“THESE ARE NO HEAVY BIOGRAPHIES.”

Featherweight and fiction-heavy, the potboilers and bodice-rippers that line our summer picnic baskets and beach bags have been around longer than you might imagine:

Today, this 19th-century focus on lightness seems amusingly explicit. But while these days we take holiday reading for granted, those all-caps advertising claims reflected what were then relatively new theories of vacationing. Each trip needed to be both relaxing and fun, if for no other reason than to prepare you to work harder, once your vacation ended. In the same way, readers in the second half of the 19th century wanted their vacation reads to be effortless. The Chicago Tribune, just before it unveiled its favorite summer reads for 1872, put it this way: The best summer book was one “the idler can take with him into solitude, and read with delightful pauses, when with indolent finger upon the page, his eye wanders up some green vista, or catches some view of the distant sea, and his ear is soothed with the distant murmur of the winds and waves.”

In distinctly American fashion, even our vacation idleness was carefully planned to maximize utility: We work hard and must, therefore, rest harder. The nineteenth century’s Dan Browns and Daniel Steels walked that formula briskly to the bank.

And then, briefly, came the scolds:

For summer resorts, this led to a new commitment to virtuous and proper vacationing. (Towns along the Jersey Shore began posting the following notice: “Do not go through the streets in bathing costumes. It is coarse and vulgar, and is in violation of the city ordnance.”) And in terms of summer reading, it led to a backlash against purely pleasurable books. “It has come to be an accepted notion that in summer a person’s reading must be as light as his hat and as thin as his coat,” one critic observed in the Globe in 1890. “This belief is largely responsible for the vast amount of utterly empty literature that is dumped upon the newsstands and book counters of the country.”

This critic went on to bash both summer readers (“People who read summer literature in the summer read it all the time”) and summer reading (“Such books paralyze thought, sap the intellect, and, in time, drain the brain as empty as themselves”). Similar articles cropped up everywhere: Summer reading was now too slight, too wasteful, too enfeebling, no matter how warm the weather.

Poll a random section of the Ocean City beachfront in July. Tell me who won that culture war.

The Bloody 1600s

Ron Rosenbaum interviews Bernard Bailyn, and they talk about the violent, tumultuous first century of English life in North America. But there’s a lot more than that up for discussion. Native religiosity:

“Their world was multitudinous, densely populated by active, sentient and sensitive spirits, spirits with consciences, memories and purposes, that surround them, instructed them, impinged on their lives at every turn. No less real for being invisible…the whole of life was a spiritual enterprise…the universe in all its movements and animations and nature was suffused with spiritual potency.”

Puritan economic theory:

Free market theory dictates there should be only one motive in economic culture: getting the max. But early colonists integrated piety and humility into their economic lives. Spiritual considerations. One of his favorite stories is about the English merchant who couldn’t stop confessing the sin of overcharging.

“Robert Keayne,” he recalls, “was a very, very proper Puritan tradesman from London who made it big and set up trade here and then got caught for overpricing.”

“The guy who made a big apology?” I ask, recalling the peculiar episode from his book.

“He wrote endlessly, compulsively,” of his remorse, Bailyn replies.

The awesomeness of Roger Williams:

Bailyn’s description of the many contradictory aspects of Williams’ character stayed with me. A zealot, but tolerant. An outcast, but a self-outcast. Willing to be seen as a “nut case” in his time. A visionary sense of the way to a better future in that dark century. So much of the American character, like Williams, emerges from the barbarous years. And that century has left its stamp on us. Not the “zealous nut case” part, though that’s there. I’m thinking of that compound word Bailyn likes about Williams: “unlamb-like.” That’s us.

Reading and Writing the Royal Body

Here’s a literary history of an ugly man and his interpreters. The man is Richard Crookback, the third of that name, last of the Plantagenets, who was probably not so bad as he’s made out to be and whose skeleton was recently dug out from under a parking lot in the East Midlands. The interpreters were Polydore Vergil, Sir Thomas More, Shakespeare, and a few others. Everybody had something to say about the man with the bent back, and it was usually unflattering:

If Shakespeare can be absolved of inventing the “bunchbacked” Richard through deliberate manipulation of his sources, it is doubtless true that he exaggerates physical details. Early chroniclers such as Polydore Vergil had emphasized that Richard lived with a “misshapen” body (“corpore deformi”) but in Shakespeare the imagined hump becomes a “mountain”. Other details which increase the Shakespearean Richard’s monstrosity have received less attention. Whereas John Rous reports that Richard was retained in his mother’s womb for two years (“biennio matris utero tentus”), Shakespeare has him born prematurely, “Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time / Into this breathing world, scarce half made up” (Richard III, 1.i).

I’m ashamed to admit that I was surprised by how clearly Richard’s scoliosis was visible in the lay of his spine. I’m no archeologist, though.

Consider the Luddite.

This isn’t about history, but I’ll write it anyway.

Here’s Dan Stevens on the ubiquity of hi-tech and the approaching singularity:

‘Drop by drop’, as Chekhov wrote, we ‘squeeze the slave’ from ourselves: our roles become ever more prescribed by the technology we have created and perpetuated, and consequently our introspection increases. The network and its resulting gadgetry is now such an inextricable part of our lives and is so entwined with our evolution that instead of it distancing us from ourselves it is forcefully reminding us that we exist and, hopefully, awakening us as to why we exist. […]

In his 1950 paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ the mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing upgraded his initially proposed question, ‘Can a computer think?’ to ‘Can a computer do what we (as thinking entities) can do?’ Now that the answer to that question is almost ubiquitously ‘yes’, the questions we face are ‘What is it we can do that the machine can’t?’; ‘What is it the machine may never be able to do?’ Go to the toilet? To laugh? Perhaps to love?

This reminds me of a recent Smart Set gaze-at-the-navel on the really real point behind Luddism (which, in this interpretation, was to rage against the dying of the light or some such other primal expression of frustration):

Perhaps one of those people shooting at the clocks in 1830 was a disgruntled French textile worker. These workers were in the same position as the stocking framers of the Luddite rebellion. They were being pushed into poverty and degradation by the technological progress of the industrial revolution. All of these workers were trying to figure out what to do in the face of the tremendous change being wrought by the industrial revolution in early 19th century Europe.

We’re looking for – and perhaps failing to find – a place for our poor, fleshy selves in a future defined by machines that will have surpassed us. In that sense, we’re all Luddites now. Ours is a particularly mild, iPhone-equipped variety of the philosophy, but it’s shot through with the same sort of emotion: We don’t know where we belong or if we have any value anymore. We want to stop the clocks. Stevens represents (or seems to, anyway) a hopeful strain of human exceptionalism. We can love, and poop, and poetize, etc., so there may be a nice fleshy corner reserved for us in the coming Brave New Digital World. We won’t be totally obsolete, and we might even enjoy the experience of partial obsolescence, given that the machines will have robbed us only of the uninspiring workaday distractions that keep us all from manifesting the Picasso or Wilde within. Suddenly The Matrix is transformed in a global pleasure palace of infinite leisure time in which all the hard, dirty work is performed by the machines. Why the super-intelligent machines would be content with this arrangement is anyone’s guess.

All of this sounds ridiculous and pollyannaish, though I’m sure that if you described the 21st-century middle class to an 18th-century peasant, he would probably call that “ridiculous and pollyannaish,” too. Or whatever term they used to signify ridiculous pollyannaism. But that’s beside the point, because I’m not convinced of the premise that we could make or appreciate ballet and poetry and fine literature in a world where making and appreciating ballet and poetry and fine literature was all that was asked of us. Workaday drudgery, broadly defined as the set of tasks that could be performed by a reasonably advanced computer system, is the sandpaper that grinds us down into the sorts of people who have things to paint, write, dance, and think about. Who will write the next Down and Out in Paris and London when nobody is down or out in Paris, London, or anywhere else anymore? And if we can’t write Down and Out anymore, what will we write? And will it be worth reading? Leisure is dandy and useful, but sybaritism is dull.

I’m not trying to put lipstick on the pig of poverty and mortality here – just to suggest that the human capacity for roles that humans, “uniquely, can fill” begs for context. Perhaps our ability to fill those roles well depends on our responsibility to fill all other sorts of less glamorous roles, too. As we lose those roles, we lose something of ourselves.

About Django

This here is a blog about history, and so it must have a post about Django Unchained (which I watched and enjoyed). I’ll put this up at the outset: I was not particularly bothered by the (over)use of the N-word. I don’t know why Tarantino likes using it. He’s a deliberate artist; I suppose he must have a reason, good or bad. I don’t know if it’s ethically problematic. My sense is that it isn’t. Perhaps the answer will depend on who you ask, and there’s no objective fact of the matter at all. It’s a tired argument, and it distracts us from the real problem with Django, which Jelani Cobb describes admirably well:

Here, as in “Lincoln,” black people—with the exception of the protagonist and his love interest—are ciphers passively awaiting freedom. Django’s behavior is so unrepentantly badass as to make him an enigma to both whites and blacks who encounter him. For his part, Django never deigns to offer a civil word to any other slave, save his love interest. In a climactic scene, Django informs his happily enslaved nemesis that he is the one n-word in ten thousand audacious enough to kill anyone standing in the way of freedom.

Is this how Americans actually perceive slavery? More often than not, the answer to that question is answered in the affirmative. It is precisely because of the extant mythology of black subservience that these scenes pack such a cathartic payload. The film’s defenders are quick to point out that “Django” is not about history. But that’s almost like arguing that fiction is not reality—it isn’t, but the entire appeal of the former is its capacity to shed light on how we understand the latter. In my sixteen years of teaching African-American history, one sadly common theme has been the number of black students who shy away from courses dealing with slavery out of shame that slaves never fought back.

It seems almost pedantic to point out that slavery was nothing like this.

Django is a revisionist revenge fantasy set in the antebellum South – just as Inglourious Basterds was a revisionist revenge fantasy set in Nazi-occupied Europe. Implicit in the “revisionist” label is the claim that what happens on screen parts in significant ways with what happened in history. In Django‘s case, it doesn’t. At least, not as much as some might think.

In the interest of fairness and giving equal time, here’s Adam Serwer, defending the film as a much-needed cinematic purgative after decades of balefully pro-Confederate “revenge westerns”:

Django is an inversion of the genre, where the loner seeking revenge is a former slave instead of a former Confederate; where the alien savages who stole his life from him are white, as is the sidekick with the nonexistent past: Tarantino hasn’t simply flipped the notion of a Western hero, he’s even given him an inverted Magical Negro sidekick in the character of King Shultz, a German abolitionist bounty hunter who appears out of the ether to free Django, and dies to facilitate his revenge—much as the death of Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) sets off Clint Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven.

Oh, and “mandingo fighting”? It warn’t a real thing.

Lincoln’s “Literary Low Road”

Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals) has been screening for a while now at a theater near you, and a few red words have left some reviewers all ablush. Writers are discussing whether Lincoln and his associates actually had the potty mouths attributed to them in the film. From The Hollywood Reporter:

Movieguide, which reviews films from a Christian perspective, says there are about 40 obscenities in the PG-13 Lincoln,including 10 uses of “goddamn.” Similarly, the Dove Foundation laments that “the language they feature in the film … does not line up with the morals and language of the time period.”

But Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the source book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, begs to differ. “I saw pretty much every draft of the script and never had a problem with the language,” she tells THR. In fact, she recalls advising screenwriter Tony Kushner to include Lincoln telling a favorite story that includes the word “shit.”

Still, while Lincoln was known to relate off-color anecdotes, it’s unlikely he cussed as much as in Lincoln, says James McPherson, a Lincoln biographer and consultant on the film, who adds that the portrayal of profanity used around Lincoln — such as when lobbyist W.N. Bilbo (James Spader) says “f—” when meeting him — also is unrealistic.

I wanted to hold off on writing about this until I had seen the film. Now I have. The language seemed mild to me (those reviews “from a Christian perspective” are worth what you pay for them), but that’s relative to a standard coarsened by contemporary English. We’re always swearing, and the leveling spirit of our age perhaps drives us to believe that past generations did the same – even among the powerful, the literate, the well-educated. Accurate or not, it’s an understandable humanizing tactic.

I don’t pretend to know whether Lincoln and his associates swore much in private, and I don’t think it’s an important question. It does, however, get at a larger point about the coarseness of Lincoln’s time and place and a seedy, lesser-known aspect of his personality. Even when popular histories emphasize his folksy western wisdom, they rarely capture just how ribald and crude Lincoln could be. He was the product of a rough-hewn historical moment in which sex, the body, and the profane in general were common topics of conversation. We’re talking about stuff that makes the occasional F-bombs in Lincoln seem, if anything, like a bowdlerization of the facts.

Here’s Fred Kaplan, in Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer:

The humor of [a poem Lincoln wrote in 1829] was profane and obscene, a semi-doggerel version of the barnyard anecdotes that became a staple of Lincoln’s storytelling. From the start, he was attracted to off-color jokes. Earthy, naturalistic, and frank, he told stories and used language considered appropriate only for male ears. His comic depictions of what happens when two people of the same sex are bedded has a heterodox clarity that reveals his familiarity with bodily realities and a subversive edge that provides a touch of titillation. John Romaine recalled one verse: “Reuben and Charles have married 2 girls / But Billy has married a boy … Billy and natty agree very well / Mamma is pleased with the match. / The Egg is laid but won’t hatch.” And Billy, another Grigsby son, is told by the woman who has rejected his marriage proposal, “you Cursed ball head / My Suitor you never can be / besides your low Croch proclaims you a botch / and that never can anser for me.” [all sic]

Sterility, impotence, and physical inadequacy, subjects rarely discussed in the Victorian parlor, were suitable but scandalous ploys in the kind of rough satire that Lincoln wrote, and jokes about such subjects were part of the usual repartee of male frontier life. There was nothing pure, let alone refined, about the young writer. He took great pleasure in the literary low road. It suited the time, the situation, and the audience. As part of its appeal, the “Chronicles” flouted decorum in the tradition of Carnival, when license is granted to speak and act transgressively. Mock marriages were a staple of the discourse, and Lincoln apparently enjoyed the widely expressed frontier humor about same-sex relationships. […]

There was now no doubt that they had a prodigy among them, and one with a talent for the literary low road, for common speech and down-to-earth language, for obscenity and comic frankness, as well as for intellectual intensity and Enlightenment rationality.

How much of this was the expression of a permanently warped, wild mind and how much of it was just the product of testosterone-addled adolescence is hard to say. Lincoln wasn’t writing much doggerel in White House, but old habits do die hard.

Wait for it…

Novelist Lee Child’s New York Times column about creating suspense in fiction contains a nifty anecdote about the evolution of narrative and style in 1980s television:

What almost no one had in 1980 and almost everyone had in 1990 was a remote control. Previously, at the end of a segment or a program, we could be fairly sure the viewer wouldn’t change the channel on a whim, because changing the channel required the viewer to get off the sofa and cross the room. But afterward, changing the channel was easy, which was very dangerous for an audience-hungry station.

So how did we respond? (Notice the structure here? Wait for it!) We started asking questions before the commercials, and answering them afterward.

For instance, heading toward a movie review program, I remember we asked: Who was the studio’s first choice for the Harry Callahan role in “Dirty Harry”?

We knew most viewers would be intrigued. (What, Clint Eastwood wasn’t the first choice?) But — and this was the lesson — the success of the tactic didn’t depend on intrigue. Even viewers with no interest at all stuck around to find out. Humans are hard-wired. They need to know. Even viewers who knew the answer for sure stuck around, in order to be gratified. The gap was bridged, and the danger averted. (It was Frank Sinatra. You waited, right?)

You can infer from this passage that Child’s favored technique for suspense creation is to ask a question and then delay the answer. Works pretty well.

Ruth Dyer, you forgot to finish your crossword puzzle.

On a lark, I bought a 1921 copy of Allen’s Antonyms and Synonyms several years ago. The book is both gorgeous and more useful than you’d imagine a relatively small 91 year-old thesaurus could be. (“Bibulate” is an archaic synonym for “drink.” The more you know.)

The flyleaf has a signature reading “Ruth Dyer. Dec. 25 – 1924.” That caught my attention well enough, but I later flipped to page 178 and found this inserted as a bookmark:

It’s a clipping from a Pasadena, CA, newspaper (perhaps the Star-News). Exact date unknown, though it was published shortly after the Presidential election of 1924. There’s a portion of an article on the reverse describing the politics of Pasadena’s “colored voters,” who were then “getting out of the beaten path” of loyalty to the Republican Party. “While the masses of the colored people,” the Reverend J.M. Brown wrote, “are republican and stood almost as a unit for Coolidge, there were exceptions.” There’s also a nugget of James W. Foley doggerel about how you reap what you sow.

What really bowled me over, though, was the half-finished crossword. Ms. Dyer had jotted in a few answers in pencil (to clues whose cultural context are so alien to me that I wouldn’t have been able to complete a quarter of the puzzle) and then stopped and used it as a bookmark between “febrifuge” and “felicity.” The crease is so sharp that I wonder if she ever touched the clipping a second time. Eighty-eight years later, it’s still there.

A Tale in Two Pictures

From the bookstore at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which is running two good exhibitions on the War of 1812 and “The Civil War and American Art” (lots of Winslow Homer and such like):

From the sidewalk bargain bin at a used book shop in DC:

Historical literature is a many-splendored thing.