Grey Owl

Born an Englishman, he came alone to Canada at the age of 16. From that point on, he constantly tinkered with his identity and seldom went by his real name, Archie Belaney. He was a poseur, a bigamist, and a drunkard, but what he is best known for is his role as a conservationist.

He wrote four books, three of which appear in this volume, Collected Works of Grey Owl:

The Men of the Last Frontier (1931)
Pilgrims of the Wild (1934)
Sajo and the Beaver People (1935)

Sajo is a children's book. The rest -- including his last book, Tales of an Empty Cabin (1936) -- are memoirs that fall somewhere between fiction and nonfiction, for much of what he wrote about himself was made up. 

The book I enjoyed most in Collected Works is Pilgrims of the Wild, the first half of which is about the beaver kits that he and Anahareo adopted. He touched upon them in a chapter of Men of the Wild Frontier, but in his second book the writing is much more assured and a masterpiece of nature writing. His portrayal of the kits is tender enough to melt anyone's heart.

Biography

From the Land of Shadows: The Making of Grey Owl (1990) by Donald B. Smith is the definitive biography, its name derived from the title of second chapter in Men of the Last Frontier. The footnotes alone take up 70 pages, yet it's not a tedious book.

Earlier contributions came from Thomas Raddall, who wrote a perceptive essay in his book Footsteps on Old Floors (1968), and from Lovat Dickson, Grey Owl's publisher, who wrote Wilderness Man: The Strange Story of Grey Owl (1973).

It was Dickson who arranged two wildly successful reading tours in England. Grey Owl was a gifted speaker, as was no more evident than when he gave a command performance for British royalty, and which so delighted young Princess Elizabeth that, as the talk drew to a close, she jumped up from her seat, clapped her hands, and urged him to continue. He took his leave of the king by touching his shoulder and saying, “Goodbye, brother.”

Anahareo

Anahareo deserves to be more well-known. She persuaded Grey Owl to save the kittens, McGinty and McGinnis, who so won their hearts that Grey Owl began his crusade to preserve the beaver, which had nearly been trapped out during the Depression. It was not until after his death in 1938 that she learned he was English.

Her memoir My Life with Grey Owl was published in 1940 by Lovat Dickson, who asked her to avoid mentioning the issue of Grey Owl's identity. Later this bothered her enough that she took to visiting libraries and tearing out the first chapter of the book.

In 1972 she published a revised version, Devil in Deerskins. In it she writes: "When finally I was convinced that Archie was English, I had the awful feeling that I had been married to a ghost."

Though wounded by the deception, she defended his legacy as a conservationist. At first glance the book's title seems like a rebuke, but in fact is a tribute, as Grey Owl planned to use that title for a final book in which he planned to reveal the truth about himself.

Later she married a Swedish count and in 1983, two years before her death, she received the Order of Canada.

Images

Collected Works, Land of Shadows, Wilderness Man, and Devil in Deerskins all contain several pages of B&W plates.

Two vintage film clips, both named "Beaver People," can be viewed at the National Film Board's website. One, at approximately 9 minutes in length, shows Anahareo interacting with beavers. The other, at approximately 16 minutes long, shows only Grey Owl and the beavers.

A 1999 movie, Grey Owl, directed by Richard Attenborough, was less than memorable, in part due to the miscasting of Pierce Brosnan as Grey Owl.

Casterologia

Many years ago I wrote a whimsical short story about a beaver family that meets up with Grey Owl and McGinnis. Entitled "Casterologia," it was published in the 1997 Spring issue of On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of Speculative Writing, along with this delightful illustration by James Beveridge.

The story concludes with a list of references, only one of which is made up:

Dallman, J.E. 1968. Giant Beaver from a Post-Woodfordian Lake. J. Mammal. 50: 826-830.

Heter, E.W. 1950. Transplanting Beaver by Airplane and Parachute. J Wildli. Manage. 14: 143-147.

Huey, S.W. and W.H. Wolfrum. 1956. Beaver-Trout Relations. Prog, Fish-cult. 18: 70-74.

Martin, H. 1892. Casterologia: Or the History and Traditions of the Canadian Beaver. Wm. Drysdale Co., Montreal.

Owl, G. 1933. Sajo and the Beaver People. Macmillan, Toronto.

Studios, U. 1957-63. Leave it to Beaver. CBS and ABC.

Shakespeare, W. 1603. Hamlet, Prince of Beavers. Ling & Trundell, London.

Google & The Space Merchants

 

Recently I reread a science fiction novel published in 1953. It satirizes the advertising industry by imagining such grotesqueries as the marketing of cigarettes for children (Kiddiebut) and a coffee product (Coffiest) adulterated with a habit-forming alkaloid.

It was first serialized in a pulp magazine under the title Gravy Planet. One of the co-authors, Frederik Pohl, described in a memoir (The Way the Future Was) the difficulty of getting it published in book form. He was told by a friend and editor:

"Fred, look. I don't know how to tell you this, but it's no good. There are a couple of good ideas, sure. But you don't know how to handle them. What you need is some good professional writer to pull the whole thing together."

Eventually the book found a publisher and is now considered a classic. It's still in print, and according to Pohl has been published in 25 languages. Due to the clunky plot, however, I tend to agree with Pohl's friend, but there is one bit that has stayed with me ever since I first read it, the part where an advertising executive refers to "safety cranks" stopping them from projecting "messages on aircar windows," and mentions "a system that projects direct on the retina of the eye."

I was thinking about this as I read Steven Levy's book about Google. We don't have aircars yet, but will Google be able to resist projecting their search engine results onto the windows of their driverless vehicles? And as far as directing them onto a person's retina, is that not what Google Glass does?

In the Plex

The book was published in 2011 (before the development of the two products mentioned above), and the title comes from the name of Google's headquarters, Googleplex, in Mountain View, California. I'll skip over the development of the search engine and the incredible wealth it's generated by monetizing searches, other than to give a quote that provides historical perspective:

Though the Internet was different from other media, most Internet companies were still selling ads the way Madison Avenue had always done it. Google saw the entire exchange differently. Advertising in Google was less comparable to television or print than it was to computer dating.

An interesting part of Google's success is its vertical integration. It is the world's largest manufacturer of computers and owns "more fibre than anyone else on the planet." Google's hunger for data is due to the constant need to feed its search engine and provide expanding markets to its advertisers. The ultimate goal is "organizing all the information in the world."

Parts that I found especially interesting:

• the setting up data centres in Brussels and Oregon
• the development of Gmail, Chrome, and Android
• the gobbling up of other companies including Blogger, Picasa, and Youtube ("after Google itself...the most popular search engine in the world")
• clashes with Apple and Microsoft
• the competitive threat posed by Facebook
• an entire chapter on Google's failed expansion into China
• the fiasco resulting from Google's attempt to digitize every book in existence

Privacy

Google faced privacy concerns over its storing of searches and emails belonging to people with Gmail accounts. Even more alarming was its acquisition of DoubleClick, an ad network that "radically broadened the scope of the information Google collected about everyone's browsing activity."

Using DoubleClick in conjunction with its own search engine gave Google "an omniscient cookie" that "provided a potentially voluminous amount of information about its users and their interests, virtually all of it compiled by stealth."

There is much to admire in a firm whose unofficial motto is "Don't Be Evil," and in the unconventional business practices of co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. (For example, doors set on sawhorses serve as desks.) Yet it could also be argued that Google has more than a passing resemblance to the advertising agencies in The Space Merchants.

Sometimes I get the feeling that Google is stalking me, which is why I've stopped using it.

Heinlein & Norton

Craving some light summer reading, I opted for a couple of books by Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton. I have very fond memories of their YA titles, which I devoured as a kid. 

These two are among their earliest, Red Planet being published in 1949 and Star Man's Son 2250 AD in 1952.

In both books two young men clash with authorities and undertake a perilous journey to escape pursuit. There are alien creatures in each book, as well as a bond between one of the young men and a non-human character.

  Red Planet                      Star Man's Son

The hardcover editions had illustrations that made the books extra special for me. Those in Red Planet were done by Clifford Geary, in Star Man's Son by Nicolas Mordvinoff. In each there was one that made such an impression that it became inseparable from my enjoyment of the book.

To my knowledge, the above illustration from Red Planet is one of the very few that made it into the paperback editions, but with a little searching you can find most of the others on the web. (I have taken some liberties by cropping the Mordvinoff drawing, as it was originally done as a two-page spread.)

Red Planet

Red Planet takes place on a Mars with canals, indigenous flora and fauna, and three-legged Martians who live in ancient cities. Humans inhabit several bubble settlements and work for a company engaged in an atmosphere project. The canals ice over in winter and provide an escape route for the two boys when they put on skates to flee. One of them has a Martian “roundhead” or “bouncer” as a sort of pet.

When outdoors, people must wear respirators, one of which is portrayed in the Clifford Geary illustration and used as a frontispiece in my Ace paperback edition. The zebra stripes are personal decoration.

After finishing the book, I made a surprising discovery. The version I read had been so mangled by an editor that Heinlein considered removing his name from it. Not until 1992 was a restored edition published by Del Rey.

In Imagining Mars, Robert Crossley devotes a few pages to Red Planet, saying, “Heinlein insists that Red Plant be read as an allegory, with Earth as the exemplification of Law and Mars of Freedom.”

Heinlein re-used some of the ideas he developed in Red Planet for his later best-seller, Stranger in a Strange Land. Though I have enjoyed a few of his adult books, my favourites are all YA titles, especially The Rolling Stones, Tunnel in the Sky, Citizen of the Galaxy, and Have Space Suit Will Travel.

Daybreak 2250 AD

Star Man's Son (reissued in paperback as Daybreak) takes place on Earth after the “Big Blowup” has caused mutations in people and animals, and rendered some areas uninhabitable due to radiation.

Fors has white hair which plainly marks him as a mutant and turns him into an outcast. But he also has superior hearing and night vision, and a non-verbal form of communication with a mountain lion – a vague sort of telepathy – that enables them to work as a team when hunting or battling foes.

Leaving his mountain home, he arrives on the plains and rescues a stranger named Arskane. They are put to flight by rat-like “Beast Things,” which were once confined to abandoned cities but are now venturing into the countryside.

To meet this threat Fors helps unite three suspicious groups of people, and it is here that Daybreak, like Red Planet, offers a moral. The groups are mountain-dwelling knowledge-seekers (Whites), plains people on horseback (native Americans) and drum-beating newcomers (Blacks) who have been displaced by a natural disaster. It's a well-intentioned but somewhat clumsy device.

Donald Wollheim, an influential editor at Ace Books, estimated that by 1971 a million copies of Daybreak had been sold.

As with Heinlein, my other favourite Nortons all came early in her SF period: Star Born, Galactic Derelict, The Last Planet, and Star Guard.

Coffee Table Chess

Chess Masterpieces
One Thousand Years of Extraordinary Chess Sets

Published in 2010, this is the most gorgeous of the books reviewed here, as well as the largest in terms of physical size and page count. The paper is thick and glossy, the quality of the photography excellent.

The book begins with the obligatory historical overview of the game, followed by a chapter on materials and another (the longest) entitled "War as a Theme."

Most of the remaining chapters are organized geographically (France, Germany, Russia, the Far East, etc.). The last two chapters show sets from the 20th and the 21st century. The text for the most part devotes itself to pointing out details about the sets that the reader might overlook.

Something that becomes clear as one pages through the book is that photographing chess sets is not as straight forward as it might seem. A single photo cannot provide both front and back views, while photographing pieces in the opening position will result in some being obscured by others. Thus sets in the book are posed in a variety of ways in order to do them justice.

Vice vs Virtue

Since most of the sets are owned by the author, George Dean, it is a small indulgence on his part to include one that he himself created out of wooden spools and drawerpulls. Charming, yes, but hardly a masterpiece.

That word causes more trouble in the final chapter, where one might wonder if enough time has passed for anything created since the year 2000 to be deemed a masterpiece -- especially if it lacks the sort of physical craftsmanship that make others in the book so appealing.

Chess Masterpieces is the most expensive of the books listed here, but worth it if you're at all fascinated by the physical side of the game. You can get a peek at some of the sets at World Chess Hall of Fame website -- go to Exhibitions/Exhibition Archive/2012. The site includes downloadable highlights in PDF form of the Dr. George and Vivian Dean Collection, as well as an audio tour.

10 x 12 in, 272 pp

The Art of Chess

Physically the smallest of the books discussed here, but also the most affordable, The Art of Chess by Colleen Schafroth was published in 2002 and takes a slightly broader approach than Chess Masterpieces.

The earlier chapters chart the development of the game, after which the focus is on sets and boards. The layouts are beautifully done with no two-page spread that does not have at least one full-colour illustration. The only flaw (and it is a relatively minor one) is that a few of the photos are a little fuzzy, perhaps being blown up a little larger than is advisable.

Greek, 20th century, bronze

The chapter titles are:

• Origins of the Game
• The First Golden Age of Chess
• The Establishment of the Game in Europe
• Modelling the Universe
• Speeding Up the Game
• Chess in the Industrial Age
• The Twentieth Century and Beyond

According to the duskjacket's back flap, "a large part of the illustrations" in the book come from the permanent collection of chess sets at the Maryhill Museum of Art in Washington. "The collection had its origins in an exhibition held at the museum in 1957," and at present includes "over 300 sets dating from the 17th century" and "features naturalistic and abstract forms from cultures around the world."

9.5 x 9.5 in, 176 pp

Chess: A Celebration of 2000 Years

The oldest of the three books, and the one that takes the broadest approach, covering all aspects of the game, not just sets.

The illustrations are drawn from a wider source than the other books mentioned here, and include photos of chess luminaries as well as ordinary players, tournaments, outdoor games, living chess, even a game played in a swimming pool. Many of these are in B&W.

Chapters are devoted to the history and culture of the game, the board, versions of the game in other countries, discussions of the attractions and complexities of the game, a few short but famous games, and finally an overview of important players.

A collection of Knights

The chapter I enjoyed most was that on the sets themselves. Pieces from different sets are grouped together in a single spread, often across two pages -- one for kings, one for queens, and so on. It's an engaging approach, highlighting the assortment of styles and materials in a revealing and eye-catching way.

Overall it's an enjoyable read from start to finish, marred only by minor typos scattered throughout, for example the quotation from Bobby Fischer, "Chess is live."

The book is translated from the German, a collaboration by Finkenzeller, Ziehr, and Buhrer, and published in Canada in 1989 by the sadly departed Key Porter Books. Physically it is only slightly smaller than Chess Masterpieces.

9.5 x 12 in, 208 pp

Moby-Dick

Intimidated by its size and reputation, I lugged this book around for most of my adult life before making a serious attempt to read it. As leviathanic as the white whale itself and every bit as elusive, it's a tale that exists on many levels. Unfortunately for Melville it was also a white elephant, sinking with scarcely a gurgle when it was first published in 1851.

Docu-Novel

Superficially it's about a man obsessed with hunting down the whale that took his leg, but there are also entire chapters that do not advance the plot, being devoted to whales and whaling, along with numerous footnotes, making it a sort of docu-novel. The reader is forewarned at the start by several pages of quotations from an eccentric variety of sources, including “The Rape of the Lock” and “Something Unpublished.”

Biblical Whaling

It's a heavily moralistic tale riddled with references to gods and religion and the bible, and lurking with symbolism and philosophical musings. It also has a mythic quality, not unlike the Odyssey, presided over by deities such as Queequeg's Yojo and the Almighty of Father Mapple, who gives a sermon about Jonah from a pulpit like the prow of a ship. Other biblical names include two of the main characters, Ahab and Ishmael, ship owners Peleg and Bildad, prophetic utterances by Elijah and Gabriel, and the vessels Rachel and Jeroboam. As the story nears its conclusion, Ahab speaks more and more like a biblical character. A typical passage:

Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy. [Chapter 118]

Humour

For me, the most surprising thing about Moby-Dick was its humour and playfulness, beginning with Queequeg, a tattooed cannibal with whom Ishmael shares a bed at the Spouter Inn, and in whose arms he awakens in the morning. Queequeg peddles shrunken heads in Nantucket, and uses his harpoon to shave with and to spear chunks of meat at the breakfast table.

There are witty turns of phrase and flights of fancy. In a droll chapter entitled “Cetology,” the difference between whales with teeth and baleen is eschewed for one based purely on size. Thus they are categorized like books: folio whales, octavo whales, and duodecimal whales.

In a later scene Ahab speaks to Captain Boomer and Dr. Bunger, who sound like a comedy team when they exchange facetious remarks.

Shakespeare

On one level the book is a tragedy like Lear or Macbeth with some chapters presented like scenes from a play complete with stage directions. There are successive soliloquys from Ahab, Starbuck, and Stubb, followed by a scene where the main deck becomes a stage for sailors “standing, lounging, leaning and lying in various attitudes, all singing in chorus.” (Chapters 37-40)

At times there are positively Shakespearean utterances. Here is Ahab, not sounding at all biblical:

Here I am, proud I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Praetorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the world's); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I'll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So. [Chapter 108]

Scenes with Ahab and the ship's carpenter reminded me of Hamlet (the grave-digging scene, Ahab's phantom limb). Starbuck contemplating the sleeping Ahab is not unlike Hamlet contemplating Claudius at prayer.

Structure

The story begins with Ishmael as narrator, but is interrupted by passages in which we are privy to the thoughts and feelings of other characters. Towards the end Ishmael disappears almost entirely, being replaced by an omniscient observer, and only returns in a brief epilogue.

Characters

Readers were not ready for a cetacean hero until the 20th-century. Now, knowing how whale stocks have been devastated by whaling, it's hard not to root for Moby Dick when he is being relentlessly pursued by a madman. He was not the instigator of the conflict. How else to describe his actions except as heroic?

Ahab sees the whale as evil, but the truth is revealed by his ivory pegleg: Moby Dick's evil is really an extension of his own ungodly and monomaniacal self. He inaugurates the voyage with an idolatrous act -- nailing a gold coin to a mast -- and later conducts a pagan ceremony that involves the quenching with blood of a newly forged harpoon head. “I'd strike the sun if it insulted me,” he says.

Iconic

One of the book's great strengths is how visual it is, which explains in part why Moby Dick the whale has become such an icon, and why Moby-Dick the book had been brought out in so many illustrated editions, not to mention other formats such as comic books, graphic novels, and movies. It's popped up in a popup book, card game, and opera, and in a fantastic retelling (Railsea) by China Mieville in which giant moles are harpooned from trains and the captain of one of them is obsessed with hunting an ivory-coloured mole that took his arm.

Farther afield Starbuck is memorialized in the coffee chain, as well as in (along with Boomer) Battlestar Galactica.

When I re-read the book, and I will, I want to use an illustrated edition, such the Rockwell Kent version published in 1930. (It has something in the order of 300 illustrations, 23 of them full-page.)

Links

Rockwell Kent & Evan Dahm
Moby Dick - or The Card Game 
Online audio version (a different reader for each of the 135 chapters)

A Natural History of the Ocean's Most Magnificent and Mysterious Creature

Before tackling Moby-Dick I imagined that Dr. Johnson's comment about Paradise Lost would be applicable, but I was wrong. I not only wanted to read it again, I also wanted to know more about whales and whaling. In this regard The Great Sperm Whale by Richard Ellis is the perfect companion to Melville's masterpiece.

Ellis is an artist and marine biologist who's written numerous books about denizens of the sea. Published in 2011, The Great Sperm Whale was clearly inspired by Moby-Dick, and is more substantial than the 11 chapters, one appendix, and 368 pages might suggest. There are 16 colour plates and numerous black-and-white illustrations throughout.

In addition to the natural history of sperm whales, it covers the evolution of whales, a history of whaling (including a chapter called “The War on Whales”), and conservation efforts. Chapter 2 is devoted to “Mr. Melville's Whale” and gives an overview of Melville's sources, Moby-Dick's critical reception, and notable editions. He also mentions some of the novels, music, art, and movies the book has inspired. Melville and Moby Dick are also referenced in subsequent chapters.

One of the things I was curious about was Melville's factual accuracy regarding whales. Ellis tells us that through Melville's reading and personal experience he knew as much about whales as anyone else in the 19th century, though the overall knowledge at the time was pretty thin. What is important from a reader's standpoint is that any inaccuracies are irrelevent, especially considering Melville's penchant for playfulness, hyperbole, and mythologizing.

On Sperm Whales

• “the largest predator that has ever lived”
• “the largest brain of any animal that ever lived”
• “the loudest sounds made by any living creature”
• “the biggest nose in history”

They are known to dive as deep as 3700 feet, and capable of immobilizing their prey with “laserlike focused sound beams that emanate from complex components in its nose.” This ability is crucial for hunting in the abyssal depths, and especially for prey like squid, which are faster and more agile.

They are also bottom feeders, apparently using their narrow underslung lower jaw as a plough. They have teeth only in their lower jaw, and unlike other whales have only a single nostril.

The nose may take up as much as a third of their total length. So when a sperm whale sank the Essex, it did it by ramming with its nose.

In the stomach of one dead sperm whale was found a squid weighing 405 pounds, and in another the mutilated body of a Newfoundland sealer.

On Moby-Dick

• Moby-Dick (hyphenated) is the title, Moby Dick (unhyphenated) is the whale.
• “Moby Dick is the single most famous animal in American literature.”
• “Moby-Dick was written and published at the zenith of the world-wide sperm whale fishery; its home port of New Bedford was the richest city per capita in America.”

Appendix

Entitled “The Adventures of a Whale Painter,” it gives an account of Ellis's development as an artist, which is rather apt since Melville himself devotes three chapters to paintings and other representations of whales. So how good is Ellis the artist? One look at the beautiful dust jacket is all you need.

Classic Spy Novels Revisited

Summer brought an urge for light reading, so I looked up some old favourites in the spy genre, representative volumes from four British authors who made a major impact on the genre. Remarkably they're are still in print despite being more than a half-century old. At times they seem like historical novels giving us a glimpse into a (perhaps deceptively) simpler past.

For example, when Bond flies to Istanbul on a Vickers Viscount, he does not have his weaponized attaché case inspected before boarding, and lights up a smoke as soon as the seatbelt sign is off.

In the Deighton books, [Harry Palmer] still has his milk delivered by a milkman, and his boss is one of the most powerful men in England because he has an IBM computer. Berlin is still a divided city.

Eric Ambler

Ambler’s heroes tend to be ordinary people. They do not work in the intelligence community and get drawn into dangerous situations against their will.

Ambler's most well-known novel is probably The Mask of Dimitrios (aka A Coffin for Dimitrios), which came out in 1939. It begins in Istanbul, takes the reader through Smyrna, Athens, Sofia, Geneva, and ends with a neat twist in Paris. On re-reading it, though, I was rather disappointed by the number of times that the protagonist is reduced to the role of a listener, as others fill in the backstory of Dimitrios Makropoulos, a shadowy criminal whose body is found in the Bosporus at the beginning of the book.

Two other novels written around the same time are better: Cause for Alarm (1938) and Journey in Fear (1940). Alarm takes place in Fascist Italy where an out-of-work British engineer fills in for a murdered predecessor, and is inexorably drawn into a dangerous scheme by a general who rouges his cheeks.

Fear, like Dimitrios, begins in Istanbul with a minor role played by the head of the Turkish secret police, Colonel Haki. WWII has just begun, but is still in the Phoney War phase where nothing much is happening in Western Europe.

As in Alarm, the protagonist is a British engineer, this time doing munitions work for the Turkish navy. An attempt is made on his life, which results in Haki taking charge of his return to England by arranging passage for him on an Italian freighter. There are a few other passengers as well, and of course several of them are not what they seem.

When the ship stops in Athens another person comes aboard, and suddenly Graham finds himself sitting across the dinner table from the man who tried to shoot him in Istanbul. (His reflections upon guns at this point are particularly ironic.)

The ship has become a trap. Desperate to escape he makes a deal with a German agent, and they disembark at Genoa. The story reaches its conclusion on a train to Paris.

What I enjoyed most about Journey into Fear were the droll characterizations, the international cast, and the liberal use of foreign phrases (French, Italian, Turkish). There are some delicious twists in store for the reader, and the writing is first rate.

When Ambler passed away, the NYTimes referred to him as “the thriller writer who elevated the genre to literature.”

Ian Fleming

The first Bond book and the first issue of Playboy magazine came out in the same year, 1953. From Russia with Love, the fifth in the series, arrived in 1957 and is often mentioned as one of the best. It's more action-packed than the other books discussed here, boasts exotic locations (Istanbul, the Orient Express) and has a surprise ending. There are also some pretty turns of phrase, such as “the silver spray of a bicycle bell.”

It is also rather unusual in that Bond is absent from the first third of the book, which is devoted to SMERSH's plan to eliminate and disgrace him. Fleming takes great care in setting up his adversary, Donovan Grant, aka Red Granitsky. Their similarities are enlightening.

Bond has a “cruel mouth” and “cold arrogant eyes,” while Grant has “cruel lips” and eyes “empty as oil slicks.” Bond smokes Morland cigarettes with three gold rings at the end, while Grant smokes gold-tipped Troika cigarettes. Bond's boss is an admiral known only as M, the head of British secret service, while Grant's is G, a general who is the head of SMERSH. Bond and Grant are professional assassins, Grant being the chief executioner for SMERSH, while Bond as 007 has a licence to kill. Both are equipped with gadgets that they use on each other in the fight scene on the train.

There are a few differences. Grant has no interest in sex and is a moon-driven serial-killer, whereas Bond is a womanizer who, despite being “tarnished with years of treachery and ruthlessness and fear,” dislikes killing in cold blood.

A nice touch is the way books are used as signposts. Bond packs The Mask of Dimitrios when he flies to Istanbul. The book Grant reads on the Orient Express is War and Peace, within which is a gun fired by an electrical battery. But most telling of all is the favourite book of Bond's love interest, Tatiana Romanova, A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov. Bond reminds her of the hero, Pechorin, a Byronic figure who likes to fight and gamble. What is not stated is that Pechorin describes himself as a “moral cripple.”

On the negative side the book has more than a whiff of xenophobia. The loudspeakers in the airport at Rome “jabber.” Turkey is slagged as “a country of stunted little men,” the Balkans smell of “very old sweat and cigarette smoke and cabbage.” The gypsies are savage and primitive.

Worse is the misogyny. Bond's friend, Darko Kerim (a version of Colonel Haki), remarks that women dream of being dragged off to a cave and raped. Rosa Klebb, a powerful member of the SMERSH hierarchy, is described as a repulsive toadlike creature. Two gypsy women fight over a man and very quickly tear each other's clothes off. And when Bond and Tatiana are alone together on the train, Bond pulls her head back by the hair and kisses her “cruelly.”

When the book ends, Bond is wearing Grant's watch.

Len Deighton

Deighton's first novel, The Ipcress File, was an overnight sensation when published in 1962. In a new introduction Deighton mentions that its publication “coincided with the arrival of the first James Bond films,” and that critics used him “as a blunt instrument to batter Ian Fleming about the head.” Deighton, by the way, knew Fleming and recently produced an article entitled “James Bond: My Long and Eventful Search for His Father,” which is available for the Amazon Kindle. 

Ipcress kicked off a series of four books featuring a nameless hero, whom I'll refer to as [Harry Palmer], the name given to him in the movies. Like Bond, he is a professional spy. He's spent three years in Military Intelligence, six months with the CIA, and is now working as a civilian with “the smallest and most important of the Intelligence Units - WOOC(P).” What the acronym stands for is never revealed, but it has a mocking ring to it.

The books are told in the first person, which allows a greater freedom for sarcasm, a key feature of the series. Where Bond is loyal and patriotic, [Palmer] is cheeky and impertinent. “Forgive me,” [Palmer] says to his boss, “if my lack of ignorance is an embarrassment to you.”

[Palmer] is more intellectual than Bond, but also more down-to-earth. He likes sherry, smokes Gauloises, and collects books on military history. He knows his Shakespeare and is able to quote from Paradise Lost. And although there are action sequences in Ipcress, [Palmer] also has to wrestle with more bureaucratic red tape than Bond. His inbox is lockable.

Another major difference is that the [Palmer] books are far more convoluted than the Bond books. Purposely so. As [Palmer] says in the Prologue to Ipcress, “It's a confusing story. I'm in a very confusing business.” The confusion, I think, is a reflection of the blurred loyalties and dubious moral grounds inhabited by people in the spy business.

So, Ipcress is a very different read from Russia with a lot to recommend it, including some fiendish reversals. I won't mention the main one, but in the end [Palmer] finds himself working with one of the villains he was pursuing, and aids a SMERSH agent in fleeing the country.

Nevertheless, my interest flagged when [Palmer] went abroad, first to Lebanon and then to a Pacific atoll, where events seemed laboured and not very believable, so I tackled the remaining books in the series. Horse Under Water (1963) involves opium smuggling and a sunken German submarine off the coast of Portugal. Funeral in Berlin (1964) -- I enjoyed this one the most -- has [Palmer] helping a Russian colonel to defect. And Billion Dollar Brain (1966) takes [Palmer] to Finland, America, and finally Russia. 

Deighton went on to publish many more spy novels, and while I haven't tried any of them yet, I can highly recommend two of his non-fiction books: Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain, and Blood, Tears, and Folly: An Objective Look at World War II.  Both are superb.

John LeCarré

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold came out in 1963, a year after Ipcress. When I first read it I was convinced le Carré would never write another spy novel. Why would he try when this one was so perfect?

Even now, re-reading it many years later, I could scarcely put it down despite knowing how it ends. It was like watching the Titanic steam toward its iceberg. The moral ambiguity hinted at in the previous books reaches its fullest expression here, and reflects the pessimism of the Cold War.

The hero is Alec Leamas, the burnt-out head of British Intelligence in Berlin, who has just seen his last East German agent shot down as he tried to cross into West Berlin. His opposite number is Hans-Dieter Mundt, a ruthless killer whose description (“the blank, hard face beneath the flaxen hair”) makes him sound like Donovan Grant elevated to a supervisory position.

When Leamas is released by the service he takes to drink and ends up in jail. The lone bright spot in his life is a girlfriend he acquires, ironically a member of the Communist Party. Yet he remains embittered and is recruited by the opposition. He is taken to the Netherlands where he meets a “kindly, plump woman” who reminds him of “an old aunt he once had who beat him for wasting string" -- a clever foreshadowing of future betrayals when the British are revealed as scarcely less principled than their adversaries. Here is Leamas's boss, Control:

“We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and everywhere can sleep safely in their beds at night. Is that too romantic? Of course, we occasionally do very wicked things”; he grinned like a schoolboy. “And in weighing up the moralities, we go in for dishonest comparisons; after all, you can't compare the ideals of one side with the methods of the other, can you, now?”

Le Carré, who worked for MI5 and MI6, positions his Intelligence headquarters at Cambridge Circus. It is frequently referred to simply as the Circus, which surely has an ironic connotation, as does the name of one of his recurring characters, George Smiley.

If Thomas Hardy had lived long enough to write a spy story, it could scarcely have been more tragic or more powerful than this.

Henry Miller

Henry Miller befriended Erica Jong when Fear of Flying came out, referring to the novel as "the female counterpart" to Tropic of Cancer.

He became Jong's mentor and "literary benefactor," setting her on a path that culminated in this "paradox of biography."

It became a search for a contradictory and divisive figure who remained "maddeningly elusive," in part due to the "blurred boundaries between fiction and autobiography" in his writing.

But it also became a search for Erica Jong herself, for how could she reconcile his chauvinism, his blatant sexism, with her own feminism?

Thus this 1993 book is "part memoir, part critical study, party biography, part exploration of sexual politics in our time."

It includes a 36-page section of letters they exchanged in 1974, as well an outrageous anecdote related by Miller about pissing his pants in a French courtroom. There is also an imaginary dialogue between the two authors. ("Make it all up!" Miller had advised her. "That's the only way to get it right.")

The book was slagged by many reviewers for its hyperbole, blurred boundaries, and suggestive title (Erica Jong on Henry Miller), criticism that seems rather narrow-minded and might be construed, perhaps, as a confirmation what Jong is saying.

Personally I found the book well-written, insightful, provocative, and full of quotable nuggets.

His Life

Born and raised in New York with "a raging mother, a retarded sister, a drunken father." Spoke German at home and was named Heinrich after his father.

"He gave off heat like a roaring fire. He was more alive than most people ever are, and when you were near him, he shed his light and life force on you."

"It is Henry's lifelong habit of letting it all hang out that often makes him appear bigoted."

"Henry's financial life reads like a surrealist farce."

Some descriptors used: scribomaniac, primal force, eternal vagabond, cock-eyed optimist.

Loved painting and playing the piano.

His Writing

"Miller's works are confrontations, not evasions. For his life force alone, Miller is unique."

"'The truth can also be a lie.' This is critical to Henry's whole concept of life and writing."

He "used the word sex in a cosmic, not a genital sense."

He was "a trancendentalist in the indigenous American tradition of Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson and Whitman." His style "as revolutionary in its own way as Joyce's or Hemingway's or Stein's."

He "predicted the art of our age--and even our journalism, film, television, and visual arts--all based on the exploration of personality and the blurring of the line between fiction and fact."

"If we have trouble categorizing Miller's 'novels' and consequently underrate them, it is because we judge them according to some unspoken notion of 'the well-wrought novel.' And Miller's novels seem not wrought at all. In fact, they are rants---undisciplined and wild. But they are full of wisdom, and they have that 'eternal and irrepressible freshness' Ezra Pound called the mark of the true classic."

"His best work was so far ahead of its time--and his worst work, as with many writers, was horrendous self-parody."

His "sexism does not annihilate his contribution to literature."

His Painting

It was only after his return to America and living on the West Coast that "he began to paint as demonically as he once had written."

The title for Jong's book came from a small work that Miller wrote and illustrated, Insomnia, or the Devil at Large.

Erica Jong

"Sexual censorship is always used to mask political goals. Frequently it is not about sex at all."

"I believe I belong to the last literary generation, the last generation, that is, for whom books are religion...for whom reading and writing are sacraments."

"For the most part, the 'fictional' novels we read today belong to a dead genre, a genre that somnolizes rather than awakens. People read mysteries, romances, and thrillers to anesthetize themselves, not to alert their souls."

"Film absorbed the lessons of surrealism. The novel speeded up its scenes to match the dwindling attention span of the contemporary reader. Fiction writers learned to cut and edit like filmmakers. But, for the most part, they ignored the lessons of Miller, Joyce, Woolf, and Stein, and continued to write nineteenth-century Dickensian or Dostoyevskian novels in the age of visual media."

"Writing problems are always psychological problems."

Henry Miller--The Paintings: A Centennial Retrospective

The three paintings shown above come from this book published in 1991.

It has nearly 100 reproductions, each with a comment by Miller himself, his former wife Lepska, his son Tony, his daughter Valentine, or a number of other acquaintances, plus a foreword by Miller's longtime pal, Lawrence Durrell. By the end of his life he'd had 70 exhibitions all over the world.

Durrell: Miller's paintings convey "the feeling of abundance and vivacity that characterised his mind and heart."

Lepska: "I remember he loved the pinks. He was intoxicated with those colors, with the names of the paints. They were like the titles of books or names of great wines to him. They would excite him so, he would literally dance about."

Valentine: "Pablo Picasso visited us once at our home..."

Tony: "My father was the most generous person I have ever known."

Tony Miller maintains a website where you can see more of his father's work. Some pieces are going for as much as $35,000.

Meet the Robisons

Two brothers, two memoirs, and two remarkably similar covers -- a boy with a box on his head, another with his eyes squeezed shut. Just what is it they can't bear to look at? The answer is a dysfunctional family with parents who loathe each other, the father an abusive alcoholic, the mother mentally ill. Enter a philandering, balloon-loving psychiatrist who invites patients to live at his squalid house and eventually becomes the legal guardian of thirteen-year-old Chris.

Running with Scissors

This is his memoir of those early years. He is gay, hates school, and likes to polish jewellery. He wants hair as smooth as plastic and dreams of becoming the next Vidal Sassoon. He also has a wicked sense of humour, and at the psychiatrist’s home there is plenty of opportunity to exercise it.

The kids play with an electroshock machine. Bowel movements and randomly selected bible passages are consulted for divine guidance. And since Dr. Finch believes repressed anger is dangerous, he encourages confrontation. The result is some hilarious foul-mouthed vituperation among family members. No one escapes the book's wounded humour, including the author himself. In one place I actually shouted with laughter. But the book's purpose is to shock as well as entertain, and includes a couple of uncomfortable sex scenes.

Dr. Finch eventually lost his licence and Chris changed his name to Augusten Xon Burroughs. He worked in advertising before launching his career as a memoirist. Running with Scissors was a huge best-seller and made into a movie, but also triggered a lawsuit against Augusten and his publisher. The case was settled out of court with both sides claiming vindication. Burroughs maintains the memoir is accurate.

Look Me in the Eye

Augusten's older brother, John, has Asperger's Syndrome, which went undiagnosed until he was 40 years old. As a teenager, John was written off as a lazy misfit by teachers and therapists. He dropped out of high school and left home at age 16.

What happened next is remarkable. An interest in music and electronics led to a successful career as a sound engineer for Pink Floyd's sound company, and soon he was modifying guitars for Ace Frehley of KISS so they would produce smoke and shoot rockets. Eventually he set up his own business based on another of his passions, repairing high-end autos – Porsches, Rolls-Royces, etc.

Where Running with Scissors is shockingly funny, Look Me in the Eye is earnest and inspirational, shedding light on what it's like to be an Aspergian and celebrating its gifts. Yet John is not without his own sense of humour, and it can be as bent as Augusten's. Some of the scenes are as startling as anything in Running with Scissors. Others are just plain memorable.

In one, John attends a faculty party with his parents and puts some snooty profs in place with an outrageous off-the-cuff tale about why you should tip your garbageman. In another, he's working at Milton Bradley, the toy company, and sets up a joke involving a pile of white powder made by shaving a plastic countertop in the R&D lab. A company VP doesn't report it -- he snorts it and keeps coming back for more.

It was Augusten's encouragement that caused John to write Look Me in the Eye. Augusten wrote the foreword, and in his own book devotes a chapter to John. At the same time, John records his own encounters with Dr. Finch, using the same pseudonyms that Augusten uses. At the end of Look Me in the Eye, we learn that the two brothers have built homes nextdoor to each other.

The complementary nature of the books is a good reason to read them back-to-back.

Meet the Finches
Ruthless with Scissors

Meet the Parents
John G. Robison
Margaret Robison

Meet the Authors
Augusten’s website
Youtube

John’s website
Youtube

The Road

Jack London's Road is a somewhat disjointed memoir of his hoboing days in 1894 when he hopped freights across the continent. America was crippled by one of its worst depressions ever, and he set out to join an army of the unemployed marching on Washington. Only 18 at the time, he went as more of a lark than anything else, and describes with youthful exuberance riding the rods and foiling brakemen by climbing to the roofs of, and jumping in and out of, moving boxcars.

When not on the train, he begged for food and clothes, which he looked upon as "a joyous prank, a game of wits, a nerve-exerciser." He spent 30 days for vagrancy in the Erie County Penitentiary outside Buffalo, and explains how he conned the other cons. He saw a woman being whipped, stole a brandnew hat off the head of a Chinaman, and ran with a gang of youths who rolled drunks.

Similarities between this and a more famous road book (an autobiographical novel by another Jack) invite comparisons, but my thoughts ran, or rather rambled, in another direction, and I found myself thinking about an entirely different sort of road novel.

Cormac McCarthy's Road runs through a post-apocalyptic America with a man and his young son carrying their meagre belongings in a shopping cart. The terrain is an "ashen scabland," the train they stumble across "slowly decomposing for all eternity." The few remaining people are broken-down wrecks living like animals –- a grinding filthy miserable existence fraught by growing fear and dread. "I don't think we're likely to meet any good guys on the road," the father tells his son.

Both books are short, London's clocking in at just over 50,000 words with McCarthy's in the same ballpark. London's prose remains surprisingly fresh a century after it was written, but in places its youthful vigour gives way to what sounds like adolescent boasting. Of his ability to fabricate a story at a moment's notice, he says, "I have often thought that to this training of my tramp days is due much of my success as a story-writer."

McCarthy's prose is far more grim and powerful. The stripped-down punctuation gives it an elemental quality suitable for such a tense and harrowing tale. London's own post-apocalyptic novel, The Scarlet Plague, seems positively sunny by comparison. Similar to McCarthy's Road, it begins with an old man and his twelve-year-old grandson plodding along a railway embankment and clad in skins. It is 60 years after a worldwide plague in 2013 (eerily, the same year I am writing this) killed off nearly everyone. The handful that remain live in "primitive savagery," collecting human teeth on strings and unable to count beyond ten. One of the survivors is a brutish chauffeur who takes pleasure in beating the widow of one of the most influential men in pre-plague times.

Brutality, atavism, and survival of the strongest are recurring motifs in London's work, but nothing in his oeuvre can compare to McCarthy's Road for the chilling evocation of how nasty and repellent life would really be in a world without the veneer of civilization. On the very first page of the novel is the following dream:

And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain the pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

London's chauffeur represents a brutal working class bent on revenge, whereas McCarthy's creature stands for a world inimical to everyone, with the man and the boy struggling to remain not only alive, but human. In the end, however, it seems to me that both authors are writing about the same thing -- the savagery of American society.

Canadian Content

In 1894 London returned from his wanderings via the CPR. It took him six days to get from Montreal to Ottawa. The latter, he says, is "the hardest town in the United States and Canada to beg clothes in; the one exception is Washington, D.C."

At a Winnipeg police station he pieced together a tale convincing enough to keep him out of jail. Travelling west, he engaged in a long battle of wits with the CPR's brakemen, which he finally won enabling him to ride over 1000 miles in a boxcar half full of coal.

In a later chapter, "Hobos That Pass in the Night," he provides more detail about the journey, describing how he and another "bo" were aware of each other's presence by their noms-de-rail (London's was Sailor Jack) which they carved in wooden watertanks as they went across the prairies and through Kicking Horse Pass in the Rockies. In Vancouver they both signed on ships without once ever meeting each other.

Despite London's experiences in Ottawa and Winnipeg, James Haley writes in his biography that "London was cheered by the discovery that Canadians were more forthcoming in their sympathy for the homeless unemployed" and that "Canadian generosity left a deep impression."

On the Rods

Haley referred to London's Road as "a combination memoir of his months riding the rails and exposition of tramping as a an American subculture created by capitalist abuse of workers."

Most of the material had appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine before it came out in book form. The magazine version contained a number of illustrations not found in the book, but you can find them on the excellent Jack London site maintained by the Sonoma State University Library. The book itself was a flop, unlike McCarthy's Road, which was famously a selection by Oprah's Bookclub, won the Pulitzer in 2006, and made into a movie.

McCarthy's Suttree is probably the closest of his works to London's Road, for it describes the ragged existence of people on the margins of society in Knoxville, Tennessee. Said to be semi-autobiographical, it's a wonderful book with powerful prose, and a good one to start with if you haven't read McCarthy before, because its darkness is leavened with humour.

Links

The Road with illustrations
Jack London's Dark Side An insightful essay about his "historical castration"

Cormac McCarthy official website
McCarthy's interview with Oprah

Jack London

Lots of interesting details in this recent bio: Jack's illegitimate birth and black wetnurse, his infatuation with surfing, his Korean and Japanese valets, his stint as a war correspondent, his bohemian friends with their vials of cyanide, his welcoming of tramps into his home, and his "supposed anti-American sympathies" that caused the FBI to open a file on him after his death.

On the literary side it was interesting to learn that there were scenes in Sea Wolf that "shocked and terrified readers;" that he purchased story ideas from Sinclair Lewis, was praised by Conrad and Kipling, and became the highest paid writer in America.

However, when the "Dickensian gloom" of a cannery was mentioned, I began to see shadowy similarities with another great writer.

London and Dickens

Both were literary dynamos. London published at least one book a year beginning in 1900, but more usually it was two or three and sometimes four. Several came out posthumously, making a total of 49 books between 1900 and 1920.

Commitment to social reform began with their experiences as child labourers, Dickens famously in a blacking factory at age 12, London in a pickle factory at age 14. Dickens's ordeal was short, lasting something like six months, but London did not escape so easily. He put in ten-hour days at a jute mill for ten cents an hour, and shovelled coal at a power plant for $30 and a single day off per month.

Before London was out of his teens his Oliver-Twist-like existence included oyster pirating, brawls with waterfront bullies, a half-year voyage on a sealing ship, riding the rails across America to join an army of the unemployed marching on Washington, and a 30-day jail term for vagrancy.

Dickens, though reform-minded, was never a revolutionary and regarded trade unions with suspicion. London on the other hand became a socialist, preaching it on street corners, writing about it in essays, and making fans of Emma Goldman and Leon Trotski. In the final year of his life he quit from the Socialist party due to its lack of "fire and fight," signing his resignation letter, "Yours for the Revolution."

Family Resemblances

Both writers were born to neglectful mothers, Dickens never forgiving his for suggesting he remain in the blacking factory when it was no longer absolutely necessary. London's mother was unstable and manipulative, "barren of maternal instinct."

John Dickens, the father of Charles, was a naval pay clerk who was unable to live within his means, and continued to embarrass his adult son by demands for money. The case was different with London, who never knew his biological father. After he was born his mother married a Civil War veteran named John London. "The best man I ever knew," Jack said of him later, but even he on occasion was embarrassed by requests for money. The difference between John Dickens and John London was that the latter was conscientious and hard-working.

An important figure in the life of Dickens was his beloved sister-in-law, Mary Hogarth. With London, it was his devoted step-sister, Eliza Shepard, daughter of John London from his first marriage. In later years she helped run Jack's ranch and manage his literary affairs during his absences.

London and Dickens married in the same year their first books were published, but the matches were unsuitable. Dickens was domineering, striving to create the sort of family life he'd missed out on, with himself at the centre; as though, writes one of his biographers, Fred Kaplan, he needed "to become father to himself." London's failure as a husband was due, at least in part, to his never having had a childhood. The marriage breakups were widely publicized and neither man proved to be a particularly able parent.

London on London

After reading the bio I was keen to dig into something by London himself, and hauled out this excellent compendium from the Library of America and which had been languishing on a bookshelf for far too long.

People of the Abyss is what I read, an expose of life in the London slums written in 1902. To my surprise and delight, the prose remains fresh and vital.

London passes himself off as a stranded American sailor in order to report on living conditions in the East End. The scenes he describes are "straight out of darkest Dickens," with people ground down by "a gross and stupid materialism" until they become stunted physically and mentally. The "gutter folk" he meets are worse off than beasts, living in "dens and lairs" and eating "pavement offal." Children take turns at night "sitting up to drive rats away from the sleepers."

Bathtubs are a thing totally unknown, as mythical as the ambrosia of the gods. The people themselves are dirty, while any attempt at cleanliness becomes a howling farce, when it is not pitiful and tragic. Strange, vagrant odors come drifting along the greasy wind, and the rain, when it falls, is more like grease than water from heaven.

(London's findings were corroborated by a government report after the second Boer War, which concluded in 1902. It found that 40-60% of the volunteers failed to pass the physical exam, a direct result of the "illness, malnutrition, and relentless hard work" experienced by the urban poor.)

People of the Abyss was a success in America but not in England, where reception was hostile -- much as Martin Chuzzlewit's had been in the U.S. for its unflattering portrait of Americans.

Thirty years later George Orwell trod similar ground in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. Like London, he was a socialist.

The Age of Shakespeare

Two nicely complementary books, one on Shakespeare by the ever breezy Bill Bryson, and the other a rambling and chatty overview of Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights by Judith Cook.

The Bryson book is the illustrated and updated edition, about 50 pages longer than the original, and a worthwhile extravagance because the images are so useful in giving a sense of the time. For example, a reproduced Elizabethan document looks like gibberish and suggests the foreignness of the age. When in 2005 a performance of Troilus and Cressida was given using Elizabethan pronunciation, one critic reckoned he understood no more than 30%.

Shakespeare's life, says Bryson, is "little more than a series of occasional sightings." We're not even sure of his name, it having been variously rendered as Shagspere, Shakspere, Shappere, Shaxberd, and perhaps even Shakeshafte. He may have been gay. We don't know whether he was Catholic or Protestant. We don't know how many plays he wrote or in what order. We know nothing about his activities during a seven-year period before his arrival in London, a period that Bryson slyly devotes an entire chapter to. Inevitably, much of the book concentrates on life in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, but context is not just necessary, it's fascinating.

However, what is known or suspected about Shakespeare is assembled with the usual Bryson industry and scope. The plays and sonnets are looked at from a variety of angles. We read about Shakespeare's stint as Burbage's house playwright, his apparent prosperity, and how his work was received in subsequent years. The book concludes with a chapter on the various claims that the plays were written by someone other than Shakespeare.

A Violent and Brutal Age

Fusing material gleaned from both books, an unsettling portrait of the times emerges. Recurring outbreaks of plague and the shifting tectonics of religion and politics made life dangerous at all levels of society. The Spanish Armada (1588) and the Gunpowder Plot to overthrow James I (1605) are two of the more famous events of the period, but there were also plots to depose or assassinate Elizabeth (e.g Essex, Ridolfi, Babington). She had an active intelligence network and at night slept with a sword by her side. Her refusal to marry or name a successor carried with it the ominous possibility of civil war upon her passing. (No wonder so many of Shakespeare's plays revolve around the transfer of power in a state.)

Hangings, bear-baiting and cock-fighting were forms of public entertainment. "Brawls," writes Bryson, "were shockingly common," as men carried swords and daggers and were quick to use them if they felt slighted. When Cook mentions the versifying of Spenser and Raleigh, she adds, "Renaissance Man indeed had many facets, but unthinking violence is rarely mentioned among them." (Which made me think of the Elizabethan adventurer, Martin Frobisher, and his ruthless dealings with the Inuit of Baffin Island, and the book by aboriginal historian Daniel Paul, We Were Not the Savages.)

"A significant proportion of the population," writes Cook, "lived below the poverty line." Vegetables were eaten mainly by the poor, while those who could afford meat supped on, among other things, "crane, bustard, swan and stork" (Bryson). Rotten teeth caused by sugar consumption was so common that some blackened healthy teeth as a fashion statement.

People believed in witchcraft. Tobacco was known but not tea or coffee. The age of consent for girls was 12, boys 14.

At the Theatre

Play-going was an intimate experience with two to three thousand people crammed into a theatre. No one was more than 50 feet from the stage and some even sat upon it. Prologues were employed due to the high level of illiteracy, yet attention spans were probably better than our own because it was an oral culture. People loved puns and wordplay.

Plays lasted three hours or more (four-and-a-half for Hamlet) without intermission. People ate and drank beer during the performance, and if they needed to relieve themselves buckets were available to piss in. Crowds were noisier than today’s audiences, unafraid to hiss or cheer, or even throw things. Pickpockets and whores were ever-present. Real bullets were used on stage.

Theatre companies consisted of about 15 actors and a handful of apprentices. Complete scripts were not handed out. Instead actors received a separate sheet or roll ("from which the word role comes" says Cook) containing only their own lines and cues. It was rare for a play to run two days in a row, which meant that over the course of a season an actor could be expected to learn 15,000 lines. Plays often concluded with a jig, an attempt to subdue post-play boisterousness.

All plays had to be approved by the Master of Revels and were subject to censorship.

Roaring Boys

Christopher Marlowe – The baby-faced fellow with the chilling stare is thought to be Kit Marlowe. Though he wrote only a handful of plays, he was hugely influential and famously praised by Ben Jonson for his "mighty line." Cook describes him as "flamboyant, outrageous in his behaviour and opinions, given to outbursts of violence," and may have served as the model for Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. He was involved in a fatal fight before he himself died in what was long thought to be a senseless tavern quarrel, but may in fact have been an assassination, possibly related to his having worked as a government spy. In the top left corner of the portrait is a Latin motto that translates as "That which nourishes me destroys me."

Thomas Kyd – His play The Spanish Tragedy was "the single most popular and successful play of its day, remaining in repertoire for thirty years after his death" (Cook). His acquaintance with Marlowe caused him to be imprisoned and tortured, an experience that shortened his life.

Ben Jonson - Known as the most erudite of the playwrights and also one of the most ill-tempered. He killed at least one man in a duel, a fellow actor. He was imprisoned more than once for the content of his plays. He was branded on the thumb and threatened with having his ears and nose slit. Shakespeare is known to have acted in one of his plays, and may have contracted his fatal illness after they were out drinking together. Jonson once walked from London to Edinburgh. He died impoverished.

John Fletcher – Followed Shakespeare as Burbage’s house playwright, very prolific and collaborated with a number of others, most notably Beaumont. He died of the plague and was probably buried in a common grave.

George Peele – "His name," Cook writes, "became a byword for riotous living and dissipation." He died of a "loathsome disease."

Thomas Middleton – Author of A Game at Chesse, a thinly disguised allegory satirizing the Spanish court. It "ran for an unprecedented nine performances" (Cook) and caused an international incident. When the Spanish ambassador complained, the Globe was shut down and Middleton imprisoned.

Robert Greene – A compulsive gambler, he took up with the sister of the notorious highwayman Cutting Ball Jack. At the end of his life he repented his riotous living and appalling behaviour in a pamphlet called "A Groatsworth of Wit" in which he called Shakespeare "an upstart crow."

Thomas Dekker - He and Jonson became embroiled in a "Poets War," lampooning each other in their plays. Cook gives a hilarious excerpt from his pamphlet "A Gull's Horn Book" in which a newcomer to London is given advice on how to make an impression:

Never cut your hair or suffer a comb to fasten his teeth there. Let it grow thick and bushy, like a forest or some wilderness. Let not those four-footed creatures that breed in it and are tenants to that crown land, be put to death... Long hair will make you dreadful to your enemies, manly to your friends; it blunts the edge of the sword and deadens the thump of the bullet; in winter a warm nightcap, in summer a fan of feathers.

Shakespeare Portrayed in Film

Having thoroughly enjoyed both books, I settled down to view a pair of equally entertaining but very different movies. First up was Shakespeare in Love, which so cleverly conflates aspects of his life with Romeo and Juliet. Then came the newer Anonymous, in which the Bard is a boob, an illiterate opportunist who takes credit for plays written by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford.