#95 Margery Kempe – How to be a Medieval Woman

I started this book in a lighthearted frame of mind. Margery Kempe was a merchant’s wife from the town of N. living in fifteenth century East Anglia, who left an account of her days. Two things about her are immediately obvious. The first is that she is very, very interested in Jesus.

Lord Jesus Christ appeared to this creature [Margery] … and he said to her these words ‘Daughter, why have you forsaken me when I never forsook you?’ And as soon as he had said these words she saw how the air opened up as bright as any lightning, and he ascended up into the air.

The second is that, pretty much wherever she goes, she immediately and catastrophically falls out with everyone she meets. This includes people in her home town, magistrates, top churchmen in Canterbury, and pretty much everyone whom she meets in the book. She falls in with a bunch of pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem, who repeatedly try to get rid of her – not letting her join them o her ship, not letting her come with them to visit holy sites, trying to bar her from their return journey.

And when our Lord had brought them all to Venice again in safety, her fellow countrymen abandoned her and went off, leaving her alone. And some of them said they would not go with her for a hundred pounds.

This amused me, because any of my family members reading this blog will be aware that I have a relative in the town of N, who is also very fond of Jesus and has a habit of falling out with many of the people whom she meets. You can’t shake the sense that time goes by and nothing changes.

But then as the book went on, I got more of a sense of Margery’s situation. This is not eccentricity, in the manner of my family-member, but outright mental illness. She describes her visions, where she is convinced that she has become married to Jesus, or that tell her she now must not eat meat, or that she is now allowed to eat whatever she wants provided that she ceases to sleep with her husband. Later, she describes one tormenting vision, which shows this is no game:

She saw, as she really thought, various men of religion, priest and many others, both heathen and Christian, coming before her eyes as she could not avoid them or put them out of her sight, and showing her their naked genitals. And with that the devil ordered her in her mind to choose which of them she would have first, and must prostitute herself to them all.

You realise that this isn’t faith; this is probably schizophrenia. And also that, having crossed paths with the devout mayor of Leicester, Margery is going to go on trial for heresy. And if she loses, she will be burnt at the stake.

So a different person I know came to mind. I have a team member who has problems with mental illness, and not subtle ones. She can be one of the best workers that we have, and will rush into all manner of tasks and come up with some incredibly clever answers. She’s a powerful asset, but I remember once reflecting that if we were living 500 years ago, her differences would fill people with fear or cruelty; I could imagine the rumours swirling that she was casting the evil eye on people, or spoiling the milk. Her life would have been a cycle of torment. For a moment, I felt honoured to be part of an age where she was safe.

Margery was not. Instead, she lived in a time where madness was put in the language of religion, and where religion to an extent took on the language of madness. Margery’s visions wove in and out of the sanctioned theology of the church. Her sincere madness left her to be classed as either a visionary or a demoniac, and without anyone being qualified to tell exactly which.

And then the steward said: ‘You shall tell me whether you get this talk from god or from the devil, or else you shall go to prison.’
‘Sir’, she said, ‘I am not afraid to go to prison for my Lord’s love, who suffered much more for my love than I may for his. I pray to you, do as you think best’.
…[Having decided to send her back to gaol for later trial he remarked] ‘Either you are a truly good woman or a truly wicked woman’

The chilling implication is that a sane man in this era, faced with mental illness, could not distinguish it from faith. Theologically-compliant insanity was accepted as as the work of God, and therefore became something that transcended the rules of evidence and became unchallengeable truth.

But the flip-side of this was that any madness that didn’t match what was required was threatening the foundations of a great institution, and would face the full murderous power of the church. The first people to suffer from this were those whose madness lacked the fortune to chime with the age.  In that world, the thing that differentiated the sanctioned saint and the charred remnants of a heretic was not the soundness of the mind, but the order in which the words spilled out of it.

Margery Kempe wasn’t burnt at the stake. Instead, to prove my point, she’s now seen as a Christian mystic and is practically a saint in some parts of the Anglican church. It seems that luck was on her side. But reading this, I wonder how the story ended for those for whom it wasn’t.

#87 Fyodor Dostoyevsky – White Nights

It’s hard to escape the conclusion, going through these series, that the secret to a happy life is very simple – don’t live in nineteenth century Russia. (Though, now I think about it, living in twentieth century Russia wasn’t really an improvement). And you don’t turn to Dostoyevsky for giggles.

Yet even the darkest authors are capable of light; and in White Nights the brooding Russian turns in a strange kind of love story. Our unnamed narrator, a socially maladroit young man who spends his time perambulating Petersburg, manages to save a young girl from a ruffian in the street. He escorts her home and the two of them get talking.

Our narrator does not meet many girls, or many people for that matter. Actually having a chance to have a conversation leads him to unburden himself of all the thoughts that have been building up inside of him.

“A dreamer – [I continued] – is not a man, but some sort of sexless being, you see. For the most part he makes his home somewhere in an inaccessible corner, as if he were hiding even from the light of day, and once he goes into hiding, he sticks to his corner, like a snail …”

If you think this lacks something as a chat-up routine, be aware that it also goes on for thirteen pages, more than half of it as a single paragraph.

The girl, Nastenka, suffers a different sort of loneliness. Young and beautiful, she is normally kept remorselessly at home by her blind grandmother, who literally pins the girl to her dress in order to prevent her wandering off. She has no company and society outside of this three-room house.

The story demands that romance blossoms; and unsurprisingly it does. To make sure that things stay appropriately miserable, the author has already committed Nastenka’s heart to the only other man she knows – their lodger, who has been away from the city this past year and has failed to show up when promised. But this is no barrier to our narrator; or indeed to the despairing Nastenka who sees a second-class salvation in him.

I don’t normally fall for literary romance. (I get told off for saying that Middlemarch could have been over in half the time with everyone happy, if Dorothea had just married Lydgate). There’s something a little dull about literary romance when the author has loaded the dice in its favour. But here, where you have two so visibly flawed and vulnerable characters, you get the sense that the game is being played for real stakes. You actually feel for both of them when Nastenka tries to figure out how to respond to the narrator’s proposal of marriage.

If, despite the fact I love him (no, loved him), if despite that, you will still say … if you feel that your love is so great that I may in the end drive out from my heart the former… if you wish to take pity on me, if you don’t wish to leave me alone to my fate, without consolation, without hope, if you wish to love me always as you now love me, then I swear that gratitude … that my love will in the end be worthy of your love… will you take my hand now?

The fact that there is nothing pre-ordained about this, that it is human and hesitant and uncertain, makes it feel like something that reaches out to the heart. You don’t care for the love of fairytale characters once you’ve passed the age of six; but those whose hearts are truly exposed will always touch me deeply.

Of course, this story doesn’t end happily. Just after Nastenka agrees to the narrator’s proposal, who should the couple run into but the missing lodger, freshly returned and still faithful in his love for Nastenka. She runs to him without a moment’s hesitation. Our narrator goes on his lonely way; and you as reader feel the loss.

#114 Emily Dickinson – My life had stood a loaded gun

A few weeks ago, I was in the business of losing a family member. My grandfather had entered a decline which, by common expectation, we did not expect him to emerge from. The day after he died, I found myself reading the following poem in this collection.

Death is like the insect
Menacing the tree,
Competent to kill it,
But decoyed may be.

Bait it with the balsam,
Seek it with the knife,
Baffle, if it cost you
Everything in life.

Then, if it have burrowed
Out of reach of skill,
Ring the tree and leave it,—
’Tis the vermin’s will.

The short-term cause of him being in the hospital had been a series of falls. The real cause was that vascular dementia had been closing down on his mind like a vice; and a man who I had known for his intelligence and wit had slowly oozed out, until what was left spent its time alternating between vacancy and panic.

A week before the end, we’d spoken with a doctor, who had told us what we all knew – that the man was lost; and that if he recovered it would mean putting him through the same situation again, and again, and again, until his body became worn past the point of persistence. An alternative was offered, where nature was allowed to take its course, and the nurses’ care turned to lessening his suffering as he went. We knew what he had wanted, and we agreed to see it through.

For the next week, his children and grandchildren kept watch by his bedside. He made his exit, with impeccable timing, on the final chords of Mozart’s cello concerto. While it was a sad moment, it was in its own way sublime. When I think back to everything his collapsing mind had taken from him, his death felt like the first time in years that he’d been himself.

I do not share this for the sake of spreading my grief, let alone the all-too-modern habit of prostituting for condolences; I share it because I learnt something from it all that I cannot shake. The time had come for my grandfather to die. The truth of that should have been with me ever since I saw him using the last fractions of his mental strength to stop us from seeing how lost he was. And because we were there with him, we could help him to an ending.

Had he been alone, I shudder to think how long they would have been able to keep him alive. It could have been years, conceivably, that his shell remained viable. Each tumble and fall and blow would have been a trip back into the maelstrom of the acute unit; each discharge another expulsion into the unknown. The hospital would have devolved into a chamber of endless torture, until his body accidentally thumped into an escape.

We fear death in our society. We think we’ve beaten it enough for it to count as bad luck. Once, we planned ourselves a good death; now, we collectively act as if that were an oxymoron. And so, while it is no crime to kill yourself, we make it murder to help someone who can no longer accomplish the deed. Men and women faced with their own unanswerable mortality have to calculate the last date when suicide is viable. We force elderly spouses, as their diamond weddings pass, to turn their minds to how best to dispatch their loved ones with their own hands. Doctors with a thousand sweeter deaths at their command are conscripted on threat of their own destruction to fight for bitter life. There is no word for this, other than barbarism.

In his death, I got my grandfather back. The thought of others like him trapped in life against their will strikes me as hideously unjust. Talk of the inviolate sanctity of life strikes me as an attempt to grab the one thing that looks like a simple answer in a world where only messy compromises will exist. And we need to change what that compromise is, if we are to be true to our own humanity.

If you feel as strongly about this as I now do, you can learn more the latest efforts to change the law and join the campaign at http://www.dignityindying.org.uk/

#86 Charles Dickens – To Be Read at Dusk

Dickens loved a good ghost story. Never mind whether ghosts exist or not; either way they sell, and Dickens was in the magazine business. This collection of stories, taken from his various periodicals, shows him mining the genre for suitable pay-dirt.

The Signalman is his most famous ghostly short story, about a man on a railway line trying to interpret the warnings from a mysterious figure.

“What is its warning against?” he said, ruminating, with his eyes on the fire, and only by times turning them on me.  “What is the danger?  Where is the danger?  There is danger overhanging somewhere on the Line.  Some dreadful calamity will happen.  It is not to be doubted this third time, after what has gone before.  But surely this is a cruel haunting of me.  What can I do?”

It’s too well told for me to spoil, so go read it yourself some time. Instead, let me turn to something more light-hearted, such as ‘The Murder Trial’.

The idea of a ghost coming back to tell people of the circumstances of his death is not a new one. The narrator of the tale is importuned in his lodgings by a vision of the recently deceased fellow, plus another man who appears to be chasing him. He links the tale to a recent account of a murder, and is even more imposed upon when he finds himself foreman of the jury at the trial of the murderer.

The twist here is that he is not the only one seeing the ghost of the victim. Everyone at the trial is. But, in a thoroughly English way, they are all much too embarrassed to admit it.

On the second morning of the trial, after evidence had been taken for two hours (I heard the church clocks strike), happening to cast my eyes over my brother jurymen, I found an inexplicable difficulty in counting them.  I counted them several times, yet always with the same difficulty.  In short, I made them one too many.

I touched the brother jurymen whose place was next me, and I whispered to him, “Oblige me by counting us.”  He looked surprised by the request, but turned his head and counted. “Why,” says he, suddenly, “we are Thirt—; but no, it’s not possible.  No.  We are twelve.”

The ghost turns up alongside the evidence to explain why he is rather paler than his picture. He stands next to the counsel for the defence to undermine the suggestion that his murder wound could have been self-inflicted. He appears to the jury in their dreams, and judge in his summing up.

Suitably close to midnight, the jury returns to give its verdict:

The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the Jury-box, on the other side of the Court.  As I took my place, his eyes rested on me with great attention; he seemed satisfied, and slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form.  As I gave in our verdict, “Guilty,” the veil collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty.

I can quite believe that this would be how a court would react to this situation. Provided the ghost wasn’t as gauche as to make its presence universally seen, but restricted itself to flickering into and out of the vision of key people at key moments, the idea that anyone would make a fuss about the matter seems most unlikely.

Much as Victorians might buy a good ghost story, they wouldn’t make a spectacle of themselves for the sake of a spectre.

#84 H G Wells – The Sea Raiders

Science fiction is a patronised genre, shelved together with fantasy and kept apart from the ‘sensible’ books. I’ve always thought this unfair; partly because they shelve historical romance under ‘literature’, but also because science fiction at its best is probably the genre that does more philosophising than any other.

So reading this surprisingly representative collection of H G Wells, I found myself thinking back to a cartoon by the glorious Kate Beaton

This isn’t entirely personal judgment on her part – Verne himself disdained Wells’ work for its lack of technical plausibility. Verne was always proud of being able to explain how his machines worked, and while Verne’s story about a voyage to the moon hypothesised a cannon and was based on some fairly accurate calculations about thrust requirements, Wells just assumed a moon machine driven by ‘cavorite’ – a magical antigravity metal that he just made up.

Personally, I prefer the Wellsian approach. Not just because it makes a better story; but because if you are reading a book about a time machine and find yourself saying ‘I bet you couldn’t make that work’, you have completely missed the point and should go back to using engineering schematics as bedtime reading.

What matters about Wells’ work, and about all of the very best science fiction, is that it challenges you to think through something you wouldn’t otherwise consider. Set aside the visions-of-the-future stuff (not that Wells was without his successes here), and note the way in which it finds an interesting idea and takes it to its conclusion.

We get some of that in these stories: an understanding that we assume too much about the world we see around us, or have not followed our own thoughts through to conclusion. In The Land Ironclads, Wells predicts the arrival of tank warfare, taking the assumption that just as sea warfare in the nineteenth century became dominated by great metal vessels, so too would land warfare in the industrial age.

Surveyed at large, the defenders already looked a beaten army. A mechanism that was effectually ironclad against bullets, that could at a pinch cross a thirty-foot trench, and that seemed able to shoot out rifle-bullets with unerring precision, was clearly an inevitable victor against anything but rivers, precipices, and guns.

He looked at his watch. “Half-past four! Lord! What things can happen in two hours. Here’s the whole blessed army being walked over, and at half-past two——

But his greatest and most lasting successes are the works where he takes something even more fundamental, and plays it out to a conclusion. The War of the Worlds builds on the observation that Europeans have been able to invade and colonise the rest of the world, and asks what would happen if there came an extraterrestrial adversary with a similar advantage? And the Time Machine is not a novel about time travel, but about what the theory of evolution means when applied to the ‘pinnacle’ that is homo sapiens, and how our descendants are destined to be no more than rabbit-like prey for future carnivores.

Science fiction is the best genre for taking a step outside of the world and seeing what it looks like if you tweak one or two things. Strip out the pseudo-sword and bootleg-sorcery elements, and you have the most philosophical of genres. Asking to understand how a thing works is trivial; asking how everything works is a fit task for a great mind.

#123 Washington Irving – Rip van Winkle

Every national literature has to start from somewhere. In the case of America, that somewhere is Washington Irving – a New Yorker writing at the start of the nineteenth century. Generally speaking, he’s thought of as the first American who actually wrote fiction at an international standard.

Irving was very lucky to be born an American, because I would argue that had he been any other nationality at all, he would have been completely forgotten by now. His contemporaries included far better writers who now go completely unread; and even in his day his fame rested on being the novelty of an American who could write. His prose, though competently assembled, is a thin cover for a fundamentally mediocre mind.

Take ‘The Wife’. In this tale, the narrator recounts the tale of a man who has married a society beauty, but is approaching a great business failing. He can’t bring himself to let his wife know what is about to come. The narrator tells him that he should tell his wife, and she will support him through their difficulties. And she does.

“Admirable girl!” exclaimed I. “You call yourself poor, my friend; you never were so rich- you never knew the boundless treasures of excellence you possess in that woman.”

As conclusions go, it makes The Old Curiosity Shop look emotionally complex. The character of the wife is so thin that you could shine a light through her and be able to read a newspaper on the other side. The idea that there might be any shade of doubt or displeasure in her attitude doesn’t even occur to Irving; while a proper author (George Eliot; George Gissing; possibly Curious George the monkey) could get a three-volume novel out of the opposite being the case.

Even the story of Rip van Winkle, the tale of Irving’s with the greatest durability, is a disappointment in the flesh. For those that don’t know it, the idea is that a man falls asleep for twenty years, and wakes up to find the world has changed dramatically while he has been away.

He now hurried forth, and hastened to his old resort, the little village inn—but it too was gone. A large rickety wooden building stood in its place, with great gaping windows, some of them broken, and mended with old hats and petticoats, and over the door was painted, “The Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle.” Instead of the great tree which used to shelter the quiet little Dutch inn of yore, there now was reared a tall naked pole, with something on the top that looked like a red nightcap, and from it was fluttering a flag, on which was a singular assemblage of stars and stripes—all this was strange and incomprehensible.

He eventually manages to convince the townspeople that he is indeed the old Rip van Winkle who disappeared all those years ago, and enjoys a comfortable retirement in the town.

Doctor Johnson, when asked to explain why he thought so little of Gulliver’s Travels, said that it was all obvious once you had the basic idea – little people, big people. My copy of that book puts the voyages to Lilliput and Brobdingnag at sixteen chapters. In my edition, Rip van Winkle’s return to the future occupies fourteen pages; and one cannot shake the thought that there was more juice to be squeezed from the orange.

But, like it or not, the history of American literature is stuck with him. Just as in my country students are condemned to follow Piers Plowman, and the French much learn the chanson or Roland, so  American colleges will enforce Irving’s study for centuries to come based on little more than his chronological primacy. Be glad the rest of us don’t have to follow.

#108 E T A Hoffmann – The Sandman

The last book was about rural madness; this one is about a more urbanised kind. The Sandman is a story about a young man, Nathaniel, tormented by the nightmare memories of a grotesque associate of his father called Coppelius. While studying at university, he finds himself approached by an Italian seller of glass instruments, Coppola, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the previous man. This sets him off into a cycle of gloom and despair.

This struggle is broken into two parts. First of all, there is the all-pervading misery that seizes Nathaniel at the thought that Coppelius might have returned. Growing up, he associated Coppelius with the legend of the Sandman, who steals children’s eyes if they don’t go off to sleep when told; and also with the explosive death of his own father in an alchemical accident. Coppelius had disappeared after that, but the thought that this may all begin again diverts the otherwise sunny Nathaniel into the bleakest of thoughts. This being the romantic era, he decides to write a poem about it:

He filed and polished each line, and as he had chosen to submit him selves to the limitations of meter, he did not rest until all was pure and musical. When, however, he had at length finished, and read it aloud to himself he was seized with awful horror and dread, and he screamed ‘whose hideous voice is this?’

Still, his fiancé and friends convince him that he must have made a mistake here, and that Coppelius is nothing to do with the glass-seller Coppola. So when Coppola appears at the door of his lodgings, an otherwise-distracted Nathaniel does not chase the man away. The man begins to offer his wares:

“Eh, no want weather glass? No weather glass? I got eyes-a too. Fine eyes-a.”
In some fright, Nathaniel cried “You idiot – how can you have eyes, eyes, eyes?” But Coppola, laying aside his barometers, thrust his hands into his big coat pockets and brought out several eyeglasses and spectacles, and laid them on the table.

Nathaniel buys an eyepiece which he uses to spy on the professor’s daughter across the street, and which immediately convinces him to fall madly in love with the girl. The fact that the girl in question is a clockwork automaton, built by the scholar, is no problem for the enamourating glass. Nathaniel is delighted at what he sees, and is driven deeper into madness. Even when the wind-up girl is torn apart in front of him, the lover is unable to recover his sense.

The word ‘chilling’ is overused, but feels just right here. The Sandman is a curious story that can’t help telling itself, and telling itself in the way it wants to. Even Hoffmann admits to the reader that he doesn’t know how to begin it, and switches from epistolatory novel to straight-up narrative about a quarter of the way in. And the chill seems to spread unnoticeably with each line.

Nathaniel’s gloom starts the tale off with a sense of things out of joint, and of childhood phantoms grown to adult size. The shadows on the nursery wall, it suggests, never went away. Freud cited the story for the basis of his idea of the uncanny, and the idea of old dreams still terrifying fits neatly into the psychological theories of a century later.

The later part, where the devilish Coppelius (for it is he!) uses magic wares to snare the young man, is a more simple tale of supernatural assault. Though Nathaniel’s fall is so tragically simple – not a faustian pact or a weakness of soul to the devil’s call – just the simple business of showing curiosity. The fatal eyepiece is more like a poison: a poison in the form of a false love that overwhelms natural sense.

There isn’t really a sense of there being any justice in what happens to the young man, which is realistic but unusual for something in such a fantastic setting. If you’re going to make the argument that novelists had figured out the limits of psychology long before the actual psychologists got started, you couldn’t ask for better proof than this.

#115 Longus – Daphnis and Chloe

This is love poetry for those who love sheep. Not in the direct, illegal sense, but in the sense that there might be no greater pleasure in life than wandering up and down hills, in pursuit of he-goats and she-sheep.

The setting is ancient Greece. A young boy, called Daphnis, is found abandoned but being suckled by a she-goat. An elderly peasant decides to take the child in and raise it as his own. A young girl, Chloe, is found abandoned by another peasant, being suckled by a ewe. The girl is also taken in by the finder. The two are raised, are sent out to tend respectively to more goats and more sheep. They meet, fall in love, run into some nymphs and a god, and then find out they were abandoned by tremendously rich people and had been betrothed since birth.

The countryside, in this tale, is a place of great pleasure; watched over by the gods, populated by kindly peasants, filled with bounty and dedicated to love. So much so that when Chloe is captured by pirates, along with all of Daphnis’ flock, he laments:

They will skin the goats and slaughter the sheep, and Chloe will live in the city from now on.

While those renting in London can understand the link between urban dwelling and being skinned, it shows how strongly the author has made his characters feel about their rural idyll. Indeed, even when Daphnis and Chloe are elevated to their proper status among the rich and pampered, they choose to return to their hillside and continue looking after their flocks. Such an outcome is the only one that can be thought of as truly happy.

This is a puzzle because, not to put too fine a point upon it, rural life stinks – literally, given the number of times people mock Daphnis for smelling like his goats. It involves back-breaking work in freezing weather; it involves hunger and strife; it leaves one vulnerable to any bunch of marauding riffs that happen to pass your way; it is full of ugly, grizzled peasants and regular violence. And these are just the points that Longus makes in his poem.

The pastoral idyll has a power that goes well beyond this story – running from the garden of Eden to the vineyard in Provence being eyed up by today’s ageing bourgeois – all of which is based on hopes more than sense. The best writing about the ideals of the countryside is usually written behind the protection of a window frame, and when people have a choice between writing about shepherds and actual shepherding, they tend to plump for the former. We know nothing about Longus, but no matter how much he felt the nobility of the rural setting, there’s little technical insight to suggest he knew one end of a sheep from the other.

But what poems like this do show is the attraction of a mythic space where love is given full play. While the city is about hectic life and polite behaviour, the countryside is free of such artifice. Here, you only have the man and the woman and the instincts that impel them both.

This only they knew – that the kiss had destroyed him and the bath had destroyed her

In that sense, the countryside isn’t just a rustic setting, but it stands in for any marginal space to which one can escape and be freed from obligations. A similar modern example might be a story based around an exotic and ‘simpler’ country, a hometown freed from urban strains, a hidden bookshop or a secret retreat. Whatever the real-world implications of the destination, the idea of an escape to one’s emotions keeps having a pull.

Just beware the risk of waking up with a face-full of he-goat.