Culture

THE WRONG SHIP FOR ANARCHY, BROTHER:

Patrick O’Brian is a Great Conservative Writer: His concern is the problem of right authority (Henry Farrell, Sep 07, 2024, Programmable Matter)

This is counterposed against the Tory notion of the ship as an organic society, in which the rules are administered so as to provide a kind of general comfort, a belief in an order that is undoubtedly harsh but that still provides some comfort in its harshness. When the Articles of War, with their threats of capital punishment are read out:

Death rang through and through the Articles; and even where the words were utterly incomprehensible the death had a fine, comminatory Leviticus ring, and the crew took a grave pleasure in it all; it was what they were used to – it was what they heard the first Sunday in every month and upon all extraordinary occasions such as this. They found it comfortable to their spirits, and when the watch below was dismissed the men looked far more settled.

There is much in this that is alien – even obnoxious – to modern sensibilities. The claim that it is “what they were used to” is regularly invoked throughout the books as justification for this or that sordid practice. But there is also something that the liberals and left could stand to learn from.

If O’Brian is unfair to Bentham – and he certainly is – he is not entirely unfair. And we are all (for values of ‘we’ that encompass most people who I think read this kind of newsletter), Bentham’s children to some greater or lesser degree. We are often more comfortable dealing with abstractions – introducing measures to help the poor or the working class; improving general ‘prosperity’ – than in talking to, or engaging with the sweating, breathing, imperfect and complicated people whom we affect to help. Even the most supple forms of democratic authority work through abstractions, formalities and complications, rather than face to face relationships. There isn’t an organic relationship between those who rule or at least influence rule, and those who are ruled. We do not like to think of ourselves as exerting authority, but we most certainly are, through collectively and abstractly legitimated forms of coercion.

Conservatism in its attractive form discovers the troubles of this means of organizing society. I think of Chris Arnade, who makes walking into a form of political discovery, spending days and weeks on foot, going through ordinary neighborhoods and seeing and talking to the people there. The implicit, and sometimes explicit reproach to liberals and the professional left is that we don’t much have these kinds of contacts, except for those of us who do it in a professional capacity. And for many of us (myself included) he’s right. The Whiggish mode of organizing society tends towards a radical disconnection.

And that is the burden of O’Brian’s books. He lays out a conservative alternative – an understanding of authority that ought properly be organic, based on a recognition of relations of authority and power that liberals might prefer to pretend do not exist. A good captain – a good exerciser of authority – ought accept their role and their isolation both, without losing all human connection. They should be ‘taut,’ perhaps sometimes even a ‘right hard horse,’ but they should never be a tyrant. O’Brian’s claim – again voiced through Maturin – is that this is very unlikely, but not impossible.

there are many good or at least amiable midshipmen, there are fewer good lieutenants, still fewer good captains, and almost no good admirals. A possible explanation may be this: in addition to professional competence, cheerful resignation, an excellent liver, natural authority and a hundred other virtues, there must be the far rarer quality of resisting the effects, the dehumanising effects, of the exercise of authority. Authority is a solvent of humanity: look at any husband, any father of a family, and note the absorption of the person by the persona, the individual by the role. Then multiply the family, and the authority, by some hundreds and see the effect upon a sea-captain, to say nothing of an absolute monarch. Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human; unless it so happens that he is immune to the poison. In the nature of the service this immunity cannot be detected until late: but it certainly exists. How otherwise are we to account for the rare, but fully human and therefore efficient admirals we see …

[‘Efficient’ in the last sentence presumably meaning not Whiggishness, but the capacity to get what needs to get done, done.]

This is the great theme of the O’Brian books as I read them, and their great contribution too. Condemning them as middlebrow is silly nonsense. They have their faults, as Dickens does – frequent longueurs; sometimes grotesque contrivances of plot. But so too they have their greatness, and the larger part of that greatness comes from their statement of a particular view of human beings, and their perpetual return to the vexed problem of right authority. We exercise authority over each other; sometimes verging on the absolute. How can we do it well, without becoming monstrous?

SUBTLE-TIES:

Ezra Pound’s Blue Dun (Ezra Pound, July 1976, Fly Fisherman Magazine)

[…]

Dark fur from a hare’s ear for a body

a green shaded partridge feather

grizzled yellow cock’s hackle

green wax; harl from a peacock’s tail

bright lower body; about the size of pin

the head should be. can be fished from seven a.m.

till eleven; at which time the brown marsh fly comes on. […]

Pound’s interests were oblique and wide-ranging, and yet our attempts to find an origin for this charming passage have not turned up any evidence that he was either a fly fisherman or fly tier. Although he often boxed with Ernest Hemingway, there is no evidence that he had fished with him. Perhaps it is only that the poet enjoyed the parallel between his own fascination with the importance of the subtle shadings of words and the fly fisherman’s fascination with the importance of the subtle shadings of color in fly tying. For the poet, the slight variation between two words can make all the difference in the value of his poem, just as the slight variation between two colors can make all the difference in the effectiveness of the fly fisherman’s pattern.

PEOPLE ARE SURPASSING PECULIAR:

When a Woman Turns into a Wife: Jenessa Abrams reviews Sarah Manguso’s “Liars” in the wake of Andrea Skinner’s revelation about her sexual abuse and her mother Alice Munro’s silence. (Jenessa Abrams, July 23, 2024, LA Review of Books)

I sent a different version of this piece to my editor days before Skinner published her devastating and poignant essay about the abuse in the Toronto Star. When I wrote that first version, the connection between Munro and her work felt straightforward. So did the connection between “Too Much Happiness” and the book I’d set out to review: Sarah Manguso’s sophomore novel, Liars (2024). Both stories confront the impossibility of marriage for women who long for an identity outside of it. For women who wear the title of wife as a shackle. For women whose husbands view their independence as a threat. For women whose husbands need to be held and coddled.

As the world now knows, Munro chose to stay married after learning about her husband’s sexual violence. She rejected her then nine-year-old daughter’s innocence and blamed her as an adulterer. Where does one go from here? A wife learns of her husband’s evil and chooses him anyway. The evil is done to her child. The wife is a woman is an author is a mother. The child is a child is a child is a child is a child is a child is a child.

This piece was never meant to be about Munro. It was meant to be about Liars and women who are erased by men—as, for many years, was the fate of the fictionalized Sofya Kovalevskaya and the silenced Andrea Skinner. That erasure is not only done by men, of course. There are also the women who enable them.

In “Too Much Happiness,” Munro retells the story of Sofya, a Russian mathematician who lived during the late 1800s and whose findings on partial differential equations made her the most significant female scientist of her time. (Here, I use the Russian spelling Sofya to distinguish between the real woman and the fictional character whose name Munro altered to Sofia.) In addition to being a mathematician and an author, Sofya was a wife and a mother—though her marriage was a formality she orchestrated to leave Russia to pursue an advanced education, and her child was sent to live with relatives so that Sofya could remain dedicated to her work. In Munro’s story, Sofia is rendered a bit like a schoolgirl due to her all-consuming love for the man she intends to marry.

Like many, I have assigned myself the task of reconsidering Munro’s authorial intent as it relates to the inner lives of the fictional women and children in her stories—though one’s intent can be easily manipulated into a digestible excuse, perhaps of the same sort that allowed Munro to stay with her husband in the face of proven abuse. I have done this somewhat involuntarily, knowing it’s probably the wrong task altogether, as it further centers Munro instead of Skinner—Munro, who chose to view her daughter’s sexual violation as a betrayed wife instead of as a mother.

Toward the end of her life, Sofya fell in love but never intended to marry, perhaps understanding the contractual realities of a woman binding herself to a man. Munro’s reimagined Sofia is engaged to her lover and acknowledges that she is unable “to think of anything but him”; this “at the very time when she should [be] working day and night.” Ultimately, it is Sofia’s impending nuptials to this man—who retreats emotionally after she receives a major award because, in the glow of her success, “he had felt himself ignored”—that is the too much happiness that kills her. In this way, the narrative suggests that the marriage of equals is impossible.