Avoidance

So  I figure if I just ignore them, my pile of paperwork will straighten itself out, and my list of phone calls will dial themselves.  This approach has always worked very well for me, very well indeed.

I'm reading Eminent Victorians right now.  It's almost 100 years old now (not my actual edition, which is electronic), published in 1918.   A paper copy of this book had been sitting on my bookshelf for many years, but when I saw a 99-cent electronic copy, I decided to actually read it.

Apparently,  a contemporary of Lytton Strachey condemned the book as mean-spirited and cruel. I wish I could remember the context; it wasn't a review (because even I don't sit around reading 97-year-old book reviews); perhaps it was in an article for one of my history or English classes.  I don't find it either mean-spirited or cruel, only a little presumptuous.  Strachey seems to have invented a form of writing that became very important in the seventies and eighties.  His sketches (especially of Florence Nightingale, the only woman covered) contain a slightly smug undertone, suggestive of the author's apparent belief that his superior modern viewpoint gave him an understanding of his subjects' psychology that they themselves lacked.  It's as if Gore Vidal or Gail Sheehy had written Vanity Fair profiles of Mother Teresa or Ronald Reagan or some other iconic target of literati scorn.

I suppose that this was the point of Eminent Victorians; to take four of the most important people in Victorian England (truthfully, though, I had only heard of Cardinal Manning and Florence Nightingale when I picked up the book; I assumed, incorrectly, that the Dr. Arnold was Matthew Arnold, and I had no idea who General Gordon was) and cut them down to size.  So although Strachey's short biographies don't even approach the level of meanness that Internet-bred 21st-century readers have become accustomed to, I suppose that the whole project and its determination to destroy idols and humble the mighty was rather mean in itself.

General Gordon awaits.  I'll decide, after I finish with him, what other reading will keep me away from bills, files, and phone calls.