And in this Jubilee year, we look back:

The young Elizabeth, heir apparent, queen to be, here performs the royal wave. Hand raised, palm turned, fingers crooked. The royal benediction, drawing glory from the skies, the divine right, the imperial weathervane.

Father king mother queen and sister princess, little Margaret Rose. Yet. It is a woman in the background that catches at the imagination

To the left of the Queen Mother we see the face of a woman who has lived too long in the afterglow of reflected glory. If little Margaret Rose would only turn her head she would see her future foretold. The ennui and emptiness, the stultification that passes for dignity. No longer can the full-hearted smiles of the young princesses be managed. Just the impression of a smile, faint, barely an expression at all.

But for the eyes.

The eyes give the game away. Weary, those eyes, put upon, one twitch away from annoyance. If little Margaret Rose had only turned her head she would have seen her future foretold and known that she would never be able to master the mask, that she would fly off the rails in quite public and tabloid ways.

This is the opening line of Peter Pan. It’s a killer opening line, one that any author would stay up nights trying to invent. Not only does it lure us with its provocative oddness, demanding an immediate explanation, but without the first-time reader quite knowing it, this single line encapsulates the novel entire, hinting at its theme, a secret wish in every reader, a battle with time in which this once, youth will triumph, fly to the top of the ship’s mast, crow over the defeated Captain Hook, trumpeting its own protean power to never grow up, never surrender, never succumb to age, responsibility, or, in the book’s most wistful passages, the temporality of death-haunted existence.

None of this is quite clear to the reader yet, or more likely the child being read to. Whether we make it to the end of the book will depend on verbal slights of hand, not slow-dawning meta-analysis. How well the author can sustain the magic of that first line is the only important thing here. Because we are children when we first hear the line, and in a sense always children suspending out belief when we begin a story, the author must satisfy us right now, keep the promise of that first line on the first page. J.M. Barrie does it — and this is the mark of a literay master — in the first paragraph:

All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end.

The narrating voice charms us with its mild whimsy. This is not the high paradoxical nonsense of Lewis Carroll, overwhelming us with seven impossible things before breakfast. These are not the Carrollingian proclamations of high Empire, nor is Wendy, like Alice, the self-confident Victorian child, upon whom the sun never sets. This is the easy, bedside voice of the good parent, engaging the reading child in a mental conversation with offhand phrases like “I suppose she must have looked rather delightful” and “You always know after you are two.”

The child in us is being invited to play; the adult usually needs stronger stuff. For this we turn to an ascended master of verbal hocus-pocus, Vladimir Nabokov, who makes no bones about what he’s up to and literally chants the opening paragraphs of his most famous novel. The chant is hypnotic (that is the point of a chant); its purpose, to make us forget that the eye is tasked with the tedium of scanning line after line. Instead we begin to hear the words in our head.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

By the time we realize a spell is being cast, it’s too late. The well-mannered cadences, the lilt and rest stops have rendered us passive and so we follow the author effortlessly through the leafy precincts of his outlaw American landscape, lulled into a romance with a 12-year-old, which only upon our release, at the end of a very long car trip in search of lost love, murder, and doppelgangers, might we reflect was truly outrageous.

At issue was whether the Post should allow direct quotes that used “profanity.” Even more radical, could they allow writers to use “profanity” in their commentary. Ombudsman Patrick B. Pexton cited the following example:

Here’s an opening to a story [the Post's style writer] wrote on the annual Westminster Kennel Club dog show in February and the female dog that won it. (Okay, you’ve been cautioned about what’s coming, and it’s mildly sexist.) This is the version that did not run:

“After winning ‘best in show’ from the Westminster Kennel Club, a dog has every right to get cranky, to go diva, to not sit, to not stay. But over the past 24 hours, as paparazzi have trailed her around New York, Grand Champion Foxcliffe Hickory Wind has borne her title with quiet dignity and grace. This bitch isn’t acting like one.”

Many of the comments asked the Post to hold the line for decency. Mine did not:

“Good writing is vivid writing,” I asserted. “And sometimes a vulgarity (or to use Mr. Pexton’s rather sanctimonious term ‘profanity,’ with its whiff of the church pew) — a well-placed vulgarity conveys the force and deftness of one’s meaning. To dance around the word (‘Frankly, Scarlett, I don’t give a darn’) is to cripple the meaning, make it posed and forced, turn Rhett Butler into Aunt Pittypat. The operative idea here is the “well placed” vulgarity.

“By contrast, the overuse of a vulgarity dulls its force and empties it of meaning, as we see now with the all-purpose use of the street term for copulation. If you trust your writer, if you believe that person is a professional, if you trust your own ear for contemporary language usage, you will allow the vivid use of language without feeling the need to make excuses for it.”

The actress embodies one of the many glamorous movie versions of Emma Bovary, played by pretty women with pretty features that the camera falls in love with, argues for, advocates.

As helpless as a lovesick suitor coming every day to the door, the pursuing camera pleads the case for these dishonorable belles, no matter how shallow the character may be when she first lifts her bonneted head from the pages of Flaubert’s novel. The camera sees only the roundness of the soft cheek, the smoothness of the black hair with the center part.

Here for instance is Jennifer Jones in the celebrated 1949 Emma Bovary, directed by the lyrical Vincente Minnelli, whose loving camera can never slight a lovely face:

The movies have falsified the petite and petty heroine, much to her advantage. In fact, as written by Flaubert, Emma is a second-rater. Provincial, grasping, full of illusions from cheap romances. Even her beauty is of a parochial sort, more a hybrid of youth and pursed lips, than any quality of soul shining through the eyes.

It is no wonder that the real Emma has never debuted on screen, which is peopled by leading ladies with heightened charisma. The genius of Flaubert is that he writes in a fascinating way about a not fascinating woman. Her self-deluded extramarital affairs, her dream of going to Rouen (as opposed to the more important Paris), even her notion that suicide will seal her indiscretions with a final bit of pathos and poetry are all pedestrian conceits.

It is not Emma who makes the novel she inhabits a masterpiece, but Flaubert’s crystalline commentary on her. Balancing sentences with the precision of a watchmaker, gifted with a musical ear that never gets the better of a much colder allegiance to unadorned facts, Flaubert is famous for the mot juste, the just-right word, doing with one deft phrase what a lesser author might fail to invoke with a string of flabby adjectives.

Here, for instance, is Flaubert making us feel Emma’s boredom, without actually boring us. Note the many glowing phrases that keep cropping up without ever impeding the speed of the passage:

But it was above all at mealtimes that she could bear it no longer, in that little room on the ground floor, with the smoking stove, the creaking door, the oozing walls, the damp floor-tiles; all the bitterness of life seemed to be served to her on her plate, and, with the steam from the boiled beef, there rose from the depths of her soul other exhalations as it were of disgust. Charles was a slow eater; she would nibble a few hazel-nuts, or else, leaning on her elbow, would amuse herself making marks on the oilcloth with the point of her table-knife.

Perhaps a kinder reader would say that Emma was the victim of the romantic novels she read. This is certainly the orthodox gloss in literature classes — poor Emma, mislead by fairytales about dukes and midnight assignations behind the rosebushes of Versailles. But I find this a superficial read. It is not simply the books she read in girlhood but a vapid self-indulgence that allows Emma to get lost in intoxicating excesses like the following: where she imagines what “true love” might be like if only she were loved properly by someone more worthy than her dull, plodding husband:

Did not love require, even as tropical plants, a duly prepared soil, a particular temperature? Sighs breathed beneath the moonlight, prolonged embraces, tears falling upon hands kissed in a last farewell, all the fevers of the flesh, all the languors of tender love, could not then be found apart from the balconies of noble chateaux, where time fleets by unheeded, or from boudoirs with silken hangings and luxurious carpets, from flower-stands filled with richest blooms, a bed raised upon a dais, the glitter of precious stones and the shoulder-knots of liveried flunkeys.

Political readings of the novel in Women Studies classes have favored the Emma as victim trope. Much has been made, for instance, of the following short passage, which neatly excoriates the status of 19th Century women. Notice, however, that it is Flaubert peeking from behind the critique. Emma, as we have come to know her, does not think on this level. She thinks not very far beyond herself and is too grandiose to allow that she might be typical or her plight common. All Emma is imagining is a sort of inchoate revenge.

She hoped for a son; he would be strong and dark; she would call him George; and this idea of having a male child was like an expected revenge for all her impotence in the past. A man, at least, is free; he can explore all passions and all countries, overcome obstacles, taste of the most distant pleasures. But a woman is always hampered. Being inert as well as pliable, she has against her the weakness of the flesh and the inequity of the law. Like the veil held to her hat by a ribbon, her will flutters in every breeze; she is always drawn by some desire, restrained by some rule of conduct.

Now, if you knew her only from movies or through the soft-focus of female victimology, you have finally met the real Emma and can share the annoyance I felt when, in an article on the most unhappy marriages in literature, some intern at the Huffington Post came up with this clanking Frankenstein of a summary, banged together, one feels, from equal parts Wikipedia, Women Studies, and Jennifer Jones.

The benighted juvenile wrote:

Emma Bovary is one of the earliest women in literature to refuse passivity in her empty marriage to an astonishingly boring man. Although (or, perhaps, because) divorce was socially unacceptable, Madame Bovary goes through great lengths to do as much damage to her marriage as possible before her novel ends. She accumulates an insurmountable debt, squeezes in two affairs, and commits a painful suicide before the novel ends, all in an attempt to escape the absolute tedium of her life: “Each smile hid a yawn of boredom, each joy a curse, each pleasure its own disgust; and the sweetest kisses only left on one’s lips a hopeless longing for a higher ecstasy.”

A lot of bloated nonsense. I had no choice but to take to my keyboard in a fury of flying fingers and post the following reply:

“Disagree with your eccentric rewrite of the Bovary story. Emma Bovary’s boredom came from within herself, not from her marriage. She was a thoughtles­s woman, given over to shallow pretension­s and Flaubert’s object lesson in the perils of certain Romantic Era conceits, such as following one’s ‘heart’ and sacrificin­g all for ‘love.’

“As a result, she was an impulsive and selfish woman with no intellectu­al reflection or sense of priorities­. Her seduction by a nobleman takes place during a country fair where manure is being weighed and auctioned — a master stroke by the author. Her second affair with a pretty and much younger man is similarly blind and heedless. Neither of these trysts are remotely about love, though Emma makes the sort of formulaic romantic profession­s she has read in books. These affairs are merely about sensation, on the part of both parties. Emma’s husband is indeed a dull country doctor, but he is not the culprit here. In fact, his simple love for Emma and their child is the only ‘true love’ in this brutal and unsentimen­tal novel.”

And so on this day 15 December 2011, we note the death of the great essayist Christopher Hitchens, whose first-rate mind and poison-dart tongue gave us so many hours of nasty fun.

GREAT MOMENTS IN HITCHENS:

Mitt Romney is in no position, and shows no inclination, to campaign on matters spiritual. His own bizarre religion is regarded as just that by much of the mainstream and as heretical at best by the evangelical Christian rank and file. Advantage Perry—at least among Republican voters. Rep. Michele Bachmann, if she is still seriously considered as being in the race, can also only lose from the comparison: Her religious positions are so weird, and so weirdly held, that they have already made her look like a crackpot. (Or revealed her as such: the distinction is a negligible one.) …

And this is what one always wants to know about candidates who flourish the Good Book… Do they, themselves, in their heart of hearts, truly believe it? Is there any evidence, if it comes to that, that Perry has ever studied the theory of evolution for long enough to be able to state roughly what it says? And how much textual and hermeneutic work did he do before deciding on the “inerrancy” of Jewish and Christian scripture? It should, of course, be the sincere believers and devout faithful who ask him, and themselves, these questions. But somehow, it never is. The risks of hypocrisy seem forever invisible to the politicized Christians, for whom sufficient proof of faith consists of loud and unambiguous declarations. I am always surprised that more is not heard from sincere religious believers, who have the most to lose if faith becomes a matter of poll-time dogma and lung power.”

Mother Teresa was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.”

The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.”

I knew it was all over for Sen. Larry Craig when he appeared with his long-suffering wife to say that he wasn’t gay…

Without overthinking it or attempting too much by way of amateur psychiatry, I think it’s safe to assume that many tearoom traders have a need, which they only imperfectly understand, to get caught. And this may be truest of all of those who are armored with “the breastplate of righteousness.” Next time you hear some particularly moralizing speech, set your watch. You won’t have to wait long before the man who made it is found, crouched awkwardly yet ecstatically while the cistern drips and the roar of the flush maddens him like wine.

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.”

The discovery of the carcass of Jerry Falwell on the floor of an obscure office in Virginia has almost zero significance, except perhaps for two categories of the species labeled “credulous idiot.” The first such category consists of those who expected Falwell (and themselves) to be bodily raptured out of the biosphere and assumed into the heavens, leaving pilotless planes and driverless trucks and taxis to crash with their innocent victims as collateral damage. This group is so stupid and uncultured that it may perhaps be forgiven. It is so far “left behind” that almost its only pleasure is to gloat at the idea of others being abandoned in the same condition.

The second such category is of slightly more importance, because it consists of the editors, producers, publicists, and a host of other media riffraff who allowed Falwell to prove, almost every week, that there is no vileness that cannot be freely uttered by a man whose name is prefaced with the word Reverend.

It is notorious that the news of the Emancipation Proclamation was kept from the people of Texas and not celebrated until ‘Juneteenth’. There may be those in Texas now who believe they can insulate their state—a state that had its own courageous revolution—from the news of evolution and from the writing in 1786 of a Constitution that refuses to mention religion except when demarcating and limiting its role in the public square. But we promise them today that they will join their fore-runners in the flat-earth community, and in the mad clerical clique of those who believed that the sun revolved around the earth. Yes, they will be in schoolbooks—as a joke on the epic scale of William Jennings Bryan. We shall be fair, and take care to ensure that their tale is told.”