Crusoe's island

I was both interested in and strangely bored by Jonathan Franzen's essay in this week's New Yorker on his friendship with David Foster Wallace and the strange allure of visiting a desert island with only a copy of Robinson Crusoe.

It is appropriate to the subject of the essay that it should be boring in parts.

(I was tickled by the birding detail about having already seen Crusoe's "two endemic land-bird species" and losing patience with the notion of another week on a small and isolated island where one wouldn't see any new birds!)

(Also tickled by Franzen's evident enthusiasm for Pamela - but he really should read Clarissa!....)

The bit that most caught my attention, both because I found it extremely sharp and perceptive in its phrasing and because I wondered whether it would be endorsed by others who spent intimate time with DFW in the last year of his life (it refers specifically to DFW's decision, after twenty years, to stop taking the antidepressant Nardil):

He made strange and seemingly self-defeating decisions about his care, engaged in a fair amount of bamboozlement of his shrinks (whom one can only pity for having drawn such a brilliantly complicated case), and in the end created an entire secret life devoted to suicide. Throughout that year, the David whom I knew well and loved immoderately was struggling bravely to build a more secure foundation for his work and his life, contending with heartbreaking levels of anxiety and pain, while the David whom I knew less well, but still well enough to have always disliked and distrusted, was methodically plotting his own destruction and his revenge on those who loved him.

It is like something out of a novel by Susan Howatch, somehow; but is it perceptive and true or perceptive and false? Impossible for me to say...

"On the Subject of Sex"

At the NYTBR, Ben Macintyre reviews Christopher Andrew's history of MI5:

Perhaps inevitably, in an organization relying on imagination and subterfuge, the ranks of MI5 included more than a fair share of eccentrics and fantasists. Among the most notable of these was one Maxwell Knight, whose agents successfully penetrated both Fascist and Communist networks in London. He was also a passionate naturalist who went on to become “Uncle Max,” a much loved children’s broadcaster on the BBC.

Knight could often be seen taking his pet bear, Bessie, for walks around London. He published the definitive book on how to keep a domesticated gorilla. He also wrote a delightful internal MI5 memo, “On the Subject of Sex, in connection with using women as agents.” This declares: “It is difficult to imagine anything more terrifying than for an officer to become landed with a woman agent who suffers from an overdose of Sex.” (Knight consistently capitalizes “Sex,” of which he was plainly ­terrified.)

Molecular prisons

At the Times, Eric Asimov:

Water not only changes the flavors, it almost magically alters the appearance of the absinthe. As you slowly add water, the liquid in the glass seems to thicken, and transforms into an opalescent pastel cloud. The French call this effect the louche (which has the wonderful double meaning of turbulent in French and disreputable in English).

"Seal steak and biscuits and pemmican and chocolate"

At the Guardian, John Crace interviews Roland Huntsford on his histories of Nordic skiing and polar exploration. The flavor of bygone days:

How someone who was born in Cape Town in 1927 came to develop a Nordic mentality is a story in itself. Huntford's father was both a soldier and a farmer, while his mother was a Ukrainian exile who had escaped the Bolshevik revolution. Huntford came to London after the second world war to study physics at Imperial College, but lasted only two years before he was asked to leave - "not a high point in my education" - and he disappeared to the continent to do nothing gracefully. "I felt my mind had been deformed by science in the UK," he says. "Over here scientists seemed to have a tunnel vision, whereas the ones I met abroad had a wide range of interests and were happy to discuss Italian literature.

"To be honest, I was a drifter, and probably still am in some ways. I ended up in Florence where I hung out with the other would-be artists, fraudulent or otherwise, that gathered there. I don't know if I had a good time, but one would need to have had a heart of stone not to be affected by its atmosphere, its Renaissance painters and writers: to this day, Dante remains my favourite poet."

He moved back to London in the late 50s, found digs in Chelsea and met a Danish communist double agent who was to change his life. "He was obsessed with Ibsen," Huntford said, "and ordered me not to read him in translation. So I started to learn Norwegian and found the language came to me naturally." On the back of his newly acquired passion for Ibsen, Huntford moved to Scandinavia, spending time in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and though the provincialism sometimes got to him, he loved the landscape, the winter darkness and, most of all, the snow.