On a Plane
Also: Classic travel novels, big families, fictional Oxfords, John Singer Sargent in Europe, and more.
Good morning! When you receive this email, I will be on a plane to Canada. My wife and I are visiting our daughter and her husband in Victoria for ten days. I hope to send another email on Friday and then some links on Saturday. After that, I’ll take a week off.
Victoria is a beautiful city. I bought an old Nishiki ten-speed a couple of years ago that I left with my daughter and son-in-law so I can get some riding in when we visit. There is no better way to see the city (and its surroundings). Last winter I went on a three-hour outing on my birthday in the cold and rain and came back muddy, exhausted, and happy.
But since we’ll be on a plane, let me share this piece, which I wrote (partly) on a plane and which was published by The Washington Free Beacon over the weekend. It is on the first nonstop transatlantic flight:
I am writing this on a Boeing 767 somewhere over the Atlantic on my way to Switzerland, where my wife and I are moving to be close to her family. We are flying at 523 miles per hour at 37,000 feet above sea level. According to my ticket, it will take us 8 hours and 10 minutes to travel the 3,800 miles between JFK and Geneva. We have made this trip a dozen times. My wife hates it. If she had realized how often she would have to fly when I proposed to her 30 years ago, I think she might have turned me down.
It could be worse, I might tell her (but won’t). I am reading David Rooney’s nail-biter of a book about the first nonstop transatlantic flight in June 1919, when John Alcock and Arthur “Ted” Brown flew nearly 2,000 miles from Newfoundland to the west coast of Ireland.
It took them twice as long to go half as far as we are going today. They made the trip in a 43-foot Vimy biplane (with canvas wings) through dense fog, rain, and snow in a cramped open cockpit and used a sextant to navigate when they could see the stars, which wasn’t often. They flew with a broken exhaust pipe for much of the way, which sent flames out the back of one of the engines and risked burning the tension wires that held the plane together. The transmitter had also stopped working an hour into the flight. If one of their two Rolls-Royce Eagles lost power—a common problem on early flights—they would have been unable to message for help. At one point, they pulled out of a spiral dive 50 feet above the ocean. They crash-landed in an Irish bog 16 hours after taking off. When Brown was asked if he would do the flight again, he said: “I wouldn’t do it again for anything on earth.”
And since you’re already at the Free Beacon (which runs one of the best short review sections online), why not read Tunku Varadarajan’s review of John Beck’s Those Who Should Be Seized Should Be Seized—a book about China’s persecution of ethnic minorities—and Rob Long’s review of Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television.
Let’s keep with the travel theme a bit longer. In The Critic, John Self writes about classic travel novels:
Paul Bowles moved to Tangier, Morocco, in his late 30s and set all his major fiction in north Africa. He remains best known for his debut The Sheltering Sky (1949), but all his novels are worth visiting, and they share a dark quality: if, as Graham Greene said, a writer must have a splinter of ice in his heart, then Bowles had a splinter of heart in his ice.
You can tell from the title that Bowles’ 1952 novel Let It Come Down will not be a comedy: it uses the words of one of Banquo’s murderers in Macbeth as they set about the deed. The story concerns American Nelson Dyar, who has come to Tangier for a new job. “He was really here now; there was no turning back. Of course there never had been any question of turning back.”
Jane Coombs writes about John Singer Sargent in Europe:
The ultimate cosmopolitan, he was born to American parents in Florence and raised all over Europe. In 1874, aged 18, he settled in Paris to train at the studio of portraitist Carolus-Duran, and later at the competitive École des Beaux-Arts. A prodigious draughtsman and colorist, he was also well-read, fluent in four languages, a gifted pianist and, above all, très discret. He could entertain and impress his sophisticated female subjects between sittings, without worrying their husbands.
But he was nobody’s court painter. A visionary, he sought beauty in the strange, the exotic and the extreme – his childhood friend Vernon Lee noted his preference for “the bizarre and outlandish” – more than any patron’s approval. Before claiming his spot as a modern old master, he was bound to end up in hot water.
“Sargent and Paris,” an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum that soon travels to the Musée d’Orsay, accompanied by a book of essays, tells the fascinating story of his swift rise to the top of the French art world to his blazing exit ten years later, when he moved to London in the heat of a scandal ignited by the display of Madame X at the 1884 Paris Salon – a highly criticized portrait of the preening socialite Virginie Gautreau, dressed in a revealing black gown with a single jeweled strap falling off her shoulder.
Jeremy Thomas Gilmer explains what it is like to work in a diamond mine in Lac de Gras:
Descending into Diavik is like landing on a distant moon, the world sealed in a hard sheet of ice and snow stretching in every direction. The plane circled a few times and then slid into a landing pattern which brought it into contact with a rough strip that shook the outdated Canadian North Boeing 737, one of the few larger planes that can touch down on gravel.
The cold that ripped through the plane after the door was opened caused a wave of grumbling. The cabin speakers came on and the pilot welcomed us, casually noting that the temperature outside hovered around thirty below. This was why we had to fly with our boots and parkas in hand. I had seen men in fleece zip-ups and sneakers turned away at the boarding gate.
The second shock as you left the plane, after the freezing wind pulled your breath straight out of your chest, was catching sight of what looked like a 1970s Canadian school bus. It was our transport to the intake facility.
David Butterfield writes about the decline of the college at Oxford and Cambridge: “Unsurprisingly, the scourge of lanyardism has spread through all sectors of college life. Fellows who used to control the estate that was their home are now treated as fungible employees by the managerial class. The sad and sombre state of most SCRs — where alcohol, tobacco, games, betting books and other signs of fellows at play have largely vanished — is a reflection of what ‘modernisation’ looks like. You certainly hear a lot less laughter there.”
Poppy Sowerby writes about “fictional Oxfords” in UnHerd:
“I came to Oxford looking for a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I chose to experience a lifetime.” Whew boy. These immortal words ring from the pages of Julia Whelan’s 2018 debut novel My Oxford Year, which Netflix has now unwisely adapted in the latest of its toe-curling original films. You’ll probably have seen the posters on public transport — that grim picture of a snogging brunette couple overlaid with a charming serif font. After braving the trailer, one old university friend told me: “I want to jump out of a window after watching that.”
My Oxford Year is the story of a fit American with nice teeth and a — gulp — “library fetish”. She inevitably falls for a sexy young don, telling him: “I just love being among those dusty old first editions.” She is, in short, a book girlie. For those spared this Gen-Z trend, that means she sees hardbacks as substitutes for intellectual curiosity; they are material objects to be conspicuously tucked under a cable-knit arm, flashed at sensitive young men, or leafed through with a steaming hot mug of chamomile tea. Bliss!
More:
Are all fictional Oxfords doomed to flop? An open-top bus tour of recent depictions suggests that, yes, the city has jumped the cinematic shark. The typical Oxford films — Saltburn, The Riot Club, even the sepia-tinged Stephen Hawking flick The Theory of Everything — all portray the city as a mirage of sunny quadrangles, orange lamps in foggy lanes and eccentric, alcoholic tutors. Of course, Oxford can be all these things (the latter most of all), but it is also defined by coffin-sized showers with gritty floors, MDF furniture in brutalist staircases and relentless, Soviet-style JCR meetings steered by the spottiest and most insufferable people you’re ever likely to meet.
In other news, Christopher Scalia recommends books with big families, like The Vicar of Wakefield and As I Lay Dying: “Anse Bundren may be humpbacked and shiftless, but he’s a man of his word. He told his wife Addie that he’d make the trek from their farm to bury her in her hometown of Jefferson, Miss., and that’s exactly what he’s going to do, come hell or high water . . . Anse and his five children—daughter Dewey Dell and sons Darl, Cash, Vardaman, and Jewel (who Anse does not know is another man’s child)—undertake a tragicomic funeral procession that goes on for nine days. The family is waylaid by fires, feuds, drowned horses, broken limbs, a pregnancy, and the aforementioned high water.”
What has happened to the Edinburgh International Book Festival? Hugo Timms explains:
How do you score an invite to speak at Scotland’s biggest literary festival? Being a popular, critically favoured, award-winning Scottish writer certainly doesn’t help.
A few authors are conspicuous for their absence at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival, which begins later this week. The first is rapper, writer and journalist Darren McGarvey, whose latest book, Trauma Industrial Complex, is published later this month. Another is Susan Dalgety, who co-authored The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a bestselling account of the gender-critical fightback against the Scottish government’s assault on women’s sex-based rights.
The titles of the books were probably enough on their own to ensure the exclusion of their authors. Trauma Industrial Complex looks at the trend of emotional ‘oversharing’ and the rise of therapeutic culture. It questions whether this has done any good for those who have endured genuinely traumatic events. McGarvey’s other works have looked at issues such as poverty and addiction from a distinctly working-class perspective. His 2018 book, Poverty Safari, won him the Orwell Prize. Meanwhile, Dalgety’s The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht celebrates the bravery of a small number of Scottish women who defied abuse and accusations of ‘transphobia’ to defeat the SNP’s gender self-identification laws. As she put it on X, ‘It appears the Edinburgh Book Festival doesn’t like people who talk about class or women’s rights’.
Last week, I linked to Joseph Epstein’s review of a new biography of Horace. Dominic Green reviews the same book in The Wall Street Journal: “Peter Stothard’s Horace: Poet on a Volcano is the gory, gripping story of an ex-slave’s son who became a war poet in the twilight of the Roman Republic and a courtier in the empire of Augustus. Satirist and strategist, lowlife and literary politician, a lover of Greek literature who wrote in Latin, Horace prospered on the edge of the political volcano and became a man of property with a country villa outside Rome, complete with a vista of Mount Soracte. He boasted that his verse would last forever, and it has. Mr. Stothard, a former editor of the Times of London, shows how Horace lived to write it by using language as both a sword and a shield.”
By the way, regarding writing about airplane journeys, if you haven't read it (and even if you have), you should look up C. Day Lewis's "The Flight". I think it's also sometimes shown as "Flight to Australia." A gripping poem.
Have a good Vac, Dr. Mattix. Your Substack work is very valuable. You're a good guide. Digests are important; wise comments rare and welcome. I read that curious (but well-written) Oxford article. It verges on the snobbish, oddly (from the perspective of an American).