Back to the Classics #7

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge.

Classic from Africa, Asia, or Oceania. In 1979, I travelled with other college students to Japan on an exchange program that was to give me a course in life. Anyway, we had a multi-hour layover in Honolulu. We were met the by the relatives of one of our group, a Japanese-American guy. They provided a big picnic. I especially remember not only the pineapple (fresh, I discovered, is way better than canned – hey, I was young) but also the cheerful hosts. I’ve always had a fond memory of Hawaiians.

Six Months in the Sandwich Islands – Isabella Bird

This 1875 travel narrative was among the first of Bird's books, her first big project and success after The Englishwoman in America (1856). Based on letters to her sister Henrietta, her stories about her seven-month stay are written in an enthusiastic tone.

A good botanist, Bird was quite taken by lushness of the tropical forest and all its wonderful flora. She writes about flowers and ferns with a sparkle not often found in her other narratives. A good geologist, her stories of visiting volcanos Mount Loa and Mount Kilauea are exciting, even if a little long, as she herself admits. 

She’s also something of an anthropologist of the participant-observer school. Staying with friends at Puna, near the end of the book, she lollygags with friends, saying “I developed a capacity for doing nothing, which horrified me….” In another passages she says of the locals:

But the more I see of them the more impressed I am with their carelessness and love of pleasure, their lack of ambition and a sense of responsibility, and the time which they spend in doing nothing but talking and singing as they bask in the sun, though spasmodically and under excitement they are capable of tremendous exertions in canoeing, surf-riding, and lassoing cattle.

These letters, often in the present tense, give a nice “here and now” feeling to the book.

I’ve spent much time with Miss Bird on the road. See Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1879) and Among the Tibetans (1894). I would recommend those, however, only to readers with a strong or scholarly interest in the countries covered, old-time travel narratives or Victorian lady travelers. But I’d suggest Six Months in the Sandwich Islands to any serious reader into Hawaii or Oceania.

Back to the Classics #2

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

19^th Century Classic. I think sometimes it’s good to read memoirs and stories by people are not writers. Think Fields of Fire by James Webb, a fictionalized memoir of his tour of duty in Vietnam in the Marine infantry.

The Private Journal of William Reynolds: United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842

I’ve been reading first-person narratives of sea voyages from Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1840) when I was a kid to The Sea and the Jungle by H. M. Tomlinson (1912) as an adult. I would recommend this book as a military service memoir and a study in the extension of power by technologically advanced foreigners over people who are basically minding their own business in places where they were born.

Reynolds was in his early twenties when the US Navy assigned him to the group of ships on the United States Exploring Expedition. Their mission was to circumnavigate the world and survey the South Sea from 1838 to 1842. The basic goal was to understand the Pacific Ocean for sake of safe passage of ships and the nation's maritime commerce. Highly educated for the time (Reynolds was from Pennsylvania), our author used the cartographic process to create nautical charts.

Being very young, he writes enthusiastically which gives his writing presence.

That great Ocean, whose bounds are not known, the Icy barriers of which have never been passed, lay beneath us stretching away in the distance until it met the Sky, for once undisturbed, almost unruffled by the light breeze that kissed its Surface--But there was no sail to be seen on the watery waste, the vast expanse of sea upheld no moving or living thing--though, starting from our feet, there was the bold & terrible promontory, Cape Horn, thrusting its rugged form far into the Ocean, the last, lingering point of the great Western World.

Immediacy, no literary pretensions, as in Pacific War Diary, 1942-1945: The Secret Diary of an American Sailor by James J Fahey.

As is the sailor’s habit, Reynolds complains about his captain and his toadies. He writes about exciting storms and terrible beachings. It’s fun and instructive until our sailors kill about 100 Fijians in retaliation of two US sailors being robbed and killed. Though early in the memoirs Reynolds is of two minds about the influence of western culture on the locals, of the reprisal he writes, “It was bloody work, but all the lives in Fegee would not pay for the two we lost.”

Back to the Classics #1

I read this book for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge

Very Long Classic. You would think that the door-stop novels The Last Chronicle of Barset or He Knew He Was Right were Trollope’s longest but in fact the novel discussed here, at 1300 manuscript pages and about 420,000 words, was his longest. Critics have said it would have better had about 100 pages ended up on the cutting room floor, but I found it a page-turner because winter is the season to settle into a long novel and Trollope tries hard to be easily understood, despite occasional balled-up sentences (he wrote too fast and didn’t revise for later editions).

The Way We Live Now – Anthony Trollope

It is 1873. Augustus Melmotte moves to London from the badlands of Middle Europe with the odor of financial impropriety wafting about him. He buys a large house on Grosvenor Square and ensconces his wife and grown daughter there. Building the reputation as great financial wizard and big spender, he throws daughter Marie a grand ball.

Probably based on the real-life bunco artist James Fisk (shot dead in 1872 by a business partner), a San Franciscan wheeler-dealer named Hamilton K. Fisker and his naïve English partner Paul Montague bring Melmotte into the puffing of a Ponzi Scheme called the South Central Pacific and Mexican Railway. Rich jackasses and titled muttonheads are induced to speculate and sit on the board, whose meetings last about 15 minutes every Friday. Trollope satirizes what he called in his autobiography "a certain class of dishonesty, dishonesty magnificent in its proportions, and climbing into high places… so rampant and so splendid that there seems to be reason for fearing that men and women will be taught to feel that dishonesty, if it can become splendid, will cease to be abominable."

Melmotte makes lavish gifts to charity and becomes so glamorous that HM government requests that he host – and pay for - a dinner for the Celestial Emperor of China. So drawn by his money, the Conservative Party recruits him to run for a seat in in Parliament. Rumor runs rampant however that Melmotte’s financial future is stormy, thus spooking would-be guests. Still, Melmotte manages to win the seat. But his future is not rosy.

This is a Trollope novel so there must be romantic trouble. Marie is pursued by two worthless guys for her money. Paul Montague’s previous affair with an American woman, Winifred Hurtle, complicates his subsequent romance with Henrietta Carbury. Georgiana Longestaffe, in her late twenties, is feeling behind in the matrimonial race and contemplates marriages with a Jewish banker, to the unreasoning anguish of her snobbish family who are quite okay with falsehood and chiseling but not okay with Jewish people. For a little comic relief, the romance of John Crumb and Ruby Ruggles (country names for country people) has rough going. There’s even a middle-aged romance between a newspaper editor and Henrietta’s mother, a writer who needs him to insure good reviews for her terrible books. A problem is that the triangle of Paul-Hetta-Roger fails to hold interest because Hetta isn’t interesting, Roger is a bit of a prig, and we Trollope veterans already know who is going to marry whom in the end.

Apparently, this is not a popular novel with readers that gush over the likes of Bertie Stanhope perhaps because the realistic observation of business and personal corruption is raw, especially for generally genial Tony, and the satire may seem strained in places. It’s hard for any writer to sustain humor and satire over the length of a novel, much less one about 700 pages long. Even more to the point, satire in 1873 seems mild to us in 2019. We have read Brave New World and Catch-22. Also, nowadays when we read Melmotte is a "horrid, big, rich scoundrel… a bloated swindler… a vile city ruffian,” how can we not  be reminded of somebody and conclude that given our nutty reality, satirists are hard put to ruffle us.

Readers may also be dismayed that with only few exceptions characters don't deal with each other with the least scintilla of honesty. Girls like the Longestaffe sisters scheme incessantly to land unwary rich guys as husbands. Parents like Lady Carbury and the elder Longestaffe disfavor their daughters as burdens while they cosset their sons who are genuine financial burdens. People even lie to themselves, persuading themselves to accept the most absurd things.  For example Father Barham convinces himself, despite evidence a child would judge rightly, that Melmotte is God's instrument and vows to help deliver the Roman Catholic vote to the crooked financier.

We have seen the weak male often portrayed in Trollope: Charlie Tudor, Harry Clavering, and Johnny Ames. But the dude-bros of the Beargarden Club are weak in ways different from the awkward hobbledehoy. Though idle and indolent, they are addicted to the excitement of gambling at cards, gorging and guzzling, and, Trollope implies, the vice of seduction and whoring. Their goal is to marry an heiress and get their paws on her money. Sir Felix Carbury is one of the most malignant, heartless characters I've read in a Trollope novel. I do believe Tony, along with us readers, smiles when Felix winces under the authorial taser.

Another point that may rattle readers that think they are used to Trollope is the author’s examination of domestic violence. Country girl Ruby Ruggles is doubly victimized. She is dragged about the house by her hair by her drunken grandfather. She is sexually assaulted in a London alley by the entitled shit Felix. We rather expect, our prejudices kicking in, victims vulnerable to assault to be young, female, rural, and poor, but Trollope does not turn a blind eye from the sensitive point that middle and upper class men coerce consent and obedience from women with violence. Lady Carbury was “at last driven out of her house by the violence of [her husband's] ill-usage.” The American Mrs. Hurtle has had to defend herself from a drunken husband and has shot a would-be rapist dead. And when Marie refuses to sign papers for her father:

That cutting her up into pieces was commenced after a most savage fashion. Marie crouching down hardly uttered a sound. But Madam Melmotte frightened beyond endurance screamed at the top of her voice, ‘Ah, Melmotte tu la tueras!’ And then she tried to drag him from his prey … Croll, frightened by the screams, burst into the room. It was perhaps not the first time that he had interfered to save Melmotte from the effects of his own wrath … Melmotte was out of  breath … Marie gradually recovered herself, and crouched,  cowering, in the corner of a sofa, by no means vanquished in spirit, but with a feeling that the very life had been crushed out of her body. …  [She] lay on the sofa, all in a heap, with her hair disheveled and her dress disordered, breathing hard, but uttering no sobs and shedding no tears.

Indeed, we are long way from Lily Dale eating her heart our over Crosbie in the sewing room.

Clearly, this story has strong passages and thus not to everybody’s taste. Some will cringe at the seeming anti-Americanism and anti-semitism. But I think Trollope’s view of Americans and Jewish people is nuanced. It seems to me that he is sympathetic to Winifred Hurtle and Ezekiel Brehgert, perhaps because they were outsiders like Trollope himself. If nothing else Mrs. Hurtle compels our attention because she’s the tough American woman who’s seen too much of life and says things like,

Yes; come. You shall come. And now you know the welcome you shall find. I will buy the whip while this is reaching you, and you shall find that I know how to choose such a weapon. I call upon you so come. But should you be afraid and break your promise, I will come to you. I will make London too hot to hold you; — and if I do not find you I will go with my story to every friend you have.

Whoa, daddy. Though a sad single girl threatened to stab another sad single girl in  scene played for laughs in He Knew He Was Right, I can't think of any other incident in Trollope where a woman threatened to horsewhip some dude.

I was badly burned by the latest one of his I read, The Belton Estate, so I was nervous this novel letting me down. I was concerned about the usual Trollope issues like his facetiousness, his less lucid grammar, and his tendency to mishandle surprises (I think unlike Austen he didn’t like pulling surprises on readers). I also fretted that it would have a slow, oh so deliberate, start like Dr. Thorne. Mercifully, the set-up was brisk and incidents started right away. This was first published as a serial so at the ¾ mark, the recapitulation of Marie’s story and Roger’s struggles of conscience makes the pace temporarily sluggish.

This book was so compelling that long as it is I read it in only about two weeks. I highly recommend it to Trollope fans and to readers who balefully wonder if the Chronicles of Barsetshire were the height of Trollope’s powers. I’d say this was as enjoyable as The Last Chronicle of Barset or He Knew He Was Right.

Back to the Classics Sign Up

I will read these books for the 2019 Back to the Classics Reading Challenge.

·       Classic Novella: The Nightclub – Georges Simenon (1933)
Posted: April 2

·       Classic in Translation: The Widow – Georges Simenon (1959)

·       19th Century Classic: The Private Journal of William Reynolds: United States Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 
Posted: February 2

·       Classic Play: The Devil's Disciple - Bernard Shaw (1897)

·       Very Long Classic: The Way We Live Now – Anthony Trollope (1875)
Posted:  January 17

·       Classic Comic Novel: Independent Witness - Henry Cecil (1963)
Posted: March 14

·       Classic From Africa, Asia, or Oceania: Six Months in the Sandwich Islands – Isabella Bird (1871)
Posted: April 14

·       Classic From a Place You've Lived: This Scheming World – Saikaku Ihara (1692)

·       Classic From the Americas: The Lawless Roads - Graham Greene
Posted: April 26

·       Classic Tragic Novel: The Old Man Dies – Georges Simenon (1966)
Posted: March 26

·       20th Century Classic: Delilah - Marcus Goodrich (1941)
Posted: May 1

·       Classic by a Woman Author: Poirot Investigates – Agatha Christie (1925)
Posted: March 22

A Classic with a Single-word Title: Emma

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

JERRY: Just talking? Well, what's the show about?

GEORGE: It's about nothing.

JERRY: No story?

GEORGE: No - forget the story.

JERRY: You've got to have a story.

GEORGE: Who says you gotta have a story?

Emma – Jane Austen

We pick up Emma and after giving it a good shot we start to fret, like the dismayed Goodreads reviewer who said, “Having loved Pride and Prejudice, I can only say that I'm most disappointed by this book. I couldn't even finish it. I read about 100 pages and not once did I find something about it that's intriguing and what's more the story is not only bland but also empty...”

Here’s the story, thin as it is: A clever, handsome, rich woman dotes on her comically hypochondriac father and makes cruel funny blunders of omission and commission in the areas of love and romance for herself and others. The characters, both rational and irrational, are motivated by avarice or generosity, pure love or comfortable settlement, selfishness or devotion, aristocratic vanity or bourgeois vulgarity. Nothing extraordinary happens, though nine-day wonders do. The vicissitudes, it must be admitted, are neither numerous nor varied though a sore throat (by no means trivial in the early 19^th century) takes a character conveniently off stage, and reliable old Death moves the plot along too. Austen contents herself, in general, with everything – especially marital ties - wrapped up tidily in the end.

Or does she?

Austen as writer and artist does not really care about the story in Emma. Austen knows life is this, life is that, life is a pat on the back, life is a kick in the pants, setbacks open up doors, good fortune imposes burdens. Austen knows cause and effect can be traced back to the Garden of Eden. Decrease and increase, ripening and rotting are the constant accompaniments of life and death. Decline, fall and surge, growth alternate in continuous succession, and we are not aware – much less mindful - of any interval. Emma engrossed by her friend Harriet and a dinner party just lives, alert and attentive in the in-betweens:

She was so busy in admiring those soft blue eyes, in talking and listening, and forming all these schemes in the in-betweens, that the evening flew away at a very unusual rate; and the supper-table, which always closed such parties, and for which she had been used to sit and watch the due time, was all set out and ready, and moved forwards to the fire, before she was aware. With an alacrity beyond the common impulse of a spirit which yet was never indifferent to the credit of doing every thing well and attentively, with the real good-will of a mind delighted with its own ideas, did she then do all the honours of the meal, and help and recommend the minced chicken and scalloped oysters, with an urgency which she knew would be acceptable to the early hours and civil scruples of their guests.

Waiting for Harriet in a store, Emma gets into the moment:

Harriet, tempted by every thing and swayed by half a word, was always very long at a purchase; and while she was still hanging over muslins and changing her mind, Emma went to the door for amusement.—Much could not be hoped from the traffic of even the busiest part of Highbury;—Mr. Perry walking hastily by, Mr. William Cox letting himself in at the office-door, Mr. Cole's carriage-horses returning from exercise, or a stray letter-boy on an obstinate mule, were the liveliest objects she could presume to expect; and when her eyes fell only on the butcher with his tray, a tidy old woman travelling homewards from shop with her full basket, two curs quarrelling over a dirty bone, and a string of dawdling children round the baker's little bow-window eyeing the gingerbread, she knew she had no reason to complain, and was amused enough; quite enough still to stand at the door. A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.

This is life flowing by. Austen knew this is what life does. It flows. Heaven grant me a mind lively and at ease, able to see the flow, of life doing what it does, the ordinary, the not-much, the neglected, for the gifts - or the white elephants - they are. 

Okay, back on the planet earth, I think that she wants to focus on the characterization of Emma and see if she can pull off something difficult. Her intention is to describe how Emma grows from a complacent busy-body to a more humble discerning fiancé. It was daring of Austen to focus on her clueless title character instead of disadvantaged Jane Fairfax with the outré hairstyle, the Fannie Price figure. Austen must have known the difficulty of changing a reader’s first impression of a character. However, in my case anyway, I was pulling for Emma by the end. Know thyself, Emma, inspire us all.

This is also worth reading for two comic figures. Emma’s father Mr. Woodhouse uses his valetudinarianism to manipulate and subtly tyrannize the people around him. He keeps up a stream of  feeble petulant whining about the risks to health posed by everything in nature. He is also so dismissive and fearful of the institution of marriage – probably because of the unhygienic conjugal duties involved – that we wonder how Emma got conceived. He’s as monstrously funny as the conceited vulgarian Mrs. Elton.

The other comic masterpiece is Miss Bates, the gabby aunt of Jane Fairfax. Her monologues are amazing.

Very true, very true, indeed. The very thing that we have always been rather afraid of; for we should not have liked to have her at such a distance from us, for months together—not able to come if any thing was to happen. But you see, every thing turns out for the best. They want her (Mr. and Mrs. Dixon) excessively to come over with Colonel and Mrs. Campbell; quite depend upon it; nothing can be more kind or pressing than their joint invitation, Jane says, as you will hear presently; Mr. Dixon does not seem in the least backward in any attention. He is a most charming young man. Ever since the service he rendered Jane at Weymouth, when they were out in that party on the water, and she, by the sudden whirling round of something or other among the sails, would have been dashed into the sea at once, and actually was all but gone, if he had not, with the greatest presence of mind, caught hold of her habit— (I can never think of it without trembling!)—But ever since we had the history of that day, I have been so fond of Mr. Dixon!

I think Austen is un-ironic about Miss Bates being, like Joe Ben in Sometimes a Great Notion, something of a holy fool:

And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good-will. It was her own universal good-will and contented temper which worked such wonders. She loved every body, was interested in every body's happiness, quicksighted to every body's merits; thought herself a most fortunate creature, and surrounded with blessings in such an excellent mother, and so many good neighbours and friends, and a home that wanted for nothing. The simplicity and cheerfulness of her nature, her contented and grateful spirit, were a recommendation to every body, and a mine of felicity to herself. She was a great talker upon little matters, which exactly suited Mr. Woodhouse, full of trivial communications and harmless gossip.

Keep it simple: respect others, do no harm, be grateful, be fair. Not easy for a guy like me, though the rules seem simple enough.

For those of us stiff-necked readers who need a moral to the story, Austen is saying that Emma develops the emotional intelligence to view others more generously and accept people as they are. With the help of the admirable Mr. Knightley, she learns to assess her own rationality and discernment in order to exercise keener judgment. Austen hints that maybe the reader too can apply lessons learned by reading literary fiction to everyday life, where we - I mean, me, actually - get too distracted to follow the golden rule for more than three minutes at a time.

Or does she?

Classic By a New-To-You Author: Jonathan Wild

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Jonathan Wild – Henry Fielding

Published in 1743, this short novel came between the massive texts of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones. Loosely based on a historical mob kingpin, it tells the story of the title character whose family name is apt. He is wild in the sense of being unrestrained in the pursuit of his ends. He cheats, robs, commits fraud, sexually assaults, kills, and denounces henchmen so that they are executed. He is uncontrolled in that he in incapable of conceiving ways to his ends except by criminal means. He then jeers at people who have been weak enough to trust him and thus be taken to the cleaners. Critics says that Thackeray was inspired by this novel to write Barry Lyndon. But Barry is a schoolboy, a lovable rogue compared to the rapacious, disturbing Jonathan Wild.

Fielding’s message is that the same insatiable qualities that make a great thief are the same that go into making a great leader. His maxims call to mind Machiavelli. Examples are below and may be useful to those of us who work in large organizations.

2. To know no distinction of men from affection; but to sacrifice all with equal readiness to his interest.

4. Not to trust him who hath deceived you, nor who knows he hath been deceived by you.

7. To maintain a constant gravity in his countenance and behaviour, and to affect wisdom on all occasions.

12. That virtues, like precious stones, were easily counterfeited; that the counterfeits in both cases adorned the wearer equally, and that very few had knowledge or discernment sufficient to distinguish the counterfeit jewel from the real.

15. That the heart was the proper seat of hatred, and the countenance of affection and friendship.

I daresay readers will get the idea that the moral atmosphere of the novel is not what an unselfish person would describe as edifying or uplifting. But it’s not utterly lacking in positive examples. This, from a good soul abused by the title character:

Why, what can [reason’s] office be other than justly to weigh the worth of all things, and to direct us to that perfection of human wisdom which proportions our esteem of every object by its real merit, and prevents us from over or undervaluing whatever we hope for, we enjoy, or we lose. It doth not foolishly say to us, Be not glad, or, Be not sorry, which would be as vain and idle as to bid the purling river cease to run, or the raging wind to blow. It prevents us only from exulting, like children, when we receive a toy, or from lamenting when we are deprived of it. Suppose then I have lost the enjoyments of this world, and my expectation of future pleasure and profit is for ever disappointed, what relief can my reason afford? What, unless it can shew me I had fixed my affections on a toy; that what I desired was not, by a wise man, eagerly to be affected, nor its loss violently deplored?

A neat defense of reason, self-command and moderation, but Fielding’s ironic repetition of “great” to describe sleazy voracious narcissism beats the reader down, rather.

In fact, like another 18^th century writer Tobias Smollett, Fielding looks hard at our commonplace notions, such as “He may be a jerk crook and jackass, but he at least get things done.” And he poses the questions, why do so many people, otherwise smart and decent, get a kick out of rogues; is all our talk about honesty and fair-dealing merely talk;  what does a society look and feel like when a large percentage of its members could care less to distinguish right and wrong and laugh at people who fret about truth.

I like this, the first novel by Fielding I’ve ever read. I’d recommend it to readers that like unblinking surveys of this vale of tears. Whether I could handle Fieldings' dense prose for the thousand pages of Tom Jones is an open question.

Re-read a Favorite Classic: Sometimes a Great Notion

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

You study literature because you’re a scholar of what’s fair. It’s just a way of learning how to be what we want to be. We go to concerts to hear a piece by Bach not because we want to be intellectuals or scholars or students of Bach, but because the music is going to help us keep our moral compass needle clean. (Ken Kesey, Paris Review interview, 1992)

Sometimes a Great Notion – Ken Kesey

This is the second novel by the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, originally published in 1964. I read it for the first time in the mid-1970s at State, then again in the mid-1990s overseas. Like other great American novels such as Look Homeward Angel and All the King’s Men, it’s the kind of epic that pays re-reading.

Set on the Oregon coast, this family saga narrates the trials and tribulations of the Stamper clan. They own a small logging business. The Stampers live in a restrictive, hierarchical structure of an old-fashioned pioneer family, in which there are few emotional outlets and little intellectual stimulation. Though brother Hank is the head of the family, father Henry presents a rip-roaring presence, bringing to mind the half-mad father Gant in Look Homeward, Angel.

Logging is hard yakka, hazardous and exhausting. The family business has to hire family members to minimize trouble with the union whose members are on strike. Using gas-powered chainsaws, the Stampers can use technology to provide as many logs to lumber company Wakonda Pacific as a large number of union-organized workers. When it comes out that the family has signed contracts to provide logs to WP, their name becomes “leech” in town.

To add to the social and economic tension, an estranged brother, Lee Stamper, returns his to boyhood home to the densely populated house of his half-brother Hank and his sister-in-law, Viv. Lee is bent on revenge for his lost childhood which has made him slightly schizophrenic and highly anxious (both in a clinical sense).

Kesey skillfully mixes the pasts of the various Stampers and the streams of consciousness of different members of the town such as the native prostitute, union organizers, the family dog, and the bartender of local watering hole, to name only a few.  The narrative is like that of Moby Dick: comprehensive, full of details, a little awkward, and mercifully repetitive, which helps the reader keep her eye on the ball. There are frequent interesting changes of perspective within a paragraph and sometimes within a sentence. It can’t - and ought not to be - read quickly, as it is quite easy to slip into, “Huh? Who said that!” There are plenty of allusions to Beowulf, The Bard, Wolfe, Faulkner and doubtless others than I’m too ill-read to identify.

I didn’t grow up in a blue-collar family, but I did grow up in a blue-collar neighborhood in the Sixties. So the strutting, bantering code of masculinity I found very familiar and – heaven forgive me – nostalgic. It’s a rush to cut trees, clear land, make something and be able to say you made something without help from the outside. It’s a gas to hunt with your buds, drink beer, listen to music together. There is a code of behavior that must be followed or you will be picked on for deviant behavior. Sure, a lot of this machismo is toxic horseshit and just another way to manipulate and control people. And Kesey is not averse to exploring the dark sides of macho, from procrastinating medical attention to being unable to ever talk about shit that really matters. The heroine of this novel, for instance, finds that she has do something about letting herself down after she becomes not much more than a shuttlecock between the two half-brothers.

Kesey also wants to capture the basic unknowableness of reality – there is so much going on at the same time, right now, that we human beings have to filter it out or go bonkers. But the filtering has a cost – we focus on the essential as taught by our culture (money, agency, reputation, making a difference, being all we can be) and shrug away what doesn’t find its way through our narrow templates, never content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to those essential things. When we focus on what is beyond our control and don’t accept what we know is going to happen, we are not free. We miss a lot of magic, the miracle of creation, by being haunted by the past or anxious about the future without getting a bead on right the hell now. Like Hank and Lee’s cousin Joe Ben says, “See what there is you can get a gas out of. It’s all a matter of how you hold your head.”

In fact, Joe Ben, the wise fool, knows about the transformative power of acceptance, gratitude for being alive, and negative visualization.

I always say to him it is our lot to accept our lot and the best way to accept that lot is back off and see what a ball it is. I tell him, back off and see what a boot in the rear it is! Because it is, it is, if you just back off and look at it with your mouth held right. … Be gassed and happy and running around and loving every bit of it and even the bad stuff like this if you just hold your mouth right, Hankus. Now I don’t expect you to know the Redeemer liveth like I do, but you do know what’s coming up right here on earth, because I can always see in your eyes how you see already. So how come, when you see already what’s coming up ahead and know already what you’re gonna have to do about it, why don’t you save yourself all this fretting and cut across to what you see coming and do what you already know what has to be done …?

At about seven hundred pages that the eye had better not skim, this novel is not for the uncommitted. But it is a great American novel and deserves to be read. And re-read. I’m not letting another 20 years go by without reading this again.

Classic by a Woman Author: Collected Ghost Stories

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J. H. Riddell - Charlotte Eliza L. Riddell

In Victorian times, both Mrs. Riddell’s father and husband suffered business failures so she had to go to work with her pen. A prolific fiction writer, she wrote novels with intriguing titles such as The Nun’s Curse and supernatural novels like Fairy Water and The Uninhabited  House.  This Dover collection from 1977 brought together 14 supernatural stories originally published in Christmas annuals.

"Nut Bush Farm" (1882) -- A skeptical man rents a farm whose nearby peasants are spooked by something which takes a weird form. The skeptical guy finds his disbelief in haints sorely tested.

"The Open Door" (18892) – The old story of guy, fired because he didn’t know his place, who needs. money. He accepts a job in which he is to stay in a creepy old mansion all night long in order to figure out why a door won’t stay shut. The things we do for money are often examined by Mrs. Riddell, who knew the pinch of being busted.

"The Last Squire of Ennismore" (1888) –The take-away from this story is that If a foreigner appears out of nowhere from the sea, don’t invite him in your country house for a drink, if you don’t want to be the last of your line, that is.

"A Strange Christmas Game" (1868) -- A penniless brother and sister think their luck has changed when they inherit an estate from a distant relative. They couldn’t be more wrong.

"The Old House in Vauxhall Walk" (1882) –The old story of a young man who needs bread in the worst way. Homeless and wandering the streets, he meets a former servant who offers to put him up in an old empty house. Spirited hijinks ensue.

"Sandy the Tinker" – (1882) There’s something very creepy about supernatural stories that involve bad dreams.

"Forewarned, Forearmed" (1874) – Another weird dream story. I think I will stay up all night tonight.

"Hertford O'Donnell's Warning" (1867) – Smart people may be very smart but they are also subject to weird fancies. Whenever a poor doctor starts to propose to his lady love, who only happens to be a rich heiress, he and he only begins to hear the howl of the banshee. Mrs. Riddell was Irish, so there you go.

"Walnut Tree House" (1882) –Stories of ghost children are weird.

"Old Mrs. Jones" (1882) –An unforgettable mix of funny, uncanny and scary.

"Why Dr. Cray Left Southam" (1889) – An utterly plausible story about the aftermath of when a doctor who doesn’t suffer hypochondriacs accuses a uxorious husband of doing away with his wife.

"Conn Kilrea" (1899) – A family is cursed by a spirit whose appearance is a harbinger of a death in the family. Doesn’t every family have such a early warning system?

"Diarmid Chittock's Story" (1899) – Very strong Irish interest in this story. Sick of the hurly-burly of London life, a sensitive guy man lets a remote house on Ireland's Atlantic coast. He is fascinated by a young governess who turned down the proposal of one of his friends. Our hero wants to get them together. Beware meddling in other people’s business.

"A Terrible Vengeance" (1889) -- A little town flirt breaks up with her boyfriend during a boating excursion, but then goes missing. Wet footprints begin the follow Somebody. A genuinely creepy story.

Mrs. Riddell (said “riddle” by the bye) is a dab hand for evocative descriptions of landscapes and flora. She also has a sharp though sympathetic wit that we like in Irish writers. Because of her own unhappy experiences of keeping the wolf from the door, she knows people are mainly concerned with the age-old questions “What’s this going to cost me” and “What’s in it for me.”

Children's Classic: The Magic of Oz

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

The Magic of Oz – L. Frank Baum

A young Munchkin boy, Kiki Aru, suffers itchy feet. He longs to walk the wider world but is forbidden to by his sorcerer father. Unhappy, Kiki Aru becomes resentful, sullen and withdrawn. Refusing to attend a festival with his parents, he snoops in his father stuff and finds a magic spell. To transform himself and others into anything he chooses, Kiki utters the magic word pyrzqxgl [pɪr ‘kwɪks gəl].

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. Don’t even try. You can exhaust every pronunciation and still not get it right.

With great power comes great responsibility, which cruel Kiki Aru shirks, unable to control his rotten impulses. When Kiki Aru says, “I hate good people. I’ve always wanted to be wicked but I didn’t know how,” he is overheard by the exiled Nome King, Ruggedo, the arch-villain in numerous Oz books.

Ruggedo and Kiki Aru scheme up an invasion of Oz, changing people to animals and vice versa to get their way.  Later though, Kiki turns on his partner in crime because Kiki is afraid of looking weak: “You acted as if I was your slave, and I wanted to show these forest people that I am more powerful than you." The things bullies, cowards, and sneaks do to look tough, though they are broken and vulnerable inside, are often featured in Baum’s Oz.

Baum is writing mainly for young girls, what with all the birthday parties with cake, confectionery, darling animals, flowers, presents, pretty clothes, and most importantly, nobody left out and everybody getting along. Once a boy reader in the ever more distant past, I can assert with confidence that these things have but scant appeal to boy readers. Though missing what Baum called “bloodcurdling incidents,” such brutes, however, may be willing to tolerate copious cuteness if a quest is involved, as there is in nearly all the Oz books.

The second appeal of Oz books is Baum’s wisdom. I think there are plenty worse messages a kid can draw from a book than feeling gratitude for what you have:

 

"There's lots o' things folks don't 'preciate," replied the sailor-man. "If somethin' would 'most stop your breath, you'd think breathin' easy was the finest thing in life. When a person's well, he don't realize how jolly it is, but when he gets sick he 'members the time he was well, an' wishes that time would come back. Most folks forget to thank God for givin' 'em two good legs, till they lose one o' 'em, like I did; and then it's too late, 'cept to praise God for leavin' one."

And here Dorothy dons her Zen Monk Robe:

"Why, I'm not afraid to go anywhere, if the Cowardly Lion is with me," she said. "I know him pretty well, and so I can trust him. He's always afraid, when we get into trouble, and that's why he's cowardly; but he's a terrible fighter, and that's why he isn't a coward. He doesn't like to fight, you know, but when he HAS to, there isn't any beast living that can conquer him."

In other words, feeling fright is natural in frightening circumstances but we can control that fear with thoughts and actions. We don’t have to behave or respond in a fearful way; we can choose to act bravely even when we are peeing our pants. Call this moral and educational or preachy. It’s also useful.

The third appeal is that Baum is genuinely funny. One wonders if he was genially satirizing Edison, another prolific inventor, and rowdy college students of his day.

But it so happened that Professor Wogglebug (who had invented so much that he had acquired the habit) carelessly invented a Square-Meal Tablet, which was no bigger than your little finger-nail but contained, in condensed form, the equal of a bowl of soup, a portion of fried fish, a roast, a salad and a dessert, all of which gave the same nourishment as a square meal.

The Professor was so proud of these Square-Meal Tablets that he began to feed them to the students at his college, instead of other food, but the boys and girls objected because they wanted food that they could enjoy the taste of. It was no fun at all to swallow a tablet, with a glass of water, and call it a dinner; so they refused to eat the Square-Meal Tablets. Professor Wogglebug insisted, and the result was that the Senior Class seized the learned Professor one day and threw him into the river—clothes and all. Everyone knows that a wogglebug cannot swim, and so the inventor of the wonderful Square-Meal Tablets lay helpless on the bottom of the river for three days before a fisherman caught one of his legs on a fishhook and dragged him out upon the bank.

Like Conan Doyle was trapped by Sherlock Holmes, Baum wanted to leave Oz be after five books. But public demand was such that he felt compelled to serve his fans. The Magic of Oz was the next to last Oz book, published in 1919, but it has no evidence that Baum was going through the motions as Conan Doyle, only a human being, was showing in the later Holmes short stories. I recommend this to general readers; I don’t know enough about fantasy to know if this would measure up to the exacting standards of fantasy readers. For a good evaluation see Martin Gardner and Russell B. Nye’s critical appreciation, a pioneering example of scholars looking a popular literature.

Classic Travel: The Station

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

The Station. Athos: Treasures and Men - Robert Byron

Robert Byron was born in England in 1905 into a family distantly related to Lord Byron. He attended Eton and Merton College, Oxford (left without a degree), and wrote several travel books, the most famous of which, The Road to Oxiana, shows up on many lists of best travel narratives. Byron had strong opinions and didn’t shrink from expressing them: “Isn't Robert simply killing,” wrote Nancy Mitford in a letter; “I love it when he talks about poetry & books, he seems to hate everything which ordinary people like!” 

Travel books were extremely popular between the wars. Every major British author of time released one: Peter Fleming, Aldous Huxley, Rebecca West, Evelyn Waugh, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene,  Auden, and Christopher Isherwood, to name only the best-known (see Paul Fussell’s overview of this great genre Abroad). The Station is basically a travel book, written when Byron was only 22 and released in 1928.

Age is key here because this is very much a young guy’s book. He’s passionately lyrical about the scenery so some passages; especially memorable is the ascent to the summit of Mount Athos, crowned by the Church of the Transfiguration.

We might, had we wished, have put out a hand to pluck the sky, have palmed away a cup of blue. For that broad illimitable space was now reality, possessing an interesting and unsuspecting texture. . .

His fervor to convince us non-experts to appreciate Byzantine buildings, decoration and other art is infectious and persuasive though sometimes the non-expert suspects specialists would quarrel with Byron’s assertions.

His language is often mannered, an unchecked fault of a youth bubbling over with knowledge and excitement about his topic. For instance, because his language is so pretentious and affected, he does not clearly explain the simple distinction of Idiorrhythmic and cenobitic monasticism.

He spares no cutting observation on range of topics. His faux outrage is pretty funny.

The food at lunch, though plentiful, was of a nastiness without precedent. Seeing me unable to swallow, Mark asked me why I did not eat the cheese. "Because I don't like it." "But it's delicious - just the same as we have in Scotland, called Crowdy." Thus the barbarians always reason. The veneer which they have acquired in the centres of the world falls off. Without a tremor they conjure up some filthy habit of their native fastnesses. And, not content with the very shame of the revelation, must needs elevate it to a standard for the universe. "Crowdy!" It has always been apparent to thinking people that some frightful custom, some orgiastic rite that would discredit the aborigines of Papua, has attended the childhood of those grim tribes among whom Albert and Victoria, in the guise of "Lord and Lady Churchill," were the Rosita Forbeses of their day. And now it is plain. "Crowdy!" These rancid, fretid curdles that I needs must eat "because we do in Scotland." Scotland? Where is Scotland?

Rosita Forbes was an explorer and travel writer, by the way.

He’s painfully honest and skeptical with people he meets, questioning them closely when they don’t make any sense:

Gripped by a vinous pentecost, I launched into speech: "We bathe every day, Father Stephen. Are there sharks here ?" "Sharks? They abound." "Have you seen them?" "I? No, I haven't seen them. But there are quantities." "But if you haven't seen them, how do you know?" "How do I know? They ate a deacon two hundred and fifty years ago. A lamb was set as a bait; they caught the shark, and there he was inside." Having long arranged, in case of natural and accessible death, to be buried in a mackintosh and manure the garden, I was appalled by this prospect of leaving my vile body, not even digested, in the stomach of a fish. And resolved, in the contemplative silence that followed, never to bathe again.

Waugh’s Vile Bodies came out in 1930 – I wonder if the expression was current then.

And anybody who’s lived overseas will connect with stories of odd requests from the locals. It really is best to be blunt.

A day or two later he began again: "A few years ago a man died here who had a number of English medals." (Greeks frequently obtained them in the war.) "Medals?" I replied, not wholly understanding the word. "Yes, medals," he repeated, drawing imaginary ribbons on his chest. "When you return to England, will you send me some?" "Send you medals? But how, and for what reason?" "Why not? Can't you go to the Foreign Office in London, and have them sent to me?" "But why? You have done nothing." "No, but I will. I will do great things. I love England." "You must do them first. Besides, the Foreign Office does not distribute medals." "The Foreign Office does not distribute medals? Who does?" "The King." "Have you visited the King?" "No. " "I visited our Kings three times." Pause. "But when you get back, you will send me those medals?" "No." Silence. Each gazes at the sea, breathing hard. "What can I do to be famous? I do want to be famous."

Later in the 1930s, as an in-your-face kind of guy with decided enthusiasms, dislikes and prejudices, at dinner parties he’d ask Nazi sympathizers if they were in German pay.

Unlike Evelyn Waugh whooping for Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, Byron the staunch individualist hated fascism and appeasement. In a letter he wrote “I am going to have Warmonger put on my passport. These people are so grotesque, if we go to war it will be like fighting an enormous zoo.”

During World War II, with his cover as a foreign correspondent for a London newspaper, he was dispatched on an intelligence mission to the Middle East. The ship he was on was torpedoed and sunk off the northwest coast of Scotland. His body was never found.

Classic with a Color in the Title: A Study in Scarlet

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle

A former army doctor returns to Victorian London from the war in Afghanistan. Instead of decorations and commendations, the war has given the medical man “nothing but misfortune and disaster.” He was wounded in the shoulder at Maiwand and suffers chronic pain from it. He caught a case of enteric fever so terrible the doctors gave up hope he would live. But, in his mid-twenties, he drew upon the resources of youth and did not die.

Back in London he must live on a small disability pension while he recovers his health. He desperately needs an affordable apartment. Another man has just rented an apartment in Baker Street and is looking for a roommate. Out of the blue to the doc’s amazement the man says , “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” The veteran warns of his eccentricities: “My nerves are shaken, and I get up at all sorts of ungodly hours, and I am extremely lazy,” thus listing the symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, insomnia, and fatigue.

Their meeting marks the beginning of the most famous partnership in detective fiction, Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes. The new roomies are still getting used to each other's eccentricities when a letter arrives from Inspector Gregson of Scotland Yard about a killing near Brixton Road.  An American named Enoch J. Drebber – now there’s a Englishman’s idea of a typical American name - was murdered, and there are no clues but for the German word “revenge” smeared on the wall with blood.

Holmes invites Watson to accompany him on his work as a consulting detective. Holmes, a brilliant quirky loner, is still human enough to get a kick out of astounding us ordinary people. Watson joins readers, clients and the cops Gregson and Lestrade as an appreciative audience when Holmes explains how he uses his knowledge and skill to "read" a crime scene and deduce the commission of a crime.

This was the first Holmes story, published as a novelette in the 1887 Beeton’s Christmas Annual. It’s not hard to understand why it was rejected many times before the 27-year-old author finally sold it. The successful first part introduces Holmes and Watson in a captivating style familiar from the later stories – it’s amazing Conan Doyle seems to have found his voice for these stories on the very first try. But the second part, set in the United States, fails as a western or an adventure tale, though it reads smoothly enough. It also says rude things about the Church of LDS and Native Americans. Conan Doyle should have just made up a religion, not pandered to anti-Mormon prejudices of his day.

Classic in Translation: Unforgiving Years

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Unforgiving Years – Victor Serge, tr. Richard Greeman

An apocalyptic evocation of the Second World War, this posthumous novel finished in 1946 had to wait until 2008 before being published in English by the New York Review of Books. Four narratives evoke the unreal Paris of the last days of the pre-war period; the thousand days of Leningrad, besieged by the Nazis; the Gotterdämmerung of the last days of devastated Berlin; and a Mexican backwater where life and death merge. In this world of catastrophe, the protagonists - Old Bolsheviks without illusions stifled by Stalinist totalitarianism and gangsterism - fight against fascism, try to save their loves and try to “escape from a world without possible escape.”

The Unforgiving Years focuses on two Soviet secret agents D. and Daria. They are not only living through their own inner chaos but are also seeking a possible escape from their employers. Through these two characters and many others, Serge wonders, as he did in other novels, about this process and moment of the "inner break" where doubt and skepticism gradually lead the agent who had abandoned himself to the imperatives of the "cadaveric discipline" imposed by "services" to the rejection of that discipline. Soviet intelligence did a lot of dirty work during the Spanish civil war and this novel chronicles the fallout of anxiety and paranoia among agents that didn’t want to do dirty work anymore but knew leaving the “services” was as easy as leaving the mafia.

This climate where prison, exile, torture, and death threaten all the time, Serge knew personally, not as a spy but as a dissident in the USSR in the 1930s. It was his daily lot in those pre-WWII years when the assassinations and disappearances of Stalin’s opponents were warning signs to a lost generation with blood on its hands but hopeful enough not to despair of the idea of genuine​​ revolution to help the workers and peasants, to protect the revolution from reactionaries, and to defend it from authoritarianism within the revolution itself.

For twenty years, Victor Serge devoted himself to the task of giving us powerful political novels. Conquered City, set in Petrograd in 1919, is about the betrayal of democratic socialists (the Old Bolsheviks) by the Stalinists, though they betrayed their own ideals by going along with savage repression too. The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a remarkable examination of the Stalinist purge in the late 1930s, stands as a must-read for any serious student of the Europe between the wars and revolution betrayed.

A Man Could Stand Up: A Classic that Scares You

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Lots of us post-moderns connect with modernist writers because we share their mistrust of power in the hands of the fallible agents of government and religion and reject many traditional beliefs. But one baddish thing to do to anybody is take away their hope for a better future. The classic tetralogy Parade’s End scares me because modernist writers, especially those coming out of World War I like Ford, were so cynical and disillusioned that the reader’s hope gets cuffed around. I thought that re-reading the novels one after another (not the way I read them about 3 or 4 years ago) would steel me, get me beyond feeling mere anger and frustration with the same old gaga fools getting the younger generation into the suck for the same stupid reasons. Emotional outcome: mixed.

A Man Could Stand Up – Ford Madox Ford

This is the third volume in the tetralogy. After years of separation and uncertainty for the duration of hostilities, the army veteran Christopher Tietjens and his beloved Valentine Wannop see each other again on the day of the armistice. But tormented by images of the horrible war and the prolonged stress of combat, Tietjens is in a bad way with PTSD. He suffers from anxiety and obsessive guilt that he was responsible for a terrible wound sustained by his subaltern. Tietjens’ harpy of a wife Sylvia has sold all his furniture and he returns from the war to an empty house.

However, now that the war has ended, with the old world of Victorianism and feudal traditions tossed in the trash heap by independent-minded people, Tietjens has the desperate strength to escape the relentless malice and cruelty of his hateful wife and is ready to confess his love for Valentine. So far he had refused to do this for the conventional reason that a gentleman doesn’t divorce his wife. The theme Ford examines is that after the First World War, nothing is going to be same. Men will return from the war in pain:

Hitherto, [Valentine] had thought of the War as physical suffering only: now she saw it only as mental torture. Immense miles and miles of anguish in darkened minds. That remained. Men might stand up on hill, but the mental torture could not be expelled.

From the nightmare of war and the chaos of a disoriented present, the lovers have the chance of a new beginning in a cottage with Tietjens selling old furniture to rich snooty Americans eager to snap up bargains. Tietjens and Valentine’s  goal is to lead a life together, where they no longer have to duck social censure, and to do what they respect each other for: to stand up a.k.a. be wise, brave, fair, and disciplined to do work that they think is important.

The cruelty of Sylvia and all power holders breaks the heart of the reader. Ford's ability to recognize and describe the effects of historical events on the souls of sensitive wise people makes him a great writer. It’s a good novel, if the reader is tough enough to manage heartbreak and roiling blood pressure and attentive enough to follow involved modernist "impressionistic realism."

Back to the Classics #12

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Shakespeare - Mark Van Doren

This collection of short essays on Shakespeare's poems and plays was released in 1939. Mark Van Doren as a critic was new to me, since I only knew him as a disappointed father due to the trouble his son Charles walked into during the infamous quiz show scandal.

Mark Van Doren was a literature professor at Columbia from 1920 to 1959. He was a poet too, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his verse in 1940. This book in fact starts with an examination of the Bard’s poetry. Poets are as tough on each other as artists are tough on each other when they are not discreet or coy. He says, "The poems of Shakespeare are seldom perfect. The songs that shoot like stars across his plays are brightest at the beginning, and often burn out before the end." This too is interesting:

"Shakespeare's poetry is idiot-pure …. Seldom is it being written for its own sake, as if poetry were the most precious thing in the world. To Shakespeare it was apparently not that. The world was still more precious - the great one he never forgot, and the little one in which he knew how to imprison its voice and body. What he dealt in was existence."

Van Doren goes over the plays in their chronological order. I’m not a Shakespeare expert so who I am to take issue with his takes on plays? Here are some quotations so the reader can decide for herself whether this book is right.

Re The Merchant of Venice

"Shylock is so alien to the atmosphere of the whole, so hostile and in his hostility so forceful, that he threatens to rend the web of magic happiness woven for the others to inhabit. But the web holds, and he is cast out. If the world of the play has not all along been beautiful enough to suggest its own natural safety from such a foe, it becomes so in a fifth act whose felicity of sound permits no memory of … long knives whetted on the heel."

Re little appreciated Coriolanius

“The movement of Coriolanus is rhetorical …. Shakespeare is interested in the character and the situation, but he is conscious of being interested…. The writing has a steady, dogged strength which the judicial critic may admire; but it has its limits, and there are clearly defined a list of the things Shakespeare has taken out in talk…. Coriolanus is a tragic hero whom we listen to and learn about entirely in his public aspect…. His character is of that clear kind which calls for statement; but in poetry and drama statement is one of the obscurer mediums…. Coriolanus remains - a strange thing for Shakespeare - cold, and its hero continues until his death to be a public man whom we are not.”

Van Doren probably wrote this book for college students, not other scholars, because the writing style is vigorous and pleasant to read even for us non-experts. So getting something out of this book would be readers who looking for appreciations of Shakespeare on the order of Anthony Burgess’ affectionate if fanciful biography Shakespeare.

Back to the Classics: Mystery

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

This novel stars the detective duo of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. The story uses country superstitions, a fiendish hound, and an old family curse. Sir Charles Baskerville is found dead with a rictus of terror on his face. And near the corpse, in one of the most famous lines in detective fiction, “… the footprints of a gigantic hound!”

Conan Doyle skillfully piles up weird little incidents that unnerve the heir to the vast estate, Henry Baskerville. Even the unflappable Holmes is concerned for the safety of Sir Henry. He sends Watson with the heir to his remote Dartmoor mansion. Watson therefore is particularly active in this story and tells his story in letters, diary extracts, and straight exposition.

On the up side, Conan Doyle skillfully describes dreary landscape in order to capture an overall grim tone. Turning a conventional Victorian creepy novel into a Sherlock Holmes tale contributes to the originality of the plot. What Conan Doyle called “female interest” is fostered in the story, mainly due to indirectly describing the hard lot of women, married and not, at the hands of men. There are melodramatic passages but they are a lot of fun. On the down side, there are is a plot hole so large that even Holmes himself acknowledges it in the reveal when, provoked by questions, he says, “It is a formidable difficulty, and I fear that you ask too much when you expect me to solve it.”

Back to the Classics #11

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Wanderer – Sterling Hayden

What might be considered classic about a memoir by a not-terribly-well-known Hollywood actor?

Sterling Hayden seems fiercely honest. Honesty is timeless. Honesty is a model. So that is why I consider this a classic not only with a one-word title but a classic written by non-writer, up there with James Webb’s Fields of Fire and Albert Ellis’ A Guide to Rational Living.

Probably best known as mad general in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, Sterling Hayden (1916 - 1986) was also in The Asphalt Jungle, Kubrick’s The Killing, the noir Suddenly, and played a bent cop in The Godfather. Knowing full well that he had all the acting chops of, say, George Raft or Robert Stack, Hayden wasn’t really at ease with his image as the hunky, strong, stolid type. When Paramount Pictures signed him up in 1940, they dubbed him ''The Beautiful Blond Viking God. '' Hayden wasn’t easy with that but he said “the money was good.”

He married a Hitchcock ice queen Madeleine Carroll. But they didn’t see much of each other because he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps under an assumed name. He didn’t want to be seen as just a Hollywood actor poser. As John Hamilton, he earned both the Silver Star and Bronze Star. He served with the ur-CIA, the Office of Strategic Services, in Yugoslavia, Italy and Germany – one of the very few Marines not in the Pacific for WWII. He knew Wild Bill Donovan, founder of the OSS, and had dinner with FDR.

War affects different people in different ways (see Suddenly). War solidified Hayden’s belief in nonviolence, civil disobedience, and his identification with poor and the oppressed people.  War also briefly made him a Communist. He joined the Party but was not active because politics interfered with dating and romance. In 1951, after being summoned by the House of Un-American Activities Committee, he named names of Hollywood friends who had naively dabbled in communist / left groups after WWII.

 If I have any excuse, and it's not a good reason, the FBI made it clear to me that if I became an "Unfriendly Witness" I could damn well forget the custody of my children. I didn't want to go to jail, that was the other thing. The FBI office promised that my testimony was confidential. And they were very pleasant. So I spilled my guts out, and the months went by, and I was on some shit-ass picture, and I got a subpoena. The next thing I knew I was flying to Washington to testify. The worst day of my life. They knew it already, and there is the savage irony.

The government knew it already but wanted to humiliate him, just like they wanted to torment Edward G. Robinson into saying he was a dupe even when he never acted out of being duped. Stories like this make me amend the Irish invocation, “God between us and evil” to “… us and the goddamn government.” After the HUAC, Hayden lost his lefty buds and had a B-movie career though John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle keep him in the public eye.

Hayden writes in a unique style, to produce a sprawling hodge-podge of a book. Over the course of 400+ pages, though some memorable passages are well-realized, the melodramatic tone takes patience, parts in need of strict editing a time-pressed reader just has to skim. But as I said above, without being embarrassing, he is honest and the parts about sailing would really appeal to a sailor.

Back to the Classics #10

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

The Genius and The Goddess – Aldous Huxley

In 2011, I first read this short 1955 novel as part of my ongoing campaign to read lesser-known novels by famous novelists. I kept it because I knew I would have to re-read this novel as I’ve re-read After Many a Summer Dies the Swan and Brave New World. Huxley bears re-reading because his novels of ideas are mainly people talking with each other about Huxley’s wide-ranging views of God, sex, literature, art, thinkers of the past, and the perpetual circus of people – being all too human – making terrible mistakes, not the least of which is making trouble for each other out of anger, lust, and greed.

This novel is a narrative by John Rivers, telling a story of his youth, to “I” the writer. Rivers spent about a year and a half living with the family of Henry Maartens, a physicist, and Katy, his wife half his age and the mother of their two kids, child Tim and teen daughter Ruth.

Rivers is an inexperienced and clueless prig because he was raised by a pastor father and a mother who mistook her proud unemotionalism for Christianity. Often lost in the fog of ego and stark clarity of scientific theorizing, Dr. Maartens is like most geniuses – hard to live with. He is a distant father and the kind of selfish husband that expects his wife to take care of everything domestic. Katy is a lovely, giving woman, a devoted wife and mother. She knows how to live life well, to flourish, in every way. Her ability to live life in a fully human way makes her unto a goddess. Used to an arid home life, Rivers experiences a loving family for the first time. He comes to love Katy as Dante loved Beatrice.

Rivers considers himself lucky to be the research assistant to the genius Maartens. But Rivers soon tumbles to the fact Maartens depends on Katy for his reason for being alive. It’s not healthy. For anybody. When Katy is called away to take care of her dying mother, Maartens goes into a tailspin. The housekeeper Beulah knows a psychosomatic illness when she sees it as Katy returns to find Maartens in an oxygen tent. Beulah, alarmed at Katy’s haggard appearance urges her to rest, since she can’t help her husband if all her “virtue” has ebbed away.

Such is Huxley’s brilliance even in his lesser novels. He puts in the mouth of an ordinary person a profound truth. Socrates asserted that our virtue was all we need to be happy. But we are only human and our virtue – that immanent force that urges us to flourish, that impulse to life that we base our bravery, wisdom, fairness, and moderation on – is tested and buffeted by fatigue and prolonged stress.

I can’t possibly give away how Katy got her groove back, but it points to Huxley’s matter of fact view of love, passion, and the transience of life, happiness, and depression. Huxley thought it was important to define things clearly, especially to ourselves. How we describe people, places, and ideas make them our reality. If those descriptions are irrational, we live in fantasy, in Cloud Cuckoo Land like Maartens.