(All reviews originally appeared in the IHT-Asahi newspaper.)
Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle. By Paul Johnson. ISBN: 978-0-06-114316-8. New York. HarperCollins. 299pp.
The subtitle is misleading. It understates the vast scope of this book, which opens with the Old Testament prophetess-heroine Deborah, some seven centuries before Alexander, and closes with a trio too recent, too familiar, for proper historical assessment: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II.
The 11 chapters in between celebrate characters so bewilderingly diverse as to challenge to the limit the reader's natural quest for a common thread. What are Julius Caesar and Mae West doing in the same book? Would George Washington recognize a kindred spirit in Emily Dickinson? Samson, meet Marilyn Monroe. Would they have anything to say to each other?
"Heroes," following "Creators" (2006), caps a trilogy that began in 1988 with "Intellectuals." Age---he is 79--has not dimmed Paul Johnson's brilliance, or dulled his insight, or blunted his sometimes obnoxious force. You read this mightily prolific British historian wishing at times he was in the room with you so you could shout him down. But you rarely read him in vain, if a broader, deeper view of mankind is your aim.
What is a hero? The earliest stab at a definition is Homer's, whose own warrior-heroes are "favored by the gods," if not actually descended from them. Homeric heroes were models for Alexander the Great (356-323 BC)---whose vision, however, far outstripped theirs. It was of "a multilingual, multicultural empire"---globalization, ancient style. A contemporary said of him, "He wanted to rule everybody." Insatiability is a heroic quality---perhaps the key one. But the gods withdrew their favor; he was dead at 32.
Heroism and death keep close company. Caesar (100-44 BC) also died prematurely, murdered in his prime. These two outsized personalities "became prototypes of the heroic character for the next [two] thousand years," eclipsing, for all except the Jews, the more ancient Biblical David. That is unfortunate. Would history have been different had David, poet and musician as well as warrior and ruler, shaped the mold in which fighting heroes are cast?
All heroes are fighters, but not all wage war. Thirteen of Johnson's 30 heroes are women, only two of them warriors---Queen Boudica of Roman Britain and Joan of Arc. Were Emily Dickinson and Marilyn Monroe "favored by the gods?" The 19th-century poet-recluse and the 20th-century "movie witch," "born to be married to the camera," were beset by neurotic fears that make cowards of lesser people. Their heroism consisted in making their neuroses work for them---Dickinson in poems like "They shut me up in Prose/ As when a little girl/ They put me in the Closet..."; Monroe in "a constant struggle not to be possessed and raped by the camera, punctuated by rare moments of submission when she engaged in lovemaking with the merciless machine."
The ancients aside, Johnson's heroes are overwhelmingly---not quite exclusively---English and American. (One wonders at the exclusion of Japan, whose traditional samurai culture, with its contempt for suffering and death, was a merciless breeder of heroism.)
Two of the four exceptions are French---Joan of Arc and Charles de Gaulle. What a contrast they make! Joan, the medieval teenage God-possessed warrior who routed the English in France only to be burned at the stake for heresy at age 20, "a brief candle of courage and goodness, soon extinguished;" de Gaulle "a repulsive person... [a] terrible man, capable of evoking heroism of the grandest kind but also inspiring the sublimity of dread."
Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee are paired in a chapter titled "Two Kinds of Nobility." Both were tragic figures---Lincoln, a man of peace to the core and yet forced by circumstances and conscience to be a war president; Lee, hating slavery but feeling honor-bound to defend it when, to his disgust, his native Virginia seceded. Lincoln's is the nobility of goodness---"he was a good man on a giant scale;" Lee's the nobility of "'honor,' a word he pronounced with a special loving emphasis, putting a stress on each syllable...."
The pleasure with which we read Johnson grows strained as we approach our own time. His guiding philosophy---muted in his analysis of the past, strident with respect to current events---surfaces in a statement regarding Sir Thomas More, beheaded (1535) by order of Henry VIII for refusal to acknowledge the king as a law unto himself. "More," writes Johnson, "was thus a hero of the highest category because the stand he took... was based upon universal principles of absolute morality, applicable in all places and ages."
Is there such a thing? The seemingly infinite variety of mankind's historical experience, of which Johnson himself is so zestful a chronicler, leaves it at least an open question. "Absolute morality" is, of course, the crux of the conservative---as opposed to the liberal---worldview, and Johnson makes no bones about his conservatism. His final chapter on Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II is unabashedly partisan. And if his unstinting praise in his epilogue of the late Chilean military dictator Augusto Pinochet makes you squirm---well, that's because the Soviet Union's "propaganda machine successfully demonized him among the chattering classes all over the world. But Pinochet remains a hero to me," he says, "because I know the facts."
Johnson certainly knows a great many facts about a great many things. But does any set of facts lead inevitably to any one ultimate, indisputable interpretation? Would "the facts," if only we knew them, make radical conservatives of us all? It's too painful a thought. From a less stirring writer it would be intolerable.
The First Word: The Search for the Origin of Language. By Christine Kenneally. ISBN: 978-0-670-03490-1. New York. Viking. 357pp.
The Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetichus (7th century BC), desiring to know what language arose before all others, reportedly commanded that two infants be reared in isolation. They would be fed, but not a single word would be uttered in their presence. Their first spoken word, when it came, would presumably belong to the first language. The word turned out to be "bekos"---Phrygian for bread. Phrygian, the Pharaoh concluded, must therefore be the mother of all languages.
Legend or fact, the story shows that the question animating the book under review goes back a very long way. And there is a modern school of thought, led by no less a figure than Noam Chomsky, that says, in effect, that the Pharaoh was on the right track. Chomsky, a giant among linguists, considered by some the greatest intellect of our time, has championed the view that language, instead of evolving, emerged suddenly and inevitably as a natural function of the human brain.
It is a view that is slowly losing ground. Long in eclipse, the proponents of language evolution find the intellectual winds slowly shifting in their favor. "The First Word," by science writer and linguist Christine Kenneally, is the story of a grand and passionate debate that is far from over, and may never be. How, and why, did mankind acquire language? What *is* language? Is it uniquely human? What could the first speaker have said to the first listener, and why was it understood?
Some 50 years ago, at the beginning of his career, Chomsky posited a linguistic organ in the brain generating what he called a "universal grammar" common to all languages – such that "English and Mohawk," summarizes Kenneally, "...are essentially the same language."
For a generation the notion stood firm against all challenge. Only in 1984 did effective opposition arise, led by Chomsky's former student Philip Lieberman, who argued that "human linguistic ability," far from arising spontaneously out of a single organ, "evolved by means of Darwinian processes." Lieberman's remained a voice in the wilderness until in 1990 his argument was taken up, with qualifications, by the famous cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. "Language," wrote Pinker and colleague Paul Bloom, "is no different from other complex abilities [such as the eye's capacity for depth perception]... [T]he only way to explain the origin of such abilities is through the theory of natural selection."
The perceived distance between human and non-human animals is steadily narrowing. Language is one attainment that seems to seat humans securely on a pedestal---but does it really?
Apes learn words, dolphins are sensitive to grammar, and an African gray parrot named Alex "has the language capabilities of a [human] two-year-old and the cognitive capacities of a six-year-old." Whether this is a tribute to the animals' innate abilities or to the vast patience and ingenuity of their researcher minders is a matter of dispute. But another question arises from the study of animals: Is language necessary?
An adornment of civilized living it certainly is, but anyone who supposes that thought is impossible without language is invited to consider Betty the crow---"a completely languageless creature, and yet no stranger to brilliant and rapid thinking." Responding to a challenge set her in a laboratory aviary, she "not only saw that a hook was necessary to lift the bucket in order to get to the meat, she didn't even try the straight wire to see if it would work first. She simply went about creating the tool she needed to reach her goal."
Complex social organizations are not uniquely human. Elephant societies can seem almost byzantine, requiring transmission of detailed knowledge from old to young. They and others show, says Kenneally, "that it's possible to have a complex inner and social life without syntax and words."
Possibly elephants, chimps and other demonstrably intelligent creatures will in the fullness of time evolve full-scale languages of their own. Or if they don't, it may not be lack of capability that holds them back but lack of need or interest. Humans, says Kenneally, summing up the work of a researcher whose specialty is the evolution of gesture, "have evolved into... a species for whom an experience means little if it's not shared. Chimpanzees took a different path. In their communication, there is never just plain showing..."
The key gesture that seems to come naturally to humans but not to chimps is that of pointing. Very young children will point helpfully at, say, an object a researcher makes a show of searching for. Chimps don't. Might the meaningfully extended finger, then, be the necessary antecedent of spoken language?
Or perhaps the key is to be found in the first symbolism---the first work directed towards a non-material end. It seems to have appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago---the ritual flaying and incision of skulls after death, possibly as a mark of veneration. Tools, as Betty the crow showed, can be devised without language, but symbols? Wouldn't they require at least simple language, and wouldn't linguistic complexities grow naturally and gradually around them?
We don't, of course, learn "the first word" from this book, but we do learn a great deal about the speculations and controversies surrounding it. With her incisive, readily comprehensible, refreshingly jargon-free writing style, Kenneally ushers the reader into the labs and conference halls where the origin of language is probed. It's a good place to be for anyone interested in language. And who, among language speakers, isn't interested in language?
A Thousand Splendid Suns. By Khaled Hosseini. ISBN: 978-1-59448-950-1. New York. Riverhead Books. 372pp.
The 17th-century poem from which this novel takes its title goes, "One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs,/ Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls."
The Kabul of that time must have been beautiful. It would not likely inspire such lines today. The poem's role in the novel is profoundly ironic. The scholar who recites it, in sorrow at being forced by civil war to flee his native city, is moments later blown to bits by a bomb. The suns of modern Kabul are anything but splendid.
The same scholar is implicated in another irony. No communist himself, he is nonetheless a fervent admirer of the proto-feminism espoused by the Soviet puppet regime of the 1980s. "It is a good time to be a woman in Afghanistan," he tells his beloved, precocious nine-year-old daughter as he helps her with her homework. "And you can take advantage of that, Laila."
Years later, Laila will ruefully reflect that it is fortunate her father did not to live to see the rise of the Taliban.
The Taliban darkened and narrowed, but did not build, the dungeon that so many Afghan women down the centuries have been obliged to call home. It is a relic of ancient standing, buttressed by religious and traditional sanction. It is hard for a Westerner to comprehend the depths of degradation involved here. Female second-class citizenship, female exploitation, female enslavement, are grim facts of life in many parts of the world and in many historical eras. But what novelist Khaled Hosseini shows us in "A Thousand Splendid Suns" is something beyond that. What he describes is the seeming criminalization of women. Women are criminals. Their crime is having been born female. The verdict is guilty, there is no appeal, and the sentence is to be delivered, often as children, into the hands of husbands who loathe them, despise them, and, in spite of that or maybe because of it, are given absolute, unrestrained power over them.
Laila, at age 14, is not so much delivered as propelled into the hands of Rasheed, the man she marries. Badly wounded by the bomb blast that killed her father and mother, she regains consciousness in his house; he and his wife, the latter grudgingly, have been caring for her. As for him, he'd had her in view all along as a second wife. She accepts his proposal with some alacrity – not because she has any illusions regarding his character but because, owing to a special circumstance known to her alone, she needs a husband – any husband. The year is 1992. The Communists are out, the Muslim warlords are at each other's throats, chaos reigns, and Kabul is being torn apart. Taliban "order" is still four years away.
We first meet Rasheed very early in the novel, in distant Heart, in a context having nothing to do with Laila. Jalil, Herat's richest man, has three wives, nine legitimate children, and – consequence of a moment's careless passion, soon regretted – one illegitimate daughter by his housekeeper. He is a cultivated and refined gentleman. Mariam, his harami (bastard) daughter, worships him. He visits her once a week in the shanty she shares with her mother some distance out of town (and out of sight). When the mother hangs herself in despair, the teenage girl, a living blot on her father's good name, must be got rid of. Rasheed, a 45-year-old shoemaker, turns up, wanting a wife who will beget him a son. He lives in Kabul, 650 km away. Mariam's view of the matter is neither solicited nor, when she gives it anyway, listened to.
Rasheed at his worst is a monster of malice, but he is not always at his worst, and one suspects that in a social system with reasonable underpinnings he might have been a decent man. He is hardworking and intelligent. He has moments of genuine kindness. With the subtlety that informs all his character portraits, Hosseini shows him to be a victim of the insane power he as an Afghani Muslim male is permitted, encouraged, even in a sense compelled to possess.
Practically all the characters in this novel are drawn with a vividness and complexity that will guarantee they stay with you long after you've put the book down, but the particular masterpiece in this regard is Mariam. An uneducated but spirited girl, she fades into the silently suffering drudge Rasheed's bullying makes of her, and then unexpectedly, magnificently, blooms in a manner that might almost persuade a cynical age that sainthood – the kind having nothing to do with prayer and ascetic practice – is not quite dead in the world.
The novel's end coincides with the Taliban's. Good – except that the U.S., now embarked full throttle on its "war on terror," is arming the very warlords whose vicious misrule had preceded and possibly spawned Taliban excesses. "Maybe," Laila thinks to herself, "there will be hope when Bush's bombs stop falling. But" – experience having taught her not to let her optimism run away with her – "she cannot bring herself to say it."
Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul in 1965 and, with his family, was granted political asylum in the U.S. in 1980. His first novel, "The Kite Runner" (2003), was as good as this one. May he keep writing.
The Gentle Axe. By R.N. Morris. ISBN: 978-1-59420-112-7. New York. The Penguin Press.305pp.
"The Gentle Axe" opens with the discovery, one freezing December evening, of two bodies in a park in St. Petersburg, Russia. The year is 1866. One of the bodies is hanging from a tree. The other, that of a dwarf, lies in a suitcase at the hanging man's dangling feet. The dwarf's skull has been split with an axe. An axe is tucked into the belt of the hanging man's trousers. All of this interests the old ex-prostitute who stumbles upon the ghastly scene much less than the 6000 rubles she fishes out of the hanging man's greatcoat pocket. God is merciful. This will mean a new life for herself, the young prostitute to whom she is a kind of mother, and the young prostitute's five-year-old daughter.
Enter... Porfiry Petrovitch.
Readers of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" will need no further introduction to that gentleman. Porfiry Petrovitch is the wily, enigmatic detective whose piercing psychological insight, belied by his comic roly-poly exterior, proved too much for Raskolnikov, the destitute student who, partly to extricate himself and his family from the humiliating mire of groveling poverty, partly to test his theory that superior individuals are above the law, murdered and robbed a rich, viperish old pawnbroker woman.
Now it's a year and a half later, and first-time British novelist R.N. Morris gives Porfiry another mystery to unravel. Our first reaction is, welcome back – for Dostoevsky's Porfiry is one of the great characters of world literature. Disappointment is perhaps inevitable. How many novelists, after all, are capable of creating, or even stage-managing, Dostoevskian characters? Very, very few – and Morris, on the evidence of this book, is not one of them.
We first meet Morris' Porfiry at the Haymarket District police bureau, among characters whose names Dostoevsky's readers will know well: Nikodim Fomitch, the kindly superintendent; Ilya Petrovitch, the "explosive lieutenant;" Alexander Grigorievitch, the foppish head clerk; and so on. The one addition to their number is the ranking official, *Prokuror* Liputin, a stolid tsarist bureaucrat for whom thought itself is suspicious and Porfiry, a born thinker, is potentially if not actually subversive. Liputin counters Porfiry's argument that appearances are deceiving with his own view of the affair – that the hanging man murdered the dwarf, then committed suicide. "The case is closed," he concludes. It is both a statement of fact, since among the ranking officer's privileges is that of establishing facts, and a command; Porfiry is to drop his investigation.
But incidents and developments unfold independently of the prokuror's will – or anyone else's. They keep Porfiry engaged. This is Dostoevsky's Petersburg, after all – though in frigid winter rather than stifling summer – and unpredictability is woven into the very fabric of the squalid urban chaos. A woman confesses at the police station to the murder of her daughter; her husband then appears with assurances that she is raving – there is no daughter. A starving student who vaguely reminds Porfiry of Raskolnikov has signed a document conferring "ownership of his soul" upon his friend. His friend is none other than the dwarf. The plot thickens.
There is more – a good deal more. A homosexual actor unaccountably disappears. The dwarf and the hanged man are shown to have quarreled. The hanged man is the yard keeper at the house where the dwarf and several other people lodged, including a certain publisher of philosophy and pornography – a purported "saint" just back, he says, from a pilgrimage to a celebrated monastery. The dwarf earned a living doing translations for him. He was a regular customer of the young prostitute, for whom the student has tender feelings and who – thanks to the old ex-prostitute's good fortune in the park - is able to quit her loathsome business. A former serf woman who also lives at the house is forever absorbed in her deck of playing cards; she evidently knows more than she says.
"In cases like this, everything is significant," admonishes Porfiry early on in the investigation. That will keep the reader puzzled and alert until the end, but for all the smoke there is little fire, and Porfiry's brains are basically wasted – what happens is simply what happens; he, and we, can only watch helplessly as the author unrolls his grim finale.
Piggybacking onto a classic is a risky tactic. One clear advantage is the number of readers you're practically assured in advance. The risk is that many of those readers will be critical, expecting you to meet classical standards. Morris doesn't. To take the two most obvious examples, Dostoevsky's Petersburg is a setting that, once you've set foot in it, you never forget; it becomes part of you. Morris' Petersburg could basically be anywhere. More crucially, no reader of Crime and Punishment can help comparing Dostoevsky's Porfiry with Morris'. Dostoevsky's is terrifyingly enigmatic – a clownish, gnomish little fat man whose cat-and-mouse game with Raskolnikov fairly makes your skin crawl. Morris' Porfiry is a generic detective-novel detective – cleverer than his colleagues, naturally, and rather more compassionate, but otherwise undistinguished. One trait of Dostoevsky's Porfiry that Morris makes a point of borrowing – his eerie white eyelashes – has no particular impact here.
"The Gentle Axe" is prefaced by a humble apology to Dostoevsky. The apology is warranted. Still, the comparisons Morris force on us are fun, and may even – should, certainly – send us back to the original to see the real Porfiry in action.
Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam. Edited by Linh Dinh. ISBN: 1-58322-706-7. New York. Seven Stories Press. 174pp.
"The writers in 'Night, Again' are considered heretical within the socialist paradigm," said Linh Dinh, the anthology's editor, in an email interview. "Instead of being cheerleaders for the government, they expose Vietnam's sordid reality."
There is no quarreling with the word "sordid." "Sleeping on Earth" opens the collection and sets the mood: a young woman rents an infant boy from the boy's homeless mother, drugs him to quiet his starved howling, and parades him around Hanoi's train station, enlisting sympathy to such effect that a pair of prostitutes grumble jealously over her luck. The baby dies and goes to heaven – no consolation intended.
"Without a King" introduces a lone bride into a tumultuous household consisting of an old widower and his five sons, all more or less brutal except one who is mentally unsound. She arrives "like rain falling on parched earth," says the author – or does he mean oil on flames? wonders the reader.
The subject matter of "The River's Curse" is perfectly summed up by the title. A boy and a girl, once childhood playmates, now shy adolescent lovers, attend a folk opera in which an entire family is wiped out by an American bomb. This is profoundly ironic: the girl's own family has been decimated by a river's curse; soon she too will fall victim to it.
Most awful of all is "Gunboat on the Yangtze," in which a young man hideously disfigured in undescribed violence is solaced in his hopeless solitude by his sister, whose tender love turns to appalled resistance when he insists on fathering her child.
Sinh, the bride in "Without a King," sums up not only her own life but the whole strange world of "Night, Again" when she declaims, in a toast celebrating the birth of her daughter, "Life is like a gust of foul wind but also very beautiful."
Writers are – must be – comfortable with that sort of ambiguity. Rulers in general are not, and Vietnam's, from the Confucian mandarins of the past to the Communist apparatchiks of today, have taken a particularly dim view of it, regarding it as frivolous if not criminal. Some of the writers represented in this volume have been in jail for their views; many are in voluntary exile. Linh Dinh himself is. Born in Vietnam in 1963, he came to the U.S. in 1975 and has lived abroad ever since, apart from three trips back - "the last time in 1999, when I stayed for two years." He is the author of "Blood and Soap" (Seven Stories Press, 2004), a collection of highly imaginative short stories scenting of that same uncanny blend of foul wind and beauty."The role of literature as moral beacon has deep roots in Vietnam," writes Dinh in his introduction to "Night, Again." He means didactic literature. Fiction, celebrating as it does "playful indeterminacy" at the expense of "totalitarian, dogmatic truth," long lay beyond the pale of acceptability. To some extent it still does.
Doi Moi, Vietnam's glasnost, offered new encouragement to writers. In 1987 a top Communist Party official exhorted them, says Dinh, to "speak the truth... No matter what happens, Comrades, don't curb your pen."
The fate of Duong Thu Hong, imprisoned for seven months in 1991 for her outspokenness, was a warning that official tolerance had its limits; widely admired abroad, Duong's books are banned to this day at home.
"The censorship has actually gotten worse since most of these stories were first published" in the 1990s, Dinh told me in our recent email interview. "The liberalization of Doi Moi continues in the economic realm, but has been curbed in the artistic arena. Many writers, especially poets, continue to express themselves, but only on websites managed by Vietnamese living overseas."
Question: Your title is "Night, Again" – why "again"?
Answer: Because it seems that Vietnam has gone through an endless series of false dawns. There's always the promise of a new beginning, but the realities on the ground remain bleak, in spite of some cosmetic changes. Doi Moi did improve the economy, and people could breathe a little easier, but the level of desperation and frustration remain high. Against the government's trumpeting of its supposed achievements, we have a more troubling reality as depicted by the authors of "Night, Again."
Q: The book was first published in 1996 – why is it being reissued now, 10
years later? Why with additions? And since with additions, why only two? Surely numerous Vietnamese stories worthy of inclusion must have been written in the past 10 years? For that matter, why not, instead of a reissue, a brand new collection?
A: The book is being reissued because it sold out, basically. I know that's a silly answer, but many universities were using it as a text book so it needs to be in print. "Night, Again" captures the literary flowering that accompanied Doi Moi, so it will always be useful as a historical document. True, many writers have emerged since then, but collectively, they do not add up to the Doi Moi generation. I have to be in Vietnam, to meet writers face to face, to know what's happening – not just above but underground, and even under the underground. One of the new story in "Night, Again" ["The River's Curse"] is by Tran Ngoc Tuan, who is a complete mystery man. I've asked everyone I know but no one knows where he is. He might be underground in the literal sense – I mean dead. No one knows.
Q: What, if anything specific, do you want or expect non-Vietnamese readers to get from these stories?
A: To most non-Vietnamese, Vietnam is synonymous with the Vietnam War, and that is unfortunate because no country should be equated with a single catastrophe, or even a series of catastrophes. The history, geography and philosophies that make up any culture yield unique insights, neuroses and senses of humor. I hope that readers of "Night, Again" would come away with a deeper appreciation of the complexities that are present-day Vietnam. More importantly, I want to introduce them to a roster of exceptional writers, each with his or her own set of idiosyncrasies.
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why. By Bart D. Ehrman. ISBN: 13: 978-0-06-073817-4. New York. HarperCollins. 242pp.
Orthodox Christians believe the Bible, "the most significant book in the history of Western civilization," is "the inerrant word of God," divinely inspired. Bart D. Ehrman, chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, believed so himself for most of his life. "Misquoting Jesus" is, on the one hand, a guided tour of the arcane world of textual criticism, and on the other, the story of Ehrman's personal discovery - "a seismic change for me" – that the Bible was "a human book from beginning to end." It's fascinating on both counts.
Ehrman's moderately religious childhood in "the nation's heartland" (Kansas) was prelude to "a 'born-again' experience" at age 15, followed by an intensely fundamentalist Christian post-secondary education at, among other places, the Moody Bible institute in Chicago, where professors and students were required to sign a declaration attesting belief in the Bible's divine origin.
"There was an obvious problem, however" – so obvious indeed, to the non-believer, that the anguished soul-searching it can occasion in thinking believers is apt to seem a little mysterious. The problem is: "We don't actually have the original writings of the New Testament. What we have are copies of these writings" – and copies of copies, and copies of copies of copies, written years, decades, centuries later. "Moreover, none of these copies is completely accurate."
How can they be? Even granting the divine inspiration of the original authors, no one claims the scribes down the ages who copied (and sometimes edited) the Biblical writings were similarly inspired; the myriad disparities among the surviving texts – "there are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament" – makes nonsense of the idea.
No, the scribes were human, subject to the same flaws and temptations that make fallible beings of us all. Copying is dreary work; a scribal note Ehrman finds appended to one manuscript suggests how dreary: "The End of the Manuscript. Thanks Be to God!" You can almost see the scribe's glazed eyes. Might not his attention have wandered in the course of his labor?
Can we even be sure the scribes were fully literate? Some assuredly were not, Ehrman asserts; they were sufficiently so to copy, more or less accurately, but not to understand what they were writing.
Moreover, the early Christian centuries were aboil with factionalism, and matters that to modern Christians seem settled – "that there is only one God, the Creator; that Jesus his Son is both human and divine; and that salvation came by his death and resurrection" – were at least until the fourth century anything but. Some Christians held there were two Gods – the Creator God of the Old Testament and the Savior God of the New. Some insisted Jesus was wholly human; others, that he was wholly divine. Passionate beliefs about hotly disputed issues, Ehrman argues, caused scribes to amend texts in light of those beliefs.
The vulnerability of texts to scribal editing and scribal error was widely acknowledged, and bitterly lamented, in the ancient world. "The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others," wrote Origen, the 3rd-century church father. Marcion, a 2nd-century Christian scribe and philosopher who maintained there were two Gods, "dismembered the epistles of Paul, removing all that is said by the apostle respecting that God who made the world, to the effect that He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," charged Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, who insisted God was One.
"We can't interpret the words of the New Testament," writes Ehrman, "if we don't know what the words were" – as, all too often, we don't. When St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 5:8, warns against "the leaven of wickedness and evil," is he referring to evil in general, or to sexual misconduct in particular? Some manuscripts copied from the original Greek bear the word "poneras," meaning the former; others have "porneias," meaning the latter. What did Paul actually write? We have no way of knowing what his supposedly inspired words were. As for uninspired scribes, it's easy to see how they could confuse those two similar words.
In Mark 1:41, does Jesus feel compassion for the leper who asks to be healed? Or does he feel anger? Some Greek manuscripts say the one, some the other. Most English Bibles favor compassion, for obvious reasons. It seems to make more sense. But that is precisely what makes it suspect to Ehrman. One can easily imagine a scribe eager to portray a compassionate Savior amending "anger" to "compassion." But why would he change "compassion" to "anger"?
"Mark, in fact," Ehrman concludes, "described Jesus as angry when approached by the leper to be healed." It shows the Son of God in a new light, one unfamiliar to most readers of the Bible in English.
If all Christians knew ancient Greek, would Christianity be different? If the original manuscripts had survived, would it be anything like the Christianity we know? "Misquoting Jesus," good reading for anyone, is must reading for those who smugly refer all questions and doubts to the Bible. Which Bible?
Terrorist. By John Updike. ISBN: 0-307-26465-3. New York. Alfred A. Knopf. 310pp.
"'Devils,' Ahmad thinks" – an opening line which, though far from telling us all we need to know about the 18-year-old "terrorist" of the title, nonetheless tells us a good deal. Devils, God, other worlds, crowd his imagination. A tense encounter in his high school corridor with a girl he can't help liking produces visions of her roasting in hell. Why, he wonders, does Allah allow so many mistaken religions to flourish? "The American way," he says, "is the way of infidels. It is headed for a terrible doom."
What devils are to Ahmad, decay is to his creator, John Updike. Updike's novel, his America – his Americans, too – are submerged in it. New Prospect, NJ, the ironically-named fictitious setting, is, in its downtown core, "a lake of rubble." In Ahmad's school there is "a blank wall desecrated by graffiti and roller-painted over so often it feels to be coming closer by millimeters." The school building itself is "rich in scars and crumbling asbestos." America is "paved solid with fat and tar," its citizens slack-bellied, slack-willed, TV-drugged consumption machines. This is the debilitating poverty of surplus. "The world's hopes had centered here for a time," muses Updike, "but the time was past." No wonder Jack Levy, the aging, weary, despairing guidance counselor to whom Ahmad listens politely while reciting to himself the Koranic verse, "The only guidance is the guidance of Allah," lies awake nights thinking, "This whole neighborhood could do with a good bomb."
Ahmad is a beguiling mix of teenage vanity (he shrinks from wearing glasses), instinctive compassion (he won't kill a bug), and unshakable faith in a God for whom, "as the Book affirms, 'Idolatry is worse than carnage.'"
His ancestry is as confused as his mind, his mother (so he tells Jack Levy) a "trashy and immoral" Irish-American, his father a ne'er-do-well Egyptian who disappeared when the boy was three. At 11, Ahmad began frequenting a mosque that was once a dance studio. The eight or nine other pupils drift away; at last Ahmad is the imam's only disciple, learning from him that unbelievers are like cockroaches who must be destroyed.
What to make of this dangerous but oddly endearing young man? Against the background of his rotting surroundings and his crude, dull-witted, morally indifferent peers, he stands out as refined, sincere, eager to be good in a world awash in evil. Joryleen, the girl he likes (he tries to divert the promised financial compensation for his martyrdom from his mother to her so she can liberate herself, a liberation she scarcely desires, from her pimp-boyfriend), says to him, "Instead of being good, don't you ever want to *feel* good?" "Perhaps," he replies, "the two go together."
Being good means, to Ahmad, destroying evil. The human spirit, he says, "longs to say 'No' to the physical world." Levy advises him to go on to college. Declining on the grounds that higher education might weaken his faith, he becomes instead, through the mediation of his imam, a truck driver. His employer is a furniture company owned by a family of Lebanese entrepreneurs. "Freedom to no purpose," he tells them, "becomes a kind of prison." He means American life in general, but in his truck he discovers purposeful freedom; he compares it, the truck, to Buraq, the horse on which the Prophet ascended to heaven.
Levy's interest in Ahmad soon shifts to the boy's mother, a nurse's aide and artist of sorts whose single-mother sexual availability is a persistent bone in Ahmad's throat. "This is what life is all about," Levy tells her, unabashedly grateful. He had forgotten. A Jew in name only, a liberal whose ideals no longer resonate, saddled with a junk-food-addicted wife whose 240-pound frame mirrors in his mind the bloated vacuity of American life, "depressed because of all the problems he couldn't solve," he is a tragic figure, ripe for the reawakening the younger woman offers him.
It is short-lived. Maybe his inability to leave his wife for her is to his credit, suggesting his ideals are not dead after all. In any case, his dismissal as a lover proves more fortuitous than he can know. What if he had left home? How would his wife's sister, an undersecretary in the Department of Homeland Security, have reached him regarding the jihad into which Ahmad, an eager conscript in the service of the God who is "closer to him than his neck-vein," was drafted?
Updike, over the past half-century, has written some 50 books. Now 74, his vision is sharper than ever, his outlook one of unrelieved despair. "Terrorist" is an acutely painful book, brightened only by the sheer shimmering beauty of its prose. Updike may be right, America may be dying; but if its death throes generate literature on this level, perhaps after all there are more grounds for hope than the author allows for.
Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney. By Paul Johnson. ISBN: 13-978-0-06-019143-6. New York. HarperColins. 310pp.
The word "worship" recurs frequently in this ravishing study of the extraordinary men and women we honor with the name "creator." At the very outset Paul Johnson defines creativity as a religious phenomenon. Western tradition dubs us creatures of a creator God, created in his image, and "creativity, I believe, is inherent in all of us."
So it is, but a difference in degree amounting to a difference in kind separates the creator of a business, say, from the creator of Hamlet. To the former we accord respect; to the latter, awe. This book is not about the creativity in all of us. It is about a mysterious and awesome quality, possessed by a very few, through which those few, in the exercise of their craft, have changed the world.
The earliest creator whose name we know is the ancient Egyptian Imhotep, the 3rd-millenium BC architect who designed the first large-scale pyramid. It still stands, a fitting monument to the immortality of art. The fact that, among numerous other offices, he held that of chief priest to the pharaoh Djoser (reigned 2630-2611 BC) suggests again the bond between religion and creation.
Imhotep's medium was stone. Chaucer's and Shakespeare's was language; Bach's, sound; Turner's, light; Balenciaga's and Christian Dior's, fabric; Tiffany's, glass; Disney's, animated cartoons. Is there any shared trait in their characters that helps account for their towering achievements? Johnson does not pretend to discover one: "Is there a typical creator? I do not think there is." Chaucer was effervescent, Jane Austen (in whose six novels "there are only 16 kisses") demure. Picasso was sexually ravenous, T.S. Eliot nearly (if not entirely) virginal. Bach, descendent and begetter of musicians, suggests a hereditary factor in genius; Shakespeare, the son of a provincial glover, belies it. Mark Twain, America's first distinctively American writer, was a sparkling raconteur; he must have been good company before despair overwhelmed him in old age. Victor Hugo, "the French Shakespeare," was "the genius without a brain" – a vulgar and bombastic fool when not writing masterpieces. And so on and so on. There is simply no telling what shack or mansion creativity will choose for a temporary residence.
As the creator defies definition, so does the masterpiece. Bach's Mass in B Minor – "a patchwork of bits and pieces assembled over a long period and then polished into a unity of overwhelming power" – "exemplifies a point I have come across again and again..." writes Johnson. "A deliberate plan is not always necessary for the highest art; it emerges."
The accidents that inspire that emergence are as likely to be grotesque as sublime. Hugo, a notorious philanderer, was caught in flagrante delicto one night in the arms of a mistress; he was a peer of France and got off scot free, but the woman was jailed as a prostitute. Outraged, Hugo "began work on Les Miserables, his great fictional epic about the workings of the law."
We tend to think of creation as a somber business, but Johnson is entranced by its lighter side. Humor he regards as "one of the most valuable of human solaces," a "rare and inestimable" gift. It was Jane Austen's "discovery of laughter," her grasp of the humor in the people of her own relatively narrow circle, that turned her from a youthful writer of wild melodrama into the writer we know, the understated and subtle chronicler of (in her own words) "follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies."
To Chaucer (c.1342-1400) is attributed "the first teehee in history." A young wife has tricked an amorous fool into kissing her bare bottom through a window. "'Teehee,'" quod she, and clapte the window to."
And to Shakespeare go the honors for creating the most comic character. That the uproarious Falstaff and the tragic Hamlet are the products of the same pen is a miracle worthy of "the most creative personality in human history."
Johnson, a prolific historian with some 40 books to his credit, is a master of single-stroke characterization. He seems at times to be speaking of his friends, so intimate is the touch. Thus, "[Bach] was the reverse of arrogant, but he had a quiet, natural pride in his skills and performance and a shrewd sense of what was due him." Turner, the landscape artist, was "a very physical man: small but muscular; tough, wiry; with powerful lungs, strong jaws, hands with a fiendish grip, and large feet. He glowed with power in a room. But he was also, in his semiliterate way, an intellectual..."
Of the Japanese woodblock maestro Hokusai (1760-1849) we learn that he changed his name 50 times, and his residence 93 times. "By 80," he wrote of himself at age 83, "I had made a lot of progress. At 90 I will begin to get to the root of it all."
Of Spanish fashion designer Cristobal Balenciaga (1895-1972) Johnson writes, "Of all the creative people I have come across, [he] was easily the most dedicated to the business of making beautiful things. His work absorbed him totally, and there was no room in his life for anything or anyone else. When the cultural revolution of the 1960s, that disastrous decade, made it impossible (as he saw it) to produce work of the highest quality, he retired and quickly died of a broken heart."
The final delightful challenge in a book full of them is Johnson's pairing in a single chapter of Walt Disney and Picasso. Picasso is the ultimate evil genius, "a small but powerfully built monster of assured egoism." Picasso dehumanized women, Disney humanized animals. Johnson ventures a prediction: Disney's work "will continue to shine through, while the ideas of Picasso, powerful though they were for much of the twentieth century, will gradually fade and seem outmoded."
"Creators" is the sequel, 18 years later, of a book called "Intellectuals." "If I live," writes Johnson, who is 78, "I hope to complete the trilogy with 'Heroes.'" It's something to live for.