Odd Jobs (146 page)

Our own century, in trying to make mental room for the uncomfortable idea of sexuality that Cleopatra embodies, has camped her up, or bimboized her. Ms. Hughes-Hallet, who until writing this book was known in print as a writer for
Vogue
and a television critic for the London
Evening Standard
, energetically connects the kittenish Cleopatra of Shaw’s
Caesar and Cleopatra
(1898) with the childlike burlesque queens in such popular entertainments as the British film farce
Carry On Cleo
(1963): “Humour of this kind at least clears an imaginative space in which sex is possible, and friendly, but it does so at a high cost. All the participants must consent to be made foolish and the women, before they can be allowed their share of the jollity, must first sacrifice their claim to be fully grown-up people.” When Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra, in the notorious film of 1963, winks, a new element of self-mockery, of complex devalorization, enters the game; quite brilliantly the author elicits from the publicized extravagance of the film’s cost, and of Burton and Taylor’s real-life, jet-set reprise of Antony and Cleopatra, an essay upon the spiritual worth of prodigality, seen as a Rabelaisian, Dionysian “holy foolishness” that liberates us from all those oppressive old Roman values.

The book concludes with the author’s own vision of Cleopatra, as a Venus subduing Mars and producing, as the myth goes, Harmony, an end to all the simple oppositions—“right/wrong, friend/foe, east/west, man/woman, alive/dead”—that make our thinking so stressful and rancorous. A pretty vision, endorsed as yet by few artistic re-creations of Cleopatra, though the author digs up an Egyptian play, Ahmad Shawqui’s
Masra’ Kliyupatra
(1929), and a curious painting of a nude, hefty, sky-gazing Cleo, asp on nipple, by Giovanni Pedrini. “If the sexes could become one, if love and power could be reconciled, if Orient and Occident could combine, death would be defeated. That concord and that hope appear epitomized in the person of my last Cleopatra.”

Well, with such a benignly cosmic conclusion, and so many insights, apt quotations, and provocative facts along the way, why did I have such a heavy time with this book, my distracting personal circumstances and possible Octavian resistances aside? Especially in its first sections,
Cleopatra
has the dogged, adviser-approved aura of a Ph.D. thesis, chewing up the centuries and spitting out word bites in a spirit of obligatory erudition. The appearance of so many plays, novels, and histories in chopstick-friendly fragments leaves one with an empty feeling that nothing, not even Shakespeare, could be a meal in itself. “The deconstruction of ancient narratives is a late twentieth-century practice,” Ms. Hughes-Hallet says in her introduction. Deconstruction sets out to relieve literary works of their intended content, substituting instead the subliminal messages the author did not intend. The old-fashioned reader
expects to confront, between the Nile-green covers, Cleopatra herself, the reality of her, or an earnest estimate of that reality, and what he gets instead are images of her, generated by the delusions and neuroses of bygone generations. This makes for a faintly monotonous flutter. “I do not know her,” the author confesses cheerfully. “I, like all the other writers whose works I have dissected, know only her depictions and descriptions, masks made by others in her image.”

The notion that an image might be “true to life,” or some images less untrue than others, is not entertained. But surely there
is
something about the story of Antony and Cleopatra that was real, and is real, and accounts for its perpetuation these two millennia. Isn’t it the story, in a sense, of every small-town boy who, at the moment when he plans to set out to conquer the world, falls in love with a local girl and stays, to reap the harvest of children, of drudging days, of relative failure? Biologically, a woman is a Venus’s-flytrap of sorts, holding her Antony, for the moments of seduction and enthrallment, in what Ms. Hughes-Hallet nicely calls “a bewildering swamp of instinctual pleasure.” Is Rider Haggard, hysterical old imperialist though he was, to be denied the element of truth in his remark “Woman, in her weakness, is yet the strongest force upon the earth … for Nature fights ever on her side”? Since Ms. Hughes-Hallet, out of the thousands of pages she read, chose that sentence to quote, she, too, must have quickened to something in it, something possibly that helps us see, that helps us grasp our condition, that helps us live.
Cleopatra
’s air of enervation stems from deconstruction’s fatiguing premise that art has no health in it, it is all cultural pathology.

HARD FACTS

T
HE
P
ENCIL:
A History of Design and Circumstance
, by Henry Petroski. 434 pp. Knopf, 1990.

The history of the pencil has rather few highlights. The first picture of one appears in a book on collecting fossils, written in Latin by the German Swiss physician and naturalist Konrad von Gesner, and printed in Zurich in 1565; a woodcut depicts a rather ornately turned tube of wood holding a tapered piece of a substance Gesner terms “a sort of lead (which I have heard some call English antimony).” Before then, English shepherds in Cumberland had been marking their sheep with chunks of a black substance discovered, legend had it, in the roots of a large tree that a storm had felled. This substance, locally called “wadd,” was also called “black lead” and “plumbago” after the metal (in Latin,
plumbum
) that for millennia had been used, for want of a better, to make marks on pale surfaces. Wadd—given in 1789 its current name of “graphite,” from the Greek
graphein
, “to write”—was found in exceptionally pure form at Borrowdale, near Keswick. Until the deposit’s final exhaustion, in the nineteenth century, “Borrowdale lead” was the by-word for quality in this matter of making a mark; the mine, operated as a crown monopoly, was closed for years at a time to conserve the precious mineral, and security precautions were taken worthy of diamonds, a more compact form of carbon. A mouthful of smuggled wadd, the miners used to say, was as good as a day’s wage.

By the end of the seventeenth century, the substance was known all
over Europe and used by artists and others. To keep the hands clean, black lead could be wrapped in string or vines or held in elongate holders called
porte-crayons
. The idea of permanently encasing a rod of wadd in wood is, like so much else about the pencil
^*
industry, obscure in origin; some credit a joiner in Keswick, and others claim priority for the carpenters of Nuremberg. In the German city, one Friedrich Staedtler is identified as early as 1662 as a pencil-maker. The first pencil leads were square, cut from a slice of raw graphite to fit a grooved strip of wood; the “lead,” commonly in a number of pieces laid end-to-end, was sealed in place by a glued strip of wood. The resulting implement, square in cross-section, could then be planed at the corners into an octagon, or fully rounded.

The pulverization, melting, and reconstitution, with sulphur added, of fragments of graphite is described as early as 1726, in Berlin; but the major breakthrough in pencil-lead technology occurred in France, where Nicolas-Jacques Conté (whose name is remembered by the Conté crayon), under pressure of the severe graphite shortage occasioned by the Napoleonic Wars, quickly developed, and in 1795 patented, a process for mixing powdered graphite and clay, shaping the paste in long molds and firing it at a high temperature, producing ceramic leads. Borrowdale wadd had been taken as it came, but now the hardness of pencil lead could be graded by the proportions of the clay-graphite mixture; the basic chemistry of pencil lead was established. Mechanical pencils, which needed extruded leads of very precise diameter, were first patented in 1822 but have never supplanted the wood-encased, repeatedly sharpened, disposable pencil. Red cedar was early recognized as the ideally strong, straight-grained, easily shaved pencil wood; no substitute quite matches slow-growing red cedar’s pleasant tint and odor. As the cedar forests, mostly American, ran out, pencil manufacturers sent agents all through the South buying up fences, railroad ties, and log cabins made of the once-abundant wood. Rubber got its name (supposedly from the English chemist Joseph Priestley, in 1770) for its ability to rub out pencil marks. The first patent for an attached rubber eraser was issued in 1858 to Hyman Lipman, of Philadelphia. The pencil-sharpener as we know it—consisting of two revolving bevelled cutters—
dates from the early twentieth century, thanks to the Automatic Pencil Sharpener Company (Apsco) of Chicago. Yellow became the favored color of paint for pencils with the Austrian firm of L. & C. Hardmuth’s introduction, in 1890, of the Koh-I-Noor model, exhibited at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. The rest is chemistry (most recently, polymerization) and forestry—what can pencil-makers cut down when all the red cedar is gone?—and corporate rivalry. Industrial competition pitted Faber against Faber—Johann against Lothar, the firm of Anton Wilhelm against that of Eberhard—and saw early English supremacy give way to French inventiveness and German organization and American mass production, all now threatened by the pencil-fabricating hordes of Japan. Present global production amounts to fourteen billion pencils a year.

Well, if the tale can be told, with but a few trifling omissions, so concisely, why has Henry Petroski, in
The Pencil
, given us a chubby book of over four hundred pages, including a twenty-two-page bibliography, an eighteen-page index, and five tightly printed pages of grateful acknowledgments? The answer, I think, belongs, like certain aspects of the standard pencil’s scale and texture, to the subjective realm of marketability. A book of a mere two hundred pages entitled
The Pencil
might appear to be merely informative. A book twice that size, though not twice as informative, is a feat, a prank; it has a certain mysterious majesty, a material mysticism, like that fondly remembered best-seller of yesteryear,
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
. Such a swelling, looming, teasingly excessive book promises to lift us high from its quaintly specific base. With its striking blue jacket, which successfully imitates pencil sheen, and its unusual shape—tall, thick, but not wide—the artifact beckons. We want to seize it, to hold it. Mr. Petroski has an engineer’s light touch upon his own pencil. He writes a relaxed, translucent, spun-glass kind of prose, with a not inconsiderable percentage of pure air betwixt its twirled filaments. A good deal of flourish accompanies his deliveries. Here is a fair specimen of a paragraph revving up: