B List: Currently between books.
C List: R. R. Palmer--The Age of the Democratic Revolution: The Challenge...333/528
Late this month. The 6th fell on a Sunday, which is a bad day for me to get any computer time. Obviously any writing time is hard to come by at this point.
The Maugham book is a readable product, ideally consumed, as Ashenden himself would do so, in first class railway carriages and sitting in one's robe and slippers with a glass of sherry by the fire in a Swiss hotel. He (Maugham) does have some literary skills, notably in the area of dialogue that moves the particular episode forward and is somewhat satisfying to the brain at the same time. He is mostly a reassuring kind of writer, the reassurance being that if you are a socially unsophisticated and only modestly smart reader, but find those qualities at a slightly higher, but not dangerous, stage of development attractive in others, he is there for you. As far as this book is concerned, Ashenden is involved in espionage, but it is really more of a travelogue and study of broad and recognizable types than a spy book, Ashenden is never in any physical danger nor is he required to outwit any particularly formidable opponent. The American character is an ignoramus and a bore who is enamored of the sound of his own voice, the Russian ones are fiercely serious and tormented and intellectual. It's that kind of book.
R. R. Palmer (1909-2002) was a historian and college professor, mainly at Princeton, from 1936 to 1977. Several of his publications are considered distinguished, and the two-part Age of the Democratic Revolution is considered his masterpiece. How I came to be reading this large work I will go into more in my next book report when I get around to it. It is a departure from the kind of thing I usually read, which is good, but some sections in it come more alive to me for whatever reason than others. To my surprise, for example, I am finding the account of the anti-aristocratic movement in the Netherlands in the 1780s to be quite interesting. As a smaller country without an internationally famous literature or, in this era, any other art, the texture of its history is not very well understood, by me at least. At the same time I was not as enthralled by the chapter dealing with a similar movement in Ireland during the same period, mainly because the main actors were almost exclusively Anglo-Irish, Catholics being entirely forbidden from the Irish parliament and other offices at that time, which dynamic--the Catholics being as it were on the sideline in the politics of the time--I had a hard time getting a clear vision of. Palmer was a man of his time and his own sympathies and principles seem to be against oligarchy and too great social and economic inequality, for wide participation (by way of voting and representation) in government and so on. His summation of the mood in Europe at the outbreak of the French Revolution resonates a little too closely to that of our own time:
"By a revolutionary situation is here meant one in which confidence in the justice or reasonableness of existing authority is undermined; where old loyalties fade, obligations are felt as impositions, law seems arbitrary, and respect for superiors is felt as a form of humiliation; where existing sources of prestige seem undeserved, hitherto accepted forms of wealth and income seem ill-gained, and government is sensed as distant, apart from the governed and not really 'representing' them. In such a situation the sense of community is lost, and the bond between social classes turns to jealousy and frustration. People of a kind formerly integrated begin to feel as outsiders, or those who have never been integrated begin to feel left out."
He had a good quote on how too extreme inequality really was bad for societies but I can't find it now.
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