Wednesday Links
Also: A history of cocaine, on the origin of “ad bellum purificandum,” talking with Jean Stafford, and more.
Good morning! Let’s start things off this morning with Craig Nova on his time with the writer Jean Stafford at her house in East Hampton:
We drank in her living room, Jean in a comfortable chair and me on a blue horsehair sofa. Jean laughed and told me stories—she liked to tell stories, though at the heart of them was often a cheerful dismay at the things that had happened to her . . . She told me of her hysterectomy, performed by a southern doctor who had said, “Don’t you worry, Miss Jean. You can go on having sexual intercourse with all your friends.” . . . She told me many stories about her marriage to Lowell. Once, she went to see him in a quiet asylum in upstate New York, where he thought he was Napoleon. When Jean arrived, he was drilling his troops, and one of his generals was Judy Garland. She told me this with an air that conveyed both a cheerful sense of the ridiculous and a feeling of profound dismay. Then there was the time Lowell wanted to become a Catholic and insisted that Jean go to early Mass with him. When she had done this for a year or more and decided she couldn’t do it any longer, she told Lowell that she was going to leave him. He said, “Don’t worry, Jean. We can stop going to Mass. I’ve got the vocabulary now.”
As a wedding present, Lowell’s mother had given her a plot in the family cemetery, but after the divorce, Mrs. Lowell wrote to ask for the plot back. Or, as Jean said, with that laugh of dismay and amazed cheer, “My remainders were no longer welcome.” . . . One evening, Jean told me of the time when she and Liebling went to the races in England. They had taken a chauffeured car, and Liebling had packed a hamper of roast pheasant and excellent white wine. I told her some stories about Los Angeles, and what my life was like in New York City. She had more to drink, and then got out a recording of Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?”
Before she played it, she said that she had been on the set of The Misfits, the movie with Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift. She turned to me with that look of dismay and slight grief. She said that when she was introduced to Clift, he responded, in a halting, impressed sort of way, “Oh, how nice to meet you. I have all your records.” He had confused her with the singer Jo Stafford. Then Jean played “Is That All There Is?” As she listened, she got up and danced, swaying in time to the music, eyes closed, heartbroken, longing for Liebling, I thought, longing not so much for another place as for another time.
Hope Coulter writes about her father in Literary Matters: “A few months after his eighty-sixth birthday, my father learned he had terminal lung cancer. Scans of his chest showed rapidly metastasizing tumors that had appeared since a routine x-ray earlier that year. The disease was aggressive, too far advanced for treatment or even—given his general frailty—a biopsy. He didn’t react much, didn’t seem surprised. He may have already suspected this news. As Sharon Olds writes in ‘His Stillness,’ a poem about her own father’s terminal diagnosis, ‘He had always held still and kept quiet to bear things.’”
Adam Roberts investigates the phrase “ad bellum purificandum”: “Kenneth Burke’s epigraph to his Grammar of Motives (1945) is ‘Ad bellum purificandum’— ‘for the purification of war.’ . . . From where does this Latin come? What is Burke quoting? In K.B.: The Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society, James P. Zappen, S. Michael Halloran, and Scott A. Wible look into the matter at some length. They note that Burke wrote the phrase upon the frame of his study window, alongside another piece of Latin (potius convincere quam conviciar: ‘better to convince [someone] than reproach them’; ‘better to prove than reprove’, or perhaps ‘better to school than scold’), and that the two phrases, written out in his wife’s handwriting, were on a welcome card pinned to the door. Zappen, Halloran and Wible think these phrases aren’t quoted from anywhere, that Burke made them up. . . . They’re right; Burke did make-up ad bellum purificandum. But I don’t think he made it up out of whole cloth.”
Speaking of Adam Roberts, Gary K. Wolfe reviews his latest novel, Lake of Darkness, in Locus: “Despite having won BSFA and Campbell Awards for his 2012 novel Jack Glass, Adam Roberts has a good case for being one of the most under-appreciated novelists in the UK – not a single Hugo or Nebula nomination in a career of more than two decades, according to the SFADB. As I and others have argued many times, awards don’t really measure anything other than the capacity to win awards, but I wonder if the eclectic intellectualism of much of his fiction, which draws not only on his encyclopedic knowledge of SF and its prehistory (his History of Science Fiction traces the genre back to 1600 or so), but on his cheerful appropriation of other genres as well (murder mysteries, adventure tales, philosophical tracts), and on his own fondness for fiercely thoughtful digressions exploring everything from hard-SF physics to principles of political and social organization, may seem challenging to casual readers . . . but it can be pretty rewarding for those willing to follow the ride.”
In the winter of 1886, William Alexander Hammond – a famed neurologist and the former Surgeon General of the United States Army – took an enormous amount of cocaine. A reporter from the New York paper The Sun who interviewed him waggishly observed that the doctor had been ‘on a terrific spree for science’. Hammond had experimentally worked his way through as many different ways of taking the drug in as many different quantities as he could devise: he tried fluid extracts of coca (the plant from which pure cocaine is extracted), mixed grains of cocaine hydrochloride into purified wines, and eventually began injecting the drug hypodermically. The injections, he said, gave him ‘a delightful, undulating thrill’. On cocaine, everything felt ‘refined’ and ‘softened’. Hammond became intensely talkative: when he was alone, he would talk to himself at great length. ‘I became,’ he said, ‘rather sentimental and said nice things to everybody. The world was going very well, and I had a favourable opinion of my fellow men and women … I enjoyed myself hugely.’
Hammond went on taking the drug in increasing amounts until ‘the sensations became rather painful than agreeable.’ He eventually pushed his tests as high as 18 grains (just over 1 gram) in a single dose, which caused him to become ‘oblivious’ to his own actions. He woke up in bed the next day with no memory of how he got there, and quickly discovered that he had, at some point in the night, decided to thoroughly wreck his own library. After this (and after recovering from a ‘most preposterous headache that lasted two days’) he called a halt to the examination.
He might have been unusually enthusiastic in his experiments, but Hammond’s fascination with cocaine was far from uncommon for a medical professional of his time. In early 1885, The Lancet laconically observed that ‘The medical press is full of cocaine just now.’
Sam Buntz reads Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus so you don’t have to: “Nexus is a history of information systems. To its credit, it is unusually wide in ambition and scope, covering the history of information and communication from the Stone Age through the invention of the printing press, the scientific revolution, the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century, and onto our AI-dominated future . . . Yet Harari’s vast ambition is undermined by the book’s persistently faulty analysis. This stems from his ideological priors. He is an old-school materialist of the ‘love is just chemicals in your brain’ school of thought . . . Harari consequently sees no purpose or truth in religious narratives other than their function as a tool to connect people and impose order. Mythologies, in his view, were a device that helped bind humans into greater wholes, making them more effective at collective projects like war. Like the New Atheists, Harari does not seem to see religious stories as containing poetic truth, wisdom, Jungian archetypes, or anything like that. They’re just made-up — clever ruses to control behaviour.”
Nadya Williams on home libraries: “[A] home overcrowded with books sets the tone for how its inhabitants spend their time at home. Bored? Read a book. Want something to do for fun? Read a book. Have friends over? Read a book together. Relaxed family night at home? Start a read-aloud.” Well, I agree, though surely there is nothing wrong with watching a bit of baseball or hockey. My home library (before we sold our house) had a television in it, too.
Allen C. Guelzo reviews Robert W. Merry’s Decade of Disunion: How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849–1861: “Robert W. Merry is a veteran Washington journalist, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and editor of Congressional Quarterly, and the author of five earlier books on subjects such as American journalists, American presidents, and American foreign policy. This is his first venture into the vast literature of the Civil War era, and from the first, Merry is convinced that Massachusetts and South Carolina really were the mutual harbingers of the war. Both states were home to some of the most radical political agitators of the conflict; together they embodied an American Kulturkampf between an uncompromising Puritan moralism and a swaggering, profit-eyed hedonism. ‘No two were as disparate in outlook, religion, moral precepts, or cultural sensibility as Massachusetts and South Carolina,’ Merry writes, and each led the rest of the republic over the brink like the Pied Piper.”
Lee Oser writes about Lionel Shriver’s latest novel, Mania, and how satire works: “Let me suggest that Pearson is not, in Laura Miller’s dismissive phrase, ‘basically an avatar’ of the author. Pearson, like Lemuel Gulliver, is an authorial persona and a vehicle of satire. Like Gulliver, she reports what she sees. She comments on the alt-reality version of the COVID freakout . . . She observes that we are breaking with ‘the scientific method through which all advanced economies have achieved their prosperity—a method whose previous practitioners were willing to brave the discovery of the ideologically inconvenient.’ When her husband needs a good surgeon, she drinks in the spectacle of the hospital that politics built: ‘I watched numerous doctors and nurses rushing down the halls, and while they all looked plausibly like doctors and nurses, some of them were fake doctors and nurses, mere simulacrums, who threaded undetectably among the real ones like Stepford wives.’ She comments that the West has ‘fallen hypnotically in love with its own virtue,’ to the point that it is ‘committing civilizational suicide.’ She remarks that ‘nothing works. Nobody does their jobs anymore, because nobody gets in trouble when they shirk.’ She refers dismissively to her ‘fellow academics, cowards to a man and woman.’ These statements are all exaggerations, but there is more than a grain of truth in them. The satirist is doing her job.”
How three fake Van Goghs fooled the experts:
Experts at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam say three paintings in private collections previously believed to be by the artist are fakes, including one that was authenticated by the museum and sold for nearly $1 million at Christie’s in 2011.
A report published this month in the monthly British art journal Burlington Magazine and authored by Teio Meedendorp, Louis van Tilborgh, and Saskia van Oudheusden sheds light on how the three forged works, titled “Head of a Woman,” “Interior of a Restaurant,” and “Wood Gatherer,” fooled private collectors and even the artist’s namesake institution for years. The findings, the report states, “pose intriguing questions about their status, as either innocent copies or fakes intended to deceive.”
The Opinion section of The Wall Street Journal has produced its first documentary. I rarely write about politics in this newsletter, but this documentary on the 1991 Crown Heights Riot is both well done and timely.
I am hosting an online book launch for Sally Thomas and Joshua Hren tomorrow at 8pm EST. You can register here if you’re interested.
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