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Violet and Vita.

Michael Holroyd's A Book of Secrets: Illegititmate Daughters, Absent Fathers tells of a number of personalities from the first few decades of the 20th century. It starts with Ernest Beckett, aka Lord Grimthorpe (don't worry if you haven't heard of him), a member of the British aristocracy who had a talent for knocking up attractive women. His lovers, wives, and illegitimate daughters are the main focus of the story, which culminates in the romance between Beckett's daughter Violet Keppel (later Trefussis) and Vita Sackville-West, plus a guest appearance by Vita's more famous lover, Virginia Woolf. The secondary storyline deals with Eve, one of Beckett's mistresses who spent most of her life drifting from house to house as a genteelly impoverished guest. She carried with her a book and asked everyone she met to write or draw something in it. The book grew larger and bulkier, and Eve poorer and more eccentric, until she finally is left with nothing but her book in an old age home for the poor.

Holroyd ties everyone together neatly, while also weaving in the story of his fascination with all the Beckett connections, which comes from his connection to an Italian villa owned by Lord Grimthorpe at one time. Along the way he brings in other modern day characters, such as a woman who is convinced she's another illegitimate Grimthorpe and desperately wants to know the truth, and a scholar who passionately believes that Violet's literary contributions have been desperately overlooked and should be rediscovered by a new generation.

The book is often entertainingly gossipy; Holroyd scatters many apt quotes throughout the story from his many subjects (who were not shy about spilling their guts in letters). It's elegantly written. I read it quickly. The reviews have been glorious, calling the book brilliant and a landmark in biography writing, the pinnacle of a glorious career for Mr. Holroyd. I liked it, but didn't love it. I admired it, but wasn't dazzled by it. I'm not sure why--I think I felt sometimes like, "Why am I reading about these people?" especially the ones from the present day. I just didn't care about any of them. I guess I still would recommend it, though--maybe I just wasn't in the right mood. And like I said, the craftsmanship is impeccable, so you can at least read it to observe that. May you like it better than me.

This will be the last book I write about for the year, I suspect. My nine best list will be coming soon. I know, you can't wait, can you?

A Foreign Affair

Berlin, 1933. Another fun night at the Brandenburg Gate.

I read In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson so long ago that I forgot I hadn't written about it until I ran across it in the New York Times list of 100 Best Books of 2011. I know, this forgetting doesn't bode well for my feelings about Mr. Larson's book, but I will plead an ongoing nasty feeling that I was forgetting something anytime I made a list of books I needed to write about and, of course, the general disastrous chaos of my life in this annus horribilis.

So in brief--I promise this time--here's what I can tell you about the book. In 1933, William A. Dodd, a history professor, won the not at all coveted job of ambassador to Berlin. He hesitated--being an ambassador was usually a very expensive job held by scions of rich families who could use their own wealth to pay for the vast amount of entertaining expected in European cities, and he just didn't have that kind of money. However, he thought that the ambassadorship would give him the time he needed to complete his passion project, a history of the antebellum South. After all, being an ambassador mostly involved going to events and occasional meetings, right?

Wrong--this was Berlin with Hitler and the Third Reich in ascendance, and Dodd found himself consumed by trying to balance the directive of the US government to stay out of German business with his increasing disgust and horror with the blatant atrocities going on around him. He also had to contend with the escapades of his family, particularly his daughter Martha.

She was considered to be very attractive and had already made the most of that in Chicago. Just in her early twenties, Martha had married hastily once and either was getting divorced or in the proces of being divorced when she went to Germany (I told you, it's been a while). I believe she was also was practically engaged to another man (or was that before she got married?). And was having an affair with Carl Sandberg, the much older poet and friend of the family. That didn't stop her from enjoying the company of many other men while in Berlin. Many other men--a veritable international/political sampler platter of men. She had affairs with Rudolph Diels, the head of the Gestapo, a Russian communist spy named Boris, someone French, Thomas Wolfe when he was in town, others whose names and connections I don't remember. Martha's own writing about her time in Berlin is probably Larson's main source, so I did sometimes suspect that maybe she was exaggerating, or bragging a bit. However, there were Americans in the consul who complained privately about the wild behavior of Martha and the Dodd son, Bill, so there must have been something to it.

Bad Medicine

Garfield's assassination.

(Here is another one of my "so late I don't remember all the details" write ups. I apologize in advance to the author.)

It suddenly occurs to me that I've read more about James Garfield than would be expected for such a minor figure on the American stage. He was the central figure in Dark Horse, Kenneth Ackerman's story of his unlikely election, and was an important player in Adam Goodheart's 1861: The Civil War Awakening. Two books, yet the 20th president served six months in office, and was really only active for three months. He was shot on July 2nd, 1881, but lingered in a debilitated state until he died on September 19th.

It is that period of lingering that is the main focus of Candice Millard's excellent The Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President. Millard, a former science writer for National Geographic zeroes in on the medical debacle that led to Garfield's death; as his would-be assassin Charles Guiteau protested at his murder trial, "General Garfield died of malpractice." (That didn't help Guiteau, who was found guilty and executed.)

She begins, of course, with a mini-biography of Garfield--we'll never know if he would have been a good president, but he certainly was a very good man. He was born in a log cabin (the last president to be able to claim that), grew up in abject poverty, yet worked his way through school, rising from a janitor at the Western Reserve Eclectic College (now Hiram College)  to an assistant professor; eventually he became president. He also graduated from Williams College.

He served with distinction in the Civil War and then, despite being a quiet, scholarly man who would have been just as happy staying in Ohio writing math treatises and translating ancient Greek, drifted into politics. As noted above, the circumstances that led to his election to the presidency are worthy of their own book; let's just say that at the bitter 1880 Republican convention, he became the least divisive figure left standing--not to mention one regarded as a rare, honest decent man in party politics.

Guiteau, meanwhile, had spent most of his life as a delusional drifter who failed at everything, though being delusional, was unaware of his shortcomings. Millard ferrets out the dismal circumstances of Guiteau's life as he kept searching for some way to fulfill the grand destiny he was sure he deserved. His stint at a free love utopian religious colony didn't go well; women there rapidly grew wary of him, referring to him as "Charles Gitout." He tried to make a living as an independent evangelist, but failed at that. He tried to make a career as a lawyer, but failed there, too. The only thing he succeeded at was scaring his siblings enough that they kept lending him money to keep him away from them. Eventually he became obsessed with politics, and decided that he deserved a political appointment. Guiteau wrote a speech supporting one potential Republican presidential candidate, but when Garfield won the nomination, pretty much just pencilled in Garfield's name, and then spent the election season trying to get party leaders to look at it.

After Garfield's election, Guiteau decided that his speech had been responsbile for the win. He spent most of Garfield's brief presidency hanging out at the White House (which you could pretty easily do in those days) pressing for the political appointment he believed he deserved for his aid in the election. Eventually he decided that Garfield was not loyal to the party and must be removed. Guiteau had no experience with guns, but bought one and practiced shooting. He stalked the president, scoped out the Washington jail where he believed he would be sent, decided it looked like a fine place, and shot Garfield at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station. He barely tried to escape--actually he feared the mob at the train station more than the police, and quickly sought there protection. He didn't fear going to jail; Guiteau felt that the Republican party would be so thankful that they would find a way to have him acquitted. He believed he had saved the US from Garfield.

This is where Millard's main story begins. In an era where American doctors literally laughed at Joseph Lister's ideas about sanitation in medicine, and doctors thought blood and pus-stains on their surgical gowns and hands were signs of an experienced tough man, Garfield stood little chance. At the train station he was manhandled and exposed to all the infectious material you'd expect to find in a train station. Things got worse at the White House, when Robert Todd Lincoln (yes, that kind of Lincoln) summoned Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss.

His first name was indeed Doctor, and it's too bad he decided to follow through the destiny of that name. He was an arrogant know-it all, who would rather be right and let a patient die than save a life. He also wanted to make sure he took credit for everything. He pushed anyone with any kind of expertise away from the Garfield sickroom (which, in pestilence filled, hot Washington, DC, was its own kind of disaster), including a doctor the Garfield family requested, and especially any doctor who might offer a contrasting opinion to his own. Bliss and his assistants repeatedly used their uncovered, unwashed fingers to probe the spot where the bullet entered Garfield's body, but didn't find the bullet, which they were sure had to be removed. In reality, it would have been fine to leave it where it was rather than keep pushing into the open infected wound. Additionally, there was a good reason why they couldn't find the bullet, no matter how hard they tried--Bliss was searching on the wrong side of Garfield's body, and wouldn't let anyone even suggest that they try looking elsewhere. Alexander Graham Bell designied a metal detector that he believed would find the bullet, but when he brought it to the White House, Bliss would only let him try it on the side where he believed the bullet could be found. The machine did react to something, but Bell later realized it had just detected the metal from a bedspring. He wanted to try again on the other side of Garfield's body, but Bliss would not let him.

Millard's descriptions of Garfield's final days are vivid and precise. I expected no less after reading River of Doubt, her story of Theodore Roosevelt's disastrous journey down the Amazon. There she made the jungle come to menacing life; here she makes Garfield's agonies suffocating and stomach-turning. I came away from this book feeling no one should have been made to suffer as Garfield did for three months.

Another success of this book is Millard's portrait of Chester A. Arthur, Garfield's reluctant vice-president and even more reluctant president. He's an incredibly minor figure in American history, but Millard proves once again that everywhere in history there lurks fantastic and unexpected stories. I came away from the book wishing I could find more material about Arthur's life (and I'm not specifically saying what part, just in case I decide to do something with it myself; where there is not enough info, there is always fiction...).

My only quibble with this book, and it is a tiny one, is that I felt initially that Millard had planned to make this a "three disparate figures collide" type of history, with the trio being Garfield, Lister, and Bell. I don't know if that was her intention, but I felt that way because Lister and Bell get what seemed like more than minor player treatment at the beginning of the book. However, Lister disappears quickly, and Bell seems to get more time than he warrants later. I'm not really saying that right. Yes, he had a part in this story, but I felt at times that it was verging on "Garfield and Bell," as opposed to Garfield and Guiteau, with a bit of Bell."

That might be just me, though, and most of me would still highly recommend this book by one of our most intelligent history writers. That is if, indeed, you have the stomach for it.

Portrait of a Lady

 

(Will try to keep it short...)

I always love a "making of" or "behind the scenes" story, sometimes more than the work itself. I can't tell you how many movies have disappointed me when I finally saw them after reading abou tthem for years.

Strapless: John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X tells the story of what is probably Sargent's most famous painting (I throw in that "probably" just because I'm not enough of an art historian to make a definitive statement). Nearly seven feet tall, the painting shows a woman with unearthly pale skin, wearing a black dress that appears to be held up by nothing--the thin jeweled straps are merely decorative--stands in a half turn so her body is in full view and her face in profile. She looks distant, both hidden and unseen, coming and going.

Originally titled "Portrait of Mme De...," Singer made the painting his official entry in the 1884 Paris Salon, the biggest art event of the year. Sargent had been exhibiting at the Salon since 1877 and had known nothing but success. The young American artist had been building a lucrative portrait painting business, but the painting of the woman in black nearly destroyed him. From the moment the Salon opened, visitors stood in front of it staring, not because they admired the work, but because they were horrified that any artist would dare exhibit something so awful in public. They hated her ghastly pallor, her barely there (by 19th century standards) and her confident sexuality. The critical reception was just as bad. Sargent was mortified. The mother of the woman in the painting wrote to Sargent demanding that he remove the painting from the Salon, stating that her daughter was in tears, her reputation in shreds.

The Fighters

James Keir Hardie and his impressive Edwardian beard lead a protest against the Great War.

[The first of a promised new leaf turned: short reviews! (At least until I can catch up.) I won't say I'm going Twitter 140 characters short, but maybe 140 words...]

Even the most diehard fan of military intervention would have a hard time defending World War I as a necessary war. When you read about the events that set the war into motion, it seems like nothing more than a group of bored European aristocrats spoiling for a fight until they realized the enormity of what they were doing. By then it was too late.

But Britain was still filled with the spirit of 19th century adventure, where the empire conquered piece after piece of the developing world and grew its own industry by leaps and bounds. Brought up on tales of adventure from Kipling, Stevenson, and Hope, young British men eagerly signed up to fight in Europe, hoping for the kind of military glory they'd always dreamed about, where they'd attack with bold cavalry charges, swords waving, enemies conquered. They may have been too young for the Boer War, but they wouldn't miss out this time.

Of course the world, and the way of fighting a war had changed a lot since the Boer War at the turn of the century. It's an old adage that generals always fight the previous war, and in this case, that would lead to disaster. One of the most fascinating parts of Adam Hochschild's tremendous book To End All Wars" is his examination of how ill-prepared Britain was to fight a modern war, and how their leaders shockingly ignore the facts that lay before them; at an astonishingly late point in the war, some British generals were still insisting that all they needed was one good cavalry charge.

The real focus of Hochschild's book, though, is the people who did not fall for the promises of military glory that were sold to the British people--the pacifists who lobbied against the war. At the time they were persecuted mercilessly, but in retrospect they look like the only ones who had any sanity. It was a hard road for many of them, but they stood their ground.

Even if you think all pacifists are softheaded, softhearted misguided ninnies, I still recommend Hochschild's book for his clear and compelling description of how the war was fought, or more often than not, misfought. It's a great book for fans of military history or just history in general.

(Okay, not 140 words, but I'm getting there...)

Forget It

Move into your memory palace.

Again, I fall behind and am trying to play catch up weeks after finishing books.

I think today people worry about their ability to remember things mostly as a test of whether they're getting old, or more precisely their brains are getting old. Why can't I remember that girl's name? How long did I live there? How old was I when we met? No one wants to lose memories from their own lives because no one else has them. As for every day things, memory isn't really that important. Phone numbers are in your phone, so are important appointments. When you don't have a phone with you, of course you can write information down (and enter it into your phone later). As for memorizing facts and trivia, other than impressing your friends, it's not necessary; it's all someplace, in a book or on a website. If you suddenly find yourself unable to remember the score of an important game played by your favorite team, you don't fear that you'll never be able to find it--that's what Google is for. However, if you find you can't remember that, you wonder what else you might not be able to remember.

The ability to remember personal history is all that counts. Memorizing because there is no other way to retain information, though, well, that went out with the introduction of writing, and even more so with the printing press. Then facts no longer risked being lost because the person who knew them forgot them or didn't pass them on to someone else; they were there for all the world to see. Memorizing just for the sake of memorizing, once thought to be the indication of a well-educated person, well, that's gone, too. Eighteenth century scholars could spend all their time memorizing long poems as an exercise for their intellect. That kind of memorizing, though, requires a serious time commitment and deep focus, two things which most 21st century people severely lack.

Unless, of course, you're a professional memorizer who does things like enter memory contests. These people are the subject of Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer. A young freelance journalist, Foer went to cover the US Memory Championship, an event I'm sure few of us have marked on our calendars (or have the dates indelibly inscribed in our memories, perhaps I should say). He met a cocky competitor who swore that by using his methods, he could teach Foer to be a memory champion himself. This was too irresistible to pass up, both for the sheer lunacy of it and no doubt for the great pitch it made to a publisher. And it paid off--Foer won the US Memory Championship and produced a charming book about his adventures learning about the art and science of memory.

Like Crazy

 

I have a guilty pleasure fondness for what I like to call "expedition disaster" literature--true history tales of a journey to some place that goes bad--not enough food, the maps are bad, the ship gets stranded in ice, the natives are not as helpful as expected, and my favorite--they packed too much junk they don't need in favor of stuff they would. It's amazing how many 19th and early 20th century explorers set out with trunks filled with things like spice racks, tins of caviar, elegant plates, a leatherbound collection of the works of Plato, and an ivory chess set.

That last problem doesn't usually show up in stories about whaling expeditions gone wrong. Whalers were made of tougher stuff, even the captains were rarely from an aristocracy accustomed to fine things, and a whaling ship just didn't have room for extras. There was, however, plenty of room for things to go wrong on a whaling expedition. A failure to kill any whales could turn an average voyage into an ever more desperate search that stretched miles, months, and years long than planned. A captain could be cruel and unreasonable. Bad weather could strike. One of the sailors could be a psychopath. That last one is what sparked the misadventures of the Globe, a Nantucket whaling ship, a story told by Thomas Farel Heffernan in "Mutiny on the Globe: The Fatal Voyage of Samuel Comstock."

Samuel Comstock, a twenty one year old from a well-off Quaker family, had been trouble practically from the start. He fought, ran away, fought some more, and caused mayhem everywhere he went. He did the kind of things that people, surely even back then, would have a hard time dismissing as just the energy of a lively boy. Instead, his rages and battles were the kind that made anyone around him a little nervous--including his brothers William and George, who both idolized him for his inventiveness, swagger, and confidence, but also recognized that it was right to fear him a little. We know this because William became a writer of some recognition, who detailed his brother's actions; George was on Samuel's final voyage and wrote his own account of his brother's deadly actions.

Fail-Safe

Let me begin by noting two things:

1) I am a huge baseball fan. I will watch any game. When the rest of your life is going to pieces (as seems to be the case these days, baseball always is there to offer some welcome distraction. I like reading about the history and people involved in the sport. Yes, it is one of my favorite things.

2) One of the best books I read this year is Contested Will, James Shapiro's exploration not of who "really" wrote Shakespeare's plays, but how history and myth become entangled and entrenched until one is indistinguishable from another, and why people want to believe one thing or another, whether it is true or not.

Baseball in the Garden of Eden, by John Thorn, deals with both of these subjects--baseball, as the title says, and the layers of legends, stories, and lies that have built up around the cloudy subject of when, where, and how the game began. Sounds like, well, a home run for me, doesn't it?

Not quite--I found the book staggeringly dull. It was the opposite of a page turner. It was a keep staring at the page hoping something will catch your attentioner.

Thorn is a well-respected writer, so maybe it's just me. Maybe something just didn't click. I made it through about fifty pages, then decided that life was too short and there were too many other books I'd rather be reading.

'Swonderful

 
Wide-eyed young Americans were surely dazzled by the Place de L'Etoile in 1830.

One of my sisters went to Paris for the first time a few years ago. After she got back, I was talking to my mother, and she commented on how much my sister had liked Paris. My response was something like, "Of course she liked Paris, why wouldn't she like Paris? She'd have to be seriously perverse or plain stupid."

Now I'm sure, of course, there are significant numbers of perfectly reasonable people who go to Paris and don't like it. However, even more--many more--have been captivated by it. In The Greater Journey, David Halberstam tells about one such group, the wave of 19th century Americans who traveled to Paris to study, live, or just pick up some Old World polish.

Halberstam begins with the true young Americans--those born in the early 19th century as the first generation of Americans born solidly in the United States who traveled to France on unpredictable, weeks long journeys on nausea-inducing sailing ships and ends with a more confident brand of Americans, those who were part of a world where the US was an emerging power, and France, for all its beauty, had been trounced by the Prussians and left weaker and anxious than its bold American visitors. The cast of characters includes James Fenimore Cooper, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Sumner, John Singer Sargent, and Mary Cassatt.

This is a book where the parts are greater than the whole. That's not necessarily bad--there are many interesting sections and people. I was fascinated by the part about the lives of the young Americans who came to study medicine in Paris because it offered the world's best and most comprehensive training (in Paris, medical students studied obstetrics, which they were not allowed to do in the prudish US). There are details about their daily lives, how early they got up, the tiny, cold rooms where they lived, and the rival methods of instruction they found in their Parisian teachers. Honestly, I could have read a whole book on that topic alone (note to self: look for book about 19th century medical education). Since I am infuriated by reading anything where Samuel Morse's contribution to the "invention" of the telegraph is regarded uncritically, I did not love reading the part about Morse and his friendship with James Fenimore Cooper, that most American of authors who spent a lot of time in Paris. The part about the Siege of Paris by the Prussians and the worse takeover of the Paris commune, as relayed through the carefully kept diaries and letters of American diplomat Elihu Washburne (note to self: another person to learn more about) was riveting. I wanted to know more about John Singer Sargent--after reading "The Greater Journey," I chased down a book solely about the artist; perhaps it will tell me more than the ever polite Mr. Halberstam, who delicately refrains from commentary, guesswork or gossip about his subjects' lives, particularly their love lives. A lot of time is devoted to the life and career of the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, which didn't do much for me. I found myself wondering whether my lack of patience had more to do with the fact that maybe I'm just from a generation that has too little appreciation of the sculptors of old who were renowned for their casting of giant bronze statues of war heroes, or from a faint suspicion that Saint-Gaudens got all those pages because there was a lot of material available about him. 

I enjoyed this book, but was left feeling somewhat less than satisfied. I wondered if it was a book about famous 19th century Americans--maybe. Or maybe it was about the history of Paris during the 19th century--yes, it was that, too. Or maybe it was French history as seen through the eyes of Americans. Could be. At any given time, it's one of these, which is fine, but sometimes I wished it was securely just one; it felt a little fragmented or lacking in drive. There also was that "survey of history" introductory feel about it that you get when a book is trying to hit a lot of topics, or people, but doesn't really go in depth about anything. That's good, because it inspires readers like me to run out and try to find a book about the subjects that interest me, but it also leaves readers like me feeling like I was watching one of those history for beginners documentaries on the History Channel. Overall, I recommend the book--it has its ups and downs, but you'll learn a little something and in the end you'll find yourself wanting more. Just like a trip to Paris.

In the Beginning

 
Elmer Ellsworth, early American Idol.

You think you know about 1861, right? Confederates soldiers open fire on Union soldiers stationed at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, forcing a Union surrender and the beginning of the Civil War. Battles followed, families torn apart, a nation divided, slaves are emancipated, the Confederacy wears out, and surrenders, everyone is happy until Lincoln is assassinated. Of course if you're a Civil War expert, you know much, much more than that. But I would guess that even if you consider yourself an expert, you probably haven't looked at 1861 in the way Adam Goodheart does in his new book--conveniently titled 1861--about the beginnings of the war.

Instead of trudging chronologically through the events that led to the beginnings of war and the early battles, Goodheart focuses in tightly on a variety of less-covered topics: the slow, long debate within Fort Sumter, as the Federal troops led by Major Robert Anderson tried to figure out what to do; the formation of the "Wake Ups," an informally organized group of young men who began to prepare themselves for war against the Confederate states; the role of the large German immigrant population in St. Louis in keeping Missouri from seceding; the story of how California was kept from seceding from both the Union and the Confederacy; how escaped slaves who arrived to help Union soldiers pushed the decision for emancipation.

Most intriguingly, Goodheart tells the story of Elmer Ellsworth, little known now, but (according to Goodheart) practically a rock star in his day. Ellsworth, a young man from upstate New York, saw a French Zouave regiment perform and became fascinated by their gaudy uniforms and strenuous gymnastic moves. He formed his own American Zouave regiment and actually went on tour with them; if you can imagine, audiences cheered the young men as they jumped, rolled, and waved their bayonets in sync. Picture a dance team, except armed. Afterwards, Ellsworth studied law, clerking in Abraham Lincoln's Springfield, Illinois, office. Lincoln liked him and brought him to Washington after Lincoln was elected president. When the war broke out, Ellsworth offered to form a new Zouave regiment. However, instead of filling his ranks with bright eyed young boys, he decided to recruit the toughest men around--New York City firefighters. The "Fire Zouave Regiment" took over Washington--they weren't the most gentlemanly unit around, but they sure came in handy if a fire broke out.

Ellsworth led his unit to one of the first actions of the war, a venture across the Potomac to take Alexandria, Virginia, back from the Confederates. While trying to take the Confederate flag down from an inn, Ellsworth was shot, becoming the first soldier killed in action during the Civil War (there is a story that Mary Lincoln had seen the Confederate flag flying in Alexandria and said she wished someone would take it down, thus prompting Ellsworth's foolhardy action. But the story is unconfirmed, and Mrs. Lincoln, nutty as she was, takes enough historical crap; let's leave her out of this one). Ellsworth received a massive state funeral and served as an inspiration to young men who joined the Union army. And now he is virtually forgotten.

As much as I love history, I've never been much of a Civil War aficionado--too many other people are, so I stubbornly resisted. But I really enjoyed this book--it's well written and covers material that you didn't sit through over and over again in junior high school and high school. Whether you are a Civil War expert, or a relative newcomer, I think you will enjoy it too.