Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Friday February 4, 2011
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ANDREW MARVELL: The Chameleon
Nigel Smith
Yale University Press
ISBN 978-0300112214
400 pages
$45
Reviewed by Michael Dirda, who reviews books every Thursday for The Washington Post
In 1921, T.S. Eliot, commemorating the tercentenary of Andrew Marvell's birth, coyly referred to the poet as "the former member for Hull" -- that is, Parliament's representative from the provincial city of Hull.
Eliot wasn't simply being cute. While most of us think of Marvell (1621-1678) as the author of the best seduction poem in the English language, he was known to his contemporaries as a private tutor, a hardworking civil servant and an occasional diplomatic emissary (to Holland and Russia). He was also quite probably a secret agent. "To His Coy Mistress," "The Garden," "Upon Appleton House" and his three or four other familiar masterpieces weren't even published until 1681, three years after his death.
Nigel Smith, a professor of English at Princeton University, is Marvell's editor in the invaluable Longman's Annotated English Poets series, and he has certainly mastered everything that can be learned about this elusive, shadowy and very private man.
While Smith expresses the hope that his biography will "make Marvell known to the widest possible readership," his isn't an easy task, given a paucity of personal anecdote and the fact that the poems most people care about are those Marvell wrote in his 20s or early 30s. The last 25 years of his life were largely devoted to government work and occasional verse satires on the politics of the day.
As a result, "Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon" focuses throughout on the distant politics of 17th-century England and on Marvell's reactions to it, whether in his public career or in his private writing.
The son of a clergyman, the poet started off a royalist, spent much of the civil war abroad, welcomed Oliver Cromwell (while showing sympathy and admiration for the doomed Charles I, who was beheaded in 1649), and ultimately worked closely as an assistant to the protectorate's secretary of foreign tongues: none other than John Milton, who by that point in his life had gone blind. When Cromwell died, it is said that Marvell, Milton and John Dryden walked together in the funeral cortege.
Following the restoration of the monarchy, Marvell served in Parliament, published religious and political pamphlets, including "An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England" (1677), and eventually died poor.
A Mary Marvell, nee Palmer and possibly his former landlady, dubiously claimed to be his widow. Smith is open to this possibility, in part because Marvell's sexuality was distinctly heterodox. Misogyny and pedophilia have been detected in some of his poems, but so have hints of homosexuality (reinforced by contemporary rumors). The satirical poet Samuel Butler even implied that some kind of genital accident left Marvell a eunuch.
No one knows for sure. As Smith writes, Marvell "had few friends and generally did not trust people. He liked drinking but would not drink in company." As Washingtonians know, public responsibilities sometimes require not only discretion but also secrecy and the maintenance of a low profile. Still, there are signs that this lifelong civil servant felt frustrated and disappointed, was subject to jealousy and sneering, and regarded himself as fundamentally an outsider.
Little wonder that Marvell's verse often leaves us unsure of where he and we stand, distinguished as it is by ambiguities, ironies and a liking for what the ancients called "concordia discors" (dissonant harmony). To the common view of Marvell as a somewhat Olympian figure, incorruptible and patriotic, Smith suggests that his poetry might have resulted from "a brilliant sublimation of a set of social and sexual confusions and frustrations."
Eliot regarded Marvell as the product of European -- that is to say Latin -- culture, neatly defining his wit as "a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace." An early Marvell poem such as "On a Drop of Dew" employs the elaborate metaphysical conceits we associate with John Donne; the "Dialogue Between the Soul and Body" -- a very Yeatsian title -- depicts "a Soul hung up, as 'twere, in Chains/Of Nerves, and Arteries, and Veins."
In "The Definition of Love," Marvell dramatically announces that his love "was begotten by despair/Upon Impossibility." "The Garden" contains the famous couplet "Annihilating all that's made/To a Green Thought in a Green Shade," and "An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland" hauntingly tells us that Cromwell's destiny was to bring about Charles I's downfall and so "to ruin the great Work of Time."
All these are famous lines. But in any rereading of Marvell's poetry one regularly discovers striking passages in unexpected works, such as this opening to "The First Anniversary of the Government under O.C." in which human life is likened to one long act of drowning:
So Man, declining always, disappears
In the weak Circles of increasing Years;
And his short Tumults of themselves Compose,
While flowing Time above his Head does close.
While "Upon Appleton House" may be Marvell's most sustained poem, it is overlong for most modern tastes, being composed of descriptions of a country estate with Horatian reflections on rural ease, coupled with advice to its owner, Lord Fairfax, and a look to the future of his little daughter Mary, for whom Marvell was employed as a tutor.
Perhaps only in "To His Coy Mistress" did Marvell avoid both obscurities and longeurs and get everything precisely right. From its opening "Had we but World enough, and Time," it presents the "carpe diem" theme with syllogistic inexorability. The first strophe describes how the lover would be happy to praise his mistress from the beginning to the end of time: "My vegetable Love should grow/Vaster than Empires, and more slow." Alas, as he says in the next section, "at my back I always hear/Time's winged chariot hurrying near/and yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity." In short, "the Grave's a fine and private place/But none I think do there embrace."
Only one logical deduction is possible: "Now, therefore," the speaker concludes, as the poem grows faster and more intense, "while thy willing Soul transpires/At every pore with instant Fires,/Now let us sport us while we may." Instead of surrendering to time's ravages, "let us roll all our strength, and all/Our sweetness, up into one Ball; and tear our Pleasures with rough strife,/Through the Iron gates of Life." Love-making's joy is, finally, both thrillingly brutal and ecstatic.
Such poetry appeals directly to almost anyone's emotions and experience, but much of Marvell's other writing is far more deeply grounded in his own time. For such fine but distinctly historical work most readers will need some help, and Smith, whether in his annotated edition of Marvell's poems or in this critical biography, is the man to see.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE MEMORY PALACE
Mira Bartok
Free Press
ISBN 978-1439183311
305 pages
$25
Reviewed by Reeve Lindbergh
Mira Bartok's disturbing, beautiful book about her mother's schizophrenia takes its title from the teachings of a 16th-century Jesuit priest, Matteo Ricci, who helped Chinese scholars safeguard their memories by associating a specific image with each memory, then assigning each image a place in a room in the mind. In this way one could build, room by room, an imaginary palace filled with real memories. "The Memory Palace" is not so much a palace of memories as a complex web of bewitching verbal and visual images, memories, dreams, true stories and rambling excerpts from the author's mentally ill mother's notebooks. It is an extraordinary mix.
Myra and Rachel Herr grew up in Cleveland with their divorcee mother, Norma, a brilliant pianist who loved all the arts and took her children to concerts and museums during her lucid moments. Yet the early parts of Bartok's book read like a good child's nightmare. It did not matter how hard she tried, how many hours she practiced the piano, how impressive her grades were. Her mother might show up on a bicycle at school and circle the building, ringing the bicycle bell and calling out "Where are my children? Someone has kidnapped my children!" She might hear voices and have conversations with people who were not there, or spin in circles in the living room, holding a butcher's knife.
Myra and Rachel's grandmother called the hospital when Norma's schizophrenic episodes became extreme, but felt deeply ashamed whenever the ambulance arrived. ("What will the neighbors say now?") After the girls grew up and their grandfather died, Norma lived with the grandmother, though Norma's illness continued and at 80 the older woman began to show signs of Alzheimer's.
When Norma stabbed their grandmother six times with a knife, Myra and Rachel legally removed the grandmother to a private elder-care facility, but the daughters were unable to have their mother placed where she, too, would receive appropriate treatment;
Norma was not considered "incompetent." Nonetheless, she attacked Myra with a broken bottle, slicing her throat. She tried to choke Rachel on the street. Finally both girls changed their names (to Mira and Natalia, respectively) and fled, leaving their mother with just the mailing address of a friend. They were estranged from Norma for 17 years, until they were called to her deathbed.
Mira Bartok, a prolific author of books for children, lived with anguishing guilt during the years of separation, always yearning to help her mother, who was homeless and alone. The danger of contact seemed too great right up to the end of Norma's life:
"Even though she was now elderly," Bartok writes of her mother, dying of cancer in the hospital at 81, "in my mind she was still the madwoman on the street, brandishing a knife; the woman who shouts obscenities at you in the park, who follows you down alleyways, lighting matches in your hair."
Some of the images in the book are terrifying, but the writing is intimate and exquisite, with sentences and paragraphs worth reading and re-reading just to savor the words. The author describes a childhood marked by trauma -- the schizophrenic mother, the father who abandoned the family, the grandfather who hit them with his belt and threatened them with his gun -- and adulthood as an artist and a writer whose life continued to be overshadowed by her mother's illness.
Bartok often writes of her mother's schizophrenia in the language of myth and magic, as if to cloak the incomprehensible in some form of understanding: "In her story there are leopards on every corner, men with wild teeth and cat bodies, tails as long as rivers. If she opens her arms into wings she must cross a bridge of fire, battle four horses and riders. I am a swan, a spindle, a falcon, a bear."
This effort is deeply touching, as is Mira and Natalia's belief that, at the end with their weak and dying mother, they have retrieved "her sweet essence that not even schizophrenia could take away." However agonizing the relationship with their mother was, and surely would have continued to be had she lived, at her death her daughters salvaged a stubborn, abiding love for Norma in spite of everything. It is hard to imagine a more poignant tribute.
Reeve Lindbergh has written a number of books for children and adults, including "Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age and Other Unexpected Adventures."
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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HEAT WAVE: The Life and Career of Ethel Waters
Donald Bogle
Harper
ISBN 978-0061241734
624 pages
$26.99
Reviewed by Wil Haygood
Toward the end of her beguiling life, the one-time vaudevillian Ethel Waters was schlepping around small college campuses.
She was performing the Carson McCullers drama "The Member of the Wedding," which had brought her fame many years earlier on Broadway. But this was now the '60s, and Waters -- in her own 60s -- was a mysterious figure to many, an obese woman with a vicious temper who moonlighted with evangelist Billy Graham's traveling revivals. She had purposely distanced herself from the civil rights movement.
The black college kids, in love with their rising cultural pride, wanted nothing to do with her during her campus tours. The white kids thought her an intriguing relic from the past. In 1972, Waters had been introduced to an audience as a legendary "black" performer. "Please, not the word 'Black,'" she said. "I'm a Negress and proud of it."
Waters, whose career spanned radio, Broadway, musical recordings, TV and film, has long demanded a major assessment. Donald Bogle's "Heat Wave" goes a long way toward putting her career in perspective and detailing her tortuous and enigmatic journey.
She was born on Halloween in 1896 in Chester, Pa., her birth a result of the rape of her teenage mother. While growing up, Waters became fond of music and musicians. It would be the way to escape poverty. "In time," writes Bogle, "Ethel got to see performers like the Whitman Sisters, the comedy duo Butterbeans and Susie, dancer Alice Ramsey, the ventriloquist Johnny Woods, and the great blues singer Ma Rainey." It was her education. She watched, she imitated, she learned.
Her voice was mature, and her stage presence aggressively sexy. (Waters never was a classic beauty like Lena Horne or Dorothy Dandridge, but in the old show-business adage, she worked well with what she possessed.) In time, Waters made her way to Baltimore, where she joined the lively Negro vaudeville circuit under the umbrella of the Theatre Owners Booking Association. It was an amalgamation of businessmen and hucksters who sent black performers throughout the country.
Performers had another name for the group: Tough on Black Actors. The theater owners could be crooks, the pay paltry, the hours long and cruel. But Waters was nothing if not a hard worker.
Harlem was a mecca for black entertainers, but it was also risky for newcomers. "There was too much Negro talent around," Bogle -- the author of, among other books, "Dorothy Dandridge" and "Bright Boulevards, Bold Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood" -- tells us of that Harlem.
Waters stormed Harlem. She waltzed into the offices of Black Swan records in 1921. They liked her style. On show billings, she was referred to as "Sweet Mama Stringbean." She traveled with the Black Swan Jazz Masters and a lesbian lover. (A brief marriage had gone bust.) Onlookers gawked as she galloped atop a horse through Central Park. She was becoming one of the highest-paid Negro performers. She made it to Broadway in "Blackbirds of 1930." The show flopped, but theatergoers would remember her singing, especially the song "My Handy Man Ain't Handy No More," whose lyrics included: "He don't perform his duties like he used to do /... He says he isn't lazy, claims he isn't old / But still he sits round and lets my stove get cold." Mae West had nothing on Ethel Waters.
But every success Waters had she seemed to undermine. She cursed managers. She had lovers' spats that ended up in the tabloids.
Domestic chaos was always at hand. She operated, certainly, in a racist environment. But charm was not her metier, as it was Lena Horne's. During rehearsal for a play, Waters confided: "I'm still a mite savage, I guess. Maybe there's real craziness in me. I'll say things I don't mean. I can't help it."
Her Hollywood foray was as dispiriting as every other black entertainer's at the time. "Generally," says Bogle, in wicked understatement, "Hollywood did not know what to do with its Black glamour goddesses." Here Bogle clearly becomes too enamored of his subject: Ethel Waters was no glamour goddess.
She performed well in "Cabin in the Sky" but did not, as Bogle proclaims, steal the movie. The newcomer Lena Horne did. Waters was mighty fine on-screen in "The Member of the Wedding." Her signature songs live on, among them "Am I Blue" and "St. Louis Blues." But the ending of her life is all too familiar. There were troubles with the IRS. Then health problems because of her weight. There were appearances in forgettable episodic TV dramas: that old lady sitting over there waiting on her cue.
Those who lived on higher ledges were never to her liking. "Though she could appreciate the attention of nobility," Bogle tells us, "she would always respond most to others like herself who crawled out of the pit, be it an economic or emotional one, and made a name or place for themselves."
One finishes this overlong chronicle wishing that Bogle had cracked the question of her mixed emotions about her race. It would also have been enlightening if he had delved deeper into her relationship with Billy Graham's crusading. Much of it, one is led to believe, comes down to the fact that entertainers are needy souls; they wish to be loved. Happy and functional romantic relationships seemed to have been beyond Waters' grasp. Upon meeting Eleanor Roosevelt, Waters said, "Mrs. Roosevelt, please hug me." But Donald Bogle has wrapped the life of Ethel Waters in empathy, and that is no small achievement.
Wil Haygood, a national reporter for The Washington Post, is the author of three biographies, the latest of which is "Sweet Thunder: The Life and Times of Sugar Ray Robinson." He can be reached at haygoodw(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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