Well-designed books

From Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts (1977)

All these kindnesses were crowned with a dazzling consummation. I had said that my books, after the lost diary, were what I missed most. I ought to have known by now that mention of loss has only one result under this roof . . . What books? I had named them: when the time came for farewells, the Baron said: “We can’t do much about the others but here’s Horace for you.” He put a small duodecimo volume in my hand. It was the Odes and Epodes, beautifully printed on thin paper in Amsterdam in the middle of the seventeenth century, bound in hard green leather with gilt lettering. The leather on the spine had faded but the sides were as bright as grass after rain and the little book opened and shut as compactly as a Chinese casket. There were gold edges to the pages and a faded marker of scarlet silk slanted across the long S’s of the text and the charming engraved vignettes: cornucopias, lyres, pan-pipes, chaplets of olive and bay and myrtle. Small mezzotints showed the Forum and the Capitol and imaginary Sabine landscapes: Tibur, Lucretilis, the Bandusian spring, Soracte, Venusia.

When I was younger, and a Star Trek fan, I enjoyed that Kirk and (more believably), Picard were fans, in that distant future, of antique printed books. Even as a kid I knew what the writers were trying to convey. A well-designed book is more than the words it contains, and I too rarely note that in this blog about books. So, a moment to appreciate as objects some books I’ve read recently.

The passage that opened this post is from a book in the New York Review of Books classics series, which are smartly designed, hearty paperbacks, printed and bound to last. At the other end of the spectrum, but no less well-designed for their subject and audience, are the lurid, pulpy Hard Case Crime volumes, with their original cover paintings by R. B. Farrell and others. The Hesperus Press, too, has a memorable, effective series design, with French flaps, an elongated trim, and well-set type.

Then there are the tiny volumes of the Library of America’s American Poets Project, with their luxurious, creamy paper and their sandy-textured, matte-finish jackets, designed by Chip Kidd. Or Francine du Plessix Gray’s Them, designed by Darren Haggar, which wonderfully weaves photos into the narrative, which is itself set in the appropriately elegant Centaur MT. And along those lines, there’s the most extravagantly beautiful design I’ve seen the past few years, the three-volume, illustrated, slip-cased New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.

All of these books are instances of designers adapting art to the needs of commerce, and thus enabling commerce itself to be put to work passing on stories, disseminating knowledge, continuing an argument. It’s complex, difficult work, and its successes—the many, many books that are a joy to pick up, open, read, and lend to friends—are the reason our house will keep getting more and more crowded as the years go on.

Posting will be sporadic through the Fourth of July holiday, as work and travel and such things intervene.

Of fashion and matters sartorial, part 4 of 8

Every group and subgroup, every class and demographic, has its own fashion, its own range of acceptable dress. And that dress frequently looks odd, or even ridiculous, to those outside the group. From the wealthy ladies parading in their furs on Michigan Avenue to the kids hanging around the Dunkin’ Donuts on Belmont getting powdered sugar all over their tongue studs to the bond traders waiting for the train in their expensive suits on a cold morning, no coats, no hats—everyone looks silly if, for a moment, you don’t take them on their own terms.

If I’d realized that when I was twelve, middle school would have been a lot easier.

From Paul Fussell’s Uniforms: Why We Are What We Wear (2002)

The universal dilemma can be specified succinctly: everyone must wear a uniform, but everyone must deny wearing one, lest one’s invaluable personality and unique identity be compromised.

From Samuel Pepys’s Diary, 19 August 1661

To Worcester House, where several Lords are met in council this afternoon. And while I am waiting there, in comes the King in a plain common riding-suit and velvet cap in which he seemed a very ordinary man to one that had not known him.

From Céleste Alberet’s Monsieur Proust (1973)

He didn’t wear his shoes out any more than his clothes. He always traveled about in taxis and never walked except on carpets and parquets. And then he was a person of habit; he hated any kind of change. He felt especially comfortable in things he’d worn for a long time. What’s more, choosing, buying, trying things on, were tiring and took up time. Also, we mustn’t forget, he only went out at times when the shops were shut. He never bought anything himself—he ordered it.

From Francine du Plessix Gray’s Them: A Memoir of Parents (2005)

I engaged in numerous diets that might help me to resemble the ghoulishly emaciated models who flocked to Mother’s parties: three days of buttermilk and soda water, three days of hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes, three days of stewed prunes and tea.

From my trip on the #6 Jackson Park Express bus the afternoon of March 30th (2006)

At 56th and Hyde Park Boulevard, a 20-ish Asian-American woman with extravagant, multi-hued hair extensions boarded the bus. She had a pretty face and was good-looking, though very skinny, dressed in a small, tight, white tank top and extremely low-rise jeans. She carried one of those long cruising skateboards, and she was plugged in to her earbuds, listening to music.

On her left hand was written, in big block letters, “BUY A SUIT!”

On love

From Barbara Pym’s A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters

21 September 1932
It was a very cold evening and I felt very tired, but we went down Weston lane and looked at the stars. I said that the happiness one got out of love was worth any unhappiness it might (and generally does) bring. I can’t remember what Rupert said but he wasn’t so sure about it not having had the experience I suppose.

From Propertius’s Elegies, 1.1 (ca. 54-40 BC), as translated and collected in A Loeb Classical Library Reader

Cynthia first with her eyes ensnared me, poor wretch, that had previously been untouched by desire. It was then that Love made me lower my looks of stubborn pride and trod my head beneath his feet, until the villain taught me to shun decent girls and live the life of a ne’er-do-well. Poor me, for a whole year now this frenzy has not abated, while I am compelled to endure the frown of heaven.

2 Samuel 11:2

And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself, and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.

From Francine du Plessix Gray’s Them: A Memoir of Parents (2005)

In this particular mimesis of [my mother] Tatiana I had aspired to be courted by barons and counts, as she had, and I bettered her: I ended up going steady—how corny can you get?—with an alcoholic prince. No earlier accomplishments of mine evoked such a surge of maternal approval as I received during my affair with that particular cad.

From Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing (1951)

Being in love is a complicated matter; although anyone who is prepared to pretend that love is a simple, straightforward business is always in a strong position for making conquests.

From Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599, 1600)

Come live with me and be my love
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or sleepy mountain yields.

From Evelyn Waugh’s "Love in the Slump" (1932)

“You’re always so much nicer to me than anyone else, Tom; I wonder why?” and before he could deflect her—he had had an unusually exacting day’s business and the dance had been stupefying—she had popped the question.

“Well of course,” he had stammered, “I mean to say there’s nothing I’d like more, old girl. I mean, you know, of course I’ve always been crazy about you . . . But the difficulty is I simply can’t afford to marry. Absolutely out of the question for years, you know.”

“But I don’t think I should mind being poor with you, Tom; we know each other so well. Everything would be easy.”

And before Tom knew whether he was pleased or not, the engagement had been announced.

From Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing (1951)

In general, things are apt to turn out unsatisfactorily for at least one of the parties concerned; and in due course only its most determined devotees remain unwilling to admit that an intimate and affectionate relationship is not necessarily a simple one: while such persistent enthusiasts have usually brought their own meaning of the word to something far different from what it conveys to most people in early life.

From Barbara Pym's A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters
1 November 1933

What a bad sign it is to get the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse out of the library.

From Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men (1931)

Barlow said: “If it’s really poisoning your life, why not ask her to marry you? I sometimes do that. Girls like it. Besides, you’d be quite safe. I don’t think she’d accept you for a moment.”

From an early 1938 letter from Barbara Pym to her friend Robert Liddell, collected in A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters

“Mrs Minshall seems to want us all to be either dead or married,” said Mrs. Pym to her daughter as they drove home in the car.

“Well, I do not see what else we can be,” said Barbara in a thoughtful tone. “I suppose we all come to one state or the other eventually. I do not know which I would rather be in.”

“Oh, there is plenty of time for that,” said Mrs. Pym comfortably.

From Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599, 1600)

The shepherds’ swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me and be my love.

From David Riggs’s The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004)

Six years after Marlowe’s death, when his [translation of Ovid’s Amores] had appeared in print, Archbishop Whitgift ordered all copies to “be presently brought to the Bishop of London to be burned” in St. Paul’s churchyard.

Fashionable parents

My mother enjoyed claiming direct descent from Genghis Khan. Having asserted that one eighth of her blood was Tarter and only seven eighths of it “ordinary Russian,” with a panache that no one else could have pulled off she proceeded to drop a few names in the chronology of our lineage: Kublai Khan, Tamerlane, and then the great Mogul monarch Babur, from whose favorite Kirghiz concubine my great-grandmother was descended, and voila!, our ancestry was established.

That’s where Francine du Plessix Gray opens, Them: A Memoir of Parents, her biography of her mother and stepfather, and that mix of mystery, glamour, falsehood, and determination characterize remain the pair’s signature throughout. Gray’s mother, Tatiana Iacovleva, an immigrant from Russia by way of wartime France, was from the 1940s through the 1960s known as Tatiana of Saks, her hats on all the right heads in that last golden era of women’s hats. Gray’s stepfather, Alex Liberman, was in the same period art director of Vogue, later moving up the Conde Nast chain to editorial director. Between them, they were a force in the mid-century fashion world, exuding confidence and seeming to be a perfect couple, devoted to each other and to their daughter.

Unsurprisingly, Them is about a privileged child growing to realize that Tatiana and Alex weren’t that good at parenting after all. Appearance was everything, and they were far more interested in each other, their careers, and their lavish parties—thrown at a scale beyond their means to a truly Russian degree—than in parenting. Unwilling to consider anyone’s needs but her own, and supported in her self-centeredness by her doting husband, Tatiana refused to handle even the most essential duties of parenting. She even abdicated the responsibility of telling Francine that her father had been killed in the war, forcing the babysitter to do so—and that only after he’d been dead for more than a year.

A memoir of bad parenting by a child of privilege is nothing new. But because Gray is impressively honest and sympathetic, and the milieu in which her parents moved varied and interesting, Them becomes as bewitching as the couple at its center. She’s not after revenge or self-justification, but answers and understanding. Why did she love her parents? Why does she still love them? What made them such fashion—and social—successes, and such failures at family life? In attempting to answer these questions for herself paints her parents so clearly that we are simultaneously appalled and captivated.

As important as Gray’s unflinching honesty is her eye for a good story, and what really makes Them is its profusion of well-told anecdotes and portraits of friends and relatives, famous and obscure. Marlene Dietrich, Tatiana’s best friend in the 1960s, cooks for Francine in a thigh-length t-shirt and not a stitch more, as she inadvertently reveals when reaching for a pot. Then there’s an editor-in-chief at Vogue in the 1950s, who at parties

used to absentmindedly chew canapés through the veils of the little black hats she always wore, creating a gooey mess of tuna fish or chopped liver, her hat gradually descending upon her face until she realized her gaffe and ran into the nearest bathroom, moaning, to clean up.

And the friend of Tatiana from Saks who was given to issuing fashion predictions along these lines: “The toreador look! Small heads are in this fall.” Or the time that

I came home from church with my children and found that [Tatiana] had swept some two inches of snow from my driveway into my living room, entirely covering the floor, and was now busy sweeping it out. “What’s happening?” I cried out. She put her broom down and, hands on hips, turned her most disdainful glance on me. “Didn’t you know that this is the only way to clean rugs? That’s how we did it in Russia.”

which echoes an earlier story of melting snow, from Tatiana’s aunt in pre-revolutionary Russia:

Aunt Sandra’s years as a young opera star in Russia yielded an anecdote that I bade her repeat innumerable times throughout my childhood: “I’d just sung Aida in St. Petersburg, it was after a huge snowstorm,” she’d tell me, “I dressed in a rush to go to a grand bal, and as I waited for my carriage my escort made me laugh so hard that I pee-peed in my pants, the snow underneath me melted, and clouds of steam rose all around me.”

Woven throughout the narrative, these odd, magical-sounding stories flesh out the world inhabited by Tatiana and Alex, bringing it all to vivid life. It's a testament to Gray's skill that, though I didn't like this frequently appalling couple, I was glad I'd spent time with them and learned their stories, and I understood why their daughter loved them and continued to struggle with their memory.

The Pleasures of Biography

From Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755)

Biographer: A writer of lives, a relator not of the history of nations, but of the actions of particular persons.
"Our Grubstreet biographers watch for the death of a great man like so many undertakers, on purpose to make a penny of him."—Addison's Freeholders, No. 35

From Javier Marias's Written Lives (2005)

When Malcolm Lowry got into trouble in 1946 during his second stay in Mexico and, in an attempt not to be expelled from the country, asked the sub-chief of the Immigration department in Acapulco what there was against him from his previous visit in 1938, the government employee took out a file, tapped it with one finger and said: "Drunk, Drunk, Drunk. Here is your life." These words are as brutal as they are exact, and perhaps, on more compassionate lips, the right word would have been "calamitous," because Lowry does seem to have been the most calamitous writer in the whole history of literature, which is no mean feat, given the intense competition in the field.

From John Aubrey's Brief Lives (169?)

Thomas Chaloner had a trick some times to goe into Wesminster-hall in a morning in Term-time, and tell some strange story (Sham) and would come thither again about 11 or 12 to have the pleasure to heare how it spred; and sometime it would be altered, with additions, he could scarce know it to be his owne. He was neither proud nor covetous, nor a hypocrite, nor apt to do injustice, but apt to revenge

After the restauration of King Charles the Second, he kept the Castle at the Isle of Man, where he had a pretty Wench that was his Concubine; where when Newes was brought to him that there were some come to the Castle to demaund it for his Majestie, he spake to his Girle to make him a Possett, into which he putt, out of a paper he had, some Poyson, which did, in a very short time, make him fall a vomiting exceedingly; and after some time vomited nothing but Bloud. His Retchings were so violent that the Standers by were much grieved to behold it. Within three howres he dyed. The Demandants of the Castle came and sawe him dead: he was swoln so extremely that they could not see any eie he had, and no more of his nose than the tip of it, which shewed like a wart, and his Coddes were swoln as big as one's head.

From Francine du Plessix Gray's Them: A Memoir of Parents (2005)

The very next afternoon, shortly after returning to [the school] Les Roches, Alex started vomiting blood. The nurse at the school infirmary told him that "nobody vomits blood" and that he'd probably eaten too much currant jelly.

From Javier Marias's Written Lives (2005)

According to contemporary accounts, Rimbaud never changed his clothes and therefore smelled disgusting, left any bed he slept in full of lice, drank constantly (preferably absinthe), and rewarded his acquaintances with nothing but impertinence and insults.

From William Hazlitt's "The Indian Juggler" (1821), reprinted in On the Pleasure of Hating

Ingenuity is genius in trifles, greatness is genius in undertakings of much pith and moment. A clever or ingenious man is one who can do any thing well, whether it is worth doing or not; a great man is one who can do that which when done is of the highest importance. Themistocles said he could not play on the flute, but that he could make of a small city a great one. This gives a pretty good idea of the distinction in question. . . . John Hunter was a great man. That anyone might see without the smallest skill in surgery. His style and manner shewed the man. He would set about cutting up the carcase of a whale with the same greatness of gusto that Michael Angelo would have hewn a block of marble. Lord Nelson was a great naval commander, but for myself, I have not much opinion of a sea-faring life. Sir Humphry Davy was a great chemist, but I am not sure he is a great man. I am not a bit the wiser for one of his discoveries, nor I never met with any one that was.

From Javier Marias's Written Lives (2005)

Lowry did not make a very good impression during his stay in Ronda and especially in Granada: at the time, although still very young, he was fat, drank wine all the time, and insisted on wearing huge Cordoban hats of a kind that no one has ever worn. In Granada he soon became known as "the drunken Englishman;" people poked fun and the Guardia Civil were also keeping an eye on him. [Conrad] Aiken's wife remembers Lowry walking around the city surrounded by a troop of children who were all laughing at him and whom he was unable to shake off.

From Francine du Plessix Gray's Them: A Memoir of Parents (2005)

Throughout these innocent adventures she had retained much of the anarchic extravagance of her Soviet youth: upon entering a restaurant and seeing a group of her friends at the other end of a crowded room, she had simply jumped onto a table and leaped from table to table until she reached her pals, impervious to any disturbance she might cause to the diners on the way.

From Javier Marias's Written Lives (2005)

It is hardly surprising that Djuna Barnes should have considered her first name as so unequivocally hers when Anais Nin took the liberty of using it, for most of the names in her family seem to have been chosen precisely so that no one else could usurp them. Suffice it to say that among her own siblings and ancestors were the following extravagant examples, which, in many cases, do not even give a clue as to the gender of the person bearing them: Urlan, Niar, Unade, Reon, Hinda, Zadel, Gaybert, Culmer, Kilmeny, Thurn, Zendon, Saxon, Shangar, Wald, and Llewellyn. At least the last name is recognized in Wales. Perhaps it is understandable that, on reaching adulthood, some members of the Barnes family adopted banal nicknames like Bud or Charlie.

From David Riggs's The World of Christopher Marlowe (2004)

During the months leading up to Marlowe's murder in a hired room near London, the pamphleteer Robert Greene publicly predicted that if the "famous gracer of tragedians" did not repent his blasphemies, God would soon strike him down. A few days before Marlowe was killed, the spy Richard Baines informed the Queen's Privy Council that he was a proselytizing atheist, a counterfeiter, and a consumer "of boys and tobacco."

From Javier Marias's Written Lives (2005)

Adah Isaacs Menken had numerous lovers, some of whom, inevitably, were writers, such as Alexandre Dumas pere at the end of his days and that masochistic poet par excellence, Algernon Charles Swinburne, that tiny red-haired, Victorian, homosexual drunkard, addicted to the whip.

From Anthony Powell's review of Rare Sir William Davenant, by Mary Edmond, collected in Some Poets, Artists, and "A Reference for Mellors" (2005)

Miss Edmond has been extremely ingenious in digging out material about Davenant; in fact one is staggered by her research, which proves the point that scholarly biography is by far the most entertaining kind. Davenant, as might be expected, was not very good at paying his tailor, who sued him (though Davenant continued to have his clothes made there), which leads to a lot of relevant information.

From "The Life and Times of John Aubrey," (1949) by Oliver Lawson Dick, in the David R. Godine edition of John Aubrey's Brief Lives

Having decided to write a life, Aubrey selected a page in one of his notebooks and jotted down as quickly as possible everything that he could remember about the character concerned: his friends, his appearance, his actions, his books, and his sayings. Any facts or dates that did not occur to him on the spur of the moment were left blank, and as Aubrey was so extremely sociable that he was usually suffering from a hangover when he came to put pen to paper, the number of these omissions was often very large.