Staging a play about the poor [Gorky’s Na Dne, 1902] is not easy, since no one in the theater knows how the characters should speak or behave. So Stanislavsky hires the reporter Vladimir Gyelyarovsky, known for his portrayals of beggars and vagrants in his seminal work Moscow and Moscovites, to give them a guided tour of the most depraved area of Moscow, Petrovsky Market. The excursion comes to a dramatic conclusion. The actors treat the vagabonds to vodka and sausage but the feast unexpectedly descends into ugliness. “They turned purple with rage, lost control and ran wild. They started shouting and swearing. Someone grabbed a bottle, another a stool, and they started swinging at each other,” Stanislavsky recalls. “At that moment, in a stentorial voice, Gyelyarovksy hurled a storm of invective of such syntactical complexity that it stunned not only us but the tramps, too. Dumbfounded and delighted, they were in a state of aesthetic rapture. The mood changed. Mad laughter and applause broke out for such a brilliant peace of swearing.”

*

Meanwhile, in Manchuria, a Russian officer observes:

The more I looked at this town [Mukden] , the less I understood. What were we doing here, in Manchuria? What did we want to trade? Whom were we trying to civilize? Any Chinese fangzi is cleaner and more spacious than a Russian izba, the cleanliness of Chinese streets and courtyards would be the envy or our town and villages. And what bridges they have! Made of stone and decorated with ancient sculpture. They speak of a civilization that is not centuries old, but millenia!

*

On the 17th of October, 1905, Trepov, the Minister of the Interior, learns via telephone, that the Tsar, in face of an outright revolt of all classes of the society, has decided to grant Russia a constitution, the first ever in its history. “Thank God”, he says to his advisor, Rakovsky, “the manifesto is signed. We’ll have civil liberties and popular representation. Tomorrow, there will be triple-kissing in the streets of Saint-Petersburg”. (Russian triple-kiss each other on Eastern Sunday, saying, “He has risen!”). Then, turning to Gerasimov, the head of the secret police, he says: “That means no more work for you.” Gerasimov replies: “If that’s the case, I will be happy to resign”.

(Think about it. The chief of the secret service is happy to be put out of his job).

Mikhail Zygar ,The Empire Must Die: Russia’s Revolutionary Collapse, 1900 – 1917

“Do you know what terror is? It is horror of the complexity and mystery of what is called the human soul”.

Gershuni, leader of the terror operations of the SR (Party of Socialist Revolution of Russia), on finding that he has been betrayed by one of his assassins.

Mikhail Zygar , The Empire Must Die: Russia’s Revolutionary Collapse, 1900 – 1917

“‘Pity the poor creature,’ George Eliot wrote in  Daniel Deronda, who has nowhere to call ‘“home”, no one spot sanctified by early associations and  affections’, but Trelawny is probably one of those rare humans who had no need of her sympathy. “

*

“There is no record of any Fenton in the 23rd of  Foot, no Fenton on the casualty roll from the Peninsula, no J. W. Fenton anywhere in the Army Lists, no mention in General Mina’s memoirs of his  ‘chief engineer’, but there is something imaginatively  stilted in this kind of determination to unpick the  fictions with which so many Philhellenes like Fenton heralded their arrival in Greece. What this historical  literalism ignores is not just the extent to which men  and women constantly reinvent themselves, but the  way in which these fictions become imaginative  realities, enabling and self-fulfilling in a way for  which Trelawny’s whole life provides the classic  model. There was almost nobody who arrived in Greece without something to hide, some blemish on  their lives, some failure to atone or disappointment  to erase; hardly a Philhellene who did not need Greece more than Greece needed him. That was as true of Byron as it was of General Normann.  Hastings would never have been there if he had not been struck off the Navy List. Humphreys was only in  Greece because there was no commission for him in  the British Army, and – sliding inexorably down into the comic world of ‘Don Juan’ – it was a chance for many to be what luck, birth, poverty or peace had  denied them in their pasts; a chance for sergeants to  masquerade as captains, captains as generals,  Washingtons as Washingtons, parvenus and tricksters  as marquises and counts.”

David Crane, Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny

• 

• 

1

Byron’s arrival in Greece, to fight the Turks, caused a great stir.

“The instinct that enables the vulture to detect carrion from far off,”  Trelawny wrote of their arrival, “is surpassed by the marvellous acuteness of the Greeks in scenting money”. 

“Almost every distinguished statesman and general sent him letters soliciting his favour, his influence, or his money. Colocotrones invited him to a national assembly at Salamis. Mavrocordato informed him that he would be of no use anywhere but at Hydra, for Mavrocordato was then in that island.  Constantine Metaxa who was governor of  Mesolonghi, wrote, saying that Greece would be ruined unless Lord Byron visited that fortress.  Petrobey used plainer words. He informed Lord  Byron that the true way to save Greece was to lend him, the bey, a thousand pounds. With that sum not three hundred but three thousand Spartans would be put in motion to the frontier, and the fall of the Ottoman empire would be certain. “

2

” The mixture of bitterness, disgust, guilt and  disappointed expectations captured in Humphreys’s  journals represents perhaps the central experience of  the Philhellene volunteer”; ” [he] came to hate his Greek companions so  much that he prayed for battle ‘if only to see some of  these wretches knocked off’ “

3

But Trelawny was not so affected: “

“Their ships could refuse to sail”, he wrote Mary Shelley, “their soldiers desert, their captains could fight among themselves and hate all foreign volunteers, it would make no difference to me. My  lot is decided. With all the crimes the Greeks themselves are taxed, with treachery, avarice, envy, break of faith, if Greece was hell and the Greeks all devils,  I would not turn back whilst I have free will. “

David Crane , Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny

18 years ago, during the monsoon, I read C. L. Cline’s Byron, Shelley, and Their Pisan Circle. I read it in the shadow of an oil palm, on a hot-spring estate in Northern Thailand, where wife and I were the only guests. It was June, or July. Each day rose cool, then rapidly heated till about 3, when a sudden, 30-minute cloud-burst would cool it again. Clouds then parted, sun shone, and there was a delicious breeze. I got on my bike and rode among emerald rice fields, over which, from time to time, over a banana grove, flashed a golden spire of a distant temple.

I returned to my bungalow by the way of a night market in the local village, where I usually picked up some deep-fried locusts, or a grilled bullfrog; to take a hot bath in the natural spring at dusk; and then retired to bed to read some more.

I remember that Cline’s book gave me a strange satisfaction: to read about the social dynamics of all these interesting people, in an interesting setting, 2 centuries before; and I remember wondering who Trewlany was. His biography seemed so fascinating, a pirate, a soldier of fortune, a sailor, a poet. Why has no one written his biography, which seemed so much more interesting than that of Byron or Shelley themselves?

Today, sribd told me who he was. And now I know.

“He  called himself one thing, when the parish register gives another; claimed the friendship of Keats, when he never met him; railed at his poverty with a private income, and boasted of an exotic past as a pirate when he was no more than a failed midshipman with the diluted romance of his family name, a squalid divorce and a musket ball in a knee to show for his first thirty years”. 

David Crane , Lord Byron’s Jackal: A Life of Trelawny

Monet, Mist in Falaise, 1885, Wallraf-Richartz

The correct way to experience great art with a narrative element is to bear in mind that that element isn’t about what happened (it’s only ever the same damn thing over and over again), but how it felt to be there. In the case of a painting it may be how it feels to stand in pink mist of an early summer daybreak somewhere in Normandy; in the case of a novel, it may be how it feels to experience in a flash the immensity of creation while fighting for one’s life in the ocean surf. And in case of a biographical work, it could be how it must have felt to be a small boy, the son of a parson beset by religious doubt, and a mother troubled by visions and voices, when the mother moved out and the boy developed nocturnal fears and breathing difficulties and had to move to sleep in his father’s room. And how he woke at night and lay in bed listening to the roar of the Rhine Falls.

Catrine Clay , Labyrinths: Emma Jung, Her Marriage to Carl, and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis

This reworking of Melville’s (chilling) Benito Cereno (or is it a liner-notes cum commentary) certainly measures up.

I have known about the West African kingdoms and the Bony Island trade already from The Voyage of Slave Ship Hare; and a little about the working of the privateering business from Dark Places of the Earth; and a little about early sailing around south Chile from In the Heart of the Sea; but I knew nothing of the slave trade in in the Southern Cone — Uruguay, Argentina, Chile; or of the history of rebellions on slave ships; and certainly nothing of the sealing business. (Yuck).

And Grandin knows how to tell a story to give one a shudder: in his description of the slave train crossing the Andes, at the feet of Aconcagua, on Laylat al-Qadr, the holiest night of the Ramadan; with the moon the brightest and clearest the slaves would ever have seen; he first carefully prepares the reader by telling us about the white petrified trees spotted there by Darwin some years prior (“during his trek over the Andes at an altitude of about 7,000 feet, [he came] across a grove of calcified trees standing white and straight “like Lot’s wife.” He [looked] back behind him toward the pampas and [realized] he is  standing in what had once been the bottom of the sea”. (“Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his  shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic;  and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”).

Now, that’s damn good writing.

Greg Grandin , The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World

The object of Hemingway’s last obsession, and of his last novel; in which he poured out all his passion for her; and which he rewrote and reedited more than any other work ever; and which, he claimed enthusiastically, was his best shot to equal William Shakespeare, yet; well, this said object, then, was not impressed by what she read of the novel, which was, besides, only a little here and there:

“The Colonel and the girl spent too much  time at Harry’s Bar and the Gritti, she answered.  Besides, a girl like Renata did not exist. “Not in Venice at least. She’s supposed to be attractive, well-mannered and well-born but she drinks like a fish and is continuously climbing into beds in hotels.” Renata was boring, she said. “How can the Colonel love such a boring girl?” 

If he had not known till then that he was spent, he knew it now. Or should.

Sadly, too, I have gotten bored myself. At page 260, I don’t think I care any longer what these characters did. Not because the author tells the story badly, but because I just couldn’t care less what these characters do.

But I enjoyed intensely the first half of the book.

Now, where is my copy of Benito Cereno?

Andrea di Robilant ‘s Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse, telling the story of 50-something Hemingway’s last serious infatuation with a barely legal Venetian, delights at first. In part, it is the places: the book takes me to Venice and Veneto, which I know and often miss, and which the author, himself Venetian, knows, too; the story involves some of his family members and his social milieu; he knows the hotels, the palazzi, the villas in valle, the bird shooting spots and the trout fishing spots, the bars and the restaurants; he can even quote recipes from items on their menus. (The fish soup recipe seems wonderful, I will try it this week). His portrayal is vivid because of the small detail he knows and deftly adds to the background. And the people: Italians cultivate a charming and delightful manner; and the author knows the people he writes about and can show them in their best light. Though the events he describes soon begin to bore — yes, the drunken games — the creation of chivalrous orders of drink, the pretend bull-fights, the nonsensical fairy tales composed by drinking teams — are entertaining at first, but, Christ Almighty, surely there must be more to life than boozy horseplay; yet, the author still manages to keep my interest up by two tricks: an empathetic insight into the inner workings of the characters involved; and a judiciously sparing beautiful turn in his prose.

But by about the middle of the book, the charm and the fun and the exoticism begin to wear thin and, as one sees more of the human motivations and actions, it all begins to turn really ugly. Hemingway is incapable of self-control; his life happens to him; he has no insight; it’s all shooting, flying, boating, fishing, boxing and womanizing. The mechanism doesn’t seem much different from that of an unthinking dog. It must be really tiring to be 100% male; it is certainly very dull.

His wife (number 4) is constantly strategizing how to stay in his good books, to keep the marriage, fend off the various women; and it isn’t clear why: there does not seem to be anything between them that would strike me as a genuine connection. What does she get out of it?

His young love is… well, young. Hemingway’s son got her number very quickly in calling her… dull. Her mother seems open to capitalize on the situation. Her brother sponges off him. The Italian retinue are variously publishers, translators, prospective lovers, spongers, or just self-promoters seeking the limelight — every single one with a calculating agenda. The charm and fun turn out to be camouflage colors — the deception required to achieve the goals.

And once you start looking at the situation in this light, you start seeing Hemingway as the only decent and honest fellow in the drama. The only one who is uncalculating, unpremeditated, transparent. And he is — uninteresting and soon becomes tiresome.

But the recipe is great.

⅓ cup chopped carrots 
⅓ cup chopped celery 
⅓ cup chopped onions 
red mullet or other fish head, bones, slab—all  raw 
saffron, tomato sauce, olive oil, salt   

Cook for 20 mns, then separate best pieces of fish from bones and junk. Put junk thru colander. In  fresh pan put juices & strained stuff, add fresh, uncooked shrimp & lobster & glass of dry white  wine.

Andrea di Robilant, Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse