Gertrude and Claudius by John Updike

Even John Updike’s jeux d’esprit give you more to think about most authors’ earnest tomes. Gertrude and Claudius, published in 2000, is a prequel to Shakespeare’s play in which we learn more about queen Gertrude’s affair with her husband’s brother Claudius, and how it led to murder. Updike draws on some of the early Hamlet legends for his version, and even the names of some of the characters — following these legends — change from one section of the novel to the next.

Updike has thought about the dynamics of adultery more than most, and his speculations about the roots of Hamlet are plausible. Gertrude, married very young to an overbearing clod of a king, is drawn to the exotic tales and dashing manner of the king’s brother Claudius, who has been spending his time in Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean. The attraction deepens and becomes mutual, and Gertrude enlists the king’s counselor Polonius to lend her his country home for meetings with Claudius. The adulterous couple enjoy their affair, but when the king begins to suspect, they realize (along with Polonius) that their lives are hanging by a thread. And so comes Polonius to pour a vial of “leperous distilment” into the king’s ear, curdling his blood and covering his body with a “vile and loathsome crust.”

Well, Gertrude and Claudius shouldn’t have had an affair, God knows, and they certainly shouldn’t have killed the king. But was it really necessary that they should die too, along with Polonius, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Laertes, and Ophelia?

The killing of Hamlet’s father was arguably a matter of self-defense. The same could not be said of Hamlet’s revenge, especially when he stabs Polonius through the arras before determining who he is. In his Afterword, Updike quotes the view of the critic G. Wilson Knight, which he himself seems to agree with.

Putting aside the murder being covered up, Claudius seems a capable king, Gertrude a noble queen, Ophelia a treasure of sweetness, Polonius a tedious but not evil counsellor, Laertes a generic young man. Hamlet pulls them all into death.

Cruising with Patrick O’Brian

Unhappily it is no longer possible to take an ocean cruise with Patrick O’Brian himself. But Annemarie Victory did just that, and now offers the next best thing through her specialty tour company. Here’s how she introduces it:

When Patrick O’Brian agreed to sail with me on the SEA CLOUD in April 1999, it resulted in perhaps the most fascinating and memorable of my over 40 charters of this glorious ship. Urbane, charming, witty and surprisingly gregarious, Patrick quickly fell into the wonderful shipboard life aboard SEA CLOUD. Indeed, as he disembarked after the cruise (which was almost the same as the one described in this brochure), he told me that he definitely wanted to sail with us again, and would really look forward to it. This possible reunion ended, of course, with his unexpected and tragic death just a few months later.

It is rather charming that Ms. Victory could see the death of an 85-year-old man as “unexpected and tragic.”

The cruise aboard the Sea Cloud runs from April 23 to May 2, beginning in Barcelona, stopping at Minorca (where Captain Aubrey rescued Dr. Maturin from torture at the hands of the French), then proceeding to Port Vendres, Bandol, Aix-en-Provence, St. Tropez, and St. Florent on Corsica. There are lectures by Count Nikolai Tolstoy and Brian Lavery, the authors of books on O’Brian, and an optional extension to Nice. Prices start at $6,600: too rich for my blood, but not out of the question for a true fan. 

Obama and “postracial” America

Support for Obama has been so strong in New York City that both campaigns hardly bothered to run commercials here, and not many residents bothered to wear pins or put out yard signs. But when the election was called for Obama at around eleven last night, my neighbors in Fort Greene spilled out into the streets, hooting and yelling and grinning at strangers. White and black folks milled around, blocking traffic, and crammed into cafes and bars to hear Obama’s acceptance speech. It was a thrilling night.

An Obama presidency will be good in a variety of ways, starting with (to look at my own priorities) the war, the environment, human rights, and the economy. But does it mean that this is now a “postracial” society, as some of the pundits have been saying? Have we solved our racial problems overnight by putting a black man in the White House? Not so fast.

When Jenn and I had our bookstore cafe in Fort Greene, there were recurring debates (not only among black customers) about the racial state of America. Some claimed racism was a thing of the past. Others said America was still racist to the core, as bad as it had ever been. The truth, I think, is closer to what’s summed up in the title of the book Long Way to Go. The country has come a long way, but it’s still got a long way to go.

That said, Obama’s election was a watershed moment in race relations. You could see it on Jesse Jackson’s face last night. It wasn’t just that he was weeping: it was that he looked totally stunned, as if his brain couldn’t process what his eyes were seeing. A milestone had been reached, and it had been done with methods very different from those that Jackson had used as an activist and a presidential candidate. Those methods were needed: entrenched political power does not yield without a confrontation. But to take things to the next level required a different approach.

Obama’s strategy, which seems to grow naturally out of his own personality, was to appeal to the better angels of our nature. He knew that as individuals and as a country we have not lived up to our ideals, but he trusted that many of us would like to. Obama’s early victory in the Iowa primary was a sign that something unusual was going on. A very white state had voted for a black man, and not because they had been made to feel they were racists if they didn’t. They did it because Obama seemed to offer acceptance and a better way, rather than rubbing their faces in the sins of the past (and the not so past).

African American parents, some of the pundits are saying, can now tell the truth when they tell their children, “You too can grow up to be president.” But if they are wise, they won’t hide the fact that it will be tougher than it would be for a white person with similar qualifications — just as it is for people of color in every aspect of life.

It doesn’t help you to succeed in business when the “self-made” millionaire tells you you can be like him if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps. And it doesn’t help you to overcome the racial barriers in American society to be told that this is a postracial America, that those barriers are all in your mind, and that if Barack Obama can do it you can too. Having Obama in the White House will help create opportunities and heal racial wounds, but putting him there is the beginning, not the end.

A visit to Dia:Beacon

On October 25 I paid my first visit to the Dia:Beacon art museum, prompted by an article called “Art and Calm Just Up the Hudson.” I’d heard about the museum but never took the trouble to go there. (The trip takes about 80 minutes on the Hudson line of Metro North. For about $27 you can get a ticket that covers the round trip plus museum admission.)

Leaving the train in Beacon, I felt as if I was a long way from the city. Canada geese stalked along the riverside, and the steady rain brought out the smells of grass and herbs. Lichen only grows where the air is very clean, and here you can see it on rocks and fence rails.

It’s a short walk to the brick building that once housed a Nabisco factory and is now the home of Dia:Beacon. You don’t realize how enormous the building is until you get inside. The sheer scale of it makes an impression, and the museum is able to accommodate sculptures and installations that would be close to impossible in the city.

Dia:Beacon’s attitude to visitors is an odd combination of overprotectiveness and laissez-faire. Backpacks must be checked, cameras and even pens are not allowed in the galleries, and numerous signs warn you not to touch the artwork. Yet guards are scarce, there are no electric eyes and alarms, and protective plexiglass is almost nonexistent, except to keep visitors from falling into the enormous geometric pits that artist Michael Heizer has built into the ground floor. (This picture gives little sense of gloomy and impressive these are.) There are many children with their parents, and some of the sculpture almost begs to be touched.

The biggest works of art were the ones that most impressed me, although you do get a strong sense of something — maybe futility — from walking down a gallery as long as a football field that is filled with nothing but square white paintings. On the top floor is a titanic malevolent bronze spider by Louise Bourgeois that recalled the malevolent Shelob in The Lord of the Rings. There is also Michael Heizer’s “Negative Megalith No. 5,” a huge upended boulder that is neatly fitted into a white wall. Walk up close and you get the pleasingly scary sensation that it might topple over and crush you.

It was a treat to walk inside each of the rings of steel that Richard Serra calls “Torqued Ellipses.” One of them is a ring within a ring, so that you make your way carefully between two curling, sloping, rust-streaked walls. The sensation was strangely familiar, and I realized that it reminded me of how it felt in 1990 to walk between the two high sloping stone walls that surround the main enclosure at the ruins of Great Zimbabwe.

Thus each wind is self-registering

One hundred forty-seven years ago today, Henry David Thoreau posted the final entry in his journal, completing the major work of his lifetime. After going out to count the rings of tree stumps during a rainstorm, he had contracted bronchitis, and his health gradually declined until his death on May 6, 1862. His last words were “moose” and “Indian.” Though he is not remembered as one of those great writers who died unusually young, he was only 44.

It gives me a melancholy feeling to read this entry again, though its exact observation and its message that nature is an open book make it thoroughly characteristic. Better to look back on what he wrote three years and two days before, when he compared the turn of the seasons to one of the enormous panoramic scrolls that were popular in his day, where a viewer could sit and watch the length of the Mississippi or the Nile pass by on painted canvas.

I seemed to recognize the November evening as a familiar thing come round again, and yet I could hardly tell whether I had ever known it or only divined it. The November twilights just begun! It appeared like part of a panorama at which I sat spectator, a part with which I was perfectly familiar just coming into view, and I foresaw how it would look and roll along, and prepared to be pleased. Just such a piece of art merely, though infinitely sweet and grand, did it appear to me, and just as little were any active duties required of me.