Undisputed Classic 6

Classic in Translation.

Librivox – Tacitus Text

Germania - Publius Cornelius Tacitus (56 - 117) Tr. by Alfred John Church (1829 - 1912) and William Jackson Brodribb (1829 - 1905)

Never leaving his study, the Roman historian Tacitus depends on secondary sources to take an anthropological walk among the ancient Germans. Bear in mind that for the Romans Germania extended east to Finland and Lithuania and in the west included Belgium and Holland. Divided into 46 short sections, Tactus covers:

·        Geography and ethnography

·        Warfare: Military leaders are selected for their demonstration of bravery in battle. They are constantly at war to increase their political power and social status, something Romans could have connected with.

·        Politics: They chose kings according to their noble descent. The leading men decide on ordinary matters, and the whole tribe decides on the important ones.

·        Everyday life for men in times of peace: They don't hunt or fish but spend time idly and slothfully, sleeping and feasting.

·        Marriage: “The young men marry late, and their vigour is thus unimpaired”

·        Institutions and customs of the individual tribes

Tacitus implies almost continuous commendation of the “wild” Germans, praising their frugality, simplicity and purity of customs, temperance, frankness, courage, desire for freedom, strong sense of community. “No one in Germany laughs at vice, nor do they call it the fashion to corrupt and to be corrupted.” – with the implication “unlike us decadent Romans.” Even post-moderns like us can infer Tacitus shaking his finger at his fellow Romans in the imperial era.

The work was only rediscovered in the Renaissance and since then has been the object of controversy. The German ethno-nationalists of the 19^th century and later the Nazis, for example, took Tacitus’ praise uncritically and ran with it per their own agenda. They saw in it an ancient and thus authoritative testimony to the existence of the imperishable völkisch spirit, the immortal and creative flame that burns in the German folk throughout the centuries, destined for magnificent achievement, under the unshakeable resolve of a strong leader, yadda yadda yadda.

When the Nazis occupied Italy during WWII, they wanted to steal a 15^th century manuscript of this work from anti-fascist Count Aurelio Guglielmi Baldeschi, who owned it. They turned upside down the count’s estate and shook it as hard as they could but were unable to find it.

It was hidden pretty well in a chest.

Librivox – Tacitus Text

Reading Those Classics #6

Third Novel in a Classic Trilogy: Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy can be read out of order; I did it second, third, first.  But Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy has to be read in order; the first The 42nd Parallel is about pre-WWI America, the second 1919 during the war, the third during the Roaring Twenties. Reading in order is more likely to give us hardcore readers that frisson of familiarity that we get from, say, meeting recurring characters in The Barchester Novels. In order will help us predict interaction when characters we already know meet each other for the first time in the story.

The Big Money – John Dos Passos

The last novel of the U.S.A. Trilogy tells the story of Margo Dowling, a pretty blonde with big blue eyes. She is punished for her beauty at the age of sixteen when she is raped by her stepfather Frank, a down-at-heels vaudevillian. To escape the situation, she marries musician Tony Garrido, a homosexual with eyelashes that make everybody quiver. Margo flees with him to his native Cuba where his traditional family encloses her in purdah. To prevent ever being vulnerable again, Margo becomes determined to succeed in show business through sheer ruthlessness to make up for her lack of talent. I’m always up for a Hollywood novel, and Dos Passos writes satirically on the familiar and dear theme of Tinsel Town Without Pity. Or Taste. Or Elan.

A naturalist writer, Dos Passos was a modernist too in the sense that he wasn’t going to sweep certain topics under the rug. He had to have been among the first major American writers to deal with rape, incest, the sequelae of sexual abuse and trauma, homosexuality closeted and not, culture shock, and the amorality of the entertainment business when most people didn’t even know they were topics or thought it best not to talk about them when they did.

Another major character is radical Mary French. Her father was a selfless M.D. doctoring for the poor in Colorado who eventually works himself to death during the 1918-20 flu epidemic, one of the few references to that pandemic I’ve seen in the literature of that time. With her father as a role model, Mary feels compelled to help the less fortunate. She volunteers for Hull House in Chicago. She works as a crusading reporter trying to bring wider attention to the brutal conditions of workers raising families in poverty.

Somehow, despite her best efforts, the poor you will always have with you and the cause costs her just about everything. She has no connection with her family. Her romances are with conniving creeps disguised as good party men. Being a self-sacrificing labor activist earns more scut-work assigned by careerist comrades. Working on the side of angels attracts the hatred and contempt of the authorities. It forces the perennial question, what is it about positions of authority and political activism, right or left, that attracts such small men.

This novel also tells the story of Charlie Anderson, who was introduced in the first novel of the trilogy. He returns from WWI where he fought as an aviator, but soon has to butt heads with the mindless avarice of a culture whose members have no kin or friends when it comes to the pursuit of a dollar. Charlie is kicked out of his brother’s house back in the old hometown because Charlie is unwilling to parade being a veteran in order to pump truck sales at his brother’s Ford dealership. His brother is under pressure from Ford to puff sales so his brother pressures Charlie to work in both marketing and the repair shop.

Charlie cannily sees commercial aviation as the next big thing and moves to The Big Apple to do R & D on engines and drum up investors. There’s no escaping pressure from partners, investors, brokers, and industrial spies who are avidly following the lure of big money. Charlie idiotically sets his matrimonial sights on a society madcap who ends up mailing him one the funniest Dear John kiss-offs in the history of American literature. His innovative and money-making style is not enough to prevent his partners from selling his ass out. Charlie is just a guy, emotionally stunted in the usual ways and without the sense heaven gave a goose to tumble to the fact that he is one of those people who have no business relieving pressure with alcohol. That particular enemy of promise sends him on sprees where he makes day-trading and contractual decisions with the acumen of Barney Gumble.

As for characterization, Dos Passos runs a set of players through the three volumes, switching roles from main to secondary and back, with some only appearing in this last one. Readers with a hankering for cognitive closure may well complain that after a thousand or so pages, the outcome for most characters proves to be merely banal. In fact, it feels as if Dos Passos simply deserts characters, not telling their fate at all or disposing of them in accidents or brawls.

Decent and earnest, Dos Passos thinks power absolutely corrupts the military, the cops, the government, political parties, the labor movement, and businesses of all sizes. Historical and social and economic forces put pressure on individuals. Besides that, their personal choices, clouded up by foolishness, intemperance and fear, are disastrous just about every time.

Dos Passos has a tough-minded sensibility like Smollet, Fielding, Austen and Thackeray in that his outlook is skeptical of ambition and endeavor. When we reach a point where we dare to think, “I’ve arrived” the ever-changing world will smirk, “Well, kiddo, try this misdiagnosis – car crash – pandemic – transfer to a mad supervisor – recession – mood disorder – on for size.” Dos Passos makes the hardcore reader wonder about our own complex yet ordinary realities and how internal and external forces influenced our own decisions as to marriage and work and mobility.

Like the other novels in the trilogy, this one has interspersed biographies about figures like Woodrow Wilson, Bob La Follette, Joe Hill, Thorstein Veblen, Rudolph Valentino, Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford, W.R. Hearst, and Isadora Duncan. The tone is acerbic, the stance left-leaning. With Dos Passos the opinionated documentarian, the politics sometimes drowns everything else out. Such were the times – the 1920s were as nutty as the1970s.

I think the U.S.A. Trilogy would be a great choice for a hardcore reader who is seriously into the time period. Reading them one after the other would be a leisurely experience to take up for a season, for a lockdown. Me, I’m always in the market for reading a Great American Novel like All the King’s Men, Edwin Mullhouse or Sometimes a Great Notion, but especially a story from the era between the wars like  Look Homeward Angel or Light in August. Dos Passos’ snapshot of the U.S.A. in the Twenties makes this a must-read for readers into that gaudy decade.

European Reading Challenge #5

I read this travel narrative for the European Challenge 2024.

Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark - Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 - 1797)

In 1795, Wollstonecraft was on an unhappy uncertain romantic footing with an American businessman. He did not count his lucky stars in attracting the love of this intelligent, well-read, articulate, virtuous woman of deep imagination and feeling. She still thought enough of him to take a business trip on this behalf to these three Baltic places in order to locate a cargo of her lover’s silver.

Amazingly, she took their infant daughter with her (her first daughter Fanny Imlay, not the second one who wrote Frankenstein). Sometimes local people, though apt to see strangers as marks, were more solicitous and kind because she had a baby in tow. At one point she had to leave baby Fanny in the care of strangers for three weeks. Seeing a girl toddler clinging to her farmer father, the single mother is moved, “I was returning to my babe, who may never experience a father’s care or tenderness.  The bosom that nurtured her heaved with a pang at the thought which only an unhappy mother could feel.”

The author was a journalist so it is natural for her to talk to people to get grist for the mill of her inquisitive mind and eloquent pen. For instance, of intercultural interaction, she observes “neighbors are seldom the best friends” and concludes the dislike the Norwegians and Swedes feel for each other is based more on feelings than reason. She’s also a thinker not averse to roaming the high regions of the mind, such as when she considers which of the ingredients of “national character” might be explained by natural differences such as climate or acquired differences such as forms of government and religion. It’s interesting to follow her thinking, her quests for meaning, in the mini-essays that adorn these letters.  On the effect of poverty she observes:

The Norwegian peasantry, mostly independent, have a rough kind of frankness in their manner; but the Swedish, rendered more abject by misery, have a degree of politeness in their address which, though it may sometimes border on insincerity, is oftener the effect of a broken spirit, rather softened than degraded by wretchedness.

The writer was a romantic, prone to examining nature and her own feelings in order to compose her poetic responses to the Baltic landscapes and long summer days. Like a romantic should, she broods, “It might with propriety, perhaps, be termed the malady of genius; the cause of that characteristic melancholy which ‘grows with its growth, and strengthens with its strength.’” The romantic, the feminist, the idealist, the writer all search for sublimity:

Nothing can be stronger than the contrast which this flat country and strand afford, compared with the mountains and rocky coast I have lately dwelt so much among.  In fancy I return to a favourite spot, where I seemed to have retired from man and wretchedness; but the din of trade drags me back to all the care I left behind, when lost in sublime emotions.  Rocks aspiring towards the heavens, and, as it were, shutting out sorrow, surrounded me, whilst peace appeared to steal along the lake to calm my bosom, modulating the wind that agitated the neighbouring poplars.  Now I hear only an account of the tricks of trade, or listen to the distressful tale of some victim of ambition.

Besides romantic sublimity, she loved to think and write about the improvement of world. She’s clear-minded about weakness, ignorance, prejudice, and inertia all being barriers to the betterment of the individual and the species. Her realism - “Cassandra was not the only prophetess whose warning voice has been disregarded” - doesn’t stop her from moralizing “that even the most spontaneous sensations are more under the direction of principle than weak people are willing to allow.” She was an ardent soul, prickly, but one also gets the feeling the affair with the American cad wounded her deeply. One imagines that when she didn't look deep in intellectual pondering, she had that air of nursing a secret sorrow, an aura certain kinds of men find irresistible.

But her heart being in the right place and her need for comfort are just two elements that make us hardcore readers like and respect this gifted writer.  Ahead of her time in having the intellectual daring to kick over fences between genres, she blends politics, economics, philosophy, ethnography, travel narrative and personal observations. Like Eothen, this kind of wide-ranging travel writing feels modern.

Online: Librivox and Gutenberg Text

The Ides of Perry Mason 58

On the 15^th of every month, we examine a topic related to Our Favorite Lawyer. I’m thinking what subject can I possibly unearth after nearly five years of doing this column. Perhaps a deep dive into the pecky cypress paneling in TV Perry Mason's office?

The Case of the Stepdaughter’s Secret – Erle Stanley Gardner

It is the summer of 1963 in Los Angeles. Unbeknownst to each other, three members of the Bancroft family have consulted lawyer Perry Mason about blackmail. Millionaire and philanthropist Harlow Bissinger Bancroft has found a blackmail note on the bedroom dresser of his stepdaughter Rosena Andrews. She’s vulnerable because of her upcoming marriage to not affluent but socially prominent Jetson Blair. In his younger days, Harlow was wild, spent a little more than a year in the pen, and is sure his past – and his fingerprints - are catching up to him.

Now, the astute reader is wondering why a young stepdaughter was sent the blackmail note, since it’s doubtful that she even knows the jailbird past of her stepfather. Smarter than us, however, Perry Mason goes over with Harlow the four ways of dealing with a blackmailer: pay him off (and keep paying forever), go to the police, put the blackmailer on the defensive, or kill him. While Thirties hard-boiled Mason may have gone with killing, Sixties calm Mason does not recommend murder. Bancroft puts the affair in Mason's hands. Mason and Drake pull off a fun maneuver to put the blackmailers on the defensive. Lucky that Harlow is a millionaire because he’s paying for legions of Drake’s speedboats, helicopters and bikini-clad operatives.

Then, the stepdaughter Rosena visits Mason. Rosena, independent boomer through and through, tells Mason to keep his nose out of her affairs.

Then, her mother Phyllis visits Mason. Phyllis tells Mason that Rosena's intended, Jetson Blair, had a brother, Carleton Rasmus Blair, who was reportedly killed in a plane crash while in the Army. One Irwin Victor Fordyce was recently released from the big house, and his fingerprints show he was Carleton. The blackmailer has touched Phyllis already for a thousand dollars, small price to pay for a maiden’s dream of future happiness. Phyllis also reports that the blackmailers have contacted Rosena, because she overheard the phone conversation.

Poor Rosena – does she have any privacy at all with a stepfather going through her papers and a mother listening in on an extension? And this family never talks to each other. They wouldn’t be so vulnerable to blackmail if they just came clean with each other and the world. All I’m saying, a dab of shamelessness goes a long way. Harlow, Phyllis, and Rosena need to loosen up and not fret so much about what other people think. It’s not their business what other people think. 

Anyway, in an unfortunate chain of circumstances, society matron Phyllis ends up thinking she snuffed a blackmailer with a round to the pump. And the cops entirely agree, based on circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony.

I admit that more than a couple Mason novels published in the 1960s are not up to the high standards of his novels of the Thirties and Forties. At about 250 pages, this is longer than usual for Gardner, with very long chapters and very short chapters. The exposition on character and setting, is, as usual, bare bones. People looking for backstory about Perry, Della and Paul will be disappointed, since Gardner probably thought background would date the books and hurt sales (he was right).

Still, this novel is pretty good. Mason’s blunt conversation with a blackmailer calls to mind his hard-boiled exchanges in the early novels. Gardner organizes the time shift solution effortlessly and persuasively. The reveal is logical, with no deductions that provoke head-scratching. So even late career Gardner could still nail it.

Undisputed Classic 5

Nonfiction Classic. This is a classic memoir, one man's answer to what Robert Penn Warren called "...the anguishing problem of man’s responsibility vis-à-vis the blank forces of history."  

The Personal Memoirs of Ulyssess S. Grant

Grant says as a child he developed the superstition that when lost or blocked he should always figure out a way to go forward, over the terrain, never turning back. As a general on horseback, Grant had a supernatural grasp of terrain and how he should engage the enemy most effectively given the lay of the land and bodies of water. An advocate of forward movement, he thought that military errors came out of not pursuing a retreating enemy with alacrity and his own errors were out of being overly aggressive.

At West Point, he was good at math and horsemanship but poor at tactics. He says he was a great novel reader but not of the trashy sort. He liked Scott, Cooper, and Irving, all popular writers of the day. One wonders if he got a sense of the importance of a distinctive style from all that reading of fiction though his plain style was not at all like the romanticism of that trio.

Grant fought in the Mexican War, which he called an unjust one, and his summary of the issues of that forgotten conflict is interesting. Acting as a quartermaster, Grant learned that writing clear orders was a key skill for an officer.  

His portraits of colleagues and commanders tell of how they acted under pressure; for example, Taylor and Scott had very different styles, with Scott being bombastic and showy and Taylor very unassuming, quiet and modest, and wanting to see action at the front with his own eyes. 

He also learned from Taylor that a calm and unflappable manner was a crucial quality of leadership. It seems super-human to not flinch even with shells falling nearby but both Taylor and Grant were legendary among the men and officers for their grace under pressure. It is also telling that Grant did not go hunting and the only times he publicly lost his temper were when he saw teamsters beating defenseless mules and horses.

After the Mexican War, Grant was assigned to duty in California. This is where the stories about alcohol abuse started, perhaps because Grant binged when he was bored (he doesn’t mention alcohol at all, assuming his readers had no interest). Grant was also anxious about the foremost American bugbear, being a failure. He does not detail this down period in the memoirs, as he assumes his audience did not care about reading about his unhappy period just before the Civil War. When the war broke out, Grant was working as a clerk his father’s store to support his young family.

The war saved him in the sense that he was able to do something he was good at, finally. The author of the textbook on tactics ended up generaling for the Confederacy but Grant studied the text nevertheless, though he did not get past the first chapter. He learned about moral courage – that the enemy has as much or as little of it as anybody else had so he refused to intimidated by the dash and daring of the adversary. A realist, he had understanding of the urge to bolt among green troops but knew with battle experience they would be brave and reliable under fire. Risking the lives of one’s men was a heavy responsibility for him. In the early days of the war he also learned much about supply and logistics, knowledge that he was later to use in the siege of Vicksburg. Grant’s men were just about never short of food, clothing, or ammunition.

After the trial and error process that lead to victory at Vicksburg, he went on to victory at Chattanooga. Lincoln decided that Grant was the fighting man he needed and appointed him to make the hard tactical, operational, and strategic decisions that brought about the end of the war. Sherman said that Grant was able to make the decisions with the scanty information he had, not the complete and accurate information that other generals yearned for as they dithered. Grant showed his legendary calm even in dreadful battles like Wilderness, a dry forest with trees, brush, and soldiers in flames where they fought by ear because the smoke made it impossible to see.

What doesn’t this memoir have? Nothing about the two-term presidency. Nothing about Julia his wife (their letters are lost too). No score settling. No confusion or soft-pedaling about the cause for which the adversary was fighting. No stuff about the “allure of battle;” in the aftermath of day one of Shiloh, this:

During the night rain fell in torrents and our troops were exposed to the storm without shelter. I made my headquarters under a tree a few hundred yards back from the river bank. My ankle was so much swollen from the fall of my horse the Friday night preceding, and the bruise was so painful, that I could get no rest.

The drenching rain would have precluded the possibility of sleep without this additional cause. Some time after midnight, growing restive under the storm and the continuous pain, I moved back to the log-house under the bank. This had been taken as a hospital, and all night wounded men were being brought in, their wounds dressed, a leg or an arm amputated as the case might require, and everything being done to save life or alleviate suffering. The sight was more unendurable than encountering the enemy's fire, and I returned to my tree in the rain.

Grant was dying of cancer of the tongue as he wrote this book (he smoked 20 cigars a day). Despite pain and fatigue, he wrote up to four and five hours a day, in pencil. The manuscript, in fact, shows his handwriting, sure on good days, but shaky on bad days. The prose is spare with no wasted words; it has been praised by writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis, and Edmund Wilson. Those interested in war memoirs or lean non-fiction prose may be into this 1200-page book.

Reading Those Classics #5

Classic Short Stories set in The Village. A collection of 42 stories, it won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1951. The stories were first published in weekly magazines such as The American Mercury, Forum, Harper’s Magazine, The Saturday Evening Post, Scribner’s Magazine, and The Sewanee Review. Faulkner came up with the themed section headings, such The Country, The Village, etc.

The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

This is the second section of the collection, with the setting Jefferson, a village in Mississippi.

A Rose for Emily. His first short story sold to a national weekly is also the one most often collected in anthologies and taught in high school English classes as an exercise in close reading for themes, symbols, and other literary ornaments. A paragon of the Southern Gothic genre, the story evokes the dust, squalor, inertia, and aloneness of a reclusive life a.k.a. a living death and the slow painful passing of generations in the South.  The generation gap is illustrated at the town council meeting where greybeards and young ‘uns are discussing how to deal with the terrible smell around great lady Miss Emily’s property. “Dammit, sir,” Judge Stevens said, “will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?”

Hair. One of the facts of The Tale of Genji that creeps out us post-moderns is that the Shining Prince raised Murasaki to be a model Heian mistress from the time she was a child. Hard to take. Really. In this story too small-town barber Hawkshaw gives a girl-child customer special attentions he gives no other clients. All for reasons not to be spoiled in a review; reasons the reader will have to decide how to take after they learn the back-story of the barber. Faulkner chides smalltown gossips, joke-relators, storytellers, and orators with an indictment of The Oral Tradition of the South: “I guess maybe a talking man hasn't got the time to ever learn much about anything except words.”

Centaur in Brass. Phlegm contains virus, bacteria, and other sloughed-off ick. Flem Snopes is parts cunning, greed, manipulativeness and cowardice, as ambitious as Lucifer to be somebody. He concocts a complicated scheme of harassment, theft, and blackmail. But the two black employees, the objects of Flem’s machinations, manage to get out from under. The climax between the two firemen calls to mind Stepin Fetchit humor so simultaneously funny and cringe-worthy for us post-moderns nowadays but powerful is the vivid characterization of the implacable dignity of TomTom and the reptilian nature of Flem.

Dry September. A harsh story in which prolonged drought and ever-present dust intensify traditional racism and penchant for violence as a solution to everything. Such that a rumor of a sexual assault of a white woman by a black man drives the white men to kidnap, torture, and murder an innocent black man, despite the intervention of the barber Hawkshaw who urges the killers to let the law investigate in the proper way. John McLendon is an odious fascist, like the militarist vigilante Percy Grimm in Light in August. After the murder, McLendon feels nothing but sweaty, goes home, and knocks around his wife, who, unsurprisingly, fears for her life when he’s around. Like A Rose for Emily, this story is about how life in a small town is hard on older single females and it has often been included in anthologies because it also feeds class discussion on intersections of race, class, and gender.

Death Drag. A story that smacks of long journalism, about a team of pilots who travel to small towns to give flying shows and perform aeronautical stunts. That the daredevil is Jewish the local unnamed narrator takes pains to emphasize, and a reader wonders why until the story plays out. The Jewish guy is manipulated and lied to, has suffered injury resulting in partial disability, and made to crash through a barn, all for the idle entertainment of villagers who are not convinced he’s a human being.

Elly. For young single white females, life in a small southern town in the early Thirties offers a future of marriage and children and homemaking and shopping. If this prospect is not enough for content - and it is not for the title character - there is always defiance in the form of the greatest transgression. Sex with a black male, however, carries risk: social opprobrium, self-loathing, and distress culminating in madness, to name only a few. That Faulkner is able to pack so much incident and theme in one short story testifies to his power as an artist and vision as a human being.

Uncle Willy. For the last forty years, the 60-year-old title character has dealt with stifled life in a small town with secluded bachelorhood, a subsistence bodega, unfailing attendance at Sunday school, and an addiction to morphine. For human connections, he has a posse of teenage boys and an ancient black retainer. Keeping himself to himself is an idyll of innocence that cannot be permitted to continue by right-thinking villagers that can’t abide the idea of somebody somewhere living and let live, quietly and harmlessly. Dare to be different, see what happens.

Mule in the Yard. This story starts with slapstick as a widow and her black companion chase Flem Snopes’ mules off the widow’s property on a winter morning spooky with fog. But the fraught backstory between the widow and Flem is smoothly revealed, showing Faulkner’s power of economical narrative. It’s also a satisfying story of ‘the biter bit,’ as the widow gets belated revenge over Flem, who, of course, deserves hurt ten times what he dished out in the first place.

That Will Be Fine. Great Christmas tale narrated by seven-year-old Georgie. He unknowingly tells of a family crisis precipitated by his Uncle Rodney’s defalcations at a company unwise enough to employ him despite his playboy reputation. Faulkner makes no missteps in causing Georgie to note and report but not understand the unfolding of events. Distracted by the prospects of getting presents and quarters, Georgie’s kiddish tone is breathless and fresh and believable and relentless. The story manages to be comic in a tragically ironic way.

That Evening Sun. "… didn't God Himself make a mistake when he settled the Jews in Russia so they could be tormented as if they were in hell," asks a character in an Isaac Babel story. And when he plunked souls down in Mississippi and made them poor, female, and black. This story examines what it’s like to be utterly powerless to stave off coercion and violence, doomed to be a murder victim, with the white people utterly oblivious to a black person’s fate. Besides a story that examines inequalities of race, class, and gender, it also has Compsons from The Sound and The Fury: Quentin (the narrator), Caddie, and Jason appear as kids, all of them acting consistently with their adult characters in the novel. This story was written before TS&TF so the chronology is all cockeyed, but who cares? Faulkner sure didn’t so why should we?

European Reading Challenge #4

I read this travel narrative for the European Reading Challenge 2024

Eothen, or Impressions of Travel brought Home from the East - Alexander William Kinglake (1809 - 1893)

In 1834, the journey started in the Habsburg town of Semlin (Serbian: Zemun), across a river from Belgrade, which was more or less run by the Ottoman Turks. Kinglake is young, in his mid-twenties, an Eton and Cambridge smarty-pants. As he passes Niš, Serbia he expresses the nonchalance of Western Europeans apt to shrug over the atrocities of the Ottomans in Balkan Europe: 

... the only public building of any interest that lies on the road is of modern date, but is said to be a good specimen of Oriental architecture; it is of a pyramidical shape, and is made up of thirty thousand skulls, contributed by the rebellious Servians in the early part (I believe) of this century: I am not at all sure of my date, but I fancy it was in the year 1806 that the first skull was laid.

He's talking about the Skull Tower, still a destination for patriotic Serbians.

Detached, yes. Conceited, surely. Maddening, definitely. But a writer down to his toes: he took nine years to write this book, indicating he wanted to get it right. Kinglake's power to write comes out of his "rapturous and earnest" reading of Homer before he was packed off to school: "You feel so keenly the delights of early knowledge; you form strange mystic friendships with the mere names of mountains, and seas, and continents, and mighty rivers; you learn the ways of the planets, and transcend their narrow limits, and ask for the end of space...." While searching for the site of Troy, he notes the "beautiful congruity betwixt the Iliad and the material world."

True, he makes vile statements about the Orthodox Church. He feels contempt for the stereotypically decadent Ottomans. And his descriptions of Grecian women border on the prurient, which is unexpected in a Victorian author. He writes off whole segments of humanity: “These Arab women were so plain and clumsy, that they seemed to me to be fit for nothing but another and a better world." I can only suggest to hardcore readers of Victorian travel narratives, be prepared to make allowances for the ignorance and prejudices of a younger world.

Being a light-minded person and a reader that wants the writer to make me laugh, however, I thought these harsh minuses were balanced by Kinglake's sense of comedy. In the first chapter he writes a funny dialogue showing the pitfalls of using an interpreter and works in a parody of extravagant flattery. His description of the economic rationale of haggling instructs while it impresses with its mock scholarly, adversarial tone in favor of the local vendors against the vexed Europeans who wonder why they can't be told a fair price from the get-go.

On Cyprus he was invited to dine with a Greek family whose children had traditional names. He reports, "Every instant I was delighted by some such phrases as these, 'Themistocles, my love, don’t fight.’ ‘Alcibiades, can’t you sit still?'—'Socrates, put down the cup.'—'Oh, fie!  Aspasia, don’t.  Oh! don’t be naughty!'” Clearly, Kinglake was burdened with what is popularly known as a sense of humor and readers who are too will understand that comic impressions of the world just come to us, unbidden, and usually, luckily for the prim touchy world, go unsaid.

After Cyprus, in the other half of the narrative, our writer went to Beirut, then to the Holy Land, Cairo, and Damascus. In other words, out of the scope of this reading challenge, but more interesting because more introspective. In Cairo he goes through a time of pestilence. His undergraduate insouciance is finally shaken as his banker, his doctor, his landlord, his donkey boy, and his magician all die of the plague.

Basically, though written in the early Victorian era, Kinglake and his writing feels modern. He calls to mind Robert Byron and Graham Greene because he is a member of the “I Hate It Here” school so popular in the boom of Thirties travel writing. But he’s also modern because avoiding the learned content of history, sociology, and politics, the young writer writes about his own responses, his own impressions and his own search for meaning and freedom.

Jan Morris, no slouch in the travel narrative herself, says that this was her favorite travel book.

On the Internet: Librivox and Online Text

Undisputed Classic 4

Classic Short Stories. Known for his novels, Lawrence also wrote almost 70 short stories.

A Modern Lover & Other Stories – D.H. Lawrence

I’ve been reading DHL since about 1975, my sophomore year at Michigan State. At that time college students felt that they had missed out on the party of the Sixties. So Lawrence‘s encouragement to live life with passion was especially appealing. Burn, baby, steam and smoke. Go for it, do it till you’re satisfied. To students wearing leather, denim, and flannel and listening to Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, Lawrence's message to be natural was totally acceptable.

In my middle age living life hotly became less feasible and attractive. I slowly realized how prone to weariness, how slow to recover from overindulgence our aging stomachs and brains are. I couldn’t help but marvel that somebody with Lawrence‘s health challenges found the strength and stamina to be so fierce and so prolific. I mean, writing novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, translations, and literary criticism and painting and incessant travel and dealing with legal battles and constant money worries. Not to mention the action-packed marriage.

Nowadays as I gulp in wonder at middle age being in the rearview mirror, I catch up with DHL’s awesome suggestion “O build your ship of death.” I’m pretty sure Lawrence was no Stoic but it’s a poem about looking at death and coming to conclusions.

Anyway, this collection presents stories from the early and late stages in his all too short writing career. Lawrence As Sage: he is a model wise man that looks at the beauty of the world, really sees the glow of the world, the is-ness of Creation.

A Modern Lover is an example of the You Can’t Go Home Again story. A young man returns to the old hometown, a mining place, from London where he hasn’t been exactly setting the literary world on fire. The young man is ready to pledge his love to the old GF but finds her new BF too. And though she still loves our hero, a woman in the 1910s has to be careful about choosing a man because being poor and female is hard yakka anywhere. This gives a sense of how modern young people in the early 20^th century had to feel their uncertain way in romance and marriage and bills in the Edwardian era when Victorian certainties and customs were falling by the wayside.

The Old Adam.  A story bursting with nature – colors, flowers, lightning and thunder. And guys brawling because even in seemingly over-civilized people latent are anger and aggression, all provoked by nothing much. A three-year-old is wonderfully described as a force of nature, spontaneous and unpredictable.

Her Turn. Who knew he had it in him? Everybody but me, apparently.  Dave does domestic comedy as a miner’s wife learns her hubby a rough lesson in that constant subject of marital discord – money. The story feels genuine, these were people he grew up with, he knew well enough to love them and yearn to get away from them.

Strike-Pay. Well yeah with money tight at home, whaddaya do with strike pay but collect it at the church (which the miners built themselves but it’s falling down because they’re miners, not construction guys) and go on a spree, drinking beer and watching futbol? And then come home only to be yelled at by a mother-in-law who gets off on fussing and fighting. A great story, closely observed grit and washing on the line.

The Witch a la Mode. Young intellectual drops in on old GF on his way home to see his fiancée. They’re both kind of awkward, him being a natural man and her being properly repressed and constrained. But her place has these two-foot high statues:

Both were nude figures. They glistened under the side lamps, rose clean and distinct from their pedestals. The Venus leaned slightly forward, as if anticipating someone's coming. Her attitude of suspense made the young man stiffen. He could see the clean suavity of her shoulders and waist reflected white on the deep mirror. She shone, catching, as she leaned forward, the glow of the lamp on her lustrous marble loins.

“Fools in love,” sang Joe Jackson a long time ago now, “gently tear each other limb from limb.” One gets the distinct feeling in this ungentle story that the hero is correct when he observes, “You know, Winifred, we should only drive each other into insanity, you and I: become abnormal.”

New Eve and Old Adam is a story of a bitter argument between two married people. How can people have a modern marriage when these half-witted wives just won’t submit to their manly men and their entitled whims? I have no idea if the reader is supposed to take sides in this story or if DHL really was such a dudebro like he comes off here, but the marriages of other people are so mysterious that I always assume no outsider can understand enough to judge who is on the side of angels.

Mr Noon is a novel supposedly written in 1920 and 1921 and then abandoned. I had feeling that it was indeed a draft, material he wanted to get out and then return to for revising. I’m glad I read this fragment because although the characters were as nutty and wayward as we’ve come to expect for his characters, there was a lightness of touch that I found surprising in DHL. He actually addresses the readers directly, kind of shaking his finger at us, telling us not to impose our expectations on what actions his characters should get up to. Such an old-fashioned device – like Trollope, for the love of Mike. Also giving a post-modern feeling that I did not expect, he winks at us readers by using their own words to satirize suburbanites, cliche Edwardianisms like “plain as a pikestaff” and “happy as a dog with two tails.”