I thought again of Dickens - Hope Jahren's science memoir Lab Girl

Through a mix of Twitter flattery and reverse psychology, influential biologist Hope Jahren tricked me into reading her memoir Lab Girl (2016).  It is an unusually good book.  (Other authors, please do not try this again – each spell works only once).

Jahren and her longtime lab manager Bill collect large samples of material – soil, moss, fossils – and run them through a mass spectrometer or some such machine.  Thus, the lab, her own lab, a series of labs that she and Bill have built from scratch and scraps.  The series of labs are one of the frames on which Jahren builds the book.

Another frame is a series of short chapters about tree biology.  All of the tree science is in these little chapters, but the trees are also clear-cut for metaphor.  Pulped for metaphor.  Jahren is as a rule good with metaphor – “The students spilled out of the van like an undone bag of marbles” (114) – but the tree chapters do something well beyond the single image.  Some of the extended metaphors are more obvious than others, but I am looking at the fascinating 2.3, about the symbiotic relationship between trees and certain fungi – “the best – and really only – friends that trees ever had” (104) – where her friend Bill is (also) the fungus.  “Why are they together, the tree and the fungus?”  It’s a dang allegory.

This is like that.  But I have written before about how scientists need metaphor as much as anyone in literature.

In Chapter 1.4, Jahren writes about her first science-like job, preparing intravenous medicine in a hospital pharmacy, a job that is not exactly David Copperfield’s child labor in the bottle-washing factory but with the empty bottles, labels and seals is like it, enough like it that Jahren interlards the chapter with direct quotations from the Dickens novel.

Lydia was magnificent at her workstation, possibly because she’d been doing this sixty hours a week for almost twenty years.  Watching her sort, clean, and inject was like watching a ballerina defy gravity.  I watched her hands fly and thought… in an easy amateur way, and without any book (he seemed to me to know everything by heart), from chapter seven.  (44)

Lydia is a great character, one of those Dickensian creations that are called caricatures by readers who have limited acquaintance with the variety of humanity.   Here is another David Copperfield quotation, upon visiting the hospital psych ward:

What originally struck me as cryptic in chapter fifty-nine was now mundane: they are turned inward, to feed upon their own hearts, and their own hearts are very bad feeling.  (49)

Not only is the chapter full of David Copperfield quotations, but they all contain the word “heart.”  Jahren says she was working on a paper for her English class, making this a truly heroic feat of undergraduate recycling.  I suppose this could look like a gimmick; to me, it looked like a triumph.  The chapter could stand on its own as a short story.

The book is much funnier than I have suggested.  See the chapter with the trip to Monkey Jungle, a Florida tourist “attraction”:

Three Java Macaques that had been straining their brains over some problem that they could neither solve nor abandon propelled themselves toward us, supposing that we somehow represented an answer.  A white-handed gibbon was draped limply across our walkway, either asleep or dead or someplace in between…  A single howler monkey sat high on a branch in the back, wailing out the entire Book of Job in his native tongue while periodically raising his arms in an age-old supplication for an explanation as to why the righteous must suffer.  (116-7, the ellipses conceal a Beckett reference)

But the Dickens chapter was the only part of this fine book that I really wanted to write about, surprise surprise.

I stole the title of the post from a later chapter, p. 61.

Alexander Herzen is saved by statistics

The section of My Past and Thoughts about Alexander Herzen’s childhood, I covered that, more or less, just great, and I brushed against the romance that ends the novel, Herzen’s love affair and marriage conducted against what should have been the insuperable obstacle of his political exile.

There is a short piece of that section that shows the downside of a memoir being written like a novel.  Herzen has, or moves toward, an affair with a married woman – this is before he realize how important his cousin, his future wife, is to him – the story of which is told in a series of clichés borrowed from a Balzac novel.  From Balzac if I’m lucky.  Probably something much worse. 

I embraced her and pressed her firmly to my breast.

‘My dear… but go!’  (II.21, 326)

And on that like, although not for too long.  The scene is a curiosity in a book that is otherwise well-written.  Herzen’s imagination fails him, so he finds help where he can.

Most original is Herzen’s account of his arrest, his time in prison, and his exile, written at the distance of twenty years.  At the university Herzen and his friends become radicalized anti-Czarists, opponents of the oppressive Nicholas I.  Their opposition is more intellectual than revolutionary, but that is more than enough to get them into trouble – followed by the secret police, arrested for trivial or false infractions, imprisoned without trial for months (nine months in Herzen’s case), and punished with capricious sentences.  Herzen’s was exile to Russia’s border, not quite to Siberia but as close as possible, to serve as a clerk under a provincial petty tyrant.

The exile was as bad as Herzen had feared.  He was saved by statistics, and by mindless bureaucratic imperatives.

The Ministry of Home Affairs had at that time a craze for statistics: it had given orders for committees to be formed everywhere, and had issued programmes which could hardly have been carried out even in Belgium or Switzerland; at the same time there were all sorts of elaborate tables with maxima and minima, with averages and various deductions from the totals for periods of ten years (made up on evidence which had not been collected for a year before!), with moral remarks and meteorological observations.

All, of course, unfunded.  Herzen turns out to be a master of bureaucratic nonsense, able to quickly write up meaningless statistical gibberish from scratch that is learned enough to sound important but vague enough to avoid trouble.

This passage, however timeless, is a relatively trivial example of the way Herzen uses his own story to address his political concerns.  His own troubles are always small stuff against the other crimes of the autocratic Nicholas and his allies – executions, torture, corruption.

What monstrous crimes are buried in the archives of the wicked, immoral reign of Nicholas!  We are used to them, they were committed every day, committed as though nothing was wrong, unnoticed, lost in the terrible distance, noiselessly sunk in the silent sloughs of officialdom or kept back by the censorship of the police?

Herzen is writing from London, in voluntary exile.  The next volume of the memoirs will tell me how he made that decision.  There should be a lot of good writing along the way.

Herzen writes characters - the chapter on his father - "For people he had an open, undisguised contempt – for everyone."

Herzen’s father was a living example of Turgenev’s literary creation, the Superfluous Man, educated and Westernized to a point that alienated him from his own country (“they [these types of men] were a sort of intellectual superfluity and were lost in artificial life,” 75).  Perhaps.  A page later:

For people he had an open, undisguised contempt – for everyone.  Never under any circumstances did he count upon anybody…  He was convinced beforehand that every man is capable of any evil act; and that, if he does not commit it, it is either that he has no need to, or that the opportunity does not present itself… (76)

One wonders to what extent Russian superfluity was cultural and to what extent it was temperamental.  His relations with other people are characterized by “[m]ockery, irony, cold, caustic, utter contempt” (77) which make him a trial to be around but an outstanding literary character, as Herzen demonstrates in Part I, Chapter 5 (“My Father”) of My Past and Thoughts, perhaps the finest example in this first volume of the memoirs of Herzen’s literary abilities.

The father spends his day according to a rigid schedule, in open combat with his servants who are robbing him at every opportunity, and with his guests, who he thinks are idiots, and to a lesser degree, thankfully, with his family.  Herzen’s chapter recreates the household of his youth in all its coldness and inflexibility which he presents as, from a distance, comic.  He often resembles, to my surprise, Proust, as in this description of an occasional guest:

Pimenov’s chief peculiarity lay not in his having once published books that no one ever read, but in the fact that if he began laughing he could not stop, and his laughter would grow into fits of whopping-cough, with explosions and dull rolls of thunder.  He knew this and therefore, when he had a presentiment that something laughable was coming, began little by little to take measures; he brought out a pocket-handkerchief, looked at this watch, buttoned up his coat, hid his face in his hands and, when the crisis came, stood up, turned to the wall, leaned against it and writhed in agony for half an hour or more, then, crimson and exhausted by the paroxysm, he would sit down mopping the perspiration from his bald head, though the fit would keep seizing him again for long afterwards.  (87)

Given this, Herzen’s father cannot resist provoking Pimenov to laughter as much as possible, for his own amusement.

Pimenov could be one of the Mme Verdurin’s circle.  That is the side of Proust I am thinking of, the woman who dislocates her jaw from laughing too hard.

Herzen writes that it was only during his imprisonment and exile that he understood there was anything more to his father, by which time it was too late – “his callous heart did not crave for reconciliation; so he remained on hostile terms with everyone on earth” (91).  Or almost everyone.  Herzen ends the marvelous chapter with a glimpse of his elderly father in “his study where, sitting in a hard, uncomfortable, deep armchair, surrounded by his dogs, he was playing all alone with my three-year-old son,” perhaps giving him a “rest from the incessant agitation, conflict, and vexation in which he had kept himself, as his dying hand touched the cradle.”

Alexander Herzen's memoirs, some introductory fuss

Alexander Herzen almost makes me want to break my guideline against encyclopedism.*  Meaning the bio and political views and the historical importance, summarizing introductory material or Wikipedia.  But you by definition have the internet yourself, so what is the point, and even though I have been reading his memoir which is about Herzen himself of course I have no interest in writing about Herzen himself but rather about Herzen’s book, something else entirely.

And anyway I have only read a third of the memoir, or a quarter, so what do I know.

The title of the memoir, My Past and Thoughts, is accurate.  Some of it is about Herzen’s past; some of it about his thoughts.  In this volume, the titles of two of the three parts summarize the story:  “Nursery and University 1812-1834”; “Prison and Exile 1834-1838.”  The third part is about his wife, her childhood, their romance, and eventual elopement.  She died just at the time he began working on this material and is treated with great love and tenderness.  The last part is a bit like a romance novel.

Each section is a fine example of its genre, actually.  The first section, the childhood memoir, is one just one of four major examples from Russia in the 1850s (some of which are fiction):  Sergei Aksakov’s A Russian Schoolboy and Years of Childhood,** Leo Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, and the “Oblomov’sDream” section from Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov.  What was going on in Russia in the 1850s?  Why so much interest in the subject?  I have no idea.

Herzen’s memoirs are often compared to the novelists who were his contemporaries, to Turgenev and Tolstoy.  At the level of the scene, the comparison is accurate, and with some of the character writing, too.  I will save the characters for tomorrow.  And the scenes.  And the politics, and the writing, and everything else, I guess.

It’s a great memoir.  I plan to read the whole thing.  It is close to 1,500 pages, that is all, so I will take breaks when the opportunity presents itself.

* I do enjoy encyclopedism about the text.  Herzen wrote his memoir, along with lots of other journalism and commentary, in pieces in the 1850s for the Russian émigré magazines in London.  The articles were turned into a multi-volume memoir published between 1861 and 1866.  Constance Garnett brought My Past and Thoughts into English in six volumes from 1924 to 1927.  She was not human.  Her translation was revised and annotated by Humphrey Higgens in 1968.  This is the edition I read.  Amusingly, it has four layers of footnotes (Higgens, the Soviet editors, Garnett, and Herzen).  The edition includes a long, useful essay by Isaiah Berlin that I assume is more or less the piece that is in Russian Thinkers.  I should check.

**  I used the same conceit when I wrote about Aksakov.  Eh, who will ever know.

Stendhal - I ask for my food

The NYRB edition of The Life of Henry Brulard - the old Penguin edition as well - ends with a separate 1840 document called "The Privileges". It begins "May GOD grant me the following letters patent:", and continues with a list of what we would now call super-powers. Some samples:

"ARTICLE 4:... The privilege-holder having a ring on his finger and squeezing that ring when looking at a woman, she will become passionately in love with him as we believe Héloïse was with Abelard.

ARTICLE 5: Good hair, excellent teeth, good skin never grazed. Faint, pleasing smell.

ARTICLE 10: When out shooting, eight times a year, a small flag will indicate to the privilege-holder, at a distance on one league, the game that exists and its exact position.

ARTICLE 16: The privilege-holder, wherever he may be, having said: 'I ask for my food,' will find: two pounds of bread, a beefsteak well done, a leg of lamb idem, a bottle of Saint-Julien, a carafe of water, one item of fruit, an ice-cream and a demi-tasse of coffee. This request will be answered twice in twenty-four hours."

Etc. Small sums of money, minimal physical pain, prowess in combat, the ability to turn into an animal. This is a strange piece of writing. I should point out that Stendhal wrote this when he was fifty-seven years old.

Nota Bene, in a comment, reasonably suggested that one could use Stendhal's memoirs to illuminate some of the more (some of the many!) perplexing aspects of his fictional characters. There are no shortage of parallels between young Henri Beyle and the fictional Julien Sorel and Fabrizio. But I'm having enough trouble understanding Stendhal himself (or "Stendhal"). Henry Brulard is a slippery book. I'll have to refer Nigel to Erich Auerbach's chapter on Stendhal in Mimesis and puzzle on the subject some more.

Stendhal – for in reality, as we know, everything is always quite different

Here’s Stendhal writing about crossing the Alps behind Napoleon, and seeing Italy for the first time:

“It was the hospice! There we were given, as the whole army was, half a glass of wine which seemed to me ice-cold like a red decoction. I have a memory only of the wine, but no doubt they added a piece of bread and cheese. I fancy we went in, or else the accounts of the interior of the hospice I was given produced a mental picture, which for the past thirty-six years has taken the place of the reality.

Which is where the risk of falsehood lies that I’ve been noticing in the three months I’ve had my mind on this veracious journal.

For example, I can picture the descent to myself very clearly. But I don’t wish to conceal the fact that five or six years later, I saw an engraving that I thought a very good likeness, and my memory is now nothing more than the engraving.” (p. 468)

Can you see why modern writers have become interested in The Life of Henry Brulard? The whole point of the book, the obsessive drawing and redrawing, the reworked timelines, are all designed to pin down the reality of Stendhal’s past. But here at the end of the book, at one of his life’s turning points, he finds that what he thinks are memories of events are actually memories of a description, or an engraving. Despite all the detail, all the dates, the entire project is fundamentally unstable.*

W. G. Sebald refers to this passage in his novel Vertigo. In fact he almost directly quotes it. The first, short, chapter of this unconventional** novel, which in general is about writers’ (Casanova, Kafka, Sebald) journeys to Italy, recounts Stendhal’s life from his entry to Italy to his death forty-two years later. Here is Sebald on Stendhal at the Marengo battlefield, fifteen months after the battle:

“The decisive turn in the battle, brought about by Kellermann’s ferocious cavalry charge, which tore open the flank of the main Austrian force at a time when the sun was setting and all already seemed lost, was familiar to him from many and various tellings, and he had himself pictured it in numerous forms and hues. Now, however, he gazed upon the plain, noted the few stark trees, and saw, scattered over a vast area, the bones of perhaps 16,000 men and 4,000 horses that had lost their lives there, already bleached and shining with dew. The difference between the images of the battle which he had in his head and what he now saw before him as evidence that the battle had in fact taken place occasioned in him a vertiginous sense of confusion such as he had never previously experienced.” (Vertigo, p. 17)

Sebald interlarded all sorts of pictures into his novels - photographs, documents, drawings. There are 13 in the 28 pages of the chapter on Stendhal, seven drawn by Stendhal, one of him (just his eyes, actually), and five others more or less related to the story. Sebald’s use of illustrations is complicated, the pictures sometimes only tenuously connected to the text. When reading The Life of Henry Brulard, Stendhal must have seemed like a kindred spirit.

The quote I put in the header is a diversion. That’s Sebald (Vertigo, p. 7) writing about Henry Brulard, not Stendhal.

* Even aside from Stendhal’s fabrications and jokes. Am I supposed to take this seriously? “Around this time, I became friendly, I don’t know how, with François Bigillion (who later killed himself, I believe, out of boredom with his wife)” (p. 277). “I believe” is a comic touch of the highest caliber.

** And brilliant, essential, etc.

Stendhal - What patience you will require, oh my reader!

Today, the strange features of the memoir of the childhood of Henri Beyle, aka Stendhal. From one of the numerous title pages:

“Life of Henry Brulard, written by himself. Novel of details, imitated from The Vicar of Wakefield. To Messieurs of the police. Nothing political in this novel. The scheme is a hothead of every kind who grows weary and slowly sees the light and ends by devoting himself to the cult of luxurious town-houses.” (p. xl)

Stendhal traveled a lot and worked in a French consular office in the Papal States, so the misdirection aimed at the police may have been in part utilitarian. Possibly. Mostly, it’s a gag. Not a true word in it. The cult of luxurious town-houses!

The drawings, Stendhal’s maps and diagrams and scrawls, are the memoir’s unique feature. The one above is typical, a luxurious town-house, the floorplan of one story of his grandfather’s house. Here’s part of the scribbling:

“Winding staircase – Large, cheerless courtyard – Magnificent inlaid chest-of-drawers surmounted by a clock: Mars offering France his arm; France wore a cloak decorated with fleur-des-lis, which later on caused great anxiety – Solitary window with panes of magnificent Bohemian glass. One of them, top left, was cracked and stayed that way for ten years.” (p. 113)

There's a drawing on, more or less, every third page. A lot of them are floorplans, sometimes repeated over and over with minor variations, often including a dot labeled "Moi". Sometimes Stendhal draws maps of Grenoble or the countryside, or gives us side views of a piece of terrain. There must be a dozen different versions of the city square in front of his grandfather's house, each with slightly different labels. There are almost no people, although the drawing of himself at the blackboard, a source of enormous trauma, from yesterday's post, is included four times. Once, Stendhal draws a tiny rat.

What are the drawings for? Stendahl insists that his memory is faulty, that he is remembering details of his past only as he writes them. He often admits that he is unsure of when an event took place, even his age at the time. He says he will look things up in the Genoble archives, like when he went to school(!). The drawings are stimulants to his memory, a way of trying to pin down the truth. This is why obsessively redraws parts of his grandfather's house - he wants not just the basic layout, which anyway he might have gotten wrong last time, but also where the furniture was, where people were sitting. Every scene is a little different.

The scene on the left is a unique one, a picnic with his relatives, an escape from his oppressive home. Here's what the handwriting says:

“From B to C slope of eight or ten feet on which all the ladies were sitting. They were laughing, drinking ratafia from Teisseire (Grenoble), there were no glasses, out of the lids of tortoiseshell snuff-boxes.” (p. 148)

And here's the narrative. Stendhal is "seven or eight":

“After my jealousy-inspired rebellion, I threw stones at these ladies from point A. The big Corbeau (an officer on six months’ leave) took me and set me in an apple or mulberry tree at M, at point O, between two branches from which I didn’t dare climb down. I jumped, I hurt myself, I ran off toward Z.” pp. 148-9

The detail about drinking out of snuff-box lids is worthy of Flaubert.

One more drawing, a famous one. The list of letters to the left are the initials of all Stendhal's lovers, in order. I think he slept with the numbered ones. "I pondered deeply on these names, and on the astonishing follies and stupidities they made me do (I say astonishing for me, not for the reader, and anyway, I don't repent of them)". The list is on p. 19 of the NYRB edition, but I've cheated here and reproduced p. 27 of W. G. Sebald's first novel, Vertigo. More on that later.

The quote in the title is from p. 23. Stendhal is right, his book requires patience. The Life of Henry Brulard has a number of tedious passages, and others that are barely comprehensible. Then some parts use a single detail or incident in a psychologically penetrating way, a little burst of insight. Much like his novels.

Stendhal – it’s cold, the pens are malfunctioning

On the back cover of the NYRB edition of The Life of Henry Brulard (written 1835-6, published 1883), which is, oddly, an autobiographical work by someone not named Henry Brulard, there is a small portrait of a young Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal. The portrait can be seen at the Musée Stendhal in Grenoble, Stendhal’s childhood home. If I ever find myself in Grenoble, I will be sure to go. Let’s see what Stendhal himself has to say about his hometown:

“Truth to tell, when I think hard about it, I haven’t been cured of my unreasonable revulsion for Grenoble: in the true sense of the word I have forgotten it. My magnificent memories of Italy, or Milan, have erased everything... If I may be permitted an image as distasteful as the sensation, it is like the smell of oysters to a man who has had a terrible indigestion from oysters.” (pp. 106-7)

Stendhal/ Beyle lost his mother when he was six years old. His family was devastated. Both his father and his grandfather essentially withdrew from society. Over and over, Stendhal laments that he never he spent his childhood without knowing children his own age. He was instead tutored at home for years, tyrannized by his cruel Séraphie and capricious father, his beloved grandfather supportive but passive. Beyle finally escaped, first to a different set of tyrants at school (but at least alongside other boys) and then to Paris, which, being the soul of perversity, he despised. The memoir climaxes with a 17 year old Beyle crossing the Alps to Italy with Napoleon’s army, Napoleon about to achieve his first great triumph at Marengo, Beyle about to fall in love with Italian mountains, Italian music, and Italian women.


Straightforward enough – a great writer’s childhood memoir, his miseries and escape into another life. But who, then, is Henry Brulard? And what is this, a marginal note on p. 247: “Rapidity. Bad handwriting (reason for). 1 Jan 1836. It’s only two o’clock, I have already written sixteen pages; it’s cold, the pens are malfunctioning. Instead of getting into a temper, I keep gong ahead, writing as best I can”? And what on earth is that thing to the right – one of the hundreds of drawings that are an integral part of the book?

The rest of the week, I’ll see if I can explain. No guarantees.