Beach Reads 2008: Outrageous Things in Stylish Phrases

I note this week advice Evelyn Waugh gave to his son when he met with difficulties at school. He wrote to Auberon, "Don't become an anarchist. There is no superiority in shirking things and doing badly. Be superior by cultivating your intellect and taste."

Sounds terribly British, if not downright snobbish, eh? Even so, it remains the dutiful fate of non-shirking readers, such as in this family, where the maternal, not patriarchal advice, "what did we learn from this," holds sway, an edict formed after we'd watched another episode of an idiotic, though addictive, tv series called Surface where swimming Iguanas took over the world. The lizards didn't get to where they were by cultivating intellect, I can tell you. Despite that, and why must it feel confessional?), I'm forced to admit (why forced?), or even apologize, that I intend to learn from the books I'll be lugging to the beach, though unlike Waugh's son, it's doubtful folks of my acquaintance will note any positive effect on taste nor intellect.

Speaking of the Waugh's, and English mothers, the first thick tome, weighing down the 2008 beach bag considerably, is Humphrey Carpenter's 'The Brideshead Generation,' which, believe it or not, is laugh-out loud funny, including the tale of the distant aristocratic mother who when asked which of her four children she'd like to take to church, responded, 'how should I know, the one that goes with my blue dress.'

A Brideshead's addict since the tv program, and later after taking a course at Oxford during one magical summer, reading Carpenter's The Brideshead Generation means greeting old friends as if at a class reunion. Charles Ryder had spoken of entering a low narrow door in the garden when he first approached Lord Sebastien's rooms, and for many, exploring the literary and social world of Oxford-Brideshead gains for the reader similar entrance to an exotic place whose dimming flame exists reflectedly today in only a few formidable descendents like Oxford alum Christopher Hitchens, who Alexander Linklater describes as "raffish, old-fashioned, and insolently charismatic," so much so, "viewers of American current affairs shows invite him on to say outrageous things in stylish phrases."

To discover why we like what we like, Freud developed free association, scientifically identifying the next beach bag selection as more about wanting to like but hardly finding anything to like - namely, poetry, where there are few I've completed, only instead, glimpsing enticingly of what might have been, such as in the highly recommended A.N. Wilson history, 'God's Funeral,' which interweaves the poetry of Thomas Hardy.

Wistfully, then, I'll be packing amongst the sun tan oils, A. Norman Jeffares' W.B. Yeats, Man and Poet, where, for a start, at least, Irishness free associates comic-tragic images formed by a mystical walk through a Killarney forest of royal deer, a pint of the purest Guinness at Mulligans in Temple Bar, and a horse lying dead in a Dublin street after being hit by a car.

Yeats wrote of modern life circa 1920:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity --

capturing just the very people and things one hopes to get away from at the beach; whether Yeats will be a good vacation companion, or not, remains to be seen.

In Freud's "The Future of Illusion," Clive James reckons when he "defined civilization as the overcoming of nature," it blinded him dangerously to the murderous intent of the Nazi's. In a round-about, far less lethal way, the third book in the bag, "Wait Till Next Year," by Doris Kearns Goodwin, relies upon the inevitability of continuity through games she scored with her father at Fenway, in a country, unlike Freud's Vienna, where there's always the certainty of next season measured stately one inning at a time.

As Tom Verducci pointed out last week in Sports Illustrated, "attendance is up for the fifth straight season," and, "none of the teams with the five highest payrolls held first place," and Tampa Bay (of all teams!), in first, "winning with pitching, defense and young players, the sometimes forgotten commodities of the power-obsessed Steroid era from which baseball is trying to escape."

Indeed, the last book in the bag, a light paperback, thank God, is "The Gift, Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World," by Lewis Hyde, noted on the back cover, as a "brilliant defense of the value of creativity and its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities," just as baseball is likewise finally regaining a field overrun by profit, cheap shortcuts and sordid theatrics.

As with Yeat's poetry, I'm unsure whether I'll get far into The Gift - the first several chapters are anthropologically devoted to a complex Native American system of trading presents, but it does carry an Endless Summer vibe and may go down well after several Bartles & James Blue Hawaii wine coolers...

Freud might have psycho-analyzed this year's selection of Beach Reads, in common, diagnosing the Spotsyltuckian's ego as formed by an "unquenchable naivety," or per Yeats, acknowledging his vulnerability to "the appeal of the life of contemplation over the appeal of the life of action." Isn't a week at the beach all about contemplation, undoing daily sordidness, so as to believe again in the possibilies of next season, just as at the end of Brideshead, the story culminates in the presence of an inextinguishable flame flickering in an otherwise empty chapel?

Such, indeed, is the naivety of those who reject anarchy, bullying and cheating, searching on their own, and in other's creativity, for the antidote, not by shirking, but by undertaking deliberate journeys to where there is always 'something to be learned from this.'

Thanks, mom.