The Ideal of Culture

by Joseph Epstein

  The Book of the Courtier is in part a manual of advice on such subjects as seduction, the behavior required of women at court, practical jokes, how to keep love secret, why it is a mistake to learn chess, and more. Some of this advice has a cold Machiavellian flavor. Castiglione writes:

  There is an adage which says that when our enemy is in the water up to his waist, we must offer him our hand and rescue him from peril; but when he is up to his chin, we must put our foot on his head and drown him forthwith.

  At other times, The Book of the Courtier reads like the anti-Machiavelli, at least the Machiavelli of The Prince, with its stern lessons on attaining and retaining power at all costs. In the fourth and final section of The Book of the Courtier, Castiglione, contra Machiavelli, addresses himself to the courtier’s role as moral adviser to princes.

  Here it becomes clear that Castiglione intends for his ideal courtier to be more much than a fop, a Renaissance dandy, a connoisseur in the art of self-presentation, but above all that an instructor to his prince on the subject of righteous rule. The point of the courtier making himself so charming, and of his elegant display of mastery of the arts, is that through them he will raise himself in the prince’s esteem, thereby seducing him into heeding his advice. If the excellence of the courtier’s cultural attainments is “the flower” of his training, “the fruit” lies in helping his prince “toward what is right and to warn him against what is wrong.” The courtier, Castiglione holds, is “the whetstone,” the prince “the knife”; as the physician is concerned with his patient’s health, so the courtier is concerned with the prince’s virtue.

  Castiglione was not a trained philosopher, but like most educated men of his day, he had read Plato and Aristotle with care. Plato and Aristotle were themselves courtiers—not philosopher-kings, as Plato had it in The Republic, but philosophers who instructed kings. Plato, alas, failed in his abortive attempt to council the incorrigible Dionysius of Sicily. Aristotle was more successful in his tutelage of Alexander the Great.

  Renaissance Italy, though in many ways one of great ages of mankind, was also an age of despotic princes with vast treasure and unlimited power. The too greatly rich, in Castiglione’s view, “often become proud and insolent.” Power applied without reflection and training in virtue, he felt, was a certain formula for disaster. Castiglione’s courtier, in his function as court philosopher, was to curb the insolence and do all he could to forestall the disaster by instilling virtue in his prince.

  What gives The Book of the Courtier its standing as a masterpiece is not alone the brilliance of its detail and cogency of its arguments but how pertinent so many of its pages seem in our day—and are likely to seem in any other day. The right relation of virtue to power will always be the key political issue, and few writers in the nearly five centuries since he wrote The Book of the Courtier understood this more profoundly than Baldesar Castiglione.

  Ronald Syme

  (2016)

  In his study of the Roman historian Sallust (86–35 BCE), Ronald Syme writes that “historians are selective, dramatic, impressionistic.” Later in the same work he notes that “systems and doctrines decay or ossify, whereas poetry and drama live on, also style and narrative.” These words apply to Syme himself, a man generally considered the greatest modern historian of Rome. Syme wrote biographies of Sallust and Tacitus and much else, but his reputation rests on The Roman Revolution. Published in 1939 when the specter of fascism clouded Europe, it was soon recognized as the magnificent book it is.

  Ronald Syme (1903–1989) was a New Zealander who studied at and settled in Oxford. His specialty was prosopography, or the study of collective biographies to find common characteristics of historical social classes or groups. This was invaluable for The Roman Revolution, which is a compelling account of the decline of the Roman oligarchy in favor of a principate, or monarchy, quietly but implacably put in place by Augustus, the first of the Roman emperors. If historians had Rolodexes, none could be more complete than Syme’s on the Romans in the last years of the Republic. “In any age in the history of the Roman Republic,” he notes, “about twenty or thirty men, drawn from a dozen dominant families, hold a monopoly of office and power.” An intramural, nearly incestuous, affair was Roman political life. Consider Servilia, “Cato’s half-sister, Brutus’s mother, Caesar’s mistress.”

  A man who sees beneath every surface, demolishing all pretenses, Syme, early in his great book, writes: “The Roman constitution was a screen and a sham.” Of the idealism of the Republic, he notes: “Liberty and law are high-sounding words. They will often be rendered, on a cool estimate, as privilege and vested interest.” No cooler estimator existed than Syme. “The career of Pompeius,” he writes, “opened in fraud and violence. It was prosecuted, in war and peace, through illegality and treachery.”

  Once the Triumvirs—Julius Caesar, Pompeius, Lepidus—were in ascendance, the Roman Republic’s day was done. “From a triumvirate it was but a short step to a dictatorship,” Syme writes. Julius Caesar, who emerged as dictator, before his assassination adopted Octavianus, whom Syme regularly refers to as “Caesar’s heir.” Octavianus would subsequently become Augustus, who, after his victories over Caesar’s assassins and later Marcus Antonius, ruled for 40 years. Augustus, Syme writes, possessed “an inborn and Roman distrust of theory, and an acute sense of the difference between words and facts.”

  Syme was a master of the brief character sketch, not infrequently followed by a sharp observation. The mixture of good and evil in the same people fascinated him. After toting up Marcus Antonius’s many flaws, he writes that “a blameless life is not the whole of virtue, and inflexible rectitude may prove a menace to the Commonwealth.” Cicero, he says, “had lent his eloquence to all political causes in turn, was sincere in one thing only, loyalty to the established order. His past career showed that he could not be depended on for action or statesmanship.”

  Augustus succeeded owing to his ambition and cunning, and to his awareness that, after long years of civil war, Romans were willing to surrender liberty for peace and concord. Concord meant rule by one man—monarchy—whose worst feature, along with the loss of liberty, “was the growth of servility and adulation.”

  Unsurpassed in his erudition, relentless in his perspicacity, Syme combined these merits with a historical style in the tradition of Thucydides, Sallust, Tacitus, and Gibbon, great disillusionists all. The interjection of the short, deadly sentence is among the hallmarks of this style. “Two days of diplomacy divided the Roman world,” is but one example from Syme. The murder of Cicero “disgraced the Triumvirs and enriched literature with an immortal theme” is another. Accounting for the rise of Octavianus, he writes: “Accident blended with design.”

  With a single sentence he fills in long spans of time. “From first to last the dynasty of the Julii and the Claudii ran true to form, despotic and murderous.” He writes of Antonius and Cleopatra in Egypt that they “spent nearly a year after the disaster [of the battle of Actium] in the last revels, the last illusory plans, and the last despondency before death.” He specializes in the risky yet authoritative generalization: “Lacking any perception of the dogma of progress—for it had not yet been invented—the Romans regarded novelty with distrust and aversion.” Sometimes this style turns aphoristic: “Politics can be controlled but not abolished, ambition curbed but not crushed.” Again: “It is not enough to acquire power and wealth; men wish to appear virtuous and to feel virtuous.”

  Toward the close of The Roman Revolution Syme writes: “To explain the fall of the Roman Republic, historians invoke a variety of converging forces or movements, political, social and economic, where antiquity was prone to see only the ambition and agency of individuals.” As with all historical masterpieces, one comes away from The Roman Revolution feeling unblinkered and intellectually rejuvenated.

  Quest for Corvo

  (2009)

  “All I can tell you about the
book, my dear fellow,” A. J. A. Symons wrote to his brother Julian in mid-composition of The Quest for Corvo, “is that it will be unlike any other biography ever written.” He was right. Symons, 34 when he published the book in 1934, never wrote another. (He died at 41.) One begins the The Quest for Corvo in delight and ends it in satisfaction—one definition, surely, of a masterpiece.

  Symons’s biography of a little-known writer named Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913) is unique in biographical literature in bringing the reader in on how the biographer knows what he knows about his subject; and in owning up to what he doesn’t know or feels cannot be known. The Quest for Corvo is biography in the form of a detective story, and as such it is riveting.

  The surest formula for a masterpiece biography—of which there are not that many—is an extraordinary human being writing about a great one. In The Quest for Corvo, we have an utterly charming man writing on a madly eccentric one. “Charlatan or Genius?” is the book’s subtitle, and when one has finished reading it one is inclined to conclude that Rolfe was fully both.

  Rolfe was a failed painter, photographer, musician, and, most devastatingly of all to him, a born Anglican who failed to achieve priesthood in the Catholic Church. (He claimed never to have met an honest Catholic, yet, in a characteristic touch, added, “if I were not Catholic I shouldn’t be anything at all.”) Toward the end of his life, he signed himself Fr. Rolfe, hoping to be mistaken for a priest.

  What Rolfe was, indisputably, was an immensely talented writer. He wrote no great books, though his Hadrian the Seventh, a brilliant fantasy in which he imagines a character obviously based on himself being made Pope after the College of Cardinals can’t decide on a worthy candidate, has gone through many printings since his death. A remarkable stylist, Rolfe wrote with precision and high comic flourish. He had a strong taste for magniloquence and was a master of vituperation.

  The Quest for Corvo begins with Symons chatting with a friend who tells him about Rolfe’s Hadrian the Seventh. Symons reads it and is so struck by it that he is determined to learn more about its author and to search out anything else by him. At the time, Symons was working on a book of his own—A Select Bibliography and History of the Books of the Nineties, with Notes on Their Authors, which he never completed—and was the secretary of the First Edition Club in London. Later, with the French gourmet and wine merchant André Simon, he founded the Wine and Food Society. Symons was dedicated to elegant acquisitions and good living. At his life’s end he said, “No one so poor has lived so well.” Good living and self-doubt prevented him from writing another book, while Rolfe continued to produce under the most penurious conditions.

  Symons’s biography takes the form of a continual connecting of the dots, filling in gaps through Symons’s encounters with Rolfe’s former friends and those with whom he had business dealings. Chance plays a large role, as Symons is led from one to another of Rolfe’s connections. “Mr. Pirie-Gordon was the missing link between Rolfe’s middle and his later years,” Symons writes. “I was able to piece the story together, to watch another rotation of the wheel to which Rolfe was bound.”

  One of the book’s special pleasures is in Symons’s portraits of the extraordinary characters who offered their hands to Rolfe only, inevitably, to have them bitten. Among these are splendid miniatures of now-forgotten but once-important English men of letters and publishers, among them Shane Leslie and the religious novelist Robert Hugh Benson. Most extraordinary of all is the astonishing Maundy Gregory, who buys a Rolfe letter from Symons and later himself turns up several of Rolfe’s missing manuscripts. The mysteriously wealthy Gregory, though Symons was unaware of it, was a bagman for David Lloyd George, selling knighthoods and other honors for the right price.

  The Quest for Corvo, as Symons notes, is in part a story of human benevolence. Men and women were attracted to Rolfe, despite all that was off-putting about him. The Duchess of Sforza-Cesarini, who gave him an allowance, also conferred upon Rolfe, or so he claimed, the title of Baron Corvo. But Rolfe was a genuine paranoid—a paranoid who made his own enemies, and did his utmost to keep them.

  He was a sponger, a liar, a homosexual dedicated to suborning the innocent, a fantasist ever ready, as Symons has it, to add “new turrets” to “his castles in the air,” yet in his dedication to his pretensions, in his utter friendlessness—he dedicated one of his books to “the Divine Friend much desired,” a want ad if ever there was one—Rolfe was also unspeakably sad.

  Refreshingly un-Freudian, The Quest for Corvo makes scant reference to Rolfe’s parents, his upbringing, the formation of his character. Rolfe enters Symons’s book fully formed, a monster not in the least sacred. “Though the peculiar inner energy which possessed Fr. Rolfe is beyond analysis,” Symons writes, “the external events of his life, and his reactions to them, can be collated and made comprehensible.”

  Rolfe’s troubles began, Symons concludes, with his homosexuality, his knowledge that he was not like most men, which fed into his paranoia. “His forbidden love,” Symons writes, “was a source of weakness, but hate could make him strong.” Rolfe was hard to do justice to, but Symons, out of the largeness of his imagination, in the end finds him a figure from whom “it is unjust . . . to withhold admiration and pity,” a judgment that seems exactly right.

  A slender book, an odd book, a completely original book, The Quest for Corvo also represents a new method of writing biography that has never been copied. That it hasn’t been, that perhaps it cannot be without the keen mind that Symons brought to it, is but another mark of its standing as a masterpiece.

  The Old Bunch

  (2012)

  Meyer Levin is best remembered, if at all, as the author of the novel Compulsion (1956), based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case of the 1920s. But Mr. Levin (1905–1981) wrote several novels, and one of them, The Old Bunch (1937), retains great power. The Old Bunch is long—964 pages in the Citadel Press reprint edition—but not in the least sprawling. The chronicle of the lives of 19 late adolescents, all Jewish, living on the West Side of Chicago, it is beautifully orchestrated, flowing from the life of one character to another. Lest this seem parochial, some of the characters travel to New York, Paris, Palestine (not yet Israel).

  The story’s timeline runs from the early ’20s to 1934, ending at the close of the World’s Fair in Chicago. Franklin Delano Roosevelt is in office. The destinies of the characters, now in their 30s, are settled.

  Destiny is Mr. Levin’s larger subject. Each character plays out his or her fate in the pages of The Old Bunch. Not one is heroic. The roster includes two physicians, a hat maker, a furniture manufacturer, a fellow-traveling lawyer, a small-time criminal lawyer, a corrupt (in the best Chicago tradition) lawyer, a high-school teacher, a sculptor, an unsuccessful inventor, and a sad loser who rides the rails during the Depression. The women are of the era when the only serious career offering was a husband and children, and in the novel all of them marry, except for a grammar-school teacher who is unable to find the right man and another woman who ends up a bit of a floozy. Mr. Levin fills in the details so artfully that the reader is caught up in all the characters’ lives, feeling the sting of their defeats, engaged in their small but touching dramas.

  The method is that of realism. Details add up to form character, and character becomes destiny. For example, young Sam Eisen’s strain of nonconformity impels him first to leave the boyhood club of friends because of its want of seriousness; later he will drop out of the University of Illinois because of his repugnance toward compulsory ROTC service; the bourgeois spirit of his wife drives him to divorce; and he ends up a lawyer whose career is devoted to idealistic but ultimately empty radical causes.

  The central characters’ parents—some immigrant and impoverished, others here for a generation and flourishing—work as button makers, have small factories, run flop houses, are fur-workers, real-estate operators, cigar makers, grocery- and furniture-store proprietors, and,
in one notable instance, the political boss of the Jewish West Side.

  The Old Bunch is an excellent corrective to The World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe’s historical account of the Jews of (mostly) New York, with their labor-union and socialist backgrounds. American Jews at the turn of the past century were more various than one might think based on Mr. Howe’s book.

  Mr. Levin sets his characters in their time by having them talk about the pop culture of the age. The names Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, Red Grange, Fatty Arbuckle, Sophie Tucker, Charles Lindbergh, Walter Winchell, Sally Rand, Leopold and Loeb play through the novel’s pages. Snatches of popular songs of the time—“Nothing but blue birds all day long”; “You’ve got the cutest little baby face”—serve as refrains, commenting, often ironically, on the novel’s action.

  Corruption—of unions, of judges, of the police, of politicians—is central to the novel. With the right connections, everyone is buyable, everything fixable. Judges are on the take, cops beat up unionists, the utilities and railroad magnate Samuel Insull perhaps the biggest crook of all. No city has ever been a greater deterrent to idealism than Chicago, and Mr. Levin neatly captures this.

  The novelist refers to his characters as “a lucky generation.” Too young for World War I, they will later be too old for World War II. But they are not too young or too old for the Depression, to which some of the most stirring pages of “The Old Bunch” are devoted. Most of the characters watch their lives unravel under the pressure of the complete economic breakdown.

  Many things mark the tradition of realism—one that includes among its masters Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Theodore Dreiser, and John Dos Passos—but it is distinguished above all by illustrating the pressure that social arrangements bring to bear on individual character.

  The novelists who wrote under realism’s banner had to know more than psychology, the heart and mind in all their wanderings. They also had to understand how institutions function, and to understand it in detail. Their very method made these novelists worldly. To write The Old Bunch, Mr. Levin had to know how the Chicago courts worked, how unionizing and union busting were undertaken, how kibbutz life in Palestine was lived, how medical research and practice are conducted, sculpture created and sold, and much more.