Pair of Peacocks

by

Lev Raphael

I’ve always read across genres, but in charting my own reading tastes, I've noticed that in recent years I’ve shifted heavily away from fiction to history, memoir, and biography. Books in the last six to eight months that still linger with me are American Lion about Andrew Jackson, Samuel Johnson by Peter Martin, Nixonland by Rick Pearlstein, the Lincoln biography Tried by War by James M. McPherson, and Graham Greene: A Life in Letters edited by Richard Greene. Those come readily to mind, but I’d have trouble remembering a contemporary novel I've read in the same period that impressed me as much as those books—or at all.

Glancing over from the computer to books-to-be-read I see biographies of Hazlitt, Dorothy Wordsworth, James Baldwin, and V.S. Naipaul waiting at the top of the pile. There’s very little fiction in it all, and the rest would be classified as narrative nonfiction. I’m not alone in this switch. Writer friends—even writers of fiction—tell me they’ve found themselves also drawn more to history and biography. Is it that we’re getting older, facing the idea of death, and seeing ourselves in history? Or is it that with grandiosity, we’re imagining ourselves as possible subjects of biography? Do we wonder what a researcher would make of the facts and fancies of our lives?

Several friends claim the reason is much simpler: a fondness for good storytelling, which for one reason or another we don’t seem to find enough of in contemporary fiction. I can’t count how often I pick up a new novel or collection of stories and think, “I’ve read this before,” or “It’s too clever,” or “I don't buy the voice.” Yet I keep finding memoirs and especially biographies whose story and story-telling power possess me.

Biographer Flora Fraser has previously written lives of notable nineteenth-century women like Emma Hamilton and Queen Caroline, but in Pauline Bonaparte (1780-1825), she’s found a figure who is almost surreal. Like her emperor brother, Pauline rose from somewhat humble Corsican origins to become a conqueror, thanks to opportunities opened up by her brother’s power and fame. In her case the conquests were man-by-man rather than country-by-country. Never especially witty or a gifted letter-writer, Bonaparte is understandably best known today for the stunning, recumbent, semi-nude statue of her done by Canova and on view in Rome's Borghese Gallery. This was the home of the Borghese family, which Pauline married into after her first husband, a French general, died in Haiti of yellow fever while trying to put down anti-French rebels.

Pauline’s second husband was a nincompoop Borghese prince, and after some early passionate months together, they seemed basically incompatible. Pauline was a true diva, obsessively demanding attention and veneration, and being around her was equal parts hypnotic and exhausting. In effect, she turned herself into a performance piece. A famous but often sickly beauty with exquisite form and complexion, she loved assuming seductive attitudes for her guests, showing off her delicate hands and feet and as much of her body as permissible, which was a good deal in the early 1800s. When the Canova statue joined the art treasures at the Borghese Palace, Pauline loved displaying that, too–until her own looks started to fade after years of on-again, off-again illnesses of various kinds and the statue’s marmoreal glory put hers in the shade.

Pauline (or Paolina) for the most part treated men the way they stereotypically treated women, as disposable objects of pleasure, though occasionally her passions were longer-lasting. She apparently loved sex so much that some of her doctors thought it was doing her physical harm, but they hesitated to press her on the issue. Fraser's book is an entertaining story of one caprice after another. Pauline loved being carried in a litter or even, for shorter distances, by a burly servant (though illness might have been the cause, not willfulness). She used ladies-in-waiting as foot stools, and once even subjected a French general to this treatment at a picnic. She was famous for her devotion to bathing in milk and forced a surprised host to put a hole in the ceiling of one of his rooms so that milk could also be poured into her in a shower (the mansion smelled of sour milk for weeks). And once when apologizing to a friend, she sent a bouquet of flowers bound in a pearl necklace. 

The book is a short one, filled with domestic and European-wide family politics, extravagant jewels, lavish balls and dinners, a Lifestyles of the Rich and Naked, if you will. Fraser keeps the story moving briskly, but it would be difficult not to be borne along on this sea of delicious excess.

Reading the Bonaparte story, I was reminded of another superficial nineteenth century woman, George Eliot’s Gewndolyn Harleth, who’s described in Daniel Deronda as  a young woman who “meant to lead. For such passions dwell in feminine breasts also. In Gwendolyn's, however, they dwelt among strictly feminine furniture, and had no disturbing reference to the advancement of learning or the balance of the constitution . . . She meant to do what was pleasant to herself in a striking manner; or rather whatever she could do so as to strike others with admiration and get in that reflected way a more ardent sense of living.”

Even at the height of her fame, many French detractors did not consider Pauline Bonaparte French, and Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) always labored under accusations of not being truly English, because he was born a Jew. Though we think of him as a Victorian, he was inspired by Byron and he came of age in the bedizened, free-living Regency, a time when England was “highly receptive to eccentrics, dandies, and geniuses.” As Adam Kirsch reveals in his fascinating new biography, Benjamin Disraeli, the flamboyant politician sought acclaim and power; he wanted to control empires and move worlds. High ambitions for someone with his antecedents. Though his father had him and his siblings baptized at twelve, Disraeli’s Jewish origins made him a perpetual outsider his whole life. But rather than fight this stigma, he gloried in it, in a way, as well as transformed it. He chose to make a virtue of being different not just by extravagantly foppish dress and manners at the beginning of his career.

Disraeli also embroidered his past, claiming ancient Spanish origins through his father that were fictional, and he constructed an idea of the Jew as heroic, exotic, and superior in civilization to Christians. The English admired Arabs? Well, in Disraeli’s inimitable pronouncement, “Arabs were [merely] Jews on horseback,” and he concocted a mythology of Jewish racial power and purity that was actually turned against him by anti-Semites later in the century.

Disraeli was Church of England, but he also claimed membership in the Jewish “race.” He called himself “the blank page between Judaism and Christianity.” It was a witty, gnomic formulation, and Disraeli, a keen debater, was celebrated for his turns of phrase, notably his reply to an Irish Parliamentary opponent who mocked his background, “Yes, I am a Jew and when the ancestors of the right honourable [sic] gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”

It took him five tries to get elected to Parliament, and decades to become Prime Minister, but once in the House of Commons, he was truly in his element. He had written novels about ambitious young men with political aspirations, but now he was living a novel in a setting that couldn’t have been more receptive to self-dramatization, as Kirsch notes: “The House of Commons combined the intimacy of a club with the excitement of a theater, and its activities and personalities dominated English life to an extraordinary degree.”

Kirsch’s biography offers a splendid psychological and political portrait, deftly explaining period British politics, the role of Jews in the English imagination and in English life, and the author even makes Disraeli’s forgettable, melodramatic novels fascinating in their depiction of English society and as expressions of Disraeli’s fantasy life.

Both peacocks in question determinedly created myths about themselves, Pauline Bonaparte using the tools most available to a woman of her time: adornment, imperiousness, and love-making. Disraeli had a much larger stage, and much greater disappointment; it took him thirty years to become Prime Minister from his entry into the House of Commons. His greatest successes came too late; Pauline Bonaparte’s came early, but with each of them, you feel the incredible effort they expended in making the world pay attention. 

Books mentioned in this column:
Pauline Bonaparte: Venus of Empire by Flora Fraser (Knopf, 2009)
Benjamin Disraeli by Adam Kirsch (Schocken, 2008)
American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham (Random House, 2008)
Samuel Johnson by Peter Martin (Belknap Press, 2008)
Nixonland by Rick Pearlstein (Scribner, 2008)
Tried by War by James M. McPherson (Penguin Press, 2008)
Graham Greene: A Life in Letters edited by Richard Greene (W.W. Norton, 2008)
Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (Penguin Classics, 1996)


Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His new memoir My Germany was published in April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.