Here, in a brisk but never breathless telling, is the story of man—how he
came to be, how he made the world, and how he has remade it to suit his
changing self, over and over again. It’s the story of who we are, where we
have been, and, in its concluding, speculative chapters, where we may be
going. The teller is David Fromkin, a professor of international relations,
history, and law at Boston University, and a sometimes contributor to these
pages. He’s an optimist, a believer in progress, an unashamed champion of
Western ideals. He’s sane. He’s trustworthy. He’s eminently intelligible. He
applies his broad brush with measured, confident,
upward-leading strokes. He
is,
in short, a refreshing, even necessary, antidote to all those
fevered end-time fantasists whose only plausible scenario for
man is to send him, banging
and whimpering and unredeemed, over the edge and into the abyss.
Fromkin organizes his universal history into eight chapters, each documenting
one of the “giant steps” we took on the long road to the present. Four steps
were taken in the deepest human past: we evolved into homo sapiens,
developing the “traits of mind, heart, and body” that separated us from our
hominid ancestors; we discovered agriculture, domesticated animals, and built
the first cities; we developed a conscience, instituting law, religion, and
philosophy; we created great empires, especially in Europe. Four
further steps were taken in our own millennium: Europe “achieved rationality,”
developed its “distinctive mentality,” and revolutionized science, technology,
and industry. Two, Europe discovered the world, and conquered
it with culture. Three, beginning in the eighteenth century, science,
technology, and
industry made marvelous leaps forward and we of the West became
moderns.
Finally, led by its freshest invention, the United States of America, the West
moved steadily toward democratic government, decolonization, and world law.
“Ancient history,” writes Fromkin, “is the story of how the human race
experimented, invented civilizations, and then created more and more of them.
Modern history is a tale of elimination rounds, with the number of
civilizations contracting until only one”—Western, or American,
civilization
—“remained.” The story of the near future
—the subject of
Fromkin’s final four chapters—will be that of mankind’s stuggle
“to adapt to
the requirements … and cope with the consequences of the
functioning
. . . of the sole surviving civilization.”
Is the glue that binds this global civilization together strong enough to
hold? And now that the Americans have remade the world in their own image,
will “the ideas and the principles the United States has championed survive
the strains and challenges of reality”? Yes, Fromkin smiles, “the world is in
luck.” The United States desires permanent peace; its ways of insuring peace
are swift, effective, and just; and “continuing American leadership, like it
or not, seems to be what the world has got.” The smile is triumphant, but it’s
not completely untroubled; it’s the smile of Noah, the world his ark. “We’re
all in the same boat,” Fromkin writes. “It may be a seaworthy boat; but it
would be less worrisome if there were more than one.”
Steerforth Press, 133 pages, $12 paper
When she was in her early sixties, Mary Britton Miller (1883–1975), who after
twenty years of publishing had found no success as a lyric poet, reinvented
herself as Isabel Bolton, a writer of lyric prose. The first book under her
pen name was Do I Wake or Sleep (1946), a perfect fable of America and
Europe on the eve of World War II and a witty, stinging satire of New York’s
moneyed class. Edmund Wilson, who seldom gushed, was lavish in his praise:
“She has cut to roundness and smoothed to convexity a little crystal of
literary form that concentrates the light like a burning glass.” Miller
followed this triumph with three more novels, each a miracle of concision, and
a handful of striking short stories—a small, distinctive, and sadly
overlooked body of fiction that, in her lifetime, earned her deserved
comparisons with James and Wharton, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. She
also wrote a remarkable memoir, Under Gemini, published in 1966 and now,
after three decades, plucked from obscurity by the venturesome Steerforth
Press.
Of Mary Miller’s many acknowledged masters, Bowen is the presiding influence
here. As Diana Trilling once noted, Bowen and Miller share “the same
scalpel-like precision of observation and expression, the same ability to make the
most delicate differentiations between appearances and reality, the same fierce
insight into human error held in check by warm human sympathy.” Both are also
modern masters of what Bowen once called “Life with the Lid On,” that kind of
fiction in which terribly well-bred ladies and gentlemen, every
whale-
bone and
stud in place, suppress passion, terror, and doubt as they take up their fish
forks and smile past their host. And, most relevant to Under Gemini,
Bowen and Miller are unrivaled as creators of child protagonists, characters
who are never miniature adults but who, in the purity of their emotions and
their imperfect understanding of the workings of the world, are at
once
real
children and criticisms of the adults who share the stage with them—their
parents, their protectors, and especially their exploiters.
The protagonist of Under Gemini is Mary Miller herself, who writes of
her Brahmin-bohemian girlhood at the end of the last century, a girlhood
marked by privilege, disorder, longing, and loss. Her parents are glimpsed; we
hear the word “cholera”; the parents disappear. We meet the good grandmother,
and run wild on her seemingly boundless estate; then we meet Julia,
the quick-to-anger aunt who too soon takes her place. Best
of all, we come to know Miss
Rogers, the loving but crisis-prone governess, a “sad and hungry heart” who
strives in vain to be the perfect mother
to the five ungovernable Miller
children.
We are led through the seasons of New England, through blizzards and
weddings and fourteen seaside summers, to the defining moment of Mary’s
life—the afternoon in August when, in one shocking instant, her childhood
abruptly ends.
The power of this book—and it is truly, strangely powerful—lies not in its
set pieces, not even in its moral counterpoint of the child and the adult worlds,
but in its unique narrative voice. Under Gemini is written not in the
first-person singular, the “I” of every other memoir, but rather in the
plural, “we,” for Mary was born not just Mary but, wondrously, Mary and
Grace—
one mind in two bodies, her own and her identical twin’s. Mary Miller
evokes not only the universal aspects of her New England childhood—beach
days, snow days, school days—but also one of the most exotic of human
experiences, that of being accompanied through life by a second self, and of
knowing oneself to be that other person, down to the last nerve. “I look
at Grace and know that I am crying too,” she writes; “Tears stream down our
faces.” “A thought that we had never had before struck us suddenly.” “I kept
shouting but it was not my voice I heard. It was hers.”
As a novelist, Isabel Bolton took as her motto a line from Keats’s letters:
“Life is a valley of soul-making.” In her own case—in her and Grace’s
case—the making of a soul was a joint, not a single, venture. Under
Gemini is an exquisite book, beautiful in its form and haunting in its
effects. It is also, at little over one hundred pages, proof of the argument
that, in matters of art, the miniature need never be mistaken for the minor.
Walker & Company, 215 pages, $22
Stately, elegant, wholly benign, all neck and spots and huge brown eyes, the
giraffe strides silently through our consciousness from earliest childhood on.
Any five-year-old master of any Western tongue will instruct you
that G
is for giraffe. Moreover, one assumes that it has always been just so,
and that Leonardo, Shakespeare, and Napoleon also learned their
G’s on the animal. The first surprise of Michael Allin’s
continuously surprising book is that
Western knowledge of the giraffe dates only from 1826, when the first live
specimen seen in modern Europe disembarked at Marseilles, a strange and
delightful consequence of the Turkish stranglehold on Greece.
The giraffe, you see, was a gift to Charles
X from Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman
viceroy of Egypt. The cunning Muhammad, fully aware that French popular
sentiment was against him and his allied Turks, was hoping to charm
Charles out of going to war alongside the Greeks. The viceroy lost his gamble. The
giraffe, meanwhile, conquered the hearts of a people.
In a tour de force of historical re-creation, Mr. Allin tells the story of
this wonder from another world, whose presence among the French both amazed
and transformed them. She crossed the Mediterranean, a charismatic,
twelve-foot-high three-year-old, in a custom-built boat with a hole
in the deck to
allow her to stand upright below. She was accompanied by exotic Arab handlers
and by three dairy cows, for she drank only Egyptian milk. The keeper of the
royal menagerie, who met her boat at Marseilles, persuaded himself that the
best way to transport her to Paris was on foot. And so
began a 550-mile
trek, spanning forty-one cloudless early-summer days, up the Rhône Valley then
west to the Seine, and on to the palace at Saint-Cloud. Along the way,
villages renamed streets and squares to commemorate the giraffe’s passage,
while in Paris she was all the rage even before her arrival. By the summer of
1827, everything was á la Girafe: wallpaper, textiles, crockery, soap,
and cookies—anything that could be was stamped with or made in her image.
Giraffe derives from the Arabic word zarafa, which means
“charming” or “lovely one.” Mr. Allin, beguiled by the fairy-tale
notion of
“this beautiful stranger in King Charles’ court,” began his little book as a
work of fiction. “I named the giraffe Zarafa,” he writes, “and imagined her
wading in a field of sunflowers. But as I learned more about [her reception]
in Paris … and as the humans involved in [her] journey emerged in my
research as real-life figures, the fairy tale kept backing up into ever more
fascinating history.” Luckily, despite all his side trips into politics,
Egyptology, and a hundred other inviting corners, Mr. Allin never lost sight
of his original inspiration, the storybook image of
thousands
of curious Frenchman leaving their fields and homes to marvel at “this living
mythological combination of creatures—a gentle and mysterious sort of horned
camel … with legs as tall as a man and the cloven hooves of a cow,
markings like a leopard or a maze of lightning, and that startling blue-black
snake of a twenty-inch tongue.”