Visiting imaginary museums with André Malraux

 

André Malraux’s Les Voix du silence (The Voices of Silence, 1951) is a synthetic, imaginative art omnihistory, an application (successful) to be Charles de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, and at the same time an implicit apology for his brief career as a looter of Cambodian art.  Terrible, terrible.  Please see his 1930 novel La Voie royale (The Royal Way) for the fascinating details.

Actually Malraux, a true con man, likely thought he did nothing wrong and was not apologizing in any way.  I am just trying to give him credit.

The first fifth of the book, “Le Musée Imaginaire” / “The Imaginary museum,” for some reason retitled “Museum Without Walls” by Stuart Gilbert in his 1953 translation, is in particular a terrific piece of imaginative art criticism.  Inspired by the great improvements in the reproduction of artworks and the flood of high quality art books, Malraux constructs, and argues we are all free to construct, a museum in our heads, or our libraries, containing all art from all time, in a way that was never possible before.

Not that Giotto or Fra Angelico did not do all right with their much smaller museum.  Malraux has interesting things to say about that.  Perhaps knowing everything about everything is not good for art.

But in the meantime Malraux juxtaposes works freely across time and space, with productive results:

This 13th century French angel and 4th century Gandharan Buddha are on pp. 158-9 of the French text, pp. 160-1 of the English.  About forty percent of Les voix du silence is illustrations, so if you enjoy this kind of thing there is a lot more to see.

I was doing a little “imaginary museum” exercise back in this piece about visiting actual Paris museums.  Malraux was obviously as inspired by the variety of the collections in the ever-growing range of Paris museums.  Think how exciting the Paris museum world must have been just after the war, with civilization coming back to life, and the collections coming out of hiding.

The rest of the book is not so original, I do not think, although I would be interested in what a historian of art history thinks of it.  The third of the book titled “La Création Artistique” / “The Creative Process” is a wide-ranging study of high-level creativity that is knowledgeable and open-minded.  His idea of creativity is more formalist than most people's, although not mine. I just have doubts about how original it is.  That “imaginary museum” stuff, that is Malraux’s.

Let’s have some prose and see Malraux’s extremely French mix of insight, lyricism, clarity, and hot air.  I read this book in French, but since the online edition had, ironically, terrible reproductions, I also used an English edition for the illustrations.  So I will use Gilbert’s translation, not mine.

Malraux is writing about the difficulty of fitting objects like Melanesian masks into our art appreciation frame.  “[A]fter seeing a hundred New Ireland figures, we prefer to isolate two or three and toy with the illusion that they are the work of some great mythical sculptor (of no time, yet a little of ours).”

Those colors of the New Hebrides, intense or muted, are employed by dressmakers and theatrical designers; indeed when a great number of these figures are brought together in a museum, we have a sudden feeling of being invited to se a haute couture of Death.  These glittering ghosts really belong to poetry, which is why the Surrealists make so much of them.  But Surrealism, far from proposing to further culture, repudiates it in favor of the dream.  Our artistic culture, however, does not repudiate the dream, but seeks to annex it to itself.  Our Middle Ages, too, suggest to us what the festival deriving from the prehistoric ages may have been; but once his Carnival was over, medieval man fell to building cathedrals, and his rulers had not “ancestors” but forebears.  (575 English)

Gilbert’s decisions, when I took a look, often puzzled me.  He has a tendency to over-expand.  But he has a heck of a task.  That last clause in French is:

… mais son Carnaval terminé, il construisait des cathedrals, et ses chefs n’avaient pas d’ancêtres, ils avaient des aïeux. (573)

… but his Carnival having ended, he was building cathedrals, and his rulers did not have ancestors, they had ancestors.  (me, trying to be literal)

You see the expansion, a simple “il” turning into “medieval man,” and “fell to” fussily solving a verb issue.  But I have no idea what subtlety separates “ancêtres” from “aïeux” – I think they are synonyms – so I have no idea what Malraux is trying to say.  My translation is obviously wrong.  Gilbert at least takes a shot at it, even adding some extra quotation marks, although I do not think he knows either.  He had to do this on page after page.

If this all sounds interesting but maybe too full of hot air, the big sections are available separately.  Just read the “Museum Without Walls” section, which is also available as its own book, and see how that goes.

In the old days I would have written about this rich, enjoyable, exasperating book for a week.

 

 

The Tragedie of Gorboduc - To see the hugy heaps of our unhaps

King Gorboduc, his head heavy from wearing the crown of England, divides his kingdom between his two sons.  One son quickly murders the other; the grieving mother (!) murders the surviving son; the outraged populace rises to murder the queen and poor, hapless King Gorboduc; England collapses into civil war. 

This sounds so exciting!  And look at all of those hints of later plays, of the history plays and King Lear.  The Tragedie of Gorboduc (1562, pub. 1565) is not exciting.  It is static and anti-dramatic.  It barely has characters. The action is presented in the dumb shows that lead each act, and in messenger speeches.  The play is mostly a mix of political speeches, advice to the king and so on, and messenger speeches.

The model is Seneca curiously mixed with English morality plays.  Seneca’s characters declaim in long set-speeches, but with an emotional intensity, building to pathos or horror, that is absent in Gorboduc, which was written by a couple of lawyers, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, for a performance before an audience of lawyers.  The warning about the dangers of a weak monarchy are the real point, the real plot, of the play.  No surprise that it was published relatively soon after its performance, that a particular audience wanted the text.

I know this sounds dull, and I do not know how it would be to sit through the play, but I found it highly readable.  I am now used to theater more undramatic than this, all kinds of crazy anti-plays, and I will note that the most produced play in America last season was Heidi Schrek’s What the Constitution Means to Me (2017).

A few scenes get close to later drama.  The queen has a two-page soliloquy about murdering her own son where she would, in Seneca or Racine, whip herself up into a frenzy.  Maybe we in the audience are horrified or somehow sympathetic:

Never, O wretch, this womb conceived thee;

Nor never bode I painful throes for thee.

Changeling to me thou art, and not my child,

Nor to no wight that spark of pity knew.

Ruthless, unkind, monster of nature’s work…  (IV.1, 67-71)

The queen is more a type than a character – she has barely been on stage before this scene – and the ideas in this speech do not really develop.  But I can see the future in it.  I can imagine Marlowe or Shakespeare reading it and wanting to fix it.  I can also imagine a less anarchically commercial English theater developing in a more Racine-like direction.

Gorboduc is the first published English play written in blank verse.  This is really why we read it.  Henry Howard’s partial translation of The Aeneid in blank verse had been published just a few years earlier.  The whole point of the exercise is that Roman poetry did not rhyme, so how can that be duplicated in English and still be interesting poetry?  Howard’s Virgil was a success, wonderful stuff, and I am not surprised that these two educated lawyers borrowed it for their pseudo-Seneca.  Their blank verse is competent, and they were right, it creates a kind of speech that sounds natural but lends itself to elaboration, that is pleasant to hear and read and not so bad for an actor to memorize.  Sackville and Norton great virtue is clarity, but they have their poetic moments:

And ye, O gods, send us the welcome death,

To shed our blood in field, and leave us not

In loathsome life to linger out our days,

To see the hugy heaps of our unhaps,

That now roll down upon the wretched land…  (V.ii, 105-10)

Almost an Anglo-Saxon poetic quality in those lines.  Compared to what Marlowe or Webster or Shakespeare will do with blank verse, sure, sure, no comparison.

I read Gorboduc in a 1974 collection titled Minor Elizabethan Tragedies which reprints a 1910 volume titled Minor Elizabethan Drama.

Next week I will glance at Stephen Greenblatt’s new biography of Christopher Marlowe (which I have not read) and poke at the idea of authorship. Then in two weeks we will begin reading Christopher Marlowe with what feels to me like the early, even unformed, Dido, Queen of Carthage.

The magician becomes a bureaucrat - what Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World is about

The Kingdom of This World (1949), Alejo Carpentier, tr. by Pablo Medina (2017).

What is this novel about.  It is about the Haitian Revolution, although not in the sense that it is a substitute for reading The Black Jacobins (1938).

It is about – I am looking at the translator’s Afterword – “the clash of cultures and races; it is a book about overwhelming social injustice; it is, above all, a book about the good and the evil that people will inflict on one another” (133).  True up to the last item; I do not know where in the novel anyone is inflicting good.  There is certainly plenty of evil.  “Like Mark Twain before him, Carpentier tackles slavery head-on and in so doing helps us to understand the awful legacy of racial discrimination with which our society still struggles.”  I doubt anyone reading this post of mine will improve their understanding of racial discrimination at all by reading The Kingdom of This World, but maybe some readers at a much earlier point in their education will?

The novel is about the failures of Surrealism, and it is also a positive argument for a particular kind of post-Surrealism that Carpentier calls “the marvelous real.”  Let’s look at the novel’s prose.  I’m on the second page here:

While his master was being shaved, Ti Noël was able to study carefully the four wax heads propped on the shelf by the entrance.  The wigs’ curls framed the fixed faces before spreading into a pool of ringlets on the red runner.  Those heads seemed as real – and as dead, given their motionless eyes – as the talking head that a traveling charlatan had brought to the Cap years before as a ploy to help him sell an elixir that cured toothaches and rheumatism.  By charming coincidence, the butcher shop next door displayed the skinned heads of calves, which had the same waxy quality.  (4)

I want to quote the entire page, I enjoy it so.

… Ti Noël distracted himself  by thinking that the heads of white gentlemen were being served at the same table as the discolored veal heads…  All they needed was a bed of lettuce or radishes cut in the shape of fleur-de-lys as adornment.

The novel is more or less written like this.  The point of view moves around.  There is, for example, an amusing digressive section starring Josephine Bonaparte.  Ti Noël becomes the protagonist because, essentially, he survives the violence.  Let’s see what happens to him at the end of the novel.

Tired of risky transformations, Ti Noël used his extraordinary powers to change himself into a goose and thus live among the birds that had taken residence in his domain.  (128)

Humans transforming into animals is one of the novel’s running themes.  Why, I see an example up above, way back on page 4.  Now, even within the realm of fiction it is not likely that Ti Noël transformed into a goose.  Sadly, he is rejected by the other “real” geese, because “no matter if he tried for years, he would never have access to the rites and roles of the clan” (129).

Ti Noël believes he becomes a goose, though, and given how narrative works, what is the difference between him believing he is a goose and actually being a goose.

I think you may be able to detect a little bit of Revolutionary political symbolism in the earlier passage, and the story of the geese has a parable-like quality.  The entire ending, the last three chapters, is full of marvelous symbolic writing, all with this Surrealist character, things transforming into other things, or things in illogical places for logical reasons.  Real and also marvelous.

I might have figured out Carpentier’s argument with Surrealism from the novel itself, but in the Preface he openly says all this.

By dint of wanting to elicit the marvelous at every turn, the magician becomes a bureaucrat.  Invoked by means of the usual formulas that make of certain paintings a monotonous junk pile of rubbery clocks, tailor’s mannequins, or vague phallic monuments, the marvelous never goes beyond an umbrella or a lobster or a sewing machine or whatever, lying on a dissection table inside a sad room in a rocky desert.  Imaginative poverty, Unamuno used to say, is the consequence of learning codes by heart (xiv-v).

Although there are some recognizable targets in this passage, only poor Yves Tanguy is directly attacked for his “troubling imaginative poverty” in “painting the same stony larvae under the same gray sky for twenty-five years” (xv).  The de-bureaucratizing solution, by the way, is to go to America, Haiti for example, and write about what is actually there.  “For what is the story of all of the Americas if not the chronicle of the marvelous and the real?” (xx).  Americans still believe in magic and miracles.

I will note that in the last two paragraphs of his Afterword, Medina takes up these more aesthetic ideas.  He also translated that Preface.

I will also note that, although I have not read the older translation or compared it to the Spanish at all, Medina’s translation seemed wonderful, energetic and clear.  Brightly lit, like freshly restored baroque architecture.

Carpentier’s subsequent novel, The Lost Steps (1953), strongly recommended to fans of the Pixar movie Up (2009), is also about aesthetics, Modernism versus Romanticism, say.  It is too long since I read Explosion in a Cathedral (1962) to argue that it is mostly about books, really, but now I wonder.

Carpentier praises Wilfredo Lam in the Preface so I put a contempory Lam painting, La Jungla (1943), up above.

Gammer Gurton's Needle - it would have made thee beshit thee / For laughter

 

Gammer Gurton loses her needle (solution to the mystery: distracted by her cat she forgets it in her servant Hodge’s pants).  A wandering stranger uses the hubbub to sow chaos for some reason, which gives the play a kind of plot, which for something like this is just a way to give the gags some order.  The stranger wants chaos but of course  so do we, the readers, the audience.  That is the point of comedy.

Such is Gammer Gurton’s Needle.  I date it near but somewhat after Ralph Roister Doister, so mid-1550s.  It was possibly printed in 1563 and certainly printed in 1575.  There we go.  The authorship is a total hash.  The author is one or another Cambridge don, writing a holiday entertainment performed by and for an audience of teenage boys.

They presumably found it hilarious.

Tib.  See, Hodge, what’s this may it not be within it?

Hodge. Break it, fool, with thy hand, and see an thou canst find it.

Tib. Nay, break it you, Hodge, according to your word.

Hodge.  Gog’s sides! Fie! It stinks; it is a cat’s turd!  (Act !, Scene v)

As a character says later, “An thadst seen him, Diccon, it would have made thee beshit thee / For laughter” (IV.iii).  Gammer Gurton’s Needle is rather more earthy than the English comedies that would follow it.  The student of Shakespeare soon learns that anything that looks like a dirty joke probably is.  Such is true here, too.

Gammer.  For these and ill luck together, as knoweth Cock, my boy,

Have stuck away my dear neele, and robber me of my joy,

My fair long straight neele, that was mine only treasure;

The first day of my sorrow is, and last end of my pleasure!  (I.iv)

The play has an outstanding cat, Gib, who sadly never appears on stage, such were the limits of mid-16th century theatrical special effects.  In Act III, scene iv, for example, Gib “stands me gasping behind the door, as though her wind hath faileth” – has she swallowed the lost needle!  The characters debate what to do – “Groper her, ich say, methinks ich feel it; does not prick your hand?” – but the cat stays behind the door the whole time.

Whoever the author was, he knew how to have some fun with the language, which is again in rhyming couplets but with more North English rural dialect.

My guts they yawl-crawl, and all my belly rumbleth;

The puddings cannot lie still, each one over other tumbleth.  (II.i.)

Or these two old ladies screaming at each other:

Gammer.          Thou wert as good as kiss my tail!

Thou slut, thou cut, thou rakes, thou jakes! Will not shame make thee hide thee?

Chat.  Thou scald, thou bald, thou rotten, thou glutton!  I will no longer chide thee,

But I will teach thee to keep home.  (III.iii)

And the humor deepens when I remember that these are two teenage boys dressed as old women shouting these lines for an audience of teenage boys.  This is what we call classic humor.

Next week I switch to tragedy, with Gorboduc (1561) by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, written and performed for young lawyers and full of important lessons and Classical learning and so on.  It will be a tonal shift.

What I Read in August 2025 - But good ale down your throat hath good easy tumbling

I have been learning a lot about Elizabethan literature.  Next month we will see what good it does me.  I am enjoying myself.  The title quotation is from Ralph Roister Doister.

I plan to put up a post about Marlowe’s first – probably his first – play, Dido, Quen of Carthage, on September 29, and in the meantime will write about some plays preceding Marlowe.

 

FICTION

Ralph Roister Doister (1552, perhaps), Nicholas Udall – enjoyed over here.

The Loved One (1948), Evelyn Waugh – amusing and minor.  Waugh briefly visited Los Angeles and imagined Disneyland (as a cemetery), just a few years before it was built.  Perceptive.

The Kingdom of This World (1949), Alejo Carpentier – Outstanding debut novel about the Haitian Revolution.  Or about the failures of Surrealism.  I should write a longer note on this one.

Franny and Zooey (1955 / 1957 / 1961), J. D. Salinger – I enjoyed Nine Stories (1953) and enjoyed “Franny” (1955) all right but boy “Zooey” (1957) was a real nerve saw.  I am amazed that New Yorker readers had so much patience for Salinger’s dialectical Buddhist fiction.

The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965), Samuel R. Delany – I found Delany’s first novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962), creative but clumsy and I suppose this novel, his fifth, is the same, but the level of creativity is even higher.  It was mostly written over four days and sometimes feels like it, but it is overflowing with exciting conceits.  The basis of the plot is literary criticism, the interpretation of the title ballad.  To do literary criticism, the protagonist must visit ruined spaceships and befriend a space monster. Delany was – let me go look this up – 22, 23 years-old.

 

POETRY

The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954), William Carlos Williams

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (1948-89), Yehuda Amichai

Every Sound Is Not a Wolf (2025), Alberto Rios

 

PURSUIT OF THE SUBLIME / MADNESS

Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak (1951), Maurice Herzog – enjoyed back here.

 

IN FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE

Os Escravos (1865), Castro Alves – Three abolitionist poems by a Brazilian teenager who wanted to be Victor Hugo and/or Byron and died young after introducing Romanticism to Brazilian poetry.  I have little idea how good these poems are, but this is pretty exciting.

Les voix du silence (1951), André Malraux – A work of imaginative art criticism by French literature’s great con man, in effect his successful application to be French Minister of Culture.  I really should write a longer note about this book, some of which is highly interesting.

Um estranho em Goa (2000), José Eduardo Agualusa – An Angolan writer’s autofiction about a visit to Goa, a place about which I knew nothing, which is why I read the book. Plus it is at my language level, plus it is a reasonable length, plus, I suppose, many other things.  The travel writing aspects were of high interest, the fiction less so, but fine.  I hope the plot line where Agualusa halfheartedly tries to buy, mostly out of morbid curiosity, the living heart of the local saint is fiction.  Some of Agualusa’s books have been translated into English recently but not this one.  I hope to read another someday.

 

 

Ralph Roister Doister, among the first regular English comedies - Then to our recorder with toodleloodle poop

Ralph Roister Doister (written c. 1550, published 1567) once had the distinction of being the first comedy in English.  Please see this 1911 edition of the play calling it “the first regular English comedy.”  I do not know what 19th century critics meant by “regular” but this was a 19th century idea, as scholars began to work seriously on figuring which plays survived from the 16th century, that Ralph Roister Doister was the first English comedy.  It is not the first, regular or otherwise.  Let’s return to this issue.

A braggart soldier type (“I am sorry God made me so comely, doubtless,” Act I, Scene ii), the title character, decides, urged on by a parasite type, Matthew Merrygreek, to woo a widow, who is engaged and not very interested.  The big comic misunderstanding involves the mispunctuation of a love letter.  The result is a battle between the widow and her maids, armed with their “tools” (for sewing and weaving and so on) versus Roister Doister, a pail on his head, and his idiot servants.  Perhaps there is a goose involved:

Tibet Talkapace:                                   Shall I go fetch our goose?

Dame Custance:  What to do?

TT:  To yonder captain I will turn her loose:

An she gape and hiss at him, as she doth at me,

I durst jeapord my hand she will make him flee.  (IV. viii)

The battle scene is a bit vague, with lots of room for whatever gags the director can think of.  As you see, the play is written in competent rhyming couplets.

The braggart soldier, and more or less the plot is from Miles Gloriosus (2^nd cent. BCE) by Plautus.  The parasite is from English morality plays.  The servants, the goose, the songs, the names, and the whole tone of the thing are likely from English popular plays, whatever touring groups were performing at fairs.

The names are wonderful.  Tristram Trusty, Margery Mumblecrust, Tibet Talkapace.  I’ve remembered Ralph Roister Doister’s name since I first saw it in some potted history of English theater nearly forty years ago.  The first English comedy should be titled Ralph Roister Doister.

The domestic detail is also a delight.  Here are the maids early on, at work:

Margery Mumblecrust: Well, ye will sit down to your work anon, I trust.

Tibet Talkapace: Soft fire maketh sweet malt, good Madge Mumblecrust.

MM: And sweet malt maketh jolly good ale for the nones.

TT: Which will slide down the lane without any bones.   [Sings.

Old brown bread-crusts must have much good mumbling,

But good ale down your throat hath good easy tumbling.  (I.iii)

The play is slackly paced giving plenty of its time to watching the maids sew and sing.  It is not exactly digressive, but like a musical.  Let’s stop and have a song or whatever:

With every woman he is in some love’s pang.

Then up to our lute at midnight, twangledom twang;

Then twang with our sonnets, and twang with our dumps,

And heigho from our heart, as heavy as lead lumps;

Then to our recorder with toodleloodle poop,

And the howlet out of an ivy bush should whoop…  (II.i)

Nicholas Udall, the likely author, was a schoolmaster.  He likely wrote this play for performance by his schoolboys.  Maybe he was the first schoolmaster to rewrite a Plautus play for his students, although I doubt it.  He may have been the first to make his rewritten Plautus so inventively English.  It could easily be much, much less English.  The Englishness is the best part.

The title character is a direct ancestor of Falstaff, although, remembering the pail on Roister Doister’s head, the Falstaff of Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff in the laundry basket.

The play is also a little step towards the creation of the professional boy’s companies, the aspect of Elizabethan theater I find hardest to imagine.  Fourteen year-old boys performing plays at the level of The Alchemist, how did that work?  But I can imagine them doing Ralph Roister Doister.

Next Monday I will write about another early boy’s comedy, and is it ever, Gammer Gurton’s Needle.

a fantastic universe where the presence of man was not foreseen - Maurice Herzog's Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak

Books that generate other books, books that are first in the line, interest me.  Despite little interest in mountaineering, I read Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak (1951, tr. Nea Morin and Janet Adam Smith) by Maurice Herzog, the subject of the book well summarized in the title, a book that led to many other books.

Annapurna was a big hit, and soon after there were books by other members of the expedition, and a parody novel, The Ascent of Rum Doodle (William Ernest Bowman, 1956) and a feminist response.  That response was to climb Annapurna, but also to write a book, Annapurna: A Woman’s Place (Arlene Blum, 1980).  The book inspired a great deal of mountaineering, Himalayan and otherwise.  The last line, “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men” (311), apparently became famously inspirational  among crazy people, by which I mean mountain climbers, but I am more interested in what inspired people to write books.

The story of the 1950 French and Swiss expedition in Nepal to climb whichever 8,000-meter peak was easiest, using state-of-the-art techniques, is a terrific adventure story, “terrific” in the current sense (entertaining) but also in the old sense (terrifying, these climbers are out of their minds), and it is the latter that really surprised me.  Annapurna is study in the variety of human taste for risk, or to put it in Wuthering Expectations terms* the taste for the sublime.

“Sublime” has softened into an inelegant variation for “very beautiful,” but I again mean the old aesthetic sense of beauty that is frightening, beauty that is trying to kill you, like the view from the top of an 8,000-meter Himalayan peak. 

This was quite different [from the Alps].  An enormous gulf was between me and the world.  This was a different universe – withered, desert, lifeless; a fantastic universe where the presence of man was not foreseen, perhaps not desired.  We were braving an interdict, overstepping a boundary, and yet we had no fear as we continued upward.  I thought of the famous ladder of St. Theresa of Avila.  Something clutched at my heart.  (207)

Herzog does not normally write like this.  He is typically a model of clarity.  But atop Annapurna he goes on for three pages like this, while his companion keeps insisting they head back before the bad weather hits them.

Some additional fragments:

How wonderful life would now become! (208)

Never had I felt happiness like this – so intense and yet so pure. (209)

 Before disappearing into the couloir I gave one last look at the summit which would henceforth be all our joy and all our consolation. (210)

The latter is well into the descent which at that point has become terrible and will get much worse.  But Herzog remains captured by his sublime experience, wavering between the struggle to descend and an obliterating acceptance of imminent death.

Given the practicalities of the earlier part of the book, the organization of camps and supplies, the turn towards St. Theresa was fascinating.  It’s those camps and supplies, along with the team doctor, that save Herzog.  If you happen to have strong feelings about needles I recommend that you skip chapter 16, “The Retreat,” which is full of horrors (frostbite treatments).  Perhaps skim the next couple of chapters as well, although the worst is over.

The whole of this book has been dictated at the American Hospital at Neuilly where I am still having rather a difficult time.  (11)

I suppose another reason for the rise of the mountaineering book in the is that explorers had used up other parts of the world.  The Arctic and Antarctic had been exhausted as subjects for books.  I will note that while Roald Amundsen insisted on the scientific value of his pointless feats, Herzog and his team have no illusion that climbing a Himalayan mountain has any value beyond the adventure.  The legendary Alpine guide Lionel Terray, one of the members of the team who got Herzog down off Annapurna, titled his 1961 memoir Conquistadors of the Useless.  Useless except for generating books.

Page numbers are from the first edition, which has a helpful fold-out map in the back.

 

* See this old post about Little House on the Prairie for more on the sublime.

A readalong of Christopher Marlowe and friends - I fear they know we sent the poison'd broth

Please join me this fall in reading the plays of Christopher Marlowe and some of his contemporaries, if that sounds enjoyable to you.  The more I have thought about it, the more enjoyable it sounds to me.  I have many questions.

Below is an attempt at a schedule, with a play every two weeks, slower than when we read all of the Greek plays.  In September, though, I will blow through some early plays the precede the commercial London theater.  They are a bit shorter and frankly I doubt that anyone else will want to read them, so let’s get on to Marlowe, right?  Marlowe is outstanding.

I hope to put up a post every Monday (the dates below), with the alternating posts about some related topic: another play, perhaps even one by Shakespeare, or poetry, or criticism, or even in theory a performance although that does not seem likely.

I think of these works more as poems than as plays; this will mostly be an exercise in poetics and literary history.  But there is no reason anyone else has to read along for that.

Early Precursors
Sep. 1	1552	Ralph Roister Doister	Nicholas Udall
Sep. 8	1553	Gammer Gurton's Needle	authorship much disputed
Sep. 15	1561	Gorbuduc	Thomas Norton & Thomas Sackville
Marlowe & Co.
Sep. 29	1587	Dido, Queen of Carthage	Christopher Marlowe
Oct. 6	1587	Tamburlaine, Parts I & II	Christopher Marlowe
Oct. 20	1587	The Spanish Tragedy	Thomas Kyd
Nov. 3	1589	The Jew of Malta	Christopher Marlowe
Nov. 17	1591	Arden of Faversham	???
Dec. 1	1592	Doctor Faustus	Christopher Marlowe
Dec. 15	1592	Edward the Second	Christopher Marlowe
Dec. 29	1593	The Massacre at Paris	Christopher Marlowe

The years are all from the chronological table in the back of The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 1990, eds. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway.  Most of these years are marked with an asterisk meaning “best guess” so please use them skeptically.  The year of The Spanish Tragedy is especially convenient – plausible but convenient – because paired up with Tamburlaine it creates a handy Year When Everything Changed, a concentrated explosion of theatrical innovation.  But maybe it did not happen.

The first London commercial theater (The Theatre) opened in 1576, the next few in 1577.  One of my puzzles is what happened in the ten years before the Tamburlaine / Spanish Tragedy revolution.  Barely more than a dozen plays survive from that period, a number of them closet dramas, not written for performance.  What the heck was on those stages?

Some of what else was going on:

1580s	Astrophel and Stella	Philip Sidney
	An Apology for Poetry	Philip Sidney
	Caelica	Fulke Greville
1590	Henry VI, parts 1 to 3	William Shakespeare, et. al.
	The Two Gentlemen of Verona	William Shakespeare
	The Faerie Queene I-III	Edmund Spenser
1591	The Taming of the Shrew	William Shakespeare
	The Comedy of Errors	William Shakespeare
	Richard III	William Shakespeare
	Titus Andronicus	William Shakespeare
	Complaints	Edmund Spenser
	Summer's Last Will and Testament	Thomas Nashe
1592	Delia and the Complaint of Roasmund	Sanuel Daniel
	Pierce Penniless	Thomas Nashe
1593	Idea: The Shepherd's Garland	Michael Drayton
	Venus and Adonis	William Shakespeare
	Hero and Leander	Christopher Marlowe
	The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia	Philip Sidney

 

The sonnet craze – Sidney, Greville, Daniel, Drayton – is at its peak.  Lots of great poetry of all types, really, but oh so many sonnets.  Then there is the upstart, catching up with Marlowe fast.  I remind myself that Shakespeare was two months younger than Marlowe.  The theaters are closed because of the plague in 1592, which is why Shakespeare and possibly Marlowe switched from plays to best-selling narrative poems (although Hero and Leander was not published until 1598).

Please feel free to offer corrections, major or minor omissions, or really any comment at all.  I have read a lot of this stuff before but have no other expertise.

In December I will think about what happens next.  But in the meantime let’s have some laughs with the hilarious comedies of Marlowe and pals.  The title quotation is from, where else, The Jew of Malta, Act 4, Scene 1.

What I Read in July 2025 - books are quiet and unobtrusive, and do not try to hustle the reader

In general, however, he [Louis XVI] preferred writing down his thoughts instead of uttering them by word of mouth; and he was fond of reading, for books are quiet and unobtrusive, and do not try to hustle the reader. (Stefan Zweig, Marie Antoinette, 1932, p. 77 of the 1933 American edition, tr. Eden and Cedar Paul)

 

Soon I will put up a schedule of my autumn Not Shakespeare reading, just in case anyone wants to join in.  In effect it will be a lot of Christopher Marlowe with a few contemporaries.  Marlowe is a lot of fun.

FICTION

Love, Death, and the Ladies' Drill Team (1955), Jessamyn West – Reading Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953) I wondered what else the New Yorker readers of the time were reading along with “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”  One answer is Jessamyn West.  These stories seemed good to me.  “The Mysteries of Life in an Orderly Manner” (1948) is easy to recommend as a sample, for one thing because it is only six pages.

The Holy Innocents (1981), Miguel Delibes – A famous Spanish novel, just translated, that uses its post-Franco freedom to indulge in a little revenge on the powerful.  Modernist and unconventionally punctuated, but I do not want to say it was too surprising.  New to English – what took so long?

That They May Face the Rising Sun (2003), John McGahern – I am not sure what a quiet novel is but this is likely one of those.  Irish people lives their lives.  Seasons pass.  There is agriculture.  I have not read McGahern before; my understanding is that the novels that made his names are not so quiet.  But Ireland in 2003 had quieted down a lot, which I think is one of the ideas behind the novel.  Quite good.  The American version was for some reason given the accurate but dull title By the Lake.

The Director (2023), Daniel Kehlmann – Discussed over here.

 

NON-FICTION

Brazilian Adventure (1933), Peter Fleming – A jolly, self-conscious romp written in, or let’s say approaching, the style of Evelyn Waugh.  Young Fleming’s river trip in the Amazon is more dangerous and a bit more substantive than Waugh’s Mediterranean tourism in Labels (1930), but still, useless, except for the pleasures of the resulting book.

Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (2003), Yoko Tawada – Tawada publishes fiction in both Japanese and German.  This book is an extended essay about the creative relationship between the two languages, based on Tawada’s education, travel, and writing.  It is perhaps especially fresh because English plays so little part in the book.

How the Classics Made Shakespeare (2019), Jonathan Bate – Outstanding preparation for my upcoming reading.  The title describes the book exactly.

Marie Antoinette (1932), Stefan Zweig – Just the first 80 or 90 pages.  I have wondered what Zweig’s biographies, still much read in France, were like, and now I know a little better.  Not for me.  Badly sourced and rhetorically dubious.  Obtrusive!  At times trying to hustle me!

 

POETRY

Selected Poems (1952-68), Vasko Popa

Helen of Troy, 1993 (2025), Maria Zoccola – This Helen lives in Sparta, Tennessee.  The up-to-date formal poems are interesting: American sonnets, and golden shovels, a form invented in 2010, incorporating lines from Robert Fagle’s Iliad.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

La rage de l'expression (1952), Francis Ponge – More thing poems.

Literatura Portuguesa (1971), Jorge de Sena – Long encyclopedia entries on Portuguese and Brazilian literature now published as a little book.  So useful.

A Bicicleta Que Tinha Bigodes (The Bicycle that Has a Moustache, 2011), Ondjaki – An Angolan boy wants to win a bicycle by borrowing a story from his famous fiction-writing uncle.  Specifically by borrowing the letters that he combs from his moustache.  That’s not how it works, kid.

A Biblioteca: Uma segunda casa (The Library: A Second Home, 2024), Manuel Carvalho Coutinho – I have now read all the books I brought home from Portugal last year.  This one is literally a series of four-page profiles of Portuguese municipal libraries.  Why did I buy it (aside from loving libraries)?  It is at times as dull as it sounds, but sometimes, caused by the authors skilled or desperate attempt to write a less dull book, shimmered with the possibility of another book, a Calvino-like book, Invisible Libraries.  Visit the library full of obsolete technology, the library with books no one wants, the library for tourists, the library, most unlikely of all, where everyone goes to read books.