'Send thy ninety cats, let them hasten and come bite the heart of King Mathias'
It has been exactly a year, give or take, since I started Wolf Tree, and also a year exactly, to the day, since my beautiful Eliza died, so I am proud and unhappy and I wish the anniversaries fell a little further apart. But they don’t! You want to know how I feel about that, you can read Johnson on the Vanity of Human Wishes. I don’t feel as Johnson does, ‘Obedient passions, and a will resign’d’ are objects of no interest to me, but reading him will make you tired and mournful, just like me.
I have fewer readers than I deserve but many more than I expected to, and I treasure every one, and a lot of you weren’t here at the very beginning. For that reason I am going to trot out an assortment of wolves Tree, if you will, that I wrote in the last year and that I particularly liked or that I don’t think anybody properly appreciated at the time. So as not to waste the time of the faithful, I pad them out with a few original lines, just for show.
Maurice Sendak, together with Randall Jarrell and Hans Christian Andersen, make up the Three Dead Men I am sworn to love and protect, and by putting my ear to the ground I can hear wicked words spoken about any of them anywhere on the Earth and must fly at once in my enchanted flying salt-cellar to defend them.
Let me tell you how much I love Randall Jarrell:
I love him so much that I love his essay worrying over how little is left in the minds of contemporary American schoolchildren of that great body of common Western cultural knowledge that one used to find there, or used to expect to find. — contemporary being 1960-something or even earlier, when, as he notes in an innocent line, winters were less snowy than once they were, because, they say, (he says), that the climate is changing. And it’s true, he says, that generation after generation everyone says the same thing, about schoolchildren and about the snows of yesteryear, both so much less impressive than the ones we remember. But what if it’s different this time?
The climate has been a settled question for a while now but schoolchildren are not, schoolchildren are always unsettled. Jarrell’s is more contemplative and subtle-minded than these kinds of complaints usually are — it really is an essay, not an expanded complaint — and it has much less of the harrumpusing and grumpusing middle-aged man about it than those usually do. He is not one of your Bill Bennetian cultural literacy types; he is not coding in anything about the superiority of white men over anyone else; he means what he says and he is reasonably subtle but not a snake. At least: I believe this to be so, but it is my opinion and not a fact; you can condemn this kind of disturbed nostalgia if you see evil shapes in it I don’t, or don’t see jokes I do. And you may.
But my favorite part of it is Randall Jarrell's melancholy over how it can be that eighth-grade girls don't seem to known who Charlemagne was, no matter how how many times he asks them. If he were still alive, or if he is listening now, I should like him to know that when I was in eighth grade, though it was a few generations later and an even more degenerate time, I did know who Charlemagne was. I have that distinction still! Ah yes, Big Charles, I would have said importantly, had Randall come to me; I know him.
and then Vreeland tells of the grand old men of Buda-Pest before the war, who put kohl around their eyes and enhanced the hollows of their clean and shining faces, as the Rumanians did
By the Danube in the days of Erzebet Bathory—who would probably not have killed me, or only would have done so faute de mieux, as she preferred tall girls and I am but middle-heighted and slump-shouldered, which has saved me from vampires all my life—there lived “zibellines and panthers, snow leopards, beavers, martens, lynxes and bears,” and still some aurochs; so says Valentine Penrose in LA COMTESSE SANGLANTE. One hunted the last with dogs, like stags, she says; I would say rather the dogs hunted what they were set to hunt, and cruel men ran along after them to take the credit and do the killing.
Speaking of cruel men gone hunting, do you know the passage in Rebecca where Max is off murdering the little foxes or purchasing humidors or some other gentleman-of-leisurely activity, and what's-her-face goes wandering around the estate and there's a couple pages where she thinks very pointedly about how great it is to be alone here and how much she loves Manderley, especially when Max isn't there?
All gothics are about marrying for the house, anyway, or marrying the house outright, but Rebecca is the greatest of them. Not because it makes the subtext text (plenty of gothics do this; not necessarily a virtue) but it dares to be a tragedy where she loses the house in the end but does not manage to lose the man. Pretty interesting, I think.
Say, remember when I unearthed the secret lost name of the Narrator, which nobody knows but me and everyone at the auction house & dealer who two-in-a-row obtained and catalogued the letter in which she writes it down? YES it was only a week or two ago, I detailed it all in the piece above, you absolutely do remember, but this is a list for posterity & I am pleased with myself still for noticing.
I do not believe…that, like her, he had a great rolling memory storehouse of bounding on four fur legs through the Hercynian Forest between the giant oaks, catching birds whose feathers (Pliny tells us) shone like fire and snapping at the jointless (Caesar says) elk
Snapping at the jointless elk! I love this little half-sentence and the only other thing I have to say about the piece to which it is attached is that in Valentine Penrose’s THE BLOODY COUNTESS, Sabine Baring-Gould of Were-Welf fame is persistently referred to as “she.” Was it Valentine Penrose or her translator, Alexander Trocchi, who made the mistake? I confess I made it myself when I was young and I would rather have been right; a Ware-Wolf expert ought to be a woman (for propriety, and for the forms.) Well, I am getting to be something of one, and if I never do outstrip the Reverend Baring-Gould in fame at least I can rival him in learning. What’s that, have a care for my hubris? Well, I don’t say I have done so yet, I am only on my way.
[S]kincare is bound up in some hermetic philosophy that I (even I) perceive only dimly. Initiates seek always to agitate the occult parts of the under-surfaces of the face, and the deeper a substance travels inwards through the flesh towards the skullbones, the better it is said to be. and if you are with me at this point we can both be reminded together of Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi who, crying out for an aesthetician,
Said he was a wolf, only the difference / Was, a wolf’s skin was hairy on the outside, / His on the inside; bade them take their swords, / Rip up his flesh, and try.
What a play that is! Anyhow, the reason this one product is legendary and the reason I, not a rich woman, enjoy it very much, is because it makes you cold and smooth and just a little numb like a polished marble statue. Like you know how in Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs Severin talks in the beginning about pressing his face to the cold pedestal of the statue of Venus in Florence? It’s like that, but you are the cold pedestal as well as the worshipful face.
Do you remember my brief foray into Wellness Blogging! great God but it was something. I think it was something wonderful. You can see how you feel about it.
I am going to have to revive this one a second time in another few days because THE ROLY-POLY PUDDING of Beatrix Potter, which I discuss in the piece above for some time before I get to the Wellness portion of it, is a text that cries out for a paired reading with Hannibal as much as any text ever did: poor little Tom Kitten rolled up in suet dough like a tiny Doctor Abel Gideon en croûte.
but that’s for later.
5. The Little Bears of Artemis
Remember in MOUSEQUETAIRE IN THE MURDER HOLE when the upperclassmen shaved off his left eyebrow for falsely boasting of his prowess in Old Church Slavonic? then was he inspired to find the Red Pearl that teaches its master to know all tongues, hidden in no oyster but nestled in a single chestnut on a single chestnut tree in a single chestnut grove, marked on no maps. Put the Red Pearl under your tongue and its powers are yours for a time, but dissolve it in champagne and it enters into your very bones—but the treasure is lost.
All other masters of Red Pearl, from dusty antiquity onward used it ruthlessly for their own gain, but always one day reburied it on some unremarked patch of earth where someday a chestnut tree would grow. Manthony alone had the colossal arrogance to try the champagne trick, swallowing the future whole, stealing knowledge not only from the past but from all generations to come. Thus the motto of his House: 'not Jonah, but the Whale.'
obscure to some.
So it was that the Red Pearl stuck fast in Manthony, and clove to him, and was to be not the momentary passion of his youth (as it had been for so many, and never will be again for any-one) but the companion of his whole soul, and all accomplished through his blasphemous villainy and the pale wines of France.
That is from my St. Valentine’s day issue, issued on the very day of Love. I’m think I’m going to do another one of those next time the day rolls around, if it does, if the calendars are still coming out of the calendar workshops by then, if we are not all drowned in our own champagne buckets, or too busy petting our sad-eyed Burt Lancaster-faced new November cats to be bothered with reading newsletters. I’m not afraid of themes! I will never be afraid of themes! We’ll see. We’ll all see.
P.S. there’s another one of these compilation best-of clip shows coming. Just one more. Just two total. give me some LATITUDE please, it is my newsletter anniversary, it is the end of my first year of mourning, it has just been my birthday, I have broken my glasses, I am doing my BEST