How Nature Writing Has Changed
Also: A book thief in Tel Aviv, the novels of Lawrence Durrell, silver bullets, a history of the masquerade, and more.
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Good morning! In the latest issue of the Hedgehog Review, Alan Jacobs looks at how writing about the natural world has changed over the last two hundred years:
About a hundred pages into historian Douglas Brinkley’s Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and the Great Environmental Awakening, I almost gave up. It was so palpably and relentlessly a story of Heroes & Villains: the heroes perfect in their heroism, and the villains equally absolute in their villainy. For Brinkley, if you’re an advocate for environmental protection or an opponent of nuclear weapons, you’re on the side of the angels; even Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. comes out of this book looking like a candidate for beatification.
But I kept going, and I am glad I did. For one thing, the appearance later in the book of Presidents Johnson and Nixon, both of whom did very good things by Brinkley’s lights, blurs the previously bright lines separating the angelic and the demonic. And for another, Brinkley really has written a comprehensive history of the emergence of the American environmental movement, which was one of the signal developments in American culture in the second half of the twentieth century. But having finished the book, I find myself reflecting on how much writing about the natural world has changed since the period he describes—and not for the better.
Several of Brinkley’s heroes wrote about their experiences in nature even when they weren’t writers by trade. William O. Douglas, who sat on the Supreme Court from 1939 to 1975, wrote lyrically about his native Pacific Northwest in his books My Wilderness, The Pacific West (1960) and My Wilderness, East to Katahdin (1961). Stewart Udall, secretary of the interior under President Kennedy and President Johnson, wrote America’s Natural Treasures: National Nature Monuments and Seashores (1971) and several books about the desert Southwest. In the early 1950s, Joseph Wood Krutch, a theater critic and longtime professor at Columbia, moved to Arizona for his health and fell in love, writing hymns of praise such as The Desert Year (1951) and The Voice of the Desert (1954). Rachel Carson, though now known primarily for Silent Spring, was famous in her lifetime for her books about the sea and parts of America’s Atlantic coast, especially in Maine and Maryland.
All these writers worked in the tradition effectively established by the eighteenth-century English writer Gilbert White, whose still-compelling Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) documents, in loving detail, his native village in Hampshire. White is the father of topophilia, the love of place, as a mode of writing, a tradition that finds its purpose in the delineation of a single small environment: a pond in Massachusetts (Thoreau’s Walden, 1854), a creek in Virginia (Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 1974), a county in Wisconsin (Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, 1949), a valley in California (John Muir’s The Yosemite, 1912). Especially in England, the topophilic impulse finds its way into fiction: the upper reaches of the Thames in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) and two small rivers in Devon in Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter (1927).
What was the first “silver bullet”? Adam Roberts explores:
So, we know what a ‘silver bullet’ is: a projectile made of silver which is able to, as no other type of bullet can, dispatch a werewolf, and possibly also kill-off a vampire (though a wooden stake through the heart is the more conventional termination strategy here). Regular leaden bullets have no effect of the Wolfman; you need a silver bullet. From this particular cultural usage the phrase ‘silver bullet’ has entered discourse to mean any unusual and singular remedy, any immediate solution with notable effectiveness.
I was curious where the phrase originated. Obviously silver has folkloric significance that goes back a very long time, for this metal has long been thought to have charmed powers against evil forces. But silver bullets, specifically, must perforce be a later development. They cannot, obviously, predate the spread of firearms, from c.1500 and onwards (in Europe).
Michael Thurston revisits the novels of Lawrence Durrell and their debt to Alexandria:
I have not run into them so often lately, but Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and its constituent novels (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea) were once among the paperbacks often to be found on the shelves of used bookstores and some of your better upstairs bedrooms. Products of an ambitious late Modernist moment, they joined projects of similar scope—Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, Anthony Powell’s Proustian Dance to the Music of Time—and often shared the company of other works of postwar fiction understood as serious: the early novels of Iris Murdoch and William Golding. They were also rumored to be racy, in the manner of, but somehow less scandalous than, the Henry Miller novels that also gathered in used bookshops. My own copy of Justine was part of a handful I bought on the cheap during the summer after my freshman year in college, along with a pocket-size copy of Golding’s The Spire. (No Miller books in that haul.) After many moves, these are both still on a shelf in my office.
Durrell’s quartet differed from some of the books with which I associate it, not because it was any more or less experimental (or sexy) than they but, instead, because it quickly became apparent that for all the interaction and intrigue among the characters (Justine and her lover, Darley, her husband, Nessim, and a cast of others, all compellingly drawn), the most important presence and something of a protagonist was the city of Alexandria itself. The Egyptian city is not simply a backdrop for erotic conspiracy or, in the later volumes, the machinations of the British security services. With its complex geography and layers of history, it emerges as a character in its own right, “the unconsciously poetical mother-city exemplified in the names and faces which made up her history.” Like the Dublin of Joyce or the London of Woolf, this was a city that, it seemed, the author had come to know so well that he could narratively become it, think as it thought and feel as it felt.
Eve Tushnet reviews Sarah Ruden’s Perpetua: The Woman, the Martyr:
Ruden is a poet and translator. She has translated everybody from Aristophanes to the Gospel authors, and crafted a jolting, fascinating translation of Augustine’s Confessions. I would not recommend this translation to someone who had never read the Confessions before (Thomas Williams’s 2019 translation is far more student-friendly), but there are both thrills and insights to be had in turning from the harpsichord of F. J. Sheed’s Confessions to the electric guitar of Ruden’s. Thrills: Who wouldn’t prefer, instead of Sheed’s “I went away from You in fornication,” Ruden’s “I cheated on you like a true slut”? And insights: for example, her insistence on translating Augustine’s Dominus as “Master” rather than “Lord.” Everybody else avoids this move in English, because it feels too redolent of slavery. Ruden is the only one who will make you ask what it might be like to worship Christ in a slave society—and what it might mean to call God “Master” more often than “Redeemer.”
Ruden’s Augustine felt foreign and alive: an ancient mind making contact with the contemporary world. And so I’m sorry to report that her Perpetua feels flimsy, as if she is not imaginatively inhabiting the saint but merely projecting contemporary interpretations and concerns onto the screen of an ancient text. Ruden criticizes scholars for “insist[ing] that Perpetua stood for a Christianity like their own”—but just a few pages earlier she writes that Perpetua “died for the right to be herself…to get into a lot of trouble and stay there.” This is a saint who can fit on a coffee mug.
J. C. Halper writes about a book thief in Tel Aviv:
They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Fine. Go sell a book, a great book, even a best-selling book, with a missing or defaced cover. It’s next to impossible. People won’t even touch it.
People are like that too. You don’t always spot the crazy one from across the room. Half the time, he only becomes visible when he’s in your doorway, taking his time, looking around like he owns the place.
I make my living buying and selling books—often whole libraries at a time—which means I see a lot of people who love books and a few who love owning them. The difference matters more than you’d think. Some people collect books the way others collect watches or art. A rarer and more insidious few collect them the way conquerors amass territory. They move through the shelves methodically, marking what is theirs, what will be theirs, what will not fall into anyone else’s hands.
I’ve only met one person like that. A rotten, library-plundering bastard.
In praise of Nancy Lemann: “Nancy Lemann is the author of five novels and one work of nonfiction, the glorious and strange Ritz of the Bayou (1987). New Orleans features prominently in her work, as do the rituals of upper-class White Southern society, drinking, and affection for the principled derelict. Her first novel Lives of the Saints, from 1985, has become a cult classic, beloved for its cracked romanticism, its giddy melancholy, its louche New Orleans grandeur. That NYRB Classics has chosen to reissue Lives of the Saints, as well as publish Lemann’s new novel The Oyster Diaries, her first in more than twenty years, is cause for much rejoicing.”
The Tuscan town that became the “international hub” of sculpture:
When he was commissioned by Pope Leo X in 1518 to build the facade of the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, Michelangelo decided not to get the marble from Carrara in northern Italy (where the stone for masterpieces including David came from). Instead, he sourced it from new quarries that he helped establish in the hills around the neighboring Tuscan town of Pietrasanta. Like a modern-day project manager, he watched the quarry workers extract and cut massive blocks of stone. He even designed roads that allowed the marble blocks to be transported from the mountains down to the coast.
Today, Pietrasanta is an international sculpture hub, with a rich network of workshops, foundries and craftspeople that serve artists from all over the world. In the spring and summer, the town of 20,000 turns into a popular meeting place for artists and art professionals.
The film critic Rex Reed has died. He was 87: “William Kapfer, Reed’s longtime friend, confirmed his death. No cause was given. Reed burst onto the movie-criticism scene in the 1960s, and was part of a wave of new reviewers, Pauline Kael among them, who offered a sharper, jazzier alternative to the more staid forms of analysis that had been showcased by major outlets. These writers also had the good fortune to arrive as cinema itself was undergoing a transformation, with the studio system collapsing and something sexier, edgier and barrier-breaking emerging in its place.”
Jakub Grygiel reviews a new history of Europe:
The author, a specialist in ancient history, is at his best giving a succinct history of Greece and Rome. But he also skillfully weaves into the history of events some formative moments of Europe’s intellectual history. Dante plays an important role, and so do various authors of the Renaissance (such as Enea Silvio Piccolomini or Pius II) and the Enlightenment (Voltaire and Rousseau). All this makes for an enjoyable book, written in a clear style and avoiding a “one fact after another” litany.
But in the end this is less a history of Europe and more a search for the European Union through 2,500 years of history. The metric used to examine and judge the past is how close it resembles the last few decades of the European political project. For example, the Achaean League failed to unify Greek city states, which then fell under the control of a well-armed Rome—a warning to European states that do not want a greater union. The Roman Empire was the closest thing to the EU in ancient times, even though it achieved that through arms rather than rules and norms. In 212 A.D., Emperor Caracalla extended Roman citizenship to every subject of the empire except for slaves, a rare political decision that did not occur until the 1992 Maastricht Treaty that created an EU citizenship supplementing the national one. Charles V was the last emperor to attempt to unify Europe as a coherent Christendom, and the treaties of the peace of Utrecht (1715) were the last to mention a respublica Christiana, giving space to secular political entities that could seek cooperative arrangements from the Concert of Europe to the Versailles accords.
The narrative culminates in what it presents as its apex—its conclusion, its true telos: the post–World War II drive to unify Europe. The significance of these efforts, from Jean Monnet to the euro and beyond, is reflected in the space they occupy in the book: While the first 1,300 years of Europe’s history are admirably condensed in 100 pages, a comparable length is devoted to the 70 years since 1945. Europe is, according to the book’s argument, reaching its full and best expression as it progresses toward the unity that neither the Greeks nor the Christians could achieve.
And yet, this unity seems as much a mirage now as it had been in the past. Some of the reasons for failure are given, perhaps unwittingly, by the author. For one, the gradual expulsion of Christianity from the idea of Europe undermined it.
Kate Chisholm reviews a history of the masquerade:
In the satirical print ‘Remarkable Characters at Mrs Cornely’s Masquerade’ from February 1771, the Georgian craze for dressing up as fantastical characters is shown in all its theatricality and wild invention. The harlequin was always popular, as was the domino, but here we also have a ‘Savoyard’ (supposedly from Savoy) playing a hurdy-gurdy with his dancing bear in tow, a nun in full habit, ‘Mad Tom’ with wild hair and ragged clothes, and, perhaps weirdest of all, a coffin, decorated with a skull and crossbones. Peeping out from beneath its sombre frame are the two ridiculously dainty feet of the masquerader.
At that time, masquerades (or ‘a diversion in which the company is masked’, to give Dr Johnson’s definition in his 1755 Dictionary) were regular events in London at Ranelagh Gardens, Vauxhall, the King’s Theatre and, most extravagant of all, Carlisle House in Soho Square, presided over by the ebullient Teresa Cornelys. A Venetian opera singer and former lover of Casanova (by whom she had a child), Cornelys had imagination and daring but not much financial acumen. A year after that print was circulated, she found herself in the King’s Bench prison after being declared bankrupt. Not that this quenched her spirit, or the enthusiasm for the masquerade that she had in large part engendered. As Meghan Kobza’s colourful new study describes, the masquerade survived into the 19th century, after which it fell victim to a different sensibility.
