September 27, 2011

An Unearthed Treasure That Changed Things

By DWIGHT GARNER

THE SWERVE
How the World Became Modern By Stephen Greenblatt Illustrated. 356 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.

The literary critic, theorist and Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatts new book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, is partly about an obsessive book collector, and it begins, appropriately enough, with a book purchase of the authors own. In the mid-1960s, when he was a student at Yale and searching for summer reading, Mr. Greenblatt came upon a prose translation of Lucretius 2,000-year-old poem On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura). He plucked it from a Yale Co-op bargain bin for 10 cents, partly because he liked its sexy cover, a pair of disembodied legs floating above the Earth in an apparent act of celestial coition. Mr. Greenblatt read On the Nature of Things that golden summer. The book spoke to him for a reason thats straight out of a Woody Allen movie or a Bruce Jay Friedman novel: because of his own overbearing Jewish mother. The core of Lucretius poem is a profound, therapeutic meditation on the fear of death, and that fear dominated my entire childhood, Mr. Greenblatt writes. It wasnt a fear of his own demise that troubled him. It was his mothers absolute certainty that she was going to be stricken at any moment. Shed stop on the street, as if about to keel over from a heart attack, and ask the young Mr. Greenblatt to touch the vein pulsing in her neck. At moments of parting there were operatic scenes of farewell. Mama, enough with the drama! you can practically hear a weary Mr. Greenblatt bleat. This is a warm, intimate start to a warm, intimate book, a volume of apple-cheeked popular intellectual history. Mr. Greenblatt, a professor of humanities at Harvard, is a very serious and often thorny scholar, a founder of a discipline called the new historicism. But he also writes crowd pleasers like Will in the World (2004), his best-selling biography of Shakespeare. The Swerve, like Will in the World, brings us Mr. Greenblatt in his more cordial mode. He wears his enormous erudition lightly, so lightly that most readers will forgive him for talking, at times, a bit down to them. This book is well-brewed coffee with plenty of milk and sugar stirred in; its a latte, not an espresso. The ideas in The Swerve are tucked, cannily, inside a quest narrative. The book relates the story of Poggio Bracciolini, the former apostolic secretary to several popes, who became perhaps the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance. His most significant find, located in a German monastery, was a copy of Lucretius On the Nature of Things, which had been lost to history for more than a thousand years. Its survival and re-emergence into the world, Mr. Greenblatt suggests, was a kind of secular miracle. Approaching Lucretius through Bracciolini was an ingenious idea. It allows Mr. Greenblatt to take some worthwhile detours: through the history of book collecting, and paper making, and libraries, and penmanship, and monks and their almost sexual mania for making copies of things. The details that Mr. Greenblatt supplies throughout The Swerve are tangy and exact. He describes how one of the earliest versions of a fluid for repairing mistakes on a manuscript Whiteout 101 was a mixture of milk, cheese and lime. He observes the hilarious complaints that overworked monks, their hands cramped from writing, sometimes added to the margins of the texts they were copying:

The parchment is hairy; Thin ink, bad parchment, difficult text; Thank God, it will soon be dark; Now Ive written the whole thing. For Christs sake give me a drink. Mr. Greenblatt reprints a curse that one monastery placed in its manuscripts upon those who neglect to return books. Some readers, I suspect, will wish to write it in their own books, perhaps even this evening. It begins: For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. It goes on: let bookworms gnaw his entrails; Let the flames of Hell consume him forever. Amen, brother. This books pumping heart is Mr. Greenblatts complicated reckoning with Lucretius masterpiece. It is a poem of startling, seductive beauty, he writes, yet one that is also recognized as a bold work of philosophy, one that helped recalibrate thinking when it began to recirculate during the Renaissance. Among those who admired and drew from it were Galileo, Freud, Darwin and Einstein. Thomas Jefferson owned at least five Latin editions of On the Nature of Things, as well as translations into other languages. On the Nature of Things was filled with, to Christian eyes, scandalous ideas. It argues eloquently, Mr. Greenblatt writes, that there is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent design. Religious fear, Lucretius thought, long before there was a Christopher Hitchens, warps human life. An admirer of Epicurus, Lucretius had the nerve to link pleasure with virtue. By pleasure he did not mean hedonism, exactly; he meant living a full life that included friendship and philanthropy and fundamental happiness. He also argued the philosopher George Santayana would call this the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon that all matter, including human beings, is made up of atoms that are in eternal and swerving motion. Yeats called one passage in On the Nature of Things the finest description of sexual intercourse ever written, which is no mean praise. Montaignes essays contain more than 100 quotations from Lucretius poem. Lucretius speaks across the millenniums because he offers the power to stare down what had once seemed so menacing, Mr. Greenblatt writes. Human beings, as transitory as everything else, should jettison their fears and embrace the beauty and pleasure of the world. Lucretius played down the beauty of his own poetry, Mr. Greenblatt observes, comparing his verses to honey smeared around the lip of a cup containing medicine that a sick man might otherwise refuse to drink. Its possible to admire Mr. Greenblatts book while wishing it contained more of the boldness and weirdness he admires in Lucretius. Mr. Greenblatts prose, charted on a Geiger counter, would register mostly a state-of-the-art air-conditioners steady hum. I found myself longing for a few more unsettling spikes of intellect and feeling. You wont be bored by The Swerve; neither will you be on the edge of your seat. There is abundant evidence here of what is Mr. Greenblatts great and rare gift as a writer: an ability, to borrow a phrase from The Swerve, to feel fully the concentrated force of the buried past.