So, this is getting to be quite the habit. I find that I very much like 'summing' up my reading at the end of the week; sitting down on a Sunday afternoon, and waxing contemplative about what has passed through my hands in the last 7 days. Also, it is somewhat necessary at this busy time of year, when buying presents, wrapping them, addressing them and posting them is taking so much of time away from writing; plus, of course, work Christmas parties, and baking (this afternoon's produce being a coffee and brazil nut cake - yum!), and the actual reading.
It has been a fictionless week - I read the first few pages of Jonathan Coe's The Rain Before It Falls on Monday but was uninspired by it and left it languishing in the staff area at work. (I will give it another chance next week; hopefully it will move over the to the 'read' pile by Friday.) Instead I've been focusing on Emerson, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton and the lastest London Review. The latter has inspired me to look out Janet Malcolm's new book, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, a biographical meditation on the 40 year love affair between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Has anyone read it? Despite being a Jewish lesbian couple they lived together in France in relative comfort and ease during the occupation of WWII, and Malcolm has spent years uncovering the discomforting truth of their ties with the far-right and with the Nazi regime, as well as the power-dynamic of their lives together. Terry Castle's article (I recommended it last week, and I urge it upon you again), which reviewed both Malcolm's book and a Tate Modern catalogue of the photography of Claude Cahun, is a classic piece of LRB criticism: incisive, intelligent and highly entertaining. It'll make you want to subscribe, honestly. (And *look* they have special Christmas subscription offers at the moment - only $35 for 24 issues to the US! That's just £17.50, the price of a new hardback, and half of what I pay for my UK subscription. Plus, subscribing gives you access to all articles back to 2001 online. Bargain, yes?)
I can tell that Emerson and I will get along famously. My essay of this week - his address to the graduating class of Harvard Divinity School in July 1838 - convinces me of both the strength of his moral convictions and of his extroadinary courage. It is inflammatory stuff, probably just as much now as then, and it is no wonder that Emerson wasn't invited to lecture at Harvard again for 30 years. His audience must have been desperately scandalised. He begins benignly enough, with praise for the 'refulgent summer' and a discourse on the moral sentiment and on the importance of the laws of common humanity, as well as a reminder that Nature is also God:
These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed that the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will, of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of the star, in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that will is everywhere balked and baffled, because things are made so, and not otherwise.
Dangerously close to pantheism as this opening salvo occasionally strays, it is still acceptable and, compared with the perilous waters that Emerson is about to enter, theologically tame. Only moments later he is describing what he calls the ' first defect of Christianity' - namely, it's 'noxious exaggeration about the person of Jesus.' I suspect such a statement would still force a clamour today, in any seminary, almost anywhere in the world. It is a shocking thing to say, although not as ideologically vicious as it sounds. Emerson does not mean to debase Christ, or to criticise Christianity's love for him; rather his material point is that:
Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history he estimated the greatness of man.
And by focusing all of it's energy on venerating Christ, by fixating on his personality and 'painting a demi-god', the Church is missing his true message: that 'the gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, over-powering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet, natural goodness, a goodness like thine and mine, and that so invites thine and mine to be and to grow.' In other words, Jesus was a good guy, but not good that he is beyond our own capacity for goodness. This seems to tie in closely with Emerson's strong belief, expressed in both 'Nature' and 'The American Scholar', that each man should be his own guide and that the most sublime revelations come from the self, not from some divine authority. In a sense, I suppose, he is denying Christ his role as singular saviour of mankind and extending the role to us all. He inspires us to revelation; he is not Revelation itself: It is a low benefit to give me something; it is a high benefit to enable me to do somewhat of myself. Jesus, then, is an enabler; he serves us by 'his holy thoughts and thus only'.
To make matters worse, Emerson then launches into an inspired attack on divinity teaching and preaching in America. In front of a class of American divinity graduates, about to embark on their preaching careers. You've got to admire his guts, if nothing else. He reiterates what he stated previously in the 'American Scholar' - each thinker must have his own ideas. Just as an academic shouldn't blindly accept the teachings of this or that accepted genius without first investigating the matter for himself, so the preacher should not simply absorb tradition. Rather he should engage in an interrogation of his faith. Thus, he concludes, the role of a religious school is not to instruct a creed, or impart fully-formed wisdoms, but to galvinise fresh thinking. The spiritual education is:
... an intuition. It cannot be received second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.
This is startling rejection of authority, and probably the primary reason Harvard (and the established Church) balked. If Christian faith is a matter of every man working towards his own truth then where is structure or the control, the very essences of ritual worship? Taking Emerson's argument to its extreme, it could be read as a disavowal of doctrine of every kind - Jesus might be man or God; communion might be symbolic, or actual, or irrelevant; worship might be led by a professional, or by anybody, or by nobody at all. I'm not prepared, on three essays acquaintance, to interpret Emerson this freely - he clearly has a certain respect for the Church as an institution - but his advocacy for spiritual immediacy, for self-sufficiency and for self-tuition speaks for itself. He is incredibly passionate when it comes to the worth of Man, and his confidence in Man's abilities:
Wherever a man comes, there comes revolution. The old is for slaves. When a man comes, all books are legible, all things transparent, all religions are forms. He is religious. Man is the wonderworker. He is seen amid miracles. All men bless and curse. He saith yea and nay, only. The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man; indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake.
The first chapters of Kathryn Hughes' biography of Mrs. Beeton were pleasantly familiar to me, in form if not in content. I spend a good portion of my own working day looking through the staple archival documents of the biographer's trade: parish registers, probate (wills and such), court papers, letters, apprenticeship indentures, tenancy agreements and school registers. I do this in my capacity as a researcher for hire and often, at the end of the day, write reports to clients made up of these bare bones of history. I try to do this in interesting ways, with as many anecdotes as possible, but sometimes there is nothing to do but list dates and draw family trees and hope to sustain someone's interest for as long as possible. So I can sympathise with Hughes' pains to make Isabella Beeton's family history - composed of the usual ingredients of births, marriages and deaths, intermitantly spiced with a little economic migration - sound fascinating. In the end she does an admirable job, far better than I ever do, and makes good reading out of the most humdrum of records. At one point she writes an entire page about the instability of early 19th century spellings of the name Mayson (Isabella's maiden name) as though it were a salacious titbit, worth permanent filing. For this alone, I salute her.
What is most fascinating about Mrs Beeton thus far, however, is the social milieu from which she came. The daughter of a Cumbrian draper's merchant, and only two generations removed from the labouring classes on her mother's side, Isabella grew up in that uncomfortable Victorian limbo between the lower and upper middle classes. Her step-father was an entrepreneurial business man, with his eye on the status of gentleman, but he could never quite shake his connections with 'trade' and her husband, while destined to become a publisher-editor of some repute, began life as an travelling paper salesman and spoke with a Cockney accent. Kathryn Hughes demonstrates rather neatly how double-minded this made 'Bella': a gentlelady of leisure on the one hand, a slave to her family and her husband's tight finances on the other. I haven't gotten to the part about her famous Book of Household Management yet, but I can already imagine the mind from which its mixture of pretension and practicality sprung.
Finally, if you enjoy post-apocalyptic fiction, or feminist fiction, or just good fiction, you might be interested in my joint review of Sarah Hall's The Carhullan Army and Jim Crace's The Pesthouse, which appeared at Strange Horizons this week.
~~Victoria~~