The Little Virtues, by Natalia Ginzburg

Virginia Woolf said something interesting once about marriage. I can’t track down the quote, unfortunately, but approximately it was that the ordinary days of any long relationship were like plain beads being put on a string, one after another, and then – at a moment when we’re beginning to get impatient, or perhaps after we’ve been impatient for some time – something magical is slipped on the thread, some invaluable, unexpected stone that would be much less beautiful if it were not set off by the beads that came before and the ones that will follow.

This idea is pleasing, but I don’t think it sits comfortably with most people today. Intensity is a more easily celebrated goal: feeling things as strongly as possible for as much of one’s life as possible, diamond after diamond on the string. We could easily be falling in love today – or visiting another country, fighting our old limits, and then sinking ourselves in some strange and exquisite pleasure. Or all at once! - the more intense the better.

I’m not sure which one I believe – neither, entirely – but I know that very few modern writers apply Woolf's advice to their books. The goal is to dazzle, line by line and page by page, because otherwise the reader – the extraordinarily beautiful creature who has agreed, for some reason, to go on a blind date with us – will get bored and leave. It is the rare writer who considers that the reader’s boredom might actually be a valuable tool in her arsenal. Not cranky and impatient boredom, of course, which we experience when a person’s forced liveliness fails to enchant, but the gentle, lazy variety. This kind of receptive boredom is a valuable state for a writer, because the most profound and surprising truths can be slipped under the table of the reader’s fully engaged consciousness.

One of the marks of Natalia Ginzburg's originality, I think, is her use of the constructive possibilities of boredom. In several of her best essays, I wondered in the middle why I was bothering to read this stuff at all, and only continued because Ginzburg's plain, conversational style kept pulling me through sentence after sentence, until, usually near the end of the piece, she would slip on that magical stone that transformed everything that came before.

The essay that first captured me was He and I, included in Philip Lopate’s wonderful anthology of the personal essay. It is about Ginzburg’s long marriage. Here are the first few paragraphs:

He always feels hot, I always feel cold. In the summer when it is really hot he does nothing but complain about how hot he feels. He is irritated if he sees me put a jumper on the evening.

He speaks several languages well; I do not speak any well. He manages – in his own way – to speak even the languages that he doesn’t know.

This is already getting a little annoying. I skipped this essay in the anthology several times because it felt like one of those narcissistic relationship features in the lifestyle section of the newspaper. But as the essay continues, it becomes apparent that Ginzburg is writing out of a belief not in her extraordinariness but her complete ordinariness - the opposite of narcissism. She feels quite sincerely that she is much like other people (several of her essays are written in the first person plural) and is comfortable using her own life to get at some general truths. And so the essay continues, alternating between her husband’s attributes and her own:

There are certain restaurants in England where the waiter goes through a little ritual: he pours some wine into a glass so that the customer can test whether he likes it or not. He used to hate this ritual and always prevented the waiter from carrying it out by taking the bottle from him. I used to argue with him about this and say that you should let people carry out their prescribed tasks.

This is mildly interesting and it makes you think about how different people are, but it isn't exactly scintillating. I kept reading with half-focus, a little bored, and when I had to do something else, I marked the page and set the anthology aside. I could easily have never picked up the essay again. Which shows what a dangerous strategy this exploitation of ordinariness can be for a writer. Good filmmakers – who have always known how to use boredom, just think of Tarkovsky or Ray or Ozu – only need us to stay in our chairs and keep our eyes open. But writers can't rely on inertia. Luckily, Ginzburg’s pieces are short; I saw the book a few days later and decided that I might as well finish the essay.

He and I continues in list form, with all the accumulated knowledge and schisms of a long relationship: the couple’s different approaches to cleanliness, and shopping, and how they fight. And then, near the end, Ginzburg mentions the first time they met and walked along the Via Nazionale, many years before they were together as a couple. Then there are a few more details about how her husband dressed differently then than when she came across him again. And the essay ends with this paragraph:

If I remind him of that walk along the Via Nazionale he says he remembers it, but I know he is lying and that he remembers nothing; and I sometimes ask myself if it was us, these two people, almost twenty years ago on the Via Nazionale; two people who conversed so politely, so urbanely, as the sun was setting; who chatted a little about everything perhaps and about nothing; two friends talking, two young intellectuals out for a walk; so young, so educated, so uninvolved, so ready to judge one another with kind impartiality; so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever, as the sun set, at the corner of the street.

This was magical for me when I read it – "so ready to say goodbye to one another for ever" – and I knew that it could not have had the same effect if not for all of those mundane details that I had half-sleepwalked through earlier in the essay. And then, in those last few lines, a rush of illumination, achieved in a way that would have been impossible through more direct means.

Illumination about what, exactly? It’ll sound hackneyed as soon as it’s written out – the great mystery, the strangeness of life! – which is why writers have to find other ways to get at it.

Impressed, I picked up The Little Virtues, a collection of Ginzburg’s essays translated from the Italian, including He and I. It's a slim collection, just over a hundred pages. When I began, I was convinced that I’d found a new favorite writer. Winter in the Abruzzi is a masterpiece; like He and I, it is a simple narrative of family life, entirely transformed by its last few paragraphs. And I really liked Portrait of a Friend, about Cesare Pavese.

And then my enthusiasm started to tail off. There are three essays about life in England with a few extraordinary passages, but full of untenable, abstract generalizations – about the obscure sadness of England, its tasteless cuisine, and various other gripes that sound like the laments of an Italian in an unfamiliar country and not the unassailable truths that Ginzburg seems to think they are.

This trend continues in the essays about life in Italy after the Second World War. At a certain point, I stopped being able to follow what Ginzburg was talking about. Here, for example, is a quote from Silence, which she considers a vice that “poisons our epoch”:

We have been advised to defend ourselves from despair with egotism. But egotism has never solved despair. And we are too used to calling our soul’s vices illnesses, to putting up with them and to letting them rule our lives, or to soothing them with sweet syrups in order to cure them as if they were illnesses. Silence must be faced and judged from a moral standpoint. It is not given to us to choose whether we are happy or unhappy. But we must choose not to be demonically unhappy.

This is simply too vague to be satisfying for me. And the less I understand an author, the more the use of “we” feels like an imposition. Maybe the audience of Ginzburg’s time knew exactly what she was talking about – in another essay, she directly addresses the survivors of Fascism in Italy – but I think a writer needs to be less insular to survive her age.

Ginzburg is at her best when she has a concrete subject to work with – her own life, or her friend’s life – instead of abstract ideas. But she is too good and careful a writer not to have at least one interesting thing to say in any piece she bothered to write and publish. The Little Virtues, for example, the title essay, is a wonderfully wise and thought-provoking set of maxims on how to raise children, going very much against the modern grain. And even though Ginzburg only duplicated, for me, the beauty of He and I in a single essay, I still think the book is entirely worth reading. Even a weaker essay like Human Relationships can contain a passage like this one, worth remembering for a long time (Ginzburg is talking about the moment when we know we are truly adults):

In that brief moment we found a point of equilibrium for our wavering life: and it seemed to us that we could always rediscover that secret moment and find there the words for our vocation, the words for our neighbour; that we could look at our neighbour with a gaze that would always be just and free, not the timid or contemptuous gaze of someone who whenever he is with his neighbour always asks himself if he is his master or his servant. All our life we have only known how to be masters and servants: but in that secret moment of ours, in our moment of perfect equilibrium, we have realized that there is no real authority or servitude on the earth. And so it is that now as we turn to that secret moment we look at others to see whether they have lived through an identical moment, or whether they are still far away from it; it is this that we have to know. It is the highest moment in the life of a human being, and it is necessary that we stand with others whose eyes are fixed on the highest moment of their destiny.

Last Evenings on Earth, by Roberto Bolaño

When I picked up my first Bolaño books, I admit I was drawn as much to the story of his life as anything that seemed to be in his books. The legend of Bolaño -- being arrested by Pinochet, the years of penniless wandering, publishing now prominent works for peanuts with minor provincial houses -- usually took up a fair quantity of his first reviews, and why not? A romantic life is worthy of attention nowadays -- few writers seem to have them.

I first picked up By Night in Chile, which had been designated his masterpiece by various bigwigs (Susan Sontag, James Wood), and was a little disappointed. It was very readable, but I felt like it existed to make rather obvious points about political complicity -- it featured a Chilean priest on his deathbed describing various encounters with the Pinochet regime -- and also, despite its streaming prose style (there were no paragraph breaks) it didn't feel fluidly constructed; I got the impression of several short stories squeezed together.

There was one short story, however, set in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire (it is narrated to the priest) that felt like a great one. And one of the things that impresses me most about Bolaño is his extraordinary flexibility, his apparent comfort in different eras, different countries -- a quality he shares with Borges, who he greatly admired (ahem, according to my research on Wikipedia). Last Evenings on Earth features stories about Americans in the Midwest, poets in occupied France, Portuguese, Spaniards, and all variety of South Americans. And each one is told in the same completely unaffected style; there is not a sentence in the book that seems to have been labored over to create the impression of beauty. Like Tolstoy, directness of communication seems to be the only goal, and every line feels like it could be naturally spoken. It is unsurprising that his big novels are all sequences of monologues.

Despite the variety of settings, there is also a certain sameness to the stories in the book. Most of them feature a man, almost always a writer, living a fairly solitary existence in one city or another; often some person crosses his path, something happens between them -- a small incident, usually, like an insult at a party -- and then after a few more encounters the person leaves the main character's life. Perhaps years later something is heard of him. There are no revelations of any variety, or even any indication that this is necessarily a significant encounter for anyone involved.

Each story is told in a flat summary narration that isn't, however, "deadpan" -- it is both completely natural and deeply strange, strange because it is used to describe lives that have no narrative arc, where one thing follows another with nothing in particular learned, no goal in mind. To me this voice felt like new in literature; the coldness came not from any lack of humanity in either the characters or the writer, but a hard look at the shape of most lives and an unwillingness to accept the sense of artificiality that comes with the epiphanies at the end of so much modern fiction. The one story that seems to contain a life-changing encounter, probably the most traditional in the book -- Mauricio ("The Eye") Silva -- also seemed the most stilted and unnatural to me.

There is one story in the book that I think is a masterpiece, and that is "Anne Moore's Life." It simply narrates the life of a young woman, moving from partner to partner, city to city, with some good experiences and many bad ones, with almost no narrative shape, no attempt to make any one event stand out more than another. It is almost an anti-narrative, with every event flattened out so you can somehow see an entire life in front of you in what appears to be its utter terrifying pointlessness.

I read the story with growing dread, a feeling of being lost in some awful place, but even as I knew that this was not the sort of feeling I read for, that the sense of aimlessness that pervades so much modern life requires no further duplication in books, I couldn't help feeling that the story was an honest one. It was telling the truth about so much many lives -- maybe all lives, at some point or another -- and its effects were not achieved by accident or through sloppiness. Only a real artist, I think, could have brushed away so many thousand years of narrative convention to produce something like this, a narrative whose significance exists in its being completely drained of significance. Well, that's not exactly true; the significance is just displaced -- instead of being found in particular moments, it is spread out to the patterns, obvious and mysterious, that rise out of an entire life.

I think I've made Bolaño seem like a drearier writer than he is, because the ease of his style also makes for incredibly addictive reading, and he can also be tremendously funny, although it is often hard to figure out where the humor is coming from. There is a passage from the Anne Moore story that seems to get at it:

A fair few of Girona's junkies used to gather outside that bar, and the local toughs were often to be seen cruising around, but Anne would reminisce about the toughs of San Francisco, who were seriously tough, and I would reminisce about the toughs of Mexico City, and we'd laugh and laugh, although now, to be honest, I can't remember what what so funny, perhaps just the fact that we were alive.

I will pick up The Savage Detectives soon and read it, and his final novel (2066) is apparently coming out next year in English. So far, it has been hard to love Bolaño books, but there is also something immensely compelling and somehow liberating about them.

Le Grand Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier

A magical book. I started it in French and, unfortunately, had to switch to English because my renews ran out at the library (I was going pretty slow). I wish I had stuck with it in the original language, because I could always feel when the English was inadequate; things that had a certain enchanting vagueness in the French (the word "domaine," for example, comes up again and again) just felt goofy in the English.

But the spell remains, in the end, even in translation. Le Grand Meaulnes is a story of childhood and adolescence, lost worlds, schoolyard fights, love at first sight, and that sort of thing. I don't want to describe the plot, because it would sound ridiculous. And the book is always, in fact, threatening to become silly. But one of the marks of its genius is that it succeeds in creating a mood in the reader where she doesn't have the slightest inclination to protest that the plot is ludicrous. You pass through it like a dream, and it seems to be telling you the truth about a certain period in your life like no other book.

I noticed something while I was reading it: one of the marks of works of adult literature that deal primarily with childhood -- David Copperfield, for example, and My Antonia -- is a narrator who is almost tangential to the plot. In so many of these books, the narrator is continually on the sideline while other people act out their dramas, and never seems unhappy about it. Perhaps this is because children feel this way when looking at adults, or maybe it is just a characteristic of the sort of people that tend to read and write books. I remember being in thrall even to slightly older or bigger children, happy to help them succeed in their own adventures with no thought to my own. Part of what makes these books magical is the fact that they are not happening to the narrator, who is only looking in and experiencing it all second hand; this might also be what gives all of these books an air of impossible nostalgia. It is as if all of these events, the show that other people put on, have already become memories which we can only deal with as spectators, and never change.

Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney

I walked through a museum a few years ago and noticing that a lot of the older paintings were, as far as I could tell, pretty bad. Even taking changes in styles and conventions into account, I got the definite impression that these were painters of minor skill. And I wondered whether a painting that managed to survive for enough years would eventually end up in a museum, even with nothing else to recommend it. I figured that it probably would, and that there was nothing much wrong with this. Museums don't attempt to present only mankind’s highest achievements; they have a responsibility to catalogue as well as celebrate. And a mediocre painting is probably much more indicative of the style of an era than a brilliant one.

Literature, as far as I can tell, recognizes no similar obligations. A so-so novel from 1759 gathers no additional luster because of its age, except maybe for a social historian. Which is why, frankly, I am extraordinarily puzzled by the survival and continued acclaim accorded to Beowulf. Children everywhere are forced to read it — many more, I suspect, than the Iliad or the Odyssey. I see the Heaney translation on bookshelves everywhere. I picked it up recently, and other than a phrase here and there (usually a striking description of something) I found nothing that seemed to me like real poetry.

It was also impossible to enjoy as an adventure story. I could never get a handle on what anything looked like and, rather often, couldn't figure out what was actually going on. Has anyone read the fight scenes? Grendel’s size kept varying in my mind from roughly the size of a large man to thirty feet tall. I had an enormously hard time figuring out the choreography: when arms were ripped off, how blows were dealt. It was frustrating in the same way as the incompetently edited fight scenes in most Hollywood action movies. Everything is described but nothing seems to make sense together. You don’t encounter confusion like this in Homer. Every once in a while you wonder why something is being said at all, and it’s clear that there are conventions that you might not understand, but it is always clear what happens — on the battlefield, in conversation; everything is fully and concretely imaged.

In Beowulf, I felt like I was dealing with the infancy of storytelling, in a civilization that had only the barest interest in human nature. I wondered continually why I was reading it at all. Then I would flip to the back of the book and read the effusive praise about Heaney’s translation, with various notables saying that he had made it work, at last, as an English-language poem.

Now, I don’t know old English, so let me just judge what I’m capable of understanding. Here is a quote:

The bloody swathe that Swedes and Geats cut through each other was everywhere.

Does this seem like nit-picking? A swathe cannot be everywhere. It is a wide belt-like line (as in one cut by scythe, the dictionary tells me) -- a swathe that is everywhere is no longer a swathe. Is this line in the original? I feel like it must be; it has the same imprecision and nebulousness as the fight scenes. These are people that do not know how to tell a story yet, and if Heaney occasionally stumbles I would say that it is largely because Beowulf is not worth lavishing much care on.

There was a single passage, lasting a few pages, that was almost up to the standard of the Homeric epics -- it was, unsurprisingly, about power, and how once people achieve it they tend to get lazy and overconfident, and let it slip away. Managing power appears to be one of the few things this society was interested in, besides drinking mead and chopping each other up, and they thankfully got a few lines of lasting verse out of it.

How this book sold so well is an immense puzzle to me. Who would ever want to re-read it? If you wish to bother with it, I recommend getting it from the library once, filling in this gap in your historical knowledge, and leaving it at that.

Père Goriot by Balzac - trans. Burton Raffel

I haven't read Balzac until now because I had gotten the impression that, while being an established classic, he was still somehow second rate - like Dvorak, Trollope, Chesterton. Maybe John Updike will be in the same boat eventually. Someone whose talent was undeniable, but who produced too much and with too much apparent ease for his work to be of the highest class.

I only picked up Père Goriot because a friend of mine is a Raffelite - that is, he is enamored with the translator, which I never thought was possible - and insisted that everything the guy touched was worth picking up. Well, I was incredibly glad I did. I haven't been this thrilled by the beginning of novel in ages.

Here's a sample of what was so gripping - a lengthy sample, since Balzac loses all of his charm in snippets:

Monsieur Poiret was more machine than man. Seeing him gliding along the pathways of the Botanical Gardens like a gray shadow, a limp old cap on his head, barely able to hold the knob of his yellowing ivory-headed walking stick in his hand, wind flapping his wilted coattails so loosely behind him that they barely hid trousers that seemed to have nothing in them, his blue-stockinged legs quivering like a drunk, flashing a dirty white vest and shriveled shirt-ruff of coarse muslin that seemed ready to part company from the tie knotted around his turkey-cock neck--seeing him thus, many people must have wondered whether this Chinese ghost truly belonged to the bold white race, said to be described from Japthet, flitting up and down the Boulevard Italien. What could have been the life's work that so shrunk him down? What passion could have darkened a face so bulbous that, had it been drawn by a cartoonist, no one would have believed it? What had he been? Maybe he had worked at the Ministry of Justice, in the office to which executioners report their expenses--how much they'd spent on black veils for the eyes of parricides; how much for straw and chaff, to line the basket where heads drop; how much for twine to tie the guillotine's blades. Maybe he had been the receptionist at a slaughterhouse door, or perhaps an assistant inspector of health or sanitation. In a word, this was a man who looked as if he'd been one of the mules who turn out great social mill wheel, one of those Parisian Rats who pull other people's chestnuts out of the fire but never ever know who eats them, a sort of spindle for public misery and filth to whirl around on--in short, one of those men of whom we say, the minute we see them: We can't do without fellows like that. Their cadaverous faces, stamped by pain--psychological or physical--are unknown to the Beautiful People of Paris. But Paris is as immense as an ocean. Drop in your sounding line and it will never reach the bottom. Have a look, try describing it! No matter how carefully you try to see and understand everything, to describe everything, no matter how many of you there are, trying hard, all of you exploring that great sea, there'll always be places you never get to, caverns you never uncover, blossoms, pearls, monsters, quite incredible things that every literary diver overlooks. And Maison Vauquer is one of those odd monstrosities.

There are a number of serious things wrong with this passage. First of all, it is totally unnecessary; Monsieur Poiret is a minor character who has only one real thing to do in the narrative, and we don't need much convincing to believe that he would do it. There is no real reason to learn so much about him, let alone hypothesize about what he might have done involving twine and guillotines. Second, there are sentences here that are obviously untrue - can anyone really imagine a nose on a human being that would seem unbelievable if a cartoonist drew it? But Balzac cannot stop to think about whether what he is saying makes exact sense - it sounds good, and he is writing as fast as the ideas come. And that, finally, is what is great about this sloppy passage. It gives off the impression of being written at white heat. This writing is alive, and that is more important than anything that might be wrong with it.

Apparently Balzac had the habit, like Proust, of getting back proofs from the typesetters and, when inspiration struck him, basically changing the manuscript - adding pages and pages to a single passage and getting rid of others. I do not get the impression that this is because he was a careful writer - he did not tweak sentence by sentence; something set off an idea, I think, and he followed it wherever it led. That is why this novel, at least, and I'm guessing most of his others, has absolutely no sense of proportion - the narrative is like a roll of dough that has been squished in various random places; there will be pages and pages devoted to minor characters, and what should be major developments in the plot are rushed through. The plot has clearly been planned out, but what should be major dramatic scenes do not come off at all, and scenes of pointless narrative padding - like a group of people eating at the inn - are as wonderful as any scenes in realistic literature. You read this novel and get the sense of a great artist who appears of have no control over his talent.

Another thing: I get the sense that Balzac's genius would have expressed itself best in short essayistic sketches. This is one of those books that starts to suck whenever it becomes concerned with advancing the plot - the basic thread is an ambitious middle-class law student named Rastignac, up from the provinces, with some distant aristocratic relations, who wants to make his way into Parisian society. An old man, Goriot, lives in the pension with him, and is driving himself to bankrupcy supporting his two daughters, who have both made bad marriages to wealthy but stingy and controlling men. There is also a schemer Vautrin who wants to help Eugene acquire a forture by less than moral means. How will all these conflicts be resolved? Balzac's prescription: melodrama.

That is, lots of long speeches, sequences of long, stagy dialogue, and - of course - secret, hidden pasts that get characters conveniently dragged off when they have performed their function in the plot. I noticed something about this book, and I get the feeling that it is representative of Balzac's work as a whole - it is at its absolute best in character sketches, generalization from the mouth of the author, and in large group scenes.

Any time a scene calls for real intimacy between two people, or a small group, it quickly starts to sound phony. But when you get a bunch of people together, engaging in the silly collective chatter that takes up so much of modern life, Balzac is your man - I have never felt a stronger sense of verisimilitude come off a book than in some of these scenes. And for anyone that thinks that, because of television or whatever, modern people speak a more degraded version of language, and are more prone to stupid fads, look no further for evidence that it has ever been so - although in Balzac's time I suspect it was an urban phenomenon and not, as it is now, universal.

The rest of lodgers appeared, one after the other, both those who lived in and those who did not, wishing each other good day and murmuring those empty phrases which, among certain sorts of Parisians, constitute a kind of droll good humor of which stupidity is the main component and whose principal virtue consists only in how the words are pronounced or what gestures accompany them. This sort of jargon is always changing. The jokes that underlie it never last a month: some political event, some lawsuit or trial, a street song, some actor's comic routine, all serve to keep this joke going, since more than anything else it involves snatching up words and ideas as they go flying past, and then hitting them back, as if with racquets.

In this case, the silly joke of the day consists of adding "-rama" to everything, as in "souporama" and "healtharama" (and I checked the French, it is "rama" in English, so apparently we English-speakers were dominating shit culture even in Balzac's time). It is hard to explain what makes these group scenes so pleasing - maybe just their energy, and how accurately they capture a bunch of people sitting around and shooting the breeze. It is easy to see why so many great writers have admired Balzac, despite his obvious flaws, because the flair and ease with which he brings off certain types of scenes is astonishing.

There was a lot in the novel, actually, that reminded me of Proust, although Proust is by far the greater artist. The main similarity, I think, is the impulse - alternately fascinating and maddening - to make every action and event stand for some sort of generalization about society. Nothing can just be what it is: there must be some sort of larger truth behind it. Even when the generalization is apt I'm annoyed to keep having the narrative broken by these essays (Balzac is much clumsier about it than Proust) especially since it seems to keep robbing the characters of their reality.

Both writers, too, despite their love of generalizations, have absolutely no talent for the epigram, because they refuse to ever turn away a clause that might pin down their meaning a little more clearly. I suppose this is a form of honestly, since an epigram always requires that a great deal be ignored. For example, the most famous line in Balzac is probably "Behind every forture lies a great crime." Well, I think it comes from this novel, and here is how it actually reads, with greater accuracy and a lot less punch: "The secret of all great fortures, when there's no obvious explanation for them, is always some forgotten crime--forgotten, mind you, because it's been properly handled." The only generalization I remember being presented with complete simplicity comes out of Goriot's mouth, and from what I have read it is the one thing that Balzac believed with no qualifications: "Money is life. It can do everything."

So: I finally understand why Balzac is usually seen as second-rate (he is) and also why he is still a classic and worth reading and learning from. Regarding Raffel, the translation reads well, although I glanced occasionally at the French and was confused by the odd liberties he took in translating colloquialisms. For example, in the French, Vautrin is talking about killing someone quickly, and says "Et, à l'ombre!" This literally means something like "into the shade/shadows." (See the second volume of the Recherche for a sample usage.) I'm guessing an equivalent English phrase would be "Lights out!" - or, in case this phrase only makes sense with the widespread use of electricity, something quick and brutal like "That's that!" since Vautrin is saying this as he demonstrates a fatal saber thurst. Here's what Raffel chooses: "And he'll do it without any fuss at all!" How he gets this out of "à l'ombre" is beyond me.

Anyway, these are quibbles. The book was thoroughly engrossing, and for all its flaws clearly had the mark of greatness on it.