GHOSTS IN THE DETAILS

1 R G H O S T S I N T H E D E T A I L S C H R I S T O P H E R B R A M ‘‘The past is a foreign country,’’ L. P. Hartley wrote in The GoBetween : ‘‘they do things di√erently there.’’ So it’s no surprise that good history writing, fiction and nonfiction, often resembles good travel writing. We read travel books for the anomalies and surprises of other countries and cultures. We want to see things that are di√erent, and see them vividly. We visit the past in much the same way. Di√erence enables us to see things more intensely. If things are too di√erent, however, we can’t connect or respond. Make it strange, we say, but not too strange. We experience this historical di√erence most keenly through details, the odd objects or striking moments or alien bits of behavior that snap another world to life. Details are the raisins in the raisin bread. Story is the bread. Let’s talk about the raisins. Here’s a brief sample of memorable details from history, biography , and novels: The opening page of The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, presents an aristocratic family kneeling in prayer. The outward piety and formality, like a nineteenth-century group portrait, evoke Sicily in 1860. Then we read, ‘‘The women rose slowly to their feet, their oscillating skirts as they withdrew baring 2 B R A M Y bit by bit the naked figures from mythology painted all over the milky depths of the tiles.’’ In one sentence we see the period clothes, the old palace, and the contradictory inner life. Arthur Schlesinger in The Coming of the New Deal mentions that F.D.R. preferred not to wear his bridgework but always put it into his mouth before he gave his Fireside Chats on the radio; otherwise he hissed his s’s. Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar, is written in a voice so close to the Roman emperor that the past dissolves into timelessness. But now and then odd details plunge us back into the past, as when he tells us about the trials of public speaking in the rain. ‘‘Protected only by my toga, which caught the water in its gutter-like folds, I had to continually wipe the rain from my eyes as I pronounced my discourses. Catching cold is an emperor’s privilege in Rome, since he is forbidden, regardless of weather, to put anything over the toga.’’ Mary Beth Norton’s account of the Salem witch trials, In the Devil’s Snare, includes details missing in most other accounts. Townspeople began to dream of witches, and their visions – feasts of red bread, a yellow bird nursing at a tit on a witch’s finger, an animal spirit with the head of a bird and body of a lion – sound less like Puritan New England and more like images from Hieronymous Bosch. Tolstoy declares in the first chapter of War and Peace that his upper-class Russian characters frequently use French, ‘‘the elegant tongue of our grandparents, who used it for thought as well as speech.’’ (A recent translator feels that this isn’t enough strangeness and presented those conversations in French – even though Tolstoy himself put them in Russian in later editions.) Samuel Eliot Morison pauses in his encyclopedic The European Discovery of America to tell us that wine stored by the Greeks and Vikings in wineskins (with the hairy side facing in) had a distinctly gamey taste. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando includes two glorious pages on the coming of the nineteenth century as a cloudy, fertile dampness that produced ivy, babies, and the British Empire. The damp even ‘‘gets into the inkpot as it gets into the woodwork – sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopedias in ten G H O S T S I N T H E D E T A I L S 3 R or twenty volumes.’’ Pure fantasy, of course, but nobody who’s read those pages will ever think...