Category: Literature

Walter Scott in his study, with a cat

Sir Walter Scott’s home, Abbotsford, is an enchanting place. I was not surprised on my visit to Abbotsford to see that he had cats, including a favorite cat, Hinse, whose portrait is among the many portraits in Abbotsford’s armoury room. I said to Ken that any writer who has cats is going to write about cats. I had no particular memory of cats appearing in any of the eleven Waverley novels I’ve read, so I had to do some research.

What I wanted was for Scott to be as much a cat person as Robert A. Heinlein, whose novel The Door Into Summer starts ands ends with a cat. Scott, it seems, was not as much a cat person as was Heinlein. But Scott’s The Antiquary has several mentions of cats.

If there is a character in Scott’s novels who is most like Scott himself, that would be Jonathan Oldbuck in The Antiquary. Oldbuck has a cat. The cat is not given a name and mostly serves as atmosphere, sitting on a table in Oldbuck’s study the same way Hinse sat on Scott’s writing desk at Abbotsford, and sitting in a chair in Oldbuck’s dining room.

Washington Irving visited Scott at Abbotsford and wrote this about Scott:

While Scott was reading, the sage grimalkin, already mentioned, had taken his seat in a chair beside the fire, and remained with fixed eye and grave demeanor, as if listening to the reader. I observed to Scott that his cat seemed to have a black-letter taste in literature.

“Our grimalkin here,” added Scott, “sometimes reminds me of the story, by the airs of sovereignty which he assumes; and I am apt to treat him with respect from the idea that he may be a great prince incog., and may some time or other come to the throne.”

⬆︎ Hinse

⬆︎ Oldbuck in his study

⬆︎ Oldbuck at breakfast

⬆︎ Abbotsford

⬆︎ And for the record, here’s a photo of Ken and me in a pub in Edinburgh, after we’d been to a lecture at the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club.

The Iliad. Translated by Emily Wilson. Norton, 2023. 848 pages.

Sixty pages of the Iliad was all I could handle. Reading Homer is thought to be edifying. I did not find it edifying. I found it boring. The mortals (at least in the first sixty pages) all are idiots, all behaving badly — vain, blind, belligerent, conniving, and mean. The gods are even worse. The mortals are hyperactive and volatile. The gods are lazy. I often have said that dysfunction and foible do not make good stories. If there is a quest in the Iliad, it’s crushing and looting Troy, just for the heck of it. What an edifying goal!

Stories require villains, but there’d better be at least one character per story whom we actually can like. No such character appears in the first sixty pages of the Iliad.

Of course I understand why reading the Iliad is thought to be edifying. To be able to read the ancient Greek would be very edifying. But translations not so much.

I tried to remind myself that the Iliad was 300 or 400 years old in Plato’s time. It’s not surprising that it is so primitive.

I do think, though, that this new translation of the Iliad is a good book to have on the shelf as a reference. There is a long list of characters at the back of the book that would serve as an excellent reference on Greek mythology. There are extensive notes nicely keyed to the verse. The notes explain many of the symbols and allusions, things that only Greek scholars would know. To me, the notes are more edifying and illuminating than the text itself.

There is a fascinating clash between Greek philosophy, with its wisdom, and Greek mythology, with its foolishness. From what little I know about Greek history, it was inspired more by foolishness than by wisdom. Reading about the Peloponnesian War, which was complete folly, will break your heart. Foolish gods, perhaps, drive foolish projects.

Having flung the Iliad, I’ve started on a guaranteed good read — Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop. I may have read it many years ago, but if I did I don’t remember anything about it. Many of Dickens’ novels were serialized — The Old Curiosity Shop, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, Barnaby Rudge, Nicholas Nickleby. These are my favorite Dickenses, though I love David Copperfield and have read it several times.

It’s a shame that nobody serializes novels anymore, because serialization requires that the writer make each installment compelling in itself, so that the reader is eager for more and desperate to know what happens next. A serialized novel probably will be a hot read, and we all love hot reads. The only modern serialized novels that I can’t think of are Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City novels, which were serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle (and briefly in the San Francisco Examiner after Maupin had a spat with the Chronicle’s editors).

Novels don’t have to be masterpieces to be worthwhile, especially if, like me, you read for escape and thus prefer novels that are set in another time and another place rather than the here and now. C.J. Sansom (who died in April), was very popular, as he deserves to be.

Sansom’s Shardrake character is a solicitor in London during the time of Henry VIII. Shardrake is a hunchback, accustomed to being stared at and made fun of, though he is a gentleman. Sansom’s plots are mysteries, and they tend to be a little wooly and complicated, as they need to be if a novel goes on for more than 600 pages. But what I like best about the Shardrake novels (I have read five of them and will read the other two) is Sansom’s evocation of Tudor England. We travel all over London on foot, on horseback, and in boats on the Thames. Sovereign takes us to Yorkshire, by horse on the way up from London and by ship on the way back. Heartstone takes us to Portsmouth in July of 1545, a date you’ll be familiar with if you know what happened to Henry’s beloved ship the Mary Rose.

Sansom reminds me a bit of Winston Graham, though Sansom is not nearly as good a writer as Graham. Like Graham’s Poldark character, Shardrake is a man ahead of his time who loves justice rather than power. That is a danger. Sansom makes it quite clear how dangerous the Tudor period was, not only for those close to the court who lost their heads, but also for the ordinary people who got crossways with a divided church that was just as cruel and dangerous as Henry. Historians give estimates that vary widely, but it seems that 57,000 to 72,000 people were executed while Henry VIII was king. Sansom’s Henry VIII is a repulsive character. Other characters such as Thomas Cromwell are more complex.

At the risk of making everything political, Sansom reminds us (as does Winston Graham) how hard it can be to be ahead of the times one lives in. We are joined to such people in the past by a kind of invisible thread. We identify with them. There can be no real compensation for those who lived through the many horrors of history. Historical novels serve an important purpose by helping us to never forget.

What is it about Alexander that continues to fascinate us? Wasn’t he just another ruthless conquerer? Or did he, in a mere ten years, leave the Mediterranean more civilized than he found it, setting the stage for the classical age, and changing the course of Western culture, by humbling the Persians and elevating the Greeks?

Historical docudramas are not usually of this quality. The drama is excellent. The mysterious English actor Buck Braithwaite was born to play the Alexander role. The scholars are very good.

This is a six-part series that quickly became very popular on Netflix. You can watch the trailer here.

Starting in 1910, books in the Tom Swift series (written for teenagers) have sold more than 30 million copies, according to the Wikipedia article. And yet I don’t recall ever having seen a Tom Swift book in a (used) bookstore until yesterday. My brother had six or eight of the 1954 series, so when I saw the blue denim cover in the store I recognized it immediately as a Tom Swift book.

I also had no idea that the Tom Swift series of books continued until 2019. I can see on eBay that the older books are highly collectible. They’re inexpensive because there are so many copies extant. I’m not sentimental enough about the Tom Swift books to collect them. I read them, I think, when I was a little too young (eleven or twelve), and they didn’t make a great impression on me. Still, they’re classic nerd fiction, and, as the Wikipedia article points out, the books inspired several generations of engineers and scientists.

⬆︎ There actually was never an author named Victor Appleton. That was a pseudonym that the publisher used for multiple authors, some of whom were women. According to Wikipedia, the 1954 series were written by Harriet Adams, who was the daughter of Edward Stratemeyer, who originally conceived the Tom Swift series starting in 1910.

⬇︎ A Danish word we all should know

I love dictionaries, and I always check out dictionaries when shopping through used books. This Danish dictionary, because of its beautiful bright red cover, almost jumped off the shelf into my hands. I know exactly one word of Danish — hygge.

If you hear a Danish person say this word, it will sound like “hooga,” or “hugga.” Thus I have no idea why it is spelled with a “y.” The Danish word hygge is surely related to our English word hug. Webster’s gives the source of the English hug as an Old Norse word, hugga, meaning “soothe.” The Oxford English Dictionary, on the other hand, is wishy-washy. It says that hug appeared in English in the 16th Century but that the origin is unknown. The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford, 1966) seems to agree with Webster’s. It says that hug is probably of Scandinavian origin and also mentions an Old English relative, hyge, meaning mind, heart, or mood.

The OED’s caution notwithstanding, it seems pretty obvious that hygge and hug are related — the sound, as well as the meaning, as well as the geography. But maybe the OED couldn’t find a source to prove it. I don’t know. I hope they’re still arguing about it at Oxford.

I can testify that the Danish are very serious about the concept of hygge. I got to know a lot of Danes because I helped install a Danish publishing system at the San Francisco Chronicle. I’ve also made a couple of trips to Aarhus. Once, in a training session on the Danish publishing system, the Danish instructor spent at least twenty minutes talking about hygge. I suspect that part of his motivation was to explain to workaholic Americans why holidays and private time are so sacred to Danes, especially in winter. Newspaper people are accustomed to working on Christmas day, because daily newspapers don’t take a day off. But Danes on Christmas day, the instructor said, “are home having hygge.” The word conveys physical comfort, as in warmth; and it also conveys emotional comfort, as in family and friends, conviviality, food and drink.

I would assume, since this dictionary was printed in Denmark (in 2002, first edition 1995), that its purpose was to serve as reference for native speakers of Danish who work with English. The sound of Danish is completely incomprehensible to me, but as I browse through the dictionary, I see can see from written Danish that Danish and English have many more cognates than I would have guessed. And though my ear can’t hear the connection, in writing the relationship between German and Danish is pretty obvious.

⬇︎ The Black Dwarf

One of the things that keeps me interested in Sir Walter Scott is the gothic atmosphere. The Black Dwarf is rich with gothic atmosphere — moors and bogs in the dark of night, spectres by moonlight that may or may not be real. Still, this novel has a simple and well worn plot. It’s one of the early Waverley novels, 1817.

My next adventure with Sir Walter Scott is Castle Dangerous, 1831, which was the last of the Waverley novels.