Start Small

         In the past I’ve had a problem when I bought a poet’s whole work—the 900+ pages of W. H. Auden’s Collected Poems, for example. These tomes would be so daunting, that instead of reading more widely in the poets, I ended up putting the books on the shelf and never delving into them. So, I devised a strategy: when I thought of a poet that I’d like to read more of, I limited myself to their first book of published poems. I tried it out and recently have gone through first collections for Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Mary Oliver, Pablo Neruda, and Gwendolyn Brooks. I’ll be posting about all of these soon, I hope, but let me start with Millay.

            Millay’s first book of poems, Renascence (1917), is on the list of Books of the Century, compiled by the New York Public Library, in an exhibition and book to which more than sixty NYPL librarians contributed. The title poem was published first in 1912, but this book gave it a wider circulation.

            I find it difficult to imagine what exactly her contemporaries found so appealing in the title poem, beyond the opening panoramic landscape that the speaker finds constricting.

All I could see from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood;

I turned and looked another way,

And saw three islands in a bay.

So with my eyes I traced the line

Of the horizon, thin and fine,

Straight around till I was come

Back to where I’d started from;

And all I saw from where I stood

Was three long mountains and a wood.

These couplets, with their repetition of the first couplet at the end and insistence on three features, as well as the straightforward and reductive description, show a stylistic selection and simplicity that is an enduring feature of Millay’s poetry, an authoritative voice that is not going to be apologetic for its formal rigor. It reminds me of Edward Hopper’s paintings.

In the rest of the poem’s 200 lines, the constriction leads her (I use the feminine pronoun for the speaker for obvious, but not compelling, reasons where the poem does not determine it) to lie on her back looking at the sky, which at first seems unconstricting, then constricting again. Infinity comes down around her—the Undefined, Immensity—and she has a view into the workings of the universe, which leads to taking on all the wrongs of it, “All suffering mine.” The speaker sinks into the earth, dead but still sentient. When the rain comes and she wishes to be alive again, she is reborn and has a vision of God’s identity. My initial thought about the poem beyond its opening lines was that Blake might have written it had he been an adolescent girl.

She writes more than once about the grief of losing a loved one, about a suicide who is told, in the house of God, when she asks for something to do, a task: “Thou hadst the task, and laidst it by.” “God’s World” is about not being able to get enough of the world, in the spirit of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur” (“To lift the lean of that black bluff”) without the turn to theology at the end. Other poems concern the absence of the dead, shrouds, sorrow, indifference, blight, the waning year.

The book concludes with six sonnets, the first she published and worth attention, since the form would become more and more her choice as her career progressed with 178 examples by the end, including one book entirely composed of sonnets, Fatal Interview (1931). Originality is there from the beginning: “Thou art not lovelier than lilacs, --no” considers beauty like the poison Mithridates ingested in gradually increasing doses until he became inured to it. “Time does not bring relief; you all have lied” lists the ways we can become ambushed by grief by the seasons, by familiar places; but even going someplace the beloved had never been, just articulating that thought brings him back. “Mindful of you the sodden earth in spring” has a similar message about the seasons: “the long year remembers you.” “Not in this chamber only, at my birth” proposes the strange idea that the speaker is “child of all mothers, native of the earth,” and at the end she longs to gather up her household gods from the current hearth to take them elsewhere. “If I should learn, in some quite casual way” gives us a speaker who says to her lover that if she learned of his death this way, she would react with indifference. This lacks explanation, but gestures toward the kind of insouciance we’re going to see in the next book’s sonnets. A titled sonnet, “Bluebeard,” recounts the beloved’s trespass into a room or internal space and the speaker’s unwillingness to forgive this.

I understand that people found a new voice in the title poem, here, but the rest of the collection was so much more appealing to me, and I guessed so much more representative of the poet Millay was becoming, that I had to go on and read her second book of poems, A Few Figs from Thistles (1920). Here Millay often presents a speaker who is much more knowing, even world-weary if not plainly cynical, than the ones we meet in Renascence. “First Fig” may be the most frequently anthologized of her poems, a quatrain whose theme of carpe diem is given a wry twist by the disapproval the speaker gets from living out this motto: “ah, my foes, and oh, my friends.”

My candle burns at both ends;

              It will not last the night;

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—

   I          It gives a lovely light!

 

“Second Fig” is a single couplet with a similar theme: the fleeting nature of things demands our enjoying them now. Millay goes further, in “Thursday,” to including love in this transience; the inconstancy gets shifted from the lover to love itself. As she wrote in her first book in “Passer Mortuus Est,” “Need we say it was not love, / Just because it perished?”

 

We were very tired, we were very merry,

We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.

 

Thus begins each of the three stanzas of the next poem, “Recuerdo,” which shows a more subtle ability to do several things at once. She writes a New York poem about the Staten Island ferry, the morning paper seller on the streets, and the subway. It’s a bright young thing poem about the up-all-nighters, but it’s also about a moment when the idle revelers meet the poor paper seller on the dawn streets and give her, first the apples and pears they’ve bought too many of, and then all the money they have, keeping only their subway fares home. I liked the poem well enough to memorize it, as was suggested by the New York Times when they featured “Recuerdo” in the interactive poetry selection they sometimes run, doing some light analysis and then encouraging readers to memorize a poem, giving them some assistance in doing so.

            “To the Not Impossible Him” addresses the question lovers don’t usually ask—why will only this one person out of the billions in the world make me happy? The speaker says how will I know if this place, this flower, or you as a lover are the best if I don’t travel and check out others? “Macdougal Street” is another snapshot of a moment, as the speaker sees her beloved “lay his hand upon her torn black hair”—a child has tossed a “quaint Italian quip” at him in the street, and he answers with this gesture, which wrecks the composure of the melodramatic speaker. “The Singing-Woman from the Wood’s Edge” asks how she could have turned out to be anything other than what she is— “a harlot and a nun” for example, given her parentage. “She Is Overheard Singing” about how Prue and Joan and Agatha, Mig, and Sue would all dump their gentle, honest, and patient men for a look from the speaker’s false and lying lover.

            “Daphne” speaks to her pursuer, telling him what may be about to happen if he chases her, and she ends, that if “Still it is your will to follow, / I am off; --to heel, Apollo!” “Portrait by a Neighbor” is about what you would expect from the nosy, disapproving, and probably jealous woman next door. “Midnight Oil” reprises the carpe diem theme of the first poem in the book. “The Merry Maid” insists with unsubtle irony that she’s “free from care” since her heart was broken. “The Philosopher” asks “what are you” of her beloved, that she should pine for him, and answers what is she to defy the truisms about the “witless ways” of women in love.

 

The first edition contained four sonnets, to which one was added later. “I do but ask that you be always fair” suggests the speaker’s love depends on that condition. “Love, though for this you riddle me with darts” taunts Cupid, deliberately insulting him in the hope this blasphemy will cause the god to punish her “with the shaft I crave.” This and “Daphne” are the only classical references in the book, both significantly linking gods and love—or perhaps in the latter case, just lust.

            “I think I should have loved you presently,” says the speaker to the man who left before that could happen. Had that happened, she continues, she would have dropped the behavior she calls her “follies” and “wicked ways” to attract him and been “Naked of reticence and shorn of pride.” She cherishes, she says, “the certain stakes” she gained by not getting to that place. As it is, she imagines how she appears in his memory, not just thinking, as she does, but certain that she “would have loved [him] in a day or two.” This sonnet’s degree of subtlety exceeds what I’ve seen in the previous poems of the first and second books, and it tempers the cynicism.

            “Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!” the speaker cries. She is only faithful to love, but since the beloved is “more changeful than the tide, remaining with him means she is, too, “most faithless when I most am true.” This playing with the contradictory is very like Shakespearean sonnetry, which she must have loved.

            The last poem in the book is the sonnet “I shall forget you presently, my dear,” whose theme is like that of “Thursday:” it would be nice if “love were longer-lived,” but it isn’t, and “Whether or not we find what we are seeking / Is idle, biologically speaking.” Millay is not the fully subtle sonneteer and feminist of her mature poetry here, but she is a long way closer to it than she was in Renascence.

            I’m recommending my method of easy submergence in a poet’s work, with a group of poems that’s manageable for reading and pondering in several days, but also gives you a fair taste of the poet.

 

 

Reading Seamus Heaney

I decided recently I should be reading more Seamus Heaney. I’d read his Beowulf translation years ago (more about that below), and come across anthologized poems I’d liked. So I sat down with his first collection, Death of a Naturalist (1966). Actually, I listened to his reading of the poems before I read them. He’s got a number of themes, beginning with boyhood experience, often as it is connected to and repeated in another form by adult experience. Irish history—particularly the Troubles and the potato famine of the late 1840s called the Great Hunger—are also themes, along with the nuances of adult love, the invisible ties that bind us to each other and our homelands, and, always nature and work.

            In the title poem, the budding naturalist steals frogspawn from a flax-dam—a pond used to soak and soften flax—to watch the tadpoles appear in jars at school and home. When the adult frogs invade the flax-dam, the boy is repulsed and runs, convinced their arrival is vengeance for his stealing of the frogspawn. “The Barn” explores childish fears: in the half-lighted barn the speaker as a boy sees “the two-lugged sacks” of wheat and the farm implements like weapons; at night he recreates the scene with bats, rats’ eyes in the corners, birds dive-bombing him, and the sacks, “like great blind rats.” He confronts some of these fears in “The Advancement of Learning,” facing down his fear of rats at an embankment and a bridge. Here one of Heaney’s word-talents is his skill with verbs: the rat that “slimed out of the water,” while another was “nimbling  / Up the far bank.” His rhymes are very often slant. In “Blackberry-Picking,” a sudden return to full rhyme at the end helps punch up an ending about the way the blackberries always start to ferment and grow fungus after picking:

                                                                        It wasn’t fair

            That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

            Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

In “The Early Purges,” a child’s horror at the drowning of kittens turns as he grows to jaded recognition that “on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.” The turning of the generations is another theme. The first poem is “Digging,” describing the speaker’s father’s and grandfather’s skill at cutting turf or digging potatoes, and the speaker’s realization that his is a different talent:

            Between my finger and my thumb

            The squat pen rests.

            I’ll dig with it.

“Follower” is a generational turn-about: the boy followed, stumbling, his father’s ploughing. Now it is his father “who keeps stumbling / Behind me, and will not go away.”

            “Mid-Term Break,” in unrhymed couplets, describes a real experience of Heaney’s. The older brother recounts his going home from school for his brother’s funeral. The details are matter-of-fact until we get to the last line: his brother is in “a four foot box, a foot for every year.” In “Dawn Shoot,” the speaker and a friend go out to shoot rabbits, and the metaphors of their approach to their spot are all of hunting and shooting: “The rails scored a bull’s eye into the eye / of a bridge,” “a snipe rocketed away on reconnaissance.” Heaney begins with a stanza of unrhymed lines of varying length, then one of pentameters and tetrameters, then another irregular one, and one like the second to conclude.

            Several poems either directly or indirectly invoke the past. In one, he expands some comments in Cecil Woodham-Smith’s history of the Great Hunger about an English ship’s commander refusing to relieve a boatful of starving Irishmen. In “At a Potato Digging,” Heaney parallels a modern potato harvest, where mechanical diggers break up the mounds of a potato planting, and workers gather the potatoes and move them to a pit, to the potato famine of 1845-49. The connecting phrase links the appearance of the potatoes, “live skulls, blind eyed” to the more literal sense of starved people when it is repeated. A more indirect reference, this time to the Troubles, is the description, in “Docker,” of a dock worker in a Belfast pub, with his attitudes and prejudices about religion, work, and family: “That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic-- / Oh yes, that kind of thing could start again.”

            Some are poems of exquisite observation with nothing else needed. Heaney describes turkeys at a butcher’s, churning day, getting a cow in calf out of a “byre”—a cow barn—or uses an extended metaphor of gunnery to show us a trout targeting seeds and moths on the surface of a stream and his swift movement underwater.

            Near the end of the book is a group of love poems. “Twice Shy,’ in triplet stanzas rhymed abcbdb, is about two not-young, not-first-love people sussing out each other’s feelings delicately on a walk:

            With nervous childish talk:

            Still waters running deep

            Along the embankment walk.

“Valediction” uses a nautical metaphor (“Until you resume command / Self is in mutiny”) in a poem about the distress of the speaker at the absence of his lover from the house. Heaney addresses a poem to his wife Marie about her pregnancy with their first child. And in “Honeymoon Flight,” he muses about the beginnings of voyages, “Travellers, at this point, can only trust.”

            The collection ends with “Personal Helicon,” a poem that came to be one of Heaney’s most frequently anthologized works. His childish love for old wells that might give back your image in the water or be too deep and dark to do so, but have echoes instead, he ties in at the end to Echo and Narcissus, and concludes: “I rhyme / To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.”

 

I listened to Seamus Heaney’s reading of his own translation of Beowulf when I was still teaching, which informs these notes. I had not yet read the translation, so the experience was good for emphasizing the oral/aural aspects of the poem and of the translation. There are some Irishisms in it: “That was one good king” is the way Heaney translates “þæt wæs god cyning” and I had no idea what Heaney’s half line “to bed in the bothies” meant without looking it up.

In listening, the elegiac tone is evident from the beginning, and we are very conscious that the poem starts with Scyld being sent off in a burial boat; “nobody knows for certain who salvaged that load,” says the poet, and compares this sending-off with Scyld’s being a foundling as a baby. And it is sad too, when we get down through Beow and Healfdene and finally Hrothgar, who wants to build this great hall just to make people happy, to realize that his wish is doomed. He wants to furnish the best place in the world for people to eat and drink and for the king to dispense gifts, “not the common land or people’s lives,” but rings and cups and standards and swords—and the wish is wholly good, to make people warm and happy and drunk and replete with gifts—but it can’t be: there is a force that will prevent this purely good impulse from coming to be or remaining, whether it is the resentful outcast Grendel or the family rivalry that the poet just hints will eventually burn Heorot to the ground.

Grendel is a kind of Malvolio type; he’s unhappy that people are having a good time. Where do these evil things come from? This is one of the questions that Beowulf raises. “The monsters and evil things that contended with God” seems to be the answer, Cain’s brothers, the spawn of an evil act, brother against brother. Grendel is an outcast because he opposes the desire of people to congregate, share, and be happy.

For several reasons I had been reluctant to assign Beowulf in our Senior Seminar, designed to fill in gaps in English majors’ reading. I had assigned it only once in the eight or ten times I’d taught the course. Heaney’s translation changed my mind. One of my reasons was a prejudice I inherited from the man who taught me the poem in my Old English grad class, Fred Rebsamen, who did the Rinehart prose translation Beowulf Is My Name. Rebsamen’s attitude was that the poem ought to be read in the original; failing that, a prose translation could be read faster and understood better than a verse translation that couldn’t really capture much of what makes Anglo-Saxon heroic verse work, anyway. Heaney conveys a lot of how the stress and the alliteration of the original work, but he never sacrifices sense to get a line that is “accurate” because he knows that accuracy to a standard that only exists in a different language isn’t possible.

When Beowulf decides to go help Hrothgar nobody tries to stop him. They encourage the doughty warrior to go and distinguish himself. When he arrives the sentry says “who are you?” Beowulf says he owes allegiance to Hygelac and that he is the son of Egtheow. The sentry is not surprised at the resolve of Beowulf and his men to help Horthgar. The impulse comes straight out of a value system that is understandable to him. Also interesting is the fact that he believes them, and he doesn’t have difficulty distinguishing between raiders, whom it is his duty as sentry to watch out for, and friends, even though they also are unknown armed men approaching his coastal watch. Apparently, you can tell the good guys from the bad guys. Hrothgar, it turns out, knows Beowulf, knew him when he was much younger, knew his father Edgtheow, and from Hrothgar we find out that Beowulf has the reputation of having the strength of thirty men in his handgrasp.

There’s a kind of give and take in the warrior’s view of taking hold of one’s fate. In the formal boast the warrior says I’m going to do this and do that, but he also says “Gæ½a wyrd swa hio scel”—fate goes always as it must.

Beowulf first decides he will not use a sword in fighting Grendel, and then we learn, when his followers take out swords, that swords are useless against Grendel. The hero’s resolve is empowering. Odysseus resolves to go fight Circe, even though he’s been told she’s a sorceress. Once he resolves, Hermes appears to tell him how to do it and give divine aid.

My students had to be taught about tone. Left to themselves they made one distinction in tone, between seriousness and sarcasm. They had to be instructed in gradations of tone. This is something that ought to be attempted in readings for the composition classes.

The story that is told by the scop at the celebration of Beowulf’s triumph over Grendel is about Finn and Hengest—is there a connection with the Hengest in the Hamlet story? and is there a thematic connection with Beowulf’s story?

Heaney leaves out our introduction to Unferth, but he includes Unferth’s gift of a sword, Hrunting, to Beowulf. What does it mean that you can fight evil out in the open, on the benches of the mead-hall, but to encounter evil’s mother you have to dive into the airless deeps of the mere? And are we supposed to believe that Beowulf just stops breathing for the best part of a day?

In fact Beowulf has to use Grendel’s mother’s own sword against her, the sword he finds in her armory. He cuts off her head. They go back bearing Grendel’s head. They find Ascheri’s head; he cuts off Grendel’s mother’s head, but they come back with Grendel’s head.

There’s no scop singing a story in Hrothgar’s hall after the defeat of Grendel’s mother; the celebration we hear about is back in Geatland in Hygelac’s hall. We hear about Ungeld and about rivalries and feuds and we wonder about how these connect with Beowulf’s story. As Beowulf tells the story of his defeat of Grendel to Hygelac, we hear for the first time about Grendel’s dragonskin pouch or bag into which he stuffs the men he carries off.

Hrothgar’s prediction comes true: Hygelac’s heir is cut down in battle, and the kingdom goes to Beowulf. Beowulf rules well for fifty years, but you know there’s always a dragon in the dark, biding his time.

Beowulf vows to fight the dragon, telling his men that this is his fight. He fights and is losing. Meanwhile his captain, Wiglaf, makes a speech to his men that is much like Sarpedon’s exhortation to Glaucus in Book 12 of the Iliad. Beowulf’s sword Nӕgling snaps in this fight; Beowulf is too strong for iron swords and keeps breaking them.

This poet talks about his authority in a way that Homer does not: I have heard, so it was told to me, and so on. Beowulf says he was not fortunate enough to have had a son and heir; we don’t know whether he has a queen or not—is Beowulf a bachelor king?

The treasure is won, bought and paid for with Beowulf’s death. Wiglaf and Beowulf together stab the dragon and kill him, and we learn that Wiglaf is the last of the Wægmundings; apparently, he’s not going to have any children either. Wiglaf talks about the recent history of the Geats and how the peaceful reign of Beowulf is coming to an end and there’s going to be strife; all the neighbors are going to come in.

I don’t know whether Heaney has deliberately downplayed the Christian references in the poem, but it looks as if those sections don’t really talk about eternal life, however much they talk about God or Christ. Even with the Christian overlay, the value system comes through in which it is glory that lasts. Glory is achieved by the hero and recorded by the poet, rewarded during one’s lifetime by gifts, but it is what lives after one rather than one’s spirit; that is the main value that is asserted by the poem.

 

 

Books I Suggest: Muriel Spark's The Girls of Slender Means

 I'm assuming you already know about Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and perhaps someone has recommended her entertaining Memento Mori. But here's a delightful book you might not have run across,, The Girls of Slender Means (1963). 

            It is a truth universally acknowledged that an unexploded bomb in the garden, mentioned early on by one of the characters (Greggie, one of the three old maids in their fifties at the May of Teck Club—women aren’t supposed to stay past thirty, but these three are, so to speak, grandfathered in), can be expected to explode before the end of the book. But Greggie is not the most credible of characters, so we don’t take her too seriously.

            The May of Teck Club is a place established for “girls of slender means” working in London, and it’s the kind of closed circle of characters—the girls’ school in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or the elderly social group of Memento Mori—in which Muriel Spark does her best work. On this limited canvas, she paints her quirky characters with their absorbing motives— “few people…were more delightful, more ingenious, more movingly lovely and, as it might happen, more savage, than the girls of slender means.” The frame for her plot is narrowly the time between the victory in Europe in the spring of 1945 and the victory over Japan in the late summer. But these events, which take up almost all the book, are actually looked back on from the perspective of the present, when Jane Wright, a journalist now, calls her former floormates from the Club to tell them of the death of Nicholas Farringdon, who had been a poet and an anarchist enamored of several girls from the floor. Surprisingly, Farringdon had become a Jesuit priest and was murdered in Haiti; possibly martyred, although the circumstances are not clear.

            Spark’s particular use of the ship of fools trope brings together a group of girls from the top floor of the Club as well as some men in their orbit. Jane works for a publisher who operates just on the edge of solvency, moving and changing his name when he can’t pay the bills, and who wants to publish—as inexpensively as possible—Nicholas’s book. Selina Redwood, the club beauty who values poise above all else, sleeps with Nicholas on the Club roof on clement nights during the summer. Joanna Childe is the statuesque blonde elocution teacher, whose taste in poetry becomes the club’s taste, and who fascinates Nicholas. Anne Baberton’s Schiaparelli gown is the preferred borrow for all the girls when they’re invited to fancy restaurants. Pauline Fox, the Club’s mad girl, often tells everyone she’s going out to dine with a famous actor. With these, Spark can skewer a particular segment of London’s end-of-the-war society, keep us smiling if not laughing outright, but also keep us a little worried for what’s going to happen to these financially precarious people (“Long ago in 1945,” the book begins, “all the nicest people in England were poor”) in a world about to be changed by the explosion of the first atomic bomb.

Books I Suggest: Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow (2016)

            Count Alexander Rostov, whose family estate, Idlehour, is in Nizhny Novgorod, is not shot by the Bolsheviks because his 1913 poem, “Where Is It Now?” was considered by them as a call to arms. We later discover that the poem was in fact written by Rostov’s friend Mikhail Mishkin, who would have been in danger from the Tzarists for having written it, so they agreed to let it be known that Rostov was its author. Instead of being shot, Rostov is sentenced in 1922 to a lifetime house arrest in the Hotel Metropol, where he contrives to turn a sentence into a favor. Though he is moved to a ten-by-ten room on an upper floor, Rostov, allowed to take whatever furniture will fit, takes his desk, whose legs are stacked inside with pieces of gold. Rostov determines to master his circumstances (rather than be mastered by them) by committing to the business of practicalities. His little society includes Andrey Duras, the maître d’hotel of the hotel’s best restaurant, the Boyarsky; Emil the cook; Audrios the bartender at the bar Rostov calls the Shalyapin, for the opera star who once frequented it; Marina, the seamstress of the hotel; Arkady, who mans the front desk; Nina Kulikova, the nine-year-old who shows Rostov the secrets of the hotel and then gives him her passkey as a parting gift; and Drosselmeyer, also known as Marshall Kutuzov, the one-eyed cat who takes milk and company from Rostov in earlier years and in later ones inhabits the hotel as a ghost.

            Other characters will enter Rostov’s life and change it, including a film actress named Anna who becomes a love interest, a five-year old child named Sofia whose temporary care of by Rostov turns out to be longer than he’d bargained for, and an oafish waiter in one of the Metropole’s restaurants he names the Bishop, who becomes a sometimes comic, sometimes not-so-funny feature of the Rostov’s life..

            Towles has a straightforward style characterized by the way one character will repeat what another has just said, epithets used to identify characters (Nina’s penchant for yellow when a child, Anna always described as “willowy,” and the bizarre head shape of the Bishop, Rostov’s main adversary in the book) and occasional odd failures of editing such as calling Colonel Osip Glebnikoff “the Captain” or Towles’s apparent belief that “malingering” means “loitering.” For me, it was a delightful read from beginning to end.

Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (2024)

     I am probably one of a small subset of people who think a book like Allen's interesting--I found it fascinating. I've carried a notebook for decades, and could not now do without one. I wrote an essay on the subject of notebooks about fifteen years ago; it's in the collection of my essays called A Place to Read (2014). Here are some notes from my reading of The Notebook. I should affirm right away that I agree completely with Allen's assertion that notebooks allow the sort of writing, figuring, drawing, mapping, graphing, etc. that really does constitute thinking on paper.

    The Romans and earlier Mediterranean traders going back to a 1300BCE shipwreck used wax set in shallow indentations in hinged wooden boards to inscribe on, but real notebooks had to await the availability of paper. A papyrus codex survives from first-century Rome, and a parchment codex from the fourth, but papyrus was not readily available and parchment was expensive and time-consuming to make. The Persians and Arabs put together the western idea of the codex and the Chinese invention of paper about 800CE, but the idea didn’t catch on until King Jaume of Aragon took over the town of Xátiva and its paper-making factory from the Muslims in 1244.  
        Amatino Manucci, bookkeeper for Giovanni Farolfi, kept at least seven ledgers and notebooks for the business. His ledger is “the first surviving) example of double-entry bookkeeping” and dates from ˜ 1300. The paper codex notebook enables the process of double-entry bookkeeping: ink on paper is permanent and can’t be scraped off as on parchment. The bound ledger means a page cannot be removed without being obvious. These features make the ledger tamper-proof. 
        “Cimabue invented the sketchbook” asserts Allen. As Italian art became less Byzantine icon-like and more realistic in the work of Cimabue, his pupil Giotto (c.1267-1337), Duccio, and others, portable sketchbooks enabled constant practice in drawing from life as well as compendia of body parts, poses, architectural features and so on, and space to try out compositions for larger works.
        Ricordanzi were home account books, libri di ricordi (memoirs) and libri di famiglia kept track of family history and individual accomplishments. All of these show up in greater numbers in Florence than elsewhere, and here the zibaldone seems to have been invented. The word means mess, jumble, salad, and the books included everything: extracts from favorite authors, prayers, notes about planting, drawings, diary entries, and anything that struck the writer as worth recording. Allen devotes a chapter to a notable example, the notebook of Michael of Rhodes from the 1430s. Michael was a seaman who rose through the ranks and his book is full of mathematical problems, details of his career, illustrations of ropework, diagrams, details about shipbuilding and navigation, the last two less authoritative than they look. Michael may have used his notebook as a resume when he sought promotion and employment.
        Allen contrasts the notebooks of two friends: Luca Pacioli and Leonardo da Vinci. Pacioli, a peripatetic Franciscan friar, published his six-hundred-page notebook in vernacular Tuscan as Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita in 1494 and made a great deal on the thousands of copies sold because, unusually for the time, he was granted copyright by Venice. Leonardo wrote and illustrated thirteen thousand pages of notebooks that survive and perhaps four times that in total in books from folio size down to small pocket ones. They are filled with lists of words, geometrical diagrams, sketches of faces, illustrations to show the workings of pumps and other useful machines and inventions, more fanciful flying machines, war machines, anatomical drawings, along with sums of money paid workers, the costs of his mother’s funeral, letters, speeches and self-contained essays—all written left-handed and backwards so as not to smudge the ink. None of it is really publishable, according to Martin Kemp, an authority on the notebooks, and we can’t imagine Leonardo taking the time to turn them into something that could be printed and sold.
        Allen covers the literary use of notebooks in various chapters. Chaucer, he says, was introduced to notebooks in Italy and probably made use of them while he was reading borrowed manuscripts of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Hamlet refers several times, once metaphorically, to his table-book. Hemingway was delighted, in 1956, to rediscover his notebooks from the ‘20s in a trunk in the Ritz basement, and he used them to reconstruct his memoir, A Moveable Feast, his last book. Patrick Leigh Fermor similarly recovered “The Green Diary,” a notebook from his walk across Europe, when he met up again in 1965 with his Rumanian mistress from the years just before the war. He mined the diary for two memoirs, A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water. The most famous regular user of notebooks who turned scribbled entries into books was Bruce Chatwin, who became Leigh Fermor’s friend. 
        Allen notes that the availability of notebooks did not immediately lead to detailed log-keeping by ships’ masters. He contrasts the purely meteorological and navigational information recorded by one of the navigators named Albo in Magellan’s last expedition, with the much more detailed journal of Antonio Pigafetta, on another ship. Albo did not bother to record the loss of ships, a mutiny, or even Magellan’s death in a violent episode on the island of Cebu in the Philippines. But for the existence of Pigafetta’s account, Magellan’s reputation would never have recovered from the slanderous report of him given by the first expedition member to reach land. The importance of detailed written accounts would eventually result in logbooks that routinely supplied more than the weather and the ship’s course.
        Allen gives us examples of notebooks used in cookery, psychology, politics---Bob Graham’s meticulously detailed notebooks that helped elect him to the governorship and the Senate, hurt his chances in his campaign for the presidential nomination, and then proved false the Republicans’ charge that Democrats had been routinely briefed by the CIA about waterboarding during the Bush administration.

        It's a big book--over 400 pages--because the subject turns out to be much larger than anyone would have imagined, but it's also one you can read selectively in. Not me. I read every page.

Books I Suggest: Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader (2007)

             Here, as in Bennett’s play, A Question of Attribution (where Queen Elizabeth spars verbally with her art advisor, Anthony Blunt, whom she knows perfectly well is a spy), the reader can be confident that Bennett knows from up close the queen’s attitudes, manner of speaking, and daily round. The premise of The Uncommon Reader is that in her seventies, the queen begins to read seriously, and it changes her, first in small ways and then in quite a big one.

            Aside from Bennett’s ease with the details of the royal household and person, he gives us here a view of her intelligence and humor. Bennett’s style is clear and without mannerisms, a mixed style in which the vocabulary ranges from the professorial to slang from the gay world (dolly=pretty), from the military (“yomping” is Royal Marine slang for long distance marching with a full kit), to cricket (being “bowled a googly” is the equivalent of being thrown a curve), and just plain slang (duff=useless trash).

Barbara Comyns, Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead (1954)

     Ebin Willoweed is one of the changed, coming out of his gormless thrall to his truly terrible, tyrant mother—she’s the most striking character portrayed in the book—to resume his writing career. What prompts the change is a tragedy in his Warwickshire village: the miller drowns himself, the butcher slits his throat, the baker drinks carbolic acid, and dozens die painfully. The villagers react like the torch-carrying mob in Frankenstein, marching to the house of an innocent man, with nasty results. 
    The already interesting Willoweeds, including the pretty second daughter Hattie, who’s obviously the child of a black father, become more interesting under the pressure of the gruesome plague that grips the village. Emma, the eldest Willoweed child, imagines a romantic young man who courts her—and finds him. All of this Barbara Comyns presents as if were the most common thing in the world. We laugh in places, even as the villagers drop. We are not prepared for it to end so quickly—the book is only about a hundred twenty pages—or so happily. Also, we like it.