Hooboy, That's a Relief

One of the many pleasures of reading Patrick Kurp's excellent blog is that he relieves you of the obligation to pretend to like stuff that you never much liked in the first place (link).

History as Novel: Tschuppik on Francis Joseph

I don’t suppose Karl Tschuppik’s Francis Joseph I (1930) is likely to win any popularity contests any time soon. For one thing, it is out of print: I had to scare it up second hand (I was prompted by Clive James in his Cultural Amnesia—where, I think, he boosts it for reasons quite different from my own). So it’s a specialized taste, but as Abe Lincoln probably did not really say: if you like this kind of book, this is the kind of book you will like.

I do like it, for reasons of my own. One, as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been trying to get myself up to speed on Central Europe, and, and Tschuppkik’s book, though nominally a biography, is really fairly close to qualifying as a full-bore history of the Austrian (oops, Austria-Hungarian) Empire through Francis Joseph’s 64-year reign. Two, Tschuppik offers the kind of product which, these days, serious academics would pass around only in a plain brown wrapper—a sustained narrative, with characters and something close to plot (though I guess it might get him a slot on the Jim Lehrer News Hour).

Writing after the collapse of the Empire, Tschuppik (like so many others of his time) betrays a wry affection for the great exhausted volcano, and a good feel for its equivocal virtues. Perhaps more important, he seems to have a discerning eye for what is (to me) the most interesting part of the story—the polycentric conflict between (a) the old, quasi-feudal aristocracy; (b) the “liberals”—meaning here mostly new men of industry and commerce, some almost inconceivably wealthy; and (c) the “nationalists”—who could be the Hungarians, with a feudal tradition even more alive than the Austrian’s own, or the Czechs, who simply didn’t understand why they couldn’t have a place at the table.

Even on these, Tschuppik’s presentation is far from complete. I found myself backstopping Tschuppik with Arno J. Mayer’s the Persistence of the Old Regime (1981), flawed-but-impressive in its own way. Mayer does offer a lot more specific data on the economic transition, though not carefully organized (and inexcusably unsourced). Tschuppik is also strangely silent on some huge issues about which I would like to know more—the emergence of modern culture, for one and for another, the place of Jews (no mention of Freud, Herzl, Klimt, Schiele). Granted: a history of Vienna without Freud is like a history of Rome without the pope—but then, strictly speaking, a history of Vienna is not what Tschuppik undertook to write.

Being the kind of narrative that it is, there’s a sense in which Tschuppik’s FJ reminds me less of any pure history and more of the great novels of social change—perhaps in particular, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, which offers a somewhat similar take on the same period in another part of the forest. In the end, I admit it was a long slog (FJ—Buddenbrooks is another of those books I think of as too short). But then the 64-year reign of Francis Joseph was a long slog, and very likely seemed so even to those who lived it, perhaps even to the old emperor himself.

God and Mr. James

Yesterday I showcased Cynthia Ozick’s perplexity over her relationship to the Bible. Here’s another appreciator, more secular but no less enthusiastic and less conflicted:

The King James Bible is a prose masterpiece compiled at a time when even a committee could write English. The modern versions, done in the name of comprehension, add up to an assault on readability…. Those responsible for the [New English Bible] probably did realize that they were atheists: otherwise they could scarcely have been so determined to leave not one stone standing upon another. For those of us unable to accept that the Bible is God’s living word, but who believe that the living word is God, the successful reduction of once-vital language to a compendium of banalities was bound to look like blasphemy, and the perpetrators like vandals. When I joined in a public protest against the rejigging of the Book of Common Prayer, a practising Christian among the London editors—it was Richard Ingrams of Private Eye—accused me of being in bad faith. He hated the new prayer book even more than I did, but thought I could have no reason for sharing his contempt. But it was my book too. I had been brought up on the scriptures, the prayers and the hymns. I had better reasons than inertia for deploring their destruction.

--Clive James, Cultural Amnesia 488 (2007)

Clives James on Shakespeare's Eighth-Grade Teacher

Clive James salutes all those eighth-grade teachers (ours, and Shakespeare's) who made us diagram all those sentences:

[U]nless we ourselves know quite a lot about how grammar works, there will be severe limits on our capacity to understand what [Shakespeare] wrote, especially when he seems to be at his most untrammelled. Take a single line from Henry V:

How ill white hairs become a fool and jester

Here is a whole story in eleven syllables, but unless we grasp how an extremely compressed sentence can be put together, we won't get the story out, and if Shakespeare had not grasped it, he would not have been able to put the story in. Though they might look like it at first glance, "ill" and "white" are not a pair of adjectives. "Ill" is an adverb, modifying the verb "become." If this is not realized, the meaning is reversed. If Shakespeare hadn't realized the fundamental diference between an adjective and an adverb, he couldn't have written the sentence. A good actor will help make the point, by emphasizing "ill" so that its effect carries over to "become." But it is quite easy to imagine a bad actor missing the point, and conveying the impression that ill white hairs make a fool and jester look good, or, even worse--two errors in one--allowing it to be thought that ill white hairs have turned into a fool or jester.

--Clive James, Cultural Amnesia 777 (2007)

Or, as Shakespeare did not say, "I kissed her on the lips and left her behind for you."