Found and Lost

Damn you, Gore Vidal. Damn you for starting it all by digging up Dawn Powell from Potter's Field, where she had been laid to her placidly pickled rest in 1957. Your piece on "our best comic writer" sparked a revival that sent a dozen titles that never earned back their piddling advances in 1930s dollars cannonballing into the Library of America. In short order, bidding wars broke out, biographies were written, diaries footnoted, and Walking Down Broadway, the play Powell never could get produced during her lifetime, packed them in on West 43rd St.

Looks like you're at it again with James Purdy. Once you got the ball rolling and passed it to Jonathan Franzen, Eustache Chisolm and the Works was an easy sell as a "forgotten classic". Actually, I have no opinion on either writer; I just want to bring up literary exhumation as a phenomenon before hauling up my candidate for forgotten classic of the month from the brackish shoals of oblivion, where, I respectfully submit, it is much too good to be suffered to remain.

Not that it's something I want make into a habit, though I'll admit to having pestered publishers in the past to get them to consider a new edition of Charles Plumb's English rendering of The Satires of Juvenal. Plumb did a remarkable job of channeling the energy of the original in modern verse, including calypso - pity he was too early for rap. At the same time, enough of the authentic Roman comes through to prove that if you scratch a sneering cynic, underneath you'll find a layer of despair too deep for tears. Which is why I think this version of Juvenal holds its own with the other great modern recreations of classics by Robert Fitzgerald, David Slavitt and Robert Fagles.

But now the disclosure: Charles Plumb was a lovely man and a friend long departed, though my lobbying efforts are fueled by factors more self-interested than a posthumous plug  for old times' sake. The Juvenal was published in 1968 by a cheapo British paperback house on paper that has aged and brittled faster than Dime Detective and Thrilling Wonder Stories pulps from a generation before. So come on, publishing people, get on it. I'd like to be able to re-read this one without having it fall apart on me. On this occasion, though, I have a different title in mind for special pleading. Absolutely guaranteed: it's great stuff, and nobody has ever heard of it, but you have to sit through some more preliminaries first.

Critics have found prospecting for neglected books or authors a sideline well worth cultivating, a gambit guaranteed to heap merit on the discoverer as well as the discoveree. How discerning, how well-read, to have lit on a treasure buried so deep! Extra points awarded if the author died young, if possible, in poverty or in the trenches of the Somme, or was stabbed by his mistress, or banned in Beantown, proof that the book in question was ahead of the zeitgeist curve and therefore genius-class. Edward Lewis Wallant qualifies on account of the aneurysm that killed him before his 36th birthday. The last time I read The Tenants of Moonbloom, it was as a 35-cent Signet paperback released in the late sixties to cash in on the film of The Pawnbroker. Yet with no prompting from me, the NYRB Press has propelled Moonbloom back into print in its Classics series, with an introduction by Dave Eggars. Along with the Dalkey Archive and the Harvill imprints, NYRB Classics appears to be making money from  diving and salvage in the backlist and long may they keep at it.

But once our interest has been piqued, how often do we actually follow through? I'm grateful to Alberto Manguel for his hot tip on Richard Outram, whom he considers "one of the finest poets in the English language". He might even be right, from his sample stanzas and comments on where Outram's poetry is coming from, I have to say this sounds like exactly the stuff for me: "robust joyfulness" combined with intelligence and passion, expressed in a diction that brings Stevie Smith immediately to mind. But how likely am I, really, to overcome nature's lethargy and track down little-press chapbooks by a littler-known Canadian bard who conceivably may claim a place in the ever-dwindling ranks of poets who actually deliver the goods? Dubious, too, are my prospects of getting acquainted with the writing of B.S. Johnson (an ugly suicide) and Hilary Masters (still with us, I trust) whose work was brought to my attention via George Garret's critical miscellanies and sounds like something I really should have a look at.

The book that I know about and you don't is called All Night at Mr Stanyhurst's, by a retired British Army officer named Hugh Edwards. It was published in 1933, originally, and again in 1963, after Ian Fleming, then at the height of his fame, prevailed upon his publishers to reissue it. This they did, after cadging an introduction out of him.

His midwifery done, Fleming's follow-up did not go very deep. Aping the banter of his pal Noel Coward, he relates a few dull facts and one piece of eyebrow-raising quasi-speculation regarding the author's life. More on that later. One would have liked to find out more about the compulsion that the book's "strange and beautiful words" exerted on the world's then-best selling author of popular fiction. Instead, we hear that Max Beerbohm "read it with the greatest pleasure", that James Agee called it "the best long story or short novel since Conrad", and that Fleming was flying over the Nevada desert en route to Chicago when it occurred to him to twist some arms to drum up new readers for a book that took four years to sell out its original 1500-copy print run.

The Mr. Stanyhurst of the title is a rake-hell, roue, profligate, a selfish, immoral and not unintelligent eighteenth-century London libertine who returns from his club one evening to dine with his child mistress, an addle-pated little slut he filched from her former "protector", his old lech of an uncle, when she was all of 14. Lovely Lucy,  of course, is the dessert course. Not that she particularly minds her lot in life. She considers what she gives out fair return for the trinkets, favors and finery received, and her only qualm is the fear of turning tricks down in docklands when Stanyhurst tires of her, as they both know he will before too much longer.

Enter the Abbe, a mysterious figure who has been invited to dine with them for no good reason at all. As the tobacco is passed around, the abbe reveals that an East India Company ship called the Blanchefleur has sunk off the coast of Africa, with the loss of a clandestine cargo worth millions and all lives on board save one. Stanyhurst, who had a pile of money riding on the venture, is naturally is keen when the abbe offers to produce the sole survivor of the wreck to tell a tale that is "at once sad, tragic and strange". With Lucy sitting in, the three of them stay up the rest of the night listening to sixteen-year-old Thomas Pidgeon, steward aboard the Blanchefleur, tells his tale of shipwreck and woe.

The new story-line takes up half of the book. Intermittent asides snap the reader back to the original  mis-en-scene as the boy breaks down in tears or is interrupted by his listeners. Lucy starts as a saucy tease, but soon is enthralled and deeply moved by the ordeal that Tommy recounts in the period vernacular of the British tar (quite different, incidentally, from the salty syntax of Patrick O'Brian's heroes.)

Tommy's account of how he shipped out to Ceylon introduces an interlude of devoted, innocent puppy-love with a pretty 15-year-old passenger. She is, in fact, an insufferable child (you wonder why nobody has heaved her overboard) who hero-worships the kind-hearted, impressionable boy. Edwards' command of detail is absorbing, the faux first-person voice convincing and his minute-by-minute account of the ship going down is right up there with the best descriptive narratives of what actually happens in a disaster at sea, and what it feels like to be part of it.

The rest is disease, starvation, hardships and horror for the handful of castaways who wash up on the West African coast. The natives they encounter not so much hostile as indifferent to the survivors, whose plight they find hilarious, until most of the adult males are massacred in an offstage skirmish. As the ordeal drags on, women, children, Lucy's mother, are carried off by disease, exhaustion or hyenas. Tommy staggers with his beloved airhead towards a Dutch settlement down the coast, and comforts her with lies as she dies in his arms. It ends as all these stories must end: "And only I am escaped alone to tell thee" or "my ghastly tale
is told".  

All this time, you feel the raw power of the "well-told story" which Iris Murdoch took as being at the heart of the successful novel, interestingly enough citing Treasure Island as the supreme example of its kind. Mr Stanyhurst's is also a marvellous piece of writing. The tale that unfolds within another tale, two stories joined together at the waist, like Cupid and Psyche in The Golden Ass, rather than interludes or sideshows spliced into a unitary narrative, like the bits everyone skips over in Don Quixote. Borges was another fan of literary twofers and noted that "Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that dreaming and wakefulness are the pages of a single book, and that to read them in order is to live, and to leaf through them at random, to dream. Paintings within paintings and books that branch into other books help us sense this oneness."

This dream-like effect here seems intentional. Tommy's beloved bears the same name as the ship, Blanchefleur, but after she reveals that her father had wanted to call her Lucy, Lucy she is to her young savior. The other Lucy, the wanton saucepot, is actually her double, as Tommy intuits at once. ("'She was like you,' he resumed, looking gravely into the girl's face. 'I know it soon's I come into the room. But she was younger'") The compelling power of the well-told tale has transformed the child-vixen and caused her to experience the need to comfort and care for another. ("'Let me take her place, Tommy,' the girl said very quietly.") 

Fleming tells us that after being invalided out of the British Army's West India Regiment when he contracted blackwater fever in Sierra Leone, Hugh Edwards (1874-1952) retired to a fisherman's cottage "in which he lived the life of an eighteenth-century recluse, confining himself to one attic in which there was nothing but a large bed and hundreds of books." If we are to believe Fleming, none of the four other novels that came out of that attic are much good, although Edwards "lived the remote life of his imagination for many years, reading, writing and composing albums of nonsense rhymes for the numerous nephews and nieces and cousins who came there for the holidays."

Presumably it was from one of these relatives that Fleming got a notion of what  made Hugh Edwards' imagination go rocketing like fireworks in just this one book. "In his Edwardian youth, he had been by all accounts a young blade of tremendous dash and virility with a zest for all the wine of life, but one of the terrible side-effects of blackwater fever is that it rids a man of all appetite for these things and there is no doubt that the romantic sexuality and the background of high life to All Night at Mr Stanyhurst's are sentimental memories of the young rake-hell he had once been."

Oh, is that it? To me it sounds like just the sort of thing Fleming would foist on his readers: purported inside dope combined with obscure expertise. Remember, this was the writer that couldn't even get the caliber of James Bond's Walther PPK right. This "forgotten classic" is one that would be better served with a brand new introduction for the sake of the new readers of the new edition that some prescient publisher is taking far too long to bring to market.

Man of Steel vs Man of La Mancha

Plutarch was onto a good thing when he decided to write his biographical thumbnails in pairs, matching illustrious Greeks and Romans to highlight the indications of divine favor he supposed they had in common. It was a great read-me gimmick but even Plutarch must have known it wasn't much more than that because his final four subjects are singletons and the only common denominator he could establish for one of his profiled pairs was that both had been filthy rich.

That the notion should have occurred to him at all was because Plutarch was himself a walking duality, a Roman citizen of Greek ancestry and upbringing strongly attached, emotionally and intellectually, to both his parent civilizations. The commodious comparison has held up well as a template for twin-track reflective riffs ever since, ranging from Montaigne’s “soldered linkage” of virtuous Roman wives to the “compare and contrast” essays taught in American high schools.


I, too, often find myself examining odd points of resemblance between the American culture I grew up in, and the Spanish one in which I live as an adult, and it’s not just me who sees the fun in shuffling cultural categories and periods, popular and high art, in the hope of drawing two of a kind. Clive James can be counted on for a winning hand at the high-low table, though I’m not sure Adam Gopnik has made his case for Darwin and Lincoln being joint architects of our “moral modernity” just because they share a February 12, 1809 birth date. But what’s the point in making a point, if not to see how far it can be stretched?


Here’s a narrative of worldly ineptitude and self-victimization that flares into fame at the very end, the loser who hits it big after trying and repeatedly failing to make it as a creative hack in a new and promising mass entertainment medium. The hapless shlub scribbles away and after enormous effort, flatlines into absolute creative insignificance. Every dreary thing he churns out is third-rate, derivative, just plain horrendously, incurably bad. Then all of a sudden, payoff. One of his creations suddenly becomes wildly popular with the public. But poor judgment leads him to sign away his rights and look on helplessly as imitators and plagiarists take all manner of liberties with the one good idea he ever had in his life, and watch others get rich from it, while he stays poor and grows even poorer.


That would be Jerry Siegel, co-creator (with his childhood friend Joe Shuster) of Superman. It is generally known that the two of them were royally diddled by Supes’ original publishers, and left to stew and sue when profits started rolling in from the radio program and merchandising roll-outs. However, those not entirely au courantwith the history of the American comic book may not have thought about how Jerry stayed alive for the 40 years he spent being leeched by lawyers in futile attempts to recover the rights he signed away to the sharpsters. Gerard Jones’s eminently readable account in Men of Tomorrow gives ghastly particulars of a career that resulted in some of the most awful comic strips ever rendered into panels, as Siegel parlayed his reputation (and the pity other industry professionals felt for him) into dead-end writing assignments.

I met him once, at a reception at the Argentinean consulate in New York, of all the unlikely places. Tongue-tied and teenaged, I stupidly decided against uttering the rhomboid S-word at a time when the guy was literally having trouble making the rent. Instead, I feigned polite enthusiasm for one of his C-list creations then being published in Britain – The Spider! The World’s Greatest Criminal! — and I’ll never forget the shudder of self-loathing that flashed across his face. ”You’re familiar with that? I’m glad you enjoy it,” he said, or something, before they marched him off to be introduced to diplomats.

That reception was arranged by Jerry Robinson, then-president of the National Cartoonists Society, who, a decade later, helped broker a settlement between Siegel and Shuster and Warner Communications, which had just acquired the Superman property, lock, stock and publishing house, and was about to bring out the first Christopher Reeve movie. Jerry and Joe finally got a credit line and a payoff that allowed them to live out their days in modest comfort and forget about such ill-fated ventures as Funnyman, who fought crime with whoopee cushions, laughing gas and squirting lapel flowers (no, I’m not making this up) or Reggie van Twerp among other low points of the vernacular art form that Jerry Siegel revolutionized.

Leaping tall windmills in a single bound also brought a paltry payoff to the creator of Don Quixote, Siegel’s career counterpart. Fact is, Miguel de Cervantes was no better at writing literature than Jerry Siegel was at creating superheroes. Except for maybe a couple– a couple, mind you — of the Exemplary Novels, and the two parts of Don Quixote, the Cervantes corpus is pretty much a washout. Philosopher Miguel de Unamuno was dishing not dirt but the plain truth when he observed that “the story of Don Quixote was dictated to Cervantes by another man whom Cervantes harbored within himself, a spirit who dwelt in the depths of his soul and with whom he never had any other dealings, either before or after writing it.”

Probably more people have read Jerry Siegel’s Henri Duval of France, Famed Soldier of Fortune than ever slogged through to the end of The Labors of Persiles and Sigismunda, an excruciating pastoral l packed with charmless characters and yawn-inducing dialogues about love. Hard to believe it was composed at the same time and on the same kitchen table as the first part of Don Quixote (1599-1605), though not readied for the press until a few days before Cervantes’s death in 1616, and that its creator seriously thought it was “certain to attain the summit of all possible excellence.” Persiles is utterly lacking in originality, humor and irony; everything that makes Don Quixote so engagingly ingenioso.


Don Quixote is in the business of righting wrongs, vanquishing evil and dispensing truth, justice and the Hapsburg way of life. Like the Man of Steel, the Man of La Manchahas a secret identity (mild-mannered country squire Alonso Quexana) and a costume that proclaims his public persona. Unlike his imitators and spinoffs, however, Superman never acquired a full-time sidekick, whereas Don Quixote’s relationship with Sancho Panza varies from Abbot and Costello to Socrates and Crito, and even in this there’s a sidekick-precursor: Amadis of Gaul and his squire, Ganaldín.


Right, the novels of chivalry. The downmarket pulp products that drove Don Quixote batty were concatenations of bad writing about beautiful maidens requiring rescue from giants and wicked sorcerers; as far removed from the feudal realities of the vanished Middle Ages as they were, quality-wise, from the courtly Arthurian romances of Marie de France or Chrètien de Troyes. Wasn’t Cervantes making fun of a pop culture genre, whereas Siegel epitomized one? Actually, Cervantes did both, parodying and at the same time making sure the incidents out of which the parody is constructed are ha-ha funny enough to appeal to a low-end readership. Although Don Quixote started off a best-seller and remained so for ever afterwards, it wasn’t until the Enlightenment that people began realizing they had a classic on their hands. Until then, it was more common to find Cervantes taken to task for having written a comic (i.e., funny) book.

Don Quixote himself was the original fanboy, and not just because he took junk literature with total seriousness and could display encyclopedic knowledge of its trivia that would blow any Star Wars worshipper out of the water. Jerry Siegel started off as a devotee of the newly ascendant genre of science-fiction, just when it was beginning to migrate from the pulp magazines to the newspaper comic pages. Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and Brick Bradford were already planet- hopping in search of plot lines by the time Superman showed up.

Cervantes, too, had failed to make it big in an exciting new medium. He had been stage-struck ever since, as a child, he was taken to see the baggy-pants slapstick of Lope de Rueda on plank-and-barrel street corner stages that ushered in Spain’s Golden Age of Drama, when play-going became as popular as it was in Elizabethan England. Desperate to get his dramas and comedies performed, Cervantes churned out his give ‘em what they want interludes (three parts bedroom farce to one part Three Stooges) including “The Divorce Court Judge” and “The Jealous Old Timer,” all to no avail.

“Aware of what was needed for success, Cervantes was unable to provide it,” writes one critic. Professional flops piled on the personal setbacks, money troubles and scrapes with the law that dogged Cervantes in his return from Algiers, where he had spent five years as a slave and undergone all manner of hardships. But even the two plays that drew on his experience as a captive of the Moors were duds, fatally burdened with stock characters, cheapjack jingoism and a flatlined dramatic arc. Talk about having something to write about and not knowing how! (The experience was put to much better use in the “captive’s tale” section of Don Quixote.)

If Cervantes’ arch-rival Lope de Vega can be thought of as the Spanish Shakespeare, Cervantes would perhaps occupy the place of Michael Drayton, a not totally untalented hack for hire who died a stranger to success. The prolific and multi-untalented Anthony Munday would probably make a better fit with Jerry Siegel. But he opened the way for successive iterations of the superhero shtick that generated millions of dollars in profits for everybody except himself — a linkage confirmed by the Federal Appellate Court that upheld the decision allowing Superman’s owners to put newsstand rival Captain Marvel out of business.

Like Siegel, Cervantes sold his rights for ready cash — to bookseller Francisco de Robles — but wisely held out for a ten-year lease. Not that it did him much good, though. Pirated editions of the first part of Don Quixote appeared in a few weeks and Robles scurried to license the rights to provincial booksellers. Within four months of publication, seven editions had come out, most of them pirated, and except for the modest advance, Cervantes got nothing. Instead, he had to cross his arms when his characters and the context he invented for them were usurped in an unauthorized sequel.


The spurious second part of Don Quixote was by an unidentified follower of Lope de Vega’s. In a prologue to the genuine Part II, which came out the following year, Cervantes avowed that what really made him mad was not so much having his characters press-ganged and degraded, but having his honor as a wounded war veteran impugned. “You would like me to call him ass, fool and bully; but I have not even thought of doing so,” he told his readers. “Let his sin be his punishment — with his bread let him eat it, and there let it rest.”

Jerry Siegel was not so self-possessed when he took his grievances before the public in a 1975 press release regretting that he could not “flex super-human muscles and rip apart the massive buildings in which these greedy people count the immense profits from the misery they have inflicted on Joe and me and our families. I wish I could. But I can write this letter and ask my fellow Americans to please help us by refusing to buy comic books, refusing to patronize this new movie or watch Superman on TV until this great injustice against Joe and me is remedied by the callous men who pocket the profits from OUR creation.”

He was lucky: he got the cash settlement. Cervantes ended up with the reputation. A cleric named Márquez was at a posh dinner party in 1615 when a group of visiting Frenchmen “began effusively praising his name, extolling the very high regard his works enjoy in France and its neighboring kingdoms and I was obliged to inform them that he was just a former soldier, poor, and a gentleman.”

“I should have thought Spain would shower riches on such a man, give him all he wants from the public treasury,“ was the reply. Another of the Frenchmen added, “Sir, if necessity forces him to write for a living, may God grant that he never enjoy greater prosperity, if by being poor he is able to make the whole world the richer.”

Necessity also forced Jerry Siegel to write for a living and while he and Cervantes are probably not doing too much hanging out together in the hereafter, you still might find Don Quixote and Superman clinking glasses under the sign of the Archetype’s Arms, where Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood, Tarzan and other familiar figures from our collective cultural mindset stand them an occasional round.

But are Miguel and Jerry a true Plutarchian pair, genuinely two of a kind? Never mind that now — one hears that Flannery O’Connor and Oliver Hardy (Laurel and Hardy) were, at one (but not the same) time, residents of Milliedgeville, Georgia. It’s something only Guy Davenport would have picked up on, but once we are aware of it, it is only natural to wonder if something might be going on down there in Milledgeville that we really ought to know about.

Fiona's Gambit

Nowhere in Berlin will you find a statue dedicated to Fiona Samson, nor a headstone with the name of Erich Stinnes in the Doroteenstadt, the pocket-sized urban cemetery where East Germany’s communists used to plant some of their well-connected dead. But that might be asking a lot, given that they are both fictional characters (not that it kept Peter Pan out of Kensington Gardens) and Stinnes, though raised in Germany, was a senior officer in the Russian KGB. So, apparently, was Fiona, which accounts for the multiple dilemmas confronting Bernard Samson, Fiona’s husband and senior field agent for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service – “London Central” in spookspeak.

Those dilemmas become cumulatively more acute as one progresses through Len Deighton’s triple-dip trilogies that were published between 1983 and 1996. Setting aside the 1987 “prequel” Winter, in which superannuated characters from the Samson series appear in their youthful pre-war personae, the nine books in the sequence are: Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match, followed by Spy Hook, Spy Line and Spy Sinker, and the loose end-wrapping Faith, Hope and Charity.

I have been on a re-reading binge and find all nine novels to be aging quite nicely, perhaps because they are only secondarily “about” Cold War intrigue, though they have got plenty of that. “Human relationships” are his real subject, Deighton once stated, and he is skillful enough to make British Intelligence work for him as the Church of England did for Trollope, as the framework on which the hidden professional and personal agendas of his characters enter into conflict with one another.

It is Bernard who supplies the first-person narrative that drives all but one of the nine volumes in the sequence. He is the consummate professional spook, but his knowledge of the Germans and their language has marked him for life as a field operative, a low-ranking technician and bruiser like the hero of The Ipcress File, the book that launched Deighton’s writing career (and Michael Caine’s acting career) half a century ago, back when the James Bond phenomenon was fresh and publishers and producers anxious to cash in on it.

Around half of Deighton’s four dozen plus books can be described as spy fiction, but you also have Bomber, which novelist Anthony Burgess placed on his list of 99 essential books since 1939, Blood, Tears and Folly, a brilliant “alternative” history of World War II, and compilations of the cult cookery columns Deighton wrote and illustrated for Britain’s Observer back in the 1960s.

Although the international settings of the Samson saga change from book to book, resolution of whatever situation is complicating, if not actually threatening, Bernard’s life invariably takes him back to Berlin, the divided and dangerous city where he was brought up and trained in spycraft by his late father, the Berlin station chief with the post-war occupation forces.

Did you ever say hello to a girl you almost married long ago? Did she smile a captivating smile and give your arm a hug in a gesture you’d almost forgotten? Did the wrinkles as she smiled make you wonder what marvelous times you’d missed? That what I felt about Berlin every time I came back here.

But his deepest feelings are reserved for his wife, Fiona. In addition to beauty (“wide cheekbones, flawless complexion and luminous eyes”), brains (honors, no, an honours degree from Oxford) and wealth (her father is an insufferable, overbearing rich bastard), she is a loving mother and wife, as outstanding a cook as she is intelligence strategist, socially at ease with the posh and mighty. She’s set to become the next deputy director-general of London Central. Oh, and she’s also a double agent taking orders from Moscow, as Bernard will have figured out by the end of the first volume.

Everything that happens after Fiona’s flight to East Berlin requires Bernard to come to terms with that monstrous act of betrayal, while trying to do his job, stay alive, raise his kids, console himself with Gloria (a sweetie half his age), steer clear of office politics and his sexually voracious sister-in-law, and keep his boyhood best friend and occasional London Central contract hire, Werner Volkmann, out of trouble – or else have Werner get him out of trouble when an operation goes south.

More than once when Bernard is sent out on a mission everybody but himself knows has been compromised, the big question turns out to be not “Who on their side is only pretending to be a defector?” but the even more chilling “Who on my side is only pretending to be a complete fool.”
But then Deighton does something brilliant. Spy Sinker, the sixth volume in the series, abruptly rewinds the story and retells it all over again starting from before the point where Bernard became involved in it, reinterpreting everything that Bernard has confided to the reader in the first five books. The third-person, fly on the wall vision discerns things that Bernard was never meant to know, or else understood wrongly because he had been set up to do so. He’s an “unreliable narrator,” as Deighton has confirmed:

His role is important because the story is told through his voice. If the books were simply spy stories then it wouldn’t have mattered greatly if another person’s viewpoint had been used They could have been written in third person. But I wanted to write a spy story that was also about a marriage. For this I needed Bernard Samson’s voice.

So Bernard’s account now becomes just one element in the multi-layered storyline that emerges after it has been embellished with facts our hero was never privy to. At the same time it has been vacuumed clean of prejudices, resentments, and cheerful acts of character assassination that shaped his personal version of events. Bernard’s fatuous idiot of a boss, Dickie Cruyer, his avuncular mentor, Frank Harrington, and especially his best friend, Werner, turn out to be not quite the people he takes them for.

At the same time, use of the third person in Spy Sinker allows Deighton to bring out Fiona as a more fully realized character than her husband is capable of depicting, one who is painfully aware Bernard has never been able to get over the fact that she is the smarter partner, but loves him nonetheless. Says Deighton:

I have tried to show that Fiona’s life with Bernard was far from smooth or easy. Her academic success, and her flashy upper-middle-lass background has been a source of pride to him. But it is also a constant reminder of his own shortcomings. He loves her, but she represents a lot of things he doesn’t like. And she makes him part of a milieu he rather despises but can’t escape from.

It is no coincidence that several characters who seemed too exaggerated or simplistic – Fiona’s father is taken straight out of the Oxford Book of Hoary Clichés, under M for millionaire – are the same ones Bernard perceives as antagonists, after it is revealed how personal dislike is affecting his perceptions. By the same take, principal bad guy Erich Stinnes comes across as cosmopolitan, articulate, self-aware and deadly because Bernard is describing and characterizing his mirror-image double.

“You know what it’s like, and so do I,’ he said. ‘Both of us work the tough side of the business. I’ve been West a few times, just as you’ve come here. But who gets the promotions and the big wages – desk-bound Party bastards. How lucky you are not having the Party system working against you all the time.’

‘We have got it,’ I said. ‘It’s called Eton and Oxbridge.’

Once the cat is out of the bag, it is easy to spot the cues we missed. Without resorting to outright falsehoods, Bernard does what anyone could hardly resist doing in a situation like his: he makes himself look good. In real life, who among us can spit out a Raymond Chandler-class simile that stops the bad guys dead in their tracks, or have a wisecrack cocked and ready at the exact moment one is required? Well, Bernard can and does—or at least he makes it seem that way, when he includes any number of perfectly timed verbal felicities that had to have been written into the script long after the real-world dialogue took place.

Samson the story-teller is also a deft hand at withering sarcasm, as in “He was in that state of euphoria that I would have guessed only knighthood or a new Lloyd Weber album could bring.” To despise a person is to render judgment on him, and so risk misjudging him – which may be what he secretly wants you to do. But were those scornful words actually spoken at the time or thought up after the fact?

He’s also very good at aphorisms like “It is very hard sometimes to know how intensely we are loved, and of what value our presence is to those who love us” or “Fear is so unwelcome that it comes only in disguise, and guilt is its favorite one.” Now why can’t I spout stuff like that? And would I resist the temptation to embellish an account of myself with a few unspoken zingers? Of course not, and neither would you.

Most of all, Bernard never takes the reader entirely into his confidence. He acts on what he knows before he lets the reader know that he knows it, without quite revealing how he knows it—that Fiona was about to bolt for example. Nor is it altogether clear how he figured out that she was being exfiltrated back to Britain nearly four years later, her work as a double agent complete. The Russians did some figuring of their own, so Bernard has to make some quick moves to keep her from danger.
The Samson saga is notable for its vivid, camera-ready set pieces. The episode in Berlin Game where Bernard must extract information from a trained interrogator who knows all the tricks, is a favorite.

He was frightened of something quite different: he was terrified that damage was going to be done to the grand illusory image that he had of himself. It was part of my job to guess what frightened a man, and then not to dwell on it but rather let him pick at it himself while I talked of other, tedious things, giving him plenty of opportunity to peel back the scab of fear and expose the tender wound beneath.

Another is the bit in Faith where Bernard fights for his life in the cab of an eighteen-wheel semi hauling Saabs to Switzerland. Only Quentin Tarantino could do justice to this scary/grotesque close quarters explosion of violence: flailing, gouging and kicking.

In the three novels that follow Spy Sinker, Bernard again takes up his duties as unreliable narrator to bring the saga to a loosely ambiguous conclusion. For me, Faith is top-drawer Deighton, while Hope and Charity are the weakest of the lot. The Berlin Wall is still standing in 1987, when the series comes to an end, but it had already entered history by the time Deighton was writing his finale during the first half of the following decade.

By then, the intrigue seems contrived and superfluous, with a plot propped up by a McGuffin – a mysterious, unopened lockbox. The author (and the reader for sure) evidently cares far more that, after years of carnal cuddling, Bernard finally has come to admit that he loves Gloria, and is not merely grateful for her love. Meanwhile, Fiona is recovering from a major breakdown and determined to put her marriage back together while simultaneously attempting to find out if her own people had her scatty, drug-addict sister killed to provide the communists with a body they’ll think is hers.

With Bernard and Fiona entangled in their respective moral and interpersonal predicaments, chances of rebuilding their marriage are not looking real good, but if you have made it all this way through the last years of Cold War disco, what happens to them is going to matter more than all the cracks that are starting to appear in the Wall as the Samson saga comes to an end.

Twelve Texts for Admonitory Sermons on the Poet Ruthven Todd

1. I mean that it is the biographer's special agony and his glory to grasp that reality, that radiant gist, that energy and direction, which should inform, in-form, a thousand thousand otherwise disparate facts and make them dance together. -- Paul Mariani, author of William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked.       2. 'What's it like, having an adolescent for a father?' Robert Graves to Christopher Todd, in conversation. What measure should we use to gauge the talent that a conventionally unsuitable lifestyle subtracted from the legacy of Ruthven Todd? Not an easy one to call: the penniless poet as alcohol-addled frequenter of low bohemian dives has become something of a frayed construct in our time. Certainly it is no longer easy to spot one  propping up bars in Soho, Greenwich Village, Martha's Vineyard and Mallorca, all of them venues where the rootless, Edinburgh-born author drank, smoked and talked with staggering immoderation to anyone, about practically anything at all, until his death in 1978. He also wrote poems. Many of them meet or exceed Auden's criterion of 'memorable speech', and can be read with pleasure, now and for a long time to come.       The poetry occupies the summit of a mountain of wordage thrust to the surface by a tectonic impulse to render into language the experiences and interests that consumed Ruthven's attention in a way that a life with family, steady job etc. evidently did not. It also produced three 'serious' novels, substantial chunks of an encyclopaedia sold in supermarkets; eight or ten (or twelve --no-one knows for sure) detective novels, each knocked off in a few days' writing time, a best-selling manual for raising tropical fish (an activity he never cared for nor attempted), a series of children's classics, a biography of Alexandre Dumas pére, several essential works of cultural scholarship on 18th century Britain, and hundreds of poems or text contributions to the 'little magazines' in which the poets of the day displayed their wares. Then there is the work that should be on the list but isn't because publishers' advances and grants were used up before they were completed -- or started. So there is no sign of the authorized biography commissioned by the Dylan Thomas estate, the catalogue raisonné of William Blake's works, A Checklist of the Flora of Martha's Vineyard, a completely revised edition of Alexander Gilchrist's Life of Blake, and the persistent attempts at memoirs by someone who knew practically everyone, but could not muster the self-critical insight that might have taken those experiences beyond the tediously anecdotal. The book that launched Julian Symons on his distinguished career as crime writer was to have been a collaboration; when Ruthven failed to follow through, Symons caricatured him chaffingly and made him the murderer. If looking for a poster child to campaign against excess and irresponsibility, however, you should be aware that Ruthven's drinking companion in London and New York, Dylan Thomas, already has the position all sewn up. Another close friend, Louis MacNeice, drank as much and as often (and frequently in the same pubs), yet produced compelling poetry in a much higher register than Ruthven's. Nor did the buzz of continuous inebriation prevent MacNeice from holding down a job, something that Ruthven did only rarely and under compulsion. 'These are facts, observe them how you will,' begins one of his wartime poems, and it has to be admitted the facts do seem to be suggesting he was just one of the odd fish who add anecdotal spice to the biographies of their betters: a sort of Oliver St John Gogarty (who did write the sort of name-dripping memoirs that Ruthven failed to produce). But to many who knew him, Ruthven Todd was also an uncommonly rewarding person to spend time with, exhausting to keep up with, booze or no booze, a born teacher/explainer brimming with contagious enthusiasm for aspects of the external world and for other people and their several pursuits, and above all, was incredibly generous with his time and his efforts on behalf of others. This is what kept him from becoming the monstrous bore that everything written here has made him appear, and ensured him the exasperated affection of his friends, and especially from the women he loved, though they, of all people, really should have known better. 3. Ruthven Todd is a Nineteenth Century Country Clergyman who has mysteriously managed to get born and survive in this hectic age. He is that contemporary oddity, a poet who actually seems to be happy. -- W.H. Auden, 1959 4. Ruthven is very much the clown - but the clown with a breaking heart. His wife has left him, largely, I should think, because when he sees a book he wants, he just buys it, with, I imagine, disastrous results to the family budget.  But I know how much he misses the child, his son, about five. Haven't I gone through all that myself? So when Ruthven plays the mountebank, I know why. I know the dark patch between his eyes and the world and I am sorry. And like me, he is the eternally uncrushed romantic and would get married again if he could. Probably will if he lives long enough to get through his divorce.  -- Charles Wrey Gardner. The Dark Thorn, 1946.      'I do not regret the spread of my interests,' he once wrote on a grant application. 'And anyhow, what else could have been expected from a Gemini whose given name, though spelled Ruthven, is pronounced 'Riven'? The Shorter Oxford defines that as 'split, cloven, rent, torn asunder.'' (Nowadays 'clinically bipolar' might be appended to the list. Though the trendy thing is to paper over with pathologies what used to be considered a moral failing, studies really have shown that alcohol eases and regulates the mood-swings that manifest as compulsive verborrhea and 'extreme sociability' at their manic extreme. That Ruthven had already developed major drinking issues by age 17, when he was shipped off to the island of Mull to dry out, would support the idea that there was more to his dependency than just uncorrected youthful excess.) Non-stop talking was not his only means of keeping realities and responsibilities at bay with ack-ack barrages of verbosity. He was not happy to share the spotlight with people who resembled him in that way, such as the legendary Daily Mailsportswriter Peter Wilson, another drinking, smoking non-stop raconteur who knew everyone. (They met in Mallorca after Wilson retired to the island). In later, sadder years, Ruthven's correspondence took over his life; recipients would seldom receive fewer than eight or ten closely-typed pages of airmailed onionskin. What started out as a business letter to a curator at Sotheby's - whom he had never met -- metastasises into a jumble of random reminiscence and present-tense accounts of people stopping by for a drink. It goes on like that, weaving in and out of time, for 118 single-spaced, margin-free pages, until cut short by an attack of pleurisy. One would not care to guess at how many times he attempted writing his memoirs. A month at the National Library of Scotland might produce a rough count of drafts begun, set aside and eventually engulfed by stacks of yellowing paper heaped on every available flat surface, or providing in-drawer accommodations for nesting mice. Months or years would go by and he would start over from scratch. Without consulting the now-inaccessible prior version, a new one would emerge as a near-exact copy of what had been written before; the same word choice and sentence structure framing the same feeble anecdotes. The words were never the right words, no matter how many came spilling out.      5. In the evening, dined with Ruth Witt-Diamant, who had with her Ruthven Todd who was very drunk, chattered endlessly revealing his interests and symptoms in one interminable stream, any segment of which contained the same strata of his character running along it. Interests: his poems, which he considers at least as good as everyone else's poems, his flower drawings, which are in fact, better than those of others, his teeth, false and genuine, girls whom he has loved and have loved him; the extraordinarily helpful and useful role he has played in other's lives. There is nothing bad about him… The only trouble about his stories is that they give such an impression of coming from the repertoire.' Stephen Spender,Diaries, March 1957.      Ruthven thrived on contradiction. As he moved about from place to place, country to country, there is no telling how he managed to retain as many objects as he did: the Miró crayon designs, the rare and beautiful seashells, a selection of arrowheads, a diminutive Samuel Palmer oil sketch, hand-carved hunter's decoys, a pre-Colombian stone mushroom smuggled out of Mexico, a peculiar Fuseli ink drawing (that turned out to be by Theodore von Holst, but never mind) and a few of the commercial engravings made by Blake and his circle. All those were in the Mallorcan mountain cottage where he died, along with hundreds of books - a remnant only of many hundreds more bearing an endpaper signature  familiar to those who ply the antiquarian book trade, or unique items like the draft of Dylan Thomas's unfinished last poem now in the Morgan Library. Sad for someone who relished the pleasure of possessing books, and had first-hand experience of fine printing  (he personally set up and pulled the first collection of verse by Frank O'Hara, with engravings by Larry Rivers) to see so many disappear as he migrated from Edinburgh to London (1934-1947), then on to New York (1947-53), Martha's Vineyard (1954-59) and finally Mallorca. On that Mediterranean island where expat living was easy and liquor, lodgings and cigarettes insanely cheap, Ruthven's kitchen was well-stocked with cookbooks and gadgetry for the professional chef such as could be found nowhere else in Spain at that time. Like many alcoholics, however, he had developed an aversion to food and eating. But he remained fascinated by cooking and carpentry and the production of Blake's 'illuminated books' -- anything involving processes, expertise, methodology and precision tools. To acquire the latter, which he might never have occasion to use, he was happy to spend the money that should have gone for food and rent.    6. Ruthven Todd, she thought, all but ignored in spite of his remarkable poetry; one line of his, she had once said, was worth fifty lines of MacDiarmid, with all his posturing; but nobody remembered Ruthven Todd any more. -- Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club.  In October 1978, the Times noted the passing of 'a Scots poet whose writing achieved a considerable degree of success and reputation over the past four decades.' How Ruthven would have deplored having the sporran hung around his neck like a noose! He had scant regard for those who, in their self-conceit, thought their verse as rampant as any lion - with the exception of Norman McCaig. But when the anthologists came calling, he was in no position to decline their guineas.           What can be said about the writing, the success and the reputation?  Ruthven started producing verse in his teens, so it is no surprise to find early work that is derivative in subject matter and style, more copybook than imitation. A line like 'But now from the map/a gun is pointing at me' could only have come from an over-eager Auden wannabee, but you have to admit, it is a good line.  Similarly,  the poems from this period convey a palpable sense of a young man deploying all the perceptive and intellectual powers of a half-formed adult in an attempt to reach an awareness of how the world is set up and what his place in it is likely to be. Auden was the master, obviously, but was Auden ever really young? Truly young?   Much of the verse Ruthven wrote before the end of his first marriage in 1943 is heavily, blatantly indebted to Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal, cast as a running dialogue in which poet decouples from self to demand an accounting of who am I, where am I coming from and what should I do about the horrors shortly to engulf the world, ending with an inventory of personal aspirations. Ruthven deals as peremptorily with Edinburgh as MacNeice does with his Belfast childhood. He must also have realized that the Anglo-Irish poet was onto something very effective indeed by placing the 'I' of his poems as one of the objects in a vivid landscape constructed with realistic or imaginary elements. Academics may lump Ruthven with the 'New Romantics' of the forties or their 'New Apocalypse' subset because lumping is their trade, and because he was doing his drinking at the same Fitzrovian pubs where Dylan Thomas was being tediously outrageous.  It would be truer to say they had little magazines and publishers (the Grey Walls Press)  in common,  rather than a common repertory of poetic sensibilities. Ruthven had, by that time, come very much under the influence of Geoffrey Grigson, the ferociously fang-jawed Cerberus who edited New Verse. Grigson demanded absolute congruency from his contributors in the development of a poetic conceit through the rendering of  experience and in the use of figurative language. To the end of his days, Ruthven revered Grigson as his mentor and literary conscience, the one person who encouraged him to systematize and incorporate into his work the casual familiarity with the natural world he had been acquiring since boyhood and to put natural objects to work as transmitters of poetical significance, just as Grigson, the author of The Englishman´s Flora, did in his own verse. The novels represent an interesting detour into the bywaters of fantasy and dream imagery. Fascination with the idea of weaving a narrative out of snippets of remembered dreams, or mimicking their content, as the Surrealists were attempting to do, had not yet run its course in 1930s Britain, nor in Ruthven's hyperactive imagination.  'The strange shapes of the personages in a painting by Miró were as real to me as the people on the underground  during the rush hour, whose faces became to me blanker and less meaningful,' Moreover,  Ruthven had become a friend of Edwin and Willa  Muir when they were working on the translations that introduced Kafka to the English-speaking world. Over the Mountain depends too much on an ending easily seen coming. The Lost Traveller is much more off- the-wall and the political allegory is handled more deftly; when an American edition came out in the 1970s, it became something of a  head shop bestseller. A third novel, written and published after Ruthven had settled in New York, was called Loser's Choice and aside from proving that its author had no notion of how to create a female character,  is of little interest other than its prefiguring to some extent Vonnegut's Mother Night. This is the one of which Ruthven remarked, 'Only I would have had the bright idea of writing a novel in which the traitor is the hero, just at the height of McCarthyism.'   Ruthven's stay at the Edinburgh College of Art lasted just long enough for him to realize that he lacked all originality. Yet a fascination with the phenomena and processes of nature, combined with an ability to recognize and reproduce significant detail made him particularly good at botanical illustration. Over time, and especially after his last wife divorced him and he was up in Martha's Vineyard drinking non-stop, he produced rigorously exact, absolutely enchanting drawings of flowers, plants and fungi, heightened with watercolour and surrounded by a running text in his miniscule italic hand. The locus of his poetical practice also shifted towards the natural world, giving rise to Auden's remark:  'As a nature poet, he is almost the only one today who is a real naturalist and can tell one bird or flower from another - his erudition in these matters makes me very jealous.' Ruthven Todd may not have possessed the vision that allowed Blake to see heaven in a flower, but he certainly could see the flower, and he could make others see it, too, with pen and brush. And you could be sure it was a real flower, blooming in the proper season and habitat, and that when it turned up in a poem, there was a good reason for it being there. Rigour and attention to detail likewise characterize Ruthven's scholarly glosses on art and cultural history, centring on William Blake and his contemporaries and the emergent Romantic sensibility they shared. Blake was reasonably well known, but considered (by Rossetti and Yeats, among others) a nutter with a strange lyrical gift. No one was paying much attention to the illuminated books, the impenetrable visionary poems, nor seriously examined the system of personal mythology that informed them, until the 1920s, when Sir Geoffrey Keynes, prepared the first critical exegeses, compiled the catalogues and midwifed the first modern biography (by Mona Wilson). Only then did Blake's achievement gradually come to be made the object of serious study.           Thus the flood that now gushes from American universities began as a trickle from a scholarly backwater that, for a time, Ruthven and a handful of collectors and fellow amateurs had pretty much to themselves.  By the time his closely annotated edition of Gilchrist's Life of William Blake came out in 1942, he had become absorbed by the technical aspects of Blake's achievement at the expense of the poetics. The question of how much Blake owed to the world he lived in, with its cross currents of scientific breakthroughs, triumphant Enlightenment rationalism fracturing the old religious verities,  radical political movements and the emergence of esoteric belief systems, was addressed in the essays published in 1946 as Tracks in the Snow. Within a year, the standard texts by Schorer, Frye and Bronowski would appear, and William Blake crossed the Atlantic, thereafter to be exhibited to the public under exclusively academic management. By that time, Ruthven was himself in the United States, where he enlisted the noted engraver S.W. Hayter, along with Joan Miró and other visiting artists popping in and out of Hayter's transplanted Atelier 17, in experiments aimed at duplicating what Ruthven was convinced had been the method Blake must have used to transfer images with a handwritten text to the copper plates for printing. Since then, alternative procedures have been suggested, giving rise to a scholarly slugfest that still has the Blake boys divided into feuding camps (one-pulls vs. two-pulls), but my understanding is that Ruthven's explanation has not been refuted, only it now appears there are other procedures that might have occurred to the artist. Decades later, in his down and out in Mallorca period, Ruthven would made heroic efforts at regaining a toehold in the world of Blake studies, seeking financial support for an updated, much enlarged and absolutely definitive edition of the Gilchrist. That he was just scraping by on diminishing royalty checks, and too far from the libraries and picture collections essential to such a project, ensured that it would founder, as did his insistence that every single piece of artwork mentioned in the text should have an illustration. Remarkably, a good deal of work on 'Gilchrist redivivus' actually did get done, as can be seen from the archive housed at the University of Leeds, and the sparks it threw off were the notes-and-queries-type short takes examining 'minute particulars' of Blakean scholarship, speculative hunches and avenues of inquiry to be followed ups. As noted by G.E. Bentley, 'He had a large correspondence with Blake scholars and collectors - he wrote to many scholars with queries and advice and he wrote at enormous length…much of Ruthven Todd's best work on Blake was in stimulating others through this private correspondence.' 7. There was Ruthven, a good example of the nervous, jumping, gutter-combing Scotsman made good. What a change from the early London days when we used to know him: gabbling, penny counting, the shy man's too hysterical cackling laugh. But now I come to think of it seriously, he hardly changed at all, only gained in assurance.  He had expanded not only physically but mentally, giving to others pleasant, warming confidence, rather than seeming in need of it himself. -- Caitlin Thomas, Leftover Life to Kill, 1957      'The trouble with Ruthven is that he carries tolerance to a fault,' one of his wives is supposed to have said, but it would be too much to claim that the bonhomie of the barstool made absolutely everyone, without exception, Ruthven's friend. Certainly he had little love for Oscar Williams or George Barker or the 'unspeakable' George Reavey. Louis MacNeice's second wife, the cabaret singer Hedli Anderson, was the targett of scurrilous limericks and epigrams. It appears that while back in Europe for his mother's funeral, Ruthven resumed an affair dating back a decade earlier with the actress Nicolette Bernard. Unfortunately, they were spotted canoodling in Dublin by Hedli, who made sure that Ruthven's then-wife, the American painter, Joellen 'Jody' Hall, found out about it. That put a bitter end to the marital venture voted 'most likely to succeed' and the beginning of a decade-long descent into obliterating drunkenness. It will not have escaped notice that he never admitted - and perhaps never even realized -- that his own actions may have had something to do with the break-up. But, yes, knowing everyone was as much a part of Ruthven being Ruthven as was the drinking and smoking. Many of those whose friendship he valued most had nothing to do with literature or pubs, such as printer Harry Hoehn, whose portrait presided over his worktable. Greenwich Village's pacifist-in-residence Howard Schoenfeld was one of two people whom I have heard voice the same sentiment using the identical words: 'I just loved him.' Though he disliked pubs, Julian Symons was a loyal friend, and remained so forty years after they first met at Mitre Coffee House off Fleet Street, waiting for Geoffrey Grigson to show up. Not everyone deserved the high regard in which Ruthven held them. Here, notably, belongs Dr Milton Feltenstein, whom modern biographers hold responsible for Dylan Thomas's death by injecting him with morphine and causing his bronchitis-ravaged lungs to shut down. Ruthven's gushing praise of the doctor's medical skills and willingness to waive a fee undermines his eyewitness account of Dylan's drawn-out demise, as messy and grotesque as the life that preceded it. It was not a pub where Ruthven first met Dylan Thomas; it was at the flat of Norman Cameron, who was helping both penniless 20-year-olds wedge a foot in the door of literary London by providing them both with food, sleeping-it-off space and a glass of lime juice to ward off hangover. The two of them became close, but not that close, at least not in ways that correspond to the usual kind of relationships that Dylan could manage, that is, friends with utterly different temperaments (Dan Jones, Vernon Watkins) or the patrons, publishers and landlords considered fair game for chiselling and cadging.  Ruthven's unpublished memoirs give the impression of school chums on a spree, a relationship that did not grow much or deepen over the years. For both I suspect, prolonged propinquity may have been a little too much like looking into a mirror.        Ruthven and Dylan were young dogs together and they shared their Woodbines and Player's Weights, shared a 'girlfriend' known as Fluffy (the sharing took place 'under a bar billiards table in a Soho drinking club'), and shared the thrill of seeing one's poems appear between hard covers. They were reunited for the final act of the Dylan road show that took place largely at the White Horse Tavern, a few minutes' walk from the Bank Street brownstone in New York owned by Ruthven's wife, where Dylan, on a day of relative sobriety, made final revisions to Under Milk Wood. While Dylan was hospitalized and dawdling towards death, it was Ruthven who went to find out if there was any truth to the 'eighteen straight whiskies' Dylan claimed to have downed (apparently not), and it was Ruthven who wrestled with a violently berserk Caitlin Thomas to strap her down in the ambulance taking her to a mental ward (cue to 'Ruthven, you old fucker, even though I HATE you, I would never let you lie here like this!').  It was also Ruthven who, while Dylan was still breathing, had the wit to contact the people who could channel money to Caitlin and the children.  But he insisted that his remark on the blue bowtie with white polka dots his friend was buried in was not heartless, merely inadvertent. 'My God, Dylan wouldn't be seen dead in that.' 8. Wholeheartedly, gave completely, toute tendresse. -- Mavis deVere Cole handicapping Ruthven's lovemaking in the margins of her copy of the book of verse, The Planet in My Hand, dedicated to her (did she also pay the printer?) Ruthven liked women and women liked Ruthven. He enjoyed paying court to them, seeing that they had a good time, enjoyed the lovemaking and the conversation. They seemed to sense he was truly interested in them. For as long as it lasted. When separation came, it was supplanted with an enduring fondness that somehow grew more intimate as the relationship that had engendered it dwindled away in time and distance. If the lady friend was also fond of a drink, so much the better. 'Men's magazine' editor Paula Norworth could drink him under the table (she became, briefly, his second wife). Another much-cherished former girlfriend acknowledged that much as she would have liked to see him give it a try, Ruthven probably would not have responded to the Alcoholics Anonymous program, which she herself strongly supported.           Faithfulness and domesticity were not his strong suit, but even so, I can't think of a single woman with whom Ruthven appears to have parted on bad terms. The poet Carolyn Kizer even wrote a love poem to him, which delighted him to no end. Ruthven's own love poems are really infatuation poems, or fondness poems or cherish forever the memory of poems but they never quite convince as love poems, principally because they turn away from the darker side of love, with not even a hint of sorrow, pain, jealousy or recrimination. Many are addressed directly to the beloved by way of paying her an elaborate compliment. Think Robert Herrick: loving kindness, empathy,  gallantry  '… Blossomes, Birds, and Bowers'.  Passion not so much.  He was a disaster as a husband. 9. Having given him a collection of valuable books, stamped with his own arms, [Lord Tyrconnel] had the mortification to see them in a short time exposed to sale upon the stalls, it being usual, with Mr Savage, when he wanted a small sum, to take his books to the pawnbroker. Samuel Johnson, The Life of Richard Savage. 10. Anyhow, people do seem to prefer their own myths and fables to the hard facts. Ruthven's a case in point. He simply WOULD NOT listen to the truth.  Elizabeth Smart,  in a letter, 1981      Once you have convinced yourself that you are not really an alcoholic and that drinking does not utterly determine your life, then deceiving yourself about everything else becomes the easiest thing in the world. The fact that your lie can easily be trumped with the truth is no guarantee that others are automatically spared your self-validating duplicity. George IV was absolutely convinced that he had been at Waterloo and led the charge of the Royal Scots Greys and didn't even mind letting Wellington know about it. For Ruthven, verging off into a different reality ensured the hand-to-mouth existence he led, and he, like King George, never anticipated the contingency of contradiction. In January 1947, thanks to two generous grants from the Pilgrim Trust, Ruthven set blithely off to America to carry out what was supposed to be a short-term survey of the Blakes that had migrated to that country. Before departing, he had invited the writer Elizabeth Smart to take over the lease on Tilty Mill House, a rural retreat at Dunmow in Essex. He had decamped there in 1944 when his Mecklenburg Square flat was demolished by a flying bomb.           To care for her four small children by George Barker while holding down  copywriting and editing jobs in London, the as yet-uncelebrated author of By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept invited a hard-drinking homosexual couple, the talented Scottish painters Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde, to live on the property.  Ruthven blamed them for all but destroying the house during his absence and removing virtually everything of value he had in it.           In that version, when Ruthven finally came back to Britain in 1954, he found that 'sluttishness and destruction had run riot' all over the property, windows were shattered, furniture smashed; 'the bothy Scots' were falling-down drunk, and most of the books and works of art he had been assembling since his school days had been 'pilfered'. Sickened and disgusted, he claims to have got away as soon as he could, writing off the irrecoverable books, prints and paintings, and reserving his version of what he called the rape of Tilty until a quarter century had gone by. By then he was confident enough of what his memory was telling him to put it down in print, for the  exhibition catalogue at a London gallery.           What his memory was telling him had wandered a long way from the truth. Fitzrovia denizens who came down to Tilty on the weekend or for long-term stays agree that the house was never 'gutted' the way Ruthven described. They confirmed that 'the two Roberts' (as they were known around Soho) were meticulous housekeepers in or out of their cups, and that beneath their drunken antics each had a core of seriousness that would never countenance damaging books and paintings. It turned out that the missing books had been removed by Elizabeth Smart, to prevent them from being seized by the bailiff. The rent money she sent to Ruthven via her sister in New York somehow never made it back across the Atlantic to Tilty's landlord, so some of the books she had never wanted to be burdened with had to be sold to pay off the debt.   If the books had been pilfered in the way Ruthven evidently came to believe that they were, it might have been no more than justice, for if Geoffrey Grigson is to be believed, Ruthven was by way of being a book thief himself. One wonders if life may not have not been too kind to the billhook-wielding, Sitwell-baiting prophet who preached the gospel of Wystianity in the Thirties, but whose 13 volumes of verse were mostly ignored; or if Ruthven was simply as wrong about the man he considered his dearest friend as he had been about Dylan's morphine-mad Dr. Feltenstein. After Ruthven's death, Grigson sneered in print at the 'unhealthy-looking grey oddity' whom he had befriended and encouraged, accusing him of nicking books off the shelves of the people who took him in, put him up, and kept him alive during his earliest days in London and claiming to have recovered volumes from his own library that had migrated to a Cecil Court bookseller. 'We never taxed the Innocent Thief with his theft, this generous creature who seldom came to see us without some present, paid for God knows how, for the children.'           Well, Grigson ought to know his own books. Or could he just be spouting drivel? I wonder about that when reading the part where he accuses Ruthven of making off with  a copy of Louis MacNeice's debut volume of poems, inscribed to his first wife, who later ran off with another man. 'Louis could never have given it away.  Ruthven -- pronounced Riv for short -- must have sneaked it off Louis bookshelves,' Grigson decrees, and note that must have. What kind of fool is it who cannot see that a book lovingly dedicated to the wife who walked out of their marriage would be the last thing a deserted husband might want to keep around the house? Grigson's 1982 book Recollections makes no mention of the weeks they spent doing research together in Somerset House and the British Museum, or mailing out copies of New Verse, or a hint to explain why Grigson's book, Poems and Poets, is dedicated to him. 11. 'Todd was the great go-between of literary London in those days who kept one well-informed on what was going on and how to earn what modest pickings might be available in terms of reading for publishers or other hack jobs.' - George Woodcock. The first of Ruthven's odd jobs may have been the oddest, and like many to come afterwards, unpaid. Herbert Read roped him in to act as assistant secretary (a euphemism for 'general dogsbody') at the first Surrealist exhibition in London in 1936. He also assisted Peggy Guggenheim at her gallery, he collated and indexed the findings of the Mass Observation movement, that strange amalgam of oral history, surrealist dream theory and market research that presumed to create a data base avant la lettre to document 'the everyday lives of ordinary people' in Britain. At various other times, but never for very long, he was a shop assistant at Zwemmer's, the art bookshop on Charing Cross Road, a paid consultant on the Alexander Korda film of Caesar and Cleopatra (paid but never consulted), a copywriter in an advertising agency, and a teacher of English to Felix Topolski. From the mid-1950s until the closing years of his life, two decades on, his main source - often his only source --  of  income, was Flyball.  Flyball was a cat, a Space Cat. He was hero of the eponymous book Ruthven wrote for eight-to-ten year olds in the early 1950s, just when science fiction was beginning to take off in the American imagination. Young readers responded to a style of writing that wasn't at all condescending and had a real story to tell; librarians could find no fault with it, so Space Cat and Space Cat Meets Mars and Space Cat Visits Venus and Space Cat and the Kittens sold and sold kept on selling for years for Scribner's.  An unauthorized parody, Space Cat on Mushrooms,appeared in the swinging sixties. Ruthven may not have known about it, but certainly would have been amused: he used to go mushroom hunting in Central Park with another amateur mycologist, the composer John Cage, and had sampled first-hand the psychedelic roller-coaster effects of the nominally poisonous A.muscaria, which Robert Graves and Gordon Wasson had identified as soma. the divine mushroom of the gods. While he was occupied tripping on toadstools, forwarded fan letters flooded Ruthven's mail box, along with a semi-annual check.      But in 1956 he had no money and no desire to return to New York and be consoled for his shattered marriage in Chumley's, Tim Costello's, The White Horse, Goody's,  the Minetta or the San Remo. He rented a shed on a farm property near the Martha's Vineyard township of West Tisbury and stuck it out there for the next three winters, making botanical drawings, writing some poems, but mostly he drank. In 1959, he turned up in Mallorca where Robert Graves, another close friend and admirer of Norman Cameron, let him stay in a spare fisherman's cottage on the cliffs above the Mediterranean.  Ruthven discovered that when translated into pesetas, a modest dollar income could purchase significant quantities of Spanish brandy and cigarettes,  so he elected to stay on the island and settled in El Terreno, a watering hole for louche expatriates,  professional remittance men, and pensioners drinking themselves into self-dug graves. One of the tell-tale symptoms of alcoholism is said to be that it leads one to socialize precisely with those people one would otherwise take pains to stay miles away from. Taking that as a bellwether, the period from 1960-1966, when he was making the rounds of Mam's Bar, the Ivy, Joe's, and the other hangouts of the Plaza Gomila in El Terreno, would represent the nadir of Ruthven's career as a drinker.        Better friends than he had in El Terreno thought so, too, for in 1965, they persuaded  him to undertake a cure at that time popular in Spain in which Ruthven was sedated into and out of unconsciousness over a period of 12 days while withdrawal symptoms wracked his body. That now discredited detox method not only failed to kill him, amazingly, it succeeded in getting him off the hard stuff.  For the rest of his days, a glass of Spanish red wine or a beer would keep him steady and allow him to joke about being a 'semi-retired alcoholic.' To put maximum distance between himself and temptation, he left the Plaza Gomila and settled in an inland mountain village, where a two-storey stone cottage with a tile roof was available for a monthly pittance. Only a handful of in-and-out foreigners lived there, and there was no bar. 12. One step aside from the ways of comfortable men and you cannot regain them. You will live and die under the law of the intolerable thing called romance.     -- Francis Thompson, author of 'The Hound of Heaven' (dying in a charity hospice in 1907).   Constantly drinking, but rarely exceeding his self-imposed limits, coughing up more and more phlegm and writing endless letters, Ruthven carried on doggedly to the end. His most successful works from this period, however, were the publisher's  contracts and grant applications he put his name to. At the time of his death, he owed unwritten books to the Atlantic Monthly Press, Longmans, Granada, Rupert Hart Davis, Studio Vista and Dover. Coaxing money out of foundations was another occupational side-line. The Pilgrim Trust was still furious, forty years later, about the grants they gave him in 1946. Ruthven also obtained two Guggenheim Fellowships (1960 and 1967), a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (1965), a Chaplebrook fellowship in 1968 that was supposed to have seen the revised Gilchrist through to completion, and still more funds from an Ingram Merrill fellowship in 1970.  That same year, he was hired as a visiting professor for a group of American students that had come to Mallorca to learn how to write. A year later, Ruthven turned up at the State University of New York at Buffalo for another year's teaching ('if at some point, they asked an intelligent question, they got a passing grade') and stayed on afterwards in New York until the money ran out. In 1975-76, he taught a course on Blake at the University of Maryland and this time there was no surplus money to be spent. Students, of course, were amazed by their 'professor'. They had never seen anything like it. By then, income from Space Cat was down to a trickle and Scribner's decided not to reprint.  His lungs had worsened and he had to be checked into a Mallorcan TB sanatorium, where he spent a few months joining the local patients in sneaking out after dark for a clandestine cigarette. But when the end came, a few months after his release,  it was swift-acting organ failure and not the slow strangulation of terminal emphysema.  He was 64 years old. Unlike the literary world's  big-ticket alcoholics, the Eugene O'Neills or Malcolm Lowries, it is useless to search for the demons that drove Ruthven over the edge, or the missing touch of  tragedy. All that needs be said is that he drank far too much for far too long, and perhaps achieved his desire of being counted as 'one of the good, minor poets' of  his century.  Blighted Fitzrovia, the gentrified West Village, bombed-out Plaza Gomila are skeletal remains or amusement park re-creations of what they once had been, but Auden's verdict still stands: Ruthven Todd was a 'happy' man, and not only happy in himself,  but the cause that happiness is in other men - the ones who had the opportunity to see him in action and benefit from his generous outlays of time, encouragement and helpful contacts. Obviously, this tribute has been put together by one such, in gratitude and continuing amazement, but the last word should go to Julian Symons:  'Ruthven had a sweetness of personality and an eternal youthful optimism that transcended the minor irritations he could cause, and there was something wholly admirable about his certainty that a life spent in pursuit of art, literature and romantic love was superior to all others.'    © Robert Latona 2011

Lost Horizons

 from New Partisan, 2006

Pari passus stopped me dead in my tracks the other day. When was the last time I saw that in  print, and was I kidding myself to think I remembered — more or less — what it meant? The context was an essay by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith on the life, times and ideas of his great 18th-century predecessor, Adam Smith. Though intended for the non-specialist but culturally literate layman, so unapologetically “elitist” a locution could only have surfaced 35 years ago in a magazine called Horizon, and Lord, how I wish something like it existed today.

No, I don’t mean Cyril Connolly’s intellectually supercharged periodical out of wartime London in which the classic George Orwell essays first appeared. Mine was the hardbound coffee table quarterly from the same outfit that brought out American Heritage and pitched it to a similarly profiled readership: a subset of American suburbia educated enough to have acquired a nodding acquaintance with the world’s cultures, desirous of learning more about the same, and receptive to richly anecdotal history and low-jargon criticism and essays on contemporary trends arranged in debate format.

It sounds, and it was, very “midcult,” to use the term invented around that same time by Dwight Macdonald and used here in its taxonomic rather than derisory sense. It is a category in which I am happy to include myself because I found I could read Horizon with pleasure and learn a few things in the process. Others must have, too; the magazine had a fair run through the 1960s, fizzling out of existence some time after Watergate.

Thumbing though a half-dozen sun-faded issues salvaged from a library sell-off, the implicit mindset connecting the magazine’s readers and writers comes across as unlike most anything going down today, notwithstanding such occasional bylines as art critic Robert Hughes and the late science maven Stephen Jay Gould’s early excursions in print.

In Horizon, you’d get a tour of the past by mandarin Oxbridge historians H.R. Trevor Roper and J.H. Plumb, or a vivid evocation of high times in ancient Athens by Gilbert Highet. A personal favorite: Morris Bishop, a legendary professor of romance languages at Cornell, who turned out many witty, knowledgeable words on any subject that engaged his first-class mind: female pirates, the cynicism of La Rouchefoucauld or the world into which St. Francis of Assisi was born. Saul Bellow’s piece on filmmaker Luis Buñuel certainly deserves reprinting — and I want the record to show that Stanley Kauffmann, moonlighting from his then-day job at the New York Times, could clean Pauline Kael’s critical clock, as it were, so far as cinema is concerned.

Horizon managed to be topical without pushing political agendas. At the height of the Vietnam mess, its editors put together a primer of Indochinese history, but object lessons, if any, were for the reader to draw. Nor could its editors stand accused of the heinous crime of Eurocentricity. To this day it shames me to admit that blissed-out Buddhas and shimmying Shivas in the basement "grotto" of the Norton Simon Museum only bring out my inner Homer Simpson, but after re-reading Edmund White or William K. Zinsser on the arts and civilizations of Asia, I am encouraged to give it another dutiful shot.

The timeframe in which Horizon flourished was also that of Leonard Bernstein and his Young People’s Concerts and Kenneth Clark’s guided tour of capital-C Civilization, while universities offered “appreciation” courses to non-majors in the belief that certain cultural artifacts were entitled to it. But no patronizing footnotes of the Van Gogh who-he? variety or atrocious “study guides”. Most amazing of all was the editors’ underlying assumption that there really were enough readers out there who knew some of the basics about, say, the Opium War or Baroque chamber music, and wanted to be taken some distance beyond them, without being snowed under with technicalities and academic game playing.

And I was not too surprised to note that in the same issue (Summer 1971) as the Galbraith piece, Stanley Kauffmann lets drop the word “footling” during a scene-by-scene dissection of Bergman’s Persona, as if to say “it won’t kill you if you go look it up, you know”. So okay, I did look it up and can report that my self-esteem suffered no bruising as a result. I also learned something, pari passus, from an extinct magazine that did its readers a huge favor by never assuming there were pre-set limitations on their cultural and intellectual horizons.

Heaven Can Wait

Lookout,  April, 1992

       Topping everybody's required reading list for the hectic year ahead should be a book called 1492 and All That. The only problem is that it hasn't quite been written yet, but when Spain finally does get round to producing a double-barreled send-up of its appalling history and the equally appalling textbooks in which it has been perpetuated, it will doubtless have to start off something like this:

     "Queen Isabel married Fernando and got Columbus on his way sailing the ocean blue, and, after they chucked out the Jews, who were unpopular, and the Moors, who objected to being reconquered, they got the Spaniards who were left over to live together for awhile in the same country without killing each other; she was thus a good queen."

     And one feisty lady, to be sure. But a saint, now? Quite a few people in Spain  think she deserves nothing less than a halo to complement the crown that suited her so well during her lifetime. And quite a few others seem to feel that's maybe stretching matters a bit, or more than just a bit. The Pope, who knows a political hot potato when it lands in his cassock, is taking no chances.

     "Some of Isabel's deeds were contrary to the teachings of the Church, especially with regard to freedom of conscience." That was the cautious verdict of Msgr. Jean Marie Lustiger, the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris and trusted pontifical adviser. So after decades of work and the mustering of 27,000 pages of documentation, the Vatican's canonization committe decided last March to simply shelve the matter.

      Now the Church is at pains to emphasize that it doesn't churn out saints to order; it merely tries to recognize the "heroic virtues" that qualify them for a spot on the calendar. It has to be admitted that in the case of Isabel the Catholic Queen, the virtuous bit has been laid on a mite too thick both by her contemporaries as well as by posterity. 

      Still, can the laudatory overkill be any worse than the put-downs Spaniards have been getting from a legion of lick-spittle "intellectuals" who make a lucrative living flogging their opinions to the press barons of Madrid? Like this one from a trendy Catalan theologian writing in El País: "Everything about Isabel la Católica was negative," he grumbles. "She had no respect for the cultue and religious practices of the Indians. She set up the Inquisition. She persecuted Judaism, Islam, Protestantism and progressive Catholicism."  

      Very nasty of her indeed, especially as Protestantism wasn't even invented during her lifetime. And true, she couldn't have been all that keen on mass human sacrifice and other alternative religious practices of the Indians. Yet Isabel-bashing remains all the rage, partly as a spin-off from the loathing being lumped on her protegé, that nasty genocidal imperialist, Columbus .

 

       In Spain, moreover, some people who grew up under the Franco regime may recall  Isabel's  presence in the political icongraphy of the times in which  the founder of the Spanish state and pre-eminent symbol of national unity and squeaky-tight central government control was exulted.

      But let's pass on the posthumous company she never solicited and consider strictly what Isabel did or did not do. For one thing, she did not, repeat not, pawn her jewels to scrounge up venture capital for Columbus, though she may have threatened something of the sort by way of pressuring her husband to dig a bit deeper in his pockets. She did, however, raise money from the royal baubles when the Granada campaign was running low on funds. The business about her vowing never to change her shift until Granada was in Christian hands also turns out to be as unfounded as it is out of character. 

      If a witness for the prosecution is needed, we might call Carlos Benarroch, a 76-year-old resident of Barcelona, to the stand. Sr. Benarroch has three times served as head of the Council of Jewish Communities of Spain and isby far the most comprehensive in enumerating what he considers to be  instances of Isabel's unsaintly behavior, starting with the alleged usurpation of her crown. "This she did, possibly by poisoning her immediate family and certainly by shoving aside the rightful heir," he charges.

      Why is it that the most distinguished female rulers in European history tend to be the ones who were never supposed to have reigned in the first place? The infanta of Castile was very much minor royalty, never closer than third in line for the top spot nor destined to be more than bait in a dreary but diplomatically opportune marriage. 

    Her father the king had married twice, giving her one full and one half-brother. Unfortunately it was the latter who inherited, and he grew into a most unpleasant character known to his  history as Enrique IV and to his scornful subjects as Enrique the Impotent.  Enrique the Pervert would perhaps have been a tad more accurate, but what really had Castilians worried was the politically explosive break in the dynastic chain.

     As with Britain's roster of royal deviates,  Enrique was putty in the hands of one faction of nobles and anathema for the others. Still, after his first wife died, there was some lingering hope that he might yet deliver the goods. 

     When the new consort, Queen Juana of Portugal, finally did give birth after a six-year interval, there were only two drawbacks. First, that it was a daughter. Second, that it was said, rumored, broadcast, and all but proclaimed on high that paternal honors belonged to a nobleman named Don Beltrán de la Cueva who was carrying on fairly openly with the Queen. The daughter was thus known to all and sundry as "La Beltraneja" practically from the moment she was born.   

    Does that mean Sr. Benarroch is right in maintaining that the rightful heir was displaced by a libel "invented by Isabel and her propagandists"? Not at all. For one thing, the story was making the rounds when Isabel was just 10 years old, and of no particular interest to anyone at all since her father had providentially managed to provide an alternate male heir.

     That was Isabel's younger brother, Alfonso, who died  suddenly of "fevers" when he was just 15 years old. There is a whole school of dedicated conspiracy theorists who insist that he was "more than likely poisoned" by his sister's henchmen, who later on did for Enrique as well. This is pernicious poppycock. Not even Isabel's most implacable enemies ever suggested such a thing.

      Up to the time tragedy shoved Isabel back into the dynastic limelight, aged 17, most of her life had been spent in the chilly town of Arévalo, north of Segovia, in a gloomy castle where Enrique kept her and her brother under a kind of unacknowledged house arrest along with their mother, who was gradually going mad all the while.

     Anecodotes are hard to come by, and it is not easy to get an idea of the woman she was and the queen she was to be by squinting at a handful of old portraits. Although true to specification, showing her as tallish, with fair skin and hair, penetrating blue eyes and a saggy underchin, they are really renderings of the qualities of piety and determination, rather than the likeness of a living person.

      It takes an effort to imagine Isabella Rosellini wearing  the crown of Castile, or Kathleen Turner or even Glenn Close, but rumor (as of this writing) has any two of the above three short-listed for the rival Columbus films due in 92. Thirty years ago, big-budget mogul Sam Bronston went all out trying to raise money  for an epic on Isabel of Spain, in which Columbus would have been the walk-on part. That film never got made, and we never got to see what an actress like Glenda Jackson might have done with the role.

     Like another royal mite a few centuries down the line, you can almost hear Isabel saying "I will be good." And in that particular time and place, that could only mean being a strict, 100% by-the-book Roman Catholic, thinking, living and carrying out the duties that correspond to one's station in life in strict accordance with the teachings of the Church.

     No one doubts she was brave.  There once was a minor but nasty uprising in Segovia. The Royal Guard had to hole up in that city's Alcázar along with the Queen's first-born, a daughter also named Isabel. She she galloped like mad from Tordesillas, and demanded icily that the gates of the city be opened to her.

     She rode right up to the edge of the moat and allowed the the dangeroulsy sullen mob close in before she let them have it. "Tell me, what is your grievance, my loyal vassals, for whatever your will is, so must also be mine." Taken aback, the ringleaders began stammering complaints, starting with a call for the destitution of the city's loyalist governor. 

     Before they could get in another word, she cut them short with "Then it shall be done, for your remedy will likewise be mine." A second later they were cheering her like mad. She understood how to play to the galley and she also knew the prerogatives of princes were not to be lightly yielded,  for as soon as the city was completely under control, she reinstated the governor as if nothing had happened.

      Unyielding and self-righteous, yes. Imperious and intolerant -- certainly. Tolerance was not then on anyone's list of virtues. But she was a stickler for justice as well as frugal and austere. Two things, they said, the Queen would never do was drink wine or break her word.  For British history buffs, it might be possible to get some insight into that now-extinct mindset from all that has been written about Isabel's daughter, the unfortunate Catherine of Aragón, and her grand-daughter, "Bloody" Mary Tudor.

     While the Renaissance was just starting to percolate through Europe and suggest less rigid moral frameworks for human behavior, that was hppening a long way from the chilly hinterland of Castile. Where it did make an impact, however, was in the adjacent kingdom of Aragón, which had extensive entanglements  with France and Italy. It certainly influenced Isabel's future husband, Fernando, and decisively shaped the consummate politician he eventually was to become.

     Talk about a marriage of opposites. She was the living essence of the moral absolutism of Middle Ages, putting matters of principle and religious rectitude ahead of all, including interests of state. But of course, to her way of seeing the world, there could be no contradiction possible. Then her husband, learned, canny, ambitious, and in essence a bit of a bastard. For Machiavelli, who marvelled at how he seemed to get his way through "cunning and good luck, rather than superior wisdom," Fernando of Aragón was the embodiment of the self-interested statesman, deft master of political one-upmanship and the protoype Renaissance prince. 

       The courtship of these two teenage second cousins makes for an interesting prologue to their 30-year reign, since it provoked the nobility of Castile, who by then had Enrique conniving to marry off Isabel to the elderly King of Portugal. Legend tells of Fernando slipping incognito across the border disguised as a servant, and Isabel vowing that if she was had to be married to anyone, it would be to this good-looking charmer two years her junior who made a most dashing figure when decked out in armor for the jousting tournaments he inevitably won.

      The open defiance of the pro-Portugal faction triggered a persistent but low intensity civil war in Castile, one that was only temporarily called off in 1468 when Enrique, then on a losing streak, finally proclaimed Isabel his succesor and expresly denied paternity of La Beltraneja. Isabel and Fernando were married a few months later, just as soon as the bridegroom could wrangle a loan from Jewish financiers to pay for the wedding.

       The dynastic dispute flared up again, and Enrique --or rather the alliance of nobles, scheming prelates and the knights of Calatrava who were pulling the strings -- again tried to reinstate La Beltraneja, whom they were now trying to marry off to the Portuguese king. But by the time Enrique finally died in 1474, nobody was fighting terribly hard on behalf the princess who may or may not have been his daughter. Another two years of skirmishes saw Isabel secure on her throne but with her most difficult days still ahead of her.

       The reason was simply that her stepbrother and their father before him had left the kingdom in a huge mess. She immediately set about balancing the books, restoring law and order and cracking down hard on clans of grandees. "Although her word was law, she governed in such a manner that it might appear the joint action of both Fernando and herself," one chronicler noted.

      And governed extremely well, from all accounts. Crown  firmly on brow, embroidery hoop in her lap and surrounded by a an inner circle of shrewd prelates, she also created a civil service staffed strictly on the basis of personal merit and honesty. Nowadays, such a revolutionary undertaking by any Spanish leader would rate as a self-evident miracle and guarantee automatic elevation to the sainthood.  

       What sort of marriage did Isabel and Fernando have? As royal pairings go, one would have to rate it a fair success, backed up with more geniune affection and mutual respect than most. But the initial passion and long-term devotion were surely the contribution of Isabel, who was left to fret and forgive as Fernando fathered five illegtimate children in the course of his extra-matrimonial dalliances.

     Despite the melding of motifs on the royal coat of arms, their matrimony-based alliance did not  automatically bring about the unification of Spain. Officially, each was no more than the consort in the other's kingdom, but everyone knew that their heir would have unquestionable claim to the thrones of both Aragón and Castile. It therefore seems reasonable to suppose that unity was taken for granted by their subjects, as it certainly was abroad.  

       Partly as a result of their dual duties, both Isabel  and Fernando kept constantly on the move. Harried ambassadors grumbled it was hard to keep up with a queen who spent more time in the saddle than on the throne and who oversaw the affairs of her realm from a tent for long stretches at a time. For Fernando's other strong suit was aggresive military adventures at home and abroad. Curiously, the people who best served his designs, including the warrior prelate Cardinal Mendoza  and Gonzalo de Córdoba, were all Isabel's hand-picked people -- her special gift was for selecting subordinates and keeping them on their toes. Even the mighty Gonzalo was not exempt from her scathing reprimands. "Stop squandering all the honor you got through your victories by misgoverning now that you are in charge," she once had to scold him.

     When hostilities finally reopened with the Moorish kingdom of Granada, they were, of course, fueled by Isabel's dream of bringing the entire peninsula (but not necessarily, at that point, its inhabitants) into the fold of the Church. But the more pressing reasons, for Fernando, had to do with the border becoming dangerously unstable and a new ruler in Granada who had overplayed his hand.

      The decade that it took to bring the Moorish stronghold to its knees saw its share of brutal skirmishes and extended sieges, but there were also occasional flashes of deering-do on both sides to underscore that this was last major European campaign fought according to the rules and conventions of medieval chivalry, which the Moors were also very big on. It ended with just the right flourish. After gallantly refusing to accept the homage of the defeated Boabdil, Fernando straightaway handed over the keys of the conquered city to Isabel. She had been there with him at the front for months at a time.

      Looking on from the sidelines was a persistent, shabby Italian seaman, his six years of soft soap and determination now within a few months of payoff. It is clear Columbus was entirely Isabel's pet project. Fernando had his eyes on new Italian conquests and old scores to settle with France; subsequently, he became Columbus's nemesis. But the disgraced admiral never blamed Isabel for his run of misfortunes, and when she died, he entreated his son Diego to remember her in his prayers.

     Isabel's boosters argue that the conversion of an entire continent to Christianity gives ample grounds for their cause and meets the requirement that two miracles be confirmed for any would-be saint. "What could be more miraculous than bringing the Gospel to America, and all the saints that continent has given us since then?" argues Msgr. Luis Aponte, the Cardinal Archbishop of Puerto Rico.

     But Sr.Benarroch has a come-back. "If America became Christian, it wasn't because the Queen wanted it, but because the Pope insisted and made Columbus take along a priest on his second voyage over. On the first trip there was no priest, not even one to attend to the spiritual needs of his own sailors."    

     Another very opinionated and very Jewish scoffer, Simon Wiesenthal, has more cold water to throw on that argument, insisting that Colombus may have been looking for a safe haven for the Jews of Spain, himself maybe included, who just three months before he set sail had been booted out of their millenial homeland. The 83-year old veteran Nazi hunter alternatively maintains that Columbus reneged on his promise of rewarding the first man to spot land because the sailor who did so happened to be a Jew, as was about a third of the  crew. 

      "Spain will celebrate in a big way but the discovery brought extermination that is still going on in the rain forests of Brazil," glowers Wiesenthal. "The only difference is that Hitler had the technology to carry out his dream of mass genocide."

         But the record makes it clear that in March, 1493, when Columbus returned from his first voyage, his patroness was extremely annoyed when he tried to make her a present of a couple of Indians he abducted casually along the way. "What right does the Admiral have to dispose of my vassals according to his will?" Isabel said, and made the Indians her royal pages, the same honor that was bestowed on Columbus's two sons.

      The explorer was given written notice "to abstain from all manner of harassment and to treat (the New World natives) well and lovingly, speak frankly and familiarly with them and render them all the kind services in his power, distribute such presents as their Royal Highnesses have caused to be embarked on the fleet for that purpose, and to punish in the most exemplary manner all those who should offer them the least molestation". The same instructions went into her deathbed-dictated testament. 

     If, indeed, Isabel the Queen was touchingly concerned for the welfare of her newest vassals, the same can hardly be said for the way she treated her some of her oldest, the half-million Spanish Jews, who on March 31, 1492 were summarily told to convert or start packing. The Inquisition, which the Catholic monarchs had been instrumental in reviving a dozen years earlier, had already moved into high gear under the infamous Torquemada. 

     And this is where we must listen carefully to Sr. Benarroch and his many partisans. "Any desire to include this queen in the list of saints shows a lack of respect for her victims and a lamentable absence of sensitvity to the feelings of the modern Jewish community in Spain," he says, and it is not easy to refute him on that. 

     The onus of the expulsion falls exclusively on Isabel, and it is clear that Fernando, whose maternal grandmother was born Jewish, and who moreover thought the whole idea was just plain bad policy, as indeed it turned out to be, was badgered into compliance. The Inquisition, however, was a different matter. He made sure that confiscated properties from convicted apostates ended up in the royal treasury. Indifferent to its excesses, he got to control the doings of the Holy Office in his home territory of Aragón, and turned a nice profit on the suffering it inflicted.

     But what compelled Isabel to do it? What would now be called plain bigotry seems not to have been at issue. She had valued the Jews she placed in the top echelons of government, including her finance ministers, Abraham Seneor and Isaac Abravanel, and rewarded converts who stood loyally by her, including Andrés Cabrera, the governor-general of Segovia, who had married her childhood confidante, Beatriz de Bobadilla.

       There is no easy explanation for her decision. To say that both the expulsion and the Inquisition came about because she wanted to "purify" her realm lis probably as close to the truth as we can get. Five centuries ago, purifying a realm would not have been a big deal  Even then, however, some of the queen's most trusted counselors were dead against the whole idea,  including her confessor, Hernando de Talavera, who branded the expulsion "a sin and an act of infamy".

       To argue, as some have done, that she was simply doing what her subjects demanded of her is likewise ingenuous, though the rising tide of anti-Semitism that began sweeping over Spain a century before was getting out of hand and doubtless would have led to new pogroms and civil disorders. But the line taken by Fr. Anastasio Gutiérrez, the official postulant of her sainthood campaign, that Isabel "only wanted to help the Jews flee from Spain when the people would have readily exterminated them all" is unconvincing to say the least.

     They are on somewhat firmer ground who say that in ordering the Jews never to set foot in her realm under penalty of death, she simply was doing what any other sovereign of the age had a perfect right to do and often enough did, such as England's own Edward I in 1290.

     A recent biographer, Fernando Vizcaino Casas, had a point worth making when he observed  that "You can't go around taking moral measurements of what was going on in 1492 with the yardsticks of 1992." Others have drawn parallels with the demands of modern Israeli extremists for the mass expulsion of  Palestinians from their historical homeland.

     In the event, the dozen years of future that remained to Isabel were in the personal sphere bleak enough to suggest some measure of divine retribution at work. The much-beloved son and heir, Prince Juan, took after his father and died young. Of their four daughters, one died in childbirth, another became the queen of Portugal, while poor Catharine of Aragón was swallowed up whole by English history.

     That left  poor Juana who as a young girl had shown all the symptoms of a textbook-case manic depressive like her grandmother. By the time she was married off to that spoiled brat of an Austrian princeling, Felipe el Hermoso (Phillip the Fair)  Juana was well on her way to becoming a full-fledged schizophrenic, even without the promptings of her uncaring and unfaithful husband whose death sent her completley round the bend.

     Whatever second thoughts she may have had, whatever deep heartsickness she must have felt, Isabel the Catholic Queen was not one to let on. Let us concede that her good intentions outweighed even her acccomplishments, and those were numerous enough. A balance-sheet that any politician could be proud of. But perhaps it's best to hang on to that halo, because it was never the road to heaven that was supposed to be paved with good intentions.