Good morning. In The Point, Alan Jacobs writes about Terrence Malick and A Hidden Life: “I live in Waco, Texas, and like many people in Waco, Texas I go to church. But unlike most people here or anywhere else, I attend a church that has a photograph of a very young Terrence Malick on a wall in the basement. In the mid-1950s Malick’s father, Emil, was the organist at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, and his son Terry sang with the other young choristers. They stand in their neat ranks in the black-and-white photograph, alongside pictures of the then-new church and its first rector, testifying to a quickly-receding past. The church sat on blank land then; now it’s framed by trees. Malick remembers St. Alban’s fondly, and can name the other choristers, but is disinclined to disturb those memories by making a return visit. Which does not stop us from occasionally inviting him to do so. Malick was born in Illinois, spent some of his youth in Oklahoma, studied at Harvard and then Oxford, but has for some years now lived in Austin, Texas. That is how I ended up being invited to his editing room. I was a friend of a friend, an eye from outside, and by Texas standards, I was just up the road.”

Mark Lawson reviews Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light: “My single caveat on language is that Mantel’s sentences, in which vocabulary and shape mainly feel exactly calculated, hold one small syntactical irritation. Rather than the traditional use of ‘he’ or the protagonist’s name in male-viewpoint fiction, the trilogy has favored what will doubtless become known as the Mantel Referent Sub-Clause: ‘He, Cromwell.’ This is clearly an attempt to show that, as the writer has explained, she is ‘behind him, like a camera’, rather than omnisciently narrating his thoughts. And there is a lovely flourish in this book, when the inner voice smugly promotes itself to ‘He, Lord Cromwell’. However, when, at a meal of veal, ‘He, himself, Cromwell, takes up the carving knife’, we may wonder if the trope isn’t affecting the cut of Mantel’s style. This, though, is a small moan about a great work, which, though categorized by whatever bookshops and libraries survive in digital Britain as historical fiction, has fascinating relationships with other genres. If students still write theses about ‘the Catholic novel’ (Waugh, Greene, Spark, Lodge), then the Cromwell books merit a chapter as a variety of ‘the post-Catholic novel’. Brought up in the Roman faith, Mantel lapsed, and the trilogy is explicitly pro-Reformation — but it bears the mark, in understanding the rituals and thinking of Catholicism, of having once knelt on the other side of the divide.”

So does Edmund Gordon: “Crucial to Mantel’s achievement is her refusal either to censure or sentimentalize the past. She doesn’t foist twenty-first-century values and beliefs onto her characters, but seeks to engage with them in all their pre-scientific, pre-democratic, God- fearing strangeness. Her language is wiry and precise, and not at all cod-Tudor, though from time to time she does deploy some vaguely sixteenth- century cadences (‘the web of treason is sticky in the palm, and leaves its bloody smear’), and the imagery is often heightened for spine-tingling effect (‘Katherine’s miscarried children, their blind faces and their vestigial hands joined in prayer’). Likewise, the jokes, which are good and frequent, don’t depend on any cheap tricks with historical perspective, but are things that the characters themselves can (and often do) laugh along with. These may be negative virtues, but it’s amazing how few historical novelists manage to attain them.”

The esoteric and tactile world of antiquarians: “The New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, held every March at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, is the world’s premier gathering of buyers, sellers and lovers of rare books. It’s a kind of Woodstock for the ultra-bookish, where museum-like displays of stunningly bound 16th-century volumes and illuminated manuscripts are surrounded by booths specializing in rare maps, historical documents, vintage crime novels, counterculture ephemera and just about anything else, as long as it’s (mostly) on paper. One veteran dealer interviewed in the early scenes of The Booksellers, a documentary opening Friday, just time for this year’s fair, calls it ‘a roller-coaster ride between tedium and great bits of commerce and discoveries.’ For the less jaded first-time visitor, it can also be an overwhelming explosion of stimulation. ‘Going in, you might imagine it’s a bunch of old brown spines, but it’s completely the opposite,’ D.W. Young, the film’s director, said last week while sitting in a the suitably book-crammed offices of Sanctuary Books, a rare-book outfit a few blocks from the armory. ‘It’s just an amazingly visually rich experience.’ Another thing you might not expect: The world of rare books is a surprisingly tactile place.”

Art Beck reviews a new translation (by A. E. Stallings) of Batrachomyomachia or The Battle Between the Frogs and the Mice.

The Louvre reopens: “Louvre employees voted on Sunday to stop work over safety fears, a move allowed under French law. The museum stayed closed on Monday, and does not open on Tuesdays. The museum’s management, its doctor and staff representatives met throughout Tuesday to consider measures to protect workers from the virus, and employees voted Wednesday morning to accept them, Andre Sacristin, a Louvre employee and union representative, said in a telephone interview.”

An illustrated memoir of London: “The artist David Gentleman has chosen My Town as the title of this wonderful illustrated account of his 70 years living and working in London. He could just as easily have called it ‘Our Town’, since it is Gentleman’s vision of the city – its thoroughfares and dead ends, soaring towers and medieval muddle, wild parts and built bits – that has done so much to shape our common understanding of the place. You don’t even need to be a citizen or a visitor to have absorbed Gentleman’s vision: his distinctive postage stamps, which so often feature the city’s sights, have been responsible for communicating London, or rather London-ness, to millions of people around the world.”

Essay of the Day:

In Outside, Kathryn Miles writes about a mysterious boat fire in 2019 that killed 34 people, making it one of “the deadliest maritime disasters in U.S. history”:

“Sunday night, September 1, Captain Boylan anchored the boat off Santa Cruz Island. After the night dive, everyone stayed up late, celebrating the birthdays of three passengers: Vaidehi Campbell, a water-conservation specialist just two days shy of her 42nd birthday; Michael Quitasol, who was celebrating his 63rd with his wife, Fernisa Sisan, and three adult daughters—Evan Michel, Nicole, and Angela Rose; and Tia Salika-Adamic, whose parents had booked the family trip to commemorate her 17th birthday. Traveling with Salika-Adamic was Berenice Felipe, 16, one of her best friends. The daughter of Mexican-American immigrants, Felipe had lost her father when she was seven years old. Her mother, Yadira, raised her and her sister alone. Salika-Adamic and Felipe were regular volunteers at the animal shelter in Santa Cruz, California. And when Felipe expressed an interest in diving, the family took her on trips to places as far-flung as Bonaire, in the Caribbean, where they worked on reef-restoration projects.

“What happened after the cake and ice cream is murky. (Boylan and the four surviving crew members have refused interviews due to ongoing investigations). What can be pieced together based on reports given to the NTSB is that 34 people, including Finstad and 26-year-old deckhand Allie Kurtz, descended the narrow ladderway in the galley near the bow of the boat to the bunks down below.

“The captain and remaining crew members, including Ryan Sims, a newly hired boat steward, eventually settled into their wheelhouse quarters (the other crew members haven’t been named). A former attorney for the Fritzler family said in September that one of the crew members checked the galley as late as 2:30 A.M. This detail, however, could not be confirmed with the family’s new attorney, who directed inquiries about the fire to court documents.

“The preliminary NTSB report said that Captain Boylan and four crew members were sleeping in the wheelhouse, on the top deck of the vessel, when the blaze broke out. Just after 3 A.M., an unidentified crew member woke to a loud noise. He says he opened the door, looked down, and saw a fire billowing out of the aft end of the dining area on the main level. He then woke the others. Boylan ran to make the first Mayday call. The others tried to descend to the main deck but could not because the ladder was on fire. With no other choice, they jumped 20 feet or so down to the main deck. Sims broke his leg in three places and injured his back and neck. With Sims unable to move, the other three crew members say they tried to open both the double doors at the dining area of the salon and the fore windows but couldn’t access either. As the smoke began to overtake them, the entire crew jumped overboard. Next, Boylan and two others say they swam to the aft of the boat, reboarded via a ladder, and checked the engine room for fire but saw none.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Blois

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