Vintage Reading

by Robert Kanigel

  Is there a trace of smugness in all this? Does it read as much like a religious tract, a fervid paean to Nature, as a calm, quiet vision of the natural world? Is the author, like a lovesick teenager, almost too consumed by passion?

  How, one wonders, could so spartan and so elemental a life as Beston lived for a year on that lonely beach produce prose so mannered and overwrought?

  On the other hand, something in the mad intensity and joy of the author’s solitary life is compelling, and that will, for many readers, carry the day. It matters so much to him, we sense— the terns floating overhead, the crickets racing off into the dune grass, the irresistible heaving of the sea - that in the end it matters to us. Maybe it is overdone, too full of florid sentiments and alliterative lushness ... But he is only a man, a writer, and the ultimate power and truth of the natural world he describes transcends his excesses. So that almost despite himself, Beston wins: He’s made you care.

  The Amiable Baltimoreans

  ____________

  By Francis F. Beirne

  First published in 1951

  What makes any city the way it is? What about a city is fixed and immutable? How does it shape its inhabitants? Or is it actually that people shape the cities in which they live? Or perhaps places and people are both merely products of their times?

  The Amiable Baltimoreans, originally one of a group of volumes about various cities and regions known as the Society in America series, does not set out to provide answers to such questions; less assuming by far, it pretends only to being a light account of Baltimore, its history, its institutions, its personalities. Still, reading it today grants a unique perspective. At almost 50, it is neither old enough to be of solely historical interest, nor so recent as to render a portrait of the city faithful to today. Rather, it lies on the cusp, offering much that is familiar, yet always as if seen through a gentle time warp.

  Many old landmarks are here—Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Preakness, H. L. Mencken and the Mobtown tradition, Fort McHenry and the city’s fabled steamed crabs. But so are many no longer familiar—once-prominent stars in the urban constellation now dimmed, important families now forgotten, a skyline unrecognizable.

  Such changes are, of course, inevitable with the passage of time and don’t, by themselves, give the book its odd, funhouse mirror quality. What does is the author’s tone, so alien to today’s sensibilities. To Beirne, writing in the early 1950s, a world war just won and America everywhere ascendant, everything seemed certain, assured, under control. Institutions were institutions, history was history. Class, racial, and gender distinctions were givens. The maniford democratizations ushered in by the 1960s, with its dissolution of so many rock-solid certainties, lay in the future.

  Beirne, editor and columnist with a local newspaper now extinct, could still comfortably refer to how the question of admitting female undergraduates to Johns Hopkins University “solved itself in a most satisfactory manner.” By their being admitted? No, that was still most of a century off. Rather, by the establishment of a Woman’s College of Baltimore, which became Goucher College. “So young women have not needed to go to the Hopkins for their undergraduate training,” Beirne writes approvingly. “Goucher can give them all they need.”

  Jews are portrayed as “rapidly pushing the old hunting set out of the Green Spring Valley.” Does he mean simply that some Jews were buying houses there, or something more? Blacks, still “Negroes” in 1951, had made gratifying progress in gaining their rights, Beirne notes—so gratifying that “There is a tendency for the more radical element to increase its demand with the end to wiping out all racial distinction. This,” he added, “is not likely for many years to come.”

  While Jews and blacks, among the minorities, had by the 1940s already begun to make themselves heard, the ethnic movement had not yet surfaced. So that while we learn of contributions made by German immigrants of the 19th century, Beirne has nothing to say of more recent newcomers from eastern and southern Europe—like the Poles and Italians, who already occupied block after rowhouse-dense block of East Baltimore. It is a flabbergasting omission.

  Beirne is always the perfect gentleman, charming, quick to put a good face on everything. When his book first appeared, a critic for the New Yorker complained that the author apparently felt that “in writing about a city it’s not chivalrous to ruffle the sensibilities of anybody who lives there.” A badmouther, for example, might label Baltimoreans, as a group, illiterate; Beirne says, rather, that “they do not enjoy a reputation for being bookish.” Even when recounting riots and scandals, Beirne seems more amused than shocked or outraged. Everything’s fine, each page seems to say. Pain and passion are never much in evidence.

  Facts are facts, of course, and Beirne’s assembling of them—dolloped out in chapters given over to sports, medicine, theater, society, and the like—is certainly as good as any, and probably more amusing than most. His account of Baltimore’s obsession with the weather, particularly the phenomenon of “the two-inch snowstorm,” is delightful—and on the mark.

  But while facts are facts, history, the lens through which they’re viewed, changes with time. So that even aside from any changes that historical research has revealed since 1951, today’s reader will find the author’s account skewed. For Beirne, society still breaks down into Leaders and Great Figures on the one hand, and everyone else on the other. We don’t think that way anymore, or at least don’t admit to it. The rare insight into the easy Amiable Baltimoreans takes us back to a simpler, more ordered, more comprehensible time, when stormy winds of change had scarcely begun to blow—or if they had, were scarcely noticed.

  What to Listen for in Music

  ____________

  By Aaron Copland

  First published in 1939

  To fans of Frank Sinatra, or Bruce Springsteen, or Alanis Morissette, lions of the “classical” music tradition like Beethoven and Bach can seem unapproachable. Their music may lack singable melody or danceable beat, be more complex and textured, more ambitious in design. The classical vocabulary, laced with terms like passacaglia, sonata, opus and divertimento, can be alienating. Finally, classical composers have by now become so synonymous with High Culture that “Bach” and “Beethoven” are no longer just men who wrote inspired music but cultural icons whose mere mention can make the uninitiated cower.

  Doesn’t have to be, said the modern American composer Aaron Copland. In a series of 15 lectures given in the late 1930s to lay audiences at the New School for Social Research in New York, Copland fashioned a sort of fieldguide to the flora and fauna of the classical landscape. What to Listen For in Music is the written record of those lectures.

  Music need not be just a blur of pretty notes, Copland tells us. We listen on several planes at once—on the emotional, on the “expressive” (what does the music “say?”), and on the purely musical. Even the novice can probably tell a Bach fugue from a Tchaikovsky symphony. But what makes them so different? Why do they leave us in such different moods? Why may one come to life only with repeated listening, while the other is instantly accessible?

  Copland, who wrote the ballet score for Appalachian Spring among other works of note, equips us to find out. He introduces rhythm, melody, harmony and tone color as the basic elements of music; outlines musical texture and structure; surveys musical forms, like theme and variations, fugue and sonata; explores the composer’s problem in writing music for opera and film; finally closes with a note on the special difficulties posed by 20th century music. So sensitive is he to the initiate’s confusions, and doubts, that he seems more one of “us” than, as a priest of musical culture, one of “them.”

  In Copland’s telling, music makes sense; you want to rush off to the concert hall to listen for the patterns he reveals. Take the sonata form—which is not restricted to works like Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata”; a symphony is really a sonata for orchestra, a string quartet a sonata for strings. (A Bach sonata, on the other hand, is no sonata at all;
back in his day, the word just meant a piece played rather than sung.) Today, “sonata form” refers to a particular way of structuring musical material: Present the musical idea, develop it, finally return to the original. The listening problem it presents, Copland writes, is that of “following the broad outlines of large sections,” not of measure-to-measure twists and turns.

  Copland wants to make his reader a more “intelligent” listener. “He must,” the author enjoins, “hear the melodies, the rhythms, the harmonies, the tone colors in a more conscious fashion ...He must, in order to follow the line of the composer’s thought, know something of the principles of musical form.” Must, yes, if he wishes to participate in our culture’s musical heritage. Copland assumes it’s better to know more than less, that life’s riches are better appreciated than ignored; anyone who’s learned to enjoy even a good cup of coffee, say, or the sound of a well-tuned engine, would agree. The average reader won’t leave Copland able to pick out the separate voices of a fugue or to tell when the development section of a sonata is over and the recapitulation has begun. But he or she may be more moved to try.

  Within the wider world of classical music, of course, many can abide the lush strains of Brahms and Tchaikovsky, say, but not the more dissonant twentieth century sound of a Stravinsky or a Schoenberg. Be patient, Copland reminds them. It’s all one musical world. The composer is not out to fool you. The listener much approach each composer on his or her own terms, must bring tolerance and good will to the experience, confidence in the composer’s good intentions.

  Since the first appearance of Copland’s book in 1939, the world has become ever more balkanized, more broken up into narrow and specialized domains; the antique car collector can say nothing to the special education teacher, the Sikh nothing to the Hindu. In making classical music approachable, Copland strikes out against that tendency, makes the world more one. Perhaps someone today ought to perform a kindred service for those music lovers—devotees, say, of Debussy, Vivaldi, or Brahms—who can hear nothing but vulgarity and noise in the sound of Alanis Morrissette.

  Gods, Graves, and Scholars

  ____________

  By C. W. Ceram

  First published in 1951

  In 1917, the English archeologist Howard Carter discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen, an Eighteenth Dynasty Egyptian pharoah who ruled in the 14th Century before Christ.

  In Gods, Graves, and Scholars, though, there is little such piling up of names and dates. Rather, author C. W. Ceram tells how Carter’s excitement mounted as the digging for the suspected tomb progressed: “Step after step appeared out of the rubble, and as the sudden Egyptian night closed in, the level of the twelfth step came to light, disclosing ‘the upper part of a doorway, blocked, plastered, and sealed ...’”

  Then, later: “taking an iron testing rod, Carter poked it through the door and found an emptiness on the other side. He lit candles to ensure against poisonous gases. Then the hole was enlarged.

  “Everyone interested in the project now crowded about ...Nervously, Carter lit a match, touched it to the candle, and held it toward the hole. As his head neared the opening—he was literally trembling with expectation and curiosity—the warm air escaping from the chamber beyond the door made the candle flare up ...”

  Much of Ceram’s account of archeological discovery is like this—crammed with facts, but also breathless with the same thrill of unraveling the mysteries of a buried past that motivates the great archeologists he chronicles.

  The reader is there as the Frenchman Champollion deciphers the Rosetta Stone, key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphics ...He marches with Cortes’ conquistadors into the Mexican jungle as they “behead” an advanced Indian civilization that predated their arrival by more than a thousand years. He looks on as Schliemann unearths Homer’s fabled Troy and discovers a priceless treasure: “There was the soft sheen of ivory, the jingle of gold. Schliemann’s wife held open the shawl to be filled with [what they took to be] Priam’s treasure. It was the golden treasure of one of the mightiest kings of prehistory, gathered together in blood and tears, the ornaments of a godlike people, buried for three thousand years until dug from under the ruined walls of seven vanished kingdoms.”

  Now such wide-eyed wonderment is ripe for sophisticated sneering— on the grounds, for example, that it leaves insufficient room to properly develop of a line of thought or body of scholarly knowledge. Indeed, when Gods, Graves, and Scholars first appeared, a reviewer for the New Yorker complained that it was “cozy and popeyed, and ... nearly always skimpy.” But that was a discordant note in an otherwise friendly reception: One critic called it “the best popular history of archeology.” Another declared that it would “do for archeology what The Story of Civilization did to popularize that far less dramatic subject.”

  Since then, Ceram’s book has been translated into 26 languages, and repeatedly reprinted. In 1967, it was updated. Those who have read it, or someday will, probably number a thousand times those having read, for example, Monumenti antichi inediti, by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, one of the fathers of archeology.

  In his preface, Ceram—a pseudonym of journalist Kurt W. Marek— acknowledges a debt to Paul de Kruif, whose Microbe Hunters pioneered what Ceram calls the “new literary category” of science popularization. Here lies the key to viewing a book like Gods, Graves, and Scholars which is not itself, in a sense, “original”: It must be seen by its own lights, not as something it isn’t and was never meant to be, as part of a distinct genre for which we today have ever more need.

  The Stress of Life

  ____________

  By Hans Selye

  First published in 1956

  Loud noise does it. So does extreme cold. Or a burnt finger. Or an intractable math problem. Or a stern lecture from your boss. All impose stress. All can make you sick.

  Back in 1925, Viennese-born Hans Selye was a medical student at the University of Prague. His professors paraded before him patients suffering from a variety of infectious diseases, in each case noting the symptoms and little telltale signs that distinguished one from another. But what young Selye noticed was not how different the sick people were, but how alike. Aches and pains, intestinal disturbance, fever—these were common, whatever the particular illness. Together, it seemed to him, they comprised a “syndrome of just being sick.”

  That perception stuck with him over the years and led to his discovery that the body responded to demands placed upon it with a universal, nonspecific response; and that too strong a response could lead to illness, those of the kidneys, heart, and blood vessels being among them.

  The story is told in Selye’s The Stress of Life, first published in 1956, when it was received as, in the words of one reviewer, “an extremely intense and personal book in which the personality of the writer is ever present.” Updated in 1976 to reflect two decades of new research, it retains most of Selye’s quirky blending of autobiography, scientific discovery, self-help, and philosophy.

  Selye first saw the effects of stress in rats he’d injected with various ovarian and placental extracts. Autopsy revealed heightened adrenal activity, shrinkage of the thymus and other immune system organs, and ulcers in the stomach lining. Surely, something in the extract he was injecting had done it. Discovery of some new sex hormone, he felt confident, was just around the corner.

  Then, he found he could inject the rats with a toxic substance called formalin and get the same response—only stronger.

  Scratch the sex hormone idea. “I do not think I had ever been more profoundly disappointed!” Selye writes. “Suddenly all my dreams of discovering a new hormone were shattered. All the time and all the materials that went into this long study were wasted.”

  But later he remembered his “syndrome of just being sick” from medical school. Were the symptoms he’d seen in the rats a general response to assault on the body akin to the general syndrome he’d seen back in medical school? He thought they were, and called it the “general ada
ptation syndrome.” His first paper on it appeared in 1936.

  Years of research followed, confirming the essentials of his theory and leaving Selye, the acknowledged father of a field in which, by the mid-1970s, more than 100,000 scientific papers had been written. Selye himself is the author of more than 1,500 articles and 30 books. But it’s The Stress of Life that’s brought the stress concept out from the medical libraries and onto the lay public’s bookshelf; that’s helped make laments about “the stress of modern life” and worry about “all the stress he’s under lately” part of popular culture.

  What’s unusual about Selye’s book is its catholicity of form.

  It is, first, quite personal. We’re there with the young Selye for key experiments, both failed and successful, that led him to the stress concept.

  It is also an exercise in science popularization. We learn how an infection, say, triggers release of corticotrophin releasing factor from the hypothalamus, which releases ACTH from the pituitary, which in turn orders the adrenal glands to secrete corticoids, which act on the immune system, and so on. Some readers, despite Selye’s best efforts, may find this tough going. But in idiosyncratic Selye fashion, he warns the reader as much in a part of the preface duly labeled “Readability.”

  Other parts of the book explain the scientific method, look into why scientists often disagree, consider the role of animals in research, list signs of excessive stress, and survey the medical literature for how stress afflicts various occupations from clerks to executives.