Kálmán: A Literary Ancestor

Among our ancestors, the earliest known to have published books was my greatuncle Kálmán Darnay (1864-1945). It so happens that he is also the latest to have one of his books (re)published, and I show it above. That book was originally written in 1929, but it was reissued again in 2010. The title is The Good Old Justices Socializing: Historical Jokes Depicting the Times. Brother Baldy received this book as a gift when visiting the Museum of Sümeg (Sümeg being an old family seat) this past summer. That title took me an enormous effort to translate. Of that more below. Remaining with Kálmán, he was an historian and novelist.

Here I provide a listing of his works with a translation or comment on the title:

Sümeg és vidékének őskora. 1899.	Sümeg and environs in ancient times.
Magyarország őskora. 1900.	Hungary’s ancient times.
Somogy vármegye őskora. 1913.	The ancient times of the Somogy castle region.
Gisimár. Kaposvár. 1913.	A history of ancient man in Somló region.
Tagisir. 1921.	A novel of ancient times.
Testőrszerelmek. 1926.	Guardsman’s Love Affairs (novel).
Elkésett csók. 1932.	The Belated Kiss (novel).
A bujdosó gyöngysor. 1928.	The Pearl Necklace in Hiding (novel).
Kaszinózó táblabírák. 1929.	The Good Old Justices Socializing.

The novels were popular and most are still available in print if in the “old book” category. Of the histories Kálmán’s last book is obviously valued. It is filled with very funny stories harking back into history. The title struck me as very odd. The first word translates as “casino-ing,” kaszinó meaning casino. That word in Hungarian also has the connotation of socializing, “clubbing” and so on; it is less narrowly attached to gambling than that word is for us.

It was the second word, táblabírák, which led into odd spaces and times. You won’t find it in ordinary dictionaries, but it has a suggestion of “board of judges.” Kálmán’s use of the word in the title, and elsewhere, however, strongly suggests that it was very familiar to his readers even if never used in any judicial setting. Trying to find something, anything about that word then landed me on a website. It holds the preface to a much more famous book by a much more famous writer, Mór Jókai (1825-1904). The book’s title is A régi jó táblabírák, rendered into English by others as The Good Old Justices.

That book was published in 1856. To understand things, one needs context. The Hungarian Revolution in the nineteenth century took place in 1848. It’s aim was to separate Hungary from the Austrian Empire. It failed. It failed, furthermore, exactly as the later, call it second, Hungarian Revolution failed in 1956. In both cases, Russia put down the rebellion. In 1849 Russia restored the re-conquered Magyars to Austria. In 1956, it restored the Communist hegemony. So, to return to our story, Jókai Mór (to put the sequence into the Hungarian mode, last name first) wrote in the dreary aftermath of a failed revolution. And, in his preface, he makes a point of explaining that word of his, táblabírák, used in his title. He does so by listing a number of situations all ending in a question. The first of these (link for those with Hungarian):

     If a public emergency arises, if acts of God strike the country, if the rivers overflow, if it was a terrible year, if hail, fire, terrifying plagues visit the people, whose heart calls on the people to make sacrifices in response? To whom does the public, lashed by fear, turn for solace?

     To the good old justices.

Four more such pairings follow. At the end Jókai sums it up. He defines “the good old justice” as the person who had charge of the commons, of the local administration, the engineer, the regulator, the legalizer, the judge, the lawyer, doctor, poet, scholar, the book printer, and the book buyer. Jókai, thus, creates a term to mean the culture’s genuine leadership—not at all restricted to the judicial branches but including them. His aim was to return to a kind of earlier time of stability, peace, and justice—and to an order in which the “good old justices” were heard and minded.

Thus our ancestor, Kálmán, echoes a much more famous work, with a definite cultural message—but he was in a more relaxed, expansive, and humorous mood. It was 1929. Little did he know that the times were about to give birth—to the Great Depression. It would come and visit, in due time, great terrors upon the people, also, of little Hungary. And good old justices would, once more, be very much in demand.
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Added later: The illustration shown was painted by a contemporary of Kálmán, Károly Mühlbeck (1869-1943), on commission, and also illustrated the first edition of this book. Mühlbeck was a well-known Hungarian artist, illustrator, and in his latter days a political cartoonist.

Literary Genes

This tale begins with my library. I love it, of course (because I’ve yet to meet a library I didn’t), but ours here is a poor relative living in a rich neighborhood—suggesting that great wealth and literary aspirations rarely coincide except in members of  the  third or fourth generation following the one that minted gold. Best sellers crowd the fiction shelves here; here and there between them one finds an old book, one of the classics—and sometimes not. In one of the branches I frequently visit while Brigitte does swimnastics, I went looking for Trollope. I found eight volumes by one Joanna Trollope but none by Anthony. Then the other day I was scanning the shelves again; I had no name in mind; I was, however, using my trusted technique: I ignore the slick-bound colorful volumes and look for something pale and old. Here’s one! I pulled it out. The title was The Old Country by Sholom Aleichem. Sholom Aleichem? Who might that be? More puzzlement followed. Julius and Frances Butwin translated this book from the Yiddish, and Frances wrote a foreword. In it she begins thus:

Years ago when Sholom Aleichem came to New York, Mark Twin was among the first to visit him. “I wanted to meet you,” he said, “because I understand that I am the American Sholom Aleichem.” History does not record the answer of the man who is called variously “the Jewish Mark Twain,” “the Jewish Dickens,” “the modern Heine.”

In the wake of these experiences I looked up these individuals—Joanna Trollope and Sholom Aleichem. And that in turn made me think that at least some part of literature might be in the genes.

Joanna Trollope (1943-) turns out to be a very popular British novelist with some twenty-eight novels to her credit, nineteen written under her own name and nine as Caroline Harvey. She is an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, an order of chivalry; she writes OBE behind her name; the award is testimony to her literary rank and reach. Several of her works have been turned into movies and one, The Choir, into a BBC miniseries. One of the Caroline Harvey historical novels is titled Parson Harding’s Daughter. Why goodness gracious. Wasn’t Harding the lead character in Anthony Trollope’s The Warden? Well, gentle reader, it turns out that Joanna and Anthony Trollope are relatives. She is a fifth-generation niece of the famed nineteenth century postal inspector. Joanna wrote her first novel at 14; it isn’t published, was all about herself, she says, and says she keeps it locked up lest her children see it. Fine and good—but also a clear indicator of the born writer. It’s in the genes. And my annoyance at that library shelf, missing Anthony, seeing the slick volumes of someone called Joanna, must now be revised. Next time I go, I’ll check one of them out. Stick with the genes.

Oh, before I forget. Trollop’s mother, Frances (nee Milton) Trollop (1779-1863), was also a writer, predominantly a novelist, with thirty-four novels and seven nonfiction books to her credit; the first of these latter was also her first book, Domestic Manners of Americans, a book said to be acerbic and witty (like mother like son). She’d moved to America and made a name for herself here (Cincinnati)—although in old age she moved to Italy and lies buried in Florence. Milton is a common enough name—but one kind of wonders…

Sholom Aleichem is of course a pseudonym, the Yiddish rendition of shalom aleikhem. Peace be upon you. The man behind it was Solomon Rabinovich (1859-1916), an extraordinarily prolific and popular author. He began writing in Russian and Hebrew then wrote the rest of his works in Yiddish, some forty volumes! Had I not been distracted when young, I would have learned something about Tevye the Milkman, and Tevye and his Daughters, stories that, by various bounces of fate became The Fiddler on the Roof. But my theme is literary genes. Solomon’s daughter Lyalya Kaufman became a Yiddish writer; his son became a painter and teacher of the arts. Lyalya’s daughter, Bel Kaufman, wrote Up the Down Staircase, which I did read and much enjoyed in my younger years. The genes march on. Sometimes they skip a generation or two or three or five. Sometimes they don’t wait.

In my own family the best-known literary figure is my great-uncle Károly Darnay (though only known in Hungary); he wrote histories, memoires, and romances. My aunt Olga was an accomplished writer. And some of those genes even reached Ghulfdom. We are, of course, but servants of our genes—to echo a modernist. When the genes want you to take the pen in hand, can you refuse?

Landscapes of Ambiguity

Cultural life produces recognizable fields of activity easily linked to physical things, but pondering them I see strange landscapes of ambiguity. Literature is an example. Literature is letters, writings, books—but, literature as such is only a narrow subset of such things. That word, for instance, excludes the Congressional Record or written forms of scientific discoveries, philosophy, etc. The word embraces imaginative writing about experience: narratives, poetry, plays. But only a subset of that category ranks as literature. To merit the name the product must have a certain structural and aesthetic quality fused with a certain difficult-to-pin-down profundity, feeling, intuition. Letters on paper, plot, rhyme, beat, story, and theme are accessible to objective valuation. Such things are either present or not; if present, they are capable of analysis, comparison. But what really matters is much more difficult to detect. Literature therefore tends to be defined by small but influential groups some members of which may be, but the majority are not, themselves creators of art. The mass of readers is also excluded. Literature has its elites, and the majority of them are neither poets nor storytellers. Rarely, but here and there, critical writings, writings about literature, also rise to the status of literature: they are unusually, creatively insightful and deep. Literature, finally, is dynamic. It has schools, movements, conflicts, camps—in which, among other things, elites compete and declare other schools, movements, or camps as producing trash. Literature also has its revered ancient forms some of which are dying of neglect, others of which enjoy brief renaissances, and so on.

The ambiguity arises because higher forms of human achievement are impossible to break down into manageable bits in order to grasp them—and their recognition by others is also impossible to discern: it depends itself on a higher function.

The analogy to another great landscape of ambiguity, Religion, is tempting. I yielded to that temptation decades ago and view Literature as the religion of the secular age. In religion the creative force arises from saints and mystics. Piety as such does not suffice. Something more must be present—and is difficult to pin down. Piety is accessible to objective valuation, the saintly state escapes it—but we know it when we see it. Religion has its priesthoods, and the majority are neither saints nor mystics. They elevate some of the saints and canonize them, ignoring what the masses of the ordinary people feel; they work by rules. And the same dynamisms apply in religion as in literature where the old is sometimes selectively revived, the new is opposed as heresy and declared as beyond the pale and Satan’s own handiwork.

The Commodification of Letters

If Cervantes had lived in modern times, soon after the resounding success of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, his publishers would have started to press him for a sequel, and since that joust with windmills had been the image in the original, the next in the series would have been Don Quixote and the Dutch Giants, soon followed by a youth-oriented novel titled Rocinante Goes to the Derby. Rocinante, of course, was Don Quixote horse. Sancho Panza’s Extravaganza, subtitled The Little Mule that Could, would have come next and exploited a multicultural thematic. Dulcinea, Will She, Won’t She would be ready for the next Christmas season and attempt to capture a wider female audience. Dulcinea? Well, she was Quixote ideal, the Lady, in fact a peasant girl, and unattainable at that. In the original. Plenty of leverage still left in that. After that would come yet other explorations of live issues in that far-off time. By the seventh and last novel in the series, Don Quixote and Moctezuma, even the greatest fan of the hidalgo would have wearied of him, of Sancho Panza, and the ever richer historical and archeological detail that would fill endless paragraphs to make the page count come out right to justify the book’s price.

Thus are successful authors commodified in our day and age. P.D. James comes to mind; so does Frank Herbert’s Dune series—of which only Chapterhouse Dune comes alive a little. Too many authors suffer thus from success. Agatha Christy, the most prolific, oddly escaped a total wilt-down—perhaps because she predates the period of commodification.

Dictionaries don’t even mention the sense of commodity we use in ordinary language—thus goods of the sort where anybody’s brand will do. When I buy sugar I buy the cheapest, usually the Kroger brand. Sugar is a commodity; there is really no difference between one kind and another. The dictionary’s definitions—fitness, adaptation, convenience, advantage—while true enough are just a tad off-target. Commodification, a word coinage of Marxist origin, suggests the assignment of market value to things or services that shouldn’t really all be treated as commodities, thus as things where the qualitative differences can be safely ignored. Marx having grown horns over time—but the process having genuine benefits in the realms of business—the word has been modified for capitalist use, as it were, into commoditization. But it means the same thing.

Once a steady and repetitious market for something develops commodification has a tendency to set in. It affects all kinds of goods, not least natural products, and we note this when buying fruit. It neither looks nor tastes like it used to in the 1930s, 40s, 50s. Changes in the growing, harvesting, and culling of apples, tomatoes, strawberries, etc., have, in the subtle process of commodification, increased the size, shape, and appearance of the product—and have usually blanded out (to coin a verb) the taste.

The same thing has affected literary productions. I’m not sure (never having read a single one) but I suspect that the penny dreadful of the nineteenth century was an early example of this process. Since then commodification has deformed virtually all of the so-called popular genres of literature and I suspect (and only suspect because I can’t get myself to read them) the straight literary novels as well. And very much as in the case of apples and tomatoes, which once had unique and local character, so with the arts of the human creator the industry that now dominates distribution has worked its commodifying powers on the product. This, at any rate, is the conclusion I draw from a three-year project, roughly, of trying to find some genuinely entertaining mystery novels at various libraries. You can still, here and there, discover something special, but the predictable blandness of the rest is amazing. This process also works its stultifying magic on the occasional gifted writer—by forcing excess production on him or her…of which a fictional example is the Don Quixote series. People of less talent simply must conform to genre rules in order to get into print at all.

Science Fiction - Looking Back

Like virtually all people with my kind of gift, I was writing from childhood onward, entirely conscious both of the pleasure of this activity and the feeling that it was something I was meant to do: a calling, in other words. Later, when time came to carry this activity into the public square and I looked around, to be sure from a pretty shaded and obscure position in a vast jungle, the ant looking up into the canopies, the only visible markets for short fiction that I saw were romance, crime, and science fiction magazines—or general circulation periodicals that carried the occasional story in a genre. There was the New Yorker, to be sure. The Saturday Evening Post still published a little fiction. I also discovered other publications of either a modernistic or academic sort that published fiction of a peculiar flavor. Indeed I thought that the fiction in the New Yorker would also be described by that adjective: it had a certain audience and, in a way, it excluded large groupings of humanity by its very mannerisms and its sophistication. Yes, occasionally, I heard an authentic voice there too. I read what I saw about me or came my way by accident (but what others consider accident I sometimes see in quite another light).

Science fiction pleased me most because, oddly, it was the most general, the most inclusive. Under this narrow label, I discovered, lived all kinds of writers. The designation was often coupled with the word fantasy. There was—and I note that there still is—a magazine called Fantasy & Science Fiction. The stories ranged from hard to soft to transcendental. In a way it was a genre where you could say that “Everything goes,” and, indeed, everything went. Here, for instance—and this is a genuine random sample—is the first paragraph on a page of F&SF that I opened just now, at random, the magazine itself plucked, also at random, from a stack on the top of a tall bookcase in my attic. It happens to be a poem by R.A. Lafferty:

The handsome stranger cast his eye
On Shirley-girl and gave a sigh.
“Oh talk a while,” he said, “with I.”
She liked his noble knobby dome.
They dinnered at the Hippodrome.
She fell for him, she brought him home.
“Oh, mother see this guy of mine,”
She said. “He’s from a noble line.
His I.Q. soars to 9-9-9.”

And so on. An amusing poem with a cultural message, it turns out. Try to find that sort of thing back in those days, in the Saturday Evening Post. Long story short, I began to write short fiction and sent it to sci-fi magazines. Total failure. Then I went off to serve in the military, got married, had children. But I was still just a kid. The writing continued, but always in private. Then Brigitte said one day: “Stop writing those tomes and write something short. Try to get it published.” I was off on a trip the following morning, a very early start, like out of bed a 5 a.m., Boston bound. I started a story on the airplane, “A Splendid Freedom,” it was called. I wrote throughout the flight, throughout the flight home again, and I finished this novella later that week, at home, working at the ping pong table in the basement. I had no desk in the house. I sent this story to Galaxy magazine. I frankly expected exactly the same result I’d already experienced in high school and college—the rejection slip. Instead I got a letter of acceptance; and the editor, Jim Baen, added an invitation. He wondered if I’d written anything else—he said he’d like to see it if so. Lordy, lord, lord. Letter in hand I shyly approached Brigitte and said. “Well, dear, I think that was a pretty good suggestion…”

For the would be author—the kind for whom literature is a universe rather than a ladder into an enclave, a cosmos rather than a billboard, an atmosphere in which to breathe, a dimension in which to thrive—throughout the twentieth century, perhaps continuing to this day, science fiction, a genre entirely misnamed, a genre that outgrew its origins rapidly—with a hard-core of grumblers at its center who wished it would still be hard-core science fiction—was the homeland of the free.

One of the pleasing oddities of reality is that the really vital element refuses to be contained and suffocated by convention that, with equal ferocity, attempts always to fossilize around it. Real literature broke away from its encrustations somewhere along the line and made a new home for itself, indeed glorying in its tawdry reputation and laughing at the dour faces looking down from the proud tower of the past, the faces that dismissed it and did not deign to call it literature.

More on Change—And On What Comes Around

Having chided Dorothy Sayers for using the archaic second person forms of address in translating Dante, I looked about for samples of old English ready to hand. A good example on my shelf downstairs—testifying to strange ambitions to which occasionally I fall prey—I discovered a copy of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. It appeared between 1590 and 1609. Spenser’s writing is a sample exactly 400 years old, a nice round number, far enough away to have a certain strangeness, and yet not quite so strange as we encounter, say in Chaucer, whose The Canterbury Tales go back roughly 840 years.

Here is a sample of three stanzas from Spenser, lifted from Book V and Canto V. It tells the story of Artegall’s defeat and capture by the evil Radigund. The latter, by the way, is female. Here is how their combat began:

So forth she came out of the citty gate,
With stately port and proud magnificence,
Guarded with many damzels, that did waite
Vppon her person for her sure defence,
Playing on shaumes and trumpets, that from hence
Their sound did reach vnto the heauens hight.
So forth into the field she marched thence,
Where was a rich Pauilion ready pight,
Her to receiue, till time they should begin the fight.

Then forth came Artegall out of his tent,
All arm’d to point, and first the Lists did enter:
Soone after eke came she, with fell intent,
And countenaunce fierce, as hauing fully bent her,
That battels vtmost triall to aduenter.
The Lists were closed fast, to barre the rout
From rudely pressing to the middle center;
Which in great heapes them circled all about,
Wayting, how Fortune would resolue that daungerous dout.

The Trumpets sounded, and the field began;
With bitter strokes it both began, and ended.
She at the first encounter on him ran
With furious rage, as if she had intended
Out of his breast the very heart haue rended:
But he that had like tempests often tride,
From that first flaw him selfe right well defended.
The more she rag’d, the more he did abide;
She hewd, she foynd, she lasht, she laid on euery side.

Shaumes — wind instruments like flutes.
Pight — pitched.
Eke — also; old Germanic; in Germany today “auch,” a modern word, is a synonym.
Aduenter — adventure? Not sure.
Rout — meaning a pack, a word once used for groups of knights as well as wolves.
Dout — can’t find the meaning, but I just read it as “bout”
Foynd — feigned.
The reader will also have inferred that U is sometimes voiced as V and V as U.

What delights me about this sample—which but for spelling and a few strange words is quite ordinary and easily understood English—is that violent, ass-kicking, lord-it-over-men female TV characters are evidently “back” again; they’re quite at home in Spenser’s tale and evidently serve the same purposes of titillation. Spenser makes a huge and flamboyant show of writing a thousand-page poem about all of the virtues, but the book attracted its readership because it was soaked in sexuality. I discovered that when, having gotten my U’s right and learning the meaning of a few recurring odd words like eke, the sense of the narrative began to penetrate. To be sure, the sexuality is a kind of endless tease, but it is there on virtually every page.

* * *

Now two examples from Chaucer. Another 400-plus years back. Here, sometimes, the strange words are much more numerous—and a background in German and French help a good deal. But it amused me to find, in the second sample (both taken from the beginning) an obvious reference to battles with Islam and a veiled reference, as it were, to Aljazeera, although the actual word refers to Algeciras in Spain. Gezira meaning “island” in Arabic, thus it’s a common enough geographical reference.

Still, what goes around, comes around. We begin with the first lines of the Tales:

WHEN that Aprilis, with his showers swoot,
The drought of March hath pierced to the root,
And bathed every vein in such licour,
Of which virtue engender’d is the flower;
When Zephyrus eke with his swoote breath
Inspired hath in every holt and heath
The tender croppes and the younge sun
Hath in the Ram his halfe course y-run,
And smalle fowles make melody,
That sleepen all the night with open eye,
(So pricketh them nature in their corages);
Then longe folk to go on pilgrimages,
And palmers for to seeke strange strands,
To ferne hallows couth in sundry lands;
And specially, from every shire’s end
Of Engleland, to Canterbury they wend,
The holy blissful Martyr for to seek,
That them hath holpen, when that they were sick.

Swoot — sweet.
Holt — grove or forest
Croppes — twigs or boughs
Corages — hearts, inclinations
Ferne hallows couth — distant saints known
Holpen — helped.

Herewith the third stanza:

A KNIGHT there was, and that a worthy man,
That from the time that he first began
To riden out, he loved chivalry,
Truth and honour, freedom and courtesy.
Full worthy was he in his Lorde’s war,
And thereto had he ridden, no man farre,
As well in Christendom as in Heatheness,
And ever honour’d for his worthiness
At Alisandre he was when it was won.
Full often time he had the board begun
Above alle nations in Prusse.
In Lettowe had he reysed, and in Russe,
No Christian man so oft of his degree.
In Grenade at the siege eke had he be
Of Algesir, and ridden in Belmarie.
At Leyes was he, and at Satalie,
When they were won; and in the Greate Sea
At many a noble army had he be.
At mortal battles had he been fifteen,
And foughten for our faith at Tramissene.
In listes thries, and aye slain his foe.

Farre — father
Reysed — journeyed
Thries — three; and listes are tournaments.

Graves and the Goddess

One of the strangest books I’ve ever read—perhaps the strangest published in the twentieth century—is The White Goddess by Robert Graves. He himself describes it as “a historical grammar of the language of poetic myth.” Indeed those words appear on the cover of my latest copy of the book (1997). The first copy, which I got in the 1950s, eventually fell apart. I still have it, in four pieces. I keep returning to this book—and must have read it at least five times, all five hundred pages of it.

The use of the word “grammar” has a scholarly odor. Another strange book I once perused was Kenneth Burke’s A Grammar of Motives. Lots of people write “Grammars of ….” The meaning in these cases, to cite Webster’s, is “The elements or principles of any science or art.” So there you are: the elements and principles of the language of poetic myth. What makes The White Goddess memorable, fascinating, and indeed sometimes maddening is that Graves avoids intellectual reduction and uses the language of poetic myth itself to weave his subject. It becomes accessible, therefore, only, as it were through absorption. You have to be adequate to it. Not surprisingly, Graves felt ignored. In the Foreword to the revised edition he acknowledges all those who helped him assemble the vast material he used. Then he complains: “Yet since the first edition appeared in 1946, no expert in ancient Irish or Welsh has offered me the least help in refining my argument, or pointed out any of the errors which are bound to have crept into the text, or even acknowledge my letters. I am disappointed, though not really surprised.” Nor am I. If you step off the trodden path and go in search for strange flowers or beasties, you will be on your own. And those you meet are likely to be as wild and strange as you are.

The organizing principle behind the poetic myth, as Graves saw reality, was the Goddess herself—and poetry is ultimately the relationship of soul to the divine. But to say this much is to say nothing at all. The book must be experienced. To enter Graves’ forest of myths it is best to jettison orthodox structures of how, why, and where the divine will manifest. The heart will learn something even though the intellect will rage at times like a chained dog sensing shadows in the night.

Graves was a prolific writer. He wrote a two-volume work on The Greek Myths, he wrote a war-memoir (Good-bye to All That), novels, and his “grammar.” He once said of these activities: “I raise dogs to keep a cat.” The cat was his poetry. I always liked that as a good program for the writer: make your money the ordinary way and thus preserve your sovereignty. For Graves prose was the “ordinary way.”

I owe Graves for introducing me to Sufism. Once, anciently, I chanced across a book by Idries Shah entitled The Sufis. I picked it up to see what it might be about. I opened it, saw that Robert Graves had written the introduction. Not checking further I bought the book. Thus stood, stands, my relationship to this poet.

Graves like all poets was open at the top of his skull and had strange experiences and—because of them—strange beliefs. He thought he could journey into the past and experience it as if he were there. Time for him was reversible at least. Mad—like Swedenborg, like Boehme. One of the more memorable snippets of this book, to which I return at times, is a short poem of his, published in Collected Poems (London, 1975), entitled “On Portents.” Graves introduces the poem thus (p. 343 of Goddess):

Time, though a most useful convention of thought, has no greater intrinsic value than, say, money. To think in temporal terms is a very complicated and unnatural way of thinking too; many children master foreign languages and mathematic theory long before they have developed any sense of time or accepted the easily disproved thesis that cause precedes effect.

I wrote about the Muse some years ago in a poem:

If strange things happen where she is
So that men say that graves open
And the dead walk, or that futurity
Becomes a womb, and the unborn are shed—
Such portents are not to be wondered at
Being tourbillions in Time made
By the strong pulling of her bladed mind
Through that ever-reluctant element.

This gives a glimpse into this forest. For more, you need to wander in…

Reading Dante in Detroit

A few years ago Monique gave me Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran—and just tracing that experience would suffice for a post. For one thing members of my extended family (Ghulf Genes, you might say) include children born of an Iranian woman, hence blood lines connect us back to Persia too. Indeed, whenever a country comes into focus in one or another context, I can trace tendrils of relationship—and strong ones, too, either of blood or spirit. But here my only purpose is to justify the title of this posting, to indicate the same kind of tension between cultures that Nafisi had in mind when she sat down to trace her own experiences as a woman and a teacher.

Yes. I’m reading the Divine Comedy, all of it this time, and slowly, with real attention. This too runs in the family’s spiritual genes. My mother would have done that sort of thing in her advanced years and Monique’s mate, John, is prone to feats like that as well—a kind of heroic determination to achieve the impossible, which is to grasp the entire culture, ancient and near, even if only by a few grand gestures. When I began reading Purgatory, I smiled as I read Dorothy Sayers’ introduction, in the first paragraph of which she says: “Persons who pontificate about Dante without making mention of his Purgatory may reasonably be suspected of knowing him only at second hand, or of having at most skimmed through the circles of his Hell in the hope of finding something to be shocked at.” Or, Sayers may have added, “something to quote.” She should have put that into her general introduction to nudge people on, beyond the Inferno, which is, as its name implies, a very dismal place. And arriving at the base of Mount Purgatory, one is astonished (I was) at the sudden change.

Culture is, ultimately, a system of shared values. Great literature holds these values. Its neglect is therefore either part of cultural change or cultural decay. If the value system continues to be renewed by great new works of art and philosophy, the sliding of the awkwardly dated back into the past is no matter of regret. But if the new has lost its nicotine, as it were, like fake cigarettes intended to wean us of smoking, the loss is genuine.

The cultural process is sharply discernible in the Comedy. In the first two books Dante’s guide is Virgil, the Latin poet famed for his Georgics and Aeneid, the last an epic account of Rome’s founding. The stories and myths in which Dante himself anchors his values are drawn from Graeco-Roman sources and the Bible, his philosophy is based on “moderns,” like Thomas Aquinas, and ancients, like Aristotle. The time distance between Virgil’s death and Dante’s birth is 1284 years. In 2009, we are 688 years from Dante’s death in 1321. Hence, for us, Dante stands closer in time than the towering figure of Virgil stood to him. The speed of change, however, has been so great in modern times that Dante appears to us at least 1300 years back, subjectively, rather than a mere 700.

It’s much more difficult today to get even a feel for the vast extent of human culture. Dante published his Comedy, if you can call it publishing, by having parts of it copied by hand as they were written, entirely in response to the demands of his friends. Printing still lay in the future. Today we can get dozens of translations of the Tao Te Ching, for example, and the best literature of any country we desire to read. And we have languages to master if we really wish to be serious students. I could here write a post titled Reading Goethe in German, for example, or Reading Madács in Hungarian. I’ve done both. Goethe’s name everyone knows, but Madács is known only to Hungarians. He wrote the all-time classic play called The Tragedy of Man. When you expend your energy in projects like that, you haven’t got time left to make money, do you? Anyway, that’s my excuse for failing in the American Way.

Mma Ramotswe

If that name makes you smile instantly in anticipation of something pleasant, indeed tempted perhaps to fetch a cup of something to enjoy it more, don’t. This is short. (Well, as usually, it got long instead. So go ahead.) But if, instead, you find yourself puzzled, be prepared to get instructions on how to enjoy your leisure just a little more.

Years ago now I’ve abandoned the habit of urging so-called high literature on people, having discovered that, to some extent, we understand high literature to be that which we enjoyed in youth, a part of what was then The Canon. What we did not personally absorb, we neither canonize nor recommend. Meanwhile, I’ve discovered that many of my friends of old have quietly slipped out the backdoor of the Canon as the modern party heated up; they’re now relaxing in Walhalla or, more likely, still creating great things in some distant reaches of eternity.

But, instead of praising, say, Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers, Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, Herman Hesse’s Magister Ludi, Tsao Hsueh-Chin’s Dream of the Red Chamber, Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of the Genji, the collected works of Jane Austen, and the bulb is out in the attic so I couldn’t immediately see other treasures of mine… So, instead, these days I recommend literature that is, perhaps, not of the highest rank but, in some ways, of the highest value: wonderful storytellers whose inner vision resonates with mine. And one of those is Alexander McCall Smith, creator of Mma Ramotswe, the sole and therefore No. 1 Lady Detective of Botswana (in fiction, of course). And, yes, one of the series is coming to a Moving Picture Theater near you SOON!

There are at least ten novels in this series. The most recent appeared days ago in hardback—and I saw it COSTCO therefore it must be good too. New readers should begin at the beginning with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. In some ways it is the most painful of them in that it brings views of the darker side of Africa, especially its diamond mining enterprise. They serve to place Mma Precious Ramotswe, a comfortable sort of lady described as “traditionally-built,” into the context of Botswana, with her own family history. Botswana? You will learn to appreciate the country the more you hear about it. Most people reading this blog in any detail will, I guarantee, be at least mildly pleased and well instructed by the experience.

This much for the general reader. The rest is for those of you who already know Mma but have wondered, as have I, what that title means. Mma is used to address women, Rra is used to address men. These titles are nowhere explained. And as I discovered today, the Internet is literally awash in blogs, discussion groups, and speculation—not least unhelpful words from Alexander McCall Smith not quite explaining the words. Ghulf Genes to the rescue.

First we deal with the pronunciation. Mma is voiced as “Ma,” Rra is voiced as “Ra” but with a rolled R. Please apply to native Spanish speakers on how to roll that R. Some swear that the roll of the R should follow the Ra, thus “Rar”; others dogmatically assert that there is only one R to roll, the first one. Make your own choice. As for how to roll the R silently as you read, on that subject I’m still searching for counsel.

The words are not abbreviations of longer words—but they do have plurals. Many Mmas, if I may put it that way, are called Bomma in the native language most Botswanans speak, Setswana (sometimes rendered Tswana). Many Rras are called Borra. The author of the series says that these are honorifics. The less informed say that they mean Madam and Sir respectively. I’ve searched high and low and finally managed to discover a book, entitled Culture and Customs of Botswana, by James Raymond Denbow and Phenyo C. Thebe, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006. This book has 244 pages whereas the average wisdom available from the web is under 45 words. In this books, on page 167, which you can look at here, the authors finally draw the veil from the mystery and reveal that Mma derives from “Mother” and “Rra” from “Father.” The Lord be praised. What a surprise!

Brigitte and I got to talking, she remembering a German and I a Hungarian childhood. And we both remember that it was customary in our youth for people to address all ladies who were older as “aunt” or “auntie” and all males as “uncle”—and this with perfect strangers. We think there is a parallel here. Monique may chime in with parallels from Bolivia in Spanish. So there’s the final word on the matter. Get busy, Google, and bring this good message to the entire Internet. SOON.

Angela Thirkell

While I am in the mode of talking about authors—and for a change in subject—I want to recommend the novels of Angela Thirkell.

She was a twentieth century author of extraordinary prolific output. She wrote a novel in almost every year from 1931 through 1961. These are family sagas; most are also love stories. They are funny and yet deadly serious as well. Each novel’s “time” is the year in which they were written; many of the same characters appear in book after book, first as children, later as adults. Thirkell had the brilliant idea to set her novels in Barsetshire, a fictional county invented by Anthony Trollope.

I’ve found that the novels written during and after World War II are by far the best. The earlier works don’t appeal to me quite so much. Something happened to the English during the war, and this change also deepened Thirkell’s own take on the world.

These are truly weird novels. You fall into them. You start to live the lives of the characters. I’ve read about ten of them now. If my library is a good random sample, there will be two or three of them present on the shelves. I started with Love Among the Ruins (1948) and got caught.

Brigitte got me started. She picked up a stray comment on Thirkell in a column by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times. Klinkenborg said something to the effect that one tends to hide the book lest visitors see what you’re reading (not high literature). Since we think that Klinkenborg himself is right up there with the best of writers, this was enough for a trip to the library. To see Klinkenborg on the subject of Thirkell, read here.