Human History

Publishers this week fling the following meaty biographies into the literary arena: the gorgeous Borgias, a magnificent Medici, swaggering Cyrano de Bergerac, Napoleon and his nephew, two literary Englishmen and some eminent Asians. THE INCREDIBLE BORGIAS--Klabund-- Liveright ($2.50). LORENZO THE MAGNIFICENT--David Loth--Brentano ($5). Since the World War the will-to-power is represented in the two extremes of public life: 1) the proletariat; 2) the tycoons. Less effectually was the same will represented during the early summer of Western civilization with the Borgias and Medici. Remembered for his ebullient Peter the Czar, the late, great Klabund of the flashy pointillistic pen calls his posthumous panorama The Incredible Borgias. Why incredible? Because only a Borgia could really love a Borgia, yet mostly because the Borgia lust for power knew no bounds. "One must display to the mob an iron front," said Rodrigo Borgia (1431-1503). "He who yields is already lost. He whose fist crashes upon their face--wins." He said it to the meek, blue-eyed Pope Calixtus III, also a Borgia. And what could Calixtus do but make Rodrigo a Cardinal? Rodrigo, who then became Pope Alexander VI, had a wife whom be kept subdued with sedatives for 13 years, had also a son Cesare (1476-1507) ruthless as himself. Rodrigo-Alexander gave the wily, beautiful Cesare a cardinal's tonsure for slaying a bull. In return Cesare, who would strut into battle like a peacock and whose ablest engineer was painter-athlete-musician-sculptor Leonardo da Vinci,* helped his father by hoodwinking France's Charles VIII, by outsmarting the latter's moral crutch, the vicious book-burning reformer Savonarola. Next Cesare committed incest with Alexander's daughter Lucrezia (1480-1519), she who inspired Michelangelo to erotic dreams, to paint the famed Leda and Venus. Alexander died by poison, Cesare died by an assassin's dagger, Lucrezia died in her own repentance. Borgias all, they wished only Borgias to be Popes, to rule Italy, the world, Heaven, Hell. What were the Borgias? They were realists and all the rest were Christians, they were a Centaur-- thus answers the great, imaginative Biographer Klabund. When Rome's Borgias were at their hot zenith, the star of Florence's Medici was setting. Yet the Medici also had their day --Lorenzo di Piero di Cosimo de' Medici (1449-92) was not in name only magnificent. True, his family's founder was a mere medico--hence the name Medici. All the same, when gay, ugly, gaudily-dressed Lorenzo flung a party the whole town knew, and probably attended. Where else lay Lorenzo's magnificence? He was an ardent polygamist, a distiller of ornate but popular verse, the lavish Maecenas of Botticelli, da Vinci, Michelangelo, many another dauber. He was banker-showman- statesman-poet-scholar-libertine-farmer-connoisseur-family man-intriguer. When Lorenzo croaked, all Florence dumbly listened--though the Renaissance revival of such pagan classics as Plato's Dialogues had revived conversational give-and-take. Politically Lorenzo was the living refutation of Plato's republican ideas. The Medici believed that Florentines "were not a bit concerned about their government so long as it left them reasonably prosperous and well-entertained." Let Biographer Loth continue the plumbing so ably in evidence throughout Lorenzo the Magnificent: Lorenzo "was perhaps a coward, a man of no principles and very little honor, inconstant, an opportunist, frivolous, and Epicurean. But he was neither brute nor a fanatical hypocrite nor a lecherous beast. ... All he wanted was peace . . . the good things of this world, wealth, and fun and art and love and learning." CYRANO--Cameron Rogers--Doubleday, Doran ($3.50). THE LIFE OF NAPOLEON--Dmitri Merezhkovsky--Dutton ($3). THE PHANTOM EMPEROR: THE ROMANCE AND TRAGEDY OF NAPOLEON III-- Octave Aubry--Harper ($2.50). Many U. S. citizens go to Europe. Few know any history except the Anglo-American combination. But U. S. play-goers who have seen Walter Hampden act the Parisian smash of 1897, Edmond Rostand's lyrical Cyrano de Bergerac, have gained an inkling of what 17th Century France was like. For swaggering, fork-tongued Gascon Cyrano actually lived, and in those melodramatic days. The Rogers biography reveals the real Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-55) as "swordsman--libertine--man-of-letters." Author of Walt Whitman the Magnificent Idler, Biographer Rogers now finds his pen cluttered at every turn with a man whose short, quick-tempered life-rhythm was the polar opposite of Old Walt's. Cyrano's nose was "long, high-bridged, and bony, curved like a Moorish sword-blade, somewhat cleft at the extremity, and immensely arrogant." Believing the world mocked at his appendage, Cyrano began making diligent study of the art of the sword. He became a fiendish practicer among the Musketeers and Cardinals' Guards, and did not take up quieter study until, wounded, aged 24, he turned philosophic disciple of Descartes' foe--Libertin Gassendi, who also taught great Dramatist Moliere. As a writer, however, Cyrano was definitely minor. Yet his Journey to the Moon, despite its preciousness, was an ably fantastic novel, compound of carica ture and philosophy, and the inventive "science" in it anticipated Swift, Voltaire, Verne. Even Moliere was not above pilfering Cyrano's best comedy-scene. A beam falling from an upper story into the street released Cyrano from a life of wenches, duels, shames, brawls, intoxications, fruitless ambitions, precious vanities -- all of which, save the first, he actually blamed on his nose. "Most of our Academicians," opined Napoleon, "are writers whom one admires with a yawn." His biographer Merezhkovsky (pronounced Meer-ish-kawf-skee) is not such a writer. A strange trilogy has "made" Merezhkovsky -- a trilogy distinguished by vividness, mysticism and symbolism. It consists of three novels, each one glorifying some significant man into an Antichrist -- Julian the Apostate, Leo nardo da Vinci, Peter the Great. But these are novels; the Merezhkovskian Life of Napoleon, less tightly woven than the author's previous book on the same idol, distinguishes itself from the mass of Napoleonic lives by disclosing a secret. Secret of the Napoleonic will-to-power, reveals Biographer Merezhkovsky, was its isolation, its "islandness." On an island (Corsica) Napoleon was born; on another (St. Helena) he died. Small Napoleon would pull down all his room's shades, pretend he was "away." He retired from battles, not actually, but "in that strange, magnetic sleep. . . ." In his colossal power he was as uniquely alone against history's red horizon as a Zeppelin sailing into the sunset. In 1848 it was Louis Napoleon (1808-73), nephew of the lonely superman, who was elected president of the Second Re public by 5,400,000 votes. His restoration of the Pope's temporal power made him of course popular with the clergy. Yet his kind-hearted unselfishness gave his actions more liberalism on some points than the Assembly itself. His four year term expiring, he gained his uncle's title "Emperor of the French" by 7,400,000 votes. And so began the Second Empire with its two World's Fairs (1855, 1867) and expeditions to China and Mexico. Napoleon III was imprisoned in Sedan (1870), along with 80,000 men, then deposed. His tragedy: "that he did not die until 20 years after his life had lost its purpose"--also that he was not his own uncle. But he was France's last king, here mourned by Biographer Aubry--dramatically, vividly, romantically, and quite 100% all-talking. THE LIFE AND STRANGE AND SURPRISING ADVENTURES OF DANIEL DE FOE-- Paul Dottin--Macaulay ($3.50). THE LIFE OF GEORGE MEREDITH-- Robert Esmonde Sencourt--Scribner ($3.50). Daniel De Foe (1660-1731) was never christened, for his father did not believe in it. Daniel later "took pride in being hated or admired, but he could not stand being ignored." How a hater described him: "A man of great rashness and impudence, mean mercenarie prostitute, state mountebank, Hackney tool, scandalous pen, foul-mouthed mongrel." A true Puritan, De Foe attacked Catholics, Tories and frivolous women in the Whig journal he edited. That journal was a success. Therein he innovated the question-box and "colyum," forecasting also the editorial page and modern makeup. More famed now are De Foe's romances which, says, erudite Biographer Dottin, "are a natural outcome of his mentality. The characters of his imagination, Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders and their younger brothers and sisters, related the ups and downs of their adventurous lives in order to serve as examples to the reader to warn him against yielding to temptation." Says famed Biographer Andre Maurois (Ariel, Disraeli): "There was no book I more desired to read than a biography of Meredith. . . . Mr. Sencourt has written one of the best lives of a writer that we have, one in which the kindred but combative powers of poetry and scholarship combine to mould the image of one of the greatest of England's writers." Before he began burrowing in unpublished letters and poems of George Meredith, Biographer Sencourt studied at Oxford, taught in India during the World War, is now a critic on the London Times. EMINENT ASIANS: SIX GREAT PERSONALITIES OF THE NEW EAST--Josef Washington Hall ("Upton Close")--Appleton ($5). Individualism is traditionally subdued in the East. Example; there is no Chinese for the word "personality." But future Eastern individualism has already its harbingers in the present. Two of Biographer Hall's six personalities: Sun Yat-Sen--father of the Chinese Republic. On his true-to-type Chinese head was $500,000. Sensitive of mouth, querulous of eyes, at 58 he was still susceptible to a pretty woman. Mahatma Gandhi-- skeletonic, large-eared, great-nosed, Indian saint and politician whose doctrines of organized nonresistance threatens British, supremacy in India. One of the author's conservative inductions: "Europe, bled by wars and revolutions, impoverished and exhausted, despoiled of her prestige in the eyes of Asia, which she formerly oppressed, cannot long resist on Asiatic soil the aspirations of the awakened peoples of Islam, India, China, Japan."

The Significance. Biography now fills the literary skies. The new artistic biography as begun by France's intelligently sympathetic Maurois, Germany's candid Ludwig, England's adroit Strachey, Russia's mystical Merezhkovsky, and this country's multifarious Sandburg, carries on the Classical-Oriental traditions of Plutarch, who anecdoted on Greeks et al., and Suetonius, great scandalmonger of the Caesars. The new biographer strives first to interest the reader and only secondly to write as a matter of record. Thus, what some bigwig did for his country is now recorded only graphically, only as a key to what he felt or thought, where not so long ago politics was the piece de resistance of political biography. The 1929 biographer investigates the character of a litterateur and seekers of pure literary criticism must go elsewhere. The biographers reviewed divide themselves into three classes: 1 ) Those who biograph where the need for personal expression is strong. Such are Klabund, Merezhkovsky. 2) Artistic biographers who use any literary method (novel or humanization) to make an appraisal of universal significance, interest. Such are Rogers, Aubry, Dottin, Sencourt, Hall. 3) Cautious eclectics like Loth who borrow novelization or humanization without deserting the conventional record-requirements. Their caution signals the early decay of the second method.

*Also would-be aviation engineer.