Vintage Reading (6 page)

Dorothy Parker, a poet and critic as well as storyteller, presided over a court of literary wits that frequented Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel during the 1920s. Mona’s visitor is like most of the characters appearing in her stories; there’s scarcely a good, sweet, sensitive soul in the lot.

In “Horsie,” a baby’s nurse is cursed with large, indelicate features; her employers tease her mercilessly behind her back, all but waiting for her to whinny. In “Glory in the Daytime,” Lily Wynton, a legendary actress, turns out to be a sad and sodden alcoholic, given to drunken recitations of her past roles. Then there’s Hazel Morse, the “Big Blonde” of the story’s title, who drifts from man to man, speakeasy to speakeasy, devoid of all sense of who she is, or of any talent but being company to men.

Why drop down into Parker’s underworld of snide, shallow and otherwise unlikable characters? It’s not fun, I’ll tell you, though it is perversely fascinating. That’s one reason to lap up her stories. To harmlessly satisfy a sadistic streak? That’s a second.

To study a consummate master in the cruel craft of dissecting human frailty might be a third.

____________

By Niccolo Machiavelli
First published in 1537

Machiavellian, adj.: Following the methods recommended by Machiavelli in preferring expediency to morality; duplicity in statecraft or general conduct.

That’s what the word meant in 1592, when the
Oxford English Dictionary
records its appearance in the phrase “pestilent Machiavellian policie,” and that’s what it means today. Its impressive constancy of meaning owes much to this slim book,
The Prince
, and to the force and single-mindedness of its message.

Which is that politics and power are one thing, morality and ethics something else.

The Inquisition ordered Machiavelli’s works destroyed. Mussolini chose
The Prince
as the subject of his doctoral thesis. Lenin and Stalin studied it, and Hitler reputedly kept it for bedtime reading. Is it, then, a work of evil, and thus not fit reading for all who ally themselves with good?

As a matter of fact, Machiavelli himself allied himself with good. A Florentine statesman who lived from 1469 to 1532, Niccolo Machiavelli cared passionately about the fate of Italy and held important diplomatic posts with the Florentine Republic. He wrote
The Prince
while banished to a country villa when out of favor. In it, he never argued for evil over good, hatred over love, war over peace. He simply observed that any ruler inclined to retain his kingdom and achieve his political ends ought not give misguided obeisance to mere ethics.

The Prince
is a practical textbook, a guide on how to rule. Chapter 5, for example, tells “The Way to Govern Cities or Dominions That, Previous to
Being Occupied, Lived Under Their Own Laws.” Chapter 17 is entitled “Of Cruelty and Clemency and Whether It Is Better to Be Loved or Feared.” Only the book’s frequent references to the labyrinthine politics of early sixteenth century Italy make its advice anything less than instantly relevant to the modern student of power.

Machiavelli points out that too-liberal policies may drain the public treasury and thus prompt unrest and wide-spread misery more readily than “niggardly” policies that preserve the state’s financial health. Sound familiar? He writes that an assassination attempt, “which proceeds from the deliberate action of a determined man cannot be avoided.” And he insists that, in the long run, the occasionally cruel prince “will be more merciful than those who, for excess of tenderness, allow disorders to arise, from whence spring bloodshed and rapine.”

The Prince
may be read today as a treatise on men and women in groups generally, and many of its prescriptions seem no less applicable to the corporate boardroom than to the halls of government: “There is no other way of guarding one’s self against flattery than by letting men understand that they will not offend you by speaking the truth,” is surely a constructive insight. A bit more questionable: “It is much safer to be feared than loved.”

Machiavelli’s air of supreme self-assurance surely owes much to the clean lines of his prose—whose virtues, as critic Kenneth Rexroth once noted, “survive all but the worst translations,” and which comes across not as self-consciously “stylish” but elegant and pure. And pithy, as in: “It is the nature of men to be as much bound by the benefits that they confer as by those they receive.”

Do not, though, be too quick to condemn Signor Machiavelli. His divorce of politics from ethics inevitably leads to statements easily construed as callous or cynical—which, of course, they are. Yet the man himself plainly felt it was better to be good than evil, kind than cruel, on the side of God than of the Devil. And when it suited him, he wrote, a prince ought to embrace just those policies most popular among the people—leave them to live their lives in peace, don’t confiscate their property, and so on. Wrote Machiavelli, “The
best fortress is to be found in the love of the people.”

But a sentiment like that fails to account for how he wound up in the dictionary, whereas this vintage Machiavelli does: A prince “must have a mind disposed to adapt itself according to the wind, and as the variations of fortune dictate, and... not deviate from what is good, if possible, but be able to do evil if constrained.”

____________

By Ambrose Bierce
First published in 1906

Babbits, boosters, flacks and other purveyors of a sunny view of the human condition will find little to sustain them in Ambrose Bierce’s misanthropic
tour de force
,
The Devil’s Dictionary
. Why, just turn to the A’s and find:

Air, n. A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful Providence for the fattening of the poor.

Proceed to the Z’s and encounter:

Zeal, n. A certain nervous disorder afflicting the young and inexperienced. A passion that goeth before a sprawl.

This irreverent literary frolic offers welcome respite to the curmudgeon who’s spent a vexing day batting off vapidly smiling young waiters and retail clerks determined to wish him a nice day. Marriage, according to Bierce, consist of “a master, a mistress and two slaves, making in all, two.” To pray, says the author, means “to ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.” But of course.

Born in 1842, Bierce came out of the Civil War with a distinguished service record in the Union Army and went on to a career as short story writer and journalist. In 1913, at the age of 71, he left for Mexico, presumably to join Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army. He was never heard from again.

In
The Devil’s Dictionary
(originally
The Cynic’s Wordbook
), Bierce leaves us with a taste of our species sour at best. But to those not inclined to
take him too seriously, and willing to forgive his more outrageous ethnic slurs, his legacy will seem more charmingly eccentric than darkly evil. Sometimes he makes you snicker, sometimes laugh outrigh; sometimes he embarrasses you with the truth of his insights.

Bierce feels under no compunction to offer each of his thousand or so definitions in the same form. Some, for instance, are epigrammatic, as:

Positive, adj. Mistaken at the top of one’s voice.

Some amount to brief, barbed essays, as in a disquisition on the word “inadmissible” which argues that the world’s religions are all based on evidence inadmissible in any court, while many of history’s horrors, like the trial, conviction, and execution of witches, were “sound in logic and in law.”

Bierce illustrates other definitions through imagined bits of doggerel by imagined poets and imagined names—Orphea Bowen, say, or Lavatar Shunk. Or Hassan Brubuddy, who adorns this definition:

Famous, adj. Conspicuously miserable.

with this verse:

Done to a turn on the iron, behold

Him who to be famous aspired.

Content? Well, his grill has a plating of gold.

And his twistings are greatly admired.

Other verses, meanwhile, are lengthier as one, accompanying the entry for “a male,” that begins:

The Maker, at Creations’ birth,

With living things had stocked the earth.

From elephants to bats and snails,

They all were good, for all were males.

Or Bierce will treat us to fictional dialogues—like one, between an insurance agent and a homeowner, illuminating his definition of “insurance,” which he pictures as a “game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.”

Snide? You bet.

Funny? Quietly.

True? That, also.

____________

By Adolf Hitler
First published in 1925

Hitler, wrote his translator in a note to an American edition of
Mein Kampf
, seldom pursues any logic inherent in the subject matter. He makes the most extraordinary allegations without so much as an attempt to prove them. Often there is no visible connection between one paragraph and the next ... His style is without color and movement.

True enough, but would any other author be so excoriated by his own translator? To the modern mind, Hitler has become such a symbol of hatred and cruelty, so much the incarnation of evil, that even normal editorial courtesies are, in his case, suspended. It has become difficult to see him as human, much less the formulator of ideas or the author of a book.

Hitler wrote
Mein Kampf
(“My Struggle”) while in prison, after his abortive
putsch
of November 1923. It is, all at once, political manifesto, historical treatise, propaganda manual, autobiography, and an account of the origins of National Socialism, the whole lardered with raw hate.

What, exactly, does Hitler say? As artless and crude as his style is, he is not ambiguous, if only because he repeats himself.

He says that it wasn’t battlefield ineptitude that led to German defeat in the Great War and the ignominious surrender terms of the Treaty of Versailles; it was a stab in the back delivered by the Marxists and the Jews.

He pictures “The Aryan” as culture creator, “The Jew” as culture destroyer; for Hitler, race, not economics, is at the core of national life.

He extols the spoken word, not the written, for reaching the masses (and regularly recounts his successes in doing so).

He equates a nation’s strength with its territory, in effect setting forth a
policy of national conquest.

He devalues intellect, holds up physical strength, obedience, and “will” as more essential to the new Aryan man.

He calls for culling out the weak and the infirm from German’s racial stock.

Mainly, Hitler hates. He hates Jews, parliamentarians, freemasons, the liberal press, Marxists, Social Democrats. He displays open contempt for democratic processes, for intellectual “objectivity,” for the masses he proposes to lead, and for any of his followers inclined to take a more accommodating, less bloody road to power.

One does not read
Mein Kampf
today for its political or racial theories, or as a contribution to human thought, or for pleasure. One reads it as a reminder: Tempting though it might be to see Hitler as a once-in-a-millennium aberration, and hence outside the human pale, he was not. He was, truly, one of us; he had a mother and father. He wavered, as most adolescents do, over choice of vocation. Before he was
Der Fuehrer
, he was a penniless painter, trying to make a go of it in pre-War Vienna. He was a common soldier. He had youthful dreams, convictions, ideas ...

And, at the age of 34, he wrote a book, an uncommonly frank one at that, in which he spelled them all out:

• The National Socialist state “must not let itself be confused by the drivel about so-called ‘freedom of the press.’”
  
• “The great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil ... Therefore in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a little one.”
  
• “The future of a movement is conditioned by the fanaticism, yes, the intolerance, with which its adherents
  uphold it as the sole correct movement.”
  
• The National Socialist “movement is antiparliamentarian, and even its participation in a parliamentary institution can only imply activity for its destruction, for eliminating an institution in which we must see one of the gravest symptoms of mankind’s decay.”
  
• And always the primitive, pornographic anti-Semitism: “With satanic joy in his face, the black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting [Aryan] girl whom he defiles with his blood, thus stealing her from her people.”
  

Vicious, evil, whacko stuff? Yet in 1933 Hitler was named chancellor and legally came to power in Germany.

____________

By Emile Zola
First published in 1880

Nana is a man-eater, a French courtesan of the glittering Second Empire who gives herself to counts, bankers, actors, boys and men, with equal abandon, worms into their psyches only to devour them, robbing them of their dignity and their riches. Capricious, unthinkingly cruel, she is the sexual monster every Parisian man desires; at her house in the Avenue de Villiers, they literally line up outside her bedroom. Her flesh offers delight, her soul corruption.

Nana
takes place in the same Paris, in the days leading up to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, immortalized by the French Impressionist school of painting. In the big racetrack scene, Nana cheers a horse named Nana, while the Comte Xaver de Vandeuvres, one of her sexual slaves, tries to recreate his Nana-decimated fortune through a rigged betting scheme ... And all the while bright bonnets and gay, colorful dresses shimmer in the sun, straight out of Degas.

The reader realizes from the first, though, that this is no comedy of manners, no polite, pretty look at Parisian high society: “The rumbling of carriages stopped short, doors slammed, and people entered in little groups, waiting at the barrier before climbing the double staircase behind, where the women, their hips swaying, lingered for the moment.” Carriages rumbling, doors slamming, hips swaying: All of
Nana
is like that—rough and gritty, devoid of delicacy. The novel begins with the premeir of a new show,
The Blonde Venus
. Someone starts to congratulate the theater owner: “Your theater...” He shoots back: “You mean my brothel.”