Swerving Round History

The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began
by Stephen Greenblatt
Vintage, 2012, 365 pages, $19.95

It is about time someone did something about subtitles, which are now swelling to lengths unseen since the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. (The most opprobrious example I can think of is Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America or At Least the Republican Party.) Every non-fiction book published in English is now fitted with a yawn-inducing subtitle, preferably one which includes the adverb how. These subtitles are doubtless meant to inform readers of a book’s contents, a role traditionally reserved for the back cover. (I fail to see how anyone who cannot be counted upon to read 150 words on the reverse side of a hardback could be expected to slog through 300-plus pages, but of course marketing executives do not much care whether the books they sell are read.)

All of this goes back to the 1988 publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Failed Democracy (in manuscript Professor Bloom had called it Souls Without Longing). How Higher Education Failed Democracy is a perfect example of what is wrong with most non-fiction subtitles: it gives one entirely the wrong idea. As any careful reader of Bloom’s book knows, it is democracy that has failed higher education, not the other way round.

Stephen Greenblatt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began, originally published in the United States as The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, is another example of a recent book with a misleading subtitle. Doubtless the brass at Norton Australia saw the American subtitle as a bit of overstatement, so they decided to replace it with something slightly less blustery. (There are also problems with the main title. The Swerve suggests, well, a swerve, a chance deviation of course, in this case history’s, which is completely at odds with the sense of historical inevitablism the author conjures up throughout.) Unfortunately, in this book Greenblatt explains neither “how the world became modern” nor “how the Renaissance began”. (These are not, at any rate, the same things.) Instead, he tells the somewhat interesting story of how Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura was rediscovered by Poggio Bracciolini, an unemployed former papal secretary.

De Rerum Natura “struck a very deep chord”, writes Greenblatt in the preface; a banal remark that portends much bad prose to come. Greenblatt writes in a bizarre stylistic hybrid of abstraction, logical elision, and cliché, a thick soup of “ordinary, self-protective, pleasure-seeking impulses”, “ample justifications”, and “precious remains”. Indifference is the only principle I can detect behind Greenblatt’s choice of adverbs, and he joins nouns with adjectives in the most pedestrian manner. Sums are “ridiculously small”, psychedelic book covers are “extremely odd”, laughter is always “raucous”, and possibilities are uniformly “distinct”.

Greenblatt’s modus operandi is a kind of oily reductiveness. Here is a telling example from his first chapter: “Indeed, curiosity was said by the Church to be a mortal sin. To indulge it was to risk an eternity in hell.” The noun curiosity is standing in for, I imagine, unbelief, of which it may or may not be a consequence. Atheism has always been considered a violation of the First Commandment and thus a species of mortal sin, but I cannot think of any church document containing strictures against curiositas per se. (If Greenblatt knows of one, he has chosen not to mention it in forty-plus pages of footnotes.) Besides, he ignores the fact that all sins are forgivable through the sacrament of confession. Greenblatt may of course set little stock by confession, but why then set any by damnation? If hell does not exist, Greenblatt has no cause to complain about the criteria for admission, much less to make false claims about such criteria. In The Swerve, anachronism of thought is relentless. For Greenblatt, who has said that his “deep, ongoing interest is in the relation between literature and history”, this is, or should be, a problem.

If nothing else, The Swerve represents a more or less admirable feat of compression. Greenblatt has conflated thousands of pages of Poggiana unavail­able in English (and difficult to track down whatever one’s linguistic attainments). The hundreds of items in his bibliography suggest that he has read a great deal about Epicurus, Botticelli, church architecture, and letter writing. (I was disappointed to find no mention of Ricardo Quinones’s The Renaissance Discovery of Time, an unfortunately forgotten book that in some ways anticipates Greenblatt’s both in its blend of criticism and the history of ideas and in its over-the-top thesis.)

Throughout The Swerve one detects a buried note of identification on Greenblatt’s part. You see, just as Poggio battled against the forces of clerical intolerance by, er, reissuing an old book, so too does Stephen take up the banner of tolerance, diversity, fairness and so on with the present volume. Poggio à la Greenblatt reminds me of no one so much as the proto-Enlightenment cosmopolitan caricature of Thomas Cromwell in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, a novel over which Greenblatt has fawned in the New York Review of Books. Both figures are urbane, aloof, anti-clerical; both are in love with something called “learning”. I cannot say to what extent, if any, Poggio as Greenblatt depicts him corresponds to l’homme réel; but I am inclined to think that Greenblatt’s Poggio is as much the product of his imagination as Cromwell is of Ms Mantel’s. (Try to imagine history’s Poggio or Cromwell swallowing such progressivist nostrums as homosexual marriage or caring whether and where people smoke cigarettes.)

Professor Greenblatt’s career trajectory is identical to that of many academics in recent years. He survived the trenches, where soporific journal articles must be written and conferences duller than dishwater must be attended, so long that finally invitations to write for medium-circulation magazines, publish books with deckle-edge pages, and appear on daytime talk shows began to appear. I have never understood why Harold Bloom, Richard Dawkins and other holders of chaired professorships who have become household names bothered with PhDs in the first place. Surely if one likes writing about abstruse subjects for large audiences it is better to cut one’s teeth at the offices of a cultural monthly than beneath Oxford’s gleaming spires or among the blue girls of Yale. It is enough to inspire nostalgia for such dull “Old” historical critics as Douglas Bush, whom I cannot envision appearing on Stephen Colbert’s comedy program any more than I can imagine Greenblatt writing a book as solidly informative and thankfully unpretentious as Bush’s English Literature in the Early Seventeenth Century.

Poggio Bracciolini’s story has the makings of a digression in the critical introduction to a new translation of Lucretius. Perhaps a good short book might even have been written about this minor figure. But Professor Greenblatt is a bit more ambitious, so mere biography is (as it proved in his idea-stuffed 2004 life of Shakespeare) beneath him. Academic ambition should be made of sterner stuff.