Educated Guesswork

Candide, by Voltaire

(We’ll get back to the other stories another time)

Trigger Warnings: Bestiality, Cannibalism, Rape, Violence, Murder, Torture, Slavery, Sexual Slavery, Cavity Searches, Child Genital Mutilation, STDs, Religion, Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, Gardening

Voltaire’s Candide is justly famous, a brilliant and searing evisceration of the world’s mores and our feeble attempts to make sense of it all. You should read it. End of report.

But for those who need a little more, and who are not turned away by the Trigger Warnings above, I can sum up Candide by telling you two jokes. The first joke is usually told in some sorts of ‘up yourself’ movements, like recovery speakers or those life coaching or TED talkers or maybe the kind of ‘Christian’ churches where they’ll tell little stories they grabbed from some book of uplifting stories, maybe from that ‘road less travelled’ guy or the ‘traveller’ or something like that. Anyway, if you hang out with a certain sort of person who likes uplifting stuff, and you listen to any of it, you’re likely to hear this first joke, or maybe it’s just a ‘story’, though it’s obviously a constructed artifact, perhaps somebody can do a deep dive on its history, à la Robert K. Merton’s On The Shoulders Of Giants. I like to think of it as part of the late-20th-century ‘philosophy’ I call “The Banality of Feeble”. In any event, here is the joke:

Once upon a time in China, there was an old man who owned a beautiful white stallion. One day, the horse leapt over the rude fence around the old man’s property, and dashed away into the woods, and was lost.

All of the old man’s neighbors came to him moaning and crying, saying, “Oh, how sad! You have lost your beautiful white horse. What a bad thing to happen to you!”

The old man replied, “I do not know if it is a bad thing. I only know that my white stallion has run away.”

A short time later, the white stallion returned to the old man’s simple farm, and when he came back he was accompanied by five other beautiful wild white horses, whom the old man was able to place in his corral.

All of the old man’s neighbors came to him, laughing and shouting, “What great fortune! Your white horse has come back and has brought your stable five more beautiful horses. What a good thing to happen to you!”

The old man replied, “I do not know if it is a good thing. I only know that my white stallion has returned and has brought five more horses with him.”

Then the old man’s son was thrown by one of the new wild horses as he was trying to tame it, and when he fell his arm was broken.

All of the old man’s neighbors came to him moaning and crying, saying, “Oh, how sad! Your son has broken his arm, and you should curse the day those wild horses came to your farm. What a bad thing to happen to you!”

The old man replied, “I do not know if it is a bad thing. I only know that my son’s arm has been broken.”

Then the army came to the old man’s small village, seeking soldiers for the emperor’s army. They took away every able-bodied young man in the hamlet, but the old man’s son was left behind when the army departed, as the boy’s arm was still incapacitated from being broken.

All of the old man’s neighbors came to him, laughing and shouting, “What great fortune! Your son has been spared by the army, because his arm is broken. It was a good thing that he was thrown by that horse.”

The old man replied, “I do not know if it is a good thing. I only know that …

Well, you get the idea.

So, it’s not really a joke at all, unless the joke is that this sort of thing just (one assumes) goes on like this forever and ever, and that, after all, is the deep, deep spiritual meaning behind the … joke, or story, or tale, or whatever.

The teller will usually say at the end, just before I wrote “Well, you get the idea”, that the story just goes on like that. I have yet to hear the version where the army passing over his son because of the broken arm causes something objectively bad to happen. But there you go, in one nutshell: Candide.

Of course, that’s not all. Not by a long shot. Voltaire was no New Age follower turned pro in this ‘greatest nation in the world’. He had a lot more depth and nuance than that. And to capture this in this book report, we need another joke. Now this one is actually a joke, though there may be many out there who will not find it very funny. That’s okay, because you might want to avoid Candide if you are one of those people. Here’s the joke:

A priest was walking along a seaside cliff one morning, enjoying the brisk wind from the ocean, when he heard a plaintive cry. Rounding a boulder between the road and his path, he saw a very young boy weeping pitiably, sunk to his knees at the edge of the cliff, blubbering and sobbing, his whole body shaking and racked by his crying.

“Dear boy,” said the priest. “Whatever is the matter?”

“Oh, father,” said the boy, wiping away the tears with a tiny fist, “my mommy and daddy and me were driving in the car, and the tire blew, and we spun off the road, hitting this rock, and I was thrown clear, but mommy and daddy and the car went over the cliff and I think they’re dead!” The boy began to sob again.

“There, there,” said the priest, looking over the cliff. “Hush, now.”

The boy stopped crying once more, and looked up with pitiable mien, and now saw the priest had removed his coat, and was now taking off his belt.

“Son,” said the priest, “this just isn’t your day.”

The Moral of the story being: Every cloud has a silver lining … for someone. At least, that seems to be a theme in Candide.

These two jokes, taken together, sum up Candide pretty well.

Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes, by R. Austin Freeman

The impossibly insightful detective is, of course, a staple of the mystery genre, with Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation being the archetype, though the lineage runs back to Poe’s “tales of ratiocination” in which the mental magic is performed by C. Auguste Dupin. Such a superhuman investigator always manages to combine eidetic memory and near-perfect perception and apperception with the ability to retrieve from an encyclopædic knowledge of facts legal, scientific, sociological, and trivial just those items of moment which have salience to the particular case being investigated. And the medico cum lawyer Dr. John Thorndyke is a fairly famous exemplar of such a masterful detective, created by the writer R. Austin Freeman over a hundred years ago, in 1907, while Conan Doyle was still maundering his creation through the post-resurrection tales which are problematic to many Holmesians (or Sherlockians, à votre goût). Combining medical knowledge with a fine legal mind, Thorndyke also brings to bear a distinctly scientific bent to each problem, aided by his ever-faithful assistant, Polton. Many recognize R. Austin Freeman as the creator of perhaps the first ‘scientific’ investigator of crime, the progenitor of that lineage which ended up in the CSI franchise.

Mr. Freeman also claimed credit for what he called the ‘inverted’ mystery story, which TV viewers of an earlier age will recognize as ‘what they did on Columbo‘, that is, where the actual crime is detailed up front, and the detective story arises from the actions taken by the investigator to unmask the criminal, already known to the reader/viewer. Generally, in his writing, Freeman plays fair with the reader, though he uses one or two tricks of the trade to hide his ‘clues’ in plain sight. For example, he will use the most arcane scientific jargon to describe a substance, trusting that few of his readers will know the abstruse term. (He lived blissfully unaware of the Internet’s power to make the recondite a mere excuse for endless Wikipedia Talk: pages.) Another peculiarity of the author is to always cast events not including his detective into a neutral omniscient third person narrative, while Dr. Thorndyke’s actions are always related by his amanuensis, the easily puzzled Jervis, a lawyer working in the same rooms as the detective. In either voice, Freeman writes with urbane and dry wit, if not always with humor.

“Yes,” said the constable, closing his note book, “he seems to have been a good deal like other people. They usually are. That’s the worst of it. If people who commit crimes would only be a bit more striking in their appearance and show a little originality in the way they dress, it would make things so much more simple for us.”

Even the Bobby on the street takes time to dryly note the monotonous dullness of the criminal type, perhaps made less noticeable by the extraordinary detectives pursuing them

The plot of Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes is fairly complex, fairly difficult to briefly recap, and perhaps best left for the reader to take as it comes. My own edition (an A. L. Burt reprint of the 1933 original published by Dodd, Mead) includes a précis on the page before the frontispiece which manages paradoxically both a) to give away much of the plot, and b) to misstate egregiously the plot (in spirit if not in detail). I thus read the mystery waiting for certain facts revealed in that ‘flapple’ (as my mother always called that material usually presented on the flaps of a book’s dust jacket) while struggling to follow the ins and outs of the actual narrative. Put very simply, for those who must be told what a book is about before reading a book to discover what the book is about, an American goes to England to assert a claim to a peerage, becomes a witness to a strange contretemps in a luggage room, engages a somewhat shady solicitor to advance his case, which case involves Dr. Thorndyke as a potential legal expert, and from that point the tightly wound up plot begins to spin in various epicycles that would have delighted Ptolemy, though different readers may have different reactions. This reader enjoyed it, though it’s a bit of a muddle at points. It seemed like the author sketched out his idea for the crimes he was to relate, and then found it fairly tricky to reveal them to the reader without just saying, “and this odd thing happened as well, which meant that that guy I mentioned had to do this other thing, which meant …”, etc., etc. There are at least four ‘mysteries’ intersecting within the pages of Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes, and though the intersection leads in some entertaining directions, perhaps one less plot line would have done the book some good, just as L.A Confidential was helped in its transition to the movie screen by dropping one of its threads.

Fans of Holmes may find they also enjoy Dr. Thorndyke, particularly if they enjoy the former’s pedantic recitation of facts, supercilious disdain of expressing opinions in the face of the unknown, and gleeful and arrogant superiority. Unlike Doyle’s creation, however, Dr. Thorndyke is not averse to spinning out theories of the case before all the facts are in, which is sometimes helpful and sometimes distracting to the (or this) reader. Thorndyke is a precise and legalistic speaker, and so will never speak of something as a verity in the absence of facts, but can go on for some time about hypotheticals. I was surprised a tad by this, as it is unclear who if anyone is paying Dr. Thorndyke for his services in this case, and I have met few lawyers willing to expound at length without an assured client to whom to invoice their billable hours. Perhaps things were different in 1921, when this book is set.

Another thing different a century ago comes across in the distinct class consciousness present in this work. Those who cannot stomach an almost innate belief in the ineluctable superiority of certain people due solely to accidents of their birth will find much to annoy them in Dr. Thorndyke Intervenes. To the reader of mysteries, much is too readily revealed when the good guys always wear white hats and the bad guys wear black, or, as is the case here, the good people are whiter than white with their fine character supposedly shown by every chiseled line of their faces.

Mistress Jenifer would have sustained the character of the earl’s daughter with credit even on the stage, where the demands are a good deal more exacting than in real life. In the typically “patrician” style of features, with the fine Roman nose and the level brows and firm chin, she resembled her redoubtable aunt; but she had the advantage of that lady in the matter of stature, being, like her father, well above the average height. And here it may be noted that, if the daughter reflected credit on the father, the latter was well able to hold his position on his own merits. Christopher J. Pippet was fully worthy of his distinguished womenkind; a fine, upstanding gentleman with an undeniable “presence.”

It was probably the possession of these personal advantages that made the way smooth for the two strangers on their arrival at the premises in which the inquest was to be held. At any rate, as soon as Mr. Pippet had made known his connexion with the case, the officiating police officer conducted them to a place in the front row

R. Austin Freeman knows very well the difference between patricians and plebeians, and I’m sure would be surprised that we don’t see it so clearly

So the novel, while engaging, has drawbacks which may prove insuperable for some readers. One issue I have not mentioned, as it may be a positive, a negative, or entirely neutral depending on one’s taste, is that much of the book takes place in various British courts, so that several whole chapters are filled with lawyers (sorry, barristers) and judges and witnesses going on in a very British legal way about this, and then that, and then one other thing. So the reader will learn some trifles about English law as it appeared last century between the wars. I also learned many other things besides the rules of inheritance and peers, such as peculiarities of the geology of southeastern England, scientific properties of dust, and the unexpected behavior of certain metals in specific chemical circumstances. Certainly the work is engaging enough, surprisingly so for a novel filled with a fair amount of pedantic prattling from puffed-up proponents of the patriarchy (not all of whom are characters in the book). However, I am not convinced by this first Dr. Thorndyke novel that I’ve read of his high place in the Pantheon of Detectives. (I have only read short stories featuring this earliest forensic detective heretofore.) I will essay another, perhaps earlier, book or two before I pass judgment.

St. Paul in Britain, or, The Origin of British Christianity, by The Rev. W. Morgan

and

The supposed Visit of St Paul to Britain: A Lecture Delivered In The University of Oxford, by Edward Cardwell

I remember watching an episode of Gilligan’s Island in the Before Time, and seeing the titular Gilligan beset by competing claims made by the Skipper and the Professor. Of course, I do not remember the actual statements made by those supporting characters who portrayed the Man of Common Sense and the Man of Science, respectively, in that mythic TV show, nor do I recall the actual plot. I suspect that it involved a chance to escape the tiny tropical island upon which the seven castaways were marooned, and that this time it seemed sure of success, although I have a further suspicion that some action (or inaction) on Gilligan’s part may have doomed their chance to return to civilization. Or maybe it was just a visit from Kurt Russell. Anyway…. What I do remember is the Professor and the Skipper, first one and then the other, explaining in each one’s peculiarly reassuring way just how such-and-such would work or should be done or whatever, the sticking point being that the views espoused by the Professor and the Skipper were diametrically opposed. After the Professor (let’s say) spoke to Gilligan, Gilligan said to himself, “The Professor’s right!” And then the Skipper cornered him and made his case, after which Gilligan said, “The Skipper’s right!” And so it went. Whoever spoke to Gilligan last was able to convince Gilligan completely. (Small aside: I once had a boss like this, whom it was very important to talk to just before he made his final presentation to his boss, else that complete project plan you’d made two days earlier would be overturned by offhand words dropped in his ear at lunch by a competing junior executive.) That peculiar Heisenberg Principle of Gilligan Certainty, combined with the well-known Dunning-Kruger effect, explains much about my own pseudo-intellectual psychology, particularly when it comes to topics such as that presented by the Rev. R. W. Morgan in St. Paul in Britain.

This delightful book is Wacko Done Right, a tasty blend of erudition, informed speculation, documentation, and plausible nonsense that makes good conspiracy theories just plain fun, and which is almost always absent from the modern product. Reading the words written a century-and-a-half ago by Richard Williams Morgan makes me almost believe that Saint Paul somehow continued on the journey begun on the road to Damascus to sojourn for a while in faraway Albion before returning to Rome for his second trial and eventual martyrdom. I am just ‘this close’ to being persuaded of this obvious untruth, and that is what is great about this book, and what is great about the best of Wacko Thought. The power to convince people of wrong-headed ideas is why men as smart as Samuel Clemens could believe that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare’s plays, why the Templars and the Illuminati can still move books off the shelves (in spite of the fact that one group became bankers after their military operations ceased and the other were just grifting dreamers and schemers who didn’t ever amount to anything), and why we will never, ever know just what did happen to JFK.

What is Morgan’s argument? He neatly summarizes his entire Wacko thesis:

Christianity was first introduced into Britain by Joseph of Arimathæa, A.D. 36-39; followed by Simon Zelotes, the apostle; then by Aristobulus, the first bishop of the Britons; then by St. Paul. Its first converts were members of the royal family of Siluria—that is, Gladys, the sister of Caràdoc, Gladys (Claudia) and Eurgen his daughters, Linus his son, converted in Britain before they were carried into captivity to Rome; then Caràdoc, Brân, and the rest of the family, converted at Rome. The two cradles of Christianity in Britain were Ynys Wydrin, ‘the Crystal Isle,’ translated by the Saxons Glastonbury, in Somersetshire, where Joseph settled and taught, and Siluria, where the earliest churches and schools, next to Ynys Wydrin, were founded by the Silurian dynasty. Ynys Wydrin was also commonly known as Ynys Avàlon, and in Latin “Domus Dei,” “Secretum Dei.”

Say what you want, at least Morgan doesn’t beat about the bush

Now don’t you worry, Rev. Morgan has plenty of evidence for each and every one of those statements, though the years since those words were published have not been kind to his arguments. And he is by no means a deceitful footnoter, like Arthur Butz, the (appropriately named) author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, who hides his use of the self-serving testimony of an SS officer on trial for his life to prove that the Holocaust never happened. No, Richard Williams Morgan fails not because he is a liar, but because he relies upon lying evidence, sources which either slant, bend, or distort the facts to bolster their own preferred arguments (such as those supporting Glastonbury’s claim to primacy among British churches), or sources which turned out to be blatant forgeries. Among the latter, the most blatant were the work of Edward Williams, whom Wikipedia deigns to call by his so-called ‘bardic name’ of Iolo Morganwg.*

Now this Edward Williams almost singlehandedly promoted a bizarre revisionist retelling of the lost mysteries of the ancient Druids, claiming that Welsh Bards preserved the ‘old ways’ against the brutalizing forces of the Roman conquest of Britain, merging their putatively peaceful spirituality with that of earliest Christianity, which remained in Britain truer to the original doctrines preached by the apostles and the Seventy. This last point is particularly important in the Reverend Morgan’s work, as it is in most proponents who promulgate the spiritual purity of the British Church in contradistinction to the (supposedly) adulterated version found in Rome. Much of Morgan’s book is spent demonstrating that the Christian Church in Britain was going gangbusters when Augustine, the future first Archbishop of Canterbury, showed up on a mission from the pope to convert the Kentish heathens and to bring the already extant churches under the sway of Rome. Morgan preaches that the churches of Britain were founded upon the true sources of Christian faith, direct from the earliest apostles and disciples, and that there was and is no reason to kowtow to some foreign prelate in matters of religion.

Thus Reverend Morgan had the misfortune not only to write his work at the high tide of credence in the unsupported beliefs which gave rise to Neo-Celtic Christianity, but also to base his claims upon spurious documents, assiduous though he was to reference each and every source. (The book was written at a time when all literate people (mostly men, we assume) read and spoke Latin, and probably a little Greek as well, so many of the citations which he quotes in full were almost useless to this ignorant, benighted reader, malheureusement.) Reliance upon forgery is not his only failing, however, for his credulous nature makes him all too liable to blind himself to the most obvious motives in even his valid sources, as when he elides over the self-serving claims of the Church of Glastonbury to be founded by Joseph of Arimathæa. There are many such instances.

For our part, we cast aside the addenda and crescenda, the legends, poems, marvels which after ages, monk, troubadour, and historian piled high and gorgeously on the original foundation. That foundation must indeed have originally possessed no mean strength, depth, and solidity, to bear the immense superstructure which mediæval superstition and literature emulated each other in erecting above the simple tomb of the Arimathæan senator in the Avàlon isle.

In a striking prolepsis, Rev. Morgan discounts his opponents’ arguments by disclaiming all dependence upon myths and legends, all while also proclaiming those legends as heavy weights in the balance for his own case

Sadly, most of this chronology for the birth of the British Church was destroyed quite aptly almost a quarter century before Morgan’s St. Paul in Britain, by Edward Cardwell in The supposed Visit of St. Paul in Britain, an Oxford lecture published in 1837. In this remarkably brief (31 pages, including the 2-page introduction) pamphlet, Cardwell demolishes almost utterly the most fantastic claims later promoted by Rev. Morgan. Indeed, the tract seems almost an outline for the latter half of Morgan’s book, which the later author had only to invert to make the positive case which is reprinted in the first passage from St. Paul in Britain quoted above. Both, in fact, speak of their debt to the famous Bishop Usher, though Morgan’s debt is to the 17th-Century prelate’s researches tending to prove the apostasy of the Roman Church, while Cardwell references the creator of the famous chronology of The Bible as an incitement to speak up against the claims that Saint Paul ever sojourned in Britain.

Unfortunately, in the reaction to the most strident claims made in St. Paul in Britain, the debunkery succeeded so well in pooh-poohing the crazy idea in that book’s title that one of the most striking aspects of British Christianity is left unhallowed and unappreciated. I am speaking of the unquestioned early date at which Christian churches can be found in Britain. The mission of Aristobulus to the faraway isles is not seriously doubted, and there certainly seems strong evidence that Christian missions were present no later than the 3rd Century, much earlier than that of Augustine of Canterbury (as he was to become) in 597. The 7th-Century fights over such issues as the correct form of monastic tonsure prove how deeply rooted the Christian Church was already before the Roman mission supported by Pope Gregory. (Unlike the circle at the top of the head, the Celtic form involved shaving the head from ear to ear.) There is a fascinating tale still remaining to be told, which perhaps can never be truthfully told due to the lying lines of the so-called bard Morganwg. As for myself, I would have to do much more reading and research on the subject (and likely would have to learn at least Latin), all while avoiding the danger of autodidactylic uncertainty, in order to have a valid opinion about the veracity of each individual point raised by Reverend Morgan.

My copy of St. Paul in Britain, offered by the publisher of the works of E. Raymond Capt, the noted British Israelite, is a 1984 reprint of the abridged edition of 1860, for which I am grateful. I doubt that the fifty-six pages about the early Church cut from my version would have added much to my enjoyment of Rev. Morgan’s argument. And I definitely found the quick pace and sparkling reasoning truly captivating. All I ask from from Wacko literature—be it Conspiracy, Secret Society, or other weirdness—is that it a) make startling claims which are b) supported by intriguing evidence that c) almost makes me a convert. St. Paul in Britain succeeds on all three counts. Nowadays we live in a world in which pizza parlor basements are named as headquarters for private child sex smugglers to the rich and powerful, only to learn that the promoters of such theories neglected to learn that the libeled pizza parlor didn’t even have a basement. Reading these learned Wacko words from 160 years ago is like breathing fresh air after enduring the stinking miasma of our current polluted product.

* The best source I have read about Iolo Morganwg né Edward Williams is a not entirely brief chapter in John Michell’s wonderful book Eccentric Lives and Peculiar Notions, which book I highly recommend. The wannabe Welsh bard has many sins to answer for, not least for his influence upon the balmy ideas of Gerald Gardner who gifted we Moderns and laters with the fictive Wicca movement.

The Wind That Swept Mexico: The History of the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1942, by Anita Brenner, with 184 photographs compiled by George R. Leighton

Proponents of revolution—or opponents, for that matter—might soberly consider the course of the Mexican Revolution, the first of the great revolutions of the 20th Century. Like the other revolts in Russia and China, one sees the same arrogant detachment of the rulers from the ruled, the same heart-wrenching poverty in a land laden with every resource people need to thrive, and the same accidents of history and fate which conspired to give birth to what in retrospect can only seem inevitable, foreordained or foredoomed. For we of the United States of America, the upheaval in Mexico is made more difficult to comprehend by our typical disdain for everything taking place below our southern border. (Above our northern, as well; one has to cross oceans for us to pretend to be interested.) Additionally, the names and events of the Mexican Revolution are for most of us living north of the Rio Grande mere unrelated points of history, if we are cognizant of them at all, tiny little beacons of misremembered high school history tests, blinking like radio tower signal lights above low fog, destined only to be engulfed in a haze of forgetfulness if they be noticed at all. Searching beneath the clouds of our ignorance may lead only to learned befuddlement, as we struggle to make sense of unfamiliar names of people and places, and are left with only a residue of (mis)understanding as deep as that enshrined on most tourist postcard pictures.

Fortunately, we are blessed by the torrential poetry of Anita Brenner’s extended essay upon the Mexican Revolution, which is accompanied by almost two hundred contemporary photographs, in The Wind That Swept Mexico. This book, originally published in 1943 during World War II, provided this particular reader with an excellent place to start learning about this revolt that most in the U.S. are almost entirely ignorant of, and that most Mexicans—I suspect—take for granted. Ms. Brenner writes of her subject with a felicity all too rarely seen, moving through her material with confidence and understanding, showing a sympathy both for the plight of the poor working poor as well as for the thorny difficulties of the actual world of politics. Though her liberal allegiances are always evident, she does not allow herself to be encumbered with cynicism, and though she moves quickly through three decades of tightly packed history, she never rushes and never lectures.

Instead, Anita Brenner shows herself a true poet, inspired by love of her subject, the Mexico she lived in for most of her life. Almost every paragraph presents some jewel of language to the reader, as when she describes one nonentity who became President of Mexico as having “the personality of a ship’s purser”. Or when speaking of German interference in the 1940 Mexican elections: “The Nazis detailed agents, blondes, and money to campaign in both camps.” And yet her poetic language remains rooted in reality, revealing the often harsh ability of moneyed interests to somehow oppress the already oppressed still further.

In the long run, it was thought, industry would solve everything. By its mere existence it would create national prosperity that would sift down to the middle class, that is, the ten or fifteen percent who were considered really people. Work would accrue to the rest, and thus the golden cycle would remain continually in motion.

But the process by which wealth was to sift down, reversing its ancient habits of traveling up, had not yet occurred. Instead, another process had been going on—a process of suction. Through it, the peasants—more than three-fourths of the population—had been stripped of land by laws which gave the hacendados more leeway for expansion, more water, more cheap labor. Many village and tribal holdings had been handed over, and most of the public lands, to great concessionaires, often with subsidies. Occupants who resisted being thus reduced to peonage were shanghaied into the army, or sold to work in the tropics, or sent to their graves.

Anita Brenner puts paid to the idea of ‘trickle-down economics’ long before the days of Reagan and David Stockman

I am sure there are more detailed and pedantic histories of the intricacies of the Mexican Revolution; Ms. Brenner’s essay is merely an précis. And I am not going to recite the many ups and downs and twists and turns and surges forwards and backwards of the Revolution’s course. I won’t chronicle the strong though aging hand of Porfirio Díaz on the Mexican nation in 1910, the fighting in Juarez in 1911, the “Tragic Ten Days” in Mexico City which saw the ascension of Huerta, the stark pleas for land from the Zapatistas, the various campaigns of Villa and Obregón against the government and (sometimes) against each other, nor the pendulum swings of the various post-Revolutionary administrations between lip service to the ideals of youth and kowtowing to landed and moneyed interests (and, always, the United States). No, I will not recite those and other events. That is what Anita Brenner does in her book, and does incredibly well.

Every home was in a state of siege. Civilians dodging out for food were often caught in crossfires, and their bodies lay in the streets. Women ran on desperate errands carrying white flags made of sheets tied to brooms. The capital was paralyzed. A million people had become only a battlefield.

“The Tragic Ten Days” during which the first Revolutionary president and anti-Revolutionary forces inside his own government fought for control of Mexico City

The joy of reading this book does not obviate the tragic and bloody history it recounts. Political enemies are murdered, promises are broken, reactionaries win … and yet somehow progress is made, little by slow, for the poorest of the poor, the downtrodden men and women and children who actually make up the Mexican nation. Brenner obviously sympathizes with the ‘little guy’ against the big combines, the big ranchers, the big money, and the big grafters, but she is canny enough to see and tell the difficult choices forced upon the succession of men who sit in the Presidential Chair of Mexico. She unmasks the money behind this would-be throne, but also is savvy to the Communist influence behind the modern Mexican labor union, the CTM.

The revolutionary chiefs … were eager to pay for their power (and the fat rewards thereof) with revolutionary works. Even those who were mere robber barons were as sincere participants in the new credos as the crusader knights who devoutly portioned their Moorish loot with the Church. So any man who had a good idea and who got it listened to by a general or an important politician had the chance to try it out, or made the chance himself. Ideas in progress ranged from irrigation plans to free breakfasts in the schools to serum laboratories and baby clinics and wall newspapers and beggars’ hostels and art for the people and cheap editions of Plutarch.

Lip service sometimes resulted in actual benefits to the people, and always benefited those on top … while they were on top
(My ellipses, in both cases)

Perhaps the Mexican Revolution was spared the tarring and sneering which met the Russian outbreak a few years later simply because the people of the United States have long accustomed themselves to not give a fig for the politics of Mexico or any Latin American country. While the powers-that-be fretted over the possible importation of radical ideas from Bolsheviki in the Urals and points east, no corporations feared any philosophical import from Mexico, only nationalization of ‘our’ oil fields and ‘our’ mines. Thus those powers ignored the actual examples of socialist ideas only slightly south of the border for fears of the same Commies that Hitler railed against in his appeals to the money men of Germany. As Brenner points out, however, the nations south of Mexico were all very aware of and were inspired by these examples.

The sharpest change was intangible. Fear left the have-nots and was distributed to the haves.

After more than twenty years of revolution, some of its ideals were put into practice by President Lázaro Cárdenas

The pictures which accompany the short text underscore the contradictory distance and nearness of the Mexican Revolution. Some images, especially those of the Porfirio regime and its grand buildings, seem to come from a time almost inconceivably far away, though you can visit Chapultepac Castle today and see the imposing building from which the presidents of Mexico once could look down, quite literally, upon the people of Mexico City. Where once Pancho Villa and Zapata lounged in the seat of the president, now the Museo Nacional de Historia displays murals of the Revolution—as well as the original Mexican Revolution of 181o. But in the photographs of the farmers and families fighting and suffering, the child soldier draped in bandoleras filled with rifle cartridges, and dead bodies lying on the ground after battle or brutal murder, in those pictures we can see all too clearly our present, where the hungry stay hungry, and everyone ignores the rats gnawing at our fingers.

all but a fraction of the total wealth was held by about three per cent of the people. The bulk was held by less than one percent, and most of that was in absentee foreign hands. The economic pump was making wealth flow outward, leaving behind a sediment only; and what came in, to multiply, again flowed outward. The dangerously unbalanced distribution of the means to live and produce—which wherever it occurs has always led to oppression and social explosion—had again for at least ninety-five per cent of the people of Mexico an extra taste of wormwood. There was this byword: “Mexico—mother of foreigners, stepmother of Mexicans.”

The situation under the rule of Porfirio Díaz

There is much talk currently of revolution, and it is a historical truism since the twin poles of the American and French Revolutions that there has always been more talk than actual revolt. For which we may be, perhaps, somewhat grateful. Even before the Mexican Revolution really got going there was much talk amongst Mexicans about revolution, harkening back to the glorious overthrow of the hated Spanish starting in 1810. And the French have never stopped talking of revolution, though the abortive experiments of 1830, 1848, and 1870 might have silenced most folk. Perhaps because of the history of the revolution in France, the Mexican intellectuals of the early 20th Century held fast to the belief that revolutions only occur when nations cannot pay their bills—with the corollary being that, since Mexico was quite solvent, it had nothing to fear from that quarter. Though, as events were to prove, much blood was still to be shed, since money jingling in the pocket can only offend those whose pockets carry only holes.

The battleground was everywhere, and every inhabitant became accustomed to living provisionally, and to being ready to migrate fast, in the wake of one army or away from another, to get food. There were nearly two hundred kinds of worthless paper money.

The joys of revolution, after the convention in Aguascalientes fails to bring rapprochement between the various fighting factions

But, as anyone who has studied the history of revolutions knows, such tumult brings with it much devastation even when the desired changes arrive on schedule. It is not only feelings that are hurt in the process. Fans of Che Guevara must elide over his personal involvement with hundreds, thousands of murders in the name of the new state after the seizure of power in Cuba. The events which left the stirring “Marseillaise” also left the drowned bodies of counterrevolutionaries at the bottom of many French rivers in the ghastly noyades, not to mention that obvious symbol of the French Revolution, the guillotine. And the story of the Mexican Revolution has its share of death and depredation. But it also led to real change in the lives of the most lowly, even if sometimes such change seemed impossible, as Anita Brenner points out.

A study of wages and living standards was made, and the results embodied in a minimum wage law. In most cases the wages declared necessary by the panel of economists, physicians, and social scientists who made the survey were so far above what was being paid that little attempt was made to enforce the law. For the peasants, the list of essentials to life, beginning with eighteen hundred calories and four vitamins, and including a pair of blankets and perhaps one medical visit a year, added up, against what they had, to sheer fantasy.

Plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change

This strange balancing act, or perhaps more an exercise in plate spinning by the various Mexican politicians, this radical yet reactionary ‘two steps forward, one step back’ history is what Anita Brenner tells so well. A child living in Mexico when the Revolution began, her interest in the history is nurtured her obvious and real love of Mexico itself, in all its splendor and problems. She deftly but firmly points out that the real danger to monied interests is for unmonied people to get to know one another, to learn about each other.

Americans and Mexicans, who had known each other, dubiously, only through the dealings of carpetbaggers and the resulting quarrels of the two governments, met by the thousand as individuals, and found each other childlike but nice.

Yet another reason to avoid fraternization

Written under the influence of a global conflict whose outcome was then still very much in doubt, and at a time when many of those who had participated in the Mexican Revolution—those, that is, who had not been killed in battle or murdered—were still actively engaged in the politics of the nation, this book may not, cannot, be the final word on the Mexican Revolution. And much more was still to come, as the PRI (originally the PNR of Calles and then the PRM of the much-beloved Cárdenas) shifted through the sands of time down to the eventual loss of power in 2000. But what Ms. Brenner’s book may lack in completeness and academic rigor it more than makes up in immediacy and poetic vigor. She writes, as she tells it, of an ongoing revolution, of a Mexico still in the process of creating itself. And she pleads for greater understanding of the winds buffeting our neighbor to the south, underlining the point that the United States and Mexico have opportunities for greater understanding and greater cooperation, as well as threats to both countries from continued ignorance.

The opportunities are still there. As is the ignorance.

[The Mexicans] fear being cheated, through our domination, of what was achieved by the million lives given up in the revolution. Our record, after all, has been, there and in other Latin American countries, to strengthen those who gain by strangling the Four Freedoms.

Ms. Brenner points out the rational reasons for suspicion of the United States

2 novellas by Wilkie Collins: Miss Or Mrs? & The Guilty River

How difficult it shall be in our ‘woke’ future to read the literature of the past! For, after ensuring that our book is printed appropriately with soy inks upon hempen paper, and reading beneath an LED bulb powered by solar light stored in our landfill-friendly accumulator, we shall still have to face the textual problems that have always beset readers, all whilst confronting a new set of challenges thrown up at every turn by the then-current arbiters of mores, morals, and taste. Those future dictators of culture, the Jacobins-to-come of reasoned discourse, may find their task made difficult by the ever-increasing pace of anachronistic reflection upon the mistakes and woeful ignorances of the ever-nearer past, but we may be certain that they shall meet that challenge, given that their present cousins, the current batch of cultural judges, have shown no inclination to shirk from issuing diktat and condemnation of any action or person seen by the social mediatariat as violating the newly imposed norms of hypervigilant awareness of roles and responsibilities in spheres as diverse as the sexual, the commercial, the gastronomic, the symbolic, not to mention those of fashion, friendship, and language. The Sleep of Reason produces monsters, as De Goya proclaimed in his aquatint, but an ever-wakeful Reason made disjoint from imagination may create its own demoniacal offspring.*

But as the cycles of ‘awareness’ spin ever faster and faster only to dissolve into a discordant mass of graceless notes of angst and reaction, like the audience who clapping along with the performer speeds ahead of the tempo faster and faster until its applause breaks upon an inability to keep the beat, the social member finds himself (or herself, or <your preferred pronoun here>) unable to keep up with what’s what and who’s who and how’s about, unable to raise the correct amount of outrage at this activity while cheering unthinkingly the appeal to that other activity, unable to wear the right line of clothes while simultaneously disdaining that lifestyle brand now deemed not only déclassé but also recidivist. Like the poor fellow traveller trying to keep up with the changes after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the twists and turns required to be ‘with it’ and hipper-than-thou can cause whiplash and may lead to a need for a full spine replacement.

All of which is merely a very roundabout way of saying that reading Wilkie Collins in the aborning Twenty-First Century is fraught—fraught, I say—with perils and concerns that have little to do with the inherent material written by Mr. Collins in the closing decades of the Nineteenth Century. And it is difficult to determine how problematic that material is on its own terms, versus the controversies brought by us to Collins’s work from the oceans of zeitgeist drowning We Who Are Living Now. A sedulous understanding of the correct perspective on difficult societal issues seems to be the hallmark of Our Times, and our especial foreknowledge of the resolution of all formerly taboo subjects might just make it hard for We Living Now to appreciate the (misguided?) insights and ideas of Mr. Wilkie Collins, an old white guy who appears to have lost some of his audience when he became more preachy after losing his best friend, Charles Dickens, in 1870. The works I am considering today come from that post-Dickens period, for the most part, with Miss or Mrs? published in 1871 and The Guilty River some fifteen years later in 1886. Two very short pieces—“trifles”, as Collins called them—were appended to my edition of Miss or Mrs?: “‘Blow Up With The Brig!’” and “The Fatal Cradle”.

All these stories are perhaps impossible to read heedless of the accretions of time long since passed. This may be particularly true of Miss or Mrs?, a novella whose main action concerns the marriage, forced or volitional, of a fifteen or sixteen year old girl. Not to worry, however; our heroine Natalie Graybrooke is rather developed for her age:

At fifteen years of age (dating from her last birthday) she possessed the development of the bosom and limbs, which in England is rarely attained before twenty. Everything about the girl – except her little rosy ears – was on a grand Amazonian scale. Her shapely hand was long and large; her supple waist was the waist of a woman. The indolent grace of all her movements had its motive power in an almost masculine firmness of action, and profusion of physical resource. This remarkable bodily development was far from being accompanied by any corresponding development of character. Natalie’s inner was the gentle, innocent manner of a young girl.

The developing maiden around which the novella turns, doubtless grateful her ears have not grown as much as her bosom

Miss Natalie has two suitors, in effect, though one is secret and the other is a troglodyte. The latter, Richard Turlington, is a man of affairs whose desire for the lovely daughter of Sir Joseph Graybrooke is more than mercantile, perhaps less than entirely honorable. The former would-be lover is Natalie’s cousin (!), the unfortunately named Launcelot Linzie, a medico who is some fifteen years younger than Mr. Turlington. (Meaning, for the mathematically inclined among you, that Turlington is at minimum twice the age of his desired bride.) The story opens on board the yacht of the rich tradesman desirous of the much younger girl. A sea voyage has been prescribed as treatment for Natalie, who has shown “Signs of maturing too rapidly—of outgrowing her strength”, and Mr. Turlington has put his schooner at the disposal of the Graybrookes, the father and daughter, along with her maiden aunt. While on board, two things precipitate the action of the story: first, hints of a strange past for Mr. Turlington; and second, business exigencies which demand the businessman’s immediate attention. As he leaves the family aboard his yacht to manage his affairs, Turlington warns Sir Graybrooke away from Mr. Linzie, whom the older suitor suspects (rightly) of competing for the attentions of his desired prize.

Twists and turns ensue, as often happens when a story is published in serial form, and Wilkie Collins demonstrates his excellence at foreshadowing and at weaving narrative threads into an intriguing and satisfactory pattern. Along the way, the author uses his knowledge of the law to navigate the more peculiar aspects of the English statutes, viz. the Law of Clandestine Marriage. For Natalie is not of age, not to mention the fact that by this time in the story her father has promised her to the ever more brutal Mr. Turlington, and so Launce Linzie (egads what a diseuphonious name) seeks out a legal loophole whereby he and she may be married without her father’s consent. Yes, you read that right: Miss or Mrs? tells how a man may legally marry a fifteen year old girl without letting her daddy know. One wonders if this law was changed after Wilkie Collins let slip this ‘life hack’. It is also indicative of the author and of his age that he delves into legal idiosyncrasies in the service of love, whilst the American focus on law in fiction is generally with regards to murder. Such is life. Fortunately, the creepiness factor is reduced greatly by the strongest character in the novel, the wonderful Lady Winwood, Sir Joseph’s niece (and therefore also Natalie’s cousin). This diminutive woman (as the author says, “But who ever met with a tall woman who had a will of her own?”) has made her own marriage to a lord and insists in her forceful way that Natalie follow her heart:

‘My dear, one ambitious marriage in the family is quite enough! I have made up my mind that you shall marry the man you love. Don’t tell me your courage is failing you – the excuse is contemptible; I refuse to receive it. Natalie! the men have a phrase which exactly describes your character. You want back-bone!’

The strongest woman in Miss or Mrs? speaks her mind

This titled spouse drives much of the remaining plot, and—through her approbation of Mr. Linzie—signals the reader that the young man might make a satisfactory husband for poor Natalie in spite of his lack of funds or position. And so the contest is engaged, fought with stealthy wedding wiles on the part of the want-to-be newlyweds and increasing domineering fury on the part of Sir Joseph and (particularly) Mr. Turlington. Alea jacta est, several times in fact, and the story moves quickly and passionately to its heart-stopping finale.

The other novella by Wilkie Collins that we consider, The Guilty River, is a much later work, which displays the same wonderful prose stylings of the author, though the plot is more turbid and the characters less engaging than those of Miss or Mrs? Unfortunately, the contrivances which flow from the author’s imagination quite naturally into the plot of the earlier work are here quite clunky, and this flaw combines with a hero portrayed in a heavy-handed and not entirely believable manner to create a somewhat ponderous tale of implied peril and almost incredible naïveté. The astonishing denouement of Miss or Mrs? has its parallel in The Guilty River, only here the ginned up closing falls flat. Whereas the first book considered keeps the reader guessing until the very end, the latter seems to telegraph too clearly how it will all turn out.

I stood alone on the bank of the ugliest stream in England.

The moonlight, pouring its unclouded radiance over open space, failed to throw a beauty not their own on those sluggish waters. Broad and muddy, their stealthy current flowed onward to the sea, without a rock to diversify, without a bubble to break, the sullen surface. On the side from which I was looking at the river, the neglected trees grew so close together that they were undermining their own lives, and poisoning each other. On the opposite bank, a rank growth of gigantic bulrushes hid the ground beyond, except where it rose in hillocks, and showed its surface of desert sand spotted here and there by mean patches of heath. A repellent river in itself, a repellent river in its surroundings, a repellent river even in its name. It was called The Loke.

But The Guilty River is not all bad, as this charming description of ugliness proves

The novella concerns a young squire, Gerald Roylake, returned from German schools to assume his inheritance, the manor and lands of Trimley Deen. He is out of place in England, unable to care about those things which seem of most import to his father’s widow (the old squire having remarried after sending his son to the Continent) and the social circle to which he belongs. As in the previous book, love is the driving force, though here the class discrepancy between the anode and cathode in the proposed marriage battery is even greater, as the master of Trimley Deen falls head over heels in love with the miller’s daughter, who can only owe him fealty, not affection. While his stepmother tries to defoliate his budding love and direct the young squire’s attentions towards a more acceptable direction, young Roylake engages in a strange relationship with a Lodger at the mill, a former doctor now become deaf who insinuates himself into our hero’s life, coming between the young man and Cristel, the aforementioned miller’s daughter.

I find myself unwilling to plod through a recitation of the twists and turns of this product of Wilkie Collins’s later years. Suffice it to say that Roylake is a babe in the woods who is manipulated into absurd stupidities, the Lodger is a monotonous (literally so, as his deafness apparently manifests itself by making his speech loud and lacking dynamics) foil, and Cristel is merely implausible.

‘He is very vain,’ she said, ‘and you may have wounded his vanity by treating him like a stranger, after he had given you his writings to read, and invited you to his room. But I thought I saw something much worse than mortification in his face. Shall I be taking a liberty, if I ask how it was you got acquainted with him last night?’

She was evidently in earnest. I saw that I must answer her without reserve; and I was a little afraid of being myself open to a suspicion of vanity, if I mentioned the distrust which I had innocently excited in the mind of my new acquaintance. In this state of embarrassment I took a young man’s way out of the difficulty, and spoke lightly of a serious thing.

‘I became acquainted with your deaf Lodger, Cristel, under ridiculous circumstances. He saw us talking last night, and did me the honour to be jealous of me.’

I had expected to see her blush. To my surprise she turned pale, and vehemently remonstrated.

Our three main characters in a first-person nutshell, showing young Roylake understands women no better than anything else

Though there are some good moments in The Guilty River, most of the tale is quite recalcitrant, shoved along like a fat old cat of disreputable mien towards its unsatisfactory conclusion. I liked it. Many of the same themes are present in both novellas, to wit, idiocies of the English class system and the hidden heart of dark brutality behind handsome masks. But The Guilty River also betrays a sluggish despondency which may be more evocative of the author’s increasing dependence upon laudanum than of the gothic tale he seeks to tell. Though the story is told with the young Squire Roylake as the first-person hero, the narration is of a man looking back years later at the mistakes and missed opportunities of youth, more maudlin than wistful, with a heavier heart than the more ebullient tale of the attempted clandestine marriage of Miss or Mrs?

Wilkie Collins himself had an iconoclastic view of marriage, spending most of his life in a relationship which defies definition with a widow, Caroline Graves, while also fathering three children with another woman, Martha Rudd. Thus, while it is easy to view these strange tales of matrimony as merely artifacts of the Victorian Age, Mr. Collins lived within the transgressive world which betrays the limits of society’s strictures. Also worthy of note is the mixed race of the ‘Amazonian’ heroine of the earlier novella, whose mother is frankly stated to have “a mixture of Negro blood and French blood”, for whatever that may be worth.

The edition of Miss or Mrs? which I have bears the subtitle And Other Stories In Outline, and the two very short stories appended to the longer tale are much better than ‘trifles’—as Collins names them in his introduction. “‘Blow up with the brig!’” is a one-scene story of a sailor facing death one long, long night. And “The Fatal Cradle” is a witty sea tale of fate and fortune, and the vagaries of birth. All three in the volume are tightly plotted, deftly described, and ultimately pleasing narratives. They do much more than “endeavour to interest [the reader] without making large demands on his attention and his time.” This reader was inspired by these tales to order a half-dozen more Wilkie Collins books. And though The Guilty River was as sluggish as the book’s titular waterway, the sparkles of wit and language were still present, in portions large enough to encourage further acquaintance with this very interesting author.

* The nuance of this most famous of De Goya’s etchings from Los Caprichos is often neglected or perhaps unknown, as the full epigraph is only seen in certain editions. Though the print itself always shows the common title “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos”, the Prado edition provides the artist’s plea for the importance of both Reason and Imagination: “La fantasia abandonada de la razon, produce monstruos imposibles: unida con ella, es madre de las artes y origen de sus marabillas.” Situated as he was on the cusp of the Romantic Era, and all too aware of some of the failures of the Enlightenment, De Goya sounded an all-too-prescient warning of possible horrors to come—predicted horrors he later witnessed and depicted in The Disasters of War. The death of God and faith, however, has brought a recrudescence of the numbing dominion of King Reason, as the ‘invisible hand’ of the so-called free market becomes one of the only three metaphysical forces appealed to in our Endarkened Age. (The other two, of course, are the Military-Patriot Industry and the Christian Brand.