Here, in a brisk but never breathless telling, is the story of man—how he came to be, how he made the world, and how he has remade it to suit his changing self, over and over again. It’s the story of who we are, where we have been, and, in its concluding, speculative chapters, where we may be going. The teller is David Fromkin, a professor of international relations, history, and law at Boston University, and a sometimes contributor to these pages. He’s an optimist, a believer in progress, an unashamed champion of Western ideals. He’s sane. He’s trustworthy. He’s eminently intelligible. He applies his broad brush with measured, confident, upward-leading strokes. He is, in short, a refreshing, even necessary, antidote to all those fevered end-time fantasists whose only plausible scenario for man is to send him, banging and whimpering and unredeemed, over the edge and into the abyss.
Fromkin organizes his universal history into eight chapters, each documenting one of the “giant steps” we took on the long road to the present. Four steps were taken in the deepest human past: we evolved into homo sapiens, developing the “traits of mind, heart, and body” that separated us from our hominid ancestors; we discovered agriculture, domesticated animals, and built the first cities; we developed a conscience, instituting law, religion, and philosophy; we created great empires, especially in Europe. Four further steps were taken in our own millennium: Europe “achieved rationality,” developed its “distinctive mentality,” and revolutionized science, technology, and industry. Two, Europe discovered the world, and conquered it with culture. Three, beginning in the eighteenth century, science, technology, and industry made marvelous leaps forward and we of the West became moderns. Finally, led by its freshest invention, the United States of America, the West moved steadily toward democratic government, decolonization, and world law.
“Ancient history,” writes Fromkin, “is the story of how the human race experimented, invented civilizations, and then created more and more of them. Modern history is a tale of elimination rounds, with the number of civilizations contracting until only one” Western, or American, civilization—“remained.” The story of the near future—the subject of Fromkin’s final four chapters—will be that of mankind’s stuggle “to adapt to the requirements . . . and cope with the consequences of the functioning . . . of the sole surviving civilization.”
Is the glue that binds this global civilization together strong enough to hold? And now that the Americans have remade the world in their own image, will “the ideas and the principles the United States has championed survive the strains and challenges of reality”? Yes, Fromkin smiles, “the world is in luck.” The United States desires permanent peace; its ways of insuring peace
are swift, effective, and just; and “continuing American leadership, like it or not, seems to be what the world has got.” The smile is triumphant, but it’s not completely untroubled; it’s the smile of Noah, the world his ark. “We’re all in the same boat,” Fromkin writes. “It may be a seaworthy boat; but it would be less worrisome if there were more than one.”
When she was in her early sixties, Mary Britton Miller (1883–1975), who after twenty years of publishing had found no success as a lyric poet, reinvented herself as Isabel Bolton, a writer of lyric prose. The first book under her pen name was Do I Wake or Sleep (1946), a perfect fable of America and Europe on the eve of World War II and a witty, stinging satire of New York’s moneyed class. Edmund Wilson, who seldom gushed, was lavish in his praise: “She has cut to roundness and smoothed to convexity a little crystal of literary form that concentrates the light like a burning glass.” Miller followed this triumph with three more novels, each a miracle of concision, and a handful of striking short stories—a small, distinctive, and sadly overlooked body of fiction that, in her lifetime, earned her deserved comparisons with James and Wharton, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen. She also wrote a remarkable memoir, Under Gemini, published in 1966 and now, after three decades, plucked from obscurity by the venturesome Steerforth Press.
Of Mary Miller’s many acknowledged masters, Bowen is the presiding influence here. As Diana Trilling once noted, Bowen and Miller share “the same scalpel-like precision of observation and expression, the same ability to make the most delicate differentiations between appearances and reality, the same fierce insight into human error held in check by warm human sympathy.” Both are also modern masters of what Bowen once called “Life with the Lid On,” that kind of fiction in which terribly well-bred ladies and gentlemen, every whale-bone and stud in place, suppress passion, terror, and doubt as they take up their fish forks and smile past their host. And, most relevant to Under Gemini, Bowen and Miller are unrivaled as creators of child protagonists, characters who are never miniature adults but who, in the purity of their emotions and their imperfect understanding of the workings of the world, are at once real children and criticisms of the adults who share the stage with them—their parents, their protectors, and especially their exploiters.
The protagonist of Under Gemini is Mary Miller herself, who writes of her Brahmin-bohemian girlhood at the end of the last century, a girlhood marked by privilege, disorder, longing, and loss. Her parents are glimpsed; we hear the word “cholera”; the parents disappear. We meet the good grandmother, and run wild on her seemingly boundless estate; then we meet Julia, the quick to-anger aunt who too soon takes her place. Best of all, we come to know Miss Rogers, the loving but crisis-prone governess, a “sad and hungry heart” who strives in vain to be the perfect mother to the five ungovernable Miller children. We are led through the seasons of New England, through blizzards and weddings and fourteen seaside summers, to the defining moment of Mary’s life the afternoon in August when, in one shocking instant, her childhood abruptly ends.
The power of this book—and it is truly, strangely powerful—lies not in its set pieces, not even in its moral counterpoint of the child and the adult worlds, but in its unique narrative voice. Under Gemini is written not in the first-person singular, the “I” of every other memoir, but rather in the plural, “we,” for Mary was born not just Mary but, wondrously, Mary and Grace—one mind in two bodies, her own and her identical twin’s. Mary Miller evokes not only the universal aspects of her New England childhood—beach
days, snow days, school days—but also one of the most exotic of human experiences, that of being accompanied through life by a second self, and of knowing oneself to be that other person, down to the last nerve. “I look at Grace and know that I am crying too,” she writes; “Tears stream down our faces.” “A thought that we had never had before struck us suddenly.” “I kept shouting but it was not my voice I heard. It was hers.”
As a novelist, Isabel Bolton took as her motto a line from Keats’s letters: “Life is a valley of soul-making.” In her own case—in her and Grace’s case—the making of a soul was a joint, not a single, venture. Under Gemini is an exquisite book, beautiful in its form and haunting in its effects. It is also, at little over one hundred pages, proof of the argument that, in matters of art, the miniature need never be mistaken for the minor.
Stately, elegant, wholly benign, all neck and spots and huge brown eyes, the giraffe strides silently through our consciousness from earliest childhood on. Any five-year-old master of any Western tongue will instruct you that G is for giraffe. Moreover, one assumes that it has always been just so, and that Leonardo, Shakespeare, and Napoleon also learned their G’s on the animal. The first surprise of Michael Allin’s continuously surprising book is that Western knowledge of the giraffe dates only from 1826, when the first live specimen seen in modern Europe disembarked at Marseilles, a strange and delightful consequence of the Turkish stranglehold on Greece.
The giraffe, you see, was a gift to Charles X from Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt. The cunning Muhammad, fully aware that French popular sentiment was against him and his allied Turks, was hoping to charm Charles out of going to war alongside the Greeks. The viceroy lost his gamble. The giraffe, meanwhile, conquered the hearts of a people.
In a tour de force of historical re-creation, Mr. Allin tells the story of this wonder from another world, whose presence among the French both amazed and transformed them. She crossed the Mediterranean, a charismatic, twelve-foot-high three-year-old, in a custom-built boat with a hole in the deck to allow her to stand upright below. She was accompanied by exotic Arab handlers and by three dairy cows, for she drank only Egyptian milk. The keeper of the royal menagerie, who met her boat at Marseilles, persuaded himself that the best way to transport her to Paris was on foot. And so began a 550-mile trek, spanning forty-one cloudless early summer days, up the Rhône Valley then west to the Seine, and on to the palace at Saint-Cloud. Along the way, villages renamed streets and squares to commemorate the giraffe’s passage, while in Paris she was all the rage even before her arrival. By the summer of 1827, everything was á la Girafe: wallpaper, textiles, crockery, soap, and cookies—anything that could be was stamped with or made in her image.
Giraffe derives from the Arabic word zarafa, which means “charming” or “lovely one.” Mr. Allin, beguiled by the fairy-tale notion of “this beautiful stranger in King Charles’ court,” began his little book as a work of fiction. “I named the giraffe Zarafa,” he writes, “and imagined her wading in a field of sunflowers. But as I learned more about [her reception] in Paris . . . and as the humans involved in [her] journey emerged in my research as real-life figures, the fairy tale kept backing up into ever more fascinating history.” Luckily, despite all his side trips into politics, Egyptology, and a hundred other inviting corners, Mr. Allin never lost sight of his original inspiration, the storybook image of thousands of curious Frenchman leaving their fields and homes to marvel at “this living mythological combination of creatures—a gentle and mysterious sort of horned camel . . . with legs as tall as a man and the cloven hooves of a cow, markings like a leopard or a maze of lightning, and that startling blue-black snake of a twenty-inch tongue.”