consuming good heavy food

Buddenbrooks moves along in set pieces or literary moments – I mean in scenes that I can think of in isolation -- either long or short, the briefest ones being those miniature performances that take place in solitary sentences, like Herr Kesselmeyer playing the piano on his shoulder.

That moment is inert, it comes and goes without an aftermath, which means that it is the easiest kind of scene to pick out, but there are other moments that act as triggers, making them less easy for me to bring them out quickly because they seep into their own repercussions. The beginning of Tony's hatred for the Hagenström family is signalled by the scene in which the son kisses her, the hatred goes on throughout the book, occasionally mentioned, then, almost at the end, the kiss re-enters the story.

Food is present almost as soon as the book opens. In chapter one they are waiting for the lunch bell to ring; by chapter two it has rung. “There they all sat, on heavy high-backed chairs, consuming good heavy food ...” (translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter). Food goes on vibrating throughout the book, the wealth of the family often expressing itself in food (and the black sheep Christian jumps up from his chair because he has a nightmare fear of choking on a peach), until my idea of their money was also a feeling for spongy substances decaying and vanishing. They could have been buying jewels in chapter one instead and showing off their jewels in chapter two. At the end of the book they might still have owned the jewels. They were never going to keep the food.

The value of food is effervescence. It starts with the gastric juices. So the family's loss, a soft haemorrhage, is a different species of loss to the losses of a character such as Shylock, who could have kept control over his money and his religion (identifying himself by both of those as soon as he appears onstage) if the Merchant of Venice hadn't taken place. But it does, and he is dispossessed. Other people are dictating to him. A state of loss exists at the end of both stories but the value of that loss is different in each case, even though you could sum up both of them with the same words: “Their wealth is gone.”

truth must be alive

You can call them gossip if you want, those posts of mine about Cavendish, since they are less about her books on the whole and more about the other people who have circled around her. I wouldn't have written like that if I hadn't looked up the essay by Woolf when I was writing the first post. I am not blaming Woolf for my tangent though I say again (third time I think) that she was relying too much on rumour, and on Firth's opinions; and her argument took precedence over the instructions that she gave to biographers in The Art of Biography. “His sense of truth must be alive and on tiptoe.”

If she had read Whitaker's book then she would not have written the essay that she wrote, and the sentences about Margaret Cavendish in A Room of One's Own would not have been the same sentences. “She shut herself up at Welbeck alone,” would not have gone on the page without modification.

But her conclusion could have stayed the same. “No one taught her.”

Cavendish herself was not alive to truth when she wrote her husband's biography. Look at the inconvenient facts she ignored, says Whitaker, listing a few of them. You'd never know that the Cavendishes rackrented their tenants. And Whitaker, defending the subject of her research against the world's Woolfs, must be writing her own book of gaps. How do I evaluate the information when she shows me, contra Woolf, that some of Margaret Cavendish's contemporaries praised her behind her back? Is this decisive evidence in Cavendish's favour or are they the exceptions that prove the rule?

Next I opened Buddenbrooks. After a while it struck me that this was a book of gap-characters, because Mann described them so often and from so many angles. Sometimes he would describe their clothes, sometimes he would go inside their heads, sometimes he would ignore their heads and speculate on their ideas as if they were unknowable, sometimes he would be the god-author and sum them up, sometimes a sentence would agree with their wrong ideas about themselves, sometimes he would give them a tic. “Herr Kesselmeyer stuck his thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat and played piano on his shoulders with his fingers.” He could edit these angles all day. There the people are, at the centre of big flocks of pecking detail-birds, in this mimicry of a biography.

her dress so antic

Margaret Cavendish dressed inappropriately, says Pepys, she put doves' eyes in a poem inappropriately, says me, she hewed to her own metaphysics when that kind of imagination was least appropriate, say the scientists of the Royal Society, and she was shy and miserable as a lady-in-waiting until she met William Cavendish, who put her two favourite qualities in her epitaph, wise and witty, for she was appropriate in his opinion and she stayed by him in his exile while he trained horses, and he would rather have sold anything else he owned, said someone, before he would have sold his Barbary horses.

Katie Whitaker amends us, she moderates the vision of Margaret Cavendish, she writes a biography, she is an amending agent, saying so or suggesting herself so in the introduction; explaining that she was “studying the meetings of the early Royal Society as part of the research for my doctoral thesis in the history of science” when she found Pepys' description of the writer, “her dress so antic,” then other descriptions by contemporaries contradicting Pepys, “an heroine,” “the prince of all wit,” “Majestic Quill,” wearing a velvet cap or trimming her nipples with scarlet (and though Whitaker describes the method that other women used when they wanted to make their nipples red she doesn't tell us that Margaret Cavendish used the same method so I am unsure how it was achieved in her case but she visited the theatre like that if I'm recalling that page correctly, not able to find it now and no nipples in the index when they should come after Sir Edward Nicholas and before Dr Nodin but go on) and exchanging letters with philosophers and scientists, good friends with some, Glanville one of those close scientist-friends in spite of their differences (they used to send refutations of one another through the mail), until she, Whitaker, came across an introduction to an 1872 edition of Cavendish's Life of her husband, this introduction written by someone named Mark Antony Lower, and Lower claims that Cavendish had a nickname among her contemporaries, “Mad Madge of Newcastle!'”

Whitaker says that “When I first encountered the story I assumed, as others had done, that he must have had access to some historical record that no one else has seen.” But when she searched for the record she couldn't find it, when she read the letters that people had written to one another about Cavendish she couldn't find it, even in the hostile letters of Mary Evelyn she couldn't find it, not in Pepys could she find it, and not in the writings of any enemy could she find it, nowhere could she find it, and concluded that it was nowhere to be found, and Mark Antony Lower had invented it in 1872 when he was writing his introduction, this antiquarian by profession who liked his own coinage so much that he never bothered to notice that the only extant shortened pet name for Margaret Cavendish during her lifetime was not Madge but Peg.

“It was her early nineteenth-century admirer, the essayist Charles Lamb, who seems first to have named her “Madge Newcastle” as a mark of his affection,” says Whitaker. She guesses that Lower found “Madge” in Lamb. And “Mad” had been Cavendish's reputation since John Evelyn's diaries were published in 1818, containing his wife's description of her, which led to Walter Scott introducing her as “that old mad-woman” in Peveril of the Peak (1823). Pepys' diaries were published in 1825. So her name during the Victorian age was linked to eccentric lunacy, though the lunacy hinged completely on two bits of writing in printed diaries, one of them by a woman who held a grudge against Margaret Cavendish for a reason that had nothing to do with madness or sanity but was due to the fact that Cavendish had promised her a thousand pounds as a wedding present, and then not seen her again for many years, and forgotten to give her the money.

“The early twentieth century represented the nadir of Margaret's reputation, both as a person and as a writer. And the most influential figure in her demolition was the essayist, novelist, and literary critic, Virginia Woolf,” Whitaker writes (then taking Woolf's description apart), and I think, look, here is my villain then, here is the one who gave me a vision that didn't jibe with the prose that I was reading; and Woolf's essay is not a source of information, it is a trapper's pit or distracting sideways arrow.

the flame is pale, like the Sun, and hath a violent motion in it

On her grave her husband called her “a wise, wittie, and Learned Lady, which her many Bookes do well testifie.” Her philosophy was as good as anybody else's, was his opinion, and it would have been hypocritical of him not to have said so when he also had the “native wit” that would not accept help from others. “ I have lived in the great world a great while, and have thought of what has been brought to me by the senses, more than was put into me by learned discourse; for I do not love to be led by the nose, by authority, and old authors; ipse dixit will not serve my turn," he writes in his memoirs.

She suited him, he suited her, they were both curious and science-minded; he had scientists visit his house and he consulted them.

The sun, no doubt, is a great fire, and must have something to maintain it; but before I deliver my opinion to you, I desire leave to make you a little relation, and it is this: Dr. Payn, a divine, and my chaplain, who hath a very witty searching brain of his own, being at my house at Bolsover, locked up with me in a chamber to make Lapis Prunellae, which is saltpetre and brimstone inflamed, looking at it a while, I said, Mark it, Mr. Payn, the flame is pale, like the Sun, and hath a violent motion in it, like the Sun; saith he, It hath so, and the more to confirm you, says he, look what abundance of little suns, round like a globe, appear to us everywhere, just the same motion as the Sun makes in every one's eyes. So we concluded the Sun could be nothing else but a very solid body of salt and sulphur, inflamed by his own violent motion upon his own axis.

Everything must be made of something, the maggots made of cheese in The Blazing World, the sun made of salt, and the responsibility of the scientist is to discover that origin or that substance. Once there, then what? There is a parody of this in those stories that trace a character's badness to parental neglect at the age of two or Ruskin pretending to blame his absent career on his aunt's cold mutton. Where is that source? What is the behaviour of that source? The scientists in those days asked themselves if a fire atom had the same shape as a water atom, so says Katie Whitaker in her biography of Margaret Cavendish. They argued about light and never spoke again. Light was that heated. Why should cheese “by its own figurative motions” turn into maggots? Whitaker's book is called Mad Madge because the Victorians had that name for her. Weeks ago I read an article which suggested that everything seeks a quantum equilibrium and so hot tea goes cool as it submits to the peer pressure of the air but you would have to “outlive the universe,” the article said, before you were lucky enough to see it defy the world and turn hotter.

Imagine the quantum battle between a warm body and the South Pole, the skin forced to be a battleground in both directions since the landscape does not want to heat up any more than the body wants to cool down, though if there is a chance that the tea could get hotter then there might be a chance (which you would have to more than outlive the universe to see) that the person's body temperature will win the war against the freezing landscape and then it will be hot enough in that place to grow geraniums, the air will be all thirty-two degrees Celsius, though dirt will be a problem then or maybe not, why not dirt spontaneously arriving, the ice transformed to earth, why not; or cheese, and then maggots, the ground bubbling with maggots (which are the gateways to heaven, wrote Yusef Komunyakaa in his Ode to the Maggot, "you | Go to the root of all things. | You are sound & mathematical"), and the person dead by now though still mysteriously warm, unless they have lived forever by mistake.

but she did not settle for the method

Can't say she's neutral about it though, Margaret Cavendish, can't say she thinks multiplicity is positive per se, but it needs to be contained a bit featly, “you have enclosed it with elegancy and eloquence” – she is against argumentative multiplicity – the Bear-men in her Blazing World arguing over the actions of the stars until the Empress tells them that they would be better off smashing their telescopes than bickering over their opinions.

[T]hey had seen three Blazing-Stars appear there, one after another in a short time, whereof two were bright, and one dim; but they could not agree neither in this observation: for some said, It was but one Star which appeared at three several times, in several places; and others would have them to be three several Stars; for they thought it impossible, that those three several appearances should have been but one Star, because every Star did rise at a certain time, and appear'd in a certain place, and did disappear in the same place: Next, It is altogether improbable, said they, That one Star should fly from place to place, especially at such a vast distance, without a visible motion; in so short a time, and appear in such different places, whereof two were quite opposite, and the third side-ways: Lastly, If it had been but one Star, said they, it would always have kept the same splendor, which it did not; for, as above mentioned, two were bright, and one was dim.

They beg her to let them keep their telescopes even though those telescopes are “meer deluders” “for, were there nothing but truth, and no falshood, there would be no occasion to dispute,” and they love that fruitless separation play. Without their telescopes “we should want the aim and pleasure of our endeavors in confuting and contradicting each other; neither would one man be thought wiser then another, but all would either be alike knowing and wise, or all would be fools; wherefore we most humbly beseech your Imperial Majesty to spare our Glasses, which are our onely delight, and as dear to us as our lives.”

Now she detects a negative variety, says William White of Stanford, variety is the slave of muddle: '“Cavendish showed with this example that, although the telescope may have revealed new objects in the night sky, the interpretation of these observations was never completely inherent or self evident.” (Science, Factions, and the Persistent Specter of War: Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World.)

Trust, as White does, that the scientific and philosophical societies that the Empress reviews in the Blazing World are Margaret Cavendish's commentaries on the Royal Society in the living world, and that the eyes of the “grey Drone-flye” that the Bear-men show her through their microscopes are the same ones that appear in the illustrated Micrographia of Robert Hooke (1665), then the criticism of the Bear-men's addiction to their instruments is her criticism of everyone who was in the room when she encountered Evelyn and Pepys. “The Empress at last consented to their request, but upon condition, that their disputes and quarrels should remain within their Schools, and cause no factions or disturbances in State, or Government.“ Remember, writes White, she had gone through the English Civil War and the Restoration, and was a Monarchist. Her husband's estates had been taken. She met him while they were both in exile. The Puritans executed her brother.

She valued science for social utility and feared that unchecked discourse could have led to social divisions and chaos, but she did not settle for the method of the Royal Society. Instead, Cavendish promoted a method fueled by human reason, deductive reasoning, and use of the unaided senses to study the external world.

Now her disregard of Glanville's advice can be considered from a new direction, looking less wilful, more thoughtful, the author having already, let's say, examined the evidence and concluded that the methods of official science would not give her the results she wanted. Instead they would ask her to depend on “meer deluders.” No, she won't.

by reason knowledg is dividable, as well as composable

Cavendish praised John Evelyn's book Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest Trees (1664), “though it is large through number and variety, yet you have enclosed it with elegancy and eloquence,” which is also her praise of Shakespeare in the Sociable Letters, who could express multiplicity with intelligence. “Shakespear did not want Wit, to express to the Life all Sorts of Persons,” “for who could Describe Cleopatra better than he hath done, and many other Females of his own Creating, as Nan Page, Mrs Page, Mrs Ford, the Doctors Maid, Bettrice, Mrs Quickly, Doll Tearsheet, and others, too many to Relate?” though I would not say that she thought Evelyn was Shakespeare, only that she saw the enclosure of multiplicity as a virtue, and found it when she looked for virtues.

It is this belief in the value of variety that made her an insightful critic, says Fitzmaurice, “The point, again, seems to be variety,” and it seems, when I read her, that she is interested in the multifarious as an idea, and how insistently it appears everywhere in life; she sees it when she looks at herself; she sees the ways she might be and the way she is.

I am that the vulgar calls proud, not out of self-conceit, or to slight or condemn any, but scorning to do a base or mean act, and disdaining rude or unworthy persons; insomuch, that if I should find any that were rude, or too bold, I should be apt to be so passionate, as to affront them, if I can, unless discretion should get betwixt my passion and their boldness, which sometimes perchance it might, if discretion should crowd hard for place. For though I am naturally bashful, yet in such a cause my spirits would be all on fire.

(A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding, and Life)

She is “a coward” but also “valiant;” it depends on the circumstances, she says, and whether a gun has been fired, also, who is in danger, and whether her honour is involved; there are all these possibilities of change in her and why omit any; she is interested in everything that she could be, or else it erupts into her and she needs to make a record, or she allows it to erupt and follows a style that encourages eruption.

“The Empress confessed that she observed Nature was infinitely various in her works” in The Blazing World and her sentences often swell themselves with multitudes of words around one theme, “an Elephant seemed no bigger then a Flea; a Camel no bigger then a Lowse; and an Ostrich no bigger then a Mite,” “the Spider-men, which were her Mathematicians, the Lice-men which were her Geometricians, and the Magpie- Parrot- and Jackdaw-men, which were her Orators and Logicians,” “the Earth is a warm, fruitful, quiet, safe, and happy habitation,” “the Women, which generally had quick wits, subtile conceptions, clear understandings, and solid judgments;” the whole Blazing World being that way also, a series of discussions around the strange country the Lady-Empress has come into, which is an example of “female rhetoric” a blogger named Celeste argues, not meaning rhetoric performed by females but a style that mounts to a point by conglomeration instead of announcing its thesis directly. “Instead of building a world for the purpose of holding a particular narrative plot, she builds a world with the purpose of simply understanding the full range of its complexity and complications.”

Truly, said the Empress, I do believe that it is with Natural Philosophy, as it is with all other effects of Nature; for no particular knowledg can be perfect, by reason knowledg is dividable, as well as composable; nay, to speak properly, Nature her self cannot boast of any perfection, but God himself; because there are so many irregular motions in Nature, and 'tis but a folly to think that Art should be able to regulate them, since Art it self is, for the most part, irregular.

to the beautiful obliquities

Woolf and Firth: Charles Lamb would have had to forgive both of them. “I can pardon her [his sister, disguised as “Bridget”] blindness to the beautiful obliquities of the Religio Medici; but she must apologise to me for certain disrespectful insinuations, which she has been pleased to throw out latterly, touching the intellectuals of a dear favourite of mine, of the last century but one—the thrice noble, chaste, and virtuous,—but again somewhat fantastical, and original-brain'd, generous Margaret Newcastle” (Mackery End, in Hertfordshire). Firth acknowledges Lamb's intelligence; Firth praises him.

Certainly his larger sympathy, and keener insight, enabled him to perceive in the style and in the writer those finer qualities which the more conventional judgment of Pepys had refused to recognise.

Lamb is loving, Lamb loves; he inserts her into a discussion of bookbinding where she did not have to be but he will mention her, “thrice noble” again in the Two Races of Men: “the Letters of that princely woman, the thrice noble Margaret Newcastle.” Horace Walpole had an opinion of her: “pedant.” Pepys, as already mentioned, had his opinion, “I do not like her at all.” Walpole had read her works but Pepys had seen her and listened to her speak. Her clothes annoyed him. He thought he had watched one of her plays but it was her husband's play instead. On Wednesday the 18th of March in the year 1668 he looked through one of her books and disliked it, “the ridiculous History of My Lord Newcastle.” Lamb venerated that same book in the early 1800s: “no casket is rich enough, no casing sufficiently durable, to honour and keep safe such a jewel.” “[I]t may be taken for granted that his [Pepys'] recollections of the authoress influenced his judgment of her book,” writes Firth, pointing out, also, that the diarist had been suffering from bad eyes that night. “So to bed, my eyes being very bad.”

Fitzmaurice opens his Introduction to the Garland Sociable Letters with these words: “Over the last three hundred and fifty years, Margaret Cavendish and her writing have elicited a variety of reactions.” There are so many reactions that Firth won't decide between them. He says, “To decide between these conflicting sentences [Pepys', Lamb's, those of “learned bodies” at the University of Cambridge], and expound the precise amount of truth contained in each, would be a tedious and ungrateful task.”

Fitzmaurice lists some of the people I've mentioned as well as a couple of others, Frederic Rowton, for example, who wrote The Female Poets of Great Britain (1853), and Mary Evelyn, Pepys' contemporary, whose word for Cavendish is “rambling,” although it's curious of Fitzmaurice to refer to Evelyn's husband John as “the famous diarist” without quoting him on Cavendish as well. He described her as he saw her on the day when she visited a meeting at the Royal Society, “a mighty pretender to learning.”

John Evelyn is writing on May 30th, 1667, and Pepys, writing on the same day, describes the same event. “I find much company, indeed very much company, in expectation of the Duchesse of Newcastle who had desired to be invited to the Society.” Evelyn says that they showed her experiments and Pepys says so too. Pepys chooses to describe the experiments and Evelyn does not. “Several fine experiments were shown her of colours, loadstones, microscopes, and of liquors among others, of one that did, while she was there, turn a piece of roasted mutton into pure blood, which was very rare.” The Society's minutes for that meeting have the experiments like this: “Dutchess of newcastle intertaynd wth. 1 weighing the air in a glasse Recr. of 9 gallons & 3 pints. which exhausted weighed & opend to let in air weighed 1 ounce & 71 caratts more than when exhausted. Expt. of mixing colours. 3 cold liquors by mixture made hott. 4 water boyle in Rarifying engine . and making a bladder swell 5 bodys floating in medio aquae. 2 marbles separated by 47ll.“