Paul T. M. Jackson

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Acte: A Tale of Greece and Rome

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The proofs of ‘Acte: A Tale of Greece and Rome’, the second edition in the ‘Classical Dumas Series’, are in for both the hard and softback versions, and they aren’t half looking good!

Two new interesting additions to the Dumas library

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An extremely rare–and somewhat curious–(Les Cahiers de la Bibliothèque Mondiale) version of ‘Isaac’, with a preface by Charles-Noël Martin and an introduction by Jacques Bernier, and photographs!!! by Daniel Wallard, and Henri Clouard’s biography.

Inheriting, reliving, and reviving an epic

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“Of the hundreds of writers and artists who have adapted the legend of the Wandering Jew, Alexandre Dumas is among the most well-known and beloved. And yet, his Isaac Laquedem is not well known among Anglophone readers or much included in voluminous scholarship on the Wandering Jew legend. Paul Jackson’s wonderful new translation is sure to change this” (Professor Lisa R. Lampert-Weissig).

In 1852, Alexandre Dumas claimed that he had been working on his epic novel Isaac Laquedem for some twenty-five years. However, as it was being published en feuilleton, it soon fell subject to a great deal of controversy, and Dumas, stubbornly refusing to make any changes to his material, was then forced to abandon the work, and upon his death some years later, it remained unfinished—though what remains is of considerable length in itself. The novel subsequently fell into relative obscurity, and for over one hundred and sixty-three years, unlike many of Dumas’s works, it never enjoyed translation into English for an audience that continues to love the French author so very much. This is all the more remarkable because Dumas himself refers to Isaac Laquedem—and not The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers, both of which he had published a number of years earlier—as  the “capital work of [his] life”, and unlike The Count of Monte Cristo or The Three Musketeers, it was written all in his own hand, and so represents pure Dumas.

This peculiarity has now been rectified, however, as Isaac Laquedem: A Tale of the Wandering Jew is the first edition in my new Classical Dumas Series, a project that endeavours to produce English translations of some of Dumas’s more obscure works set in or about the ancient world—of which there are many—in the hope of revealing a perhaps rather underappreciated aspect of the writer, the passionate lover of the classical world, a passion that has been the focus of several papers and articles I have produced in recent years, and indeed a post or two here as well.

However, my own project has itself experienced something of an epic too, and one not so dissimilar to Dumas’s decades of writing Isaac Laquedem, the adventures across the world therein that the eponymous Wandering Jew experiences, and the journey through time that the book has taken from then until now. For, coming out of my PhD with the Open University, which was supervised by professors Sophie Grace Chappell and Naoko Yamagata, with my topic bridging both philosophy and classics respectively, I almost immediately emigrated to France and took up this project, something that I had of course had to set to one side until my thesis had been completed. The project was then taken up relatively quickly by a literary agent in London and a publishing house in the United States, and things progressed rather nicely for a number of years, until, that is, challenges began to present themselves, challenges that ultimately could not be overcome. The arrival of COVID was a big hit, but if that were not enough, the closure of Small Press Distribution (SPD), which had operated for over fifty years until then, was just too much for my publishing house to take, and the project was set aside indefinitely. It would then be taken up by another publishing house in London, who were initially extremely excited about things too, but again, things began to unravel, with life getting ever tougher for the literary world, and so it was that I decided to take the plunge, to do what I had resisted doing for so long, and ‘go it alone’!

So much work had gone into the project, you see, and I had also faced a number of personal challenges too, challenges that I will not go into detail about here but challenges that the project had managed to survive, and I was just so eager to share what had by then remained dormant for one hundred and seventy-three years. And so it was with great pleasure—if not considerable relief—when the first volume of my translation of Isaac Laquedem was published. The other three volumes are being released successively, initially in softback and then also in hardover and ebook versions, before bundles or boxsets arrive towards the end of this year in time for Christmas.

I have many people to thank for helping me get to this point: my agent, literary houses, and editors, who had all put so much time and effort into this project over the years; the avid Dumasian Rick Volpe, who continues to push me to not give up on things; my friend Holly Hill Mangin, who helped me to ‘go it alone’; my friend Kate Collord, who meticulously proofread Isaac Laquedem; Professor Lisa R. Lampert-Weissig, who penned an introduction for it; and many others besides.

But more than anything else, the decision to ‘go it alone’ has allowed me to work more closely with my wife, Cécile Césarini-Jackson. We had originally started out on this epic adventure together all those years back, and it must be said, what with the diligence, organisation, and sacrifice required in such things, how she puts up with me, I will just never know. But now, together, we have accomplished something, something that we had perhaps suspected might never have been, and this has brought us even closer together.

Dumas’s magum opus has become ours!

Acte: A Tale of Greece of Rome will be coming out before the end of the year, and I am presently well on my way with the extremely exciting third edition in the series, which is something that has never seen the light of day even in book format, but before then, enjoy Isaac Laquedem: A Tale of the Wandering Jew, for it has been far too long in coming!

Paul T. M. Jackson

The Other Dumas: Alexandre Dumas and the Classics

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Porthos, Athos, Aramis, d’Artagnan, “One for all, and all for one”; Edmond Dantès, the Count of Monte Cristo; The Man in the Iron Mask; The Nutcracker…Alexandre Dumas requires little in the way of introduction. Over one hundred and fifty years since his death, his work remains popular, far beyond the borders of his country, with his writing spawning hundreds of adaptations on both the big and small screens and even Russian ballets. The French have named metro stations after him, turned his homes into museums, and laid his remains to rest in a televised event in the Panthéon alongside Hugo and Zola. And yet, even in France, even during his own lifetime, let alone elsewhere, today, Alexandre Dumas is not, and never has been, fully appreciated. This was not just a feuilletoniste whose swashbuckling Napoleonic novels of high adventure were published serially in newspapers. There was much, much more to him, things that relate directly to us. Another side to him, you might say: Dumas the classicist.

His father, Général Dumas, was an avid reader of Plutarch and Caesar, but he died before Alexandre turned four. Even so, Dumas was, from an early age, fascinated by mythology. In his memoirs, he recounts how, as a child, he was in possession of mythologies, Les Lettres à Emilie sur la Mythologie by Charles-Albert Demoustier, and a Mythologie de la Jeunesse by Henri Tardieu-Denesle, which “I was everlastingly devouring,” he remembers. “Not a god or goddess or demi-god, not a single faun or dryad, not a hero was there whose attributes I did not know. Hercules and his twelve labours, Jupiter and his twenty transformations, Vulcan and his thirty-six misfortunes, I had them all at the tips of my fingers, and, what is more extraordinary, I still do.”

Dumas was subsequently taught by an Abbé Grégoire, and Dumas recalls in his memoirs that his “sole education then was limited to as much Latin as Grégoire could teach” him, with Virgil and Tacitus at the core of his curriculum. “I have always adored Virgil,” he admits, “his compassion for the wandering exiles, his solemn pictures of death, his intuition of an unknown God, touched my heart supremely from the first; the melody of his verses […] had an especial charm for me, and I knew by heart whole passages of the Aeneid” (some three or four hundred lines in fact). Though ancient Greek never entered into Dumas’ curriculum, Andrew Lang, of Fairy Book fame, testifies to Dumas’ appreciation of Homer: “The Homeric student who takes up a volume of Dumas at random finds that he is not only Homeric naturally, but that he really knows his Homer.” Dumas himself proclaims, “Oh, ancient Homer, dear and good and noble, I am minded now and again to leave all and translate thee—I, who have never a word of Greek—so empty and so dismal are the versions men make of thee, in verse or in prose.” And indeed, later on in life, when he brought out his own newspaper, Le Mousquetaire, he proceeded to publish translations of Homer’s Iliad, for it is said that he was able to produce satisfactory and even elegant renderings of the classics. When the time came to give advice to his son, he wrote, “My dear boy, your letter gave me great pleasure, as every letter from you does, which shows you are doing what is right. You ask me the use of the Latin verses, which you are forced to compose. They are not very important. Nevertheless, you learn metre by so doing, and that enables you to scan properly and to understand the musicality of Virgil’s poetry and the freedom and ease of Horace. Again, this habit of scanning will come in useful, if you ever have to talk Latin in Hungary, where every peasant speaks it. Learn Greek steadily and thoroughly, so as to be able to read Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes in the original.”

At the age of twenty-three, Dumas left his hometown for Paris where he made his name. Not, however, as a novelist, but as a playwright. Here, the influence of Racine and Corneille and their neoclassical tragedies was still being felt—plays such as Alexander the Great, Andromache, Britannicus, Mithridates, Iphigenia, Phèdre; Medea, Horace, The Death of Pompey. Now, two centuries after them, de Jouy and Arnault had taken up the reins with their plays such as Belisarius, Sulla; Marius at Minturnae, Lucretia, Quintius Cincinnatus, Horatius Cocles, Scipio the Consul, and Germanicus, and it was into this neoclassical climate that the Romantics came.

Dumas, who had seen de Jouy’s Sulla when it had opened in Paris’ Théâtre Francais in 1822, was ambitious enough to try to win over the Parisian audience by sparking theatre’s dry bones into life, feeling that the supply of plays seemed to fall inevitably into the hands of academic sorts who wrote according to rule and who had thereby reduced drama to a lifeless state. We will see this ambition of Dumas’—of breathing life into the stuffy—throughout his career. 

Dumas advocated the classical precedents of ancient Greek drama, with his 1830 Christine founded on classical traditions and conforming to the unity of time, place, and action as laid down by Aristotle. He also made shocking and revolting excesses the subject, best seen with his scandalous play about adultery, Antony. This was an absolute sensation, much, much more successful than Dumas had dared hope for—it is perhaps worth noting here that he was only twenty-eight years of age at the time—running for one hundred and thirty nights at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin at a time when the political situation in Paris was affecting theatres, for this was 1831, only a year after the July Revolution. Indeed, Antony was to maintain such a strong hold upon French theatre that Dumas would be known much more as a dramatist than as a romancier for generations to come.

Dumas would bring out Caligula in 1837, Catiline in 1848, The Testament of Caesar in 1849, and The Oresteia in 1856, but the stage was not to be the only medium for his classical interests. Incredibly, only two years after the success of Antony, the playwright at the peak of his powers had a history, Gaul and France, published. His fans could not imagine what business he could have with dry, solid history, and academics resented his intrusion into their province, and yet Gaul and France was not to be his only foray into this field. The Caesar who featured in Gaul and France was to make another, much bigger appearance over twenty years later. I will let Henri Blaze de Bury, a biographer of Dumas, take up the story: “‘I did not know you were a student of archaeology,’ said a local savant to Dumas one day, surprised by his recognition of the bust of Caesar. ‘I am not,’ replied Dumas, ‘but I probably know as much about Caesar as most people. I have written a history of him.’ ‘You, a historian! Well, the work has never been spoken of amongst scholars.’ ‘Scholars never speak of me.’ ‘Yet a history of Caesar would have made quite some stir.’ ‘Mine did not. People read it, that was all. It is the unreadable histories that make a stir. They are like the dinners you can’t digest. Digestible dinners give you no cause to think about them the next day.’”

This was his Caesar, which ran to some six hundred pages.

Early on in this work Dumas announces his aim of trying to teach his readers more history than academic history can—an implicit criticism of those unreadable, undigestible histories which were, as he saw it anyway, as lifeless as those stuffy plays of the Théâtre Francais: “When we are shown the Greeks and the Romans, we are shown far too many statues and not enough people,” he argues. This is typical Dumas, wanting to make history, as with theatre, accessible to everybody, making it relatable, enjoyable, not boring: he wanted not only to teach, but to please and to move. “Who knows Levassor, Guillemot, and Techener,” he asks his readers part way through, “who sell their twenty-five volumes for twenty-five francs, not to the public, but to those who, like me, have to buy them?” Rather, Dumas seeks inspiration from someone closer to his heart, someone whose Hamlet he had himself put onto the French stage in 1848: “O great Shakespeare, you who understood these things much better than all of our wretched professors of Roman History!” Dumas’ history may indeed be more artistic than scientific, and yet, as was the case with a play like Catiline, it is evident that the likes of Sallust, Cicero, and Plutarch had been well and truly studied, as well as Suetonius, Velleius Paterculus, Florus, Aulus Gellius, Orosius, Macrobius, Catullus, Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan. 

Dumas would also write a biography of Augustus, but let me take you back to the 1830s again, to 1839 in particular, when the dramatist-come-historian brought out one of his first novels, set in antiquity, Acté, about Agrippina, Nero, and his eponymous mistress, a novel which would come to inspire Quo Vadis by Nobel Prize laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz, the movie version of which became a box-office hit, was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and reputedly rescued MGM from bankruptcy. Acté itself has one or two particularities, in that it depicts, for perhaps the first time in fiction, a Roman chariot race, from start to finish, and also in that it casts Nero, for perhaps the only time in history, in a positive light.  

Dumas returns to Nero in 1852 with another historical novel, his incomplete tale of the Wandering Jew, Isaac Laquedem.  Isaac Laquedem was a hugely ambitious undertaking, with Dumas planning to recount the whole history of the world through the eyes of his wandering Jew. An epic on the grandest of scales, one might say. Ultimately, however, and unfortunately, it was to prove too ambitious. Running into controversy, hostility, and objection, condemned for its use of apocryphal gospels and for dramatizing the Passion of the Christ en feuilleton, and accused of being antisemitic, no less, Le Constitutionnel, in which it was being published, suddenly brought publication to a halt. Intended to go all the way from the dawn of time, through Dumas’ own epoch, to the Last Judgment, and even the day after that, Isaac Laquedemends abruptly during the reign of Nero, leaving us hanging, desperate for more of the same. Of a projected thirty volumes that Dumas is said to have envisaged for the whole thing in its entirety, “only two volumes remain for us, a prologue, but what a prologue,” Blaze de Bury says, in a chapter of his biography dedicated to this work.

And quite rightly so, for this prologue amounts to five hundred pages.  Isaac Laquedem, though perhaps a fragment, though leaving us to imagine what could have been, is remarkable in many ways. Dumas had spent some twenty-five years on it, postponing the putting of pen to paper on it until he felt mature enough to do so. During this time, he had amassed an unusually large amount of source material even for him, stuff from Apuleius’ Golden Ass, Pausanias’ Description of Greece, Herodotus’ Histories, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, Hesiod’s Theogony, and Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana, which he then worked into these two volumes alongside the philosophical, the theological, and the doctrinal. Comparisons have been drawn between it and the Golden Legend by Jacobus da Varagine and Ernest Renan’s Life of Jesus given the sheer number of legends packed into it, and even in the little we have, there are physical manifestations of the devil, Homeric voyages, and Virgilean descents down into the Underworld. And yet it is much more than a cornucopia of legends. It has been claimed that Dumas, in attempting to reconcile history, mythology, religion, and even science—for one can also recognise the evolutionary influence of Dumas’ contemporary, Darwin, in there—he essentially created a whole new genre, with myth and Scripture almost effortlessly and seamlessly interwoven into a novel hybrid form. And it is through this sweeping, sprawling epic, staged across the world and moving through the ages, through instances of sheer poetry and moments of pure fantasy, that his Byronic protagonist, the book’s Leitmotif even, walks.

It is also perhaps worth noting that, unlike The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, both of which owed much to Dumas’ chief collaborator Auguste Maquet, it can be safely said that Isaac Laquedem represents Dumas unassisted, for the manuscript, all in his own handwriting, was later presented by his son to the town of his birth.

Dumas vehemently objected to accusations of antisemitism and irreverence, wanting only, as with history and theatre, to make it accessible to everybody. Rather, he considered Isaac Laquedem his magnum opus, and that it would one day be recognised alongside the likes of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, works which he especially regarded so highly. Dumas, in announcing Isaac Laquedem to Le Constitutionnel, claims that it had no precedent in the history of literature, but even so, had to be read in its entirety before being judged. This is of course no longer possible, and so we are left to speculate about how good it actually could have been.

However, the discontinuation of one work did at least allow him to pursue other projects, one of which was his Memoirs of Horace, published in four volumes in 1860 in the Siècle. This is a Vita Horatii, if you like, and, written in the first person, it feels like a precursor to I, Claudius, and—as one might expect from one of Epicurus’ herd—large parts of it concern Epicureanism. He took up arms on this matter with the editor of La Presse in 1853. The editor, a Monsieur de Valois, had taken exception to Dumas referring to his friend, the chansonnier Pierre-Jean de Béranger, as an Epicurean in his Memoirs. Dumas’ reply is remarkable, not only in its lengthiness, but also in its content and structure. Dumas himself takes exception to the very definition of the word ‘Epicurean’ given in the Dictionnaire de l’Académie français—the official dictionary of the French language that is – as “a follower of Epicurus and by extension a pleasure-seeker”, a definition, incidentally, which continues to trouble us to this day. In making his point, he calls upon Diogenes Laertius, Pierre Gassendi, Abbé Batteaux, and Epicurus himself, and he ends up offering his own definition to the dictionary, a definition which, quite correctly, omits the troublesome ‘pleasure-seeking’ aspect entirely.

We can perhaps already see then how passionate Dumas was about the classical world, from childhood and those books of mythology that so fascinated him, from the ancient authors that he took such great pleasure in, from the plays that he put on, the histories and novels that he wrote, and from the philosophies that he studied. He would spend months at a time in the places where his works were to be set, in Rome, Naples, Pompeii, and Herculaneum for Caligula, for instance, touring the Roman sites of Provence in 1834, visiting Carthage in 1846. At home, at his incredible Château de Monte-Cristo just outside Paris—which has now been turned into a museum and is well worth a visit—he surrounded himself with an ancient bestiary, a vulture that he had picked up in Constantine and so christened Jugurtha, a golden pheasant named Lucullus after the Roman gastronome, and a cock called Caesar. Dumas had another château constructed facing this home, the Château d’If, which acted as his writing studio, above the entry to which he had CAVE CANEM engraved—something he had perhaps picked up on that earlier trip to Pompeii—to indicate that when he was in there, working, he was not to be disturbed, and where, in line with Virgil’s precept (Georgics, 1.299), “nudus ara, sere nudus”, he would be wearing a simple working costume.Not much of this may be a huge surprise to us. Anyone who has read any Dumas will remember how he will almost habitually allude to the ancient world and to mythology. When recounting a hunt he was on, for example, who but Dumas would even think of describing the three hares advancing towards him at unequal distances from one another “as the three Curiatii”, and when he had one of them, of describing clasping it to his chest “as Hercules did with Antaeus”? When on a boar hunt, to whom but Dumas would “the picture of another Meleager and the boar of Calydon” occur upon seeing one of the gamekeepers, thinking he had killed the beast, sat proudly upon the carcass? Browse through any one of his numerous Travel Impressions and you will find them full to the brim with anecdotes about the ancient world; skim through his astonishingly encyclopaedic Great Dictionary of Cuisine, the one thousand-page monster published posthumously in 1873, and you will find it rich in historical, mythological, and classical allusions. But even so, he is still not as appreciated as he perhaps ought to be. The works mentioned here remain virtually unknown, especially to the English-speaking world, in spite of Dumas’ enduring popularity, paradoxically. In an attempt to bring this hitherto neglected side of our great feuilletoniste to light, his reception of the Graeco-Roman, I am currently working on a Classical Dumas Series, producing new, English-language editions of the titles I have mentioned here, the first of which will be a 155th anniversary of Isaac Laquedem, which, remember, in the author’s mind at least, was his magnum opus, not The Three Musketeers or The Count of Monte Cristo.

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The Via Appia (for Paul-Jean Toulet)

Who else hath trodden those antique, paved ways,

Gone from distant seas to loftiest walls,

Through those sweeps of green lined with marble halls,

‘Neath shady pines, those abodes of manes[1].

From within they watch, from within they gaze,

And to all who pass by, they calmly call,

Hoping to hold those strange souls in their thrall,

This now their life, these now their deathless days.

But who hath heard the silence of those stones,

Ever reaching for us with wraithlike arms,

Speaking to us in epitaphic tones,

Whispering so softly oracular charms,

“Seize the moment, whilst you still have some breath,Knowing that with this life, comes deathless death…”

[1] The souls of the dead.

https://paultmjackson.com/2022/03/13/the-via-appia-for-paul-jean-toulet/

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Our Prince of the Stars

It seemed somehow better, letting all go by,
When winter rained down on summer’s love,
In the blinking of an eye.
You just took to the air, when the day was done,
And winged your way through the black of night,
And sailed to the stars above.
No time to smile, or to do the things you might,
Now there’s no chance to start anew,
And no claims on your birth rights.
But safe now, now that you’ve made your way to blue,
So forget this cruel world where we belong,
But please don’t forget us too.
Taken so, so far away, from those who did you wrong,
The silence sits so heavy, the silence holds so strong.

https://paultmjackson.com/2022/03/13/1073/

Isaac Laquedem: A Tale of the Wandering Jew

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Here are some reviews of the first part of ‘Isaac Laquedem: A Tale of the Wandering Jew‘:

“The historical novel is our best means of time travel and the great masters of the form achieve escape velocity through rich descriptive passages that carry the reader to another time and place. Alexandre Dumas père may well be the most beloved writer of historical fiction, but the work he considered his most ambitious was never published in English in its full form. In Isaac Laquedem, Dumas reimagines the story of the immortal Wandering Jew to create a work that takes the reader to multiple pasts. Paul T.M. Jackson’s graceful and extremely readable translation allows new access to Dumas’ exciting and multi-layered retelling of the legend.”

“You’ve done a fantastic job. Having been a fan of the folktale of the Wandering Jew for some time now, I’d been eagerly awaiting your English translation and believe that the life you’ve breathed into the prose is beautiful. Even for what is only a prologue, it certainly fits the bill of what one conjures up when imagining a historical epic…As far as the contents go, I hadn’t considered to what extent religious redemption would fuel the wanderer, but it only makes too much sense that it would play a large one considering the impious crime the character is accused of in the myth. Once again, excellent work.”

“I just finished the Prologue, and I was completely captivated…You have achieved a balance between the language of Victorian England and that which flows smoothly for the modern reader.  It still retains the aura of another time, but without sounding strange to read aloud. As for the story, I was drawn in from the beginning.  The history, the details of the history, all the way to the description of the “large, grey slabs” that made up the Appian Way…I very much enjoyed the colorful descriptions of burial ceremonies and the detail accorded to the contents of the tombs.  The historical anecdotes lent an air of intimacy to our travel, of knowing who came before us, and how in many ways man hasn’t changed much. But what I enjoyed most was the traveler’s interactions with others, particularly the archery contest.  That was rich.  And when the traveler meets with Pope Paul II, you can almost feel the pain enveloping the traveler…you have done a beautiful job translating this prologue.”

Classical Dumas Series

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As a pre-Christmas treat, marking the 150th anniversary of the death of the author, and providing a little taste of what is to come in the 2021 printed edition, Noumena Press have made the first part of Isaac Laquedem: A Tale of the Wandering Jew available as a PDF ebook for the month of December, this being the first volume of my Classical Dumas Series, a series of translations of works by Alexandre Dumas set in or about the classical world. In the author’s own opinion, this was the work of his life, his magnum opus, which he spent over two decades on. Your own thoughts, though, would be very kindly received. Sincerest thanks to my agent Robin Jones and Noumena Press for making this possible

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Weekly Recipes (from the Epicurean Cookbooks)

Smoked Pork Side

Pork side

Smoked wood chips

  • Soak your wood chips in cold water for half an hour
  • Prepare your smoker with coals, and when they are white, sprinkle the chips over them
  • Place a tinfoil container of water with some herbs and spices in directly on top of the coals, then set the smoker’s grill over this, and your piece of pork on the grill over the water. This will stop the meat from drying out and also prevent any dripping fat causing flames 
  • As a rule of thumb, your meat will need roughly an hour to an hour and a half per pound of meat
  • Close the lid tight shut
  • Try to resist the urge to keep checking on the meat, as you will lose heat and smoke in doing so
  • Keep the temperature between 225 – 250 degrees. You can regulate the airflow and thus the temperature by opening and closing the dampers. Opening the lower damper will allow more air to get to the fire and thereby increase the heat, opening the upper damper will let the air escape and so decrease the heat
  • Turn the meat over half way through cooking, and at this time you could add some more chips, coals, and water to the container if required
  • At the end of cooking, slice up the meat, and enjoy! You can of course do this with anything…

About Smoking

The smoking of food dates back to the Palaeolithic Era, for preservation purposes as well for flavouring

https://paultmjackson.com/2019/04/16/weekly-recipes-from-the-epicurean-cookbooks/

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William Ralph “Dixie” Dean

2019 will see the opening of the Dixie Dean Hotel in Liverpool, a fitting tribute to the man who to this day towers above the city. His 60 goals in the 1927-28 season for Everton F.C. remain the most goals scored in a single season in the top flight of English football, and even at that time, before the dawn of social media, he was an internationally renowned figure: “F**k your Winston Churchill and f**k your Dixie Dean”, military records show an Italian prisoner of war saying to his British captors!

With the opening of the hotel, it is perhaps timely for me to share some perhaps lesser-known anecdotes about the great man, anecdotes taken from my late grandmother’s remarkable little book, Liverpool’s Sporting Pages. This is mainly a biography of her father, Louis Antonio Page, an England international footballer and baseballer in the 1920s, but also of his three brothers, Jack, Tom, and Willie, all professional footballers and international baseballers in their own right. Louis perhaps deserves special mention though. As a footballer, he remains Burnley F.C.’s fifth highest goalscorer with 111 goals, despite the fact that he was largely what we would now know as a winger, not a centre forward, and indeed the first time he played as centre forward for the Lancashire club, in a topflight game away to Birmingham City F.C. in 1926, he scored a double hat trick in a 7-1 victory, scoring three in each half, which earned him a place in the Guinness Book of Soccer Facts and Feats! He would go on to play for Manchester United and later become a footballer manager, but he was also an all-round sportsman, as I mentioned representing his country at both football and baseball, being invited to run in the professional Powderhall Sprint, and was an extremely talented boxer too who allegedly could have made that sport his career rather than football!

Louis was also Dixie’s best friend, and the two of them made their England debuts together on Saturday 12 February 1927, away to Wales, a game in which Dixie scored twice in a 3-3 draw. Louis would play seven times for his country, scoring once against Belgium, and in all seven games he was playing alongside Dixie in the forward line. Dixie himself would play 16 times for England, scoring 18 goals! My first anecdote comes from their second game for their country, away to Scotland on Wednesday 27 April in the same year. Before the game, so the story goes, Louis and Dixie went for a stroll. Dixie bought himself an orange and, after eating half of it, stuffed the empty skin into his sock and over the ankle, making a huge ‘swelling’. It should be noted that in those days even England internationals had to provide their own shorts and socks for games as well as take care of their own travel arrangements to and from matches. Anyway, when they arrived back at Hampden Park, where the match was being played, there was absolute panic until the trainer removed the sock and realised that Dixie’s ankle wasn’t really ‘sprained’! Indeed, Julie Dean, Dixie’s granddaughter, assures me that this was typically mischievous of her grandfather! And perhaps they were right to have panicked, for Dixie would go on to score both of the goals in a 2-1 victory! Louis and Dixie would never play club football together, but they were incidentally both involved in an exhibition match the following year on April 10 at Burnden Park, Bolton. This was the Lancashire Football Association Jubilee Match between a Lancashire Select XI and an F. A. Select XI, and the two of them were in the Lancashire forward line!

My second anecdote comes from the world of baseball. As I mentioned above, all four Page brothers were England internationals, and Louis was responsible for introducing Dixie to this sport. On June 17 1929 a charity match was arranged between the English Baseball League and a team made up of footballers, including Louis and Dixie and also Tom and Willie. The match was played on the Police Athletic Ground in Liverpool in aid of St John Ambulance. The Baseball League, perhaps unsurprisingly, won, but the local newspaper did make mention of the performances of Louis and Tom, as well of Dixie being caught at long stop!There is also of course the story, told elsewhere, of the time Dixie met the American baseball legend Babe Ruth, after both had broke records in the same year, with the one scoring 60 league goals in the space of a single season and the other hit 60 homeruns, beating his own record in so doing!

Anyway, this was just one of many such matches played at venues up and down the country for charity, and indeed the charity of Louis and Dixie extended beyond baseball. Back to football now, and two years earlier, disaster had struck Fleetwood when a storm flooded the town to a depth of ten feet and took the lives of five people in October of 1927. The following month the Fleetwood Disaster Charity Football Match took place, with Louis playing outside left to Dixie, who scored four goals! Their generosity wasn’t reserved to charity either. In 1929, Louis, Dixie, and Donald Mackinlay, the former captain of Liverpool F.C., organised a boy’s six-a-side tournament for the August bank holiday, to be held at the St Edward’s Boys’ Orphanage in Broad Green, Liverpool. Dixie’s team came out winners, and so bought all his boys a medal and paid for their expenses!Living in a time when footballers are paid incredible sums, it is perhaps salutary to reflect on yesteryear, when England internationals had to provide their own shorts and socks for games as well as take care of their own travel arrangements to and from matches. Indeed, when Babe Ruth met Dixie, he was astonished to learn how little he was paid, and indeed later on, after their playing careers had come to an end and Louis was taking up his first managerial position at Chester F.C. – beating Everton’s legendary T.G. Jones to the post incidentally – Dixie was the licensee at the Dublin Packet Hotel in the same city! And yet this didn’t prevent the likes of Louis and Dixie giving something back to the people, beyond their performances on a Saturday afternoon. At this time football really was the people’s game. In recent years Everton F.C. has been christened the People’s Club, and quite rightly so, for their official charity, Everton in the Community (EitC), led by Dr Denise Barrett-Baxendale (MBE), has become a world leader in community schemes, winning over 80 accolades, nationally and internationally, including Best Community Scheme in Europe. In this respect Everton is living up to its motto, nil satis nisi optimum, but also to their history, with its standout player Dixie Dean not only to be remembered for his goalscoring feats but perhaps also for being a forerunner of its future charitable and community successes. With the opening of the Dixie Dean Hotel, both a football player and a human being ought to be celebrated, for Dixie’s legacy perhaps goes far beyond scoring 60 league goals in a season.

https://paultmjackson.com/2019/03/15/william-ralph-dixie-dean/

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The Bouchons of Lyon

Curnonsky once referred to Lyon as “the gastronomic capital of the world”, and he knew a thing or two about gastronomy. Such was his reputation, legend has it that all of Lyon’s restaurants would reserve a table for him just on the off-chance that he would wander into theirs! Anyway, it was with his claim in mind that I went there myself to find out if what he said might be true…

Now ‘gastronomy’ is very much a loaded term these days, and in order to understand what the cuisine is that the famous Meres lyonnaises gave birth to here in the nineteenth century it is perhaps important to note that Curnonsky advocated simple food over the complicated, rustic over the refined, and two aphorisms that are associated with him are, “La cuisine, c’est quand les choses ont le goût de ce qu’elles sont”, “Et surtout, faites simple!” Now in Lyon the typical restaurants that you find are called bouchons, traditional places that serve local fare. Don’t expect haute cuisine in these. What you will get is ‘real’ food, and above all ‘good’ food, the type of food that led Curnonsky to refer to Lyon as “the gastronomic capital of the world”. These are the places I needed to visit. It is important to know though that there are lots of establishments here that call themselves bouchons now, but there are only in fact a handful of certified ones, and these are the ones you would need to get yourself to. The following link will help you find them: http://lesbouchonslyonnais.org

As with any weekend break, heading to the cathedral and the old town is often a good idea, and so it is here. If you base yourself in Le Vieux Lyon, or the 5e arrondissement, you will find a good number of ‘real’ bouchons in walking distance. The College Hotel (http://lesbouchonslyonnais.org) is a decent place to stay at – especially for a teacher – with its ‘back to school’ theme, and it even has a Pablo Reinoso on display, specially designed for the hotel! Next door to the hotel you will find the affiliated Baràgones bar that has a very good selection of rums and whiskies for your nightcap later, but before that we must hit the bouchons…

Almost over the road – or the ancient cobbles of the Rue Lainerie at any rate – we found our first one, Les Fines Gueules (https://www.fines-gueules.fr), where I can strongly recommend the terrine de queue de boeuf, the cassolette de tripes, the pieds de cochons en crépinette, and the tête et langue de veau with sauce Gribiche. Indeed, I often found myself having to order two mains for myself rather than a starter and main so that I could taste as many specialities as possible! All this is washed down with good wine, either a light Beaujolais coming from north of Lyon or a more full-bodied Côtes du Rhône coming from the south, whatever your preference on the night.

As Keith Floyd quite rightly put it once, “No good cooking comes without good drinking!”

Oh, I maybe should have mentioned this earlier, but be prepared to get to know the owners and those eating around you in these places, for these bouchons are generally smallish, convivial places where you don’t have to worry about talking too loudly, waiting for the waiter to pour your wine, having your elbows on the table, or eating with your knife! It’s all rather relaxed, thankfully. And also don’t expect these places to be necessarily ‘cheap’ either, just because it’s simple, rustic grub. What you get is always done extremely well, and you will be more than happy to pay for it, but pay for it you will! It’s a funny old thing isn’t it? I’m thinking of other things, like conger eel, which fishermen used to threw back not so long ago, and oysters, which, as Dickens’ Sam Weller remarks in The Pickwick Papers, “Always seem to go” with poverty. But times change don’t they, as do people, places, markets, fashions, and tastes, and now some shrewd souls are making good money from recovering and rebranding such ‘specialities’!

Anyway, after eating well you might want a few pints to wash it all down with – before that nightcap that is – and you will find plenty of decent Irish pubs in the vicinity to cater for just that, and an English one right next door called The Smoking Dog, which will do nicely for tonight, it being not too far back to the hotel, and the hotel’s bar…

Now the weekend isn’t just about bouchons so the next day we are off to do a little visiting, up Fourvière Hill to the ruins of Lugdunum, once a provincial capital of the Roman Empire where the emperors Claudius and Caracalla were born! Anyway, you don’t have to be a classicist like me to appreciate all this. The ruins are extensive and well-preserved and there is a wonderful little museum alongside, and it is all free too!

Afterwards we head back downhill and then over one of Lyon’s two rivers, the Saône, and stumble across a wonderful food market stretching right along the farther bank which makes us feel peckish again! We head to another gastronomical landmark, Les Halles de Lyon-Paul Bocuse (https://www.halles-de-lyon-paulbocuse.com), named of course after the city’s famous chef who passed away only last year and who remains the longest-standing recipient of three Michelin stars (that being over 40 years!) Now even a stroll around les halles is enough, but while you are there you may as well eat, and so it was that we took a seat at the bar at Les Garçons Bouchers and enjoyed a most succulent poulet de Bresse, a chicken which that other epicure Brillat-Savarin once described as “the Queen of poultry, the poultry of kings”, which has appellation d’origine controllée status, and which is now generally regarded as being the best table chicken in the world, and which commands a premium price too…

But boy it was good!

Things are heating up a little nearby in La Place Bellecour (which Everton fans took over a couple of years back before we were beaten 3-0) due to a run in between rival gilet jaune gangs, so we head back across the Saône and back to The Smoking Dog to watch a game…

I forgot to mention, there are Six Nations matches being played this weekend, and one of them is England v France!

After a good few pints watching us win 44-8 and somehow winning the sweep in the process we make a hasty retreat from the doubly-unhappy locals and head to our second bouchon just down the way, Le Laurencin, which occupies a quaint, sixteenth century building! Now this wasn’t our favourite bouchon, perhaps stemming from the moment when the rather surly owner told us to wait outside until a table became available, or from then tasting that other Lyonnaise speciality, l’andouillette, which, unlike that favourite cheese of French kings, Maroilles, really does taste as bad as it smells, and I won’t tell you what it smells of! This is the only thing in the whole wide world I won’t eat again, and the only thing on this trip that I wouldn’t recommend! Anyway, we finished off at The Big White down the road which has an unbelievable stick of world beers, and we soon forgot about andouillettes!

Other good bouchons in the old town include Daniel et Denise Saint Jean (http://www.danieletdenise-stjean.com) and Les Lyonnaise (https://restaurant-lyonnais.com), but we decided to be slightly more adventurous the next day and head back over the Saône again to the Café Compoir Abel (http://www.cafecomptoirabel.fr) in the 2e arrondissement, Lyon’s oldest bouchon which has been here since 1726, and here we enjoyed a truly wonderful experience, rognons de veau with sauce Madère, gratin d’écrevisses, and the star of the show, ris de veau aux Morilles à la crème!

In conclusion then, I can’t know whether Lyon is “the gastronomic capital of the world” or not, and I don’t know whether that can even be said. I’ve heard, for instance, that there’s rather good eating to be had in San Sebastián over in Spain (note for future weekend break). But what I can say is that I did have a very good time trying to find out…

P.S. All recipes for the meals mentioned here can be found in my Epicurean Cookbooks

https://paultmjackson.com/2019/02/21/565/

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Weekly Recipes (from The Epicurean Cookbooks)

Canard au Sang

Duck

Butter

Cognac

Port / red wine

Madeira

Lemon

Salt and pepper

Shallots

  • Clean and then partially roast the duck
  • Take off the legs and breasts and set them aside
  • Remove the liver, grind it down, and season it
  • Put the rest of the meat, bones, and skin through a ‘duck press’ to extract the blood and the juices. Thicken this with the liver and combine with butter, shallots that have been peeled, finely-sliced, and fried in a little butter, Cognac, port, Madeira, and lemon and then season
  • Slice the breast up and serve with some of the sauce
  • Broil or grill the legs and serve as the next course with the rest of the sauce

About Canard au Sang

Pressed Duck is a traditional French dish, a speciality of Rouen, and its creation is attributed to an innkeeper from Duclair called Père Denise!

https://paultmjackson.com/2019/02/21/canard-au-sang/

Isaac Laquedem: A Tale of the Wandering Jew

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Alexandre Dumas’ Isaac Laquedem: A Tale of the Wandering Jew

Coming soon in 2019, my translation of Alexandre Dumas’ sweeping epic Isaac Laquedem: A Tale of the Wandering Jew, a work which the author spent two decades writing and considered the capital work of his life, and yet which has never been rendered into English in its entirety. Over 165 years since first being published, this scandalous oversight will finally be set right, thanks largely to @noumenapress and @AgentRobinJones for their belief in this project