Recently-Published Nonfiction Reads I

          One of the recently-published books I’ve been reading is Nigel Spivey’s The Sarpedon Krater: The Life and Afterlife of a Greek Vase (2019). The Sarpedon Krater was already the best example of the late sixth century BC vase painter Euphronios and the first Greek vase to fetch over a million dollars, but Spivey sets out to make “the case for regarding it as an eminent and influential achievement within world culture”(10). America did not have much of Euphronios’s work when the krater was found by grave-robbers in 1971 in Cerveteri, a necropolis in the Greppe Sant’Angelo area of what had been Etruria, north of Rome. They sold it to a middleman, Giacomo Medici, and he sold it to Robert Hecht, a Basel antiquarian dealer who had enough respectability to deal with collectors and museums. Hecht invented a provenance for the krater—it had supposedly been in the collection of a Beirut antique merchant named Sarrafian and had belonged to his family since WWI or had been bought in a lot of ceramics in London in 1920—and Hecht sold the krater for a million dollars to Thomas Hoving, the director of the Metropolitan Museum, in 1972, where it was put on display that November. Hoving probably did not believe Hecht’s story but asked few questions. When the krater’s true provenance became clear, a later Met director allowed it to be repatriated to Italy in 2008, and it is now in the Cerveteri Museum.

             The Euphronios Sarpedon Krater is eighteen inches high and twenty-one inches in diameter at the mouth, a mixing bowl (κράσις=blending) for wine, water, and any other ingredients. On one side it depicts a scene from the 16^th book of the Iliad: Zeus, after briefly considering whether he should spare his son Sarpedon, a Lykian ally of the Trojans, allows him to be killed by Patroclus, and then instructs Apollo to take him from the battlefield and give him to Sleep and Death to take back to his home in Lykia. Euphronios depicts the moment the body is handed over to Sleep and Death, not by Apollo but by Hermes, easily recognized and not so pretty as Apollo, who might draw attention away from the main figure of Sarpedon. The krater is signed by Euphronios, who worked in Athens until 470BC and probably painted this piece about 510BC. It was made for a symposium or drinking gathering, perhaps by special order though this motif shows up on other works by Euphronios and by others. There are other things painted on the krater. The figures are identified by name and there are other words; for example, ΛΕΑΓΡOΣ ΚΑΛΟΣ, “Leagros is beautiful.” This remark shows up on the pottery of Euphronios and others thought to be in his workshop, and Spivey speculates that Leagros was the shop’s proprietor. On these works, Spivey writes, “images do not exist independently of words.”

            How do the pots get to Etruscan graves? Cerveteri was a primary contact point between Greeks and Etruscans. Half of the work attributed to Euphronios showed up at Cerveteri. Greek producers must have known what the Etruscans liked, and have given it to them. Spivey speculates that the Etruscans were aware of the Homeric context and were not just looking for vessels with images of death for their burial sites. He imagines that the symposium was common in Etruria also, and that ordinary ware was chosen when the Etruscans furnished a burial room.

            Spivey argues that the Sarpedon motif came to represent an untimely and heroic end as well as noble or divine mourners. Greek plays in the original or translated into Latin also spread the Sarpedon narrative, first through Greek-speaking lands and then throughout the Roman Empire. The image on the krater has parallels in the bearing of Memnon’s body, or Hector’s body or any grieving bystanders and a transported corpse. Achilles also imagines his own father grieving when his son comes to be killed, as he must. The image is a fungible one of transporting and mourning the dead. The most extensive reworking of the image is in Roman sarcophagi of the imperial period. A lot of these were in fact made by Greek sculptors working in Asia Minor.

            In his last chapter, Spivey takes the Sarpedon image into the Christian era. He invokes Aby Warburg and Ernst Gombrich in arguing that “one image is usually begotten by another” in art (192). Gombrich said that artists until the Renaissance repeat what they have learned, relying on “the formulas evolved in classical art” (Gombrich, Art and Illusion), and thereafter they still start with those formulas, but modify them to their own purposes. Warburg called the motif of the dead body being carried—down from the cross, into the tomb—Pathosformel, and he showed the formula going back to ancient pagan sarcophagi; where Warburg begins is where Spivey’s classical story ended. Pisano, Donatello, Michelangelo, Raphael and others in their depositions and pietás are using one or more of the features of the Sarpedon motif, the hanging arm or braccio della morte that signals the body is dead, the athleticism of the chest and abdomen ( Sarpedon has a six-pack) and the tendency to tilt the body toward the observer so it can be seen, the heroic size of the figure in relation to its bearers and their straining to lift it, its necessarily being unclothed as much as possible, and so on.

            Spivey makes a convincing case for me. There is a lot of information here, and the narrative may be more fragmented than it needs to be over several chapters, but I think he has assembled the examples, which are nicely reproduced, and used them to make a good argument.

Michael Dibdin's Variety

Michael Dibdin was a crime writer best known for his series about Aurelio Zen, a detective in Rome, but he wrote half a dozen other mysteries and, except for the series, each of his books has a brand-new setting, period, and plot. The Last Sherlock Holmes Story was Dibdin’s first book, originally published in 1978 and recently reissued in a Vintage Crime paperback, and it’s a good example of his originality.

            Not that there’s anything unusual about this kind of book, called a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, a literary work that imitates the style of Arthur Conan Doyle and pretends to continue the adventures of the character he made so famous. The Holmes pastiche has been practiced by writers such as John Gardner and University of Louisville author Sena Jeter Naslund. Doyle’s son Adrian Conan Doyle wrote some Holmes stories with the help of mystery author John Dickson Carr. Probably the most successful author of Sherlock Holmes pastiches was the now-little-read Wisconsin writer August Derleth, who called his Sherlock Holmes clone Solar Pons and whose series ran to seven books.

            Most Conan Doyle imitators suffer from Holmes worship; they try too hard and too reverently to portray Holmes. The key to a good pastiche is to get away from idolatry and make the characters your own. In this case, Dibdin makes Watson into a credible character who understands that, as he says, “Living with great men is itself a minor art.” Watson knows his role is that of the amazed and admiring sidekick in the famous verbal exchanges in which Holmes reveals a brilliant chain of deductions. So, when one morning the great detective surprises him by inferring that he had dinner the night before at Simpson’s in the Strand with an old friend and fellow-intern, Watson, suitably amazed, does not correct Holmes by telling him he had actually dined with his fiancée Mary Morstan at a restaurant in Mayfair.

            The Last Sherlock Holmes Story purports to be papers written by Dr. Watson not long before his death, sealed up by his bankers for fifty years, and dealing with events in the fall of 1888 when Jack the Ripper was terrorizing the Whitechapel district of London. Dibdin welds factual details of the Ripper murders with fictional details of Holmes cases as chronicled by Arthur Conan Doyle. The result is an ingenious solution to the murders that will shock Holmes fans.

Nothing could be more different than another Dibdin favorite of mine, The Dying of the Light, published in 1993 and reissued in paperback in 1995.

            The book opens at tea time, in the lounge of what appears to be an English nursing home, where the old folks’ names sound as if they came out of a Clue game or an Agatha Christie novel: Colonel Weatherby, Lady Belinda Scott, Canon Purvey, and the corned beef millionaire, George Channing, who turns out to be the first victim.

            In this setting, two of the characters, Rosemary and Dorothy, are amusing themselves and trying to keep their minds alive by pretending they are indeed in an Agatha Christie novel: they speculate that the last two deaths in the home were the result of foul play rather than natural causes, and they invent linked romantic pasts for the other guests, providing them each with a motive for doing away with their late companions.

            Then Dibdin begins to twist the plot. First a cruel nurse attendant enters, striking one of the guests, snarling, threatening the rest. “Aha!” we think, “perhaps there is more to Rosemary and Dorothy’s speculation than game playing.” Then we learn that the clock in the lounge always says ten past four, and we see some of the guests behaving in a very disturbed way. “Aha!” we think, “Rosemary and Dorothy aren’t just playing mind games; they’re nutty as fruitcakes and so is everyone else; this isn’t an old people’s home but an insane asylum.”

            Then Rosemary finds Dorothy dead, an apparent suicide, and we realize Dibdin has tricked us again: we have to take seriously the murder speculation that Rosemary and her dead friend have been indulging in. Dibdin plays with the reader in this way throughout: First Rosemary is set up in the tradition of the elderly female amateur—that is, the Miss Marple type—but then she is undercut, then set up again, but we are always reminded that she is also an inventor.

             When a police inspector from the county constabulary enters, we are ready to play Dibdin’s game and to guess whether the constable will look like a bumbling idiot and turn out to be brilliant, or look like a bumbling idiot and turn out to be . . . a bumbling idiot. The questions remain right up until the end:  will Rosemary be able to convince the inspector that her friend was murdered?  Was Dorothy in fact murdered?  When Rosemary leaves herself off the list of possible suspects, does that mean we should suspect her?  Dibdin keeps shifting the ground under us, and ultimately creates a kind of paradox: a book that is both a good mystery and a good parody of a mystery. The Dying of the Light is a dark book, but an entertaining one that will keep you guessing.

Profumo, Peter Dickinson, and Me

When I was twenty years old, I briefly met Mandy Rice-Davies, who was performing a quite chaste act in an Istanbul night club. Between sets I introduced myself and we chatted for a couple of minutes. I didn’t mention the Profumo affair of the previous year—that would have been too gauche even for me and even at that age. The books and the movie about the Profumo scandal made over the next decades were trash that failed in capturing any real interest in the story. But in 1994, Peter Dickinson wrote a book called The Yellow Room Conspiracy which transcended—even though it was obviously inspired by—the sordid British government scandal of the Foreign Office secretary John Profumo sharing a mistress with a Russian military attaché, call girls hired to service rich businessmen and politicians, and the shady Dr. Stephen Ward and his stable of girls for hire, one of whom was Mandy Rice-Davies.

Peter Dickinson is an author whose books are often mentioned as among the top mysteries of the twentieth century, especially The Poison Oracle and The Glass-sided Ants’ Nest. But his fifty books are in a variety of genres, including children’s stories, and he doesn’t repeat himself. The Yellow Room Conspiracy is another unique production. Dickinson recognizes that the interest of the story is not with the principals, and so he concentrates on the foreign secretary’s beautiful wife, whom he calls Lucy, and a man—he calls him Paul—who was at the very fringes of the scandal. Paul has loved Lucy since he first met her (and her four sisters) at their huge, ramshackle country house. The sisters’ attachment to the house, called Blatchards, and their bond with each other become active characters in the book.

Paul and Lucy tell the story in alternating chapters.  Both are old and near death, and each thinks, until they urge one another to get the story down on tape and paper, that the other had something to do with the death of the man who first brought them together. This man, who later married another of the sisters, died at Blatchards of gas poisoning just before the explosion that destroyed the house.

The death at Blatchards is only one small part of the mystery surrounding these characters, a mystery that goes back to spy activities during the war and includes, over the decades, not only the five sisters but also nine men who were husbands or lovers of the five. The death at Blatchards, though it’s not definitively solved by the combined accounts of Paul and Lucy, is illuminated enough to let readers confirm their own guesses—or to decide they’ve been wrong. This slight open-endedness is one of many features making The Yellow Room Conspiracy unique.