Notes from the New Yorker staff on their literary engagements of the week.
I recently bought a copy of Lytton Strachey's "Eminent Victorians" at the ominously named Last Bookstore, in downtown Los Angeles. Last, but not first—the cavernous space opened just a couple years ago, and it was full of teen-agers, wondrously handling used paperbacks as if they were Polaroids or vintage seven-inch records. The best unintended consequence of the devaluing of the book, described in George Packer's recent piece about Amazon, has been the devaluing of the book—on the mezzanine, the Last Bookstore had a hundred thousand volumes, each selling for a dollar. "Eminent Victorians" was one of twenty books my wife and I jammed into the overhead compartment on our flight home.
Strachey, the biographical pioneer associated with the Bloomsbury group, was devoted to replacing, as he put it, "the two fat volumes … with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric" by which the recently dead had typically been commemorated. His ambition was one of wit and psychological motivation. In practice, he put the bitchy in biography, filling his portraits with taunts and insinuations. It's pretty fun.
"Eminent Victorians" consists of four sections: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, and General Gordon. Strachey attempted to undercut the reverence the Edwardians felt for these stolid Victorians and to show them as humans—in fact, as especially hypocritical, blinkered humans. There is a fair bit of malice in his tone. Of Cardinal Manning: "Power had come to him at last; and he seized it with all the avidity of a born autocrat, whose appetite for supreme dominion had been whetted by long years of enforced abstinence and the hated simulations of submission. He was the ruler of Roman Catholic England, and he would rule." Not exactly Kitty Kelley, but close enough for the period.
Of course, I had never heard of Cardinal Manning. Just Florence Nightingale, and maybe General Gordon—something about Khartoum. I often find myself reading these kinds of books, where not only do I not know the protagonist but I don't know the milieu, the references, or any of the other groundwork the author assumes of his or her reader. I like piecing these things together. For a time, I subscribed to Tape Op, "the creative music recording magazine." I didn't know much about recording music, creatively or un-, but I enjoyed slowly rendering sense from the jumble of tossed-off technical references. Then you have something—self-made knowledge, almost.
—Willing Davidson
George Packer is right to question Amazon's effect on the publishing and book-selling industries, and those with a Three Lives or a Bonnie Slotnick or a Tattered Cover around the corner—or even across town—should peruse them or lose them. But for those us who live in places where the books we want are not available—Packer touches on the point, writing, "Readers, especially isolated ones, adored Amazon"—the importance of Amazon cannot be understated. I live in Switzerland, and Amazon is a lifeline. No one else is coming to give us "French Lessons," Alice Kaplan's 1994 memoir of language assimilation, or Rebecca Mead's "My Life in Middlemarch," the day it comes out. I know I'm late to the Kindle game, but one showed up under the tree at Christmas, and, since then, I've been on a tear. Already I've bought, read, and been moved by more books than I did at the bookstore all of last year.
And, so: "Men We Reaped," Jesmyn Ward's account of the way America withers and bleeds black families, especially their young men, five of whom—one of them her brother—died in her Mississippi hometown between 2000 and 2004. "Little Failure," Gary Shteyngart's ode to/purge of his mother's chicken Kiev. "Comfort & Joy," by India Knight, the perfect deep-masquerading-as-light novel for a flight. A book you should read anywhere but on a plane: "The Skies Belong To Us," by Brendan I. Koerner, in which I learned that in 1972 a hundred and fifty-nine commercial flights where hijacked in the United States, by "frazzled veterans, chronic fabulists, compulsive gamblers, bankrupt businessmen, thwarted academics, career felons, and even lovesick teens."
Anita Brookner's moody "Hotel du Lac" ("I had her down as a Belgian confectioner's widow"). "The Collaborator," another brilliant Alice Kaplan, about the emblematic trial and execution of the French collaborationist journalist Robert Brasillach. "Wave," by Sonali Deraniyagala: shattering. Dana Goodyear's "Anything That Moves," delicious. "Keep It Simple," an old Alastair Little cookbook that made me wish he would open another restaurant (if you want tangerine peel in the daube de boeuf, do it yourself!).
"Five Days at Memorial," Sheri Fink's exhaustive investigation of the logistical and moral tumult that consumed a hospital during Hurricane Katrina. "Red Love"—O.K., I bought this one at Daunt Books, in London—in which Maxim Leo examines his childhood in a true-believing family in the G.D.R. George Packer's own study of American inequality, "The Unwinding," which I particularly admire for offering as nuanced a portrait of my home state, North Carolina, as I have read.
Balzac may have the final word on the Amazon age, in "Le Père Goriot," translated by A. J. Krailsheimer:
Eugène de Rastignac, for such was his name, was one of those young men trained by poverty for hard work, who realize from their earliest youth what their parents expect of them, and from the start prepare for a successful career by working out the scope of their studies, adapting them in advance to future trends in society so they can be the first to exploit it.
—Lauren Collins
In honor of Fashion Week, I've been perusing the delectable "I Am Dandy: The Return of the Elegant Gentleman"—a book of photographs with accompanying profiles of men who take great care over their clothes. The project was a collaboration between Nathaniel Adams, a journalist who manages the bespoke men's atelier Against Nature (it's the English translation of the novel "À Rebours," by Joris-Karl Huysmans—about an elegant man who arranges himself and his house as a series of exquisite tableaus) and Rose Callahan, a photographer and filmmaker, who runs the blog The Dandy Portraits.
Adams has been researching the history of dandies for years, beginning with Beau Brummell, a nineteenth-century wit and confidant of King George IV, who banished the frilly collar and replaced it with the clean white cravat accented with a gold pin. "Byron said that the three most important men of his age were Napoleon, Byron himself, and Brummell, and that, of the three, Brummell was the one that he wanted to be," Adams told me one day, when I visited his store. Adams searched for other characters in Brummell's lineage: "There's Oscar Wilde, obviously, but there's also people like young Benjamin Disraeli, and Alfred d'Orsay," a Frenchman who lived in a ménage à trois with a couple of eccentric Irish aristocrats, decorating their various houses with halls of mirrors and elaborate red silks. "Most of them were outsiders—Disraeli was a Jew, Wilde was gay Irish—who sort of found their way inside, quite high on the social ladder, through creating these elegant personas."
Sensing an upsurge of interest among men in spiffing up their dress, Adams and Callahan travelled to London, Paris, Italy, and around the United States in search of contemporary dandies. They visited the Churchwell brothers, two doctors from Memphis who learned how to dress from their father, the first black civil-rights reporter at the Nashville Banner. For ten years, he wasn't given a desk at the paper, so he worked from home, dressing in a pressed suit each morning; the brothers appear in the book in handsome tan and dusky-blue bespoke suits. Robert Burton, of Ozone Park, Queens, is a soft-faced, heavily made-up, sorrowful-looking man who wears "a green frock coat affixed with small songbirds." The men's styles vary wildly. Sean Crowly, of Brooklyn, collects clothes and objects from Regency England, and is pictured in a robe with his large collection of spirits; Robert E. Bryan, former men's editor at W, has nothing in his house that isn't Art Deco.
Dandies come in many types, Adams told me. "There's the colloquial well-dressed man—everyone in the book fits into that definition. And then there's another kind, which is hard to define—it involves attitude, insouciance, aloofness. The one common thread is that these men couldn't exist any other way. If they were on a desert island they'd be polishing their shoes in squid ink and using fish scales for tie pins."
—Sasha Weiss
Photograph by Time Life Pictures/Mansell/Getty.
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