The Early Nineties"

2007-12-08T19:32:00.000+01:00

James Nelson: The Early Nineties: A View from the Bodley Head. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. SBN 674222253. xvii + 387 pp.

Introduction

The Bodley Head was a London publishing house, started in 1887 as a partnership between Elkin Mathews and John Lane. They became famous in the early 1890s for both the content and the production values of their books, many of which were written by young avantgarde authors of that period — aesthetes, decadents, and the like. In addition, the Bodley Head books were typically produced to a high standard, often on handmade paper, issued in limited editions, illustrated by daring and innovative artists such as Ricketts and Beardsley, etc. Thus, these publishers were one of the main representatives (and instigators) of the 1890s trend for books that were self-consciously aesthetic and elitist not just in terms of content but also technical aspects, print runs, and often in price.

This book is a history of the Bodley Head from the beginning until 1894, when the two partners split and went their separate ways (though they both continued to work as publishers). I first heard of this book a couple of years ago, when I read James Nelson's 2000 book about Leonard Smithers, Publisher to the Decadents. There I saw that Nelson had also written two other books about notable 1890s publishers, namely The Early Nineties (1971) and Elkin Mathews: Publisher to Yeats, Joyce, Pound (1989). So now I've read the Early Nineties, and I plan to read his book about Elkin Mathews eventually as well.

Overall, The Early Nineties was a fairly interesting read. My main complaint is that a lot of the material here, maybe as much as half of the text (after you exclude the appendices and the notes and the like) deals with the authors and contents of the books published by the Bodley Head, rather than just with the aspects directly related to the publishing and production side of the books. Along the way we learn a little bit about a large number of English fin-de-siecle writers and poets, many of whom are relatively little known nowadays. Nelson often quotes passages from their works and discusses the responses of the critics. All this is interesting in a way, but often I was also bored and felt that the author was going into more detail than I cared to read about. My general impression of these parts of the book is that they were pleasant in moderate doses, but if you try to read too much at once you might get bored. But anyway, I shouldn't complain; the title of the book is honest enough: it isn't purely a book about the Bodley Head, but about the early 1890s in English literature, as seen through the books published by the Bodley Head.

The business side of publishing

My favourite chapter is probably chapter 3, which focuses on the economics of the Bodley Head's publishing. See e.g. p. 77: “Toward the close of the 1880s there were signs which suggested that there was a relatively large group of persons who were willing to buy not only rare and exotic volumes from the antiquarian bookseller but also choice limited editions of contemporary authors. [. . .] I have already shown that in the 1880s there was an increasing interest in antiquarian books. Auction records and sale catalogues amply indicate the fact that prices for book rarities were rising rapidly because of a surprisingly widespread demand.” Mathews would have been aware of these trends, having been an antiquarian bookseller himself.

Later, the vogue for “rare and exotic volumes” even gave a new lease of life to some older books. “So certain was the Bodley Head of its ability to sell these books that it was later to buy up the remainders of books which, having been published in the early 1880s and therefore lacking the advantage of vogue, did not find sufficient buyers.” (P. 79; for example, they bought 220 copies of Oscar Wilde's 1881 Poems, from its original publisher, who had gone bankrupt.) Similarly, the Bodley Head had considerable success with reissues of works by Lord De Tabley which had all largely flopped in the 1880s (p. 132). The story of the Bodley Head's publication of De Tabley's poems is told at great length on pp. 132–47; I doubt I have ever seen an author express such pessimism about his own work and its chances of success. When trying to decide which poems to include in the book, De Tabley made two lists titled “Dustbin I” and “Dustbin II” (p. 135) :)

Publishers such as the Bodley Head also benefited from the relatively low production costs of the time. “Although today it is an extremely expensive — almost prohibitive — affair to print fine editions of belles-lettres in very small quantities, the cost of book production in the early nineties was so low that the Bodley Head not only printed editions of 350 copies and made a profit but charged on the average no more than five shillings net per copy.” (P. 84; see more about production costs later on the same page.)

This is really remarkable; according to this inflation calculator, five shillings in 1890 is equivalent to approx. £19 nowadays — which is quite a typical price for a new trade hardcover of non-genre fiction, but a fine-press edition would be much more expensive.

Another interesting thing was that poetry books were cheaper to produce than books of prose, because the printers charged less for setting type in larger sizes and with more spacing, both of which was more likely to happen with poems than with prose (p. 85).

Lane and Mathews also sold some of their books in the USA, through various U.S.-based publishers such as Copeland and Day. Interestingly, “these copies sold at considerably higher prices than those on sale in England” (p. 105). Nowadays we are used to seeing books cost considerably less in the U.S. than in Britain.

“The costs of materials and labor were very low, and authors asked very litle in the way of payment so that the average price of the Bodley Head book was a very competitive five shillings [. . .] These factors plus a literary and artistic milieu which fostered an interest in belles-lettres and a desire for beautiful things were the grounds for success” (p. 106). For further interesting details about their prices, see p. 108. Their typical books cost less than comparable books earlier in the 19th century. Of course, there were also exceptions: their most expensive book was Wilde's Sphinx, which cost two guineas for the ordinary issue and five for the de luxe issue. Wilde's Salome was also more expensive thatn the average (15 and 30 shillings, respectively).

Although the Bodley Head is nowadays usually remembered for publishing the works of ‘decadents’ and similar then-controversial authors, it is only fair to point out that they also published many mainstream books: “it is doubtful that the firm could actually have survived if their ‘nest of singing birds’ had been made up solely of those whom the English public considered as one with the French poètes maudits.” (P. 211.) The more conventional works were more popular and sold better (p. 215).

Miscellaneous

A hilarious passage from a letter that the writer Le Gallienne wrote to John Lane, complaining about Lane's partner: “If there is, & decidedly there is, one person to blame in this matter it is that incarnation of all that is vacillating, procrastinating, old-maidish & [?] in human nature, that Elkin Mathews that never answered a letter till it was a month overdue, that attends to no report without the prod of a telegram, that — well, god knows you should know him” (p. 32).

Nelson's somewhat cruel opinion of Le Gallienne: “most of the pleasure his earliest books of verse afford us today comes from their external appearance, which derives from the pre-Victorian book” (p. 71) :-]

Norman Gale's 1893 book, Orchard Songs, is described on p. 65 as “a mediocre little book of verse about glow-worms, nightingales, first kisses, budding orchards and babies” :))

The poet Lionel Johnson was apparently a very nocturnal person and slept through most of the day. “Calling on Johnson one afternoon about five, Yeats, much to his surprise, was told that his new friend was not up. ‘He is always up for dinner at seven’ the servant added by way of encouragement.” (P. 179.)

On p. 211, Nelson quotes from a letter of Le Gallienne's thus: “carcas[s]es”. I'm not sure why he thought it necessary to insert the ‘s’; after all, ‘carcase’ is (or at least was) a perfectly regular alternative form of ‘carcass’.

Another good thing about The Early Nineties are the illustrations — there are many reproductions of title pages (and sometimes also of cover designs) of Bodley Head books.

The book also makes some unusual design decisions: in a typical book there would be page headers showing the title of the current chapter, but here this is shown in the footers instead. Additionally, on the first page of each chapter, the chapter title is not at the top of the page, above the text, as you would expect, but at bottom, below the text of that page. I suppose this was somebody's idea of bold, avant-garde design. I can't say that I was terribly excited by it.

Incidentally, this book also carries a price on the dust jacket — I thought it was uncommon for books published by academic presses to include a price on the dust jacket. Now I remember that the two volumes of Amadis of Gaul, published by Kentucky University Press in the 1970s, also carry prices on the jackets. So maybe this habit of not showing the price on the jacket of academic-press books is a relatively recent thing. Anyway, the other interesting thing about the price on the DJ is that it shows us that this book cost $15 in 1971! According to the inflation calculator, this would be equivalent to approx. $75 in present-day dollars, which strikes me as very expensive even for an academic press book. Fortunately I got it via abebooks.com for just $10.

ToRead:

Richard Le Gallienne: The Book-Bills of Narcissus. An “autobiographical story” (p. 17). Le Gallienne was a writer; the Bodley Head published several of his books, and he also worked for them as a reader, giving his opinion of the manuscripts they had received.
Richard Le Gallienne: Young Lives. An “autobiographical novel” (p. 212).
Andrew Lang: The Library (1881); Percy Fitzgerald: The Book Fancier; John Burton: The Book-Hunter. Mentioned here on p. 22 as part of a growing 1880s interest in bibliophilism.
Charles T. Jacobi: On the Making and Issuing of Books (1891). By the director of Chiswick Press, the printers of numerous fine-press books, including many published by the Bodley Head. Mentioned on p. 36.
Interesting-sounding memoirs:
- Edgar Jepson: Memories of a Victorian. P. 161.
- William Rothenstein: Men and Memories (1931); Charles J. Holmes: Self and Partners (Mostly Self) (1936). Mentioned on p. 336.
- Laurence Housman: The Unexpected Years (1937). P. 337.
W. H. Mallock: The New Republic (1878). Mentioned on p. 212 as containing a “satirical and jaundiced account of the Victorian intellectual elite”.
Florence Farr: The Dancing Fawn. “[A] notable example of the aesthetic novel of the day, which was often difficult to distinguish from novelistic parodies such as Robert Hichens' The Green Carnation” (p. 263).
Other parodies mentioned later on the same page: John Davidson's Earl Lavender (1895) and G. S. Street's The Autobiography of a Boy.
Katherine Lyon Mix: A Study in Yellow (U. of Kansas Press, 1960). A study of The Yellow Book (p. 298).
Ruari McLean: Victorian Book Design and Colour Printing (1963); mentioned on p. 335. And: Modern Book Design from William Morris to the Present Day (1959), mentioned on p. 337.
J. Lewis May: John Lane and the Nineties (1936). Mentioned on p. 342.
John Russell Taylor: The Art Nouveau Book in Britain (MIT Press, 1966). Mentioned on p. 338.

The Slovenia-Slovakia mixup

2007-11-26T20:03:00.001+01:00

As is well known, Slovenia and Slovakia are often confused by outsiders. See the excellent (and often very funny) series of posts on this subject on The Glory of Carniola.

Well, recently I've had my first direct experience with this phenomenon, when a book I had ordered from a seller in the U.K. reached me with a few days' delay. As the stamp on the envelope shows, after leaving England on November 6, the book reached Bratislava, Slovakia on November 9. From there it was redirected to Slovenia and reached me a couple of days later.

BOOK: Matthew Lewis, "The Monk"

2007-11-24T19:13:00.000+01:00

Matthew Lewis: The Monk. Edited by Howard Anderson, introduction and notes by Emma McEvoy. Oxford World's Classics, 1998. 0192833944. xl + 456 pp.

I'm quite fond of gothic novels, though I haven't read very many of them yet; just Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixirs, and now Lewis's The Monk. I also have several novels by Ann Radcliffe, which I intend to read eventually.

Anyway, I enjoyed this novel a lot. It's got plenty of everything one expects in a gothic novels; ghosts, devil-worship, monasteries, scheming clerics, a picturesque castle in Germany, subterranean dungeons with distant moans and creaking of chains, sex, rape, murder, lots and lots of melodrama. (For a synopsis of the story, see its page in the Wikipedia.) Sure, it's the pulp fiction of an earlier age. I usually think of reading pulp fiction as a guilty pleasure, but this time I didn't even feel any guilt; I just enjoyed it.

This OUP edition also has an interesting and fairly extensive introduction, which compares The Monk with other gothic novels, especially those of Ann Radcliffe (none of which I've read yet). Apparently The Monk is somewhat of an exception in this genre, and other gothic novels aren't quite as lurid or as explicit. See esp. pp. xiv and xix.

One thing that I found interesting about this novel is how many crimes the bad guys get away with, and for how long. Sure, in the end the good side wins, sort of, but how much damage has been done until then! Especially the monk, Ambrosio — the deeper he sinks into his crimes, the less they bother him, and the manages to murder Elvira and kidnap and rape Antonia before the novel is over. And then there's poor Agnes, her circumstances getting worse and worse despite all the efforts to the contrary, until at the end of the novel she is rescued from the very brink of death. First we see how her scheming relatives manage to get her to enter a monastery, despite the best efforts of don Raymond; and then, when the nuns discover her pregnancy, the abbess and a few other older nuns, after failing to obtain enough support among the others to have Agnes condemned to the worst sort of underground imprisonment, resort to trickery — they drug Agnes, making it seem that she died, and then after her ‘burial’ they convey her to the secret prison. Anyway, my point here is that we see evil doing very well indeed throughout most of the novel. It's true that the good side wins in the end, but it's hard to feel quite reassured by this after all the harm that's been done until then. From this point of view, this is not so much a reassuring story that good will win in the end, but rather a cautionary one that the world is a dangerous place with lots of evil people. In fact the steady progress of Antonio's corruption reminded me several times of what you usually see in another writer of the same period, namely de Sade; except that de Sade went one step further, and made the evil side triumphant at the end of the story as well, not just during it.

Especially in the last part of the novel, the last third or so, I felt that the novel was also one big cry of protest against religious fanaticism. I don't know if Lewis intended it to be seen that way (or maybe he did; perhaps he wanted it to function as an anti-Catholic work?), but the vast majority of the bad things that happen in this novel, especially towards the end, are ultimately due to religious fanaticism. It was this that made it possible for Antonio's ambition to be channelled into the career of a zealous and famous preacher, with the result that, between the pious celibate austerity (on which his reputation depended) and the wanking off to a picture of the Madonna, it's no wonder that he ended up crazy with lust, first for Matilda and then for Antonia. Likewise, it was religious fanaticism (and not her own) which made it possible for Agnes to end up in a convent in the first place, and then to be imprisoned by the evil abbess and her accomplices (another example of ambition that was channelled towards evil deeds due to religious fanaticism). And there's the inquisition near the end of the story, which is another sad result of excessive religious zeal. Now admittedly the situation is made more complicated by the presence of the devil, which the narrator of the novel takes quite seriously and matter-of-factly; he is no mere apparition but genuinely takes Ambrosio out of jail and later kills him. But even this, the presence of the devil in the novel, can be seen as another sorry consequence of fanaticism — people end up believing in this kind of terrible fictitious entities (and being afraid of them).

In ch. 2, p. 58 there's a passage where the novice Rosario admits that he is in fact a woman named Matilda. Well, this reminded me of this excellent comic.

On p. 79, when Ambrosio feigns sleep: “None sleep so profoundly, as those who are determined not to wake.”

“They who are conscious of Mankind's perfidy and selfishness, ever receive an obligation with apprehension and distrust: They suspect, taht some secret motive must lurk behind it: They express their thanks with restraint and caution, and fear to praise a kind action to its full extent, aware that some future day a return may be required.” (Vol. 2, ch. 3, p. 249.)

There are some amusing remarks on the Bible on p. 259 (vol. 2, ch. 4): “That prudent Mother, while She admired the beauties of the sacred writings, was convinced, that unrestricted no reading more improper could be permitted a young Woman. Many of the narratives can only tend to excite ideas the worst calculated for a female breast: Every thing is called plainly and roundly by its name; and the annals of a Brothel would scarcely furnish a greater choice of indecent expressions. [. . .] Of this Elvira was so fully convinced, that She would have preferred putting into her Daughter's hand ‘Amadis de Gaul,’ ” and other novels of chivalry.

An illustration of Antonia's utter innocence (vol. 2, ch. 4, p. 261): she says to Ambrosio, “ ‘Father, you amaze me! What is this love of which you speak? I neither know its nature, nor if I felt it, why I should conceal the sentiment.’ ” Especially the phrase “what is this * of which you speak” is priceless :)) See the Language Log for more examples (link 1, link 2 — the above passage from The Monk seems to be the earliest instance of this cliche that they're aware of), and also this post on Language Hat. The comments there contain a few excellent examples (“I was educated with the Queen's English with all its biases. I spoke it rather well. The first time I met with blacks from the States I was puzzled by their continuous use of a word sounding like ‘fucking’. I had never heard it. So I asked them, what does that word mean? What is fucking?”) :)))

The phrase “The Marquis constantly fell into the most terrible access of passion” appears on p. 282 (vol. 3, ch. 1). I wonder if it's simply a misspelling for “excess” (either Lewis's own, or perhaps by the typesetters of this OUP paperback edition?), or if Lewis deliberately used “access”. Its meaning could after all be stretched far enough to fit into this sentence; e.g. dictionary.com includes the meanings “an attack or onset, as of a disease; a sudden and strong emotional outburst”).

On p. 302 (vol. 3, ch. 1) there's a passage where the monk Ambrosio is caught as red-handed as one could possibly be, just at the point where he was about to rape Antonia. Of course, since this is a gothic novel, events proceed relatively gruesomely (Ambrosio ends up killing Antonia's mother Elvira, who had just caught him), but in general this type of situation is a great vehicle for humour. Here are some of my favourite examples: a recent one from I can has cheezburger?, a slightly older one from Sexy Losers, and a classic from one of the late, lamented parts of rotten.com (the link points to the version in the Internet Archive; it's very slow, if the image fails to load, try this direct link instead; or try simply searching for whytx.jpg in Google to find mirrors, such as this one).

On p. 321 (vol. 3, ch. 2), Jacintha complains how everything goes wrong for her, despite all her efforts to purchase god's goodwill: “ ‘ [. . .] What signifies my having made three Pilgrimages to St. James of Compostella, and purchased as many pardons from the Pope, as would buy off Cain's punishment? [. . .] ’ ” :)

The end is remarkably lurid and melodramatic. The devil even tells Ambrosio that he is related to his victims: “ ‘ [. . .] That Antonia whom you violated, was your Sister! That Elvira whom you murdered, gave you birth! [. . .] ’ ” etc. Someone seems to have been reading too many Greek tragedies :)

Incidentally, the text in this book is based on Lewis's manuscript and preserves many of the quirks of his spelling. He is very fond of starting his words with capital initials, but I didn't get the impression that he is following any simple consistent rule in his choice of which words to capitalize. Another curious spelling is “risque” for “risk”.

Also incidentally, I am shocked to see that this novel was originally published in three volumes. It fits quite comfortably into one, and it isn't even particularly thick. Even if they used large type, the three volumes would still have to be very thin. I suppose it must have been done for some commercial reason, to increase the publisher's profits, but I'm surprised that the buyers went along with this.

ToRead:

Other gothic novels, especially those by Ann Radcliffe.
The introduction in this book, p. xiii, mentions another interesting-sounding title: The Necromancer, translated into English in 1794. It is also mentioned in the Wikipedia: The Necromancer: or, The Tale of the Black Forest (1794) by ‘Ludwig Flammenberg’ (pseudonym for Carl Friedrich Kahlert; translated by Peter Teuthold).
It might be interesting to read some of Lewis' poetry. The biography on p. i says that The Monk is Lewis' only novel, but that he later wrote many successful plays, and also “produced some volumes of poetry, and was well respected as a poet”.

Incidentally, there are also several poems sprinkled throughout The Monk. They may not be terribly thrilling, but aren't that bad to read either. Anyway, I find that I usually don't particularly care for poems that are included within novels. Among the rare exceptions is Scott's wonderful Proud Maisie.
One notable plot element in The Monk is a kind of zombification: the victim is given a drug which causes her to fall into a kind of deep sleep in which she is invariably recognized as dead. She wakes up after two days, which gives the perpetrator enough time to have her buried and then steal her body so that he can manipulate with her later. See e.g. p. 329 here (vol. 3, ch. 2). Unlike in traditional zombification, however, the drug doesn't affect her state of mind after the point when she wakes up. Anyway, this method is used here in The Monk by the abbess against Agnes, and by Ambrosio against Antonia. Well, this reminded me that I would like to eventually read The Serpent and the Rainbow, a curious book by Wade Davis about zombification in Haiti.

BOOK: Sophia McDougall, "Rome Burning"

2007-11-17T19:25:00.000+01:00

Sophia McDougall: Rome Burning. London: Orion, 2007. 9780752860794. xviii + 472 pp.

Introduction

This is a sequel to Romanitas, an alternative-history novel set in the present time but in a world in which the Roman Empire never collapsed but instead occupied approx. half of the world. (See also my post about Romanitas, which I read last year.)

I enjoyed reading Romanitas a lot, but I liked Rome Burning even better. Just like with Romanitas last year, I was staying awake later than usual because I couldn't put the book down.

Comparison with Romanitas

According to a note on p. vi, this is the second of three books set in this alternative-history timeline; the third one is planned to be published next year. Well, one question that often interests me when it comes to trilogies is how well their individual parts stand on their own, i.e. if you consider them as individual works rather than as parts of a trilogy. Romaintas did just fine in this respect: it didn't assume that the reader has any prior knowledge of the alternative-history world in which the story takes place (which is of course natural as this was the first book in the series), and it provided a reasonable ending of the story so that the reader doesn't feel that the story is incomplete (although you could see that things have been set up so that the story could conveniently continue in the sequels). In contrast to that, Rome Burning is in my opinion not so suitable for being read as an individual work; it would be better to read Romanitas first. It's true that you get, here and there, brief explanatory passages of information that you already remember from Romanitas (if you have read it) and that could therefore in principle be helpful to a reader that hasn't read Romanitas yet; but I doubt that these passages would be enough to make such a reader really comfortable. They are OK to refresh your memory if you have read Romanitas a year or two ago and have forgotten the details, but a newcomer to the series would do best to start with Romanitas rather than jumping ahead and reading Rome Burning first.

The other thing is about the ending of the story; in Romanitas, as I said above, there was a normal enough end of the story; but here in Rome Burning the end is very abrupt and doesn't give you a sense of closure at all. In Romanitas you could see just that the story *could* conveniently continue, while in Rome Burning you see that it absolutely *must* continue, otherwise you will be left quite frustrated. Indeed the end here in Rome Burning is very dramatic; it reminded me of what I heard was a widespread practice in some TV series that span multiple seasons: at the end of the season, in the last episode, they gather most of the characters in one place and set up a big explosion or some other kind of disaster just at the end of the episode. That way any of the characters could either survive or die, and both of these possibilities would seem equally plausible. The purpose of all this is to prevent the actors for demanding higher salaries when they are negotiating for the next season: the producers can conveniently sack any actor who gets too demanding, since his character's absence from the next season will be easily explained to the audience by saying that he died in the disaster at the end of the preceding season. This practice strikes me as horribly cruel, cheap and sleazy. In a novel, it is not so objectionable since no real people are suffering because of it, but still it strikes me as a somewhat cheap way of building suspense. The end of Rome Burning looks like a classic example of what I have just described. It isn't clear to me whether the members of the Imperial family were evacuated from their box in time or not, or if the explosion did affect them, which ones would survive and which ones won't; and even Dama could, with a bit of effort, be made to survive his fall from the roof of the Colosseum. Anyway, this doesn't really bother me much by itself; what annoys me more is that the ending is so incomplete that I can really hardly wait for the third part of the series, to be published next year. I suppose this is just what the publishers want, of course, but I'm not entirely happy about it :)

There are several other aspects in which I felt that this book was an improvement on Romanitas. Una's paranormal abilities (about which I have already grumbled in my post about Romanitas last year) aren't so prominent here in Rome Burning, and aren't so crassly employed to create more suspenseful situations. I think this is a very nice improvement. Another thing I liked about Rome Burning is that the story moves through a wider range of locations. A considerable part of it even takes place outside the Roman Empire, mostly in China, and one brief scene in Japan. We also observe Marcus' train journey through the Sarmatian steppes, and towards the end of the novel there's a chapter that is set on some remote island in the Hebrides.

The story

<spoiler warning> Here's a short summary of the story. It is three years after the events of Romanitas; the old emperor Faustus is temporarily incapacitated by a stroke and Marcus, his nephew, takes up the position of regent. Marcus' cousin Drusus, who has already been one of the leading villains in Romanitas, comes out of the woodwork and starts scheming how to overthrow him. Drusus is especially annoyed by Marcus' relative humanity and pacifism; for example, Marcus is doing his best to avoid the outbreak of war with the Nionian empire (i.e. Japan; the two empires have a common border in North America, and are on the brink of war due to the recent incidents there); he has also proposed the abolition of crucifiction, and has manumitted all the slaves in the Imperial palace. There seems to be no doubt that he would abolish slavery altogether when/if Faustus dies and Marcus inherits his position. One very important source of support and encouragement to Marcus is his girlfriend Una; Drusus, noticing that, attempts to kill her in a few splendid scenes that made me hold my breath with excitement. Fortunately, he fails and ends up in prison, awaiting trial. Marcus travels to China, where he will negotiate with representatives of the Nionian empire and try to restore peaceful relations between the two superpowers. Meanwhile Drusus persuades a general Salvius, the commander of the Roman army, to release him from prison and take him to the emperor; the still-ailing and bedridden old man is partly convinced, partly bullied into agreeing with them that Marcus' policies are misguided and will dangerously weaken the Roman empire. Drusus travels to China, surprising Marcus there with the emperor's order commanding him to return to Rome. A sudden explosion kills one of the leading Nionian representatives. Marcus takes advantage of the confusion to hastily hand Una and his advisor Varius over to the Nionians as hostages, partly to reassure Nionia that the Romans had nothing to do with this assasination but partly, and more importantly, to prevent Una and Varius from getting into Drusus' hands. Despite Drusus' efforts to delay his journey, Marcus eventually returns to Rome, talks to the emperor who, by now somewhat confused and tired by all this, insists that Marcus and Drusus must now share the regency. Marcus returns to China, which is a clear sign that Drusus' coup has not been quite successful and people's loyalties shift into Marcus' favour again; Drusus' position is quite weak for the remainder of the novel. The negotiations with Nionia continue and are eventually brought to a happy conclusion, involving a detente, perhaps even a condominium, in North America. But this comes at a huge personal cost to Marcus: he ends up having to marry Noriko, the Nionian emperor's daughter. Although they treat each other kindly enough, it is clear that neither of them is happy with this dynastic marriage. Una, not wishing to be a concubine, leaves Marcus and is also supremely miserable. Meanwhile it turns out that the incidents along the Roman-Nionian border, as well as several other acts of terrorism, are due to the activities of an organization set up by Dama, a former slave who helped Marcus and Una so much during the events described in Romanitas but was gone without a trace at the end of that novel. Dama is hoping to provoke a world war which would bring about the collapse of the three big empires (Rome, Nionia, China) and a more just world, free of slavery, would presumably be able to rise from their ashes. In the very last few pages of the novel, he carries out a suicide bombing in the Colloseum, hoping to include the emperor, as well as Marcus and the rest of the imperial family, among the victims. </spoiler warning>

Character development

There are a lot more psychological and emotional things going on in this novel than there were in Romanitas, which I think is another improvement. I often found myself wondering how I would react in this or that situation, although I usually found that I lack the life experience necessary to really imagine how I would react. The saddest part of the story is undoubtedly when Marcus has to get married to Noriko for dynastic reasons, and Una leaves him. All three of them are clearly so miserable that I was damned close to weeping once or twice myself, and I certainly felt even more gloomy than usual for a couple of days.

Another thing that was rather sad to see was how Marcus has grown somewhat harsher due to his struggle against Drusus; see esp. pp. 335 and 348–52. In this latter passage, Marcus beats up Drusus in quite a gruesome way; it's interesting how much the impression these things leave on one depends on how they are presented. I remember the movie 300, with lots of gruesome swordfighting scenes and blood spurting by the bucketful, and it was all so hilariously funny that I just laughed. But here in the fight between Marcus and Drusus, it was described in such a way that I couldn't help feeling rather aghast, cringing and thinking ‘oh dear, how horrible’ — a reaction similar to what I would probably feel if I saw such a thing in real life.

One thing that stands the author in very good stead in that scene is her medical or, should I say, physiological bent: “he felt a rubbery crunch of bone under his knuckles, which came away wet [. . .] pain inflated densely into the hollows of his skull [. . .] Drusus gulped in a bubbling red breath” (pp. 348, 350). This sort of focus on low-level physiological details also appears in many other passages both here and in Romanitas (where probably the best example is the description of how a crucifiction works at the beginning of ch. 3); in many instances it felt to me more like an annoyance than something that improves the style, but here in this scene it works very well. You can really see very clearly how Marcus is little by little beating the very life out of poor Drusus, and how he really would have killed him if Varius hadn't stopped him in time. And you can see that it's not so easy to kill a person, and that it's very gruesome; a welcome reminder nowadays that death by violence is so commonplace and boring, both in the movies and in the news. Also, I couldn't help feeling sorry for Drusus at that time (which I think is a good thing), even though he had done some very bad things up until that point.

The alt-history world of the book

Some new things that we learn in this novel about the alternative-history world in which it takes place:

there's a tunnel underneath the Otranto strait (p. 39);
the last lions and tigers were killed three hundred years ago; gladiatorial games still exist, and gladiators now fight against polar bears and sharks (p. 40). Fighting “the beasts in the arena” is also a possible military punishment (p. 259);
I already mentioned in my post about Romanitas that mobile phones are clearly not known, and there are several passages here in Rome Burning that confirm it. Many problems could be avoided if the characters were able to communicate simply, directly and immediately via mobile phones. Drusus' intrigue on pp. 145–8, where he lures Una into an out-of-the-way office so that she can use the phone, would be impossible. Etc.
Another thing that I already noted last year is the absence of airplanes. Now Marcus is flown from Greece to Rome in a helicopter on p. 22, but when he has to travel home from China he goes by magnetway (p. 172). The magnet trains, incidentally, travel at 300 mph (pp. 273–4) and the “Silk Road magnetway” across central Asia consists of ten parallel tracks (p. 274).
It would seem that Rome, China and Nionia don't exactly have a well-established tradition of diplomatic relations, otherwise they wouldn't be getting into the hilarious protocolary complications that are described on pp. 174–7.
The current Chinese emperor is just a figurehead and the country is really ruled by his mother, the empress dowager. I guess that this was inspired by the real-world empress Tzu Hsi, who ruled China on the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Chinese and the Nionians eat with sticks, just like in real life; Romans use spoons and knives (p. 178; forks aren't mentioned). And: “Often the Romans laid down their spoons to scoop up their food with their fingers, as was normal in the Empire.” (Ibid.)
A Nionian general is developing a mysterious weapon of great power: “ ‘ [. . .] we would strike with a force like an invisible hammer, a hammer to level armies and cities two hundred miles away. In the near future, explosives will be virtually obsolete! [. . .] ’ ” (P. 183; and Romans will try to learn more about it and develop something similar of their own, pp. 317–8.) I guess that in the third novel we'll find out what exactly this is. Of course one's first thought is an atomic bomb, but that doesn't work “two hundred miles away”. Rockets perhaps? But that are still explosives. Maybe something altogether more exotic is intended [the HAARP project comes to mind :)].
Tea is known in Rome but not widely used (p. 184).
There is an interesting passage on the use of cars in Rome and China on p. 258. “Romans liked to travel in belligerent, implacable-looking behemoths, spacious within and seemingly capable of bulldozing over anything outside.”
There aren't any TVs in the remote parts of China, and even phones are rare and extremely expensive (p. 284).

Miscellaneous

On p. 66 there's a passage that says about Sulien's memories of some of the events three years ago that although he rarely remembered them now, “they were there, like radioactivity in the bone marrow”. This struck me as very incongruous — there is otherwise no sign in this book that the world in which the story takes place is familiar with radioactivity.

Grumbling corner: I have a complaint about the ink used in the book. As often, I used a white piece of paper as a bookmark and also to slide it down the page as I read, to guide the eyes and make reading a little faster. Well, by the time I finished the book, the formerly white piece of paper was more gray than white, and quite greasy with all the ink it had picked up from the pages along which it had moved. What sort of vile, filthy muck did the printers use for ink? Is there any cost-cutting method that these greedy publishers will hesitate to adopt? I shudder to think what this book will look like in a few decades' time. Grrr.

Conclusion

This is an excellent and delightful book, even better than its predecessor. I heartily recommend both of them to anyone who is interested in this type of alternative-history novel, and I can hardly wait to read the third volume in the series (to be published in October 2008, according to amazon).

BOOK: J. W. Spencer, "Limbo of the Lost - Today"

2007-11-10T19:19:00.000+01:00

John Wallace Spencer: Limbo of the Lost — Today. New York: Bantam Books, 1975. (1st ed. was Westfield, MA: Phillips Publishing Company, 1973.) xvi + 188 pp.

This is an updated and expanded edition of a book that Spencer had originally published in 1969, when it was titled simply Limbo of the Lost. The biographical note on p. 188 says that Spencer is “the owner and manager of the Phillips Publishing Company”, so I guess you could say that in a way it was self-published.

Anyway, 1969 is fairly early compared to most of the other well-known Bermuda Triangle books, which were published only in the 1970s. The phrase “Limbo of the Lost” is simply Spencer's term for the Bermuda Triangle. As he explains here on pp. 174–5, he objects to the “Bermuda Triangle” because the area he has in mind is not particularly triangular, and he suggests that the term has been adopted for marketing purposes. This makes some sense, but his own term, “Limbo of the Lost”, doesn't sound much better, and his justification for using it (p. 174) is rather strained. And he has an annoying habit of repeating it ad nauseam — at the end of almost every section, he says something along the lines of “and so this is another disappearance in the Limbo of the Lost”.

The main strength of Spencer's book, compared to the other Triangle books I've read so far, is in the large number of incidents it describes, and in the amount of detail provided about them. Berlitz, for example, spends just a couple of chapters describing the better-known disappearances of ships and airplanes, and then moves on to discussing possible explanations, which are of course just silly paranormal theories that I don't particularly care to read about. But here, Spencer dedicates almost the entire book to describing unexplained accidents and disappearances, and there are a lot more of them here than in the other Triangle books I've read; ships, airplanes, tugboats, drifters, submarines, the stories go on and on.

Unlike Adi-Kent Jeffrey, who likes to spin long yarns about each incident and include tons of made-up dialogue, Spencer focuses on telling his stories briefly and concisely, but includes plenty of factual details (if available). (This style is a result of his deliberate decision; see pp. 175–6.) Also unlike Jeffrey, who spends about half her book writing about pre-1850 disappearances where it's less obvious whether something really mysterious is going on, Spencer's book is more or less entirely about more recent events — another plus for Spencer, as far as I'm concerned.

Sometimes the masses of details he provides start seeming a bit unnecessary to me; e.g. he has a tendency to include complete lists of crew and passengers on lost ships or airplanes, including their ranks and home towns and states. But I guess that for those who lost a friend or relative in these events, such details are interesting; the rest of us can easily skip them, and they aren't really annoying.

Most of the time, the writing is remarkably sober — much more so than I would have dared to expect in a Bermuda Triangle book. I particularly liked the fact that he usually describes the search efforts in a lot of detail; the various hypotheses that e.g. the Coast Guard considered to try explaining the accident; the progress of the search, and its final abandonment; and in quite a few cases he mentions that some wreckage was found, i.e. the ship or plane didn't disappear entirely without a trace. But he does say, in such cases, that one would expect more wreckage to be found than that.

[Here's a funny example from p. 153. A cargo plane carrying frozen beef crashed into the sea for no very obvious reason in 1971, within sight of eyewitnesses on a nearby ship. “The crew upped anchor and within a matter of just a few minutes were at the crash site. The chilling part of the story is that nothing was there, no bodies, no debris, no oil slick; just one floating side of beef.” :)]

However, on those few occasions when the discussion does come to the subject of explanations for the Bermuda Triangle accidents and disappearances, Spencer leaves us in no doubt as to his views. He is quite sure that this is all due to the activity of UFOs; he talks of this as matter-of-factly as about everything else — as if no doubt or controversy whatsoever existed about this subject! See e.g. pp. 155–6, where he says that the frequency of Triangle events and that of the UFO sightings are correlated. And on pp. 177–8 he says that aliens “clearly do not want to socialize or fraternize with earth begins” so they built “their bases and laboratory facilities deep under the ocean” (p. 177); “whenever they need someone or something for experimental purposes, all they have to do is leave their facilities, take what they want, and return to their hidden underwater laboratories” (p. 178).

The first chapters, which are about airplane disappearances, are a bit heavy on jargon; probably because of his background in the U.S. air force and NORAD (p. 188).

He mentions on p. 64 that “a large store of Phoenician coins” was discovered on the Azores.

The section on the Cyclops (pp. 80–7) is fairly detailed, although still not as extensive as the story on Gian Quasar's web site. I was interested to learn on p. 86 of the disappearances of two sister ships, Proteus and Nereus, both colliers and similar to the Cyclops; they disappeared within a few weeks of each other in November 1941, and the cases bear several similarities with that of the Cyclops (including the lack of an explanation).

All in all, this is quite a good Bermuda Triangle book. If you want a book that emphasizes facts and details about the disappearances and accidents, rather than a book that emphasizes bizarre paranormal ‘explanations’ and theories, than this is the book for you.

ToRead:

Yet more Bermuda Triangle books, of course :) Once again, see the list in the Wikipedia article.
Spencer also wrote a book titled No Earthly Explanation, where he discusses his theory that the Triangle events are caused by UFOs. He says here on p. 178 that the book includes the story “of how U.S. Army helicopter pilot, Captain Lawrence J. Coyne, and his crew of three were hijacked by a UFO on October 18, 1973” :)

[Incidentally, I like the fact that he says “hijacked” rather than “abducted” — alien abduction is a big cliche now, with a whole genre of books in its own right, and his use of a different term (“hijacked”) is a nice reminder of the times when these things were recent and original and even the terminology was not yet as established as it is now.]
There's an ad at the end of this book, listing several other delightfully kooky books published by Bantam at that time. Apart from several volumes of Däniken, the following titles sound interesting:
- Richard Winer: The Devil's Triangle
- Ralph Blum: Beyond Earth: Man's Contact with UFOs
- Robert Dione: God Drives a Flying Saucer
- Peter Kolosimo: Not of This World
- Andrew Tomas: We Are not the First
How could one resist all this vintage 70s weirdness? :))

BOOK: Adi-Kent Jeffrey, "The Bermuda Triangle"

2007-11-03T19:35:00.000+01:00

Adi-Kent Thomas Jeffrey: The Bermuda Triangle. London: Star Books / W. H. Allen & Co., 1975. (1st ed. was New Hope, PA: New Hope Publishing, 1973.) 352398280. 143 pp.

The Bermuda Triangle, as is well known, is an area in the western Atlantic that is supposedly the site of an unusually large number of unexplained ship and airplane accidents, or, to put it more accurately, disappearances. Some dispute this claim, saying either that the number of such accidents is not unusual (given the large amount of traffic in the area), or that the accidents that are often cited by Triangle supporters are in fact not really that difficult to explain. The Triangle supporters, on the other hand, of course claim that something unusual indeed is going on and cannot be explained otherwise than by this or that kooky paranormal phenomenon.

I personally have no opinion about whether the number of disappearances in the Triangle is unusually high or not (after all I don't have any data on this subject), and I can't accept explanations that resort to paranormal phenomena. I am, however, under the impression that at least some genuinely unusual and hard-to-explain accidents did take place, and I'm simply curious about them, although I don't doubt that if an explanation would eventually be found, it would always turn out to be fairly mundane rather than paranormal.

Anyway, the golden age of the Bermuda Triangle was, unsurprisingly, the 1970s — a decade generally noted for its fascination with the paranormal. That's when the best-known book on the subject was published, The Bermuda Triangle (1975) by Charles Berlitz. I read it quite some time ago, several times in fact, and enjoyed it tremendously. Of course you cannot take Berlitz' explanations in the least bit seriously — the Atlantis, Edgar Cayce, UFOs, the Philadelphia Experiment, time travel, nothing is too flaky for him to consider as a possible explanation for the Triangle incidents. But regardless of that, his book was a great read, and his descriptions of the airplane and ship disappearances were quite chilling and often made me afraid to go to sleep afterwards, small child that I was at the time. Anyway, after that I've read several other books in this genre: Without a Trace, Berlitz' 1977 sequel to The Bermuda Triangle; then Gian Quasar's Into the Bermuda Triangle (2003 — one of the few recent books on the subject); and now Adi-Kent Jeffrey's The Bermuda Triangle. I think this genre is best thought of as a shifty cousin of science fiction, except that it's marketed as fact :)

The main difference between Jeffrey's book and those by Berlitz and Quasar is that she spends much more time on describing the incidents and less on dreaming up ridiculous paranormal explanations. This, in principle, is a very good thing — paranormal theories are easy to come by; what makes a Triangle book really interesting for me is the descriptions of the unexplained disappearances of ships and airplanes.

However, many of the disappearances described in this book are of ships from the age of sail. Inevitably, if a ship two hundred years ago went off to the sea and was never heard of again, it's hard to convince oneself that this must be due to some unusual or unknown phenomenon. Surely a simple storm or something of that sort is quite sufficient in most cases. In an age without radio and other modern technologies, months might pass before anyone would notice that the ship is missing, and nobody would have any idea where to look for its flotsam. Jeffrey tries to connect the incidents she describes to the Triangle by saying that if the ships in question had simply perished in a storm, somebody would certainly have to have found some wreckage at some point, but I'm not quite so sure of that.

Some of these early disappearances, which she describes in considerable detail, include: the Venture (1609), a boat carrying some shipwreck survivors originally travelling to Virginia (ch. 1); three Spanish galleons, disappearing in 1750 after being separated from the rest of their convoy by a storm (ch. 2); the 1813 disappearance of the Patriot, one of its passengers being Theodosia Burr, the daughter of the former U.S. vice-president, Aaron Burr (ch. 3; in the subsequent decades, many a former pirate claimed on his deathbed that it was he that had put Theodosia to death after the capture of the Patriot); the 1814 disappearance of a U.S. Navy ship, the Wasp, led by captain Blakeley, renowned for his courage (ch. 4).

Another disappointing story where you really have to stretch things very far to make it seem mysterious is from 1973: “the huge 13,000 ton German freighter, Anita, laden with a cargo of coal, steamed out of Newport News, Virginia, headed for Germany. She never made it. The Anita, like so many before her, was swept into oblivion with her crew of 32 men.” (P. 62.) Where the heck do we have any evidence that this even happened near the Triangle (rather than e.g. halfway across the Atlantic)? Or that the explanation wasn't something more mundane? At least she should write more details if she thinks there is reason to believe that the more obvious explanations wouldn't work here.

She briefly mentions the Cyclops (p. 61), but without much detail. For a longer version of this delightful yarn, see this account on Gian Quasar's web page.

There's a nice story of the Porta Noca, a ship that sailed from the Isle of Pines in 1926 and disappeared; told by one Rad Miller who, had he not changed his mind in the last moment, would himself have been a passenger on it (pp. 63–5). There's also the story of the famous Joshua Slocum and his disappearance in 1909 (pp. 66–70). The Revonoc (1958; p. 70) and the Witchcraft (1967; p. 76) are two classic Triangle disappearances. There's also the Enchantress (1964, pp. 73–5), which I don't remember from Berlitz.

There's a nice chapter on the ‘ghost ships’ (ch. 6), the most well-known ones probably being the Mary Celeste and the Carroll A. Deering. But a far more bizarre story involves La Dahama, found in 1935 by another ship; she was in poor condition and unmanned. The bizarre thing is that another ship subsequently reported that she had encountered the Dahama during a storm, rescued its crewmembers and then saw the Dahama founder in front of their very eyes!

The chapter 7 on airplane incidents mentions all the well-known ones: the Flight 19, the Martin Mariner and the Star Tiger and Star Ariel. However, it also mentions an interesting disappearance that I don't remember reading about yet: in the summer of 1945, two out of a squadron of twelve bombers failed to return from a training flight, for reasons unknown (pp. 91–3).

There's also chapter 8 about the Devil's Sea, an area near Japan supposedly noted for disappearances similar to those in the Bermuda Triangle. It also mentions Ivan Sanderson's well-known theory that there are ten or twelve such areas around the world (pp. 116–17, including “one unique region of ‘land-deadliness’ — Afghanistan”), but curiously it doesn't mention Sanderson's own impressively silly term for these areas — Vile Vortices :))

Ch. 9 is particularly interesting — it's about submarines, which tend to be somewhat neglected in the Triangle lore. A large nuclear sub, the Scorpion, disappeared in 1968. However, unlike in many such ‘disappearances’, the sub was later found — the U.S. Navy took pictures of it on the bottom of the ocean, but they were unable to determine what caused it to sink (p. 126).

Ch. 10 briefly describes various more or less wacky explanations that have been suggested for the Triangle disappearances: “atmospheric ‘sleeves’ ” and other curious quirks in the fabric of space-time; magnetic aberrations; time travel; UFOs. There's an excellent story on pp. 138–40 of an airplane who had, in 1961, a brush with an antique-looking WW1-style biplane. Soon afterwards, just such a biplane was found in a nearby barn, scratched just where it should have been given the above-mentioned near-collision; and, as an added bonus, it contained an old logbook with an entry, dated sometime in the 1910s, in which the horrified pilot described his near-collision with an unusually futuristic and metallic airplane. Any yet those spoilsports at the Civil Aeronautics Board had the guts to say that it was all a hoax!

The author has to be commended, however: she cites, in this chapter, a number of articles with very scientific-sounding titles. She even includes the names of the authors (but not the names of the journals). Anyway, of course if one took the trouble to follow these articles up, it might turn out that they are either wacky or that they are sober but don't say anything that supports the wacky theories mentioned in this book; but at least she cites something — which is much more than you can say for most books on this subject.

So, what to say at the end? On the plus side, the proportion of the book dedicated to describing incidents rather than offering silly ‘explanations’ and theories is much higher than in the case of Berlitz (and Quasar). Jeffrey describes many incidents not mentioned in those other two authors. Another plus: she manages to affect, much of the time, a tone more sober and reasonable than I would have dared to expect in the average Bermuda Triangle book. I don't mean to say that the succeeds in resisting the lure of paranormal explanations — far from that, but at least much of the time she keeps them decently in the background.

On the downside, many of her incidents are ships from the age of sail and as such not very convincing. Additionally, the book is very short (143 pages, easily read in a single sitting) and contains lots of typos. And, ridiculously, the back cover says “16-page section of exclusive photographs” — and then most of them are from Culver Pictures and UPI... :)

One more thing, which can be either a plus or a minus depending on how you look at it: she often describes the incidents in a way that would be more appropriate in a work of fiction, i.e. she includes the details of what the people involved did or said even in cases where it's quite clear that she can have no firm proof that this is really how it happened — i.e. she's just making it up based on what seems the most likely to have happened. On the one hand, this is a tad dishonest; on the other hand, it makes for a better read, the whole thing's just hokum anyway, and besides, if it was OK for Thucydides, why not for Jeffrey?

Anyway, I don't regret reading this book, and if you are also a Triangle enthusiast like me, you'll probably enjoy it too. And I'm looking forward to reading still more books on the Triangle.

ToRead:

Other classic books about the Bermuda Triangle — see the Wikipedia page for a list.
Larry Kusche's The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved (1975), a debunking of many well-known Triangle incidents. However, see also this page by Gian Quasar, which, if true, suggests that there are many serious errors in Kusche's book.
amazon.com mentions several other books by Adi-Kent Jeffrey, also on paranormal subjects: Witches and Wizards; They dared the Devil's Triangle; and Ghosts in the Valley: True Hauntings In the Delaware Valley (this last one even has a sequel, both published in 2007, so apparently she is still alive and kicking).
See also this interesting web site with a compilation of data about the various disappearances often associated with the Bermuda Triangle. Among other things, it lists exactly which books mention which disappearance.

BOOK: Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (cont.)

2007-10-27T19:23:00.000+02:00

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Volume 3: The Picture of Dorian Gray: the 1890 and 1891 texts. Ed. by Joseph Bristow. Oxford University Press, 2003. 0198187726. lxxvii + 465 pp.

[Continued from Part 1.]

New chapters in the 1891 text

The main difference between the 1890 and 1891 texts is that the latter has six new chapters. First there's chapter 3, where Lord Henry goes to visit his uncle and talks to him about Dorian's mother; then he goes to dinner at the house of his aunt Agatha. This chapter is pleasant enough, but it seems pretty isolated — one could omit it and not change anything else, and nobody would notice that anything is missing.

Then there's chapter 5, with the scenes involving Sibyl Vane and her mother and brother. Her brother is a completely new character in the 1891 text and, if I'm not mistaken, isn't mentioned at all in the 1890 text. Otherwise, this chapter generally made me as a reader less sympathetic towards Sibyl and her mother than I would have been from the 1890 text where this chapter was missing. Sibyl is so much in love with Dorian and expresses herself in such saccharine terms that she is quite unbearable. Her mother, on the other hand, is an old former actress who, now that she cannot act much on the stage any more, compensates this by behaving theatrically in her ordinary life, which is also very annoying. Sibyl's brother James makes a much more favourable impression, although he is almost too earnest and serious. It's as if Wilde deliberately made him so very down-to-earth, to provide a contrast with Sibyl and their mother.

A major new addition, a whole subplot really, are chapters 15–18, coming soon after Dorian murders Basil, the artist who had painted his portrait all those years ago, and blackmails an old acquaintance into disposing of the corpse. Dorian then goes to a dinner-party at one Lady Narborough's, which is of course yet another opportunity for a few pages of clever conversation and witty epigrams. But Dorian doesn't feel too well; apparently the murder has been getting on his nerves somewhat; so he leaves early and to go to an opium-den in some sleazy part of London (and apparently he also keeps opium at home, p. 322, “green paste waxy in hue”; and see the editor's introduction, p. lv). This opium habit of his was not so prominent in the 1890 text (I'm not even sure if it was mentioned at all).

In ch. 16, Dorian meets, in an opium den, Adrian Singleton, a young man whose life he had apparently ruined (though it is not quite clear how — perhaps by introducing him to drugs? — anyway, in the 1890 text, Adrian is mentioned only once, in the conversation between Basil and Dorian shortly before the murder; Basil mentions the rumours that are circulating about Dorian, how many people he had associated with are now in disgrace etc., and Adrian is mentioned once among the others, p. 129). This chapter ends with the encounter between Dorian and Sibyl's brother James, who tries to kill him for causing the suicide of his sister at the beginning of the novel. However, this was almost twenty years ago and Dorian hasn't aged since then, so he manages to convince James that he cannot be that man, who would have to be almost forty years old now.

Most of ch. 17 consists of a conversation among Dorian, Lord Henry and a Duchess of Monmouth; a conversation in which clever epigrams are flying back and forth like lightning-bolts and the whole scene reminded me somewhat of swordfights in old swashbuckling movies (Scaramouche comes to mind). But at the end of the chapter, Dorian sees James Vane's face peering at him through a window, and faints. In ch. 18, there's a hunt and a man is accidentally shot by one of Dorian's guests; it turns out that the victim is none other than James Vane.

Wilde also inserted a couple of pages of text (pp. 349–50) into the conversation between Dorian and Lord Henry in ch. 13 of the 1890 edition and then split this chapter into two, resulting in chs. 19 and 20 of the 1891 edition.

So the main differences betwen the 1890 and the 1891 texts can be summarized thus: a couple of chapters of witty conversation in Wilde's trademark style, plus the whole James Vane part of the story. I must say that I didn't really miss these things when reading the 1890 text, but at the same time, adding them probably does improve the novel. They make it seem as if fate was playing a cat-and-mouse game with Dorian, first giving him a good fright when James Vane comes on his trail, and then an immense relief when Vane ends up being shot a few days later (and, in a further twist of irony, this wouldn't have happened if Sir Geoffrey had listened when Dorian asked him not to shoot!). This also provides a better motivation for Dorian's last (and unsuccessful) effort to become good (by not seducing the country-girl Hetty). The James Vane episode is also helpful because it further underscores that Dorian led a charmed life; he could get away with murder and with driving people to suicide, even in the face of such a dogged pursuer as James. It was only his own conscience, rather than any external human agency, that finally brought Dorian's morally bankrupt life to an end.

Minor changes from the 1890 to the 1891 text

In the other chapters, the ones that existed both in the 1890 and in the 1891 texts, most of the changes are small. Wilde often changes a word here or there, and sometimes adds or removes a sentence, but it isn't obvious to me that most of these changes really make much of a difference, neither improving the text nor making it worse. But I guess I haven't got a delicate enough sense for language to be able to really judge such things :)

One well-known change between the 1890 and 1891 editions (I remember it mentioned e.g. in Hesketh Pearson's biography of Wilde) is that the frame-maker whom Dorian asks for help in moving the portrait is named Ashton in the 1890 edition but Hubbard in the 1891, because Wilde felt that “Ashton is a gentleman's name” while “Hubbard positively smells of the tradesman”. The editor's note on p. 441 says that these comments by Wilde were reported in the 1917 memoir In Good Company by Coulson Kernahan (Wilde's editor for the 1891 edition of Dorian Gray; p. li).

Another change is in ch. 10 (or ch. 8 of the 1890 text), where Dorian's old housekeeper, Mrs. Leaf, is described more affectionately in the 1890 text (“Mrs. Leaf, a dear old lady in a black silk dress”), while in the 1891 text the conversation between her and Dorian is shorter and colder. See the textual notes to 268.13, 268.14 and 269.8–10; Wilde removed four short paragraphs of the conversation. I wonder why he thought these changes necessary. He basically went out of his way to kill a pleasant and perfecly sympathetic minor character and turn her into little more than a theatrical prop.

Near the end of ch. 10 (ch. 8 in the 1890 ed.), when discussing the style of the book that Dorian receives as a present, the 1890 text refers to “the French school of Décadents” (p. 103), but in 1891 Wilde replaced this by “Symbolistes” (p. 274). See also the editor's note on p. 442.

At the beginning of ch. 11 (1891 text; p. 276, l. 4), Dorian buys “no less than nine large-paper copies of the first edition” of the book that Lord Henry had given him as a present. But in 1890 (ch. 9, p. 105), he was satisfied with a mere five copies :)

Near the beginning of ch. 4 (1891 text; p. 208, ll. 26–8), Lord Henry's wife says that he has seventeen or eighteen photographs of Dorian; but in the corresponding place of the 1890 text (ch. 3; p. 35, ll. 25–6 and p. 36, l. 1) he has as many as twenty-six or twenty-seven.

In ch. 12 (1891 text, p. 293), Wilde added a couple of paragraphs to the conversation between Basil and Dorian (starting with “ ‘Stop, Basil. You are talking about things of which you know nothing,’ ”); I think this is a welcome addition and tells the reader a bit more about the scandals and rumours with which Dorian has become associated.

Miscellaneous

I used to think that Caligula had appointed his horse to the position of consul, but now I see that I got these things slightly mixed up: Caligula only “meant to make him consul” (p. 413, the quote is from Suetonius, Caligula 55), while it was Elagabalus that had really “raised his horse to the honours of the consulship” (p. 414; the quote is from Gibbon, ch. 6).

There are two interesting passages, one in ch. 3 (1891 ed.), and one in ch. 4 (1891 ed., or ch. 3 of the 1890 ed.), about aristocrats not being able to afford things. The Duchess of Harley says of the Americans: “I must confess that most of them are extremely pretty. And they dress well, too. They get all their dresses in Paris. I wish I could afford to do the same.” (P. 201.) And Lord Henry's wife Victoria says on p. 209: “You've never been to any of my parties, have you, Mr. Gray? You must come. I can't afford orchids, but I spare no expense in foreigners. They make one's rooms look so picturesque.” I know that these passages are meant to be humorous, but I wonder if Wilde wasn't also picking up on a real historical trend at the time, namely the slow but steady decline of the British aristocracy from their formerly undisputed position at the top of the political, social and economical hierarchies. In the late 19th century they were increasingly unable to compete with the much wealthier industrialists, the wealthiest of which were of course to be found in America. See David Cannadine's fascinating book, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy.

A curious passage from ch. 11 (1891 text, p. 114): “In Lodge's strange romance ‘A Margarite of America’ it was stated that in the chamber of the queen one could behold ‘all the chaste ladies of the world, inchased out of silver [. . .]’ ” I suppose this is a joke (if a slightly misogynyst one), right? If all the chaste women can be portrayed in a single room, then there clearly can't be very many of them...

The obligatory bit of grumbling: it's great that in the commentary, the page headers tell you to which page of the text the commentary there refers to; but I wish that the headers of the text itself told you which chapter you're in, but they don't; they just tell you whether it's the 1890 or 1891 text. I noticed just a handful of typos: “one fo the grooms” (p. 344, l. 40); “Jean-Baptise Poquelin” (p. 453, note to 335.18); and the critical note to p. 348, l. 35 mentions “p. 348” instead of “p. 350”. Well, that's still three mistakes too many for a book that costs as much as this one :)

Conclusion

I won't write much about the literary aspects of the novel, because so much has been written about it already by people who can do it better than I could ever hope to anyway. I found that I enjoyed re-reading it after all these years, but I also got a feeling that all these delightful and outrageous epigrams and witticisms for which Wilde is so famous and with which The Picture of Dorian Gray is peppered as densely as perhaps any other of his works start to eventually get slightly tedious. “Ah, yes, yet another epigram by the ever-witty Lord Henry, just the sort of thing he is always saying (and very likely the sort of thing that has been said by three other characters in other works by Wilde), oh, how very clever, what utterly delightful cynicism, yawn, yawn, yawn.” It all starts to feel somewhat predictable and overly familiar, but of course this complaint of mine should not be taken seriously — it isn't fair to Wilde. None of these things bothered me when I read Dorian Gray for the first few times; they were fresh and delightful to me then. And they are still enjoyable now, it's just that they aren't new any more, they are all familiar and they are things that I've heard so many times before; so that although the charm is still there, the novelty is all gone, and consequently reading Dorian Gray for the eighth time wasn't quite so delightful as hitherto. But I must say that I was mostly annoyed by this in the beginning of the book; later, as the story gathers up pace, Lord Henry's epigrams are no longer so prominent as in the beginning of the book, and so they didn't really annoy me any longer at all (especially in the 1890 text; in the 1891 text, some of the new chapters, 15, 17 and partly 18, are chock-full of epigrammy goodness :)).

But, as I said, please disregard my grumbling. Wilde, after all, had an answer for it as well: when a man says he has exhausted life, one knows that life has exhausted him (ch. 15, p. 319). Now admittedly I haven't exactly lived yet, nor am I likely to in the foreseeable future, but I cannot help feeling that there's a kind of exhaustion at work here just the same :) Anyway, to anyone who enjoyed The Picture of Dorian Gray, I recommend this edition very highly. Between the editor's introduction, his extensive commentary, and the critical apparatus with its delightful possibilities for comparing the 1890 and 1891 editions (and the manuscripts), there's so much fascinating material here, besides the text of the novel itself, that it's definitely worth the price.

BOOK: Oscar Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray"

2007-10-13T19:43:00.001+02:00

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Volume 3: The Picture of Dorian Gray: the 1890 and 1891 texts. Ed. by Joseph Bristow. Oxford University Press, 2003. 0198187726. lxxvii + 465 pp.

Ah, The Picture of Dorian Gray. This is the book that got me hooked on Wilde. I had to know it really well for an exam at the end of secondary school, so I read it six times during the last year. I found that I enjoy Wilde a lot, so I later read his collected works in an inexpensive paperback edition, and then when I eventually saw that the OUP would begin publishing a variorum edition of his collected works, I decided to start buying it volume by volume as they would be published. But I wrote about this before, and there's no point in repeating myself. Anyway, I'm just saying that if it hadn't been for The Picture of Dorian Gray, I probably wouldn't be reading the OUP edition of Wilde right now.

This novel exists in two versions — first, Wilde published it in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, and later he expanded it to nearly twice the length to make it suitable for a standalone book. This OUP edition contains the text of both versions, as well as a critical apparatus in which this text is collated with various manuscripts and typescripts. In addition to that, there's a very interesting and extensive introduction by the editor, as well as wonderfully detailed explanatory notes at the end of the book. This is the third volume in the OUP edition of Wilde's collected works (the first two contain his poetry and De Profundis); although they are all expensive, I didn't regret buying any of them; but with this volume, my feeling that it was really worth the price is even greater than with any of the first two volumes.

The editor's introduction

I particularly enjoyed the editor's introduction, which describes the circumstances of the composition and publication of both versions of the novel, with an emphasis of what these things looked like from the perspective of the business side of publishing. The book version of The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in a small-paper and a large-paper edition; the former was a standard format at a standard price, while the latter was expensive and aimed at connoisseurs. “Certainly, the practice of issuing the same work in differently sized volumes dates from the 1600s. Yet this mode of publication appears to have become defunct by the turn of the nineteenth century. The trend for using the same plates for both a small-paper edition and an edition de luxe came into its own with the marketing of Pre-Raphaelite poetry.” (P. xxii.) There's also an interesting mention of the three-decker novels and the reasons for their demise at the end of the 19th century (p. xxi).

The introduction also notes the differences between the advertisements in the American and British editions of Lippincott's Magazine. The British edition contained, among other things, an ad for “ ‘Wansborough's Metallic Nipple Shields’ (‘at 1s. a pair’)” (p. xv). Sounds like something that Madonna might have a use for... :)

Another very interesting part of the introduction discussess the reviewers' responses to Dorian Gray. It's interesting how, when the novel was first published in the Lippincott's Magazine (in 1890) simultaneously in the UK and the USA, the negative criticism was all coming from the UK: “the New York Times observed that the controversy that Wilde had aroused with the publication of his story remained largely incomprehensible to American readers.” (P. l.) The editor adds: “I have found no evidence of outright hostility towards The Picture of Dorian Gray in the American press.” (Ibid.) On the other hand, many British newspapers were complaining about the supposed unwholesomeness of the novel, its lack of a clear moral and the presence passages that could be interpreted as allusions to homosexuality (pp. xliv–xlix). Wilde defended himself in letters to the editors of various newspapers, emphasizing that “his story refused to spell out what ‘Dorian Gray's sins are’ for the reader. ‘He who finds them,’ he added, ‘has brought them.’ ” (P. xlviii.)

In addition to these things, the introduction contains a discussion about the various kinds of revisions that Wilde (and his editor in the Lippincott's Magazine) made to the text at various points, both before the magazine publication and later when he was working on the longer version that would be published as a book in 1891.

By the way, it seems that Wilde had also done some translation work in the early part of his career. The editor's introduction (p. xliv) mentions his 1886 translation of A Fire at Sea, a short story by Turgenev. But I wonder — did Wilde understand Russian? I'd never heard of anything of that sort. Maybe he translated from a translation into some other language, rather than directly from the original. — Anyway, the editor also says (ibid.) that Wilde received offers to translate Euripides and Herodotus in 1879 (which sounds reasonable — after all, he had studied the classics, this was his area of expertise), but it isn't clear to me whether anything came of this or not.

Interesting things from the editor's notes

The editor's commentary and notes at the end of the book are wonderfully detailed. As an example: they even include a discussion of whether the various flowers mentioned as blossoming around Basil Hallward's studio in Chapter 1 really could all have blossomed at the same time :) (The conclusion is that this is improbable, p. 366.)

Sometimes the notes explain things that I would think are obvious to everyone. On p. 387, the note to 71.28 explains that when Dorian says to his servant that he is “not at home” to anyone, this means that he is “not available to receive visitors”. On p. 390, the note to 96.3 explains that Bologna is a “city in north-east Italy”. I don't know whether to praise the editor for this thoroughness of the notes and the unwillingness to expect too much from the reader, or to criticize him for thinking that the readers are such ingoramuses that they need to be told what Bologna is.

Wilde is well-known for frequently reusing the same witticisms and epigrams in several different works. One of the good things about this edition is that the editor's notes at the end of the book identify these cases, pointing out the passages that he reused in his plays and other works. I was, however, very surprised at one gaping omission: in chapter 11 (or chapter 9 of the 1890 text), he refers to one of the curious musical instruments collected by Dorian as “the mysterious juruparis of the Rio Negro Indians, that women are not allowed to look at and that even youths may not see till they have been subjected to fasting and scourging” (p. 112). Wilde later reused this idea in Salome, where Herod says: “I have a crystal, into which it is not lawful for a woman to look, nor may young men behold it until they have been beaten with rods.” But the editor's notes in this volume don't point out this reuse. Too bad — it's so wonderfully bizarre, and one of my favourite passages from Salome.

The editor's notes also identify the sources of various factoids that Wilde amassed in such quantities here in chapter 11 (or 9), as well as elsewhere to some extent. For example, he learned of the juruparis and other exotic instruments from an 1875 book, Musical Instruments by one Carl Engel. The sources of his facts about gems and outrageous anecdotes about Roman emperors and Renaissance tyrants have similarly been identified quite precisely.

Critical apparatus: 1890 text

I'm usually not particularly interested in studying critical apparatuses (whatever the correct plural of this word is), but in this case I took a glimpse at it anyway, and was often rewarded — it's a gold-mine of interesting comparisons between the 1890 text, the 1891 text and the various extant manuscripts and typescripts.

Thus the critical notes often reflect the minor battle of the wills between Wilde and J. M. Stoddart, the editor of Lippincott's Magazine in which The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published. For example, on p. 11, l. 13, we see that Wilde first wrote “he is” in the manuscript, then crossed it out and replaced it with “we are”; but then in the subsequent typescript, Stoddart crossed out “we are” and replaced it with “he is”, and this version was then published.

Stoddart also changed Wilde's spelling from British to American and made various other small modifications (e.g. toning down Wilde's use of capital initials: “Opera” → “opera” on p. 84; “Agate” → “agate”, “Cornelian” → “cornelian” and other names of gems on p. 114; “Science” → “science”, “Scientific Reviews” → “scientific reviews” on p. 145).

In addition to that, he occasionally tried to make some of Wilde's passages somewhat tamer: e.g. he changed “I don't suppose that ten per cent. of the lower orders live with their own wives” to “live correctly” (p. 11, l. 16). In ch. 9, there's a passage that discusses Dorian's descent into depravity: “he would [. . .] go down to dreadful places near Blue Gate Fields [i.e. probably to opium-dens], and stay there [. . .] until he was driven away.” Here, “until he was driven away” is Stoddart's text; Wilde had originally writen more luridly, “till they almost drove him out in horror, and had to be appeased by monstrous bribes” (p. 118, l. 25).

In a passage about a fictitious Lady Devereux on p. 122, l. 9, Wilde decided to change “the strange stories that were told about her lovers” into “[. . .] about the death of those to whom she granted favours”, but Stoddard changed it back to the earlier version :) On p. 124, l. 11, Wilde refers to a tapestry of “the Borgia on his white horse, with Incest and Fratricide riding beside him”, but Stoddard deleted Incest and kept only Fratricide. Stoddard also removed an allusion to homosexuality on p. 120, l. 2, and one to the depravity of Caligula (and of the hero of the novel that Lord Henry gave to Dorian as a present) on p. 123, l. 8. He removed a passage in which Lord Henry regrets that Dorian decided not to seduce a simple country girl named Hetty (p. 155, l. 19).

Another deletion by Stoddard, for which the reasons are less clear to me, is on p. 157, l. 2, where Lord Henry talks about missing his wife, who had left him for another man. It's true that his tone is somewhat aloof, as usual for him, but he does seem to have been genuinely fond of her. Thus I don't know why Stoddard removed this passage — keeping it would have made Lord Henry seem a better person. Perhaps he felt that Henry was an amoral cynic anyway and as such his positive sides shouldn't be emphasized, so that he can be safely seen as a negative character?

I guess that Wilde didn't disagree very much with these changes by Stoddard, as he retained practically all of them in the 1891 text; he didn't restore the passages that Stoddard had deleted.

Some interesting things were deleted by Wilde himself (or at least the critical apparatus doesn't say that it was Stoddard), e.g. on p. 124, l. 5, we hear of “Filippo, Duke of Milan, who slew his wife, and painted her lips with a scarlet poison” — but why? It turns out that Wilde had originally included an explanation in the manuscript, but then deleted it: “that her guilty lover might suck swift death from the dead thing that he fondled”. Wilde restored this passage in the 1891 text (p. 290, l. 4).

The Shame of Oscar Wilde

Yes, yes, I know that that's really the title of a book :) But here I'm referring to Wilde's spelling mistakes in the manuscripts, which are of course all faithfully noted in the critical apparatus. He had a tendency to write “do'nt” and “ca'nt” instead of “don't”, “can't” etc. (Another curious spelling, which however doesn't seem to be regarded as a mistake and is consistently used in the 1891 text, is “sha'n't”. This is not how it would be written nowadays, but I must admit that the extra apostrophe actually makes sense, because after all there is indeed an omission of “ll” between “sha” and “n”. This spelling appears e.g. on pp. 272, 291, 315, 321 and 352.)

The manuscript of the 1890 edition also contains many French phrases which were then replaced by English ones in the printed edition, partly because the readers of Lippincott's magazine couldn't be expected to understand French and partly because Wilde's own French was somewhat shaky (which is quite surprising, to me at least) and there was a risk of embarrassing mistakes (see the editor's introduction, p. xxxvi). In the 1891 edition, he misspells “fin de siècle” as “fin de siêcle” in chapter 15 (and it isn't just a printer's error — it also appears in Wilde's manuscript; see p. 318, l. 25).

Basil's feelings towards Dorian

One particularly interesting thing one sees from the textual notes is the evolution of Basil's attitude towards Dorian. In the manuscript of the 1890 text there are many hints that Basil felt a homosexual attraction towards Dorian. Many of these passages were removed or toned down in the 1890 printed edition by the editor of Lippincott's magazine; see e.g. 91.4, 93.19. Then, when preparing the 1891 edition, Wilde didn't restore any of these passages, but rather toned down the remaining ones even further (see 217.24, 261.31, 264.10, 264.12–14, 264.17, 266.2), so that for example I, as a naive reader who has until now always read only the 1891 text, had never before even thought that Basil might have had homosexual feelings towards Dorian. (See also the discussion of this in the editor's introduction, p. liii.)

Another change between the 1890 manuscript and the printed edition (as well as the 1891 edition) is about the book that Lord Henry gives as a present to Dorian, and which fascinates him so much (ch. 9 in the 1890 text, ch. 11 in the 1891 text). In the manuscript, Wilde provides a fictitious name of the author of the book (Catulle Sarrazin), as well as of its hero (Raoul, the title being ‘The Secret of Raoul’), but in the printed version these are all removed. See the editor's notes, pp. 392–3, for an interesting discussion of how Wilde came to select those names in the first place. Anyway, it is well known that the book that Wilde really had in mind here was Huysmans' À rebours.

[To be continued in a few days.]

BOOK: J.-K. Huysmans, "Marthe"

2007-10-06T19:44:00.000+02:00

J.-K. Huysmans: Marthe: The Story of a Whore. Translated by Brendan King. Sawtry: Dedalus, 2006. 1903517478. 149 pp.

Introduction

This is Huysmans' first novel, and his second book altogether, published in 1876, preceded only by A Dish of Spices a few years earlier.

The book also includes an introduction by the translator, with interesting information about the beginnings of Huysmans' literary career. After A Dish of Spices, he began writing short essays and sketches for magazines, but some friends eventually persuaded him to try writing a novel (p. 10).

Marthe was published in slightly unusual circumstances; Huysmans had largely finished his manuscript when he learned that Edmond de Goncourt, a respected writer of the older generation, was also working on a novel with a similar subject, i.e. dealing with the life of a prostitute (it was eventually published in 1877 as La fille Élisa). To avoid being accused of plagiarism, Huysmans decided to hurry his book through the press to get it published before Goncourt's. Because of censorship in France, he had it printed in Belgium at his own expense. (As a civil servant, he was also concerned about the reaction of his employers to the book if it were published in Paris.) He tried to personally smuggle a considerable part of the print run into France, but the books were seized by the customs officials :) (p. 13).

This first edition did not attract much notice, and newspaper reviewers tended to be hostile, but it was warmly praised by several famous writers to whom Huysmans sent copies, such as de Goncourt and Zola. Thus Marthe was an important step towards establishing Huysmans as a noted and respected naturalist writer. (Incidentally, Zola also wrote a prostitute-themed novel not long afterwards — Nana, first published in 1880.)

The story

As far as the contents are concerned, Marthe seems pretty much your typical sordid naturalist novel.

Marthe grows up in powerty, her parents die soon; she spends her adolescent years at exhausting work in an artificial-pearl factory (in the usual naturalist fashion, Huysmans cannot resist including a detailed description of the manufacturing process — it involves large quantities of fish scales; pp. 37–8). Following the example of the other girls she works with, she takes a lover; things go from bad to worse, a few lovers later she ends up in a brothel, finds this kind of work rather revolting and runs away.

She gets a job in a (very) downscale theatre, more for her looks than for her singing or acting abilities. She even gets herself a reasonably decent boyfriend, a young journalist named Léo. After a while she moves into his flat, but this turns out to be the beginning of the downfall of their relationship, as they cannot help getting more and more on each other's nerves. This is exacerbated by their dire poverty, as the newspapers Léo writes for aren't exactly thriving, and the theatre where Marthe worked goes bankrupt. Léo learns of Marthe's past when the police come to take her to a medical examination, which she is required to undergo regularly as a former registered prostitute (apparently a public-health measure to prevent the spread of venereal diseases).

Meanwhile, Ginginet, an old actor, Marthe's former theatre manager, and inveterate drunkard, has inherited a bar and set himself up as a publican. He persuades Marthe to come live with him as his mistress and bartender, and even manages to get her struck off the prostitute register. However, their relationship is stormy and full of violence, with Marthe mostly as the victim; and they are both pretty hard drinkers. Eventually she leaves, briefly returns to Léo but leaves him as well after just one night, as they both realize that their former relationship is well and truly dead. Soon she ends up in a brothel again.

Ginginet, meanwhile, has drank away his inheritance as well as his health and his voice; he dies as a beggar in the streets, and in the last chapter of the book we witness his autopsy for the benefit of medical students. We also hear that Léo has got married; he doesn't particularly love his wife but it seems that they'll manage to put up with one another somehow, and he definitely (if cynically) appreciates the convenience of having someone cook your meals and mend your clothes.

</spoiler warning>

Why was it ever written?

Well, I haven't really read any naturalist novels before (nothing by Zola, for example), so this is in a way my first encounter with genuine naturalism (not just its traces in Huysmans' later works). I must say it is about as bad as I was led to expect by what I've heard or read about it until now. I don't see why anybody would take the trouble to write such a novel, not to mention why anybody would think it worth being published. (Ah, but I forget; the first edition was published at Huysmans' own expense anyway.) It's all so ceaselessly negative; it's just bad things, bad people, bad actions, all the damn time.

From what I've heard, at least some naturalists, Zola for example, thought of their works as something that should point out society's faults and act as kind of call for social reform. But it isn't clear to me that Huysmans had any such aim here. The narrator of the story doesn't seem to particularly sympathize with the characters (in particular, one ofter seems to feel in the narrator's tone a kind of contempt for Marthe and for the way she always ends up returning to the life of prostitution; in fact the narrator seems to be a bit cynical about women in general, and is somewhat of a misogynist).

(See also the introduction, p. 19: “While Zola used Naturalism as a political tool with which to offer a critique of contemporary society, Huysmans saw it as a means to an aesthetic end.” And Huysmans himself writes in a preface to Marthe (p. 28): “I write what I see, what I feel and what I have lived, writing the best that I can, and that is all.” But that's a mighty poor excuse, if you ask me.)

In fact the writer seems to have gone out of his way to make much of the characters' misfortune a result of their personal faults rather than of social problems; for example, Ginginet inherits a bar just when his theatre fails — surely an act of providence if ever there was one — but he promptly goes and drinks day and night until he squanders everything and ends up a pauper. Similarly with Marthe, one cannot help feeling that at least some of her problems stem from her unstable character; she seems to want to be abused (ch. 8, pp. 97–8). Nowadays some people say that many prostitutes, especially victims of abuse, later come to suffer symptoms very similar to those of shellshock, or post-traumatic stress disorder; perhaps something similar is going on in Marthe's head as well.

Anyway, in the end you can of course always conclude that all the problems of the characters in this book stem from their hopeless poverty and from living in a society with no safety net; but I'm afraid that the book doesn't do much to encourage such a conclusion; it will only be made by people who are, like me, predisposed to blame the society as a whole for all the problems that beset the individuals who live in it.

Perhaps you could also argue that in some ways Marthe tries to act as a traditional morality tale. Surely Ginginet's career requires no further comment, it is already a perfect warning against the evils of alcoholism. And as for Marthe, she herself says to Ginginet near the end of the book (end of ch. 11, p. 123): “All the same, my dear, if we could live our lives over again, you know it would have been better to sweat and slave in an honest job, it would have paid better!” And Léo writes, most callously (ch. 12, p. 129): “whores like her have this much good about them: they make us love those who resemble them least; they serve as a foil to decency.” But on the other hand, it's hard to take this novel seriously as a traditional morality tale. It contains just negative examples, no positive ones, and the narrator seems too neutral: he doesn't strongly take sides for good and against evil, for example; nor would I really expect Huysmans to do such a thing at that time in his career.

Huysmans, an aspiring old salt?

I was surprised by the frequency with which maritime metaphors occur in this book, something that I don't remember seeing in Huysmans' other works. But maybe I was simply careless; the translator says on p. 148: “The notion that human beings periodically need to shelter from the storms of life is expressed through another maritime metaphor that recurs throughout Huysmans' work. The title of his 1887 novel En Rade, for example, literally means ‘in dry dock’ or ‘at harbour’.”

“This girl hadn't needed to strike a reef: she'd gone down with all hands on the open seas.” (Ch. 2, p. 45.)

The prostitutes trying to attract customers were “trying to reignite that flame in their glance for a few moments, so that some passing man might walk their plank and board them.” (Ch. 3, p. 49.)

“blondes who, seven sheets to the wind, were roaring with laughter and drinking wine” (ch. 4, p. 56).

Ginginet “had drowned his spirits in such a huge lake of cheap wine that he was lurching like a ship in distress, taking in not water but wine on all sides” (ch. 8, p. 93).

“The poet would have found her unsufferable if she hadn't served as a kind of harbour, in which he could refloat his stranded ship.” (Ch. 10, p. 113.)

The prostitutes “drank absinthe, shuffled their cards again, and waited until it was time to set sail, whether for Lesbos or for Cythera.” (Ch. 11, p. 116. Incidentally, does this mean that they also had female customers? I would naively imagine this to have been unthinkable in the society of that time.)

Funny passages and other miscellanea

“ ‘But what paper do you write for?’ — ‘The Monthly Review.’ — ‘Don't know it. And when does it come out?’ — ‘Generally every month.’ ” (Ch. 1, p. 34.)

“He lived by his pen, which is as much to say he starved” (ch. 4, p. 58).

“She dressed like all whores, sitting on the edge of the bed” (ch. 4, p. 60). WTF? Decent women must dress standing up, or what?! I can't help imagining Huysmans' office being stormed by disgruntled old grandmothers (armed with umbrellas and handbags, of course) who, due to weakness and a poor sense of balance, cannot dress standing up any longer :)))

During a performance in Ginginet's theatre, the audience pelts the stage with apple-cores. Ginginet consoles the authors of the play: “ ‘Young men,’ he said, ‘the profession of dramatic author may not provide you with bread, but at least it'll grant you plenty of apples.’ ” (Ch. 4, p. 65.)

“there were greengrocers where you could buy milk and lead soldiers” (ch. 8, p. 91). Oh yeah, lead soldiers — part of a nutricious breakfast!

On Ginginet's acting career: he spent “years declaiming on the boards, mouth like a chicken's arse and eyes bulging like billiard balls” (ch. 8, p. 93).

“Big-bellied and short of breath, he had bushy sideburns and his face offered that astonishing peculiarity, a nose the colour of aubergine, while the rest of his face seemed to be stained that striking red used by enamellists, Cassius purple.” (Ch. 9, p. 102.)

“hitching up his trouser-legs with a fine semblance of absent-mindedness, he revealed to the woman he was keeping that he was wearing long pink tights. As she failed to go into ecstasies over this clownish elegance, he pulled a little at his leggings and, pouting his lips, said: ‘Can you see how supple that silk is?’ ” (Ch. 10, pp. 107–8.) Nowadays pink is considered a very feminine colour, but I've read in a number of places that this is relatively recent, and as little as a hundred years ago pink was considered a vigorous, lively, manly colour. Well, the passage above seems to confirm it in a way.

At some point (ch. 4, p. 56), the novel refers to a painting, The Bean King, by Jacob Jordaens (I think we can by now safely say that Huysmans was constitutionally incapable of writing a work without any references to the visual art of the Low Countries). There's an interesting translator's note explaining what the painting is about (p. 141), and the painting itself is shown on p. 139. It is rather hilarious, especially “the pot-bellied slattern wiping her child's backside while a dog sniffs at it” — clearly the 17th century was a very weird place :) If a party gets so rambunctious that you don't hesitate to wipe your child's arse during it, in plain view of everyone, then this is surely a party that you shouldn't have brought your child to in the first place. (At least this is probably what most present-day parents would think, not that I necessarily agree.)

Wallowing in filth

There are a few passages of memorable wallowing in filth, the kind that the naturalists were so fond of.

“piss-coloured velvet of the sofa” (ch. 1, p. 29).

“a sinister staircase that creaked at every footstep and was impregnated with the foul stench of drains and the smell of the lavatories whose doors swung open in the slightest breeze.” (Ch. 2, p. 43.)

“one of the lowest dives in the Rue de Vaugirard. [. . .] the floor, powdered with rouge, was starred with dried spit, phlegm, cigar butts and pipe dottle” (ch. 5, p. 76).

“window displays in which shrivelled fish turned brown and fell apart, and bloody rabits were framed by a wall of lacklustre dishes and salad-bowls that disgorged prunes wallowing in a mire of their own juices.” (Ch. 8, p. 92.)

“a dirty junk-shop at the door of which hung dresses whose crinoline flesh had rotted away and whose wire carcasses tinkled in the wind.” (Ch. 11, p. 120.)

Conclusion

All in all, there are many commendable things about this edition. The introduction and the translator's notes are interesting, there are even a few helpful plates, and the translator has made a good effort to have the characters speak in a colloquial tone that was no doubt also used by Huysmans in the original. What I disliked most was the general sordidness that pervaded the whole novel, but I guess that this is simply inevitable in a naturalist work.

Another thing I disliked was the typeface in which this book, and several other Dedalus books, is set. It's a horrible romantic typeface, similar to Bodoni; the vertical strokes are so thick that it feels as if the whole book was set in boldface. (And it's not like Dedalus doesn't know how to use prettier typefaces; the one they use in the last few pages, for their advertisements, is much nicer.) But, of course, I must admit that in a way the typeface is aptly chosen; the late 19th century, when the novel was written and in which it is set, was dominated by just such typefaces. And it is, after all, appropriate that an ugly novel about the sordid aspects of life in an ugly 19th-century city should be set in an ugly 19th-century typeface; to set it a humanist face would be an affront to everyone involved :)

(Yes, yes, I admit, I'm a bit of an aspiring typeface snob :))

Anyway, I think this book can be recommended to fans of naturalism (along with a hearty swig of prussic acid, to put you out of your misery) and to Huysmans completists (along with another look at À rebours, to remind you why you started reading the guy in the first place), and to pretty much nobody else.

ToRead:

Edmond de Goncourt's La fille Élisa; and Zola's Nana, both mentioned in the introduction of this book. I will need to find English translations, of course.
Evenings at Médan (1880), a collection of short stories contributed by Zola and five other naturalist writers. (Mentioned here on p. 18.)
Eugèene Sue: The Mysteries of Paris. (Mentioned here on p. 143.)

Naj jedo inflacijo

2007-10-02T19:52:00.000+02:00

Izjava Dimitrija Rupla o inflaciji v zadnji Mladini je preprosto priceless :)))

BOOK: J.-K. Huysmans, "A Dish of Spices"

2007-09-29T19:42:00.000+02:00

J.-K. Huysmans: A Dish of Spices. Translated by Paul Oldfield. Caryatid Classics, 2005. 0955166705. 126 pp.

This is Huysmans' first work; the first edition was published at his own expense in 1874. It is a collection of short pieces, ranging in length from less than a page to some 10-15 pages. Some of them are perhaps best described as poems in prose, others as sketches or short stories. In many ways they reminded me of his later collection, Parisian Sketches, which I read last year, although there the pieces were perhaps on average slightly longer, and there weren't any poems in prose.

Thematically this collection is somewhat more diverse than Parisian Sketches, in the sense that not absolutely everything in it deals with Paris. For example, #8 “Claudine” is set in a somewhat more rural environment, and is really a charming short story about a girl who cannot make up her mind between two suitors. Several of the pieces are set in the past rather than in contemporary times; thus there's a very brief sketch of the life of Villon (#15), and several stories involving various more or less besotted 17th-century Dutch and Flemish painters (#16 “Adrian Brauwer”, #17 “Cornelius Bega”).

(Incidentally, this interest in Dutch and Flemish art seems to be one of the running themes going throughout Huysmans' works (although in the later ones he seems to be mostly interested in their medieval artists rather than more recent ones). I wonder if this is a result of Huysmans' own family background — his father was a Dutchman, and indeed Huysmans himself used the Dutch version of his name in his capacity as a writer (Joris-Karl, whereas as a government bureaucrat he would have been Charles-Marie-Georges). See his biography in the Wikipedia.)

In addition to that, this book contains, of course, the usual assortment of pieces based on pointless flaneurism through the more sordid and/or obscure parts of Paris (e.g. #14 “The Left Bank”, #19 “Around the Fortifications”); I've ranted about this in my post about Parisian Sketches, and there's no use repeating myself.

The book also has an interesting short introduction, some illustrations (unfortunately most of them seem to be based on low-resoution scans of old photographs, and the pixels can be seen all too well), and helpful notes at the end of the book. It is, if I understand correctly, the first translation of this collection into English. I think it can definitely be recommended to every Huysmans enthusiast; some people will perhaps enjoy these short pieces for their own sake, while others (like me) will chiefly find them interesting as an early example of Huysmans' decadent sensibility, and also as a proof that this sensibility didn't only emerge in his career with À rebours but was already present from the very beginning, even in the years when he was still writing naturalist novels.

P.S. I couldn't help noticing the contrast between the glitter of À rebours, which is the first book by Huysmans that I had read, and the general sordidness that pervades A Dish of Spices, as well as other early books of his that I've read in the last years. What a crafty writer Huysmans is — he lures you in with des Esseintes and his jewel-encrusted turtle, and then before long you end up wading along with him through the gutters of Paris, and crawling on your knees around obscure French ecclesiastical institutions :)

P.P.S. Shame on amazon.co.uk — they are currently selling the book for £8.49, but the RRP printed on it is just £6.50. Well, they used to charge a special £2-or-thereabouts ‘sourcing fee’ for books from obscure publishers; I guess that people were annoyed by that, and so amazon is now silently including those two pounds directly into the price of the book itself. Anyway, I got it for just £3 on eBay :)

P.P.P.S. One thing that annoyed me about this book is the ridiculously tight binding. It takes a nontrivial amount of force to hold the book open while you are reading it. And forget about keeping it open without the use of your hands (e.g. to read it while eating), at least not without utterly ruining the spine in the process (which I didn't try). I know that paperbacks can sometimes be a little cumbersome in this way, but this one is much worse than any other book I've ever read. And it seems that the paper of the pages is tougher than that of the covers :)

BOOK: Giovanni Pontano, "Baiae"

2007-09-22T19:43:00.000+02:00

Giovanni Gioviano Pontano: Baiae. Translated by Rodney G. Dennis. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 22. Harvard University Press, 2006. 0674021975. xiii + 362 pp.

This is a book of approx. 70 short poems, written by Giovanni Pontano in the 15th century. Most of them are just one or two dozen lines long, and the lines are ‘hendecasyllabics’, at least in the original — i.e. they have eleven syllables, but in the translation most of them are shorter. Well, at least the translation is in verse rather than in prose (as has been the case in some of the other ITRL poetry volumes). On the other hand, it doesn't try to preserve the metrical characteristics of the original verses.

Baiae was a seaside town (on the Bay of Naples), of which Pontano was apparently quite an avid visitor. Thus, most of the poems here deal with drinking or with sex, or possibly with both. Some of them are addressed to Pontano's friends, inviting them to come to Baiae and join him; some are written to the various ‘courtesans’ that he had been seeing over the years (none of which apparently got in the way of his perfectly regular marriage of several decades; see the translator's introduction, p. xi, and the poems 1.12, 1.13). The mentions of sexuality are fairly explicit in several passages, much more so (according to the translator) than what one typically finds in the classical poets that were Pontano's models (mostly Catullus).

In fact there's a very interesting passage in the introduction (pp. xv) that argues that Catullus was (and still is) widely misunderstood as a “poet not of passion, but of sexuality. The essential event took place about one hundred years after his death when Martial wrote ‘donabo tibi passerem Catulli’ (‘I shall give you Catullus's sparrow’) and changed, for all time, the charming little bird into the membrum virile. Subsequent generations accepted Martial's reading of Catullus's sparrow poems.” (See also p. xvi, and the note to 1.29.11 on p. 213.)

The translator's notes make a very detailed comparison between Pontano's poems and those of Catullus, identifying every passage where Pontano seems to have been influenced by something from Catullus. For someone interested in a very detailed study of these influences, this is undoubtedly great, but for a casual reader like me, most of these notes weren't really terribly interesting.

As for the poems themselves, many of them aren't bad or unpleasant to read, but there's nothing here to write home about either. Several of the poems struck me as fairly conventional — praising Baiae, extolling the pleasure of the easy life of the people vacationing there, the drinking and the sex — this is all very well and good, but there's nothing particularly clever in most of these poems, nor, I guess, anything terribly original either. They are pleasant enough to read, but I also quickly forgot them and there's nothing much here that I will remember e.g. a few months hence.

Some of the more touching passages were those in which Pontano acknowledges that now that he is old he will have to leave sex to others, while he himself will focus on wine as his main remaining consolation (1.6, 2.1). But sometimes he is also more optimistic; although he often makes reference to his age (2.14, 2.35), he isn't quite ready to give up sex yet.

When he praises the physical aspects of the women that he sings about, he often mentions the sweetness of breath in a more prominent way than I would have naively expected (see e.g. 2.30.12, 2.33.7, 2.34.15). Maybe it's just a poetic convention; or maybe, in an age before modern medicine and dentistry, it was more likely that there would be difficulties in that department.

I learned something new from the title of poem 1.23 (p. 69), “Lucilla's Dazzling Breasts”. In the Latin text on the opposite page, there is the word “papillis”. This reminded me of the fact that Edmund Spenser tends to refer to breasts as ‘paps’, and I wondered if this might have been descended from this Latin word. Now I looked it up in the dictionary, and it indeed says that the word ‘pap’ is related to (although not descended from) the Latin ‘papilla’. Incidentally, the dictionary says that it means ‘nipple’ rather than ‘breast’.

There's an interesting stylistic peculiarity in many of these poems: Pontano is very fond of repetition. Not (at least not usually) direct repetition of whole lines, but a phrase is repeated, with slight variations, perhaps with one of the words replaced by a synonym, in several lines, not necessarily with any particular regularity (the lines need not be directly one after another, the repeated phrase is not necessarily always at the beginning or the end of the line, etc.). I didn't get the impression that this device particularly improves the poems, but Pontano clearly enjoys using it throughout this collection.

One thing that annoyed me about this book is the small amount of material — I think it's the thinnest ITRL book I've read so far, and most of the pages are half empty anyway (each poem begins on a new page, and many poems take up much less than one whole page). Judging from the translator's notes (p. xi), Pontano wrote plenty of other poems as well, so they really could have translated some more and published a somewhat thicker book. The ITRL series has a constant price per book, usually around $30, so the thinner the books, the less value we are getting for our money :)

What to say at the end? This book was not a disappointment, but it isn't one of my favourite ITRL poetry books so far either — that title remains with the volume of Pietro Bembo's lyrical poetry.

BOOK: Angelo Poliziano, "Letters"

2007-09-15T20:15:00.001+02:00

Angelo Poliziano: Letters. Vol. 1: Books I–IV. Edited and translated by Shane Butler. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 21. Harvard University Press, 2006. 0674021967. xiii + 362 pp.

Introduction

Poliziano was a 15th-century humanist; I've already read one other book of his from the ITRL series, namely Silvae, which contains his didactic poems about literature. This present book, on the other hand, is a small selection of his correspondence, containing not just letters written by Poliziano but also letters written to him by various correspondents, mostly other Italian humanists of that period.

Perhaps unusually for a book of letters, this one was was initially edited and published by Poliziano himself; according to the translator's introduction here (p. ix), the whole thing consists of twelve books, of which the present volume contains the first four, so I guess there will eventually be two more volumes of Poliziano's correspondence.

Lucio Phosphorus, bishop of Segni, writes to Alessandro Cortesi (3.10.1, p. 163): “I have read Poliziano's letters very attentively and with the greatest pleasure, both of these being nearly inevitable”. How I wish that I could say the same :( But, as on a number of previous occasions, I must sadly say that this was one of the most boring I Tatti Renaissance Library books I've read so far (perhaps even the most boring one altogether).

I was disappointed to see how little of substance these intellectuals had to say to one another. Most of the text of these letters consists of mutual compliments — they just can't help praising each other, with an intensity that looks extremely weird by present-day standards. Their abject grovelling would make even the Usenet Oracle blush. The contents of most of them can be summarized as “You are so wonderful, can I be your friend?” or (if the writer is already the addressee's friend) “My friend X also thinks that you are so wonderful, can he be your friend too?” or “X and me both think that your patron / influential acquaintance / etc. is really wonderful, can you recommend us to him as well?” Perhaps one of the greatest services that LinkedIn and Facebook will do to humankind is to rid them of the need to write, and read, letters like these :)

The other major concern of these letter-writers (especially Poliziano's own, I suspect) was showing off their erudition in front of their humanist peers — they are constantly trying to be clever and polished, employing all sorts of rhetorical technicalities, reams of classical allusions, etc. According to the translator's introduction (pp. x–xi), the originals of some of these letters are also preserved, and comparing them to the text as it was printed by Poliziano shows that Poliziano sometimes changed the letters a little bit to improve them stylistically — not only his own but even those of other people!

If we ignore the politenesses and the mutual praise, most of the letter here don't really have a whole lot to say. One relatively commonly recurring topic has to do with books — this was fairly early in the age of print, many books weren't readily available, and the letters often involve requests for help in finding some obscure work, or having a manuscript copied, etc.

Another frequent subject has to do with a book, the Miscellanea, which Poliziano published around that time (1489), and many of the letters contain his friends' comments (mostly praise) regarding the book. For example, Jacopo Antiquari writes (3.18.1, p. 195): “I ran into a large number of young men [. . .] who [. . .] vied keenly with one another to read a book they had in their hands, its pieces distributed among them. When I ask, ‘What new work, pray tell, has come out?’ they reply, ‘Poliziano's Miscellanea.’ ” I am especially intrigued by “its pieces distributed among them” — poor book! but it shows how itching they were to read it.

Lorenzo's death

The longest, and perhaps the most interesting, letter in this volume is 4.2, in which Poliziano describes the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, the de facto ruler of Florence and Poliziano's patron and friend of many years. The letter describes Lorenzo's final days on his deathbed, followed by his death and funeral. It was fairly touching to read. Perhaps Poliziano embellished the truth somewhat to make it more touching and edifying, but if not, then I must say that Lorenzo was really a model dying person. I was also impressed by his insistence on avoiding a state funeral and having only a small one, such as would be suitable for a private individual (4.2.5, 4.2.17); he was a de facto rather than a de jure ruler of Florence.

In 4.2.3 (p. 229), Poliziano writes about Lorenzo's illness: “Lorenzo de' Medici had suffered for roughly two months from those pains which, since they settle into the cartilage deep in the body, are called, on that basis, hypochondrian.” This is interesting because I wasn't familiar with the etymology of this word until now, but, in the light of the present-day meaning of the word ‘hypochondria’, this passage is quite hilarious. Poor Lorenzo, seems that nobody told him that he was just imagining it, and he just went and died :-))

On the rather silly last efforts to save Lorenzo's life (4.2.6, p. 235): “Next, your Lazzaro, a very creative physician, as indeed became apparent, arrived from Ticino. Although he had been summoned too late, in order to avoid leaving anything untested, he tried a very expensive kind of remedy by grinding pearls and precious stones of all sorts.”

Other interesting letters

Another of the more interesting letters was 3.17 (pp. 189–93), written to “Cassandra Fedele of Venice, most learned girl”. Poliziano is quite effusive in praising her skill and talents, and encouraging her to keep going in her studies of the humanities. His writing seems to be quite free from the sexism and misogyny with which women's efforts to educate themselves and have all too often been greeted throughout practically all the periods of history.

Another interesting letter is 4.8 (pp. 271–5), in which Poliziano writes to his friend Francesco della Casa, describing “the self-propelled device which recently was constructed by a certain Florentine named Lorenzo, in which the movements of the stars, in accord with the logic of the skies, are revealed” (4.8.1, p. 271). The translator's note on p. 352 says that the inventor's full name was Lorenzo della Volpaia — see e.g. this web site for more about him.

There's also a letter (4.10) that Poliziano wrote to one Ivan Gučetić of Dubrovnik (pp. 279–81), who apparently dedicated some of his poems to Poliziano. He warmly praises Gučetić's work, although he is also “stunned to heard that a man from Illyria, employed ‘in buying and selling merchandise’ (as Plautus says), has made, while still in the flower of his youth, such great strides in poetic art” (4.10.2, p. 279). The translator's note (p. 353) says of the poet: “Celebrated in his day for works in Latin, Greek, and Croatian (of which, however, only a single Latin poem survives) and still famous for the villa and garden (with arboretum) he built outside Dubrovnik.”

Miscellaneous

At the end of a letter to Jacopo Antiquari, Poliziano adds (3.19.6, p. 205): “Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who resembles no one more completely than he does himself, has instructed me to append a hello to you in his own name as well.” Seems like someone overdosed on his tautology pills that morning :)

I was interested to learn, from the translator's note 3 to 3.10 (pp. 342–3), the source of the anecdote of the cobbler and Apelles the painter, which is famously referred to in one of Prešeren's sonnets: it's from Pliny's Natural History, 35.36.85 (Latin, English).

In one of the many passages about friendship, Poliziano writes (to Ludovico Odasio; 3.4.1, p. 147): “But genuine love does not need proof [. . .] nor does it engage in public boasting, since friends, according to Epicurus, are for one another a sufficiently large theater.” This ought to win some kind of ‘hypocrisy of the year’ award. No public boasting, huh? And then he goes and publishes this letter, along with several dozen others, in a book for all the world to see. No public boasting my ass.

A fine calumny against physicians, from Poliziano's letter to Niccolò Leoniceno (2.6.1, p. 93): “it pained me to consider the current condition of the human race, which for such a long time has allowed this depressing ignorance to victimize it and has gone on buying, at a price, the expectation to live from those very persons who are the source of detain death. Who, indeed, cannot see that more danger comes from a doctor than from disease, since treatment is for one disease instead of another, and these remedies are used instead of those?” This reminds me somewhat of Petrarca's invective against a physician — apparently doctors really weren't popular in the Renaissance.

Apparently Poliziano's erudition made him the target of importunate requests from all sides: “For if anyone wants a motto fit to be read on the hilt of a sword or the signet of a ring, if anyone wants a line of verse for a bed or a bedroom, if anyone wants something distinctive (not for silver, mind you, but for pottery pure and simple!), then straightway he dashes over to Poliziano. And already you can see that every wall has been smeared by me (as if by a snail) with diverse themes and inscriptions.” (He goes on for a whole long paragraph. This is from his letter to Girolamo Donà, 2.13.2, p. 127.)

Conclusion

Despite these sort-of-interesting things that I mentioned in the previous paragraphs, the book as a whole was really boring to read and I'm very much not looking forward to the remaining two volumes of Poliziano's letters. I would recommend this book only to people who enjoy witnessing academic mutual masturbation and those who are in a position to enjoy Poliziano's much-vaunted skillz in the composition of Latin letters (which I'm not, since I can only read the English translation, and there doesn't seem to be anything terribly impressive about the style there).