Book Review: 'Gwynne's Grammar' by N.M. Gwynne & 'The Sense of Style' by Steven

Book Review: 'Gwynne's Grammar' by N.M. Gwynne & 'The Sense of Style' by Steven Pinker

Good grammar is crucial to clear thinking, say the language grumps. Nonsense, say cognitive scientists. Nobody seems to know why intelligent people write inscrutable prose.

By

Joseph Epstein

Sept. 26, 2014 4:58 p.m. ET 30 COMMENTS

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Grammar is not everybody's idea of a good time. Thanks to the remarkable inefficiencies of the Chicago public school system, I was able to steer happily clear of the subject until going off to college. Until then the entirety of my grammatical knowledge included beginning a sentence with a capital letter and ending it with a period and never using the word "ain't." Commas to me were so many gnats strewn upon sheets of printed paper, a colon was an internal organ, and a dash a synonym for just a touch of ketchup or mustard. As for the semicolon, my understanding of it was equal to my understanding of Mandarin Chinese, in which, for all I knew, it might have passed as a letter.

Part of the problem here is youth, which is often unprepared to receive knowledge that does not immediately excite. How, after all, could a male adolescent, hormones churning, care about a dangling participle when his own participle so seldom dangled? I could scarcely have told you what a split infinitive was because I had no notion of what an infinitive might be. If a sentence wished to run on, hey, that was fine by me. Ask me the meaning of the genitive, the ablative or the gerundive and I would probably reply that it is not nice to mix with Mr. Inbetween. Grammar, fair to say, was not my long suit.

Gwynne's Grammar

By N.M. Gwynne
Knopf, 249 pages, $19.95

I first learned grammar through instruction in French by a modest man named Philip Kolb, who I subsequently learned was the editor, in French, of the letters of Marcel Proust. Only later, gradually, did I pick up the rudiments of English grammar. When I was a university teacher in a department of English, I corrected my students' obvious lapses in grammar, but I should certainly never correct anyone else's grammar, in public or private, nor do I deign to correct that of the contemporary authors whose books I occasionally review. The critic John Simon has made rather a speciality of this. I once met a man who told me that John corrected a toast he gave at a wedding.

I used the word "speciality" in the penultimate sentence of my last paragraph, and not the word "specialty," and straightaway became a touch nervous. H.W. Fowler, whose magisterial "Modern English Usage" I keep near my desk, informs me that it is all right to do so. The two words, he reports, seem to call out for differentiation, though little progress has been made in achieving it, and "writers use either form for any of the senses according as they prefer its sound in general or find it suits the rhythm of a sentence." The wrestle with language, like that with conscience, is unending.

The Sense of Style

By Steven Pinker
Viking, 359 pages, $27.95

Not the least notable thing about "Gwynne's Grammar," the work of Neville Martin Gwynne, an English businessman and earlier an Etonian who went on to Oxford, is that it spent some time on best-seller lists in Britain. What makes this all the more extraordinary is that the book is a textbook, one with no pictures—"pictures in textbooks," Mr. Gwynne writes, "actually interfere with the learning process"—and with not the least wisp of dumbing-down in its composition.

Mr. Gwynne does not deny that grammar can be hellishly complicated. "Rather," he writes, "the encouragement that I offer is that whatever work is involved is overwhelmingly worth it and also that this work gradually becomes progressively easier as the skills involved become more habitual and indeed as making the necessary effort becomes more habitual."

If any criticism might be made of "Gwynne's Grammar," it might be about the extravagance of its author's promises. Mr. Gwynne holds that grammar is crucial to clear thinking, which may well be right. He also claims that "the rules [of grammar] always have a logic underpinning them," which, alas, isn't always the case. In a five-step syllogism, he contends that "grammar is the science of using words rightly, leading to thinking rightly, leading to deciding rightly, without which—as both common sense and experience show—happiness is impossible." Improvement in grammar, he also argues, unfailingly affects "both mind and character." All of which, as the English say, sounds like overegging the pudding.

On the underegging side, Mr. Gwynne writes that there is "virtually nothing original in [his book] except its manner of presentation." This manner is simple enough. Mr. Gwynne defines the parts of speech, the elements of punctuation and the grammar of writing verse (once considered a standard practice of the cultivated). He then follows up in each instance with examples of these things both properly and improperly used. His definitions—terse, logical, precise—are among the best things in the book. He defines a definition—not an easy thing to do—as "a statement of the exact meaning of a word or phrase that sufficiently distinguishes it from any other word or phrase, preferably in the fewest possible words." A sentence "is most comprehensively defined as a word or group of words expressing a complete statement, wish, command or question, whether as a thought or in speech or in writing." He defines grammar as "being simply the correct use of words."

As Mr. Gwynne moves into the subtler elements of grammar, he sets out the range and use of verbs and their tenses, the basic rules of syntax, the mechanics of punctuation. With his customary precision, he guides his readers through the arcana of the subjunctive and introduces the notion of modal verbs. He makes the clean distinction between a clause and phrase by noting that a clause is a phrase with a verb in it, a phrase a clause without a verb. He takes up the active and passive and those troublesome fraternal twins, transitive and intransitive.

Something quite new to me is Mr. Gwynne's dictum on the placement of multiple adjectives, according to which adjectives of opinion come before those of size, which come before those of age, which come before those of shape, which come before those of color, which come before those of origin, which come before those of material purpose. His illustrative sentence on this point runs: "The book you are holding is therefore a nice little just-published oblong-shaped attractively colored much needed hardcover grammar textbook."

Memorization is a strong element in the Gwynne pedagogical method. He insists on the importance of readers memorizing his definitions and rules. He believes the rote method of learning, currently much despised, essential to acquiring grammar. Returning to that ordering of adjectives, I had myself thought to memorize it but found I could not. But, then, my little gray cells, unlike those of Inspector Poirot, may not be in top condition.

The personality of its author is not the least attraction of "Gwynne's Grammar." Mr. Gwynne is unflinchingly, unapologetically rear-guard. Straight out of the gate he announces that "the word to indicate whether anyone is male or female is 'sex,' not 'gender,' which is purely a grammatical term," an assertion that, if taken up, would wipe out every Gender Studies program in American universities. Excepting the need for new words for new things, he is against any changes in language that "are not in the direction of greater richness, clarity, and precision." His position on splitting infinitives is to note that "Shakespeare never needed to split an infinitive," with the implication that therefore neither should we. Case closed.

Mr. Gwynne's literary opinions are no less firmly held. He attacks Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot for setting verse free. Late in the book he remarks, though by this point he need scarcely do so, "I am not an innovator. On the contrary, my position throughout this book is that of defender and promoter of what has been shown to work over long periods of time and what is real."

N.M. Gwynne and Steven Pinker, the author of "The Sense of Style," would not, fair to say, be ideal cabin mates on a lengthy cruise along the Mediterranean. For Mr. Pinker, Mr. Gwynne would qualify supremely for what in his book he calls a "language grump," or "pedant," or "anal retentive," or "Miss Thistlebottom," his term for the type of the old-fashioned school marm. For Mr. Gwynne, Mr. Pinker would be written off as a man with no literary standard, a mere psycholinguist and cognitive scientist, which at Harvard is what Mr. Pinker is. As teachers, Mr. Gwynne is a suit-and-tie man, Mr. Pinker, I should imagine, an open-collar guy. Mr. Gwynne makes no effort to charm; Mr. Pinker perhaps overestimates his own charm. Mr. Pinker is at ease using such words and phrases as "feedback," "fun facts," "case-selection circuitry"; he advises his readers to think of grammar as "the original sharing app." Mr. Pinker is a man who goes with the flow, Mr. Gwynne a man who wishes to stop that flow, dead, in midstream.

A psycholinguist, I take it, is someone who investigates the psychological uses and implications of language; a cognitive scientist someone who studies all that has to do with the mechanics of thought, from within the brain and beyond. In "The Sense of Style" Mr. Pinker brings both these endeavors to bear on a book that sets out to improve writing style chiefly through considering the capacity and needs of readers. How much confusion can a reader accommodate is the central question in his book, and how best to eliminate that confusion is his goal. "The curse of knowledge," he writes, in a chapter devoted to the needless complexity of much academic and scientific prose, "is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose."

Unlike Mr. Gwynne, Mr. Pinker does not blame the Internet for the barbarization of the young and the encouragement of slovenly writing habits. He believes there are many occasions in which one not only may but is well advised to split infinitives. He holds, with Calvin Trillin, that the person who invented the word "whom" had little more in mind than to have those who use it sound like butlers. Mr. Pinker thinks, contra Mr. Gwynne, that it is not always true that "good prose always leads to good thinking." In his book, he occasionally uses cartoons and tells old jokes to reinforce and underscore points. He does not feel that sloppy writing bodes the end of civilization and suggests, if he does not come right out and say it, that those who do may require psychotherapy.

Many of the long-standing rules about grammar and usage that Mr. Pinker's language grumps get worked up about—ending a sentence with a preposition, using "decimate" to mean anything other than wiping out a 10th, and many others—he considers little more than bubbe mieses, Yiddish for grandmother's tales. Where Mr. Gwynne stresses the importance of etymology, Mr. Pinker highlights the fallacy of etymology, pointing out that "deprecate used to mean 'ward off by prayer,' meticulous once meant 'timid," and silly went from ''blessed' to 'pious' to 'innocent' to 'pitiable' to 'feeble' to today's 'foolish.' " Etymology in defense of restricted meanings, in other words, is for him no defense.

All this makes Messrs. Gwynne and Pinker sound like stalwart opponents in the old battle between the Prescriptivists and the Descriptivists, or between those who believe the rules of grammar and usage ought to be rigidly prescribed and enforced and those who believe that common use dictates regular changes in the rules and in the meanings of words. But Mr. Pinker argues that this battle is ultimately phony, a myth. Few rules in the realms of grammar and usage hold up as true rules; they are instead, in his view, "tacit conventions." The last third of "The Sense of Style" is devoted to demolishing the most cherished of putative rules of grammar and usage; he does this by coming up with exceptional cases that do not prove but blow up the rules. Of the age-old distinction between the words "can" and "may," he holds that "the distinction is usually moot, and the two words may (or can) be used more or less interchangeably."

Such quotations are made all the more compelling because of Mr. Pinker's linguistical learning, which is considerable. His knowledge of grammar is extensive and runs deep. He also takes a scarcely hidden delight in exploding tradition. He describes his own temperament as "both logical and rebellious." Few things give him more pleasure than popping the buttons off what he takes to be stuffed shirts.

Mr. Pinker makes a useful distinction between formal and informal writing and speech and claims—who could dispute him?—that ours is an age of informality. He seeks to have academics write less woodenly, and especially less obscurely. Not inflexible in his rebellion, he often sensibly suggests staying with conventional usage lest one offend the easily enraged "gotcha" crowd by departing from it. He does not argue that anything goes but instead fills his readers in on the fact that they are already freer in their use of language than they might have thought. He wants them unfettered by hollow dicta. All this should be liberating.

Why, I wonder, isn't it, at least not for me? I would find making use of Mr. Pinker's loosening of the rules, as Robert Frost said of the writing of free verse, like playing tennis without a net. I feel a certain elegance in what I have been taught and still take to be correct English, and so, except when doing so results in a barbarous construction, I choose never to split an infinitive. I prefer not to end my sentences with prepositions because I have learned that the best-made sentences tend to close on strong words. "Disinterested" for me will always mean "impartial"; "literate" will mean "able to read and write," not "reasonably well-read." I plan to continue to observe the old distinction between the words "can" and "may," to use "each other" when referring to two people and "one another" when referring to more than two, and I'm sticking with "directly" or "soon" as the only meanings of the word "presently." As for the reader, that figure with whom Mr. Pinker is most concerned—I've never met the guy and therefore feel no obligation to make things all that much easier for him. All I owe him is clarity and such relief as I can provide him from boredom. In the end I write for myself and for anyone who cares to eavesdrop on my conversations in prose with myself.

Rather than align myself with the Gwynnians or the Pinkertons, I say a blessing on both their houses, and I would add: Let the language battles between them rage on—except that to do so would expose me to the charge of ending this review on a preposition, which I cannot allow.

—Mr. Epstein is the author of "Friendship," "Snobbery" and the new collection "A Literary Education and Other Essays."

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Book Review: 'Censors at Work' by Robert Darnton

The censors of 18th-century France functioned like peer reviewers today, writing blurbs for books they liked.

God Dog

A 1906 cartoon depicting 'a cartoonist and his captors,' from the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus. In the decade following its 1896 founding, one publisher was sent into exile, and an editor sent to prison for attacking the clergy. Universal History Archive/UIG / Bridgeman Images

By

Felipe Fernández-Armesto

Sept. 26, 2014 4:56 p.m. ET 2 COMMENTS

I fell in love at a debate about pornography. It was 1975, on the day the Order of the Garter commemorated Haile Selassie, the recently deceased emperor of Ethiopia, at Windsor Castle. The link between the two events was the Earl of Longford, the eminent socialist statesman and my fellow guest-speaker at the debate, who arrived just in time, having represented Britain's prime minister at the imperial obsequies. He turned up in court dress and top hat, dripping with medals, to take his seat on the platform alongside my future wife (the secretary of her college debating society). At the time, the earl was busy with what he called his "crusade against pornography." Against a passionate peer and a beautiful girl, I could not hope successfully to extol pornography. Instead, I concentrated on the evils of censorship. I won the woman and lost the debate.

I still think that my argument was right. Pornography, libel, sedition, hate speech and lies are a fair price for freedom of speech. They would be powerless in a justly ordered, well-educated society. If pornography incites your lust, commend the pornographer for success and condemn yourself for succumbing. If you believe the propagandist, he or she has done his job: It is your critical faculties that are at fault. If the advertiser exaggerates, caveat emptor.

Censors at Work

By Robert Darnton
Norton, 316 pages, $27.95

Robert Darnton, who is justly renowned as a scholar, is, in a mild sense, a pornographer himself: In the appendix to "The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France" (1996), he translated "Thérèse philosophe," one of the fruitiest of the Enlightenment's erotic novels. But I am not sure that Mr. Darnton would have been on my side in the debate. In "Censors at Work"— a vivid, fascinating study of would-be controllers of literary output in Enlightenment France, British India and communist East Germany—he takes an equivocal stance.

On the one hand, he says that he believes "in the right to freedom of speech with all the fervor of my fellow citizens." On the other, he appeals to the examples of Milton and Diderot, who collaborated in censorship, to justify compromises with "a real world of economic interests and political lobbies." Mr. Darnton sees freedom as "an ideal to be defended," not demanded. He disclaims relativism but advocates what he calls an anthropological approach, acknowledging that censorship's meaning is different in changing cultural circumstances.

Censors, those generally friendless individuals, emerge with some honor from Mr. Darnton's book, which unfolds a "human comedy" full of intriguing revelations. He makes modest heroes of the state's officially appointed censors in 18th-century France. Dedicated more to licensing good literature than excising heterodoxy, they functioned like peer reviewers today, focusing for little or no pay on the quality of submissions and writing blurbs for books they liked. The public could rely on their imprimatur as a measure of excellence. Books they rated as bad but tolerable got tacit assent. They wrote their reports "as men of letters," and Mr. Darnton shows that their decisions, when self-interested (like those of many modern reviewers), were influenced more by obligations of patronage and friendship than by matters of principle. Of course, the censors did censor, but what they identified as pernicious appeared illegally or abroad and, in most cases, reached the public without difficulty.

The bureaucrats who monitored literature in British India, too, emphasized matters of taste more than politics. They "could not allow the Indians to use words as freely as Englishmen did at home" but genuinely sought beneficent government, good literature and the rule of law. They practiced censorship by deterrence, exercising repression retrospectively, by means of trials for sedition or libel. The Raj was feebly repressive and never stifled criticism from prolific presses or innumerable street performers.

Although East German censorship is a well-troweled field, Mr. Darnton approaches it from a fresh angle and wrests new perceptions, partly from sallies in the archives and partly from his interviews with former censors, whom he found defensive but unrepentant. Their job, as they saw it, was "to make literature happen" in a Leseland—a land of books and readers protected from the trash-culture that infected the West. Like their 18th-century French predecessors, they were cultivated, literate men and women, who developed personal and often fruitful editorial relationships with writers whose work they vetted. They were sometimes a liberalizing influence.

The East German censors had to filter out taboo words such as "ecology," "critical" and "Stalinism," but when they wished they could find ways around the system. They smuggled politically repugnant works onto the approved list, such as Volker Braun's "Hinze-Kunze Roman," which exploded scandalously on the regime like an "intellectual bomb," criticizing the system implicitly through an examination of the relationship between an apparatchik and his chauffeur. The censors also deliberately committed significant editorial lapses, as when the real name of the prison in which the novelist Erich Loest was confined appeared by contrived "error" in a fictionalized context. The censors even allowed Christa Wolf's influential "Kassandra," whose depiction of classical Troy had much in common with oppressive East Germany, to appear with dots in place of deletions: Readers could restore the missing parts using texts circulated by samizdat means. On at least two occasions the censors banned books because they were too crudely apologetic about the regime.

In East Germany, the weakness of censorship was compensated for by harsh repression, deterring dissent by cruel and capricious acts of exemplary violence. The human comedy shaded into tragedy. In 18th-century France, at least in Mr. Darnton's telling, comedy predominated, animating relationships between the police and their victims. Mr. Darnton relates, for instance, the engaging story of Pierre-Auguste Goupil, inspector of the book trade, who ended as an arch-pornographer. Police action targeted illegal publications if they were seditious or obscene, but the effect hardly seems to have inhibited the output. There were moments when state and church issued a virtual "declaration of war against the Enlightenment," with book burnings and bans on sales, but these seem to have been more about relieving outraged feelings than restricting trade.

Nevertheless, Mr. Darnton concludes, even without coercion, in a suitably crafted atmosphere authors become complicit in self-censorship and mutual denunciation. Sometimes "the system censors," and for East Germany and similar regimes he demonstrates this convincingly. Some writers collaborated as a sacrifice for socialism; others because they believed censorship was inevitable—implicit in capitalism, candid in communism, but morally equivalent in both. Others hoped their compromises would mitigate the state's hold on literature. Alexander Solzhenitsyn made calculated concessions over the text of "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. " Some writers even appear to have relished censorship as an extra source of discipline in their art.

A logical difficulty arises that Mr. Darnton never confronts. If writers are saying what they want to say—if they willingly defer to the culture that surrounds them, if they want to be apologists for a regime or an ideology or spokesmen for their own clique or country, is their "self-censorship" censorship in more than a metaphorical sense?

Mr. Darnton's definition is narrow: He wants to limit the term "censorship" to interventions by the state or religious bodies. What matters, however, is the power relationship between censor and censored. Anyone—a publisher, for instance, or a university, or a patron—who pressures or compels me to suppress or change my words by pulling rank or making credible threats is practicing censorship as surely as a government that bans my work. States are not the only, or even perhaps the commonest, enemies of free speech. Political censorship is peculiarly pernicious only because states are peculiarly powerful.

It is hard to believe that Mr. Darnton, as a practicing academic and published author, has never been a victim of this sort of attempted censorship. I have often confronted it, sometimes in comically trivial instances. One author's heirs, for instance, objected to an introduction I wrote for the publisher of her collected stories because of my mild animadversions on her snobbery: I published the piece in the Times of London instead. One another occasion, a U.S. copy editor tried to make me change my description of Japan as "a long, thin country" on the grounds that it might offend fat people. Recent, serious alleged cases of non-state censorship include the attempt of Louisiana State University to silence a teacher who criticized the Army Corps of Engineers and the effort of publishers Taylor & Francis to block a critical report on for-profit academic publishing in the journal Prometheus.

Should we privilege morally inspired censors by allowing special concessions to their well-intentioned objections? Mr. Darnton makes no distinction between censorship for political reasons and censorship for pornographic improprieties—rightly, because the frontier between different kinds of obscenity shifts with changes of regime. Corruption, like persuasion, requires the assent of the reader or viewer. I do not want to re-engage in the fight I lost to my wife 40 years ago, but I still believe it is better to allow pornography than to empower prudes, and better to license excess than endorse censorship.

— Mr. Fernández-Armesto is a professor at Notre Dame and the author, most recently, of "Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States."

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How to Stop Time

How to Stop Time


IN the unlikely event that we could ever unite under the banner of a single saint, it might just be St. Expeditus. According to legend, when the Roman centurion decided to convert to Christianity, the Devil appeared in the form of a crow and circled above him crying "cras, cras" — Latin for "tomorrow, tomorrow." Expeditus stomped on the bird and shouted victoriously, "Today!" For doing so, Expeditus achieved salvation, and is worshiped as the patron saint of procrastinators. Sometimes you see icons of him turned upside down like an hourglass in the hope that he'll hurry up and help you get your work done so he can be set right-side up again. From job-seekers in Brazil to people who run e-commerce sites in New Orleans, Expeditus is adored not just for his expediency, but also for his power to settle financial affairs. There is even a novena to the saint on Facebook.

Expeditus was martyred in A.D. 303, but was resurrected around the time of the Industrial Revolution, as the tempo of the world accelerated with breathtaking speed. Sound familiar? Today, as the pace of our lives quickens and the demands placed on us multiply, procrastination is the archdemon many of us wrestle with daily. It would seem we need Expeditus more than ever.

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Credit Viktor Hachmang 

"Procrastination, quite frankly, is an epidemic," declares Jeffery Combs, the author of "The Procrastination Cure," just one in a vast industry of self-help books selling ways to crush the beast. The American Psychological Association estimates that 20 percent of American men and women are "chronic procrastinators." Figures place the amount of money lost in the United States to procrastinating employees at trillions of dollars a year.

A recent infographic in The Economist revealed that in the 140 million hours humanity spent watching "Gangnam Style" on YouTube two billion times, we could have built at least four more (desperately needed) pyramids at Giza. Endless articles pose the question of why we procrastinate, what's going wrong in the brain, how to overcome it, and the fascinating irrationality of it all.

But if procrastination is so clearly a society-wide, public condition, why is it always framed as an individual, personal deficiency? Why do we assume our own temperaments and habits are at fault — and feel bad about them — rather than question our culture's canonization of productivity?

I was faced with these questions at an unlikely event this past July — an academic conference on procrastination at the University of Oxford. It brought together a bright and incongruous crowd: an economist, a poetry professor, a "biographer of clutter," a queer theorist, a connoisseur of Iraqi coffee-shop culture. There was the doctoral student who spoke on the British painter Keith Vaughan, known to procrastinate through increasingly complicated experiments in auto-erotica. There was the children's author who tied herself to her desk with her shoelaces.

The keynote speaker, Tracey Potts, brought a tin of sugar cookies she had baked in the shape of the notorious loiterer Walter Benjamin. The German philosopher famously procrastinated on his "Arcades Project," a colossal meditation on the cityscape of Paris where the figure of the flâneur — the procrastinator par excellence — would wander. Benjamin himself fatally dallied in escaping the city ahead of the Nazis. He took his own life, leaving the manuscript forever unfinished, more evidence, it would seem, that no avoidable delay goes unpunished.

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As we entered the ninth, grueling hour of the conference, a professor laid out a taxonomy of dithering so enormous that I couldn't help but wonder: Whatever you're doing, aren't you by nature procrastinating from doing something else? Seen in this light, procrastination begins to look a lot like just plain existing. But then along come its foot soldiers — guilt, self-loathing, blame.

Dr. Potts explained how procrastination entered the field as pathological behavior in the mid-20th century. Drawing on the work of the British-born historian Christopher Lane, Dr. Potts directed our attention to a United States War Department bulletin issued in 1945 that chastised soldiers who were avoiding their military duties "by passive measures, such as pouting, stubbornness, procrastination, inefficiency and passive obstructionism." In 1952, when the American Psychiatric Association assembled the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — the bible of mental health used to determine illness to this day — it copied the passage from the cranky military memo verbatim.

And so, procrastination became enshrined as a symptom of mental illness. By the mid-60s, passive-aggressive personality disorder had become a fairly common diagnosis and "procrastination" remained listed as a symptom in several subsequent editions. "Dawdling" was added to the list, after years of delay.

While passive-aggressive personality disorder has been erased from the official portion of the manual, the stigma of slothfulness remains. Many of us, it seems, are still trying to enforce a military-style precision on our intellectual, creative, civilian lives — and often failing. Even at the conference, participants proposed strategies for beating procrastination that were chillingly martial. The economist suggested that we all "take hostages" — place something valuable at stake as a way of negotiating with our own belligerent minds. The children's author writes large checks out to political parties she loathes, and entrusts them to a relative to mail if she misses a deadline.

All of which leads me to wonder: Are we imposing standards on ourselves that make us mad?

Though Expeditus's pesky crow may be ageless, procrastination as epidemic — and the constant guilt that goes with it — is peculiar to the modern era. The 21st-century capitalist world, in its never-ending drive for expansion, consecrates an always-on productivity for the sake of the greater fiscal health.

In an 1853 short story Herman Melville gave us Bartleby, the obstinate scrivener and apex procrastinator, who confounds the requests of his boss with his hallowed mantra, "I would prefer not to." A perfect employee on the surface — he never leaves the office and sleeps at his desk — Bartleby represents a total rebellion against the expectations placed on him by society. Politely refusing to accept money or to remove himself from his office even after he is fired, the copyist went on to have an unexpected afterlife — as hero for the Occupy movement in 2012. "Bartleby was the first laid-off worker to occupy Wall Street," Jonathan D. Greenberg noted in The Atlantic. Confronted with Bartleby's serenity and his utter noncompliance with the status quo, his perplexed boss is left wondering whether he himself is the one who is mad.



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A month before the procrastination conference, I set myself the task of reading "Oblomov," the 19th-century Russian novel by Ivan Goncharov about the ultimate slouch, who, over the course of 500 pages, barely moves from his bed, and then only to shift to the sofa. At least that's what I heard: I failed to make it through more than two pages at a sitting without putting the novel down and allowing myself to drift off. I would carry the heavy book everywhere with me — it was like an anchor into a deep, blissful sea of sleep.

Oblomov could conduct the few tasks he cared to from under his quilt — writing letters, accepting visitors — but what if he'd had an iPhone and a laptop? Being in bed is now no excuse for dawdling, and no escape from the guilt that accompanies it. The voice — societal or psychological — urging us away from sloth to the pure, virtuous heights of productivity has become a sort of birdlike shriek as more individuals work from home and set their own schedules, and as the devices we use for work become alluring sirens to our own distraction. We are now able to accomplish tasks at nearly every moment, even if we prefer not to.

Still, humans will never stop procrastinating, and it might do us good to remember that the guilt and shame of the do-it-tomorrow cycle are not necessarily inescapable. The French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote about mental illness that it acquires its reality as an illness "only within a culture that recognizes it as such." Why not view procrastination not as a defect, an illness or a sin, but as an act of resistance against the strictures of time and productivity imposed by higher powers? To start, we might replace Expeditus with a new saint.
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At the conference, I was invited to speak about the Egyptian-born novelist Albert Cossery, a true icon of the right to remain lazy. In the mid-1940s, Cossery wrote a novel in French, "Laziness in the Fertile Valley," about a family in the Nile Delta that sleeps all day. Their somnolence is a form of protest against a world forever ruled by tyrants winding the clock. Born in 1913 in Cairo, Cossery grew up in a place that still retained cultural memories of the introduction of Western notions of time, a once foreign concept. It had arrived along with British military forces in the late 19th century. To turn Egypt into a lucrative colony, it needed to run on a synchronized, efficient schedule. The British replaced the Islamic lunar calendar with the Gregorian, preached the values of punctuality, and spread the gospel that time equaled money.

Firm in his belief that time is not as natural or apolitical as we might think, Cossery, in his writings and in his life, strove to reject the very system in which procrastination could have any meaning at all. Until his death in 2008, the elegant novelist, living in Paris, maintained a strict schedule of idleness. He slept late, rising in the afternoons for a walk to the Café de Flore, and wrote fiction only when he felt like it. "So much beauty in the world, so few eyes to see it," Cossery would say. He was the archetypal flâneur, in the footsteps of Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire, whose verses Cossery would steal for his own poetry when he was a teenager. Rather than charge through the day, storming the gates of tomorrow, his stylized repose was a perch from which to observe, reflect and question whether the world really needs all those things we feel we ought to get done — like a few more pyramids at Giza. And it was idleness that led Cossery to true creativity, dare I say it, in his masterfully unprolific work.

After my talk, someone came up to ask me what I thought was the ideal length of a nap. Saint Cossery was smiling. Already one small battle had been won.




Anna Della Subin is a writer and contributing editor at Bidoun, a Middle East arts and culture magazine.

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I Am Sorry for My Hipster Generation's Utter Destruction of Culture

By Will Self

July 2014: it's breakfast time at the Farmer's Daughter, a boutique motel in the Fairfax district of Los Angeles. The decor is suggestive of some deconstructed Midwestern idyll, what with old farming implements nailed up against one exterior wall, yards of gingham hanging from assorted rails, and plenty of rough-hewn yet varnished wood. The establishment is constructed around an exterior courtyard, and as I take my seat, intent on caffeine and carbohydrate, the soft, fume-tangy morning air is pulverized by the reverberating bassline of Massive Attack's 1995 single "Karmacoma." It makes me think of the neon-furred nights I endured that year, when, my synapses misfiring in a slop of MDMA, I'd rear up to look blearily at the dawn.

I rear up and head over to reception for the usual useless parlaying: Would they please turn the music down? No, they would not, because they cannot comprehend why anyone wouldn't want to eat their waffles to the accompaniment of loud trip-hop ... When I reassume my seat, looking frazzled and out of sorts, one of my sons bellows sympathy over the shingly sonic backwash, and I say: "Really, it's OK. After all, it's my generation that's to blame for this bullshit culture."

And we are, aren't we, us fiftysomethings? We're the pierced and tattooed, shorts-wearing, skunk-smoking, OxyContin-popping, neurotic dickheads who've presided over the commoditization of the counterculture; we're the ones who took the avant-garde and turned it into a successful rearguard action by the flying columns of capitalism's blitzkrieg; we're the twats who sat there saying that there was no distinction between high and popular culture, and that adverts should be considered as an art form; we're the idiots who scrumped the golden apples from the Tree of Jobs until our bellies swelled and we jetted slurry from our dickhead arseholes—slurry we claimed was "cultural criticism."

So all I can do is sit there and reflect on the great world-girdling mass of mindless attitudinizing that passes for "hip" in the third millennium since the death of the great sandal-wearing hippie. In 2005 Charlie Brooker and Chris Morris's satirical series Nathan Barley aired on British television; in it, they portrayed the nascent scene around Shoreditch and Hoxton in east London as a miserable gallimaufry of web-headed, tiny-bike-riding, moronic poseurs. Watching these programmes again nearly a decade on, I'm struck not only by the uncanny prescience of Brooker and Morris, but, far more disturbingly, by how nothing has changed. Changed, that is, qualitatively—if you walk down Brick Lane nowadays you see the same beards, low-cut T-shirts and fixed-wheel bikes; and if you eavesdrop on conversations you hear the same idiotic twittering about raves and virtual art forms; but quantitatively the picture has been utterly transformed: This quarter of the metropolis is positively haunching with dickheads—but then so is Manchester's Northern Quarter, or Clifton in Bristol, or the West End of Glasgow. If you venture further afield you will find dickheads the world over—downtown Reykjavik, I discovered to my horror, is a phantasmagoria of frothy-coffee joints and vinyl record shops.

Comrade Stalin once observed that "Quantity has a quality all its own," and the sheer quantity of dickheads now wandering bemusedly around the world represents, in my view, a big shift in cultural dynamics. In Los Angeles, arguably their Mecca, to be a dickhead is unremarkable; but Portlandia, the U.S. equivalent to Nathan Barley, posits the Oregonian city as a sort of time capsule of all that's righteously hip. The theme tune is a song featuring the lyric: "The spirit of the Nineties is alive in Portland!" If only that were the only place it was alive—but the truth is that this seisdick shift is global. If you log on to YouTube and key in "Being a Dickhead's Cool," you'll be subjected to two and a half minutes of satiric genius. Reuben Dangoor, who wrote and sings this ditty, doesn't seem to have done much else with his life, but frankly he doesn't need to. With lines such as "I remember when the kids at school would call us names/Now we're taking over their estates" he has so effectively skewered the phenomenon that he can rest eternally on his twisted laurels.

The rousing chorus of the song—"I love my life as a dickhead/All my friends are dickheads too"—suggests to me why the dickhead is at one with the zeitgeist. By providing even the most woefully untalented with an outlet for their "creativity," the web has massively enlarged the numbers who style themselves as "artistic," as well as increased the duration of their futile aspiration. In the kidult dickhead milieu, it's now quite possible to encounter fortysomethings with weird facial hair, wearing shorts and still resolutely believing that their career is about to take off.

And in a way I suppose they're right, because the totalizing capability of dickheads + web = an assumed equivalence between all remotely creative forms of endeavor. Nowadays someone who sticks old agricultural implements on the wall of a Los Angeles motel regards himself as on a par with Michelangelo; moreover, since all their friends are dickheads, too, no one is about to disabuse them. Hell, on Planet Dickhead just turning up the trip-hop can be a work of unalloyed genius. 

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Karl Miller obituary

Founding editor of the London Review of Books and, behind the scenes, a formative influence on the literature of his age

The enduring reputation of Karl Miller, who has died aged 83, will be as the greatest literary editor of his time, and one of the greatest ever. He founded, with Mary-Kay Wilmers and Susannah Clapp, the London Review of Books, and went on to edit "the paper" (as he always called it) for 10 years, and co-edit it for a further three years with Wilmers. Alan Bennett described the LRB as "the liveliest, the most serious and also the most radical literary magazine we have". Over its lifetime, it has elicited contributions from all the best British writers – Philip Larkin, Seamus Heaney, Angela Carter, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel – and, with its long and often playful essays on every conceivable subject, become an indispensable part of the nation's intellectual life. A main aspect of Miller's editorial genius was his ability, intuitively, to match a book with the right reviewer, whom he had known for years and whom he could persuade to do the thing for pennies as a "favour to Karl".

The LRB was devised to fill the vacuum left by the Times Literary Supplement when, in 1978-79, an 11-month lockout at Times Newspapers left Britain without a serious reviewing organ. The idea had been around for some time, bruited originally by Stephen Spender and Frank Kermode, but it took Miller et al to get the LRB off the ground – initially as a supplement to the New York Review of Books, but soon as an independent publication. Working simultaneously as professor of English at University College London from 1974 to 1992, Miller toiled indefatigably at the LRB. It was not uncommon to see him marking proofs while listening, with one ear, to a visiting lecturer. Multitasking came as easily to him as overwork.

Miller was born in Straiton, Midlothian. His world fragmented when his parents, as he ruefully records, decided they were disinclined to stay married to each other "or to me". An only child, in every painful sense, he was brought up by his maternal grandmother, in the lee of the Pentland Hills, within sight of Edinburgh.

It pleased him to note that his middle names Fergus Connor connected him to Scottish radicalism (although his politics, like those of his idol, Henry Cockburn, were Whiggish). Karl – a commoner (un)Christian name on Clydeside than Edinburgh's Morningside – resulted in the "rumour that I was named after Marx". His mother, Marion, was a committed socialist, but in fact "Karl" was a tribute by his father, William, to a Dutch farmer who had been kind to him when a prisoner in the first world war.

William Miller was an unsuccessful artist – an unsuccessful anything. Karl retained an occasional relationship with him until well after the second world war; they sometimes came close to blows. With his mother, who took up residence in nearby Gilmerton, he was on Sunday visiting terms by bicycle. He claimed never to have been "conscious of bearing my parents any ill will for not being around". But a temper which could flare out suggested lifelong deposits of resentment.

His grandmother stabilised his childhood. She survives in tender anecdotes such as when he asked her (having come across the term in Scott's The Heart of Midlothian) what a "brothel" was; she tactfully explained it was a place "where bad people went to dance". The death of his grandmother, in 1948, was one of only two occasions in his life on which Miller records feeling grief. The other was his resignation from the editorship of the LRB in 1992.

Miller won a place at the Old Royal high school on Calton Hill, Edinburgh, and left it "a hardworking scholarship boy, a dux, a valedictory orator, a poet" and determined "in a Scottish way, to get on".

There were obstacles. Two years' national service was obligatory in the late 1940s. He was not, for all his schoolboy laurels, handy in ways approved of by the army. He scored "nothing out of 20 in an intelligence test in which you assembled the parts of a bicycle pump". Nor did Miller approve of the army. "National service," he recorded, "made me turn to the working class as to a beautiful woman."

The badge of working-class affiliation was his lifelong love of football (listed in Who's Who as his only recreation). Those who took to the pitch with him (as much as those who took to it against him) record it as being a terrifying experience. He was eventually dissuaded from playing by physicians, perhaps fearing apoplexy if he continued. Watching remained a passion and, when editor of the Listener, he inaugurated – via Hans Keller and Danny Blanchflower – a distinguished style of soccer journalism.

In the army, defiantly un-commissioned, Miller worked with the British Forces Network in Hamburg. Bicycle pumps might defeat him, but he took naturally to media. Already he was establishing a personal network that he would consolidate through life. In 1951 he went to Cambridge to read English at Downing College, under the fearsome FR Leavis. Miller was a "Scottish scholarship boy" and unpolished. At one sherry party, asked by a Sitwellian don which public school he had attended, he replied "none". Later he overheard the comment "remarkable fellow, that Miller, entirely self-educated".

He was strongly influenced by Leavis although "not close." Had he been close, his move to the post of editor of Granta would have been prohibited. "Miller", the Leavisites muttered, had "begun to call people 'darling'". Although he had defected, Miller kept much of the faith. "I was disliked," he recalls, "by members of the London literary world as a Leavisite zealot, and disliked by Leavisite zealots as a renegade who had sold out to the London literary world." Neither prejudice was correct.

During his editorship (along with Nick Tomalin, in succession to Mark Boxer), the magazine published early work by Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes and Claire Tomalin. Already Miller was conducting, rather than contributing, the best writing in town.

On graduating from Cambridge, with the inevitable first, Miller spent a couple of years (one of them at Harvard) doing research on Scottish literature. He married in the same period, which rendered a life of scholarship, on scholarships, financially inadvisable. The couple quickly started a family. Becoming a father, Miller believed, was the best antidote for never having had one. Two sons, Daniel and Sam, were followed by a daughter, Georgia. His wife, Jane Collet, would go on to become one of the country's leading educationists.

He found his niche, after brief and unhappy stints in Whitehall and at the BBC, as literary editor of the Spectator (1958-61), while the magazine was under the patrician editorship of Ian Gilmour (later Margaret Thatcher's defence minister, and later still her deadly foe). The regime suited him, and companionship with congenial wits such as Bernard Levin and Alan Brien rendered it a happy interlude. But it was a short one. After three years, he took over the literary editor's chair at John Freeman's rival New Statesman (1961-67). From the magazine's offices on Great Turnstile, Miller published criticism by VS Pritchett, Frank Kermode, Christopher Ricks and William Empson. He established what would be a career-long relationship with Conor Cruise O'Brien.

Miller was, however, restless and wholly unbiddable. When the subsequent NS editor, Paul Johnson, objected to Empson's knottier contributions, Miller promptly resigned. Johnson, as an act of goodwill, handed over a parting cheque for £3,000 – good money in 1967. Miller, as an act of independence, tore it into confetti at his editor's desk.

By this point, Miller was ringmaster to the most distinguished stable of writers in Britain. Careers such as those of VS Naipaul, Dan Jacobson, Brigid Brophy, Beryl Bainbridge and Seamus Heaney were nurtured by him. More importantly, contributors wrote their best for him.

Miller moved from the New Statesman to the editorship of the Listener. Here he virtually invented the new craft of TV reviewing, recruiting John Carey, Raymond Williams, Ian Hamilton and Clive James.

When, after what was now a pattern of rupturing dispute, he resigned in 1973, Miller was at a loose end. Noel Annan, provost of UCL (and a fellow Cambridge Apostle, it was widely suspected), eased his way into the Lord Northcliffe chair of English, recently vacated by Frank Kermode, in 1974. "Why are you here?" AS Byatt, a lecturer in the department, asked him. Because he liked literature, Miller mildly replied. Byatt's was a good question. He had no book, as such, to his name (Cockburn's Millennium would not come out until 1975); no higher degree; nothing that resembled a learned article. But the chair, as set up by the Harmsworth family, had been designed to bring together the worlds of academic, creative and journalistic writing. Miller fitted that bill perfectly.

He would stay at UCL, running the English department, for the longest stint of his professional life – 17 years. He wrote good, scholarly books (Doubles, in 1985, is the best and the most characteristic). His imperturbable management skills and unswerving loyalty to colleagues kept the department steady during the horrors of Keith Joseph's "cut and freeze" assault on the British university system.

As a don, Miller distrusted the turn to "theory" introduced by his predecessor, but tolerated anything that was clever. Among the research he supervised was Blake Morrison's pioneering thesis, later a book, on the Movement poets, whose verse, among all the moderns, Miller most admired and whose careers – most of them – he had materially advanced.

Miller resigned his chair at UCL and the co-editorship of the LRB in the same year, 1992. He was always a great mover-on and seemed strangely exhilarated by the willed act of separation. But this time there was no magazine waiting for him. Only 61, he felt the lack of magazine as the amputee feels the phantom limb. But he turned his energy to writing autobiography (Rebecca's Vest, 1994; Dark Horses, 1998) and the work on Scottish literature that he had begun at Harvard a half-century earlier. It was published as Electric Shepherd (2003), a study of James Hogg, like Miller a Pentland man.

In a late poem (he wisely kept most of his verse private) Miller pictured himself as a "sad foreman" – one who glumly oversees the work of others. "I would like," he said, "to have been more a writer of books than I have succeeded in being." Like Francis Jeffrey, founding editor of the Edinburgh Review (1802-29), whom he much admired, Miller's hugely formative influence on the literature of his age was a behind-the-scenes thing, but no less remarkable for that.

He is survived by Jane and his children.

• Karl Fergus Connor Miller, writer and editor, born August 2 1931; died 24 September 2014

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In a Boat of His Own Making

James Camp

• BuyJack London: An American Life by Earle Labor
  Farrar, Straus, 439 pp, £21.99, November 2013, ISBN 978 0 374 17848 2
• The Sea-Wolf by Jack London
  Hesperus, 287 pp, £9.99, August 2013, ISBN 978 1 78094 200 1

Jack London's writing routine was the single unchanging element of his relatively brief adult life. From the age of 22 until his death at 40, he wrote a thousand words every day, a quota he filled as a rule between 9 and 11 a.m. He slept for five hours a night, which left him with 17 hours of free time. But in his writing hours he was prolific: he produced short stories, poetry, plays, reportage, 'hackwork' and novels, many of them bestsellers. In 18 years, he published more than fifty books. 'I'd rather win a water fight in the swimming pool,' he said, 'than write the great American novel.'

Jack London in 1916

In his off hours, London 'wanted to be where the winds of adventure blew', as he wrote in John Barleycorn, his 'alcoholic reminiscences'. He was a child labourer in Oakland at 14, a Bay Area pirate at 15, a transcontinental hobo at 16, an able-bodied seaman at 17, a New York State prisoner at 18, a California 'work beast' at 20 and a Yukon prospector at 21. He escaped penury at 23, when after a frantic apprenticeship he began selling short stories. The bulk of them were set in the Yukon or in the South Pacific and drew on the life he'd left behind. The Call of the Wild, published in 1903, made him a celebrity at 27, and subsequent additions to his CV – candidate for mayor of Oakland, no-good husband, doomed sea captain and arthritic debauchee – were a matter of public record. London's life had a mythic quality in the eyes of his contemporaries. Earle Labor, his latest biographer, who was born in 1928, sees him in this way too. 'The careers of few writers,' he writes, 'mirror so clearly the American Dream of Success and the corollary ideal of the Self-Made Man.'

Labor's bland subtitle, 'An American Life', may be meant as a riposte to previous biographers. 'The greatest story Jack London ever wrote,' Alfred Kazin said in On Native Grounds, 'was the story he lived.' But his afterlife has been uneven. Irving Stone was the first to tackle it, in Sailor on Horseback (1938), in which he more or less invented the evidence for London having killed himself with two vials of morphine. Subsequent biographers, even those who reject Stone's theories, have been lurid in other ways. In Jack London: A Life (1997), Alex Kershaw compared London to 'another self-educated man who mangled Nietzsche – Adolf Hitler'.

Labor leaves Hitler out of it and barely mentions Nietzsche, whose importance to London is unarguable. But those looking for a more wholesome figure won't find one in this book. The hero of excess is still on display, as is the nihilist, controversialist Übermensch. London as a writer is somewhat reduced. Labor's book is light on the published work, and lighter still on the inner man. In the epilogue he passes on a 'rumour' supposedly current 'among the fisher folk of Scandinavia and Finland … that Jack London is still alive … in a boat of his own making': not the words of someone who sets much store by the immortality offered by libraries.

Labor is in some respects London's ideal biographer, since his hero wasn't too keen on writing either. Few artists can have been on worse terms with their chosen medium. 'Every time I sit down to write,' London wrote, 'it is with great disgust. I'd sooner be out in the open, wandering around most any old place.' Labor attributes such talk to London's 'thoroughly professional' attitude, but the fiction hints at discontent. Wolf Larsen, the anti-hero of The Sea-Wolf (1904), talks about his even more fearsome brother, Death Larsen, who 'is all the happier for leaving life alone … My mistake was in ever opening the books.' London used to sign letters 'Wolf', and the mansion that remained uncompleted on his death was to be called Wolf House.

London's best works are epics of downward mobility, in which the only way to survive is to regress. In The Call of the Wild, Buck, an 'unduly civilised' dog, is abducted from San Francisco and shipped to the Yukon to join a sled team. London used the template over and over again. In the story 'Love of Life', a malnourished prospector is returning from the tundra with bags of gold when he slips in a creek and sprains his ankle. As he limps hunger redefines his notion of what's necessary. 'The life that was in him,' London writes, 'drove him on.' He casts off his possessions, first his gold, then his gun, his knife and his hat. He loses several teeth chewing a bone. At last, he loses his sanity, becomes a 'mere automaton': even the mind is excess baggage.

Like most of London's writing, 'Love of Life' has memorable descriptions of panic and weather; it also has clichés, overstatement and a happy ending. London seemed a canonical figure when he was alive: he was briefly the most highly paid writer in America, valued by magazine editors alongside Edith Wharton. He's now remembered for a handful of short stories and his 'dog books'. As early as 1942, Kazin was writing that London seemed to be 'slipping away even as a boy's hero'. By 1953, he was the punchline of one of Nabokov's jokes. Pnin tries to buy a 'celebrated work by the celebrated American writer Jack London', but the sales assistant doesn't know who he's talking about. 'Let me see, you don't mean the book on the English statesman? Or do you?' Pnin is moved: 'The vicissitudes of celebrity!'

The 'celebrated work' in question, Martin Eden (1909), turns on those same vicissitudes. The hero is a self-taught writer who rises from anonymity much as London had, then kills himself out of disenchantment. 'He was the fad of the hour,' Martin thinks near the end. 'Fawn or fang, it was all a matter of chance.' Martin Eden is a semi-autobiographical novel in social realist mode rendered slightly surreal by authorial bitterness. Martin strives for fame as a writer and ardently courts a girl called Ruth Morse, an angelic virgin from a bourgeois family which looks down on him because of his working-class background. Fame comes, but with a postscript: his friend Russ Brissenden, who writes with an ease that makes Martin envious, shoots himself in the head – writing, it turns out, wasn't enough. Brissenden was based on the Bay Area poet George Sterling, a friend of London's who didn't actually commit suicide until 17 years after Martin Eden was published (he used cyanide). Ruth had a real-life model too, Mabel Applegarth, though the views she expresses seem to be London's. 'If I were a woman,' he wrote to Applegarth in 1898, 'I would prostitute myself to all men but that I would succeed – in short, I will.'

London's mother, Flora Wellman, was a runaway from a rich family in Ohio. She held séances at which the ghost of an Indian chief called Plume spoke from her mouth. She used the séances to help her make financial decisions; she also met men at them, among them her first husband, William Chaney, a fellow spiritualist. In 1875 Wellman told Chaney she was pregnant; he denied being the father. After he went out, she took a small dose of laudanum, borrowed a pistol from a neighbour and then, according to reports in the press, shot herself in the head. She survived. Actually, she probably didn't discharge the pistol: the weapon didn't smell of gunpowder; no gunshot was heard; she was unscathed. The press reported a further rumour that Chaney had left her because she refused to have an abortion; the backlash forced him out of town. 'There was a time,' Chaney later told London, 'when I hated her with all the intensity of my intense nature, and even thought of killing her and myself.'

The fatherless infant, then named John Griffith Chaney, was handed over to a wet nurse called Jennie Prentiss. Prentiss was black, a freed slave; she called her new charge her 'white child'. She also introduced Wellman, by now divorced, to John London, a farmer, who became her second husband and provided his stepson with his surname. (His paternity remains uncertain.) The family was peripatetic and became less and less prosperous. London said his stepfather was 'too intrinsically good' for the 'soulless scramble' of life. Wellman, goaded on by the ghost of the Indian chief, browbeat her husband into a series of unwise agricultural schemes. After a disease killed their chickens, they left the countryside for Oakland.

As a child, London became an unlikely reader, first of travelogues and adventure stories, and later of epic novels from the Oakland public library, along the way developing an ambition, recalled in John Barleycorn, to 'see all I had read in the books come true'. Did that mean becoming an author or a hero? Among his favourite books was Ouida's Signa, the story of an orphan who makes it big as a violinist. But the last pages of the copy London read had been torn out: 'He might have hitched his wagon to a different star,' Labor writes, 'had he known that in the end the hero kills himself over the love of a heartless tart.' The counterfactual isn't convincing: London wasn't risk averse. 'One cannot really come to appreciate one's life,' he once wrote to a friend, 'save by playing with it and hazarding it a little.'

At the age of 14, London went to work at a cannery because his parents couldn't afford to send him to high school. He was paid two dollars a day and hated it. Not having a normal job became his life's work. He got a loan from the Prentisses, bought a skiff, and became an oyster pirate on the North California coast. 'Every dark night's raid,' Labor writes, 'was an invitation to get shot or arrested.' He oddly leaves out a crisis that in John Barleycorn London describes as formative. One day 'Young Scratch' Nelson (his nickname came from what his father, 'Old Scratch', did to other men's faces), started buying London rounds. The boy was unworldly enough not to realise that he was supposed to reciprocate. He was already drunkenly making his way home when it struck him that he should have been buying too. He had been a 'thrifty, close-fisted boy' but these men were 'magnificently careless': 'I was deciding between money and men, between niggardliness and romance. Either I must throw overboard all my old values of money and look upon it as something to be flung about wastefully, or I must throw overboard my comradeship'. After a period of reflection, he returned to the bar, opened a tab and got everybody drunk. The controlling principle of his adult profligacy was now in place.

Labor allots a separate chapter to each year of London's life from adolescence onwards and the first few are repetitive: he discovers a new way to make money; has a 'close call with death' (sometimes several); experiences disillusionment. In everything he did, bingeing was the paradigm. How to document all this hard living is a technical difficulty every biographer of London must negotiate. Labor relies on quaintness: 'He had the proverbial hollow leg.' London himself wrote two autobiographies. The later one, John Barleycorn, suggests he could be bad company, ('I have seen much, done much, lived much'), but the first, The Road, which deals with his days as a tramp, is altogether more upbeat. London started hoboing at the age of 16 and returned to it every so often until he was 19. He'd met some 'road kids' in Sacramento whose slang entranced him. 'With every word they uttered,' London writes, 'the lure of The Road laid hold of me more imperiously,' and the writing displays a self-delighting inventiveness seldom equalled in his fiction.

Labor thinks the key to this period lies in London's stint at the Erie County Penitentiary, where he was imprisoned for thirty days for vagrancy when he was 18. Prison primed him for socialism. On his release, keen to better himself, he enrolled at Oakland High School, where he studied for a year, then at Berkeley, where he studied for 11 months. He became a socialist and a demagogue, spending a night in jail after one public diatribe. Soon he went to the Yukon. The 'stampede' phase of the Klondike Gold Rush lasted a year, beginning in the summer of 1897. London was part of a prospecting team subsidised by his brother-in-law. According to Labor, he thrived in the extremes of the Arctic. No gold was discovered, but less than six months after his return London sold his first short story to the Overland Monthly.

At the end of John Barleycorn, London says that he's decided to drink 'but, oh, more skilfully, more discreetly, than ever before', and the delusion that he could outsmart his appetites grew more painful as it became easier for him to satisfy them. It compelled him into a marriage with a woman he didn't love, Bessie Maddern, shortly after the appearance of his well-received first book, The Son of the Wolf, in 1900: 'I shall be a cleaner, wholesomer man' etc. They had two daughters, but he had a series of affairs and in 1903 bought a 38-foot sloop, the Spray, to facilitate them.

The Call of the Wild appeared that same year. Needing money, he sold comprehensive rights to the novel to Macmillan for a $2000 advance and so never earned royalties on a book that brought millions to his publisher. Of its reception as an allegory, he wrote: 'I plead guilty, but I was unconscious of it at the time. I did not mean to do it.' He'd meant to write a story about a good dog. The success of The Call of the Wild led London into new forms of confusion over whether he wanted to be a hero or an author. He had already made a symbolic run for mayor of Oakland in 1901; he made another in 1905. He became a sought-after speaker, though his politics weren't easy to reconcile with his tendency to go too far. He was the dissolute favourite of his circle in San Francisco. In 1903, he lived in the slums of East London for a month, then wrote a rage-filled book about it, The People of the Abyss, which sold well. ('I am made sick by this human hellhole called London Town,' he wrote.) Almost everything he wrote sold well; demand for his 'virile truck' (London's phrase) was high, and his debacles made him even more famous.

In 1904 William Randolph Hearst sent him to Asia to cover the Russo-Japanese War. The press corps was in lockdown at a hotel in Tokyo, and the fighting was far away in Manchuria, but London went by boat and on horseback from Tokyo to the fringes of 'Ping Yang'. He had a fever, frostbite, saddlesores and body lice; he was imprisoned twice and was saved from Japanese martial law only by the intervention of Theodore Roosevelt. In its combination of publicity, futility and ill health, London's trip to Manchuria prefigured the rest of his life. White Fang, published in 1906, was conceived for its 'marketing possibilities': the story of a feral animal, three-quarters wolf, domesticated by a noble-hearted man, it reverses the premise of The Call of the Wild. Soon London would be purchasing plotlines from the young socialist Sinclair Lewis 'at $5 apiece'.

*

As London's work declined his personal life became the stuff of parody. He clumsily divorced Maddern in 1904, and married Charmian Kittredge the following year. Both events made the headlines. Her appetites were on a scale similar to his, and he described her as his 'Mate-Woman'. For fun the couple used to box, a detail that has led some (Labor not among them) to speculate about their sex life. Kittredge was a more judicious drinker than London, and weathered their 'purple passages', as he called them, better than he did.

Martin Eden kills himself en route to Tahiti, in 'his loved South Seas' on a trip intended to be restorative. London wrote the novel during a similar voyage. He set out from San Francisco in April 1907 to circumnavigate the globe in a 43-foot sloop called the Snark. Kittredge and a small crew were with him. There were surf lessons in Hawaii, suckling pigs in Polynesia, an erupting volcano in the Solomon Islands, but the trip was constantly troubled. At Guadalcanal Island in July 1908, he made the mistake of smoking 'hasheesh' with the Englishman George Darbishire, who soon after died of dysentery. This gave London a hangover he never got over, to add to malaria and a ravaged digestive tract. In December he abandoned the Snark in Guadalcanal. He was 32.

He wrote a cheerful book about the fiasco, The Cruise of the Snark (1911). 'Funny way to make a living!' he remarked to his wife. 'I carry my office in my head, and see the world while I earn the money to see it with.' By his mid-thirties, London was an invalid. 'Never again will I have the thumbs of my youth,' he wrote, also noting his 'smashed ankles'. There was irony in the evaporation of his vaunted energies but it was, as he foresaw, inevitable. 'One pays according to an iron schedule,' he wrote in John Barleycorn: 'For every feat of telescoping long days and weeks of life into mad, magnificent instants, one must pay with shortened life, and oft-times, with savage usury added.'

London spent his last years in the Sonoma Valley, where he had bought an estate in 1905. He cut a figure of ghostly glamour, even though his outgoings always 'threatened to exceed his income'. He thought up ways to make money from his land but didn't succeed. Wolf House, the mansion he had begun to build for himself, burned to the ground before it was even finished. He no longer wrote well though he continued to be prolific. Writing had appealed to him as a way of evading the brutality of work but it turned out to be brutal in its own way. He became cynical, promising his publisher 'crackerjack dog books' for his 'dog public'. In his final days, he ate mostly duck, vomiting it up when he thought no one was looking. Perpetually seeking a 'way out of his daily grind', he died in 1916 without finding one, of uraemia.

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How Stoical Was Seneca?

How Stoical Was Seneca?

Mary Beard

October 9, 2014 Issue

Dying Every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero

by James Romm

Knopf, 290 pp., $27.95

Hardship and Happiness

by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, translated from the Latin by Elaine Fantham, Harry M. Hine, James Ker, and Gareth D. Williams

University of Chicago Press, 318 pp., $55.00

The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca

by Emily Wilson

Oxford University Press, 253 pp., $29.95

Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen/bpk/Art Resource Peter Paul Rubens: The Death of Seneca, 1612–1613

In AD 65, the elderly philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca was forced to commit suicide on the orders of the emperor Nero. He had once been the emperor's tutor and adviser, though he had withdrawn into retirement when the true character of Nero's reign became clear, and he had recently become rather too closely involved with an unsuccessful coup (quite how closely, we shall never know). He must have been expecting the knock on the door.

The knock came from the captain of a troop of praetorian guardsmen who had stationed themselves around Seneca's house, just outside Rome. Ironically, the captain himself was also involved in the planned coup, but had decided to follow the emperor's orders in order to save his own skin ("he was now adding to the crimes he had conspired to avenge," as the Roman historian Tacitus tersely put it). After a brief interrogation, Seneca was told to end his own life, which he did only with great difficulty. He severed his arteries, but he was so old and emaciated that the blood hardly escaped; so he asked for the hemlock that he had stashed away for just that purpose, but that had little effect either. He died only when his slaves carried him into a hot bath and he suffocated in the steam.

While all this was going on, he had been offering words of encouragement to the friends who happened to be dining with him when the praetorians arrived (he was bequeathing to them, he claimed, the only thing he had left, and the best: "the image of his own life," imago vitae suae); and he had been dictating to his secretaries, for future circulation, some last philosophical thoughts. His final words were to offer a libation to "Jupiter the Liberator."

So Tacitus—probably the most acute analyst ever of the autocratic rule of the Roman emperors—described the scene in his Annales, half a century or so later; he was no doubt relying on some hard evidence (a few modern critics have even suggested an eyewitness account), but inevitably recasting it in his own terms. One of Tacitus's favorite themes in the Annales is death and its corruption; he repeatedly stresses the idea that autocracy disrupted not only the natural rhythms of life but the processes of dying too. People died for the wrong reasons, in the wrong places, and in the wrong order. Children killed their parents. Funeral pyres were prepared before the victim had even breathed his last. In fact, Tacitus opens his narrative of Nero's reign with the bleak, and significant, phrase: "The first death under the new Emperor…." The suicide of Seneca, as Tacitus tells it, can be seen as a prime example of how even dying had been corrupted.

That is partly because, try as he might, applying all the usually reliable methods, death almost defeated Seneca. For a philosopher who had devoted so much of his writing to preparations for death—as the title of James Romm's new biography, Dying Every Day, hints—he made a very bad job of it when his own turn came. It is also because he made such a histrionic display out of the act of dying. Seneca publicly embraced Stoic philosophy, which took an uncompromising view of the importance of "virtue" in both living and dying (it was, in fact, much more uncompromising than the popular modern term "stoical"—in the attenuated sense of "stiff upper lip"—would ever suggest).

But Seneca's death was a frankly hubristic imitation of the death of Socrates: with his last thoughts being dictated (as in Plato's Phaedo), the attempted resort to hemlock, and a final offering to the gods (though in this case it was a libation to Jupiter, not, as in Socrates' last words, a sacrifice to Asklepios). Even so, his death ends up no more than a very poor imitation of its model. As Emily Wilson nicely summed it up in The Death of Socrates (2007):

It is as if trying to learn about death from Socrates has made Seneca all but incapable of experiencing death for himself. The academic study of the subject has desiccated his body until it has no blood left to spill.

To be fair, over the years, not all judgments on Tacitus's account of Seneca's suicide have been so negative. Some admirers of the philosopher have chosen to see the death as an example of fortitude, and of tremendous philosophical courage amid the corruption of Roman imperial society. Seneca, it is argued, was a man whom Tacitus saw as one of the few potentially good influences on Nero, and who might have prevented his reign from developing as catastrophically as it did.

In his suicide, fighting against the recalcitrant frailty of his own body, he met unwaveringly the death to which he has been cruelly sentenced; and he turned it into the ultimate lesson in how to die (not for mere show was he dictating his last philosophical thoughts on his long-drawn-out deathbed, but for the true edification and education of future generations). This is presumably the message of Rubens's famous painting, which shows Seneca standing almost naked in his small bath, in a pose strikingly reminiscent of the suffering Jesus in many Ecce homo scenes from medieval and later art: so suggesting triumph over death, not defeat by it.

Yet as both Romm and Wilson in The Greatest Empire insist, it is impossible not to see some ambivalence, at the very least, in Tacitus's version of Seneca's last hours, and in his evaluation of the man more generally. Romm focuses in particular on that phrase imago vitae suae ("the image of his own life"), which was to be, as Tacitus put it, Seneca's bequest to his followers. Roland Mayer has argued that we should detect here a reference to the kind of imago that was displayed in elite Roman houses: one of those series of ancestor portraits intended to spur on future generations to imitate the achievements of their great predecessors. That is very likely one resonance of the phrase: Seneca was offering a positive example to be followed in the future. But, as Romm rightly observes, "Imago is a multilayered word," and like "image" in English, it also suggests "illusion," "phantom," or "false seeming."

The problem about Seneca is that it was always difficult to pin him down (and so it remains). What Tacitus is saying, in his carefully chosen words, is that in his last hours he was "shaping…still" an imago of himself that he had been working on, revising, and adjusting for most of his life, in many different forms. Like it or not, there is something elusive, even a whiff of "spin," about Seneca.

Romm finds a vivid symbol of that elusiveness in the surviving likenesses of the philosopher ("images" in yet another sense). Before the nineteenth century, the favored image of Seneca (now demoted to "Pseudo-Seneca") was "a gaunt, haggard, and haunted" portrait sculpture that has survived in several ancient versions. It is not named, but it so matched everyone's preconceptions of what the elderly philosopher must have looked like that it was simply assumed to be him. In 1813, however, a double-sided portrait—showing two male heads, back to back—was unearthed in Rome, probably dating to the third century AD: one was clearly labeled, in Greek, "Socrates," the other, in Latin, "Seneca" ("the two sages joined at the back of the head like Siamese twins sharing a single brain," as Romm has it).

This Seneca is completely different: full-faced, bald, and slightly bland, looking more like the caricature of a bourgeois businessman than of a tortured philosopher. Quite why Romm concludes, as he seems to, that this is the "true" likeness of Seneca, I fail to understand (some not hugely talented Roman sculptor a couple of centuries after Seneca's death almost certainly had no better idea than we do of what he really looked like). But the contrast is still telling, and points to Seneca's shifting, uncertain, often self-contradictory identities.

Perhaps an even more powerful symbol of that confusion would have been the famous painting by Rubens. The sources for this are strikingly mixed: the pose reflects the Jesus of Ecce homo; the face is that of the haggard "Pseudo-Seneca," in Rubens's day taken as an authentic likeness; the rest of the body is drawn from another famous ancient sculpture, now in the Louvre, that was traditionally believed to be the old philosopher standing in the bath where he finally died. This has been almost universally reinterpreted as an elderly fisherman (and in its new display in the Louvre, the bath—which turned out to be a modern addition anyway—has been removed).

These ambivalences about who Seneca was, what he stood for, how we recognize him—and even more, how far we admire or deplore him—run right through his life story and the many volumes of his surviving writing, genuine and otherwise. These range from philosophical and scientific treatises (he was a particular expert on earthquakes), through some disturbingly bleak tragic dramas and a hilarious skit (very probably, but not absolutely certainly, by him) about the emperor Claudius being made a god after his death, to some flagrantly apocryphal correspondence between the philosopher and Saint Paul.

These letters point again, like the Rubens, to his incorporation into that select Christian group of "good pagans," and try to link the ethics of Christianity with Seneca's Stoic philosophy. In fact, as Wilson notes, some Christians in the Middle Ages even claimed that Seneca had been converted to Christianity in his final moments "and was, as it were, baptized by the bath of his death." In fact the ideological links between Stoicism and Christianity were weak at best (though both were broad churches). Hard-line Stoicism was a deterministic, fatalist doctrine that valued a virtuous life (and death) beyond almost everything else, with very little room for human frailty indeed.

Seneca's career might most generously be described as "checkered." Born to a family of Roman settlers in Spain around 4 BC, he came to Rome, along with his elder brother Novatus, where both of them made their way up the social and political hierarchy of the city. Novatus really did have contact with Saint Paul: his main modern claim to fame derives from his walk-on part in the Acts of the Apostles, when as Roman governor of Achaea he refused to prosecute Paul as the Jews demanded (probably more a sign of his distrust of the Jews than any fondness for Christians).

Seneca himself spent most of his life in the dangerous penumbra of the imperial court, combining the preaching of hard-line Stoic philosophy (renowned for its commitment to unadulterated virtue) with dynastic wheeling and dealing and a taste for the high life. He certainly cultivated connections with the sisters of the emperor Caligula, and early in the reign of Claudius was exiled to Corsica on the charge of adultery with one of them, Julia Livilla (maybe trumped up, maybe not). It was not until almost eight years later (in AD 49), when another of the sisters, Agrippina, married Claudius that Seneca was recalled to Rome and took on what in hindsight we know was the unenviable job of tutor to her son, the future emperor Nero.

Antikensammlung, Berlin/bpk/Art Resource Roman double herm of Seneca and Socrates, third century AD

After Nero came to the throne in AD 54, Seneca remained at first one of his closest advisers and speechwriters. He is supposed to have written the eulogy to the dead Claudius that the new emperor pronounced at the funeral—which generally went down well with the assembled mourners, even though, as Tacitus remarked darkly, it was the first time that any emperor on any such occasion had had to rely "on borrowed eloquence."

But as the standard account goes, Nero soon proved hard to handle, and it would take more than a few elegant speeches to manage successfully his relations with the Senate and the more upright courtiers and army officers (though it is clear that, for longer than he might have liked to admit, Seneca did continue to "lend" his eloquence to help the emperor cover up some of his worst crimes). After he had seen Nero arrange the deaths of his own stepbrother, Britannicus, his mother Agrippina, and his stepsister and wife, Octavia, Seneca eventually found it more comfortable, morally and in other ways, no doubt, to distance himself from the court. He may even have played, as the emperor believed, a significant part in the conspiracy that led to his death sentence.

The contradictions in this career are obvious and they troubled many ancient observers, just as they have troubled many later ones. Part of this is the question of how to reconcile Seneca's intimate involvement in the brutal power politics of the Roman court with the high-minded philosophical ethics he professed. That indeed is the question that Miriam Griffin addressed in her classic study, Seneca: A Philosopher in Politics (first published in 1976), and it is one to which both Romm and Wilson also turn.

How could the true Stoic philosopher, who wrote so strenuously of the importance of virtue in politics, square his conscience with the role he had chosen to play at Nero's right hand? Or to put it another way, how could a man who denounced tyranny take on the job of tutor to a tyrant? Sophisticated modern critics, as Wilson writes, have generally avoided the charge of hypocrisy (it implies, she concedes, "a simplistic and even anachronistic set of expectations about how life ought to relate to literary work"). But to be honest, hypocrisy is precisely the charge that comes to mind—unsophisticated as that may be—just as it did two thousand years ago.

It was not only in the relationship of political theory to political practice that problems were felt about Seneca's character; there were other tricky matters, notably wealth. Stoics in general were supposed to be indifferent to riches, and Seneca often opted for an especially hard line in praising poverty as a philosophical good; for Stoics virtue itself (and certainly not cash) was the only real aim. But it was widely believed that he had used his position at court to amass riches on an enormous scale.

Tacitus, in fact, records the accusation against Seneca of one Suillius Rufus (not a very pleasant character himself) that he had, as Romm says, "heaped 300 million sesterces in four years as a palace insider." This would have been a vast fortune, given that the annual pay of a Roman legionary soldier at the time was less than a thousand sesterces. Dio Cassius, writing in the early third century AD, adds that he owned five hundred tables of citrus wood, with ivory legs, all identical, for serving his dinner parties; and Dio even alleges later that the revolt of Boudica in Britain in AD 60 or 61 was sparked by Seneca suddenly choosing to call in the loans he had outstanding in the province. If that is the case, he was obviously exploiting the provincials too.

Seneca does sometimes attempt to address the paradoxes of wealth. In his treatise On the Happy Life, for example (newly translated by James Ker in the collection of Senecan essays gathered together under the title Hardship and Happiness), he suggests that riches are acceptable, provided that they are not ill-gotten and properly used, and the philosopher can rise above them. Nevertheless it is hard not to see this unpleasantly plutocratic side of Seneca in the bourgeois businessman of the double portrait, and to draw an unflattering contrast between him and the truly austere Socrates to whom he has been attached in the sculpture.

These problems are hardly assuaged by a closer look at Seneca's surviving writings. As individual works they can be extremely engaging, despite some occasionally off-putting first impressions. It is true, for example, that there is a sometimes monotonous preoccupation with dying and the preparation for death throughout his philosophical work, from his short essays or Letters (which include the slogan "we are dying every day" of Romm's title) to several of the longer treatises collected in Hardship and Happiness. These often harp on the same basic, Stoic message: one should not grieve over death (for it is inevitable) but over having been born; the dead are not afflicted by any suffering after death; no one dies "too soon," as they were surely fated only to live as long as they did.

But Seneca is adept at sugaring the pill, or rather at building some of these philosophical truisms into vivid pictures of Roman life. So we learn in passing about Roman children's games (they would play at dressing up in purple-bordered togas, pretending to be consuls and judges), or about the difficulties of being a governor's wife in a Roman province (always liable to be the subject of gossip). And one of the most memorable and often-quoted descriptions of the noise generated by a Roman bathhouse (the pummeling and pumping of flesh, the screams of men having their armpits roughly plucked) comes from one of Seneca's Letters whose principal theme is nothing to do with bathing, but concerns mental and philosophical concentration.

The trickier question, however, goes beyond any of the individual works, to ask what his writing as a whole adds up to, and just how uncomfortably self-contradictory it is. It may well be largely generic differences that explain the contrast between the restrained control of Seneca's philosophical Letters and treatises and the outlandish and frightening passions on display in his tragedies. (The Thyestes, in which he replays the mythical cannibalistic feast of King Atreus, who serves up to his brother the flesh of his own children, is one of the most upsetting works of classical literature to survive.)

But the idea that Seneca could one minute (as Tacitus tells us) ghostwrite Nero's funeral eulogy for the emperor Claudius, praising his wisdom and good judgment, and the next minute compose a devastating satire, pouring scorn on the lumbering, limping, and stammering Claudius and his claims to divine status, has often seemed not far short of hypocrisy. Funny as the skit is—it pictures poor old Claudius struggling up to join the Senate of the gods on Mount Olympus, only to be instantly dismissed and sent back down to Hades—there is something slightly distasteful about it coming from the pen of a philosophical guru who set such store by moral probity and ethical consistency.

These are the contrasts, conflicts, and ambiguities that Romm and Wilson confront: How do we make any consistent and coherent sense of Seneca? Both are partly successful, but only partly. Romm seems rather too ready to shrug his shoulders and put down Seneca's faults, as he sees them, to some version of the human condition: "Seneca was human, all too human, with the flaws and shortcomings that the human condition entails." At other points he prefers to sidestep the problem, as biographers of Seneca often do, and focus his attention on the more straightforward story of the emperor Nero instead; and a fairly racy story it turns out to be, sprinkled with "deluded despots," "stiff-necked Stoics," "fog-bound glens," and such breathless, half-accurate hyperbole as "he had committed the most audacious murder of the century and had gotten clean away with it."

Wilson has a much stronger line, in suggesting that the search for consistency—elusive, even impossible, though it might have been—was precisely Seneca's project, and his problem. As she cleverly insists, "the most interesting question is not why Seneca failed to practice what he preached, but why he preached what he did…given the life he found himself leading." Ultimately, she claims, he was trying to assert mastery (or "empire" as her title has it, taken from one of the Letters) both over himself and over the world. It is a bravely argued case. But even she, in a different way, finds some of the biographical traps difficult to negotiate: her chapter on Seneca's youth, for example, occasionally sinks to desperate speculation about his early playmates, and is illustrated by a painted Roman toy horse—just like baby Seneca might once have owned.

But from time to time Dying Every Day and The Greatest Empire seem to nudge us toward some more interesting conclusions that do not sweep the issues of hypocrisy under the carpet, but put them into a wider political setting. These take us back to Tacitus, and to his preoccupation with Seneca—who in the relevant books of his Annales is almost as prominent a character in the story of Nero's reign as the emperor himself.

For Tacitus, another of the corrupting effects of Roman autocracy was on the meaning of words and deeds. (In this respect, his Annales are an unsettling precursor of Orwell's 1984.) In his cynical analysis of the imperial court, nobody meant what they said or said what they meant. In fact, survival depended on dissembling and on concealing true feelings, on acting rather than being; hence, in part, his stress on Nero's ambitions on the stage.

This was a world embedded in doublethink and doublespeak. Nero entertained his mother lavishly, gave kisses, and said fond farewells on the very evening he planned to kill her. The Senate voted to give divine honors to Nero's dead baby daughter, although most of them knew it to be ridiculous (or at least were chuckling at Seneca's skit on the deification of Claudius). The emperor held a lavish triumphal celebration for his victories, not on the battlefield but in musical and athletic contests. And when the young Britannicus keeled over at the emperor's dinner party, poisoned on Nero's orders, it was only his sister, Octavia, who reacted "correctly"—she just went on eating. It was left to the hopelessly naive, untrained in the conventions of autocracy, to give the "natural" response and ask if the poor boy was all right.

It is, as both Romm and Wilson find, very hard to uncover the "real" Seneca. There are certainly plenty of first-person pronouns found throughout his work, but these "I"s are even more performative than is usual in autobiographical writing. Even the most private of Seneca's works are (in Wilson's words) "carefully constructed works of public performance…. Seneca's literary work plays a fascinating dance with the reader's desire for information about his lived experience." And that is precisely why they are important to Tacitus. For him Seneca was the "perfect" imperial courtier—the true imago, for whom (like Octavia) hypocrisy and dissembling were a way of life. The irony was that in the end it saved neither of them from a difficult death. Philosophy was like dissembling: it turned out not to help anyone.

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