I was in a big city, where I joined a revolutionary socialist debating society with a vague commitment to direct action; I joined on account of a female member, a tall blonde with the world’s longest legs; and, to give myself ideological heft, I claimed for myself a long revolutionary and direct-action past; and proved it by extensive body tattoos — the yakuza sort which document one’s accomplishments — and a series of skillfilly woven hints and suggestions that I may have been involved in some notable revolutionary actions, various train robberies and bombings. (“Oh, that thing? Yeah, that was me”). I used this invented CV to impose my leadership of the group and start dragging the talkers into action — by taunting them as “bourgeois tourists”, I raised my own profile as man of action. Perhaps even — this cleverly hinted but repeatedly denied — a Komintern agent. My idea was to stage an attack on an airport — or perhaps someone landing there. It felt like the target was Josef Strauss; or perhap Konrad Adenauer.

As we studied our target — not too eagerly, my co-conspirators clearly preferring debating to action — we became aware that another clandestine group was interested in the target and soon realized that that group was planning the same attack as we, though with far larger resources, and much more serious resolve. At one point we identified at least 12 operatives, all of them small, slender, dark-skinned women; perhaps Rohingyas, or Somalis. (I once saw a group of Somali women sitting on the floor in a Gulf airport — they were in transit to jobs as maids — or worse — in Gulf households; I was much moved by the realization that they were in effect stateless, and therefore completely defenceless). In my dream, I suddenly realized seeing quite a few of similar women in the city of late — my first inkling of the size of the operation.

As the scale of the group’s action dawned on us, we decided to cancel our own action; but found ourselves at the airport on the day when that other group struck: there were far more of the women than the half dozen we have seen, attacking with improvised weapons and single shot, front loaded guns dating to mid 18th century. In my dream, I remember looking at the bodies of six of the terrorist fighters laid next to each other, they were so scrawny and tiny, like human mosquitoes.

The battle was huge and raged for hours. There were hundreds of casualties, 120 attackers alone. We had never realized how huge the operation was. But the security services had and had been waiting. For the attackers, it became a compete annihiltion, as police shot to kill.

In the course of the battle, I, too, was seized by the police. During interrogation that followed, I tried to tell the truth: that I had made up my revolutionary credentials and my past; that I really didn’t have a Komintern connection; and didn’t mean to carry out an action, just to sweep off her feet a bourgeois fashion marxist with beautiful legs; and that my group was in no way connected to the Rohingyas/Somalis plot; but the police had very detailed account of the invented revolutionary curriculum vitae, which I had done so much to create and make believable; and they — at least — seemed to fall for the deception. And now they were going to take me down.

And thus I knew I had been ratted out; our cell had had an informant; the informant, I realized, was a man with whom I vied for the favors of the girl.

In short, a John Le Carre dream.

How sweet, how delicious, when one delectable book leads to another: the listening to Moby Dick in audiobook leads to the reading of In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex; Melville in Love; American Bloomsbury. It calls for a flowchart with crisscrossing arrows. Some now point to Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, others to Hawthorne in Concord, and The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism; others yet to Ida von Hahn’s The Countess Faustina, Bettina von Arnim’s Goethe’s correspondence with a child, Hawthorne’s French and Italian Notebooks, and Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. This intellectual life keeps one so busy… how do people find time for life?

After graduating from college and  deciding to be a writer—he rejected the other possible professions of the ministry, the law, and  medicine as too hard—Nathaniel Hawthorne moved back into his sister’s house on Herbert  Street in Salem, went up to his bedroom, and lived there for twelve years.    From his graduation in June of 1825 until the publication of Twice-Told Tales in 1837,  Hawthorne spent most of his time in the upstairs bedroom of his family house. He came and went freely, going on some walking tours, but he seems to have been suffering from some kind  of terminal introspection, schooling himself in the writers’ life by reading and writing and  rewriting and even completing a novel. On his limited inherited income, he thought this was the way to a writing career. But his short stories and an early novel, Fanshawe, as Rick Moody writes in his memoir The Black Veil, “didn’t register even briefly in the national consciousness.”  Still he wrote.   In seclusion—and he and his sisters often even ate all their meals in their own  rooms—Hawthorne produced a series of remarkable stories for a magazine called The Token. He made friends with Elizabeth Peabody and kept up his Bowdoin  friendships, but he rarely left his room except at night when a village bonfire or a public event  might bring him out to lurk at the edges of the crowd and observe. “My brother goes out when  there is a fire,” his sister wrote. 

Susan Cheever, American Bloomsbury

The Old Manse had been their home when they  were newlyweds. It had been so much their home that Sophia and her husband had spent a long time one April evening passing Sophia’s diamond ring back and forth in an inspired act of  vandalism, scratching their thoughts in the window pane of Hawthorne’s study on the second  floor. Standing there now as evening falls, time stops. It feels as if your hosts have just gone  downstairs to dinner, leaving you this portrait of their marriage written in diamond on glass.   

Man’s accidents are God’s purposes
Sophia A. Hawthorne 1843   
Nath Hawthorne
This is his study 
The smallest twig leans clear against the sky   
Composed by my wife and written with her diamond   
Inscribed by my husband at sunset, April 3 1843. In the Gold light.   
SAH   

It was their house, and at that moment it felt as if they would be there forever. 

Susan Cheever, American Bloomsbury

“Never was a poor little country village infested  with such a variety of queer, strangely-dressed,  oddly behaved mortals, most of whom took  themselves to be important agents of the world’s  destiny yet were simply bores of a very intense  character.”

Hawthorne on the leading lights of Concord

(How my liking for Hawthorn grows)

Susan Cheever, American Bloomsbury

“Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it  their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which  Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that  Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in  libraries when they wrote these books.”

Emerson

Susan Cheever, American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work

Like Turner at his easel, Melville learned to make a  virtue of the fault of indistinctness. Moby-Dick is the literary equivalent of a gallery filled with the best of Turner’s canvases. So much of the book shows the painter’s influence, which can be felt in the bold sweep of the  story, in the iridescence of the language, and in the author’s frequent willingness to cast a suggestive haze  over certain scenes. Moby-Dick features an overwhelming collection of powerful scenes in which the  shapes we know from reality float in a tumultuous wash  of colors and images spilling from the artist’s eye. The  effect is what happens when the “great flood-gates of  the wonder-world”—as Ishmael calls them—swing  wide, producing a cascade of suggestive impressions  whose full force may not be understood for years. The  first image of the great white whale in Moby-Dick is a Turner oil in eleven words—“one grand hooded phantom, like a snow hill in the air.”

(…)

In Turner’s masterpiece the angel standing in the middle of the sun may look benign at first  glance, but it is the archangel Michael holding his sword aloft on the Day of Judgment, and in  the molten gold of the light pouring down from him, there is nothing below but a few  frightened humans fleeing in panic and despair. Overhead, like a blot on the canvas, is a swarm  of black birds circling in a frenzy. It was one of the great magical effects of Turner’s brushwork  that he was able to create the impression of an overwhelming light circling outward and turning  inward at the same time. Light flows from the angel while seeming to collapse into a vortex at  the outer edges, swallowing the shadowy humans below. Then again, Turner was a master at  painting an elemental vortex, especially at sea. What the noted painter and art critic Sir Lawrence Gowing says of light in Turner could also be said of humanity in Melville’s vision of a  universal vulturism: “Light is not only glorious and sacred, it is voracious, carnivorous,  unsparing. It devours impartially, without distinction, the whole living world.”

Michael Shelden, Melville in Love

For several months now, my joyful routine has been to read a book for 3 or 4 hours each day, putting it down frequently to look up something from it in wikipedia or on the open maps. I have come to love the routine so much that when a day goes by without it, I feel unsatiated; I miss it; like a professional pianist misses his daily practice.

But here is a new variation on the practice: listen to the brilliantly recorded audio version of Moby Dick (read delightfully, dramatically by William Hootkins); and in its interstices to read Michael Shelden’s delightful Melville in Love.

Here is Melville working on his masterpiece, on his newly bought farm in the Berkshires:

Day  after day, his pen raced across the pages of his  manuscript, and the book that would become  Moby-Dick began to assume its final shape. All the  while that he was working at this high window, with  the north winds rattling the glass, he had the  strange feeling that he was at sea again. “I have a  sort of sea-feeling here in the country, now that the  ground is covered with snow,” he remarked in a letter. “I look out of my window in the morning when I  rise as I would out of a port-hole of a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights  when I wake up & hear the wind shrieking, I almost  fancy there is too much sail on the house, & I had  better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.”  In the distance, clearly visible from his window,  was a lumpish shape on the horizon that might  have been mistaken for a leviathan coming up for  air. The sloping form of Mount Greylock was about  fifteen miles north of Arrowhead, and for those  among his family and friends who knew the subject  of his book, it was easy to imagine the author rubbing his eyes at twilight and wondering whether the great whale in his novel had escaped and was swimming across the hills. 

Michael Shelden, Melville in Love.

It has become fashionable in the Old Country to talk about “small fatherlands” (i.e. local patriotism) and one’s “roots”. Someone actually asked me about “my roots”. I could not believe my ears. “I don’t have roots. I have feet,” I replied. Please, people, whoever and whatever you are, I, for one, am a man, not a tree.

“One of my friends, a professor of politics, once told me jokingly that it had come to him in a blinding flash that he was trapped in the body of an European when, in truth, he was actually Bengali.”

Old business, but worth reminding oneself of.

Christina Thompson, Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All