By the mid-eighteenth century, Shakespeare had become the iconic English genius—Britain’s answer to Homer, Dante, Cervantes. But this had not always been the general opinion and was not so at the outset of the eighteenth century. There had been a gradual elevation of Shakespeare from just one among several popular Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights to the one and only national treasure: “a kind of established religion in poetry,” as the playwright Arthur Murphy was already describing him in 1753, as well as a focus for a new, patriotic British nationalism that had begun to coalesce at that time. It was a process in which several members of the Club were intimately involved, both individually and as a team. Shakespeare might well have achieved his cultural apotheosis without these men, but the process would have been slower and less certain. Scholarship, criticism, performance, interpretation: the Club members had a profound effect on each of these aspects of Shakespeareanism.
At their genesis, the letters of the alphabet borrowed their shapes from the pictures we drew to represent the world around us: ox (A), fence (H), water (M). We were illustrators long before we were writers. As children, we learn to read illustrations before we learn to read words, making our way from picture books to alphabet books to chapter books. At some point, illustrations are dropped, and only text remains. My question has always been, why? The two are not the same. Text cannot replace image in our comprehension or appreciation, nor can image imitate the subtleties and rhythms of language.
In 1988, the children’s novelist and Russia expert James Riordan translated several of these for a collection called The Lion and the Puppy: And Other Stories for Childrenem>, published first by Henry Holt and Company. The cover has a nice picture of a lion and a puppy; the illustrations by Claus Sievert are lovely throughout. My children fell in love with that picture, and they wanted me to read them the book. My first thought was: Children’s stories by the author of the inspirational The Death of Ivan Ilyich? But pestilence has closed the schools and home reading was important. Tolstoy wrote them; they couldn’t be that bad. Now I sincerely wish I had never touched them.
“The world will never know what has happened—what a light has gone out,” the belletrist Lytton Strachey, a member of London’s Bloomsbury literary set, wrote to a friend on January 19, 1930. Frank Ramsey, a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge University, had died that day at the age of twenty-six, probably from a liver infection that he may have picked up during a swim in the River Cam. “There was something of Newton about him,” Strachey continued. “The ease and majesty of the thought—the gentleness of the temperament.”
Dons at Cambridge had known for a while that there was a sort of marvel in their midst: Ramsey made his mark soon after his arrival as an undergraduate at Newton’s old college, Trinity, in 1920. He was picked at the age of eighteen to produce the English translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” the most talked-about philosophy book of the time; two years later, he published a critique of it in the leading philosophy journal in English, Mind. G. E. Moore, the journal’s editor, who had been lecturing at Cambridge for a decade before Ramsey turned up, confessed that he was “distinctly nervous” when this first-year student was in the audience, because he was “very much cleverer than I was.” John Maynard Keynes was one of several Cambridge economists who deferred to the undergraduate Ramsey’s judgment and intellectual prowess.
The one place where I felt safe to walk by myself was a small clearing in the woods on the edge of town. There were long sightlines between the conifers, so I could watch for approaching animals. Still, walking the same 500-metre route between a train track and a small cluster of hotels soon gets old. To mix things up – and because a glamorous early aviator named Beryl Markham used to do it – I began going barefoot.
Hey, I’m so sorry I didn’t text you back this afternoon. I was finishing a 1,500-piece puzzle of a basset hound wearing a cowboy hat for the second time.
I apologize for not answering your FaceTime earlier! I was curious how long it would take me to pluck each and every single one of my leg hairs and then decided to find out. Five hours 36 minutes!
As in this quartet of ants ferrying a torn
moth across worm slime and slate,