Trolling too hard to be a true poco.

I recently re-read Ford Madox Ford’s great novel The Good Soldier (the saddest story, but pure joy!) and came across this sentence near the end describing the casual lifestyles of the local gentry: “It is queer the fantastic things that quite good people will do in order to keep up their appearance of calm pococurantism.”

I’m sure I knew what pococurantism meant at some point — I last read The Good Soldier thirty or so years ago — but I pulled a blank here and had to pull out the dictionary. As a noun, pococurante is defined as a careless or indifferent person, someone who displays a lack of concern. As an adjective, someone who is careless, nonchalant or apathetic. It comes from the Italian poco (“little”) and curante (present participle of “to care,” or “caring”).

In fact, it’s a word with a solid literary pedigree. In Voltaire’s Candide there’s a Senator Pococurante and Laurence Sterne uses it Tristram Shandy. As near as I can tell, it’s traditionally been used to carry a negative connotation. A pococurante is an idle person who’s not doing anyone any good. Perhaps someone shirking their duties and responsibilities. When the Ashburnhams in Ford’s novel affect the appearance of “calm pococurantism” it’s a bit like conspicuous comfort and being above it all. Or, as a former first lady’s coat once put it, “I really don’t care. Do U?”

But I like to see pococurantes in a more positive light. Isn’t pococurantism a little like the classical Greek notion of ataraxia? Or the modern cool? Still, there are moments where one should be cool and care, as Thomas Pynchon once put it. In such cases the word, which sounds silly enough, still makes a handy pejorative.

Words, words, words

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth

By Elizabeth Williamson

Page I bailed on: 44

Verdict: I really wanted to like this one, but it turned out to be not what I was expecting. There was too much stuff on the families coping with the tragedy, a lot of which felt overwritten (“Neil carried his grief like hard water in a metal container, blunting its corrosive power by staying in motion . . .”). What I was looking for was something more in-depth on the rise of conspiracy culture in politics and the media, which is where Williamson was heading but she was taking way too long getting there. I skimmed ahead a bit, but the book came out just before the first of Alex Jones’ trials so it all felt a bit behind the times. Then there was an extra point off for putting “American Tragedy” in the title. Wasn’t that the name of Matthew Lysiak’s Newtown book? It was.

So not a bad book, from what I read of it, but not one that I thought was going to repay the time spent finishing it. A longish magazine article might have handled the subject just as well. It’s quite a tome, going on for nearly 450 pages, and I couldn’t see myself hanging in there.

The DNF files

(1) The standard line on The Taming of the Shrew is that it’s a play that needs to be seen in performance. It’s a lot of fun when you see it live, but a chore to read. This is borne out by the evidence of its consistent popularity on stage over the centuries while not being studied much.

Then there’s the fact that the text as we have it is a mess. It may be that we were supposed to get more Christopher Sly interspersed throughout the play and at the end. Also, the already more-than-confusing-enough mash of secondary characters who adopt new identities is made worse by the way a couple of the roles (Hortensio and Tranio) seem to have bled into each other at some point. All of this is easier to follow on stage than it is on the page, especially when some streamlining helps sort things out.

That said, I remember an acquaintance of mine going to see it at Stratford years ago and saying that she hadn’t understood much of it and didn’t think any of it was funny. This is one of Shakespeare’s most accessible works (again, on stage) and I figured if that production wasn’t working then there must have been a problem. But I can also understand her feeling that way regardless. Biondello’s description of Petruchio’s horse, for example, is one of the highlights, but it’s impossible for any modern audience to understand. It might as well have been written in Old Church Slavonic.

(2) Petruchio’s ambition “to wive it wealthily in Padua” is a great line (and song too), but just why is he so fixated on the bottom line? He’s after the money and he doesn’t care who knows that “wealth is burden of my wooing dance.” The fact that marriages at the time were primarily economic arrangements has been said to justify his mercenary motives on the grounds of realism, and to be sure Bianca is basically auctioned off. But Petruchio seems, at least to me, to go over a line, especially since he’s already a man of independent means. “My father dead, my fortune lives for me,” he tells us. He has been “Left solely heir to all his lands and goods, / Which I have bettered rather than decreased.” In the 2005 BBC modernization they rationalize his character by having him inherit nothing from his father but a dilapidated mansion and an ancient title. He reallly needs the money. But that’s not in Shakespeare’s play.

So why then such an insistence on a rich bride? I think he’s just that kind of guy. He’s not romantic, but a climber who knows his worth and is looking to increase it through marriage, which is just another deal to be won, to come out bettered rather than decreased. Is this something Katherina sees in him, and respects and approves of? The end of the play is usually read as Petruchio and Katherina recognizing each other as soul mates, and that may be true in a not very nice way.

(3) A lot of one’s response to the play depends on how you read Katharina’s final speech on the necessity of a wife’s submission to her husband. Are we to take it straight, or as her being ironic? And if the latter, how ironic?

Tony Tanner is one critic who says the speech “cannot be heard as irony,” but it still seems to me that she’s putting it on. Such a reading is prepared for by the Induction, when the page boy Bartholomew is instructed in how to play a dutiful lady. Then Petruchio’s tyrannical “taming” or training exercises (gaslighting well avant la lettre) have made the point that life, at least public life, is all a show anyway. That seems to always come up in Shakespeare, and the fact that this is such an early play means it’s presented in starker terms than it usually is.

The thing is, we tend not to like people who are looking to reshape our reality like this. We see them, justifiably, as both cynical and up to something. On the other hand, their cynicism is often justified. All the world’s a stage and they’re the playwrights, directors, and theatre-owners who get to make all the rules. At least until they bomb, or the stage burns down.

A homeless man is found shot dead in an abandoned building. The word most often used to describe such people in these books is “tramp,” and I thought for a moment that Maigret and the Tramp would have been a better title for this one but then remembered that it had already been used.

As with the previous tramp, the victim here just walked out of his marriage and his old life, only to end up as a Parisian crime statistic some twenty years later. The mystery unravels in the usual perfunctory manner of the later Maigret novels. As a reader, Simenon doesn’t even let you play along because he just skims over any necessary information. Indeed, at one point I was surprised to find Maigret looking for a suspect who he described as very tall and thin with a long face and blue eyes. When I went back I couldn’t find where Maigret had got this description from, as the suspect had only been described as looking “very upright” by the first witness. A second witness, at least in his initial interview, doesn’t mention seeing anyone with the victim at all, but Maigret later calls him back in to identify the suspect. I feel like I missed something here, and probably did.

In any event, it doesn’t matter because a clue like that – a tall, thin man with blue eyes – doesn’t mean anything to a reader until you come to a later description of a character as a tall, thin man with blue eyes. At which point you know that’s the guy. Throw in the fact that this suspect and his wife sleep in separate bedrooms (always a bad sign in Maigret’s world) and the detective chief inspector has got his man. It’s all automatic and not very interesting, which by this point shouldn’t come as any surprise.

Maigret index

Murder Book: A Graphic Memoir of a True Crime Obsession

By Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell

Page I bailed on: 165

Verdict: Wasn’t my thing. Every artist has their own style, and since Campbell has risen to what I reckon is the top of her profession – a cartoonist for The New Yorker – then it’s pretty clear hers is working for her. But for me the slapdash drawing, which extends to lettering that in places is so sloppy I had trouble reading it because the letters were so poorly formed or spaced, didn’t seem expressive of much. It fits with all of the verbal tics and mannerisms of a generational voice, but that’s the best I can say for it. And that voice, while I could understand it, was something I didn’t relate to. The ironic self-awareness that comes with mocking millennials and their narcissism, while very much indulging the same, gets on my nerves. The whole genre of true-crime memoir does that too.

I want to emphasize though that in saying it’s not my thing I’m not saying it’s bad. I just didn’t feel like I was the target audience here. This feeling began on the first page, where Campbell welcomes us to her Murder Book by saying that you (the reader) must have bought it because you love murder, are a murderer, or are “trying to understand why your wife/girlfriend/daughter/niece/aunt/partner loves murder.” She says this because the audience for true crime is “mostly female.” Which is kind of off-putting, if you’re a man.

After a while, the whole “Fuck the patriarchy!” bit (yes, she says that, or yells it in bold caps) became tiresome and then started to grate. When Campbell mentions how Ted Bundy approached his victims and introduced himself using his real first name it’s presented as evidence of “how confident men are.” Huh? That’s a man thing? And why was Bundy successful at picking up women? Not because he was good-looking and intelligent but because he played to their sympathy and “Women, partly because most of us are decent human beings and partly because we’re socialized to be helpful, want to help those in need.” Campbell gives this another wink by saying it’s a “blanket statement, I know,” but it’s something you still hear a lot and I don’t really get it. Men aren’t socialized to be helpful or to want to help those in need? When Bundy presents himself as a security officer to another victim she goes along with him because “Women are taught to trust authority, not to question it.” It was just after this that I gave up and didn’t even bother skimming the rest. Women still hold views like this in the 2020s? Campbell’s obsession with the 1970s may go a lot deeper than she thinks.

The DNF files

(1) Yes, Lear is more sinned against than sinning. But only just. Throughout the twentieth century critics started judging him more harshly, and that’s a turn we may not have seen the back of.

He really doesn’t start off well. We begin with an exercise in flattery, the pre-eminent sin of court life back then (whenever then was) as it is now. Today I think we may be less likely to feel sympathy for the old guy. Lear is a familiar type: enjoying living in a bubble of privilege maintained by his wealth, power, and celebrity. In olden days this was an exalted condition pretty much exclusive to royalty. The monarch or lord of the manor could surround himself with people who would only tell him what he wanted to hear. When, late in the play, Lear complains that “they told me I was everything: ‘tis a lie, I am not ague-proof,” he seems doubly shocked in a way that’s startling. Is he put out because his courtiers lied to him, or to find that he is not ague-proof? Either way, he must have been pretty far gone to have put any stock in such flattery. Admittedly he’s quite old, and has probably lived in this bubble his entire life, but still. I think today the lesson would be the familiar one (to us) that you’re in trouble when you start believing in your own publicity.

Then again, why not? If you have enough money you can afford to buy your own version of reality. Lear’s house, Lear’s rules. It’s wrong to think of Lear as being entirely foolish here. He has a plan for the succession, it’s just that he’s not used to being crossed. Then the problems start when the plan comes apart in a way he hadn’t anticipated. The illusion machine stops being greased and the posse of riotous retainers instantly disappears. This is the madness that Lear fears: not that the world will stop making sense but that his world will stop making sense, will indeed fall to pieces.

This strikes me as being a message that’s still very much relevant to our own time, and one that’s just as disturbing today to think about. Put simply: wouldn’t it be better to maintain the illusion, even knowing it to be all a lie, and self-awareness be damned? This is the lesson of Plato’s parable of the cave. We all live in a world of make-believe, after all. Cordelia is just ruining it for everyone, and upsetting Lear’s actually rather careful plans for the succession, by not playing along.

This gets to the question of how much Lear actually believes in all of this court bullshit. “Thy truth then be thy dower,” is how he condemns Cordelia. I wonder if “thy truth” is related to what we mean today when we say people speak “their truth.” In any event, he’s saying that if that’s the way she wants to play it then she doesn’t get a cookie. So much for the truth. Cornwall is even more cynical when faced with Kent’s plain speaking:

This is some fellow
Who, having been praised for bluntness, doth affect
A saucy roughness, and constrains the garb
Quite from his nature. He cannot flatter, he:
An honest mind and plain, he must speak truth!
And they will take it, so: if not, he’s plain.
These kind of knaves I know, which in this plainness
Harbour more craft and more corrupter ends
Than twenty silly ducking observants
That stretch their duties nicely.

This actually echoes something Lear says in the first scene where he refers to Cordelia’s “pride, which she calls plainness,” but takes it even further. I wonder what’s worse: to not believe that people can speak truth, or to rage against it when they do? Cornwall’s way of thinking is more dangerous to the social order because nobody can be trusted (except to lie out of self-interest), while Lear’s is more dangerous to himself because it leaves him exposed when reality comes knocking. Either way, I think Lear comes off looking worse. He’s a spoiled old fool in the first act, and even out on the heath seems a bit too much like a child having a tantrum. Someone who rides on a tiger can never dismount, and if you live in a bubble you can never leave.

(2) Why so much interest in sexual matters, expressed in such lurid terms? This doesn’t seem to me to be a play about sexual passion at all. The only lusty ones on stage are the “murderous lechers” Goneril and Regan, and their feelings toward Edmund are not reciprocated as he’s indifferent to which of them he’ll end up with. But then there’s Edgar. As Poor Tom he implies, I think, that he’s lost his mind to syphilis, his downfall the result of having lived a life of dissolution (one who “slept in the contriving of lust, and waked to do it”). This is also connected indirectly to Gloucester. When Edgar reveals himself to Edmund at the end he says that “The dark and vicious place where thee he got [that is, where Gloucester begot Edmund, presumably in a brothel] / Cost him his eyes.” This may be another indirect nod to syphilis but it’s also just Edgar being moralistic again and looking to find some way to interpret what happened to Gloucester as effect following cause. I don’t think we need to follow his lead and draw the conclusion that some critics do: that Gloucester’s blindness is the wages of sin (in his case the physical sin of lechery). But aside from Edmund having been begotten between unlawful sheets some twenty or more years earlier where else is Gloucester’s lechery in evidence? This isn’t Ibsen’s Ghosts. (Marjorie Garber is one critic who has it in for Gloucester, saying that he has “been established in the play as the ‘old lecher’.” But the words “old lecher” are only a bit of figurative language used by the Fool and are not necessarily directed at Gloucester.)

Lear is more direct and forceful in his language, raging right up to the end about animal lechery. Below the waistline there’s only hell: “there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous burning, scalding, stench, consumption. Fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah!” This reminds me of Hamlet always being distracted by thoughts of his mother and Claudius romping in incestuous sheets (he even repeats the “Fie on’t! O fie!”). Hamlet’s father has to warn him about tainting his mind in this way. But to return to what bugs me: we expect this kind of language from Othello given the kind of things Iago is whispering in his ear, and even to some extent Hamlet, but why does Lear go down this road?

Such imaginings are the ravings of an unbalanced mind. Hamlet and Lear are getting carried away and finding in the language of runaway lust a sort of mental release valve. Claudius, Goneril, and Regan are villains who need to get their comeuppance, but their greatest sins aren’t lechery (and there’s no indication Lear is aware of his daughters’ chasing after Edmund anyway). Hamlet thinks Claudius a satyr but there’s little to no evidence for that, and he even acknowledges that the heyday of his mother’s blood is tame and humble so that she isn’t being driven by her hormones. Hamlet’s the only one who sees things in these terms, just as Lear is. And in many ways I find Lear’s raging about sex even stranger. I saw an interview with Ian McKellen where he was talking about playing Lear and musing over the same thing. He likened it to his elderly mother-in-law’s fascination with sex just before she died, and found it to be true of other old people as well. Is there anything more to it than that? Anthony Burgess speculated that the screaming against lechery (“totally without pretext in the plot”) might have been connected to Shakespeare suffering from venereal disease. Perhaps. In any event, I don’t think Shakespeare wants us to believe that bad people are all bad in the same predictable, bestial ways.

(3) In a footnote in his book on Shakespearean Tragedy A. C. Bradley dips a toe into the matter of linking Shakespeare’s biography to the writing of King Lear and draws the following tentative conclusion: “Shakespeare during these years was probably not a happy man, and it is quite likely that he felt at times even an intense melancholy, bitterness, contempt, anger, possibly even loathing and despair.”

Shakespeare changed his sources to give the play its unhappy ending, one that mocks the idea of poetic justice. This was so shocking and ahead of its time that for a couple of hundred years it had to be cleaned up. But it was obviously quite deliberate because that notion of poetic or divine justice is directly invoked only to be slapped down again and again. This really was a point Shakespeare was insisting on.

I don’t think Shakespeare believed in poetic justice outside of what would play well. He seems to have had a cynical view of how justice works. It crops up here in several places. Lear himself talks about how if “change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?” Only “Place sins with gold / And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks.” Goneril has learned well from her father, and when confronted by Albany with proof of her own evil she can be dismissive: “the laws are mine, not thine: Who can arraign me for’t.” That’s not a question.

Justice, like truth, is something everybody expects can be bought.

Over the years I’ve been posting on words I’ve come across that I didn’t know but found kind of interesting. Here’s a list (not alphabetical, but in order of posting) that I’ll keep updating as I go along:

Catena and Pulvinate
Lethiferous
Equitation and Toxophilite
Oscitant
Azoic
Graticule
Dehiscence
Raddled
Pococurante
Gurning
Gulosity
Daven
Taradiddles
Virga
Shiver
Hassock
Infandous
Grawlix
Cataphonic
Lingamic
Simous
Lemniscate
Orectic