Good morning, everyone. Be wise and safe out there. Let’s get the only coronavirus items in today’s email out of the way: Broadway shuts down while Amazon is flooded with self-published coronavirus books. “As the coronavirus spreads around the world, it is not only health professionals and politicians who are being kept busy. Amazon has been flooded with badly put together, often plagiarized ‘guides’ to combatting the virus.”

In other news: Jennifer Szalai reviews a family memoir by the grandson of Stalin’s bodyguard: “When the poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested by the Soviet secret police in the 1930s, he was taken to the notorious Lubyanka prison for interrogation. He drew a distinction between the guards ‘on the outside’ — village youths doing terrible things out of a dim sense of duty — and the interrogators ‘on the inside,’ who seemed like specialists in cruelty. ‘To do that job, you have to have a particular vocation,’ Mandelstam said. ‘No ordinary man could stand it.’ It’s an observation that Alex Halberstadt forced himself to keep in mind when meeting with his paternal grandfather, Vassily, who worked in Lubyanka for several years before becoming one of Stalin’s bodyguards. Halberstadt considered his grandfather, who was a member of Stalin’s security detail for more than a decade, to be ‘the moral equal of a Gestapo officer.’ Vassily survived countless rounds of purges and recriminations to live into his 90s — no small feat for anyone so entwined in the paranoid politics of the Soviet state.”

The unsung heroine of the Irish Literary Revival: “‘All this mine alone.’ The phrase, hastily scrawled in pencil across a neat manuscript, tells an intriguing story. The manuscript is a draft of William Butler Yeats’s play, Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), but the scribble belongs to Lady Augusta Gregory, a critical—yet often overlooked—figure in the Irish Literary Revival of the late 19th and early 20th century. Unbeknownst to many for decades, the bulk of Cathleen ni Houlihan was written by Gregory, Yeats’s close friend and mentor.”

Roger Catlin writes about John Singer Sargent turn to charcoal portraits later in life: “John Singer Sargent became one of the most sought-after artists at the turn of the last century. Commissions rose for his lavish oil portraits but, as he wrote to a friend in 1907, ‘I abhor and abjure them and hope to never do another, especially of the Upper Classes.’ So at the age of 51, he took early retirement from oil portraits, says the art historian and distant Sargent relative Richard Ormond—‘which is an extraordinary thing for an artist to do at the height of his powers.’”

Alex Preston is impressed with Louise Erdrich’s The Night Watchman.

David Bahr writes about Wendell Willkie’s internationalism: “Willkie, who never quite recovered from the failure of the League of Nations, became increasingly convinced that America must lead a new world, safe from isolationism, nationalism and imperialism.”

Essay of the Day:

In the Times Literary Supplement, Frances Wilson writes about the life and reputation of Patrick O’Brian:

“In 1998, two years before his death at the age of eighty-five, Patrick O’Brian was asked by David Kerr in a BBC documentary – Patrick O’Brian: Nothing personal – how long he had lived in his house in the South of France. ‘I’m not going to answer that!’, he barked. ‘The next thing you’ll be wanting to know is how much I paid for it!’ O’Brian (who never understood how to operate a television set) was famously testy in interviews. ‘Question and answer’, says the secretive surgeon Stephen Maturin in Clarissa Oakes (1992), ‘is not a civilised form of conversation’, and in his diary O’Brian described Kerr’s questions as ‘verging on the 3rd degree’. The film crew, he added, were ‘good fellows in their way’ but ‘heavy and unread’, which makes them sound like the crews of HMS Sophie or any of the other men-of-war commanded by ‘Lucky’ Jack Aubrey, hero of the Aubrey–Maturin series.

“It is surprising that O’Brian, described by Nikolai Tolstoy in Patrick O’Brian: The Making of the Novelist (2004), the first volume of this two-volume Life, as ‘one of the most secretive authors who ever lived’, agreed to be filmed at all, but he had been in his French hide-out long enough (nearly fifty years) to have forgotten the ‘skulduggery’ of the British media. After years of struggle, O’Brian’s historical novels had attained cult status. He had recently received an advance of $1.6 million from Norton for the nineteenth and twentieth books in the Aubrey–Maturin series, and the British Library had published a laudatory apparatus containing appreciations by John Bayley and Charlton Heston, as well as a rare autobiographical essay by O’Brian himself in which he described being sent, after his mother died, ‘to live with more or less willing relatives in Connemara and the County Clare’. The introduction by William Waldegrave emphasized the importance to O’Brian’s novels of his ‘Irish, French and English childhood’ and ‘firsthand experience of the sea’. O’Brian, like Conrad, drew from deep resources.

“Patrick O’Brian suffers from comparisons. He was working, reviewers said, in the genre of C. S. Forester but with the elegance of Jane Austen; his plots had the sophistication of John le Carré; his characters had the depth of Tolstoy; and his imagination had the immersive qualities of Proust and Joyce. Embarrassed to be a writer of genre fiction, O’Brian was offended when A. S. Byatt compared him to Georgette Heyer, and he must have winced to find that, like Tolkien (to whom he was also compared), he attracted fans rather than readers, for whom his Regency world was a watery Middle Earth. The paraphernalia surrounding his books included a ‘Patrick O’Brian Newsletter’, a cookery book of recipes taken from his seaboard cuisine (Strasbourg pie, lobscouse, spotted dog, figgy-dowdy, drowned baby), car-bumper stickers, and CDs of the music played by the two friends after supper – Aubrey on the violin, Maturin on the cello, the cabin swelling with ‘a glorious texture of sound, the violin sending up brilliant jets through the cello’s involutions’.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Morant’s Curve

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