Showing posts with label Umberto Eco. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Umberto Eco. Show all posts

Thursday, February 25, 2021

Risorgimento!



My Sixth Form history teacher at Rangitoto College in 1978 was called Mr. Dalton. He was an excellent teacher, I think, relaxed and approachable, and treating our overall theme - European history in the 19th century - with gusto and enthusiasm.

The topic that interested me most that year was the Unification of Italy - aka 'il Risorgimento' [the Resurgence / the Uprising]. I knew nothing whatever about it (though I already had some grasp of the main events of the Napoleonic wars through assiduous reading of C. S. Forester's Hornblower books). Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi - I might have heard their names, but I had no idea who they actually were.

I had, of course, encountered the last of them in that celebrated passage in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows (1908) where Mole's tastes in ornamental statuary are itemised:
... Garibaldi, and the infant Samuel, and Queen Victoria, and other heroes of modern Italy.


Chris Dunn: Carol-singing mice


Presumably those 'other heroes' would have included Cavour and Mazzini, and possibly even King Vittorio Emanuele himself. If you look at the picture at the top of this page, you can see an idealised version of the famous meeting between the King and Garibaldi at which the latter handed over to the former dominion over the whole of Southern Italy.

G. M. Trevelyn. Garibaldi and the Thousand (May 1860). 1909. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948.

I think, at the time, I already owned a copy of G. M. Trevelyan's Garibaldi and the Thousand (1909), his classic account of the liberation of Sicily during a single month of that year of destiny, 1860.

I owned it but I hadn't read it. In fact I didn't finally read it till last week, more than forty years after buying it for a buck or so from a pile of other remaindered stock at Allphee books in Auckland. It wasn't so much laziness as the fact that I knew that it was the middle part of a trilogy, and - being of a somewhat obsessive temperament where such things are concerned - I had to get the other two parts before I could finally open its pages.

G. M. Trevelyan. Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic, 1848-9. 1907. A Phoenix Press Paperback. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2001.

I found volume one, Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic, in Albany in 2011. I'm not quite sure when I acquired volume three, Garibaldi and the Making of Italy, but it's an ex-library book, so it was probably in Palmerston North in the 1990s.

G. M. Trevelyan. Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (June-November 1860). 1911. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948.

I guess the point I'm making is that it was quite a protracted process.

In many ways I'm glad that I waited so long, though. I think I'm in a better position now to appreciate it without being put off by the almost hysterical tone of adulation that pervades its pages.



William Hope: George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962)


The young Trevelyan, great-nephew of the classic Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay and son of his biographer George Otto Trevelyan, was in his late twenties when he began his researches, and had only reached his mid-thirties when he completed the last volume. Perhaps as a result of youthful enthusiasm, he seems to have found it nearly impossible to maintain any distance from his subject.

The mere fact that he'd found time to tramp over every obscure goat track frequented by the great one gives testimony to that. He was even able to talk to many of Garibaldi's principal lieutenants (and accomplices) before time overtook them.

All of this gives his trilogy an atmosphere of intimate absorption in the career of a larger-than-life hero. Nor does he apologise for this in any of the prefaces to its many reprints. There is, he admits, room for alternative approaches - but this is his, and it does have the effect of making it feel more like an elaborately researched work of creative non-fiction than your more typical dry-as-dust history.



I suppose, in retrospect, that sixth-form history course might have had something to do with my decision to take Italian as one of the majoring subjects in my BA. I've certainly never regretted that choice. It's true that we spent more time studying the literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries than that of the nineteenth - in fact, so much Ariosto, Dante, Poliziano and Tasso did we read that our young Neapolitan Italian conversation teacher, Francesca, accused us of speaking "una specie d'italiano Dantesco": a distinctly Dante-esque Italian - but at the time that suited my medievalist inclinations very well.

But the theme of the unification of Italy dominates not just the writers of its own era, the mid to late nineteenth century, but also many of their precursors. Reading Trevelyan, with his copious quotations from contemporary English and Italian poets, got me to thinking about the literature of the Risorgimento: those books which can give us some sense of what it felt like to be alive in those times.

Trevelyan puts it best in the preface to a 1920 popular edition of Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic:
The events of the Risorgimento, a large portion of which are covered in this Garibaldian trilogy, are ... to the Italian of to-day more than any single epoch of English history can be to us. They are to him all that the story of Washington and Lincoln together are to the American. To be friends with Italy, we must begin by understanding and sympathising with the movement that gave her birth. [6]
Any attempt to chronicle the history of English culture in the nineteenth century has to run up continually against Italy: the Romantic poets were obsessed with its language and literature; Keats and Shelley both died there, and Byron spent many years there before his final Greek adventure. Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Ruskin, all travelled there, and all had a singular relationship with it.

I've tried to confine myself to those writers who had a direct connection with the actual events of the Risorgimento or who significantly influenced it. If you look at the list of books below, though, you'll see that that still amounts to quite a few names:





Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803)

Precursors:



    Vittorio Alfieri: Vita Scritta da Esso (1804)


    Count Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803)

  1. Alfieri, Vittorio. Vita Scritta da Esso. 1804. Ed. Luigi Galeazzo Tenconi. Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1563-1566. Milano: Rizzoli Editore, 1960.
  2. Vittorio Alfieri's posthumously published autobiography gives a good account of the life of this turbulent, quarrelsome poet and tragedian. His liberal inclinations, expressed in his various political writings ("Against Tyranny" and "The Prince and Literature"), had a considerable influence on the beginnings of the movement for Italian freedom.


    Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872)

  3. Mazzini, Joseph. The Duty of Man and Other Essays. 1907. Everyman’s Library, 224. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1924.
  4. Giuseppe Mazzini was the heart and soul of the ideological struggle for a unified Italy. While his own desires for a republic rather than a monarchy were not fulfilled, his lifelong devotion to the cause inspired Garibaldi and the other architects of the eventual, compromised Kingdom of Italy. His brief stint as one of the three triumvirs at the head of the Roman Republic was a failure in practical terms, but a symbolic triumph, which helped establish the idea of Rome as the capital of the new nation.






Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827)

Poets:



    Giosuè Alessandro Michele Carducci (1835–1907)

  1. Carducci, Giosuè. Selected Verse. Ed. & trans. David H. Higgins. Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips Ltd., 1994.
  2. Giosuè Carducci, the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize for literature, has come to be seen as a kind of embodiment of intellectual liberty, both in his life and his works. His most famous poem, the "Hymn to Satan" (1863) was considered "by Italian leftists of the time as a metaphor of the rebellious and freethinking spirit." It was first published in a newspaper shortly before the 1870 march on Rome which finally reunited the country. Somewhat appropriately, the Museum of the Risorgimento (Bologna) is located in the house he died in, the Casa Carducci.


    Ugo Foscolo: Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802)


    Niccolò [Ugo] Foscolo (1778-1827)

  3. Foscolo, Ugo. Tutte le Poesie. Ed. Ludovico Magugliani. Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 411-413. Milano: Rizzoli Editore, 1952.

  4. Foscolo, Ugo. Liriche Scelte: I Sepolcri e Le Grazie. Commento di Severino Ferrari. Ed. Oreste Antognoni & Sergio Romagnoli. Biblioteca Carducciana, 5. Firenze: Sansoni, 1964.

  5. Foscolo, Ugo. Ultime Lettere di Jacopo Ortis. Ed. Ludovico Magugliani. Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 12-13. Milano: Rizzoli Editore, 1949.
  6. Ugo Foscolo's famous novel The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (1798) depicts the state of mind of an Italian patriot forced to endure the destruction of the Venetian Republic by Napoleon's invading armies in 1797. His most famous poem, "Dei Sepolcri" [From the graves] (1807) suggests summoning up the spirits of the dead to help in the struggle from freedom in his country. He died in exile in London, like so many other Italian writers and thinkers. Long after his death he became a potent symbol of resistance for the new nation of Italy.


    Giacomo Leopardi: All'Italia (1819)


    Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi (1798–1837)

  7. Leopardi, Giacomo. Canti. Ed. Franco Brioschi. 1974. Superbur Classici. Milan: BUR, 1999.

  8. Leopardi, Giacomo. Canti. Ed. John Humphreys Whitfield. 1967. Italian Texts. Ed. Kathleen Speight. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978.

  9. Leopardi, Giacomo. Canti. Trans. Jonathan Galassi. 2010. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin, 2010.

  10. Leopardi, Giacomo. Operette Morali. 1827. Ed. Saverio Orlando. Classici Italiani. Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli. 1976. Milano: Rizzoli Editore, 1982.

  11. Flora Francesco, ed. Tutte le Opere di Giacomo Leopardi: Le Poesie e le Prose. 1940. vols 1 & 2 of 5. I Classici Mondadori. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1962.

  12. Leopardi, Giacomo. Poesie e Prose. Volume primo: Poesie. Ed. Mario Andrea Rigoni. Essay by Cesare Galimberti. 1987. Le Opere di Giacomo Leopardi. 4 vols. I Meridiani. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1998.
  13. Giacomo Leopardi was unquestionably the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century. While he was not directly involved in the revolutionary movements which led eventually to the reunification, the strongly idealistic and even (at times) nationalistic tone of much of his poetic work had a huge influence on the generation which attempted to enact these abstractions in reality. Poems such as "Orazione agli Italiani in Occasione della Liberazione del Piceno" [Oration to the Italians on the liberation of Piceno] (1815) were read as more directly prophetic of Mazzini and Garibaldi's aspirations than they were probably meant to be by the poet himself.


    Anthologies & Secondary Literature

  14. Kay, George R., ed. The Penguin Book of Italian Verse: With Plain Prose Translations of Each Poem. 1958. The Penguin Poets. Ed. J. M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960.

  15. Sanguinetti, Edoardo, ed. Poesia Italiana del Novecento. Gli Struzzi, 3. 2 vols. Torino: Einaudi, 1969.
  16. Either of these anthologies can serve as a useful sampler from the immense body of patriotic Italian verse produced during the nineteenth century (alongside the usual reams of love poetry).






Ippolito Nievo (1831-1861)

Novelists:



    Umberto Eco: The Prague Cemetery (2010)


    Umberto Eco (1932-2016)

  1. Eco, Umberto. The Prague Cemetery. 2010. Trans. Richard Dixon. Harvill Secker. London: Random House, 2011.
  2. Umberto Eco's penultimate novel is set against the backdrop of the Italian Risorgimento. The main character, a cynical reactionary called Simone Simonini, encounters the patriotic Italian novelist Ippolito Nievo in Sicily, during Garibaldi's 1860 campaign to liberate of the island:
    Simonini is ordered to destroy some heavily guarded documents in Nievo's possession. He befriends Nievo to gain his confidence - but the papers are too closely guarded. The only way Simonini can think of is to blow up the ship on which Nievo is sailing - sending the papers, Nievo himself and dozens of others to the deeps. Simonini develops an elaborate scheme to smuggle aboard a deranged malcontent with a box of explosives, and bribes a sailor to take part in the scheme, knowing that they would both be killed along with everybody else on the boat. Simonini then stabs to death an accomplice on land who had provided the explosive, to silence him.
    Simonini goes on to engineer the forgery of the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion.


    Giuseppe de Lampedusa: The Leopard, with a Memory and Two Stories (1958 & 1961)


    Giuseppe Tomasi, 11th Prince of Lampedusa (1896-1957)

  3. Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. Il Gattopardo: Edizione conforme al manoscritto del 1957. 1958. Universale Economica Feltrinelli. Milano: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1981.

  4. Lampedusa, Giuseppe di. The Leopard. 1958. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun. 1960. Fontana Modern Novels. London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1969.

  5. Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. I Racconti. 1961. Ed. Nicoletta Polo. Prefazione di Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi. 1988. Universale Economica Feltrinelli. Milano: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1993.

  6. Lampedusa, Giuseppe di. Two Stories and a Memory. 1961. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun. 1962. Introduction by E. M. Forster. The Universal Library. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1968.

  7. Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di. The Siren & Selected Writings. 1961 & 1990-91. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun, David Gilmour, & Guido Waldman. 1962 & 1993. Introductions by David Gilmour. London: The Harvill Press, 1995.

  8. Gilmour, David. The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. 1988. The Harvill Press. London: Random House, 2003.
  9. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is really known only for the one novel he wrote, Il Gattopardo [The Leopard] (1958), set in his native Sicily during Garibaldi's invasion of the island, and not published till after the author's death. Acclaimed as a masterpiece, the book was subsequently filmed by Luchino Visconti. Starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale, The Leopard won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1963.


    Alessandro Manzoni: The Betrothed (1827)


    Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Manzoni (1785-1873)

  10. Manzoni, Alessandro. I Promessi sposi: Edizione Integrale Commentata. 1825-27. Ed. Lanfranco Caretti. Grande Universale Mursia testi, Nuova serie, 16. 1966. Milano: U. Mursia & C., 1972.

  11. Manzoni, Alessandro. The Betrothed: ‘I Promessi sposi.’ A Tale of XVII Century Milan. 1827. Trans. Archibald Colquhoun. 1951. London: The Reprint Society Ltd., 1952.
  12. While Alessandro Manzoni's famous novel I promessi sposi [The Betrothed] (1827) is set in the seventeenth century:
    The novel is also a symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, both for its patriotic message and because it was a fundamental milestone in the development of the modern, unified Italian language.
    Having published it, first, in his native Lombardy in the 1820s, he painstakingly rewrote it in Tuscan dialect - identified by him as the proper model for a modern literary Italian - for republication in 1842. His stanzas on the death of Napoleon, Il Cinque maggio [The Fifth of May] (1821), have become one of the most popular lyrics in the Italian language.


    Ippolito Nievo: The Castle of Fratta (1954)


    Ippolito Nievo (1831-1861)

  13. Nievo, Ippolito. The Castle of Fratta. Trans. Lovett F. Edwards. Illustrated by Eric Fraser. London: The Folio Society, 1954.
  14. Ippolito Nievo, who died young in the shipwreck described in Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery (mentioned above), shortly after taking part in the liberation of Sicily as one of Garibaldi's famous "thousand", is best known for his novel Le Confessioni d'un italiano [Confessions of an Italian], a portion of which was translated into English as The Castle of Fratta in 1954. A complete translation came out from Penguin Classics in 2014. It is widely considered the most important Italian novel of the Risorgimento era.






Carlo Pellegrini: Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909)

Foreigners:



    E. B. Browning: Casa Guidi Windows (1851)


    Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

  1. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. The Poetical Works. Introduction by Alice Meynell. London: Ward, Lock & Co., Limited, n.d.

  2. Kelley, Philip, & Ronald Hudson, ed. Diary by E. B. B.: The Unpublished Diary of Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1831-1832. Including Psychoanalytical Observations by Robert Coles, M. D. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1969.

  3. The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 1845-46. With Portraits and Facsimiles. 2 vols. 1898. New York & London: Harper & Brothers., Publishers, 1926.
  4. Elizabeth Barrett Browning moved to Italy with her husband in 1846, and died in Florence in 1861. She took a passionate interest in the movement for Italian freedom, and wrote an account of her personal experience of the events of 1848-49 in her 1851 poem "Casa Guidi Windows." Shortly before her death she issued:
    a small volume of political poems titled Poems before Congress (1860) "most of which were written to express her sympathy with the Italian cause after the outbreak of fighting in 1859". They caused a furore in England, and the conservative magazines Blackwood's and the Saturday Review labelled her a fanatic.


    Robert Browning (1812-1889)

  5. Browning, Robert. The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. 2 vols in 1. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1872.

  6. Browning, Robert. The Poetical Works, with Portraits. Ed. Augustine Birrell. 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1900.

  7. Browning, Robert. Poetical Works, 1833-1864. Ed. Ian Jack. 1970. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1975.

  8. Browning, Robert. The Poems. Ed. John Pettigrew & Thomas J. Collins. Penguin English Poets. 2 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

  9. Browning, Robert. The Ring and The Book. Ed. Richard D. Altick. 1971. Penguin English Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

  10. Hodell, Charles W., trans & ed. The Old Yellow Book: Source Book of Browning’s “The Ring and the Book”. 1911. Everyman’s Library, 503. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1927.

  11. Browning, Robert. Browning to His American Friends: Letters between the Brownings, the Storys and James Russell Lowell, 1841-1890. Ed. Gertrude Reese Hudson. 1970. London: Bowes and Bowes, 1965.
  12. Robert Browning was perhaps the most 'Italianised' English poet of the nineteenth century. From his first travels there in 1838, looking for material for his book-length poem Sordello to his epic poem The Ring and the Book (1868-69), it stood at the centre of his preoccupations. His poem "The Italian in England" (1845) shows an interestingly detached view of revolutionary politics, but there's no doubt that he sympathised greatly with the movement for Italian independence.


    George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron (1788-1824)

  13. Byron, Lord. The Complete Poetical Works. Volume 1. Ed. Jerome J. McGann. Oxford English Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.

  14. Byron, Lord. The Poetical Works. Ed. Frederick Page. 1904. Rev. ed. 1945. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.

  15. Byron, Lord. Don Juan. Ed. T. G. Steffan, E. Steffan, & W. W. Pratt. Penguin English Poets. 1973. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996.

  16. Byron, George Gordon Noel, Lord. Selected Letters and Journals. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 1982. London: Picador Classics, 1988.

  17. Byron, George Gordon, Lord. Byron's Letters and Journals: The Complete and Unexpurgated Text of All the Letters Available in Manuscript and the Full Printed Version of All Others. 12 vols. Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. London: John Murray, 1973-82.

  18. Longford, Elizabeth. Byron. 1976. London: Arrow Books Limited, 1978.

  19. Origo, Iris. The Last Attachment: the Story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli, as Told in Their Unpublished Letters and Other Family Papers. 1949. The Fontana Library. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1962.
  20. George Gordon, Lord Byron lived in Italy for seven years after the breakup of his marriage in 1816. He moved between the cities of Venice, Ravenna, and Pisa, where he maintained extensive contacts with radicals and revolutionaries from a number of nations, and participated in a lot of vague plotting before settling on the struggle for Greek Independence as his principal cause. This period is chronicled in Peter Quennell's Byron in Italy (1941), as well as the book by Iris Origo listed above. More of a precursor than a participant in the struggle for freedom in Italy. one can't underrate the lasting influence of Byron's example on future poets and writers devoted to the cause.


    A. H. Clough: Amours de Voyage (1858)


    Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861)

  21. Clough, Arthur Hugh. Poems. 1891. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1903.

  22. Clough, Arthur Hugh. The Poems. Ed. A. L. P. Norrington. Oxford Standard Authors. 1967. London: Oxford University Press, 1968.

  23. Thorpe, Michael, ed. A Choice of Clough’s Verse. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1969.
  24. Arthur Hugh Clough's most famous poem Amours de Voyage was written in Rome in 1849, though it wasn't published until 1858. Clough provides us with a surprisingly modern set of reactions to the revolutionary turmoil taking place around him, rather in the manner of Stendhal's account of the Battle of Waterloo in La Chartreuse de Parme (1839).


    Henry James (1843-1916)

  25. Collected Travel Writings. The Continent: A Little Tour in France; Italian Hours; Other Travels. Ed. Richard Howard. The Library of America, 65. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1993.

  26. Kaplan, Fred, ed. Travelling in Italy with Henry James: Essays. A John Curtis Book. London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 1994.

  27. William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections. In Two Volumes (Combined). 1903. London: Thames & Hudson, n.d.

  28. Edel, Leon. Henry James. 5 vols. 1953-72. New York: Avon Books, 1978.
    1. The Untried Years: 1843-1870 (1953)
    2. The Conquest of London: 1870-1881 (1962)
    3. The Middle Years: 1882-1895 (1962)
    4. The Treacherous Years: 1895-1901 (1969)
    5. The Master: 1901-1916 (1972)

  29. Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. Vol. 1: 1843-89. 1953, 1962, 1963. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

  30. Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. Vol. 2. 1963, 1969, 1972. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

  31. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. 1953, 1962, 1963, 1969, 1972 & 1977. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1985.

  32. Lewis, R. W. B. The Jameses: A Family Narrative. 1991. An Anchor Book. New York: Doubleday, 1993.
  33. Henry James's devotion to Italy was profound and life-long, though largely apolitical. His travel book Italian Hours (1909) chronicles forty years of impressions of the country. His contribution to the literature of the Risorgimento comes more from the one biography he wrote, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903), an account of the American sculptor's long stay in Rome from the late 1840s onward. There Story made friends with the Brownings, Walter Savage Landor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, and a host of other travellers and exiles.


    George Meredith: Vittoria (1867)


    George Meredith (1828-1909)

  34. Meredith, George. The Poetical Works. With Some Notes by G. M. Trevelyan. London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1912.
  35. George Meredith spent three months in Italy in 1866, which assisted him in composing Vittoria (a sequel to Emilia in England (1864) - later retitled Sandra Belloni). While not perhaps among his finest works, these two novels - along with many of his poems - show his lifelong love and devotion to Italy.


    Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

  36. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Collected Works. Volume I: Poems, Prose-Tales and Literary Papers. Ed. William M. Rossetti. 2 vols. London: Ellis & Elvey, 1888.

  37. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Collected Works. Volume II: Translations, Prose-Notices of Fine Art. Ed. William M. Rossetti. 2 vols. London: Ellis & Elvey, 1888.

  38. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel. Poems and Translations: 1850-1870. Together with the Prose Story ‘Hand and Soul.’ Oxford Standard Authors. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1913.

  39. Doughty, Oswald, ed. Rossetti’s Poems. 1961. Everyman’s Library, 627. London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd. / New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Inc., 1968.
  40. Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian patriot and poet in exile, married Frances, the daughter of another prominent political exile, Gaetano Polidori, one of whose other sons, Dr John Polidori, was Byron's physician and companion during the famous 'haunted summer' of 1816. They had four children, including the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the critic and editor William Michael Rossetti, and the poet Christina Rossetti, all important figures in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and vital to nineteenth century English literary and artistic culture in general.


    A. C. Swinburne: Songs Before Sunrise (1871)


    Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909)

  41. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Collected Poetical Works. 2 vols. London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1924.

  42. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Poems. Ed. Bonamy Dobrée. The Penguin Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961.

  43. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Poems and Ballads / Atalanta in Calydon. 1866 & 1865. Ed. Morse Peckham. Indianapolis & New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.

  44. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. A Choice of Swinburne’s Verse. Ed. Robert Nye. London: Faber, 1973.

  45. Thomas, Donald. Swinburne: The Poet in His World. 1979. London: Allison & Busby, 1999.
  46. The dissolute English poet Algernon Swinburne's most famous contribution to the struggle to free Italy was his poetry collection Songs Before Sunrise (1871), which continued the themes of his earlier "A Song of Italy". It was partly inspired by his meeting with Mazzini in 1867.


    Illustrated London News: Tennyson meets Garibaldi (1864)


    Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (1809-1892)

  47. Tennyson, Alfred. Poems. London: Edward Moxon, 1853.

  48. Tennyson, Lord Alfred. The Works. 1884. London: Macmillan and Co., 1893.

  49. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. Poems of Tennyson, 1830-1868: Including 'The Princess,' 'In Memoriam,' 'Maud,' Four 'Idylls of the King,' 'Enoch Arden' etc. Introduction by Sir Herbert Warren. Oxford Edition. London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1923.

  50. Tennyson, Alfred, Lord. Poetical Works, Including the Plays. 1953. Oxford Standard Authors. London: Oxford University Press, 1963.

  51. Ricks, Christopher, ed. The Poems of Tennyson. Longmans Annotated English Poets. London & Harlow: Longman, Green and Co, Ltd.. 1969.

  52. Tennyson, Alfred. Tennyson: A Selected Edition. Longmans Annotated English Poets. Ed. Christopher Ricks. 1969. Revised ed. 3 vols. 1987. Selected Edition. 1989. Pearson Longman. Edinburgh Gate: Pearson Education Limited, 2007.

  53. Tennyson, Alfred. Tennyson’s Poetry: Authoritative Texts; Juvenilia and Early Responses; Criticism. Ed. Robert W. Hill, Jr. A Norton Critical edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971.

  54. Lang, Cecil Y., & Edgar F. Shannon, ed. The Letters of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Volume 1: 1821-1850. 1981. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981.

  55. Hallam, Lord Tennyson. Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, by His Son. 1897. 2 vols in 1. London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd., 1899.
  56. Alfred Tennyson's 1851 poem "The Daisy" gives a vivid account of his honeymoon in Italy. Though far less of an "Inglese Italianato" (è un diavolo incarnato) [An Italianised Englishman is a devil incarnate], as the proverb puts it, than many of his contemporaries, he did have a widely publicised meeting with Garibaldi on the Isle of Wight in 1864, and the latter planted a tree to commemorate the event.


    Geoffrey Trease: Follow My Black Plume (1963)


    Geoffrey Trease (1909-1998)

  57. Trease, Geoffrey. Follow My Black Plume. Illustrated by Brian Wildsmith. 1963. Puffin Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972.

  58. Trease, Geoffrey. A Thousand for Sicily. Illustrated by Brian Wildsmith. London: Macmillan & Co. Ltd., 1964.
  59. Geoffrey Trease's pair of historical novels give a lively and nuanced account of the dramatic events of 1849 and 1860 - meant for children, but based firmly on a reading of Trevelyan's trilogy among other works.


    Anthologies & Secondary Literature

  60. Baker, Carlos. Emerson among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait. Ed. Elizabeth B. Carter. Introduction & Epilogue by James R. Mellow. New York: Viking Penguin, 1996.

  61. Morley, John. The Life of William Ewart Gladstone. 1903. Lloyd's Popular Edition. 2 vols. London: Edward Lloyd, Limited, 1908.
  62. The first of these books gives a lively account of Emerson's friend Margaret Fuller's involvement with Italian revolutionary politics over the 1848-49 period. She was a close friend of Mazzini, and had a child with Italian patriot Giovanni Ossoli. All three of them were drowned in a shipwreck in 1850.

    The second gives full details of the circumstances surrounding the composition of Gladstone's Letters to the Earl of Aberdeen (1851), a denunciation of the Bourbon regime in Naples based on a visit to some of the political prisoners in their jails. Gladstone famously described what he saw there as "the negation of God erected into a system of government." This had an immense effect on public opinion throughout Europe.







G. M. Trevelyan with his Father and Son (1910)

George Macaulay Trevelyan
(1876-1962)


  1. England in the Age of Wycliffe, 1368–1520 (1899)

  2. England Under the Stuarts (1904)

  3. The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith (1906)

  4. The Garibaldi Trilogy. 3 vols (1907-1909)
    1. Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic, 1848-9. 1907. A Phoenix Press Paperback. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2001.
    2. Garibaldi and the Thousand (May 1860). 1909. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948.
    3. Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (June-November 1860). 1911. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1948.

  5. [Ed.] The Poetical Works of George Meredith (1912)

  6. The Life of John Bright (1913)

  7. Clio, A Muse and Other Essays (1913)

  8. Scenes From Italy's War (1919)

  9. The Recreations of an Historian (1919)

  10. Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (1920)

  11. British History in the Nineteenth Century, 1782–1901 (1922)

  12. Manin and the Venetian Revolution of 1848 (1923)

  13. History of England (1926)

  14. [Ed.] Select Documents for Queen Anne's Reign, Down to the Union with Scotland 1702-7 (1929)

  15. England Under Queen Anne. 3 vols (1930-34):
    1. Blenheim. 1930. The Fontana Library. London: Collins, 1965.
    2. Ramillies and the Union with Scotland. 1932. The Fontana Library. London: Collins, 1965.
    3. The Peace and the Protestant Succession. 1934. The Fontana Library. London: Collins, 1965.

  16. Sir George Otto Trevelyan: A Memoir (1932)

  17. Grey of Fallodon (1937)

  18. The English Revolution, 1688–1698 (1938)

  19. A Shortened History of England. 1942. A Pelican Book. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964.

  20. Illustrated English Social History. 1942. 4 vols. Volume One: Chaucer’s England & The Early Tudors. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1949.

  21. English Social History. 1942. Illustrated Edition, ed. Ruth C. Wright. 4 vols. 1949-1952. Harmondsworth Penguin, 1964.
    1. Volume One: Chaucer’s England & The Early Tudors
    2. Volume Two: The Age of Shakespeare and the Stuart Period
    3. Volume Three: The Eighteenth Century
    4. Volume Four: The Nineteenth Century

  22. Trinity College: An Historical Sketch (1943)

  23. History and the Reader (1945)

  24. An Autobiography and Other Essays (1949)

  25. [Ed.] Carlyle: An Anthology (1953)

  26. A Layman's Love of Letters (1954)




Saturday, March 03, 2018

Novelists in their 80s



Francois-Joseph Sandmann: Napoléon à Sainte-Hélène (1820)


My brother Ken, one of various novelists in our extended family, once explained to us his intention to stop writing at the age of 60. After that there was a great risk of letting your senile lack of judgement falsify the true nature of your oeuvre, he claimed. He'll be hitting that mark next year, so it'll be interesting to see if he follows his own advice. My bet is he won't.

Nvertheless, I would have to admit that there's a certain amount to be said for this view. Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), for instance, might have been well advised to hang up his spurs before perpetrating, in his sixties, such disappointing works as The Arrow of Gold (1819) or The Rover (1923). James Joyce (1882-1941) died at the age of 60, having finished his work on Finnegans Wake (1939), so we were spared that late epic about the sea he was allegedly intending to write next. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) stopped writing novels in his fifties and switched to poetry, claiming that he now preferred the conciseness attainable in verse as against the sheer heavy lifting required by novels. Herman Melville (1819-1891) stopped writing prose in his forties, though in that case there was the late flowering of Billy Budd, after nearly thirty years of verse writing.

Sixty might be a bit on the conservative side, but what of eighty? Life expectancies (in the developed world, at any rate) have vastly increased with the advent of modern medications against cholesterol, heart disease and a slew of other silent killers. Perhaps 80 is the new 60?

Over the summer I've been reading some novels - by some of my favourite authors - which nicely illustrate this dilemma. They are:

  • Umberto Eco: Numero Zero (2013 / 2015)

  • Tom Keneally: Napoleon's Last Island (2015)

  • Mario Vargas Llosa: The Discreet Hero (2013 / 2015)

(In the case of Eco and Vargas Llosa, the first date in brackets is the date of original publication, the second the date of publication of the English translation).

Umberto Eco was born in 1932, and died in 2016, at the age of 84. Tom Keneally was born in 1935, and is at present 82. Mario Vargas Llosa was born in 1936, and is now 81. Neither of the latter two show any signs of stopping writing: and writing novels, too. Both have published another one since the title listed above. So what are they like, these late works by an Italian polymath, an Australian jack-of-all-trades, and a Peruvian phenomenon? Surprisingly diverse, to be honest.





Umberto Eco, b. 5 January, 1932-d. 19 February, 2016


I have to admit to being a bit blind to the merits of The Name of the Rose when it first burst upon the world in the early 80s. It seemed laboured and over-constructed. I did enjoy the movie, though.

It wasn't until I read Foucault's Pendulum that Eco's true distinction started to dawn on me. It could not be said to be a particularly well-constructed book, either - and it certainly drove away many of The Name of the Rose fans who expected him to continue in the same vein, like a kind of Brother Cadfael for Intellectuals. But the idea of the book was, I thought, brilliantly clever (and prescient, considering how much it predated Dan Brown and his ilk). I began to see how pointless it was to judge Eco by the standards of other writers: he demanded his own style of reading, as cerebral as he was himself, but with a strong streak of emotional vulnerability hidden away inside somewhere.

The Island of the Day Before is probably my favourite of all of his fictions. Again, it was very clever - but the various intermeshing plots seemed to spin more smoothly than Foucault's Pendulum. He was clearly learning on the job. Baudolino and The Prague Cemetery were less pleasing. While full of rich material, they seemed more predictable and linear than their predecessors.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana was an exception to this tendency, however. It's hard not to admire the portrait he paints there of a disintegrating mind - the suspicion that some of it might be autobiographical added particular poignancy to the novel.

Numero Zero has the makings of a brilliant book. The idea of painting a counter-history of post-war Italy based on the conceit that Mussolini did not in fact die, but went on hiding in the Vatican for many decades more, is an excellent (though disconcerting) one, and the portrait Eco provides of the world of petty journalism and jobbing writers that constitutes mid-century Italy's New Grub Street is similarly interesting. It is, nevertheless, a terrible piece of writing.

Why? Because it's too short to hold up the weight of its central conceit - because the conversations sound like lecture fragments, and the characters like stick figures in a powerpoint presentation - because he resorts to the most desperate mystery story cliches to finish off this albatross of a narrative. Because, in short, he lacked the energy and time to complete it, and yet somehow managed to persuade himself that it still merited publication.

It's a sad coda to the life work of a unique and brilliant writer. Should we have been allowed to read it? Curiosity was probably always going to commit it to some kind of publication. I suppose the real problem is that it appeared during his lifetime rather than posthumously. A preface apologising for its brevity and lack of finish would have ensured a much better reception, though, I would have thought.



Umberto Eco: Numero Zero (2015)


    Umberto Eco (1932-2016)

  1. The Name of the Rose. 1980. Trans. William Weaver. 1983. London: Picador, 1984.

  2. Reflections on The Name of the Rose. 1983. Trans. William Weaver. 1984. London: Secker & Warburg, 1985.

  3. Foucault's Pendulum. 1988. Trans. William Weaver. London: Secker & Warburg, 1989.

  4. The Island of the Day Before. 1994. Trans. William Weaver. 1995. Minerva. London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1996.

  5. Baudolino. 2000. Trans. William Weaver. 2002. London: Vintage Books, 2003.

  6. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. 2004. Trans. Geoffrey Brock. 2005. London: Vintage Books, 2006.

  7. The Prague Cemetery. 2010. Trans. Richard Dixon. Harvill Secker. London: Random House, 2011.

  8. Numero Zero. 2015. Trans. Richard Dixon. Harvill Secker. London: Vintage, 2015.






Eva Rinaldi: Thomas Keneally, b. 7 October, 1935 (aged 82)


So, if we take Umberto Eco's last novel as a vote against publishing such late fictions, what of Thomas (now 'Tom') Keneally's next-to-latest tome, Napoleon's Last Island?

I have to admit that, after a somewhat shaky start, I came to love this book. It seemed to me to combine all of Keneally's virtues, and very few of his faults. This despite that fact that the tale of Betsy Balcombe and her relationship with the ex-Emperor is a familiar one. I remember seeing a television play based on the story when I was a teenager, and it's come up for me in a number of other contexts since.

I think the first book I read by Keneally was his wonderful American Civil War epic Confederates. His command of the vernacular and incidental detail seemed to me superior to anything I'd read before about that war, even by bona fide American authors. It was his talent for ventriloquism which first impressed me about him, then.

After that I read desultorily in his work: the books which had been made into films (Schindler's Ark, Gossip from the Forest), and also the ones about Antarctica (The Survivor, A Victim of the Aurora). In all these cases I was struck by how much better they were than they had to be. That sounds a bit paradoxical, but what I mean is that there's a kind of middle style and general competence which many novelists evolve and which drags them through their day-today labours. It sounds terrible, but they don't really pull out the stops unless they absolutely have to.

Keneally was not at all like that. Each new challenge seemed to fill him with gusto. He clearly relished the difficulty of interpreting unlikely characters, and entering strange and alien environments. Reluctant to repeat himself, he remained on the lookout for fresh woods and pastures new.

In the case of Napoleon's Last Island, this has led him to concoct an excellent pastiche of Jane Austen's prose-style and psychological penetration, set in the strange landscape of the tiny mid-Atlantic island of St. Helena. Betsy Balcombe has a good deal in common with Pride and Prejudice's Elizabeth Bennett, with the Emperor as a kind of super Darcy, and even a long-suffering older sister to provide her with a foil.

The dramatic nature of the story leads one to expect a kind of costume drama potboiler, but Keneally's interests seem altogether elsewhere: in the oddities of human psychology as shown under stress, and in the paradox of the man of destiny reduced to an atom in the sea of humanity, but still somehow retaining his uncanny charisma and fascination. Like Foucault's Pendulum, Napoleon's Last Island appears to have disappointed a good many admirers of Keneally's Australian epics: but it's an admirably subtle piece of work for all that.

Chalk that up as a vote for keeping up with your craft even as you approach your ninth decade, then. (The list of his works below is only a selection, I should emphasise: the books by him that have ended up in my collection. A full listing would occupy many more pages).



Tom Keneally: Napoleon's Last Island (2015)


    Thomas Keneally (1935- )

  1. The Fear. 1965. London: Quartet Books, 1973.

  2. Bring Larks and Heroes. 1967. London: Quartet Books, 1973.

  3. Three Cheers for the Paraclete. 1968. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.

  4. The Survivor. 1969. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.

  5. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. 1972. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.

  6. Blood Red, Sister Rose. 1974. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1976.

  7. Gossip from the Forest. London: Collins, 1975.

  8. Season in Purgatory. Sydney: Book Club Associates, 1976.

  9. A Victim of the Aurora. London: Collins, 1977.

  10. Passenger. London: Collins, 1979.

  11. Confederates. 1979. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1981.

  12. The Cut-Rate Kingdom. 1980. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin Books Australia, 1984.

  13. Schindler’s Ark. 1982. London: Coronet Books, 1983.

  14. Searching for Schindler. 2007. A Vintage Book. Sydney: Random House Australia Pty Ltd., 2008.

  15. The Playmaker. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1987.

  16. A River Town. Port Melbourne, Victoria: William Heinemann Australia, 1995.

  17. Napoleon's Last Island. A Vintage Book. Sydney: Random House Australia Pty Ltd., 2015.

  18. Crimes of the Father. 2016. A Vintage Book. Sydney: Random House Australia Pty Ltd., 2017.





Mario Vargas Llosa, b. 28 March, 1936 (aged 81)


So what of that wondrous, protean genius Mario Vargas Llosa? He's not the best known of the great writers of the Latin American "boom" of the sixties and seventies (it took him until 2010 to win the Nobel Prize his near-contemporary Gabriel García Márquez was awarded as far back as 1982), but he is - to my mind, at least - the best of them.

Year after year, decade after decade, he's produced a dazzling series of works, constantly reinventing himself and experimenting with new style: after the majestic, quasi-Faulknerian gravitas of those first three socio-historical novels The City and the Dogs, The Green House and Conversation in the Cathedral, he post-modernised himself into the prankster of Pantaleon and the Special Service and the autobiographical Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter.

How I pored over his works while working on my Doctoral thesis on European Images of South American in the late 1980s! The book I was writing about, The War of the End of the World seemed to combine the virtues of both his late and his early style: the trickster in bed with the sociologist at last.

It wasn't for a long long time that he attained similar heights, however. He stood (unsuccessfully) for President of Peru in the late 80s, and his work seemed to suffer somewhat from the increasingly public nature of his life. His politics, too, had gone far to the right to the point that he was hardly on speaking terms with many of his former literary comrades in arms.

None of the books he wrote during these years was unreadable or unchallenging in its way (even the quasi-soft porn of In Praise of the Stepmother and The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto), but it wasn't really until his dictator-novel (almost the classic Latin American subgenre) The Feast of the Goat appeared in 2001 that he really amazed the world again.

The Way to Paradise and The Dream of the Celt are both good ficto-biographies in their own right, but they hardly seemed up to the standard of his earlier work. The Discreet Hero is not among his masterworks, either, but it's a fascinating read for the fans (in particular).

Those of you who've read Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter will recall how the latter's scripts start to fold in on themselves, with characters appearing in the wrong contexts and contaminating the plotlines with unexpected interventions. So many of Vargas Llosa's own old characters - Lituma, Don Rigoberto, the 'Stepmother' herself - turn up in this novel that one has, at times, the odd feeling that the whole thing is set in Vargas-Llosa-land rather than any kind of recognisable Peru.

His obsession with the provincial Peru of the 1950s, its constant recurrence in its work, is supplanted here by an rather more 'contemporary' Lima and Piura. The characters all seem to live in the past, however: his past, Vargas Llosa's, rather more than their own.

The novel is neatly plotted and full of unexpected treats - though perhaps more for readers familiar with his work than any newcomers. The playfulness may seem a little forced at times, the virtuosity a bit tired, but there's no doubt that Vargas Llosa at his worst (and this book is a long way from his worst - The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, say) is still superior to most other novelists at their best.

Would he, too, be wise to give up this strange compulsion to dream on paper and call the end-result art? I don't think so, no. The Feast of the Goat came after such a long dry spell that most critics had already written him off. I'm not expecting anything as good as that to come up again, but then, the essence of the unexpected is that you don't expect it. Who can say what the future holds for Mario Vargas Llosa? I hope not something as sad as Numero Zero, but it may well contain something as luminous and strange as Napoleon's Last Island.

Let's just say that as long as he's writing, I'll be reading (and buying). To hell with nay-sayers and agists! One can write a bad book at any age - and (I firmly believe) go on to redeem it with a good one. And always in the wings shimmers the alluring prospect of a Billy Budd, that late, redemptive masterpiece that comes out of left field - albeit often posthumously - to astonish the world ...



Mario Vargas Llosa: The Discreet Hero (2015)


    Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa (1936- )

  1. Vargas Llosa, Mario. The Cubs and Other Stories. 1965 & 1967. Trans. Gregory Kolovakos & Ronald Christ. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1979.

  2. The Time of the Hero. 1962. Trans. Lysander Kemp. 1966. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1986.

  3. The Green House. 1965. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. 1968. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1986.

  4. Conversation in the Cathedral. 1969. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. 1975. London: Faber, 1993.

  5. Captain Pantoja and the Special Service. 1973. Trans. Gregory Kolovakos & Ronald Christ. 1978. London: Faber, 1987.

  6. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. 1977. Trans. Helen R. Lane. 1982. Picador. London: Pan Books Ltd., 1984.

  7. The War of the End of the World. 1981. Trans. Helen R. Lane. 1984. London: Faber, 1986.

  8. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta. 1984. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. 1986. London: Faber, 1987.

  9. Who Killed Palomino Molero? 1986. Trans. Alfred MacAdam. 1987. London: Faber, 1989.

  10. The Storyteller. 1987. Trans. Helen Lane. 1989. London: Faber, 1990.

  11. In Praise of the Stepmother. 1988. Trans. Helen Lane. 1990. London: Faber, 1992.

  12. Death in the Andes. 1993. Trans. Edith Grossman. 1996. London: Faber, 1997.

  13. The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto. 1997. Trans. Edith Grossman. 1998. London: Faber, 1999.

  14. The Feast of the Goat. 2001. Trans. Edith Grossman. 2002. London: Faber, 2003.

  15. The Way to Paradise. 2003. Trans. Natasha Wimmer. London: Faber, 2003.

  16. The Bad Girl: A Novel. 2006. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.

  17. The Dream of the Celt. 2010. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Faber, 2012.

  18. The Discreet Hero. 2013. Trans. Edith Grossman. London: Faber, 2015.

  19. The Neighbourhood. 2016. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Friday, April 01, 2016

Worried about the Illuminati?



No? Well, you probably should be!

There’s a wonderful scene in the film version of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons where Ewan McGregor, who’s acting as a kind of Vatican caretaker while the Cardinals are locked up in conclave to elect a new Pope, is attacked by a madman with a red-hot branding iron.

“Illuminatus!” cries Ewan, as his flesh burns. Yes, his assailant is indeed one of the Illuminati, fresh from the late eighteenth century (where we might have hoped they’d all be resting in peace).

As it turns out, there aren’t any actual Illuminati in the movie. Tom Hanks, reprising his role as Harvard Professor of “Symbology” Robert Langdon from The Da Vinci Code (2003 / movie 2006), manages to detect the subterfuge and discover that Ewan has actually branded himself as part of his complicated plan to subvert the Papacy.



It’s funny how those elusive Illuminati recur – mostly as villains, admittedly. My local fish ’n’ chip shop keeps a pile of tattered magazines to read while you’re waiting for your order. I think it was in the Australian Women’s Weekly that I learned that Beyoncé Knowles is one of the Illuminati. Apparently she’s been making pyramid shapes with her hands at recent concerts, which is a sure-fire sign of being an initiate (presumably this was before she took to dressing like a Black Panther instead).



The pop group Coldplay, too, has been displaying strange flower symbols on their drumkits of late. The author of the article thought there was a good chance that joining the Illuminati might well become the latest Hollywood craze, in succession to Scientology and Kabbalah. Rihanna’s “Umbrella” video, too, is apparently full of similar occult references to her dark master, the Devil.



Probably the most sophisticated treatment of this theme is in Umberto Eco’s great novel Foucault’s Pendulum. His two protagonists, Belbo and Casaubon, deliberately cook up the most outrageous mixture of Occultist conspiracy theories possible – complete with Templars, Rosicrucians, the Priory of Sion, and every other conceivable permutation on the general theme of Gnosticism – and then invent a fictitious rendezvous for the whole strange crew.

Sure enough, when the two turn up at the appointed meeting place under Léon Foucault’s famous Pendulum in the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris, there they all are. Belbo and Casaubon’s fertile invention has somehow succeeded in creating the very absurdities it set out to parody. Casaubon manages to escape through the sewers, but his companion is hanged from the wire of the pendulum, changing (significantly) the arc of its world-defining rotation.

Eco’s multi-layered, multiple game-playing book can be seen, in retrospect (somewhat like Cervantes’ Don Quixote), to have predated many of the worst excesses of the genre it parodies. True, Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln’s The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982), with its theory of the descent of the French Merovingian Kings from Jesus Christ (via his common-law wife Mary Magdalene), was already a bestseller. The massive vogue of Dan Brown was yet to come, however, and public knowledge of these ideas was thus not yet universal.



Umberto Eco: Foucault's Pendulum (1988)


It was a bit of a shock to me to discover just how far things had gone, though, when I when I found myself reading an online article on Illuminati symbolism in Australia. They're everywhere, apparently - not just in the old world, but here in the new world, too!

The trouble, of course, with all this heavy tongue-in-cheek irony, is that people have a tendency to take it straight. For the record, then, I do not believe that latter-day Illuminati have subverted all our democratic institutions and are secretly plotting to take over the world (though for that matter, they're welcome to have a go, as far as I'm concerned - it's hard to see how they could do a worse job than the present lot ...)



What does interest me about them is that strange penumbra of omnipurpose, one-size-fits-all conspiracy theory they exhude: sometimes it's the Templars, sometimes the Cathars, sometimes the Priory of Sion, only too often (unfortunately) the Elders of Zion, but always (we're told) there's a bunch of idiots somewhere dressing up in strange robes and painting their faces with symbols and having wild parties to which none of us happen to have been invited (unless some of you reading really are members of the international Illuminatist Frater / Sorority, in which case apologies).



I suppose it's all harmless enough: I mean, is any conspiracy worthy of the name really going to centre on Beyoncé? No offence, and I suppose the name of her former girl-group Destiny's Child might be seen as a bit of a clue, really, when you think about it ... Huh? What's that? ... a scratching at the window ... that hand! ... what are they chanting? ... Ngaah, Nyarlathotep ... NOOOOOO! ... Aaaaargh ... [CRASH]

[We publish this blogpost just as it was found on the author's computer, complete with those last few meaningless lines. Of course, it can only be regarded as a coincidence that he was interrupted by some intruder or intruders unknown just at the moment he was recording the results of his own investigations into the Illuminati in New Zealand. To draw any other conclusion can only be regarded as absurd and baseless paranoia ... - Ed.]