A Number of Things

The 50 Funniest American Writers

2012-01-23T11:32:00.002-05:00

Wondering what to say about The 50 Funniest American Writers (a 2011 collection by the comedian Andy Borowitz), I thought about absentation. This is one of those funny words made up by literary theorists or their at-their-wits’-end translators. It describes the opening scene in a fairy tale where someone or something is found to be missing. This disturbs the serenity of the family or community. Absentation can be seen in other kinds of stories, too. In the movie, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” George Smiley suspects that a mole has undermined the integrity of MI-6, the British secret intelligence service.

There is such a variety of styles and topics in The 50 Funniest American Writers that it seemed to me a better title would be 50 Ways to Be Funny in America. I narrowed the field by asking the question, “Do any of the pieces in this book dramatize the feeling of losing something familiar?” —They can’t all be called stories. Some are comic essays or they do imaginative things with lists, pictures or other material. They are pieces.

I had to do imaginative things to get answers to my question.

Like saying the familiar is your perception of another person. As in “The Lecture Tickets That Were Bought but Never Used,” by George Ade (1904), which is a retelling of “The Country Mouse and the City Mouse.” In this version, “the Cousin who lived out in the Woods” comes to visit “the man who lived in the Wicked Metropolis,” and defies his City Cousin’s view of him as “a Pure Character and somewhat of a Rube.” Playing “a short Engagement as the Village Indian,” he has his City Cousin Down and Out in two days.

Or that the familiar is the public’s opinion of you. Donald Barthelme makes a joke in “In the Morning Post” (1978) about “a rather astonishing communication” from Writer’s Digest. The magazine wants to include him “’in a roundup piece summarizing the drinking habits of the top writers in America today.’” His scandalized reaction is “’How did they find out?’” He goes on, “I mean, I do take a drink now and again. In fact my doctor, who is the soul of tact, once characterized my consumption as ‘slightly imprudent.’ But how did Writer’s Digest discover this? Does the whole city know?” This poor comic’s world will never be the same.

Or that the familiar is where you were yesterday (this is really a stretch). Jenny Allen’s “Awake” (2008) is a middle-aged woman’s conversation with herself when she can’t go back to sleep. “If you added up all the hours I’ve been awake in the middle of the night,” she says, “it would come to years by now.” I know how she feels. Tonight when I lie there with the covers pulled up to my chin, wishing I were dreaming about India silks or whales dancing, I’ll probably talk to myself about absentation and the good old days of tranquil, uninterrupted snoozing.
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You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto

2012-01-16T12:02:00.001-05:00

Reading Ignazio Silone concurrently with Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (2010, 2011), I came across an interesting correspondence. In Bread and Wine, an interregional secretary prods Pietro Spina to declare his solidarity with the Russian Communist Party. Pietro refuses to conform, saying, “How can we hope to destroy Fascist subservience if we abandon the critical spirit?” Later, he speaks of the “one perfectly ordinary little man who goes on thinking with his own brain” and thus has the power to imperil an entrenched sociopolitical system. Then there is Luigi Murica, who will be a martyr to freedom, reminding Pietro of the time he “spoke of men painfully attaining consciousness of their own humanity.”

At first, when I scanned the jumble of internet lingo in You Are Not a Gadget’s Table of Contents, I didn’t know how I was going to manage it. But Lanier’s humane message is matched by an ability to write about technology in language a non-technologist can absorb. He writes for people, he says, not computers, although he knows his words will mostly “be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world.”

“Cloud” was one of the words I looked up. To Lanier, it is “a vast computing resource available over the internet. You never know where the cloud resides physically,” he says. “Google, Microsoft, IBM, and various government agencies are some of the proprietors of computing clouds.”

I googled “cloud” to expand Lanier’s definition and was rewarded with 164,000,000 hits—almost a definition in itself! Wikipedia explains prolixly that the term “borrows from telephony in that telecommunications companies, who until the 1990s offered primarily dedicated point-to-point data circuits, began offering Virtual Private Network (VPN) services with comparable quality of service but at a much lower cost. By switching traffic to balance utilization as they saw fit, they were able to utilize their overall network bandwidth more effectively. The cloud symbol was used to denote the demarcation point between that which was the responsibility of the provider and that which was the responsibility of the user. Cloud computing extends this boundary to cover servers as well as the network infrastructure.”

It is the invisibility of those servers and that network infrastructure, with their hidden powers to influence human behavior, that Lanier opposes. He is against the ideal of anonymous sources (the Wikipedia ideal) that arises as a consequence. Why, if you have something to say, should you be invisible? He believes those who provide content to the internet, in all their individuality and wonderful variety, ought to identify themselves.

Lanier was one of the digital revolution’s pioneers in the 1970s and 1980s. He and others thought the new technology would expand human consciousness and make possible new avenues of creativity. Virtual reality was a great dream; what experiences couldn’t be had? But in the early 2000s the revolution took a wrong turn, resulting in a dumbing down of original expression in favor of the hive mind. In the new philosophy, human beings are bits who contribute knowledge and creative effort to a larger construct, which is thought to be wiser and more intelligent. To Lanier, this is abhorrent. I’m sure he would agree with Ignazio Silone’s dramatization in Bread and Wine of characters (admittedly few) who painfully attain consciousness of their own humanity. He argues for more discriminating use of the internet. Ways ought to be developed, for example, to pay artists and musicians who put their creative products online. Predictably, proponents of the internet’s “open culture” despise this idea.

You Are Not a Gadget reminds me of Plato’s cave metaphor in The Republic: we human beings so easily fall asleep and wake up to find ourselves in prison. Institutions look inevitable. Jesus, resisting the Pharisees whose rigid traditions would have his disciples go hungry, said, “The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27). The problem of the internet is similar: it was made for us perfectly ordinary little people, not we for it. We ought to go on thinking with our own brains and not “surrender them to the Overlords,” as Ken Jennings quipped on Jeopardy!
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"The Wild Duck's Nest"

2012-01-13T14:55:00.002-05:00

A reader left a comment on my 8/15/11 post, "What Makes a Story a Story?" I don't know what's going on with Blogspot, but I can't get back to the post to write an answer. So it's here:

Toni, you asked what the wild duck's egg symbolized. I hope you've been able to find the story and read it because it's wonderful. Here's the key part: In the nest "lay one solitary egg. Colm was delighted. He looked around and saw no one. The nest was his. He lifted the egg, smooth and green as the sky, with a faint tinge of yellow like the reflected light from a buttercup; and then he felt he had done wrong. He put it back. He knew he shouldn't have touched it and he wondered would the bird forsake the nest. A vague sadness stole over him and he felt in his heart he had sinned."

You might say the egg represents any precious thing that ought not to be disturbed, e.g., complicated things like someone else's marriage; a child's dreams of what he wants to be when he grows up; or an unborn child; or simple things, like the arrangement of a craftsman's tools in his workshop. Probably everyone has had the experience that Colm did.

The Seed Beneath the Snow

2012-01-09T09:42:00.001-05:00

The thought process I mentioned in my last post; it began way back in the summer of 2007. It was basically about making my posts in A Number of Things more coherent. I wanted coherence, continuity, congruence, something less like a butterfly flitting from flower to flower—or at least a good reason for the butterfly to do such a thing. It was finally while I was reading You Are Not A Gadget that I got the picture: these things require planning! Thus, the reading schedule for 2012.

Now let me reflect a bit on Ignazio Silone’s The Seed Beneath the Snow (1940), the third novel in The Abruzzo Trilogy.

In a scene about a third of the way through, a group of people gather at the home of Don Lazzaro in Colle, one of the villages in the Italian province of Abruzzi. Don Severino talks about “the madmen of the cross who manage to keep out of prison and lunatic asylums” They “take refuge in secret societies,” he says. He is the only one present who knows that Pietro Spina, a fugitive from the Fascist regime, is hiding in his grandmother’s house nearby. The year is 1936. In earlier days, Pietro was a leader in the underground communist movement.

Don Lazzaro argues that such madmen must be destroyed; they must be crushed. But Don Severino presses on: “I don’t believe you will ever succeed in completely uprooting that proud, rebellious plant. And even if you do, I don’t believe you’ll be able to destroy the seeds that are already germinating underground here and there.”

The metaphor of the seed appears again later, when Pietro tells his grandmother about his weeks of seclusion in a donkey stable. The only opening for fresh air was a small hole at the base of a wall. For lack of anything else to drink, he gathered snow through the hole. One morning as he lay down near the hole, he discovered that a wheat seed had germinated in a clod of earth outside. He melted snow to water it; he “often breathed on it to give it some warmth…. In a way that small seed and I lived on the same food; in a way we became real companions.”

Only twice more do we receive hints about the meaning of the novel’s title. In one scene, Pietro’s friend Simone the Weasel, to annoy a group of government party dignitaries in the village square, flits around them and says it is spring.

“‘Can’t you see anything down there?’ Simone asked, pointing to the hills and fields in the distance that were covered with snow.
“Several voices answered: ‘All we can see is country covered with snow.’
“‘You can’t see anything beneath the snow?’”

In another, Pietro tells Faustina, the woman he loves, about the sheep that will be brought back to the mountains to feed when summer returns. “Hard little seeds of rosemary and thyme must now be sprouting for them beneath the snow. I don’t know if you have ever seen them.”

The question is whether we readers of The Abruzzo Trilogy can see seeds beneath the snow—not in a literary sense but in our lives, in our social worlds. Can we see promises of resurrection, of rebirth? Can we see the proud outlaw plants who cannot be uprooted? Can we see the work they are doing?

Pietro has another friend, Infante, a deaf mute who protected and fed him in the stable before he was brought, an ill man, to his grandmother for ransom. Infante’s father, Giustino, unexpectedly returns to the Abruzzi from America, after a twenty-year absence. Infante hates this stranger who wants to take possession of him and work him like a donkey, and he kills him. Thus is the stage set for a climactic event like those in the first two novels, Fontamara and Bread and Wine, in which a man lays down his life for his friends. Pietro tells Infante to run away. Then he sits down and waits for the carabinieri to arrest him.

Central to the drama of The Seed Beneath the Snow is Pietro’s social position as a member of the gentry, which he has rejected. He is one of those “men who have plenty to eat but are unable to tolerate others being hungry.” Infante stands in for the multitude of cafoni, poor Italian peasants, overworked, politically oppressed and hopeless, who populate the pages of the Trilogy.

How are we who have plenty to eat to respond a novel like this? I ask myself, paraphrasing the desperate question of the cafone family in the closing pages of Fontamara, What am I to do? Is it enough to put together a bag of food for the homeless shelter?
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From Ignazio Silone to Flannery O'Connor: 50 Ways to Enjoy 2012

2012-01-02T09:29:00.005-05:00

Living Nature, not dull Art
Shall plan my ways and rule my heart.
—John Henry Cardinal Newman

About three weeks ago, while doing my Christmas shopping, I picked up Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget. I’m still reading it; it’s become for me part of a thought process. One result is a blogging plan for 2012. If living Nature redirects my ways—to paraphrase Cardinal Newman (veering, alas, from the spirit of his poem)—I won’t follow the plan precisely. Nevertheless, the dull Art of a list sometimes makes good things happen. You never know.

1.      The Abruzzo Trilogy, three novels by Ignazio Silone (1930, 1937, 1940). Just coming to the end of the third novel, The Seed Beneath the Snow.
2.      You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier (2010). A unique perspective on personhood and the Internet.
3.      The 50 Funniest American Writers, a collection of short stories (2011). A Christmas present from Mitch and Dottie which I’ve started reading. Lots of Christmas jollity.
4.      The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TTOMS), by Adam Smith (1759), Part I: “Of the propriety of action.” This book will be time stretched over 45 weeks.
5.      Making It Up, an “anti-memoir” by Penelope Lively (2005)
6.      Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, by Flannery O’Connor (1962)
7.      Jamrach’s Menagerie, a novel by Carol Birch (2011)
8.      “Jesus and the Disinherited,” in For the Inward Journey: The Writings of Howard Thurman (1947)
9.      The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, by Frank Kermode (1999)
10. TTOMS, Part II: “Of merit and demerit; or, of the objects of reward and punishment”
11. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a novel by Robert Tressell (1914)
12. Antigone, a play by Sophocles (5^th century B.C.E.)
13. Jesus in Gethsemane: The Early Church Reflects on the Suffering of Jesus, by David M. Stanley, S.J. (1980)
14. The Tempest, a play by William Shakespeare
15. Oliver Twist, a novel by Charles Dickens (1838)
16. Two essays from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (16^th century)
17. Silas Marner, a novel by George Eliot (1861)
18. TTOMS, Part III: “Of the foundation of our judgments concerning our own sentiments and conduct, and of the sense of duty”
19. Gone to Soldiers, a novel by Marge Piercy (1995)
20. Chapters in The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, by Dorothee Soelle (2001)
21. Love Medicine, a novel by Louise Erdrich (1984)
22. Existentialists and Mystics, collected essays in philosophy by Iris Murdoch (1998)
23. The Death of the Heart, a novel by Elizabeth Bowen (1938)
24. The Word Before the Powers: An Ethic of Preaching, by Charles L. Campbell (2002)
25. Heir to the Glimmering World, a novel by Cynthia Ozick (2004)
26. TTOMS, Part IV: “Of the effect of utility upon the sentiment of approbation” and Part V: “Of the influence of custom and fashion upon the sentiments of moral approbation and disapprobation”
27. Prodigal Summer, a novel by Barbara Kingsolver (2001)
28. Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, by S. C. Gwynne (2010); another Christmas present from Mitch and Dottie.
29. Crime and Punishment, a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)
30. Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson (1890-1896)
31. The Comforters, a novel by Muriel Spark (1957)
32. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, by Jorge Luis Borges (1964)
33. What Maisie Knew, a novel by Henry James (1897)
34. TTOMS, Part VI: “Of the character of virtue”
35. Ellen Foster, a novel by Kaye Gibbons (1987)
36. Spirit and Beauty: An Introduction to Theological Aesthetics, by Patrick Sherry (1992)
37. The Alchemist, by Paolo Coelho (1988), or Dear James, by Jon Hassler (1993). Both are novels.
38. Them, a novel by Joyce Carol Oates (1969)
39. The Garden Party and Other Stories, by Katherine Mansfield (1922)
40. TTOMS, Part VII: “Of systems of moral philosophy,” Sections I and II
41. Death Comes for the Archbishop, a novel by Willa Cather (1927)
42. Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich (14^th century)
43. The Year of the Death of Ricardo Ruiz, a novel by José Saramago (1984)
44. “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity,” by Adrienne Rich (1986), in The Art of the Personal Essay, ed. Phillip Lopate (1994)
45. Davita’s Harp (1985) or My Name is Asher Lev, novels by Chaim Potok
46. Amos 8:4-7 and other social justice readings in the Bible
47. Child of My Heart, a novel by Alice McDermott (2002)
48. TTOMS, Part VII: “Of systems of moral philosophy,” Sections III and IV
49. The United States of Banana, a work of fiction by Giannina Baschi (2011)
50. “Revelation” (1964), a story by Flannery O’Connor, in The Vintage Book of American Women Writers (2011)

The architecture of the list was a lot of fun. Among the authors, 21 are women and 21 men (counting The 50 Funniest as one male author). Eight or nine works have social justice themes. About half are book-length works of fiction. At least ten are by Catholic authors, three by Jewish (not counting the Bible). Five examine the moral life. One is a spiritual classic. Six are works of theology; two, of philosophy; four or five look at historical events. There are two plays, one Greek and one Shakespearean; a work of poetry; three personal essays; and selections from the Bible. The time-stretched work of philosophy by Adam Smith (Nos. 4, 10, 18, 26, 34, 40 and 48) looks like a skeletal framework for the plan. I don’t know if it will work out that way; but I hope, as I make my way through the list, for a flow from first reading to last. For example, I expect The Abruzzo Trilogy, No. 1, to engender a question that will echo down through the weeks, about the poor, weak and oppressed of the world. Likewise, the theme of revelation addressed in Nos. 8, 42 and 50 promises an insightful closing (remembering that insights in No. 50 will assuredly be ironic).

We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise
And then, if we are true to plan
Our statures touch the skies.
            —Emily Dickinson, No. 1176
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What Was Happening in Italy?

2011-12-26T15:57:00.001-05:00

Reading Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine, I am curious about the political and social back story of the novel, which is the second book in The Abruzzo Trilogy. These are my questions:

What was happening in Italy in the late 1920s, early 1930s? When and why did Italy go to war in Africa? Why was the anti-emigration law passed in 1924? When was the ban lifted? Why did communism look good to some Italians? What happened to communism in Italy? What was fascism? How did the Church in Italy react to communism and fascism? What was the story of the Piedmontese movement into the south of Italy? What was it like for poor people in Italy after the First World War? For landowners? What happened with the banks? Was there a bank crash parallel to that of the United States in 1929? A Great Depression?

Here are two answers, which I found in the Encyclopedia Brittanica:

First, Bread and Wine is set in 1935, when Italy was controlled by the totalitarian Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. In the chapter I’ve just read, a character says Italy is about to go to war in Italy. The back story is that Mussolini, ambitious for colonial expansion, is mobilizing troops for an attack on Ethiopia. This took place on October 2, 1935. The war ended in victory; in May of 1936, King Victor Emmanuel III “donned the ephemeral crown of the Empire of Ethiopia.”

Second, it is useful to return to the closing lines of Fontamara, the first novel in the Trilogy. There, a peasant family has narrowly escaped a massacre of Fontamaresi peasants, carried out in retaliation by government police for the publication of a revolutionary newsletter. Trapped in exile in Europe, the three family members, speaking for all of Italy’s peasants, ask themselves repeatedly: “What are we to do?” My guess is that Silone took this question from the title of Lenin’s statement of doctrine in 1902, What Is To Be Done? Marxists had believed that industrial and agricultural workers, becoming aware that their struggles and hardships differentiated them from their employers, would eventually organize “for the purpose of bettering their lot by reconstructing society to eliminate all economic classes.” Lenin disagreed with this approach. He taught that “socialism would be achieved only when professional revolutionaries succeeded in mobilizing and energizing the masses of workers and peasants. Left to themselves, the workers would get no farther than a trade union consciousness.” Pietro Spina, the hero of Bread and Wine, is devoted to the peasants of the Abruzzi (a province on the east coast of Italy). He hopes to mobilize and energize them for revolution.

Christmas Books

2011-12-19T10:17:00.002-05:00

So much fun, picking out Christmas books for the family. I hope they like them and read them all the way to the end!

The one for Rock, who is eleven years old, was written by a Nigerian author. He is famous for a novel about the ravages made by colonialism on his country’s tribal ways. This book, beautifully illustrated with primitive-looking woodcuts, is a children’s story. It is about a village boy, also eleven, who goes to live with his uncle and work as a clerk in his store in the big city.

It wasn’t easy finding a book for Ichiro, who is nine. Many of the stories written for children nowadays are jerky and disjointed in style, as if children are not sophisticated enough to appreciate fine prose. Some are self-consciously about the author when he or she was a child. Newer ones feature girl protagonists having all the exhilarating adventures. True, I chose a boy protagonist for Rock; but in that book there is the sense of a universal theme. Then I came upon one about a thirteen-year-old boy who time travels. It’s a good one for Ichiro. It’s about how the time-traveler boy goes back and rescues three French boys from a dire, life-threatening calamity. If he doesn’t, they won’t grow up to be the Three Musketeers.

Mitch’s book is also by a foreign author, this one Portuguese. In September Mitch passed on to me a strange and unusual novel by this author that he had enjoyed. I thought he might like to sample another. It plays with the idea that, on one day, during one twenty-four-hour period, no one dies. In a city? In a country? In the world? I don’t know. If it’s like the novel Mitch gave me, the author sets the story in a city, which he describes as if it is the only place in the world. I chose this one because I like the way it reads on the first couple of pages. I like the author’s narrative style and the way he builds suspense right away.

Now the thing about Dottie is that she coaches Rock’s soccer team, the Shooting Stars, who went to the finals a couple of weeks ago. They lost only at the last minute—after Rock, who was the goalie, had stopped eight out of fifteen penalty kicks! Far from devastated by the loss (unaware of the tension Mitch and Dottie were feeling in the stands), she ran to her mother, hugged her around the middle, and cried, “That was the most interesting game I ever played in!” Dottie’s book is by a man who had a career in professional football; now he coaches youngsters. He believes sports can either damage young people or enrich their growing-up years. I was excited when I read the first few pages. It turns out to be a bit confessional in tone, which is annoying—but I think there is something in it for Dottie.
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The Train Ride to Nowhere

2011-12-12T12:07:00.001-05:00

Saturday, December 3. So relieved when I woke up this morning, remembering yesterday’s decision. Felt rested. Night had blessed me with unbroken sleep. I was reminded of our Alaskan cruise at the end of August. Nights were heavenly. The boat rocked us like an enormous, seagoing cradle. Every morning we woke to wondrous sights, the spreading ocean or a new town on a new shore. When the ship of last night returned me to shore, I saw my decision as if planted in a landscape. A familiar landscape, richer in detail and consequence than I expected.

It was a weighty decision. I was scheduled to make the first payment on upcoming cataract surgeries. The plan was to have them this month; first the left eye and then the right. But it had all happened so fast, the making of this plan. Too fast; I was swept for the second time in three months into somebody else’s highly organized, highly efficient program. The first was the cruise, but it was a golden experience. We traveled with eight lively relatives. I was all set on the second day when I got off the elevator at the Crow’s Nest and found the library—this was me being lively. Ensconced myself in a broad and deep leather chair near a large window; dove into a collection of short pieces by Graham Greene. I wasn’t as independent as I felt. The ship’s agenda—an incredibly rich roster of activities—was compelling.

The cataract surgery agenda was like a train ride through a tangled industrial area. The first station was the ophthalmologist’s office. He was the one who said two years ago that I had cataracts. I just wanted to know how far they had progressed. I blame myself for what happened next. In this day of Google, there’s no excuse for not looking something up and finding out as much as you can. He said they appeared to be ready. Before I knew it, I had an appointment at an Eye Surgery Center for an evaluation. The place turned out to be a complex of seven or eight stations, in terms of the number of people who shepherded me through tests, examinations and demonstrations. I peered into the depths of at least four machines. I don’t blame myself completely. I didn’t understand what cataracts were or what surgery entailed; those things I could have Googled. But no one at the Center told me what was obvious to all of them, which was that the evaluation—I was there for three hours and twenty minutes—was not a tool for educating me or helping me to make up my mind, but a set of delicate measurements meant to ensure safe and precise surgery on my eyes.

The surgical coordinator’s office was the last station. Here I learned that the surgeon, whom I had met two or three stations before, planned to operate on both eyes. When I questioned the coordinator—I had thought only my left eye needed attention—she gave me a reasonable explanation. She also said the surgeries had to be performed soon, in four to five weeks. This made sense. They wanted to operate while they knew the exact condition of my eyes. It all made sense. It was all reasonable. There was no reason to fear that I wouldn’t be in capable hands. But did I, at this juncture, want to be in anyone’s hands?

Sitting at the dining room table, I opened the folder the coordinator had given me. Among other papers, there was a copy of the consent form I had signed. Not a photocopy; it didn’t show my signature. I didn’t remember reading and signing a consent form. I am like a child in these situations; I do what I am told. I am like a teenager if someone says, “Go home and talk it over with your family.” What’s to talk about? I know what I’m doing. But I didn’t.

I overcame my resistance enough to get on the computer and start learning. A cataract isn’t a thin sheet of material that can be lifted from the eye, as I had imagined, by a very clean pair of tweezers. It is a deterioration of the lens itself. Surgery involves destroying the lens and inserting an artificial one. This was where I balked. I reread the consent form with the clarity that accompanies the prospect of spending $5,600. (For the special multifocal lenses that Medicare wouldn’t cover, considering them cosmetic surgery.) It wasn’t the money that got me. It was this sentence, the first honest statement of the train ride, the one truth I could grasp: “You must remember that the natural lens within your own eye with a slight cataract, although not perfect, has some distinct advantages over any manmade lens.” I talked it over with Paco. I did more research on the Internet. I went to the phone and canceled the surgery.

Surgeons must be very careful

When they take the knife!
Underneath their fine incisions
Stirs the Culprit—Life!
EMILY DICKINSON

The landscape I awoke to this morning was a collection of memories. I am made this way, distrustful of medical science. When I was a child, we didn’t have the money for doctors. We just got better when we had to. My grandfather was fond of saying, “They call themselves practicing physicians. I don’t want them practicing on me.” Many times in my adult life I have tested myself (rebellious, going out the door of a doctor’s office) to find out just how long I can let nature take its course. I’ve always had good health. I can afford to play these games.

So I’ll write down what it’s like having cataracts. Then come back in a year to see whether or how much things have changed.

My vision is not significantly different from what it was two years ago. I look out the living room window and see the road, Tim’s yard, the river behind his house. I see all the way to the trees on the other shore. It’s misty today because of the rain. I can’t tell if there are houses mixed in with the trees. The left eye is definitely worse. It’s like looking through a scrim. I can drive (except at night). I can read (with reading glasses). I can use the computer. What the cataracts do is affect the way light comes into my eyes. If Paco stands in front of a strong light I can’t see his features; he’s a silhouette. Cataracts spread the light so that it seems almost to be a quality of the air. At night, the streetlamps and the headlamps and tail lamps of cars spread out and make auras. The whitest lights radiate in sharp points from their centers. In an emergency I can drive at night, but certainly not in the rain. The lights on the road mesmerize me. The spreading effect destroys my spatial sense. I can’t tell if I’m staying in my lane.

Except for the play of light, my eyes are fully functional. In most circumstances I’m not aware of light or other obstacles to my vision. I’ll be sensible. I’ll avoid driving at night. To slow the cataracts’ development, I’ll wear a brimmed hat and sunglasses outdoors in the daytime. One website says some cataracts develop only so far and then stop. All agree that there is no danger to postponing surgery. We’ll see. Everything will be all right.

The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

2011-12-05T15:48:00.000-05:00

The last time we were together, dear friend, you asked about the book I had taken out of my purse—I was looking for my car keys; despite the cheery stuffed dinosaur I’ve attached to the key ring, they still manage to bury themselves underneath everything else. I said I would tell you what it was about when I had finished. I have. It is The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick (2001). In a nutshell, it’s about personal essays and memoirs, and how to read them.

I was reluctant to say anything that day, although I was reading the book for the third time, because it was related to the situation I told you about. You helped me to understand my role there: I am intimately involved but at a distance; I care a great deal but am not the one who can bring on a resolution. I won’t say more—there are things that ought not to be put in writing—although I did scribble out my worries in a rough way before I saw you. It was what led me to reread Vivian Gornick. I remembered that her main theme was: Who is telling this story? I thought that if I could find meaning in the situation it would become a story, and then I could live with it.

Gornick calls the self who tells the story the persona. “The creation of … a persona is vital in an essay or memoir. It is the instrument of illumination. Without it there is neither subject nor story. To achieve it, the writer of memoir or essay undergoes an apprenticeship as soul-searching as any undergone by novelist or poet: the twin struggle to know not only why one is speaking but who is speaking.” It amuses me to reflect that we have many personae in our repertoires to choose from. Gornick’s opening example is instructive: a eulogist speaks about her early relationship with her mentor (they were both physicians). “Of the various selves at her disposal … she knew and didn’t forget that the only proper self to invoke was the one that had been apprenticed. That was the self in whom this story resided.”

Leaning on her experience of writing a memoir about her mother, herself and their next-door neighbor when she was a child, Gornick gives the impression that choosing a persona is a conscious process. “I had a narrator on the page strong enough to do battle for me…. Devotion to this narrator—this persona—became, while I was writing the book, an absorption that in time went unequaled. I longed each day to meet up again with her, this other one telling the story that I alone—in my everyday person—would not have been able to tell. I could hardly believe my luck in having found her.”

The several writers and their work that Gornick goes on to examine, however, were not all so lucky. I was particularly taken with Loren Eisely, who, “as an anthropologist looking at bones, animals, and oceans,” produced many essays on his findings. A reader might conclude from them that he was “a man long emerged from his own chaos, now working in a state of inner equilibrium.” He was “resolved upon integrating whatever comes into view.” That was the phrase that caught my eye. It is what I have wanted to do for a long time, integrate whatever comes into view.

Eisely intended to write the memoir of his life in the same tone. “He would treat himself much as he would any other specimen he might dig out”; but the material of his life refused to allow a lofty persona. His life had been painful: he describes his mother as “paranoid, neurotic and unstable.” Entering adulthood during the Great Depression, he rode the rails and lived in poverty for many years. All his life he considered himself a solitary, “destined for the company of the universe, not of human fellowship.” The memoir is a chronicle of agony; exhausted at the end, he writes, “Dig as I may, I cannot get directly at it.” Gornick asserts that Eisely’s struggle to tell his story “characterizes his persona,” but nowhere is she able to say that he became aware of the persona who so desperately fought to tell the story.

When I neared the end of The Situation and the Story, I thought I knew another reason why I kept going back. There was something unfinished about the book. It was not fully satisfying. I made my way through the concluding chapter (again) and then the light dawned. “Get the narrator,” Gornick advises, “and you’ve got the piece.” She adds that this proves “an irresistible guide to how essays and memoirs organize a mass of raw material.” For me it proved an irresistible guide to discovering the persona who wrote Gornick’s book. This was the self who had been a teacher of writing in M.F.A. programs for fifteen years; it was the self who had learned that “you cannot teach people how to write … but you can teach people how to read, how to develop judgment about a piece of writing: their own as well as that of others.” I sensed also that it was the self who wanted to be a good teacher. These were satisfying discoveries. I had “gotten the narrator”; I had “gotten” how Vivian Gornick organized her book. She says in one place that the story in a personal essay is the large sense a writer makes of her participation in a situation. In her extended essay, which is both personal and formal, we watch her as she makes large sense of her experience as a memoirist and a teacher of writing.

As for the need that led me to reread Gornick, it is, thanks to you, less strident. I’ve thrown away my scribbles. There are more interesting things to do than worry. “The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.” If all goes well, I will be in your neck of the woods in March.

The Very Old Book

2011-11-30T13:50:00.003-05:00

Sometimes things come into our possession by surprise. This is what happened to me about three weeks ago. It was a book I had been wanting for a long time but never expected to see. A very old book; but I didn’t think of it this way then. Its faded, light blue cloth cover was frayed at the edges; its pages lacked the crisp, flat, smooth look of those in a book that has never been opened. It had obviously been read many times.

I took the book into my hands and examined it closely. It was a novel. Looking back on that day, I’m sure I read the entire thing, but I don’t remember turning the pages one by one. Nevertheless, I comprehended it. Almost as soon as it was presented to me, I absorbed it as a complete book. I knew what it meant.

Two strange features occupied my attention. For one thing, there were no preliminary pages: no frontispiece; no title page; no publisher’s information. And the story began on the very first sheet. (Strangely, I don’t remember or never took note of what the story was about.) The other thing was that the last page was glued to the back cover. The glue job was homemade; it had been done by a reader, not the printer. This page contained the end of the story, or perhaps an epilogue or an afterword. I read the story, came to this page and was puzzled: it was printed in a script just different enough from the Roman that I couldn’t make it out.

There was also something about the body of the text. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Everything between the first page and the last hung on a kind of framework or skeleton. It was almost as though it had been set down in outline form.

Just as I reached the end of the book, the author appeared. I thanked her warmly for writing it; I barely had words to say how much it had meant to me. “Oh, I didn’t write it,” she replied airily. Well, this was confusing; I knew she was the one. When I questioned her, she said the book had been “transferred” to her. I think that was the word she used. Her looks reminded me of the tall, shy young mother from my church whom I had met the evening before at a candlelight vigil outside Planned Parenthood. She had an unusual beauty, with high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes. The author, unfortunately, was a caricature of her. The conformation of her face around the eyes was exaggerated, with cheekbones too prominent, and eyebrows shaved and new ones penciled in. (I feel guilty remembering her in this way; perhaps I am destroying her.)

All this brought thoughts of beauty to mind. I wondered, What is it that makes someone truly fair and comely? As if in answer to my question, another woman appeared. This one was indeed lovely, with a more mature grace than that of the young woman from church. I stared at her in awe. She was ageless in form. She, in turn, looked down at me from a height that made me feel child-sized. She peered into my eyes with deep intensity. She seemed to want to hold my gaze. I kept still but squirmed inside. This kind of thing had happened to me before—although never with someone so resplendent. Usually I was afraid that if I allowed the mutual gaze to continue, the other person would turn into something dangerous, evil or ugly. The woman’s gaze held a kind of warning in it. But I wasn’t sure. More than anything, I felt overwhelmed by her beauty. I looked away. I shook my head and wriggled my shoulders to put my mind somewhere else.
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A Checklist

2011-11-23T09:31:00.001-05:00

Did you make it clear at the front desk that you had come only for an evaluation? Was your picture taken when you checked in? Did you show the woman with the smart haircut, the smart pantsuit and the smart shoes your insurance cards? Did you choose a seat in the waiting room where there were empty chairs to your right and your left and the television screen relaying videos about cataract surgery and intraocular lens options was around the corner from your line of vision? Did you check your watch? Did you reset it to Eastern Standard Time? Did you rise from your seat, take off your coat and carry it across the room, crossing behind the people looking at the television screen, to hang it up? Did you make a mental note not to walk past the coat closet, forgetting your coat, when your appointment was over? Did you return to your seat, sit down, put your purse on your lap and consider what to do next? Did you check your watch? Did you briefly consider asking someone at the front desk what on earth could possibly take two and a half hours? Did you settle for wondering whether there was a way you could use all your five senses as you sat in the waiting room? Did you listen for the voice on the video describing blepharoplasty? Did you look at the elderly couple who arrived, took off their coats, hung them in the closet and sat down across from you? Did you reach into your purse and grasp the book of stories by Donald Barthelme that you had bought at Barnes and Noble before your appointment? Did you lift the book to your nose to smell the newness of its paper and print? Did it occur to you that it is impossible to describe a scent, a smell, an aroma, an odor or a fragrance without reference to the smell itself? Did you check your watch? Did you wonder when you would get to eat the granola bar in your purse? Did you steal a gaze at the elderly woman’s face and wonder if her expression of frozen horror came from the sight of the cover illustration on your Donald Barthelme book? Did you put the book on the chair to your left and loosen the laces of your left shoe? Did you wish you could always wear sandals, even in November? Did you check your watch?

The Lie That Tells the Truth

2011-11-14T08:07:00.000-05:00

Quotations from The Lie That Tells the Truth: A Guide toWriting Fiction, by John Dufresne (2003).

Epigraph: “A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”

“The Meaning of Life Is to See.” A chapter title.

“Nothing is quite so mysterious as a thing well-described.” Garry Winogrand, photographer.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: “The limits of language are the limits of my mind.”

“The surest—also the quickest—way to awake the sense of wonder in ourselves is to look intently, undeterred, at a single object. Suddenly, miraculously, it will reveal itself as something we have never seen before.” Cesar Pavese.

“Travel trains us to notice.”

In many short-shorts, the narrative is an emblem of a larger story. For example, in Jayne Anne Phillips’ “Wedding Picture,” the formal wedding photo “represents our culture’s faith in family and romantic love. It suggests much more than it states.”

“All stories are about trouble.”

“The story is the call that awaits its response. So maybe the important event in a short-short is what happens to the reader, not [to the] characters.”

“Values and motivation lie below the surface.” Why characters do what they do.

Revisiting The Blithedale Romance

2011-11-04T11:28:00.003-04:00

As I read and thought about The Blithedale Romance a second time, two things stood out for me: the novel’s first-person point of view and its theme of sympathy.

Here’s the story. Miles Coverdale, a former poet, recalls events of ten or fifteen years ago (some time in the 1830s) when he joined an Arcadian social experiment. Several people buy a farm in the New England countryside for the sake of working together and “showing mankind the example of a life governed by other than the false and cruel principles, on which human society has all along been based” (19). It’s an idealistic venture; the communitarians hope that theirs will be “a better system of society” (37). Before many weeks pass, Zenobia, a strikingly beautiful woman, and Priscilla, a poor girl, come under the sway of Mr. Hollingsworth, a philanthropist with a magnetic personality. A tug of war for Priscilla’s soul ensues between Hollingsworth and Mr. Westervelt, a slick character who has metaphorically sold his soul to the devil. Zenobia agrees to aid Westervelt. The story ends in tragedy. From the safe distance given by time, Coverdale recalls that he assumed the role of observer in these events, without reflecting on what this might have meant.

Thomas Foster’s How to Read Novels Like a Professor has a chapter called “Never Trust a Narrator With a Speaking Part.” It was only a couple of days ago that I finally understood what he meant. Let me ask you a question. When you neared the end of The Blithdale Romance, did you trust Miles Coverdale when he said, “I have made but a poor and dim figure in my own narrative, establishing no separate interest, and suffering my colorless life to take its hue from other lives” (245)? I hope not! Did you squirm when you saw his last words, “I—I myself—was in love—with—PRISCILLA!” (247)? I hope so, because, if he was, he sure had a funny way of showing it.

Other characters out Coverdale at every turn. We’ve barely turned a page when we see the first instance of this. The night before he is to leave for Blithedale, he is stopped on the street by Mr. Moodie, who we will learn later is Zenobia’s and Priscilla’s father. Mr. Moodie wishes to ask a favor, but he changes his mind when Coverdale says brusquely: “A very great favor, do you say? My time is brief, Mr. Moodie, and I have a good many preparations to make” (7). In another example, a companion riding to the farm with him sees that he has little enthusiasm for the venture. Indeed, Coverdale’s twisted idea is that, if a vision is “worth the having, it is certain never to be consummated otherwise than by a failure” (10-11). Then Hollingsworth discovers that he has no purpose in life: “Miles Coverdale is not in earnest,” he says, “either as a poet or a laborer” (68). At the horrible end of the tale, Zenobia, ever acerbic, accuses him sarcastically: “Ah, I perceive what you are about! You are turning this whole affair into a ballad. Pray let me hear as many stanzas as you happen to have ready!” (223).

Coverdale could have been a good man. On May-Day, when Zenobia decks out Priscilla with an arrangement of flowers and the twigs of flowering trees, he detects “a slightly malicious purpose in the arrangement;” Zenobia has stuck “a weed of evil odor and ugly aspect” in with the flowers. He convinces her to fling it away (59). He’s a complex character, with so many blind spots it’s a wonder he can see where he’s going.

Sympathy, which means experiencing another person’s state of feeling exactly as he does, becomes explicit as a theme when Coverdale and Hollingsworth disagree on a fundamental point. Commenting on their “outbreak,” Coverdale notes that the “species of nervous sympathy [which is] a pretty characteristic enough, sentimentally considered, and apparently betokening an actual bond of love” among the members of the Community (139), is now disturbed. The struggle to preserve his individuality that earlier led to his stance as an observer takes precedence and he leaves. However, he can’t shake off the emotional effects of ties he has made. “Our souls, after all, are not our own. We convey a property in them to those with whom we associate, but to what extent can never be known, until we feel the tug, the agony, of our abortive effort to resume an exclusive sway over ourselves” (194).

What he fails to see is that he has violated something like a code of sympathy. I’m just guessing here; the novel doesn’t say this. He has been intensely curious about the inner lives of Hollingsworth, Zenobia and Priscilla, but particularly the two women. He wants to know the “mystery” within each of them—while keeping his distance. Zenobia calls him on this more than once. At the end she says, “This long while past, you have been following up your game, groping for human emotions in the dark corners of the heart” (214).

While still in the midst of his story, Coverdale confesses, more honestly, that things could have been different. He could have trusted his heart. “Were my life to be spent over again,” he says, “I would invariably lend my ear to this Cassandra of the inward depths, however clamorous the music and the merriment of a more superficial region” (139).

He could have been less blithe and more sympathetic.

On Rereading War and Peace, Parts 1 and 2

2011-10-28T12:26:00.001-04:00

Back in 1962, when my husband-to-be was twenty-two years old, he read War and Peace over a weekend. He was a Navy ensign stationed in Meridian, Mississippi, with nothing else to do. Since I’m a slow reader, I’ve always been amazed at this feat. Yesterday I worked out the math. If he got off early on Friday and if it was a long weekend; and if he slept six hours a night and took time off for hygiene and exercise (but not for meals; he would have taken the book with him to the mess), he read twenty pages an hour. I’m still amazed.

Two years ago, when I read War and Peace for the first time, I allotted myself fifty pages a day. It takes organization to read this mountain of a novel. I bought the Barnes and Noble Classics edition and, when I got home, promptly slit it down through the spine to divide it into three volumes. I thought this would make the book less daunting, and it did. I enjoyed it immensely. I knew, even before I finished it, that I wouldn’t wait too long before reading it again. Now is the time. I’ve just reread Parts 1 and 2.

This is how you know someone’s reading War and Peace. The World Atlas sits on the dining room table for days at a time, open to Austria or Russia.

Here’s another fact: War and Peace is not hard to read. It may be old; it may be Russian; it may be packed with allusions to historical personages and battles you’ve never heard of and might not give a fig for; but the only daunting thing about it is its length. Tolstoy couldn’t have invented a more straightforward third-person omniscient narrator. Take it from this reader-for-pleasure: you don’t have to flip to the endnotes if what you’re looking for is a gripping and coherent story. After this, the length of a novel is no longer an issue for me.

I try to imagine Tolstoy wearing his thinking cap as he begins assembling diagrams, notes, charts and reference books before starting his first draft. He must have pondered long over narrative voice. I find that the voice in War and Peace has a different tone from that in shorter works like Resurrection and “Master and Man.” It’s the kind of tone that sustains a story and a reader over a long stretch. And he must have considered the structure of the projected work. The novel is divided into fifteen parts and a two-part epilogue. Each part contains several short chapters; it’s like reading the acts and scenes of a very long play. The structure contributes to the ease of reading; you’re never far from a convenient place to put your bookmark.

Briefly, Part 1 is set in Petersburg and Moscow, where talk among the Russian aristocracy centers on war. It is early July, 1805, and the army of Napoleon Bonaparte is storming through Europe. Ironically, everyone speaks French and enjoys French customs, such as the soirée. We meet the four major characters who will carry the narrative of War and Peace: Prince Vassily Kugarin, “a man high in rank and office”; Pierre Bezuhov, whose father the Count legitimizes him just before he dies, thus making him his heir; thirteen-year-old Natasha Rostov, whose parents are celebrating her (and her mother’s) name day with a party; and Prince Andrey Bolkonsky, adjutant to the commander-in-chief of the army and young married man whose wife is expecting their first child. By the end of Part 1, the Tsar has proclaimed war.

In Part 2, the action shifts to Austria, where Russian troops arrive to join the Austrian army, which, however, has just suffered a decisive defeat at the hands of the French. It is October, 1805. Prince Andrey, who had been suffocating with boredom in the confines of Russian social life and his marriage, is enlivened by the thrill of war. In one battle, he is wounded in the arm, but he pays little attention to this. He conceives a battle plan for the Russian army by which he believes he will establish his reputation as an officer and strategist. The reality of war, which is characterized by a distressing atmosphere of confusion, thwarts his efforts to explain the plan to his commander-in-chief.

Next week, I’ll take a break to read The Blithedale Romance with Frances and other Hawthorne fans. Then I’ll come back to War and Peace.

"Young Goodman Brown," Again

2011-10-26T11:27:00.001-04:00

Since it turns out that four different volumes on my shelves include “Young Goodman Brown,” I’ll say a few more words. The reprint in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Second Edition Shorter, is annotated, which is helpful. The story’s first publication was in the New-England Magazine (April, 1835); it was “ascribed to ‘the author of “The Gray Champion,”’ which had appeared in the same magazine three months earlier.”

The story is about goodman Brown’s appointment with the devil on the one night of the year when the Wicked One welcomes souls into what he calls “the communion of your race!” By this he means a kinship of sin; the whole earth is “one stain of guilt.” They journey into the depths of the forest for a communion ritual, or “witch-meeting.”

Halfway there, goodman Brown balks. He sits down on a stump and refuses to go farther. When he sees townspeople who he has thought were righteous and good, he gets up and moves on. He believes Heaven and the love of his wife Faith will protect him. The forest erupts in cries and groans of grief, rage and terror. Someone screams; it means Faith is lost. Maddened with despair, he rushes onward. Faith is at the meeting; she is the other new soul to be welcomed. Goodman Brown cries to her, “Resist the Wicked One!” Suddenly he is alone in the calm night.

Has it been only a dream? No matter; goodman Brown is a changed man. For the rest of his life, he is filled with sadness and gloom.

What is the theme here? In my analysis of the first page, I intimated that the central idea of the story was the ways a person can put his faith, his trust in God, in danger. Certainly this happens when goodman Brown makes an appointment with the devil. I suppose a real-time equivalent would be someone’s decision to become a drug dealer, which would mean choosing a life’s journey that leaves only destruction in its wake. But the rest of the story presents a bleaker picture: mortal man, in Hawthorne’s words, has an instinct that guides him to evil. The devil scoffs at goodman Brown’s naïve reverence for people he thought were holier than himself. “Depending upon one another’s hearts,” he says, “ye had still hoped, that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived! Evil is the nature of mankind.”

Was this view of the human condition a legacy of Calvinism?

Theme: Will Faith Come to Harm?

2011-10-21T11:22:00.000-04:00

You’re waiting for the bus, it’s a bright sunny morning. Uh huh, you say to yourself, it’s time to read “Young Goodman Brown.” Down the sidewalk comes Professor Tom Foster, pops up out of nowhere, he’s walking his dog. Wait a minute, he says. Did you know stories start working their magic on you right there on the first page. No kidding. Your book says that about novels, but short stories. Yep, them too. They want so much to tell you what’s important, they can’t wait to get started. Show me, you say, and start to hand over Selected Tales and Sketches. The dog pulls on its leash. The professor cries heel and the dog obeys. All at once, they’re gone. You get on the bus, open Tales to the first page, and read. {See my last post, just below.}

Sure enough, there it all is. Right away, the story delivers its main character, Goodman Brown. Not only is he in the first three words, he’s in the title. The anxiety of his wife, Faith, seems important; but he is the one whose mind is made up to reach some end. The words Salem village, in the same sentence, give you the setting—place, Tom would call it: a sense of things, a mode of thought, a way of seeing. You want to think about this. What really blows your mind is the amount of repetition on the first page. Goodman, five times (including the title); night, or words referring to it, nine times; evidence of the newlyweds’ affection for each other, six times; something to do with a journey, five times; pink ribbons, three times. These are motifs in the pattern of the story. You read the page again and a mood or an atmosphere emerges—the piece carries a tone of foreboding; you feel something bad is going to happen. Point of view is easy; the story is told in the third person. Time frame is easy; the story begins at sunset and will end at sunrise. As for style, you notice something peculiar about the modifiers: every one (including the adjective pink) refers to the feelings or appearance of Faith.

These are elements of fiction.

You’ll need outside information to get a better understanding of setting. Fortunately, you brought the Encyclopedia Britannica with you. It says Goodman is an archaic term meaning the head of a household; Salem, Massachusetts, was the site of the witch trials of 1692; Nathaniel Hawthorne, writing 150 years later, was preoccupied with this event; the meeting-house was where Puritans gathered for worship. Putting these clues together, you discover the historical period in which the story is set. You set the encyclopedia on the seat beside you, suspecting that you’re missing something.

Just then, the bus slows down and John Gardner moves down the aisle toward the door. He pauses, points to Tales and Sketches and says, Each fictional element carries its burden of meaning. He walks on and you stare after him, open-mouthed. As he gets off, you say, Now there goes a good novelist and a good man. Which causes you to muse, as the bus pulls away, that Goodman Brown is not a good man. He’s not a good young husband, leaving his new wife alone with her fears. He’s not a good householder, leaving their home unprotected on what promises to be a dangerous night. Thus do you stumble upon an instance of verbal irony.

You wonder if the repetition of the name Faith (five times), along with Goodman Brown’s accusing her of doubt, points to the story’s theme. Those pink ribbons, the only vivid image on the page—they may be an emblem of Faith. Faith, a religious word, a theological virtue. The man with faith puts his trust in God; but Goodman Brown leaves Faith behind. You see other religious references: the phrases God bless you and Say thy prayers; the meeting-house (where Goodman Brown is about to turn the corner). Faith, the woman, is afeard of herself. She does not want to be abandoned. She prays her husband will find all well when he comes back. Something might happen to her on this dreadful night.

The bus slows down again. It’s your stop. You think, yes, you must be making your way toward a theme. In spite of Goodman Brown’s assurances, his nighttime journey will surely bring harm to his love and his Faith. You tuck Tales and Sketches under your arm and step down to the sidewalk, telling yourself there’ll be time for the rest of the story on the ride home.

(The post below presents the first page of “Young Goodman Brown” and a link to the rest of the story.)
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Opening of "Young Goodman Brown"

2011-10-18T14:31:00.000-04:00

"Young Goodman Brown came forth, at sunset, into the street of Salem village, but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the wind play with the pink ribbons of her cap, while she called to Goodman Brown.

“’Dearest heart,’ whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when her lips were close to his ear, ‘pry’y thee, put off your journey until sunrise, and sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts, that she’s afeard of herself, sometimes. Pray, tarry with me this night, dear husband, of all nights in the year!’

“’My love and my Faith,’ replied young Goodman Brown, ‘of all nights in the year, this one night must I tarry away from thee. My journey, as thou callest it, forth and back again, must needs be done ‘twixt now and sunrise. What, my sweet, pretty wife, dost thou doubt me already, and we but three months married!’

“’Then, God bless you!’ said Faith, with the pink ribbons, ‘and may you find all well, when you come back.’

“’Amen!' cried Goodman Brown. ‘Say thy prayers, dear Faith, and go to bed at dusk, and no harm will come to thee.’

“So they parted; and the young man pursued his way, until, being about to turn the corner by the meeting-house, he looked back, and saw the head of Faith still peeping after him, with a melancholy air, in spite of her pink ribbons.”

You can read the rest of this story by Nathaniel Hawthorne at The Literature Network.
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The House of the Seven Gables

2011-10-14T08:25:00.002-04:00

With this post, I’m participating in a group read of The House of the Seven Gables. Thank you, Frances and Audrey, for the inspiration! It’s my third reading of the edition my grandparents gave me for Christmas in 1951 when I was twelve. The House of the Seven Gables and I go way back. We weren’t a perfect match when we met; I had to give it a try once a year for three years before I could read it through. Then it became part of me. I read it again six years ago, with my granddaughter.

This time I read it more closely, hoping to detect a theme. I missed the fact that Hawthorne had already done this work in his Preface. The moral of the story, he says, is “the truth … that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.” In my more mundane words, the theme is “the weight of the past” or “the persistence of unrepentant guilt.” Hawthorne then undermines his moral-of-the-story intention, explaining that he is writing a romance, if you don’t mind, and can’t be responsible for what readers take from it. A romance, he says, is “the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us.” It doesn’t aim for the “minute fidelity” of a novel but it does present the “truth of the human heart.” How the writer of a romance “manages his atmospheric medium,” well, that is up to him.

“Atmospheric medium.” It was this kind of archaic language and Hawthorne’s facility with it that charmed me when I was fifteen, and that still intrigues me. The House of the Seven Gables is all about the qualities and elements that, in Hawthorne’s imagination, form atmosphere: ghosts and spirits, scents, sunbeams, the movement or stagnant condition of the air, feelings, thoughts, music, voices mingling, cobwebs, moisture, moss, damp and dry rot, decay. My memory, over these sixty years, focused on the sunny scenes that signaled Phoebe’s presence. The arched window giving onto the sights and sounds of Pyncheon Street; the garden with its breezes, hens clucking and bees buzzing. It must have been Phoebe who drew me into the story and carried me to its end (where, together, we fell in love with the daguerrotypist).

I suspect Hawthorne was influenced by the emerging literary fashion of realism, for he seems to undermine his romantic enterprise, too. In Chapter 1, it appears we will have a ghost story. All the appurtenances are there: a wind that suddenly sweeps through the house, a looking-glass in which Pyncheon ancestors may be seen, the hint of sinister Maule powers, the brooding portrait of Colonel Pyncheon. But nobody ever actually sees a ghost; Matthew Maule is only a “reputed” wizard; and the ghost of the ancestor who opened a cent-shop only “might” be seen. In the last chapter, Maule’s well throws up “kaleidoscopic pictures in which a gifted eye might have seen foreshadowed the coming fortunes” of our now familiar characters; but that gifted eye is absent. Again and again, where spirits and ghosts are concerned, a character or the narrator seems to shake himself, clear his throat and say, “Not so!” We the readers are permitted to see ghosts, as in the long chapter about the dead Judge Pyncheon; but not the characters. What we see, in the tension that emerges between a whimsical ethereality and an insistent rationalism, is an artist at play.

The House of the Seven Gables is the most playful of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s four well known novels. (I’ve never read his first, called Fanshawe, which disappointed him.) I find only one wrong note in it, namely, Holgrave’s shift from a radical character to a conservative one, which is explained by his love for Phoebe. Last weekend, at a family dinner party, my son asked what everyone’s favorite novel was. I said I couldn’t pick one, there were so many good ones. But now, after days of immersion in The House of the Seven Gables—and remembering our history together—it’s got to be my choice.
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Seventh Son

2011-10-10T13:49:00.002-04:00

I’m beginning to think the gut is where theme is found in the novel. Oh sure, it takes intentional thinking to hunt down “the often rich and varied underlying idea of the action” in a novel, as The Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature tells us. The idea comes across in a myriad of scenes, character descriptions and dialogues. But the hunt ends at the door of the gut, where the hunter asks politely, “So how do you feel about all this?”

The theme of José Saramago’s All the Names really is a quest or a search, not “the loneliness of human existence,” as I asserted earlier. All the scenes, and Senhor José’s accidental discoveries and internal musings, are about his search for the unknown woman. The novel discloses nothing explicit about his or anyone else’s loneliness. As I have said, he avoids actually finding her. In fact, the world of the story opposes his finding her. She commits suicide. A man he meets at the cemetery tells him people commit suicide because they don’t want to be found.

The theme of Don DeLillo’s White Noise really is the fear of death: it would be hard to miss it! White Noise shows how a theme can be expressed abstractly, as an idea, and then take on richness and variety as the novelist plays with it in characters and scenes.

The theme of Giorgio de Chirico’s Hebdomeros is not as complicated as my expression, “the futility of pondering deeply the meaning of life.” It is, I believe, simply thinking. The novel is about thinking. Every time you turn around, Hebdomeros is thinking. What he thinks about, and his thoughts “abandoning him altogether” at the end, demonstrate the working out of the theme.

Sticking with my secondary quest to reread non-realistic novels, I went back to Orson Scott Card’s Seventh Son (1987). This is a fantasy novel, the first in a trilogy called The Tales of Alvin Maker. It is set in early America during the days of the pioneers; an unusual early America, whose place names are new inventions. The volume covers the first ten years of Alvin’s life. He is the seventh-born son of a seventh son. As a result he is gifted with the hidden power of “making,” which means his life purpose is to oppose an evil force in the world called the Unmaker. This destructive force attempts again and again to kill him, always through the agency of water.

The theme of Seventh Son is hidden powers, or “knacks.” It begins with the story of Little Peggy, who by the age of five is known to be a torch, someone who can see into the futures of other people. From a distance, she protects Alvin from dangers that threaten him. Once she causes a falling ridgebeam in a church under construction—the tree from which the ridgebeam came having been weakened by water—to split in two before it hits him. You could say that the theme is “hidden powers versus the principle of evil,” but the story is more complex than that.

And here is a photo of a real, nonfictional, seventh son: http://the-hermeneutic-of-continuity.blogspot.com/2011/09/baptism-of-seventh-son.html

Hebdomeros, A Second Reading

2011-10-04T16:45:00.002-04:00

“Theme is a complex aspect of literature, one that requires very intentional thinking to discern.” So says A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature. So I am discovering, as I reread samples of short and long fiction lying around my house.

It was a special challenge to find theme in Hebdomeros, a 1929 novel by the surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico. The novel is also surrealist.

The surrealist, says The Penguin Dictionary, “allows his work to develop non-logically (rather than illogically) so that the results represent the operations of the unconscious…. The surrealists were particularly interested in the study and effects of dreams and hallucinations and also in the interpenetration of the sleeping and waking conditions on the threshold of the conscious mind, that kind of limbo where strange shapes materialize in the gulfs of the mind.”

There is no plot in Hebdomeros to tie down its relentless—and non-logical—flow of vivid imagery. Instead, there is a frequent repetition of many motifs. A few of these are rooms, sleep and waking, Hebdomeros’ father, the ruins of ancient buildings and statues, a distant mountain, and the marching of massed troops. They offer, by their repetition, a setting for the wanderings of Hebdomeros.

Who is Hebdomeros? He is a man who travels from place to place pondering the eternal question, What is life? He is sometimes accompanied by friends but is often alone. He indulges in long periods of what he calls meditation, which is really thinking. He is puzzling out something that bothers him, namely that people don’t understand the things he says. He believes he is a superior being because he thinks deeply.

Although he is a thinker, Hebdomeros’ memories, visions, descriptions of his environment and disquisitions to his friends are presented in concrete images. For example, “Hebdomeros mixed with the crowds that filled the restaurants; he still hoped for the ‘unexpected’; he questioned the people around him, read the papers, lent an attentive ear to the conversation of his neighbors at the next table.”

The unexpected arrives in the form of intuitions and a vision. Hebdomeros realizes that work is important to him. “This is your life!” he exclaims. “Go and do!” Then he has the thought, “After all, it would be really too eccentric to consider oneself superior to others without first being superior to oneself.” The apparition of a female figure called Immortality completes his transformation. “Hebdomeros, his elbow on the ruin and his chin in his hand, pondered no longer … His thoughts, in the pure breath of that voice that he had heard, yielded slowly and ended by abandoning him altogether. They surrendered to the caressing waves of unforgettable words, and on these waves they floated toward strange and unknown shores.”

Thinking as intentionally as I can, I deduce that the theme of Hebdomeros is the futility of pondering deeply the meaning of life.
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Jack Gladney's Fear of Death

2011-09-27T13:00:00.005-04:00

Don DeLillo begins White Noise with an indirect approach to theme, with Jack Gladney telling us he is chairman of the department of Hitler studies at his college. For fifteen years he has built the department around Hitler’s life and works; he is the inventor of Hitler studies in North America. Twenty-five pages later, he makes a curious speech to his assembled students and the language becomes direct. A student has asked about the plot to kill Hitler.

“All plots tend to move deathward,” replies Jack. “This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.” (26) A few pages later, the reader feels certain that the theme is the fear of death. Sure enough, the novel unfolds with one death scenario or death dialogue after another. Jack’s family watches a TV program cataloging worldwide catastrophes. The disaster of a black cloud full of toxic chemicals overtakes their town and they and other citizens must evacuate to public facilities beyond the reach of the cloud.

After Jack makes the speech, he asks himself privately, “Is this true? Why did I say it? What does it mean?” The rest of the novel dramatizes answers to his questions. The last two chapters, a double climax in two very different scenes, say: No, it is not true that all plots move deathward. Jack’s plot to kill a man results in their shooting each other but not dying; Jack’s and Babette’s little son Wilder inexplicably plots to drive his tricycle across a multi-lane expressway and, despite the mayhem he causes in traffic, feels no fear until he reaches the other side and tumbles down an embankment into a creek.

Last week, my discussion of theme brought up the question of genre in novels. I reread White Noise because it was on Bruce Sterling’s list of slipstream novels. My reference books show that, loosely speaking, the terms genre, kind, form and mode are interchangeable. Personally, if I were to speak strictly, I would say that prose fiction is a literary genre (along with the epic, poetry and drama), and that the various kinds of novels are all modes of prose fiction. Category is another useful term. Slipstream attempts to gather a number of different modes into one category; Sterling’s idea was that contemporary authors were revolting against conventions of science fiction and fantasy.

The mode of White Noise is largely expressionist. In expressionist fiction, the author “translates some basic psychological reality to actuality.” DeLillo dramatizes Jack Gladney’s dread of death, which he has experienced since he was a young man, in death-preoccupied characters and catastrophic scenes that threaten death. Although White Noise is a comic novel and has a light-hearted tone, fear never lets up for Jack. He is convinced that he will die as a result of his brief exposure to the toxic cloud when, during the evacuation, he stopped at a filling station. It may take thirty years, but it will happen.

On Theme in the Novel, 5

2011-09-23T11:08:00.002-04:00

Yesterday I skimmed three or four websites looking for ways to detect theme in fiction. I was pleased to discover that the cyber-people took me seriously in this quest! Here’s a summary:

In the first place, a writer may not know at first what his or her theme is. This was comforting to hear, since I had gotten the impression from Gardner that a novelist couldn’t go anywhere without knowing first what his theme was. It was the latest of disagreements I’ve found among writing coaches. One says you can’t get started until you have a plot in mind. But Chris Baty, the founder of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), says the opposite. He goes so far as to write a book called No Plot? No Problem! You can plunge in on the first day (November 1^st) buck naked, if you want, as long as you turn up with your writing implements. My theme coach said that the writer eventually, in the process of writing, discovers a theme, then works closely around it.

Since the theme is an idea, it is expressed abstractly; but a fictional story works best if the theme is dramatized indirectly in concrete descriptions. Some writers present their theme directly, in dialogue scenes, but this can be heavy and boring.

You can recognize a novel’s theme by the understanding you take away when you are finished with it. You could call this a “lesson,” but that’s a little tricky; generally novelists don’t try to teach something to their readers. They wish only to present their view of the human condition. So the question is, What did you learn from the novel you’ve just read about what it means to be human?

Sometimes the theme appears in the title of a novel.

The best advice I found was to look at the behavior of the characters. The protagonist and antagonist (if there is one) may show the light and dark sides of a theme. An array of characters may display various aspects of the theme. Most importantly, theme may be revealed in the protagonist’s final action with regard to his main concern.

When I reopened White Noise, I read the first chapter, then the last chapter, the second to last, and the third to last. I went back to the second chapter and continued in the usual way. I’m now halfway through the book. I had forgotten that the protagonist, fifty-one-year-old Jack Gladney, is deeply preoccupied with death. So is his wife Babette. Many of their conversations revolve around the question, “Who will die first?” In fact, Jack is seriously anxious about death; he wakes up in the middle of one night in a “death sweat.” I probably didn’t see this the first time because I was carried away by the language and form of the novel, and by the problem of figuring out what kind of novel it was. I finally concluded that it was a farce, in the dramatic sense. It was a comic novel. Every event, every dialogue, every bit of straight narration was given in a highly exaggerated form.

On Theme in the Novel, 4

2011-09-22T13:02:00.001-04:00

About an hour after I wrote my post yesterday, Paco told me I had received a very nice comment from Isabella. How I love comments! She wrote something I had just begun wondering about, as I was reading another novel: “I’m not sure if it’s fair to relate his style to his theme. Saramago uses a very similar, punctuationless, break-less style in all his books, but surely his themes vary, don’t they?”

Well, yes, they must. It’s funny how this was a thought right out of my own head. On Monday, I picked up Don DeLillo’s White Noise for a second reading, after a hiatus of three years. I chose it because it was on Bruce Sterling’s list of slipstream novels. I had forgotten how funny DeLillo is, and what a strange and unusual style he has. It’s the only novel of his that I’ve read. Last night I couldn’t help thinking that his style must be similar in his other ones, “a matter of his personality,” as Isabella might say.

I’m a little panicked about my choice of theme in the novel as a topic to write about for two weeks. It’s something like the feeling I had in graduate school when I wrote papers and my master’s thesis; I always had trouble identifying the thesis, or main idea, in my topic. But I’m sticking with the choice as part of my marathon training. Undoubtedly, when I do NaNoWriMo in November (if I do it!), I will dig a hole for myself every day and have to find a way to climb out of it.

A few words about my view of slipstream fiction. First, these are the books on Sterling’s list which I have read:

The Green Man, by Kingsley Amis

The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

Giles Goat-Boy, by John Barth (a very long time ago)

White Noise, by Don DeLillo

Grendel, by John Gardner

The Tin Drum, by Gunter Grass (also a very long time ago)

Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban

Midnight’s Children, by Salmon Rushdie

The Laughing Sutra, by Mark Salzman, and

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Taking these novels as a starting point, I’ll venture a definition of my own. I remember Midnight’s Children as realistic, but agree that the others display what Sterling calls a “peculiar aggression against ‘reality’.” He says hardcore slipstream implies that nothing we know makes a lot of sense and has “unique darker elements.” My take is that the novels play with reality, sometimes darkly (does there have to be a “hardcore slipstream”?) and sometimes with a great deal of sunshine, as in The Laughing Sutra.

But I’m running out of space now. What is your experience of realism and non-realism in novels? Do you like one approach better than the other?

On Theme in the Novel, 3

2011-09-21T20:32:00.001-04:00

Okay, I think I’ve got it. The central idea of All the Names isn’t the quest, which I mentioned on Monday. Quest is the type of plot that structures the novel. A clerk, looking for the record of a famous person, comes upon that of an unknown woman and goes on a quest to find her.

As for me, I am still on a quest to find the theme. Today I think it’s the loneliness of human existence. Let me tell you how I arrived at this conclusion.

There is a website called Slipstream Quarterly, whose offerings are slim but which, to my delight, includes a short autobiography of José Saramago. Chronicling his writing career, he mentions the narrative style he adopted for his novels, a style which is so unique that it took me a couple of long paragraphs in All the Names to figure out what he was doing. The best way to describe it is to give an example:

What’s wrong with you, he asked, I’ve got a cold, said Senhor José, A cold has never been a reason not to come to work, I’ve got a fever, How do you know you’ve got a fever, I used a thermometer, What are you, a few degrees above normal, No sir, my temperature’s well over 100, You never get a fever like that with an ordinary cold, Then maybe I’ve got flu, Or pneumonia….

Saramago can go like this for a page, with no punctuation marks other than commas and no paragraph breaks. If you’re like me and like to keep track of who is speaking, it’s disconcerting. Sometimes he uses the device when Senhor José is talking to himself, which he does a good deal of the time. Twice, Senhor José lies on his bed and, pondering the complications arising from his search for the unknown woman, strikes up a conversation with the ceiling. The ceiling, as befits its lofty position, displays a wise and calm perspective.

I was looking in The Art of Fiction, by John Gardner, for more understanding of theme when I came upon the statement: “The writer’s choice of theme … will dictate his selection and organization of details, his style, and so forth.” And I remembered All the Names. Ah, I thought to myself, this is the story of a lonely man.

Ironically, Senhor José doesn’t think of himself as lonely. The unknown woman is a thirty-six-year-old divorcee, but he refuses to imagine what this might mean for him. A suggestion that he look her up in the phone book and call her horrifies his clerkly sensibilities. It is data that he is seeking, not a face-to-face encounter. He panics at the thought, What will I do if I find her.

My guess is that the theme of All the Names is the loneliness of human existence. No character in the novel is shown to have a satisfying relationship with someone else, or even to long for one. Isn’t that odd?

Theme Is What I Mean

2011-09-20T13:16:00.001-04:00

Our topic is theme in the novel: the central idea of a novel. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory says that a work’s theme can be stated directly or indirectly. My guess is that novelists rarely state their themes directly, which must be why I have a hard time picking them out. Yesterday I said the idea of a quest is what drove José Saramago’s All the Names. Now I’m not so sure.

In How to Read Novels Like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster has a chapter entitled, “What’s the Big Idea—or Even the Small One?” He points out that ideas in a novel can’t take the place of story. “The novels that last, and have something to say, capture us with narrative, then hit us with ideas.” That said, it’s perfectly legitimate for a novel to ask questions about life’s meaning. On one page, Foster gives several examples of ideas that have been dramatized in novels: dignity, the right to live freely and express oneself, equal treatment by one’s fellow creatures, self-determination, the right to make one’s own mistakes, social justice, sanity and madness. He points out that Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, argues for “unity in existence.” The protagonist records aspects of her life in four differently colored notebooks. In the end, a fifth, gold-colored notebook defeats her efforts at compartmentalization.

So what is the theme of All the Names? I think it’s what I stumbled on yesterday, that, compelling as the lives of famous people are, ordinary people also have existence. Senhor José’s search for the unknown woman is the subject of the novel; the life of an ordinary man is its theme. This is not just an idea, says Foster, it is a big idea, the idea that Miguel de Cervantes introduced with Don Quixote. Until this groundbreaking novel appeared, literary works were highly elitist, concerned solely with famous or heroic characters. In Shakespeare, people like Senhor José are an “entirely expendable class whose stage time is counted in seconds.”

Yesterday I also mentioned slipstream as a genre in fiction. Googling helped me toward a better understanding. The word slipstream entered the world of literary jargon in 1989 with an article by Bruce Sterling, who was commenting on the departures writers were making from classic science fiction and fantasy. Slipstream is not exactly a genre; it is more a revised attitude toward the representation of reality in fiction.

Sterling writes: “It seems to me that the heart of slipstream is an attitude of peculiar aggression against ‘reality.’ [Slipstream works] are fantasies of a kind, but not fantasies which are ‘futuristic’ or ‘beyond the fields we know.’ These books tend to sarcastically tear at the structure of ‘everyday life.’ Some such books, the most ‘mainstream’ ones, are non-realistic literary fictions which avoid or ignore SF genre conventions. But hard-core slipstream has unique darker elements. Quite commonly these works don’t make a lot of common sense, and what’s more they often somehow imply that nothing we know makes ‘a lot of sense’ and perhaps even that ‘nothing ever could.’”

I’ll come back to theme and slipstream tomorrow.

What's the Big Idea?

2011-09-19T09:42:00.004-04:00

Unless there is a tornado and the roof is torn off my house, leaving my computer exposed to the elements and covered with irremediable dust and debris, in November I’m going to join NaNoWriMo. I was this foolish once before, in 2005, and it was a lot of fun. I completed a 50,000+-word novel which turned out to be a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s a marathon. In November I’ll be running a marathon. I need training and that’s what these next six weeks are for. What I’d like to do is, for two weeks at a time, keep my blog posts on one topic. The topic I propose for the first two weeks is theme, or idea. What is the main theme in novels I’ve read over the past three years?

On Saturday I finished reading José Saramago’s All the Names (1997). It’s the story of a man, Senhor José, a clerk in the Central Registry of Births and Deaths, which is a bureau in the city where he lives. The novel is somewhat Kafkaesque or Borgesian. I have a feeling it might belong to the fiction genre called slipstream; but I need to learn more about this before I say more. What I mean to say is that it is a kind of fantasy, but its tone and its manner, its descriptions, belong to mainstream fiction. There really are bureaus in our society that record everyone’s births, marriages, divorces and deaths; but none have been around since antiquity, and none operate with the precision and singlemindedness of the Central Registry. That’s all it does.

Anyway, Senhor José is a lowly clerk in the Central Registry, a nobody whom his coworkers and the Registrar barely take notice of when he arrives for work in the morning. He is unmarried and lives in a little house that has a connecting door to the Central Registry. He amuses himself in off hours with collecting newspaper and magazine clippings of famous people. The first complication in the plot arises when he opens the connecting door one night after hours to enter the Central Registry and look for the records of five of his famous people. According to custom, the connecting door has never been used. By opening it, Senhor José enters a forbidden world.

The main idea of the novel arises after Senhor José has copied down the data from the five cards and discovers another card stuck to the back of one of them. It is not the record of a famous person; it is the record of an unknown woman. Senhor José has already turned his familiar world upside down by entering the Central Registry through the connecting door; now he will do something completely out of character for him as an individual and for people like clerks of the Central Registry. It will suddenly dawn on him that unknown, ordinary people like himself also have existence. He will go in search of the unknown woman. He wants to find out who she is, to learn some details of her life beyond what is on the card, the record of her dates of birth, marriage and divorce. This search is what drives Senhor José’s thoughts and behavior until the end of the book. The idea of a quest is what drives the book itself.
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Of Montaigne

2011-09-14T10:14:00.002-04:00

Currently, I’m reading Michel de Montaigne’s essay, “Of Books.” For the fourth or fifth time in three days. It’s not long, about eleven pages in my Philip Lopate anthology; but at first it was hard going. After all, Montaigne is an old guy; he lived in sixteenth-century France—and my eye was hurting because I had poked myself with a hydrangea twig while gardening, and it was way late in the day.

Still, the essay intrigued me, especially the ending; it suggested an answer to the question I’d had when I opened Lopate, which was about how I ought to write about books. Montaigne's suggestion went like this: “To compensate a little for the treachery and weakness of my memory, so extreme that it has happened to me more than once to pick up again, as recent and unknown to me, books which I had read carefully a few years before and scribbled over with my notes, I have adopted the habit for some time now of adding at the end of each book … the time I finished reading it and the judgment I have derived of it as a whole, so that this may represent to me at least the sense and general idea I had conceived of the author in reading it.” He closed the essay with three examples of his annotations.

It was helpful; I was growing bored with writing summaries of books. What could a book teach me about its author? Certainly, my inability to imagine Carlos Castaneda had been frustrating when I read The Teachings of Don Juan. (See my last post.)

When I read “Of Books” a second time, the language suddenly flowed. Now my tasks were to track the author’s meandering thoughts and to absorb the names he dropped, none of which had I read, except a paragraph from Pliny. I read it again, and then again, scribbling over it with my notes. I would be a stone if, after this, I did not come away with a “sense and general idea” of Michel de Montaigne.

For he tells much, in a short space, about the way he thinks, how he writes, and why he reads what he does. He writes about his “fancies,” the things that interest him; and he says: “If I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness.” He reads not for the sake of learning but to give himself pleasure “by honest amusement.” Or he endeavors to mingle “a little more profit with the pleasure” by finding instruction in “how to die well and to live well.” In Plutarch and Seneca, he says, “I learn to arrange my humors and my ways.” When he writes, he attempts to give knowledge of himself; when he reads, he demands from authors knowledge of themselves. He admires Sallust, the classical historian. In fact, he reads him “with a little more reverence and respect than one reads human works.” But he can’t help adding: “I think the only fault that can be found in him is that he has been too sparing in speaking of himself.”

This is how Montaigne writes about books: He makes notes in them as he reads. Later, he tries his thoughts in an essay and divides books into two categories, entertainments and moral guides. In the second category, he wants to know the character of the author, to know what example he gives of a well lived life.

Montaigne’s desire was “only to become wiser.” Whether I shall follow his way of wisdom in my reading and writing is something I will have to ponder.

A Cult Classic

2011-09-08T18:48:00.003-04:00

One of my finds at the Borders close-out sale was The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1969). I first read this book thirty years ago and went on to devour the next five books by Carlos Castaneda, all of them variations on Castaneda’s apprenticeship with the old Mexican Indian sorcerer Juan Matus. My reading this time baffled me as much as it did the first time. I think I know why, and why, in those days, I kept reading, unable to decide whether to believe Castaneda or not. I think he tells the truth about his experiences with don Juan, but there is something not genuine, not quite truthful, about his tale. I believe this is because he reveals so little about himself as a man who also lives in the real world.

The book is about how, through psychotropic drugs and various rituals, don Juan introduces Castaneda to an alternate reality, a reality for which there is no consensus in the modern, technologically oriented, left-brain-driven world. Castaneda is a graduate student in anthropology who sees material for a fascinating study. As for don Juan, why he takes him on is a mystery because, from the beginning, Castaneda fails to demonstrate the commitment that don Juan requires of an apprentice. The old Indian claims, after observing him in a trance state, that an aspect of the alternate reality has “chosen” him, but we’re not told why or how this overrides the requirement of commitment. In the end, Castaneda fails to complete the apprenticeship.

Indeed, we are told far too little about Castaneda's multiple experiences of a sorcerer’s reality. He engages us in them with such colorful language that for a while we think we are really seeing something; eventually we realize we have no idea why they are important. He never reflects on what he is going through; he seems to have no interest in the personal meaning of what happens to him or in what his association with don Juan might mean for his future.

Castaneda's lack of imagination and curiosity about these things apparently derives from his academic goals as an anthropologist. He is a scientist and scientists report objective facts, not meaning and motivation. The first part of The Teachings is a report on his subjective experiences but, as I have indicated, he fails to let us see him as a person. The second part is a long “structural analysis,” in which he attempts to objectify the teachings and his apprenticeship. Unfortunately, it comes across as amateurish. Maybe he did make it all up.

Most disappointingly, the “way of knowledge” promised in the subtitle of The Teachings of Don Juan never comes to light. What kind of knowledge is it? What value does it have for the sorcerer? Of what value is the power don Juan speaks of? Is it only for destroying enemies in an alternate reality? Is sorcery evil? Do Carlos Castaneda’s adventures in the Sonoran desert have any implications for people in the ordinary world? Is Castaneda changed by them, or does he just go on to write more best-selling books? I may reread the later books some day; they’re fascinating adventure stories. But I can’t help having the queasy feeling that their object is nothing more than mystification.

An Old Man's Strange Pronouncement

2011-08-22T08:37:00.001-04:00

The day after the training session with the new volunteers, I felt tired. The meeting had been the culmination of efforts spread over three or four months. I lay down on the couch and distracted myself by imagining 75 Short Masterpieces as a treasure chest heaped with stories instead of rubies, pearls and gold. In one of these, “The Riddle” by Walter de la Mare, seven children go to live with their grandmother. She is kindly and delighted to have them but warns them not to play in the spare bedroom, where there is an old oak chest. Naturally, the children’s curiosity gets the better of them and one by one, or sometimes two at a time, they climb into the chest to play. And they close the lid, and they disappear.

In my reverie of 75 Short Masterpieces, the chest turned into a big box; I could climb into it and command it to take me to the locations and eras of any of the stories. I would be a time traveler. Even the newest of the stories was fifty-five years old. The reverie was colored by a memory of watching my children play in two large packing boxes when our family, in 1978, moved to England. After their play, I dreamt I was one of them, sitting in a box and sailing through the night sky. We swung close to the ground on one leg of our journey, gliding past a castle and gazing through tall windows at servants preparing a long table for a banquet.

In my present life, lying on the couch, I slipped into another dream, but only for a second. In this one an old man said, “We all feel that, when you’re earthly, you perish.” The old man was taller than I; he bent forward slightly to speak to me. I woke up suddenly with his startling declaration in my mind. Holding onto it, I tried to find a connection with my thoughts about the treasure chest. The only thing I had was a sense that the old man was summing up the opinions of the stories, as if they were people, and as if they, after consulting with one another, had elected him their spokesman.

Certainly, stories are immortal. Michael McLaverty, the Northern Irish author of the most recent one, “The Wild Duck’s Nest,” died in 1992; his poignant story lives on.

But, since dreams speak to us on more than one level, I was curious about what this one meant outside of my love of stories. My rickety old copy of Tom Chetwynd’s Dictionary for Dreamers said the old man was the archetype of my animus. The animus “represents the masculine features in a woman’s character which, integrated properly, will give her greater discernment, self-knowledge, and ability to reflect and deliberate.” It must also give her greater ability to organize and conduct a meeting, for the training session went well. If this dream reflected my character accurately, my animus was in pretty good shape. But, besides his stating the obvious, I still didn’t know why he said what he did.

What Makes a Story a Story?

2011-08-15T15:17:00.000-04:00

In February I started rifling through old notebooks and computer files for writings that looked like stories. By the end of June I had put together a book-length (60,000 words or so) collection of almost sixty pieces, ranging from 240 to 2,300 words. About a third of these were fiction; the rest were scraps of memoir. A few dreamscapes found their way into each genre.

Once I had the collection, it occurred to me to look for markets. This, in turn—it’s wonderful how these things work—sharpened my efforts to polish the pieces. I had to ask myself, what is the one thing that makes this story or essay work, or will do so if it doesn’t work?

When I discovered that very short pieces were my métier, I went back to Philip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay and my editions of short short stories (sometimes called sudden or flash fiction). I also bought 75 Short Masterpieces, ed. Roger B. Goodman (1961). I began reading, trying to figure out what made these very good stories and essays work. In One Year to a Writing Life, Susan Tiberghien says that creative nonfiction, as well as fiction, must have a “narrative tug.” Even in a factual story, the reader wants to know: What happened next? How did it all turn out?

Tiberghien also says that, in a story, something happens to someone. And, in a story, an incident arouses a strong need or desire in the main character. The story is about the character’s attempt to fulfill this need or desire. I dove into 75 Short Masterpieces to try to understand what she was talking about.

What an excellent school for fiction-writers a quick succession of the best short shorts is! I saw very soon that “something happens to someone” can mean many things. Also, on the second reading, the moment of the “happening” (in a short short at least) clearly appears in one or two delicious sentences. Here are two examples:

In “The Wild Duck’s Nest” by Michael McLaverty (1955), Colm is plunged into anguish when he picks up a wild duck’s egg and knows right away he shouldn’t have done so. The story is about his reassuring himself that the mother hasn’t forsaken the nest.

In “Germans at Meat” by Katherine Mansfield (1926), an Englishwoman dining in Germany is put on the spot regarding English eating habits: “All eyes were suddenly turned upon me. I felt I was bearing the burden of the nation’s preposterous breakfast.” The story proceeds as a satiric description of the German diners’ generous portions.

Now I’m wondering if the need for a “narrative tug” occurs in real life. For instance, this week I will facilitate a meeting of new volunteers at church. What is the one thing I should emphasize so that the “story” we are telling each other makes sense?

Wretched Excess

2011-08-08T11:22:00.002-04:00

The bright yellow signs hanging from the ceiling at the Annapolis Mall Borders say: “Everything must go!” “Up to 50% Off!” I’ve been there three times in the past three weeks. Oh, the greed, the wretched excess! Here’s my haul:

Upstreet. This is a literary magazine, published yearly. I bought it as part of a project I’m excited about, researching markets for short short fiction and nonfiction I wrote between 1993 and 2009 (not counting the blog). One piece has gone to The Sun (wish me luck!). When Upstreet’s reading period opens in September, I plan to submit another. It’s an almost surreal account of a migraine headache.

Fiction 2011, a special issue of The Atlantic. Wonderful stories by contemporary writers (good beach reading, week before last). What I liked best was the essay “Don’t Write What You Know,” by Bret Anthony Johnston. Johnston emphasizes the need for the writer of fiction to transcend his or her personal story. Not to ignore it, but to let it fall away like scaffolding as the invented, fictional world comes alive.

Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut (1969). A novel that often comes up in my readings of book reviews, etc. It’s apparently controversial, has even been banned, after complaints by religious and political conservatives, from school libraries. Recently I read Player Piano, which indicated to me that Vonnegut was a fundamentally moral human being and author. I’m curious to see what all the fuss is about.

One Year to a Writing Life: Twelve Lessons to Deepen Every Writer’s Art and Craft, by Susan M. Tiberghien (2007). It may sound histrionic, but this book saved my life. When I began scouring and reorganizing computer files in March, pulling out short pieces, I was afraid my writing life was over. I was reduced to collecting and cleaning up. Wrong! Tiberghien breaks her lessons down into genres: journal writing, personal essays, short stories, dreams and writing, etc. This was exactly what I needed, along with marvelous techniques for jolting the imagination.

In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis, by Karen Armstrong (1996). Armstrong articulates thoughts I’ve had about reading the scriptures, saying they “demand an imaginative effort that can sometimes be as perplexing and painful as Jacob’s wrestling match.” Once a Catholic nun and now a heterodox religionist, Armstrong probably irritates believers. But on the question of how to read the Book of Genesis, she makes sense to me, a practicing Catholic.

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, an edited collection of nonfiction by Flannery O’Connor (1969). What a solid understanding O’Connor had of her profession! “The writer whose vocation is fiction,” she says, “sees his obligation as being to the truth of what can happen in life, and not to the reader—not to the reader’s taste, not to the reader’s happiness, not to even the reader’s morals.” I hope I can fulfill this obligation.

A Long Fatal Love Chase

2011-02-17T16:37:00.001-05:00

A Long Fatal Love Chase, by Louisa May Alcott (1866).

Rosamond Vivian lives on a rugged island off the coast of England with her grandfather, a “weird, withered old man who [is] her sole companion” (2). A stranger appears, a “tall, powerful” man named Phillip Tempest who, when he laughs, shows “a glitter of white teeth under a drooping black mustache” (3). As he and Rosamond chat, a storm arises, and the light in the dusky hall of the gloomy old house is fitful. Standing near a portrait of Mephistopheles, “the newcomer’s face suddenly [appears] fiery-eyed and menacing.” Rosamond can’t help but exclaim, “Why, you are the very image of Meph—“ (5). As for Tempest, he sees a “graceful girlish figure with pale, passionate face and dark eyes full of sorrow, pride and resolution” (3). He wins her from her grandfather in a card game and whisks her away on his yacht, the Circe.

For pages and pages I wished I had placed this book back on the shelf at Borders, as soon as I’d heard Rosamond say: “I often feel as if I’d gladly sell my soul to Satan for a year of freedom” (1). But I was eager to read American fiction from the 1860s and, after all, when I was young and read Louisa May Alcott, I was enthralled. The story outran my distaste for its florid style of narration. “Like a bird held by the terrible fascination of a serpent’s eye” (185), I kept reading to see how it would turn out.

Rosamond and Phillip marry and for a year live an idyllic Mediterranean life. Then his crimes catch up with him. Lito, his cabin-boy, learns that he is actually Tempest’s son, and that he has a mother who, discovering he has not died, wants him back. He disappears and Rosamond fears that Phillip has had him killed. Distraught, she eavesdrops on a conversation in which she learns that her marriage is a sham; Lito’s mother has never granted a divorce to Tempest. She runs away and the chase begins, taking the reader to Paris, to Amiens, to Wiesbaden…. Rosamond’s love turns to hatred; Phillip’s will to power intensifies each time she gives him the slip. The chase ends in tragedy.

As a girl, my mother loved the strong, independent figure of Jo Marsh in the stories that begin with Little Women. She would have liked Rosamond Vivian, as well as three other women characters, including the first Mrs. Tempest, who play minor roles in A Long Fatal Love Chase. Jo grows up and marries happily, but Rosamond, after she runs away, and the three other women live without men. They are intelligent, resourceful, and have strong wills. Not once does Alcott describe them as fragile or delicate, qualities that Oliver Wendell Holmes in Elsie Venner, and Nathaniel Hawthorne in many of his works, ascribe to their younger female characters. Rosamond, firm, resolute and defiant as she is, however, is stereotypical in other ways. No matter how severe her trials, she is always beautiful. Further, her status as an innocent is staunchly defended by Father Ignatius, a priest who does his best to guard her. (He also falls in love with her, and she with him, but remains true to his vow of celibacy, looking forward to when they can acknowledge their love in heaven.)

The lesson for me, once again, is to be patient with style. Was it a good story? Yes, it was a ripping good yarn. It never did become my cup of tea, but I’m glad I read it.

"Sympathy" and Elsie Venner

2011-02-05T16:53:00.001-05:00

If you had asked me last week what I thought sympathy was, I would have said, “sorrow, sometimes including an expression of sorrow, for another’s misfortune.” A few years ago I read The Scarlet Letter (1850), where Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about sympathy in an unusual way. I didn’t understand. I’d always been curious about his sources, and I began to wonder how he had acquired his conception of sympathy.

It turns out that in 1759 Adam Smith, who is best known for The Wealth of Nations, wrote an earlier book called The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He considered it his greatest work. As summarized in a review of a recent biography, it “is Smith’s attempt to ‘develop a coherent and plausible account of the processes by which we learn the principles of morality from the experience of common life.’ At its heart lies the fundamental importance of sympathy, of the ethical power of the imagination. In essence, we can through our imaginations identify with the suffering or joy of others.”

Hawthorne, and Oliver Wendell Holmes in Elsie Venner (1861), concern themselves with the moral life and the human capacity for sympathy. Until I see something different, I believe this is due to Adam Smith’s influence. But they both take the artistic liberty of disconnecting the themes. It’s just so much more interesting, they seem to say, if you develop each theme separately.

As far as sympathy is concerned, the way they use the word, it seems to be rooted in nature, including human nature, or intuition with a component of feelings, rather than in imagination. Here are a few excerpts that demonstrate Holmes’ understanding:

“The light of those beautiful eyes was like the lustre of ice,” thinks schoolmaster Bernard Langdon, studying Elsie as she reads a book; “in all her features there was nothing of that human warmth which shows that sympathy has reached the soul beneath the mask of flesh it wears. The look was that of remoteness, of utter isolation” (183-184).

Elsie’s father, Dudley Venner, meets her teacher, Helen Darley, at Mrs. Rowens’ tea-party. “Each saw the other had been in long conflict with some trial; for their voices were low and tender, as patiently borne sorrow and humbly uttered prayers make every human voice. Through these tones, more than by what they said, they came into natural sympathetic relations with each other” (306-307).

At the party, Helen felt “the stirring of deep, confused sympathies with this suffering father” (308).

Elsie develops a crush on Bernard Langdon: “She could be secret and cunning in working out any of her dangerous impulses, but she did not know how to mask the unwonted feeling which fixed her eyes and her thoughts upon the only person who had ever reached the spring of her hidden sympathies” (393).

Old Sophy shows Elsie a half of an old Spanish silver coin as a way of explaining that she loved a man once. “Elsie looked her in the face, but did not answer in words. What strange intelligence was that which passed between them through the diamond eyes and the little beady black ones? …This was the nearest approach to sympathetic relations that Elsie ever had: a kind of dumb intercourse of feeling, such as one sees in the eyes of brute mothers looking on their young” (419).

Finally, Helen Darley is bewildered when Dudley Venner tells her that he has loved her from the moment they first met. “Why, she had thought he was grateful to her as a friend of his daughter; she had even pleased herself with the feeling that he liked her, in her humble place, as a woman of some cultivation and many sympathetic points of relation with himself; but that he loved her … it was all a surprise, a confusion, a kind of fear not wholly fearful” (468-469).

Sympathy that “reaches the soul beneath the mask of flesh.” The idea that one can “come into natural sympathetic relations” with another. The way “deep, confused sympathies” with someone can be stirred. That one’s “hidden sympathies” are like an internal spring or fountain. That one can have “sympathetic points of relation” with another.

Holmes never precisely describes sympathy, but he clearly thinks it’s important. It’s not the same thing as love, although it may accompany love; it’s an affinity on the level of the soul. It’s a psychological relation or harmony between two persons, or on the part of one person towards another, such that both, or the one, have a sameness of feeling, at least about certain matters. It can be pity or compassion, but it doesn’t have to be.

Medicine and Elsie Venner

2011-02-03T18:15:00.004-05:00

Since Oliver Wendell Holmes was a physician, I wondered to what extent Elsie Venner revealed nineteenth-century ideas of health and medicine. The book is a romance, as the author terms it, not a medical text, and so every insight is couched in a scene, a character’s words and thoughts, or the stream of narrative.

Old Dr. Kittredge unifies the story thematically. A figure of wisdom, he interacts with almost every other major character. He is introduced by a description of what people think when they see his carriage turn in at someone’s gate:

“Oh, that narrow sulky! What hopes, what fears, what comfort, what anguish, what despair, in the roll of its coming or its parting wheels! In the spring, when the old people get the coughs which give them a few shakes and their lives drop in pieces like the ashes of a burned thread which have kept the threadlike shape until they were stirred,—in the hot summer noons, when the strong man comes in from the fields, like the son of the Shunamite, crying, ‘My head, my head,’—in the dying autumn days, when youth and maiden lie fever-stricken in many a household, still-faced, dull-eyed, dark-flushed, dry-lipped, low-muttering in their daylight dreams, their fingers moving singly like those of slumbering harpers,—in the dead winter, when the white plague of the North has caged its wasted victims, shuddering as they think of the frozen soil which must be quarried like rock to receive them” (140).

Coughs and shakes, headache, fevers, the wasting of the body; each season of life brings its ills.

Bernard Langdon, a student doctor who is serving temporarily as the town’s schoolmaster, asks the old Doctor if he has “an extensive collection of medical works.” He replies, “I’ll tell you, Mr. Langdon, when a man that’s once started right lives among sick folks for five-and-thirty years, as I’ve done, if he hasn’t got a library of five-and-thirty volumes bound up in his head at the end of that time, he’d better stop driving round and sell his horse and sulky” (210).

About halfway through the book, the old Doctor and one of the Protestant ministers in town, the Reverend Doctor Honeygood, engage in friendly debate about the difference between physicians and theologians. Dr. Kittredge says: “We don’t fight with a patient because he can’t take magnesia or opium; but you are all the time quarrelling over your beliefs, as if belief did not depend very much on race and constitution, to say nothing of early training” (316). His remark amplifies the theme of “transmitted tendencies” which I pointed out in my last post. Dr. Kittredge prefers a compassionate approach to those who suffer, in opposition to what he sees as Protestantism’s too quick damning of them.

Further, he believes that doctors always see the Creator “trying to help his creatures out of their troubles. A man no sooner gets a cut, than the Great Physician, whose agency we often call Nature, goes to work, first to stop the blood, and then to heal the wound, and then to make the scar as small as possible. If a man’s pain exceeds a certain amount, he faints, and so gets relief. If it lasts too long, habit comes in to make it tolerable. If it is altogether too bad, he dies. That is the best thing to be done under the circumstances” (320).

He gives the example of “some of the little folks we watch grow up to be young women, and occasionally one of them gets nervous, what we call hysterical, and then that girl will begin to play all sorts of pranks … so that she might seem to a minister a good example of total depravity. We don’t see her in that light. We give her iron and valerian, and get her on horseback, if we can, and so expect to make her will come all right again” (322).

Dr. Kittredge sees the health of the will as important. The excerpt also gives a brief look at a particularly feminine affliction, in the nineteenth-century scheme: nervous hysteria.

Other possible complaints appear in a scene with the younger Protestant minister, the Reverend Mr. Fairweather. Dr. Kittredge “received his visitor very pleasantly, expecting, as a matter of course, that he would begin with some new grievance, dyspeptic, neuralgic, bronchitic, or other” (402).

Toward the end, a mysterious change takes place in Elsie, which appears to be constitutional and to “make her will come all right again.” She has apparently overcome the effects of the rattlesnake bite to her mother, which had caused her “to have her blood changed in her” before she was born (434). She experiences a need for love, especially from Bernard Langdon, and grace, through the prayers of her congregation. But circumstances deny her these things and she becomes ill. The old Doctor explains to Silas Peckham, who runs the Apollinean Institute: “A mild feverish attack, I should call it in anybody else; but she has a peculiar constitution, and I never feel so safe about her as I should about most people” (429).

Weeks pass and the doctor begins “to look graver, in spite of himself. The fever, if such it was, went gently forward, wasting the young girl’s powers of resistance from day to day” (438). A group of schoolgirls brings Elsie a basket of flowers; but these include a plant which, when she sees it, throws her into a “curdling terror.” She “fell back senseless.” Her nurse, Helen Darley, tries to “rouse her with hartshorn” (440), with only partial success. The incident is called an “unexplained paroxysm” (441).

Soon afterwards she requests a visit from her minister. This leads to indirect discourse from Dr. Kittredge: “The old Doctor knew by sad experience that dreadful mistake against which all medical practitioners should be warned. His experience may well be a guide for others. Do not overlook the desire for spiritual advice and consolation which patients sometimes feel…. As a part of medical treatment, it is the physician’s business to detect the hidden longing for the food of the soul, as much as for any form of bodily nourishment” (449-450).

Tender nursing, medical treatment and spiritual intervention are unable to keep Elsie from wasting away. She dies soon after her seventeenth birthday, which is “the best thing” in some circumstances (320).

It seems to me a humble view of medicine.

Elsie Venner and Moral Poisoning

2011-02-01T12:12:00.001-05:00

Elsie Venner, A Romance of Destiny, by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1861)

Let’s begin by looking at the opening of “Lamia,” a narrative poem in two parts by John Keats (1795-1821):

“Upon a time, before the faery broods

Drove Nymph and Satyr from the prosperous woods,

Before King Oberon’s bright diadem,

Sceptre, and mantle, clasp’d with dewy gem,

Frighted away the Dryads and the Fauns

From rushes green, and brakes, and cowslip’d lawns,

The ever-smitten Hermes empty left

His golden throne, bent warm on amorous theft:

……

“The God, dove-footed, glided silently

Round bush and tree, soft-brushing, in his speed,

The taller grasses and full-flowering weed,

Until he found a palpitating snake,

Bright, and cirque-couchant in a dusky brake.”

The poem turns out to be about the palpitating snake, not Hermes. The snake, some kind of fabulous creature like nymphs and dryads, convinces Hermes to transform her into a woman in exchange for revealing to him the nymph with whom he is smitten. She calls herself Lamia. In her dream-forays into the human world, she has espied a fair youth in Corinth and fallen in love with him. She figures she has a better chance for his affections if she accosts him as a woman. Let’s just say the project doesn’t turn out well for the young Corinthian.

It was something in the text of Elsie Venner, or in a commentary, that led me to “Lamia.” Elsie Venner is a girl of sixteen who has a strange, snake-like quality, which includes a coldness of temperament that keeps her from forming attachments except with the old Negro maid, Sophy, who has taken care of her since birth. Her bewildered, widowed father doesn’t know what to do with her. She is allowed to follow her whims and takes it into her head to attend a nearby girls’ school, the Apollinean Institute, but keeps herself apart from the other girls. Her greatest pleasure is wandering in the forests on the mountain behind her New England mansion, sometimes at night. She has the ability to charm the rattlesnakes that dwell in a rock cavern high on the mountainside.

I picked up Elsie Venner with a question in mind: What can this book tell me about Americans in the 1850s and 60s? Doing genealogy, I wanted to know something about my great great grandparents, Michel and Margret Becker, who emigrated from the German state of Hesse Darmstadt, as it was called before German unification, to Quincy, Illinois. Would a novel tell me what people were thinking about in those days?

My first problem was literary, not historical. What was a lamia? The dictionary says that the Indo-European base of the word lamia has the meaning “with gaping mouth.” In English, a lamia is (1) a figure from classical mythology, any of a class of monsters, half woman and half serpent, supposed to lure people, especially children, in order to suck their blood; or (2) a vampire; a female demon; a sorceress.

So why did Holmes thread a Gothic theme—the snake-like Elsie; the dark old mansion; a portion of the mountain seeming dangerously to overhang the mansion; a dark and stormy night—through a story that otherwise alternates between light romance and earnest rationalism? Why did he fashion his main character after the image of a mythological female monster, while presenting her as thoroughly human?

It seems a lamia was the best way he could think of to talk about the problem of evil. A physician in his working life (and an influential medical reformer, by the way), Holmes wasn’t after writing a Gothic romance. Although he claimed in his first Preface to have written an entertainment, the book suggests that he was preoccupied with understanding “the force of transmitted tendencies” (75), a preoccupation which may have resulted from his medical practice. His most interesting and best developed character is old Doctor Kittredge, the local physician who knows everybody. Elsie Venner is, among other things, a novel of ideas, with Holmes’ ideas emerging in the wise old doctor’s conversations with the Reverend Doctor Honeygood. The jovial minister ponders the same problem: “There were mysteries in human nature,” he thinks, “which pointed to some tremendous perversion of its tendencies—to some profound, radical view of moral constitution, native or transmitted, as you will have it, but positive, at any rate, as the leprosy, breaking out in the blood of races, guard them ever so carefully” (236). Tendencies could be transmitted as well, for example, through alcoholism, poverty or snake-bite. Could individuals be held responsible for immoral behavior—Elsie had once nearly murdered a governess she didn’t like—that arose from a “transmitted tendency”?

Holmes explains it best himself, in a Second Preface: “The real aim of the story was to test the doctrine of ‘original sin’ and human responsibility for the disordered volition coming under that technical denomination. Was Elsie Venner, poisoned by the venom of a crotalus before she was born, morally responsible for the ‘volitional’ aberrations, which translated into acts become what is known as sin, and, it may be, what is punished as crime? If, on presentation of the evidence, she becomes by the verdict of the human conscience a proper object of divine pity and not of divine wrath, as a subject of moral poisoning, wherein lies the difference between her position at the bar of judgment, human or divine, and that of the unfortunate victim who received a moral poison from a remote ancestor before he drew his first breath? … “My poor heroine found her origin, not in fable or romance, but in a physiological conception fertilized by a theological dogma” (ix-x).

It would only be through an act of imagination that I could tie any of this to my ancestors’ way of thinking. For instance, not only would they, five years after arriving in America, still be thinking like Germans; they were working-class people. My great great grandfather was a farmer in Germany, a shoemaker at the time of the 1860 federal census, and a brewery laborer after the Civil War. I have no idea whether working-class Germans in that era were concerned with the problem of the “moral principle” (236) in the same way that intellectual, educated Americans might have been. There were, however, other, more useful pointers. Maybe they’ll turn up in a future post.

Oliver Wendell Holmes. Wasn’t he a Supreme Court justice? No, says Wikipedia; that was the author’s son, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

The Good Shepherd, by Thomas Fleming

2010-08-30T12:19:00.004-04:00

The Good Shepherd, a novel by Thomas Fleming (1974)

Since I was traveling last May when I read this novel, I took no notes and made no marks in the book except for turning down the corners of a couple of pages and leaving two or three little Post-its. Fortunately, these were enough to bring the story back so that I could write something down. I do remember thinking I wouldn’t be able to finish the novel because of the sour character who appears on p. 7: “The pale freckled face of Father Dennis McLaughlin, made even paler by the round white collar beneath it, responded with a nod.” He really made me feel bad! But the story pulled me in. I want to put down some impressions because it was one of the spurs to my decision for a summer of Catholic fiction.

Dennis McLaughlin is a young priest who has resigned from the Jesuits, although he had been highly esteemed by the order as one of its “most promising young intellectuals” (18). He felt he “was becoming a paper-mâché priest, withered scraps of questionable wisdom fluttering in his windy emptiness” (18). Now things are worse: he is tormented by lust. A letter from a Jesuit friend named Goggins doesn’t help much. Goggins, another intellectual, thinks the Church needs to be turned upside down. He hopes for the writing of a new Gospel and the “degodification of Jesus” (21). But he is a friend and hopes McLaughlin can pull out of his funk: “What we need above all is a writer with the power and grace of Teilhard de Chardin and a lot more courage – to wit, you” (22). I Post-itted that last sentence as a reminder to myself to try again The Phenomenon of Man, a Teilhard book I bought during my Jesuit college years.

McLaughlin believes that working in the city’s slums will revive his vocation and cool his lust. Instead he is assigned to the office of Archbishop Matthew Mahan, to be his secretary. He is at Mahan’s elbow while he makes his rounds and, because of his cynicism regarding practically everything the archbishop does, must frequently hold his tongue and nod sardonically to his comments. Mahan is soon appointed by Pope Pius VI as a new cardinal. The novel follows the two men through the weeks before and during the days surrounding his consecration in Rome. Mahan is a good, hardworking bishop and shepherd. Through his example and occasional prodding, McLaughlin eventually tames his demons and finds purpose in his priesthood.

The interesting thing for me, as a Catholic reading the novel, was the contrast between Church problems in the 1970s, as shown in the novel, and those of today: priestly celibacy, but not yet the sex abuse scandal; the priestly vocation, but nothing about women wanting to be ordained; and the furor over the encyclical Humanae Vitae – one glance at the pews today shows that most Catholic couples have made family size a matter of conscience rather than obedience. Halfway through the book, a minor character makes the intriguing remark that Pope John XXIII “liberated the Church’s unconscious” (213). This pretty nearly sums up the shift in Catholic sensibility that took place in the 1960s.

At two of my turned-down-corner pages, both men are with a woman and both are in a moment of crisis, McLaughlin because he has just arrived with Sister Helen at her apartment in the ghetto; and Mahan because he and Mary, a friend of many years – they love each other but have respected every boundary – are revisiting the Church of St. Peter in Chains, in Rome. Years before, Roncalli, Pope John XXIII, had said to them, “You must go … to this church at twilight, my favorite time to visit it … Go now, and when we meet again, let us talk of some thoughts I have to free St. Peter from his chains” (182-183). The actual speech is nearly a page long and in italics, which I think is a big fat hint that it is the main theme of the book. Mary says:

“If only he hadn’t died so soon.”

“I don’t feel that way, Mary,” Matthew Mahan said. “Remember what he told that fellow who said he should abolish the College of Cardinals and fire the whole Curia?”

“ ‘It’s not for me to do everything.’”

“What he wanted done,” Matthew Mahan said slowly because the thought was coming to him as he spoke, “involved all of us. It was part of the thing itself – us doing it” (185).

Ah, those were the days.
.

The Call of Stories, by Robert Coles

2010-08-27T19:26:00.005-04:00

The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (1989) is an extended essay by Robert Coles on the question of what literature can offer to the moral life. How shall I live? Can literature guide me in a life of goodness? Coles indirectly urges the reader to ponder these questions by relating his personal history of the call of stories.

He begins, in the Introduction, with his book-loving parents, who read War and Peace and other great works aloud to one other, often interrupting themselves to probe the motives of characters and the meaning behind incidents. In college, believing he was going to be an English teacher, Coles came under the influence of physician and poet William Carlos Williams and redirected his course for medicine, eventually reaching qualification in pediatrics and psychiatry. He became a prolific writer on social, moral, literary and spiritual issues. At Harvard he taught courses and led seminars on topics such as the literature of social reflection (with works including Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Tillie Olson’s stories, collected as Tell Me a Riddle, and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer); and literature and medicine (William Carlos Williams’ “doctor stories,” Anton Chekhov, Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Illych”). His hopes in these courses were to do “moral and social inquiry” (xvi) with the students.

In the first chapter, Coles recounts his experiences as a new psychiatric resident, in which he learned the difference between classifying patients according to diagnoses, with all the technical lingo this implies; and inviting them to tell the stories of their lives. This second approach was no easy task. Patients tended to use the doctor-speak they were accustomed to hearing; more guarded patients required Coles to reveal something of himself first. The chapter has little to do with the moral influence of literature, but it illuminates the salubrious effect of understanding one’s life as a story. In the remainder of the book, Coles builds on this insight as he explores literature in conversations with students in the classroom and his office. (Apparently he had a tape recorder running most of the time.)

He never asserts that literature is a guide to our moral understanding of things (127), but instead offers his many descriptions of the moral effects of good reading as an invitation to try it out. Indeed, the constant presence of his friend and mentor William Carlos Williams illustrates another tack. Where moral conduct is concerned, literature can be a guide (Williams isn’t so sure), but what really counts, in the measuring of our worth as human beings, is our response to those in need. This parallel idea, which opposes the central theme suggested by the title, gains strength as the book proceeds, until Coles finally makes a place for it in the last chapter. Here is where the book speaks the truth.

Robert Coles wrote the Introduction to the Loyola Classics edition of Vipers’ Tangle, and this is where I met him (although I first heard of him years ago). Here, he views Francois Mauriac’s novel with a moral rather than an aesthetic imagination. “The point of the novel,” he writes, “is to look at the way an individual’s will interacts with chance and circumstance. What have been the consequences of his choices? What kind of life has resulted? What has been missed?” (viii). Coles’ example in the Introduction to Vipers’ Tangle represents a stepping-off place for me from his book The Call of Stories. In other words, The Call of Stories doesn’t fulfill what I saw as a promise in its subtitle: I don’t know what the moral imagination is; I’m not conversant with discourse on moral issues; I can’t even describe imagination with any assurance! These questions are where I go next as I leave The Call of Stories.

With a couple of juicy book lists tucked in the crook of my arm.
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The Fall Semester

2010-08-25T17:52:00.002-04:00

Who’d have thought the weather would shift like this, while it’s still August, from the beastly summer heat of the Washington area, to this morning’s crisp, sunny coolness? I’m sure it’s why I dreamt about going back to school. That and, as of this week, having TWO grandchildren in college!

In the dream, I was late for class – naturally; that’s the way dreams go. I tried to slip unnoticed into a desk and quietly put down my books and satchels, but the professor wouldn’t have it. He was lecturing on Sherlock Holmes. He came to my desk and asked for my pass, and I saw that he was portly, had sandy hair, and wore a light brown tweed walking suit like the one Dr. Watson sports in a Sherlock Holmes episode on PBS. He gave me grief because I didn’t have the pass and ridiculed me when I didn’t even have my driver’s license, having left it with the security guard who was making out the pass. “Humpf,” he said, “the security guard, a likely story.”

Well, I guess I put him in his place. I told him none too patiently that I was back and planned to take three courses this semester (I had to think about this for a minute), and demanded he never again speak to me in a tone of ridicule.

When I woke up I felt as though someone had shaken a shallow box sideways and carefully sorted my ambitions into neat little piles. About five of them; and each one looked like a college course. Here’s one:

Assembling a family history and genealogy report. A practical exercise in collating one family’s archival material and genealogical researches and synthesizing these as a family history.

For more than thirty years I’ve sporadically amplified the genealogy project my grandfather began in the 1960s. His interest was in establishing the line of his Scott surname from his grandfather to his grandsons. In the letters he wrote to request information, of which he retained carbon copies, and the letters and documents he received, there were nestled many family stories. My interest was in filling in his research laterally; what could I find out about his wife’s, mother’s, and grandmother’s lines? When my mother and aunts saw what I was doing, I became a magnet for old pictures and letters.

My task in 2010? I’m not a serious genealogist. My ambition is to turn the material already collected into concise, coherent prose, enriched with old pictures and photocopies of some of the documents, self-publish it, and pass it on to family members. I don’t want to do more research, but sometimes I have to for the sake of clarification. This is where my Sherlock Homes persona comes in: solving the mysteries, for example, of when my great great grandparents and their children emigrated from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Boston, Massachusetts. I’ve joined Ancestry.com. To whom I’m grateful! Yesterday they sent me a note telling me where my grandmother was living in 1910, when she was nineteen years old. She’d gone out to Boise to live with her sister, who was married and had two little boys. Which means she went West at least in the same month as, and probably earlier than, my grandfather.

A cousin in New York e-mailed me a month ago to say he wanted to come down and see my genealogy folder. This was the spur to put it in order and begin writing it up. To finish the task by Christmas: this is my dream!
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The Driver's Seat, by Muriel Spark

2010-08-05T15:28:00.009-04:00

The Driver’s Seat, a novel by Muriel Spark (1970)

If you’ve ever lived with someone who has been diagnosed bipolar, manic-depressive or schizophrenic; or who has managed to least once to get herself into a psychiatric lockup, you might miss clues in this little novel that are obvious to other readers. Your normal is different from theirs.

Lise is a British office clerk in her thirties who plans to be murdered on the first day of her holiday in the south of Europe. You’ll know this soon enough. But on the first page, when she likes the boldly colored and patterned dress she is trying on in a shop, and then tears it off in a fury because the salesgirl has said it is stain resistant, you’ll probably give her the benefit of the doubt and put it down to irrational behavior.

But Lise is not irrational. Sometimes she laughs so loudly and at such length that others are afraid, and often her speech consists of non sequiturs. Nonetheless, her thought processes are supremely methodical. The event of her murder is to be a spectacle. She must have exactly the outfit that announces itself ahead of time and that will show bloodstains when her body is found. The only suspense occurs in her search for the “boyfriend” who is “just her type.” All at once, there he is:

“Lise touches him on the arm. ‘You’re coming with me,’ she says.
“ ‘No,’ he says, trembling. His round face is pink and white, his eyes are wide open with fear. He looks neat in his business suit and white shirt, as he did this morning when Lise first followed and then sat next to him on the plane.
“ ‘Leave everything,’ says Lise. ‘Come on, it’s getting late’.”

In the past couple of years I’ve read two other pieces by Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) and “Alice Long’s Dachshunds” (1967). Years ago I read Memento Mori. The novels have each left vivid impressions; all are stark and economical. The story is excellent but is told more conventionally, in a more leisurely manner, without the intense distillation of theme found in the novels. When I started to write my impressions of The Driver’s Seat, I found myself so caught up in its style and syntax that I was grateful for an interruption. That way lay madness! I took the hiatus as an opportunity to articulate my goals. When I got back to it, the novel’s assiduous examination of madness gave me a question: How does the author achieve her effects? The main answer lies in The Driver’s Seat ’s unremitting use of the present tense. The story hurries along at a breathless pace. It’s as though the murder can’t happen too soon. Another device comes clear when the narrator describes Lise’s one-room flat as “meticulously neat.” Every description is meticulously neat. We see all the tidy details of Lise’s sleepless night before the day her holiday begins:

“Her face is solemn as she lies, at first staring at the brown pinewood door as if to see beyond it. Presently her breathing becomes normal … The lines of the room are pure; space is used as a pattern in itself, circumscribed by the dexterous pinewood outlines that ensued from the designer’s ingenuity and austere taste when he was young, unknown, studious and strict-principled.”

These devices take us right into Lise’s severely systematic mind.

I had an aha! moment when I finished the novel and turned it over to read David Lodge’s blurb on the back cover: “Some of her finest fictions are novellas rather than novels, short enough to be read in a single dizzying sitting.” It seemed to me that with The Driver’s Seat I had finally been shown what a novella is: a long story that drives straight to its ending without the stop-offs, tangents and sometimes downright flusterings of ordinary novels. But wasn’t this polished picture of a woman firmly in the driver’s seat of her own destruction really another example of Muriel Spark’s skill? Surely there is something about the directness and simplicity of certain short works. Notes From Underground (Doestoevsky) and The Death of Ivan Illych (Tolstoy) call themselves novels, but I would say their close development of a single character and a single theme renders them as novellas. In truth, the critics don’t have a single definition for the novella. So I’ll just keep testing my own experience of the genre.

As for a Catholic theme or sensibility in The Driver’s Seat, I don’t find one, unless it is in the absence of one. The decision to kill oneself must reflect utter despair, an utter loss of hope, the feeling that one’s soul has taken a hike. (Is there a suggestion of hope when Lise tries staring beyond the pinewood door, which is then extinguished by her unforgiving need for order?) Such a state must be a kind of hell. I’m not scared. I’m going to read more Muriel Spark.
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Cry, the Beloved Country

2010-07-22T09:48:00.006-04:00

Cry, the Beloved Country, a novel by Alan Paton (1948).

Sometimes I feel I ought to be reading recently published novels. Most authors seem to be familiar with the works of their time, which help them to find a secure footing. If I were a novelist I would go for the tried-and-true, the books that teach me the most about good writing. Such a novel is Cry, the Beloved Country, which is still so widely read that Barnes and Noble offers at least four editions for the choosing.

Because of my summertime theme, I’ll say at the outset that Alan Paton was not a Catholic author. (Then again, Graham Greene said that he was not a Catholic author, he was an author who happened to be Catholic.) I chose Cry, the Beloved Country because of an article called “Communication, Consecration and the Catholic Novel” (which no longer seems to be accessible on the Internet), in which Glenn Statile writes about Catholic themes in Cry, the Beloved Country. The task of focusing on one approach for several weeks – what makes a novel Catholic? – is showing me something I didn’t expect, which is the intense respect these stories have for ordinary humanity. What makes them Catholic is their awareness of a reality beyond the human, not fate or destiny, society or culture, science or philosophy, but a reality that looks like love and mercy.

The novel is about Stephen Kumalo, a Zulu parson in the poor village of Ndotsheni; he is presumably a priest in the Church of England. One day he leaves his wife and parish to travel to the great city of Johannesburg to search for his son Absalom, his brother John, and his much younger sister Gertrude, who has herself gone with her little son to Johannesburg to search for her husband. None has written home in a very long time. Kumalo arrives in the city just as newspapers are reporting the shooting death of a white man by a native housebreaker. Before long, Absalom is arrested. The dead man is Arthur Jarvis, married and the father of two young children. His father is James Jarvis, a well-to-do farmer who lives in the green rich hills above Ndotsheni.

The story is told, especially in Book I, in language that resonates with the rhythms and poetry of ancient storytelling. About John Kumalo, who holds meetings criticizing the government in his carpentry shop, it is said that “he speaks like a bull and growls like a lion” (70). In another example, when Stephen Kumalo is nearly undone by fears that beset him in the city:

– Sorrow is better than fear, said Father Vincent [a white man] doggedly. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arriving.
– And where have I arrived? asked Kumalo.
– When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house, said Father Vincent in that symbolic language that is like the Zulu tongue. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house (140).

The house that is destroyed and must be rebuilt is South Africa. There, the black people of the African tribes comprise almost two-thirds of the population. The land has been ravished by poor farming methods, and the tribal system worn down and broken by white men’s greed, while family bonds are every day rent asunder by the need of young men to travel to the mines or urban centers to find work. The novel reflects the period just before the policy of apartheid – “separate development” – was put into effect.

Book II shifts to include the story of the Jarvis family, the chance meeting of Stephen Kumalo and James Jarvis, and the trial of Absalom. Book III relates Stephen Kumalo’s return to Ndotsheni and the bittersweet juxtaposition of his personal tragedy with marvelous answers to his prayers for restoration of the land.

It wouldn’t be a bad idea to read Ignazio Silone's Fontamara and Cry, the Beloved Country together. Both describe the displacement of peoples from land their families or tribes have cultivated since time immemorial. Fontamara focuses on the personal anguish of those wrenched from the soil, while Cry, the Beloved Country describes the resulting social evils. The situation is more intense in the latter novel (for the reader, at least), because of the repression of the blacks, but both stories demonstrate the demoralization of people who lose everything that gives their days structure, purpose and meaning. Both were written by men from distances that enhanced their perspectives: Silone while in exile for his political activity; Paton during a study of international penal systems. Each author takes a different view of what he saw. Fontamara ends in despair; Cry, the Beloved Country in hope. Their themes are timeless.
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Vipers' Tangle, by Francois Mauriac

2010-07-15T15:50:00.010-04:00

Viper’s Tangle, a novel by Francois Mauriac, originally published in French in 1932.

On his sixty-eighth birthday, a few days before Easter, Louis begins the letter of vengeance he has intended to write to his wife for many years. The time is about 1930. He is dying, an invalid keeping mostly to his room in the farmhouse they occupy, except when he suddenly gathers himself to journey by train to Bordeaux or Paris to conduct business. In his work life he has been a lawyer, but now, in what he believes are his last days (he will live until Christmas), his prime objective is to keep his sizable private wealth from passing to his wife or their children and descendants. He wants her to understand what she did forty-five years ago to drive him to this decision.

I found an unusual number of resonances, in the first few chapters, with other fiction I’ve recently read. For example, Louis addresses his words to “you,” as does the invisible narrator in “Sevastopol in September” (Tolstoy). In another example, a dying man writes a letter, to be found after his death, in which he outlines a female relative’s crime, the same thing Asbury Fox does in “The Enduring Chill” (O’Connor). The most striking resonance is in the way Louis parallels the narrator in Notes From Underground (Dostoevsky). He despises himself and everyone around him. About his early years he says, “The very look of me was enough to produce in others a sense of chill” (25). Toward his mother he recalls being “the repressed, unyielding son” (55). Many times since the night his wife admitted, yes, this was her crime, that she almost married another man, “I have felt such a loathing of myself that I have turned with revulsion from the very thought of my body and my feelings” (62). Such a sad life!

But there was something else, something subtle, which I didn’t pick up until I went back and read the Introduction by Robert Coles. I did see the tender humanity of Louis’ love for his daughter Marie, who died as a child, and for his nephew Luc, who was killed in the Great War. I did marvel at his close inspection of the “knot of vipers” that is his heart. But I failed to imagine what his self-observation might lead to, and I overlooked the moments of grace that pierced his fierce rejection of God, faith and religion. (So many novels, still so much to learn!) Remembering when he was first in love with his wife, he confesses: “One day, when we were driving through the Lys Valley, we got out of the Victoria. The streams were gurgling. I was rubbing a leaf of fennel between my fingers. The lower slopes of the mountains were growing dark, but the light was still secure upon their peaks… An intense feeling suddenly came over me, an almost physical certainty that another world did exist, a reality of which we know only the shadow” (43-44). Louis' inability to ignore memories like this one reminded me, on my second, partial reading, of Hazel Motes, whom others kept calling a Jesus-man, no matter how much he denied it (Wise Blood, O’Connor), but especially of Francis Thompson’s poem, “The Hound of Heaven”:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter…

Finally, I was thrilled to discover, whether this was intended by the author or not, an exegesis of the Gospel story, The Healing of the Paralytic (Mark 2:1-12). First, there was the metaphor of rigidity (paralysis): “It is exactly as though a hand were gripping my left shoulder and keeping it rigid in a strained position so that I may never be allowed to forget” (14); “Your fingers felt no trace of tears, but perhaps the rigidity of my clenched jaws struck you as strange” (63); and “All of them, wife, children, masters, and servants, were in league against my soul. I must play my hateful part at their dictation. I was painfully caught in the rigidity of the expected attitude” (250). Then there was the re-imagining of the men who carried the paralytic to Jesus, in these words by Louis’ granddaughter: “Since he died I have seen much of people who, in spite of all their faults and weaknesses, live according to their faith and move about their daily tasks in the fullness of grace. If Grand’pa had lived among them, mightn’t he have discovered years ago the harbor that he reached at last only on the very threshold of death?” (280-281).

Except for the second-person point of view (which stops halfway through, as the story deepens), the resonances point to universal themes: resentment in the family; the poison of self-hatred; the insistent invasion of love; the futility of avoiding grace. I hope that when you read and enjoy Viper’s Tangle you will come upon resonances of your own.
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Wise Blood, by Flannery O'Connor

2010-07-09T18:25:00.004-04:00

When I finished reading Wise Blood I was mystified. What could it possibly mean? The plot summary on the back cover didn’t seem to have it right, and the blurbs on front and back were no help at all. As in The Violent Bear It Away, the main character commits a murder, yet the weight of the story is on this character’s redemption. Not redemption from the sin of murder, but from something else. Each of the Flannery O’Connor works I’ve read – these two novels and three short stories – have left me in confusion. What’s not hard to see is that they are religious in intent; their themes are Christian. Christian in the rawest sense.

I forgot that I had started the novel by reading the Author’s Note to the second (1962) edition, in which O’Connor summarizes Wise Blood better than anyone else possibly could. The Note includes these words:

“That belief in Christ is to some a matter of life and death has been a stumbling block for readers who would prefer to think it a matter of no great consequence. For them Hazel Motes’ integrity lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind. For the author Hazel’s integrity lies in his not being able to. Does one’s integrity ever lie in what he is not able to do? I think that usually it does, for free will does not mean one will, but many wills conflicting in one man. Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery and one which a novel, even a comic novel, can only be asked to deepen.”

To someone familiar with her New Testament, it’s clear that O’Connor chose the phrase stumbling block carefully. Last year I led a Bible study group in First Corinthians, where in the first chapter Paul writes: “For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Cor 1:22-23). Placing Paul’s terse statement in a modern idiom (and remembering that analogies are imperfect), we might say: “There are some who believe God is approachable only through the observance of religious regulations, and others who think religious faith of any sort is stupid because it presumes human beings have no common sense or morality without direction from God. But we believe in a crucified Messiah, that is, a man sent to redeem humanity from the pains of sin and death through his own sacrificial death. Our faith is a stumbling block to strict observers, who hope for signs of divine affirmation, and foolishness to liberal humanists.” O’Connor collapses the two categories and says (in my words): “Hazel Motes’ severe belief in Christ has been a stumbling block for liberal humanists.”

Were I to write a blurb, I would say that Wise Blood portrays a man who is redeemed from the impossibility of rejecting Christ. What about Hazel’s sins of murder, fornication, and blasphemy? (He piles up sins in his desperate flight from Christ.) Does he turn over a new leaf and live happily ever after? Stories by Flannery O’Connor don’t go that way. In The Violent Bear It Away, Francis Marion Tarwater sets a forest on fire as he submits to a call to preach the Word of God. In “The Enduring Chill,” Asbury Fox learns that his wasting illness will not kill him, as he has anticipated, but will rub his face in his ignorance of God. Hazel Motes binds his naked body with barbed wire when the time comes for his purification.

Oddly, it is articles in two liberal humanist publications that help me to find a position on Wise Blood. The first is “What Did Jesus Do? Reading and Unreading the Gospels,” by Adam Gopnik in the May 24 issue of The New Yorker. Gopnik points out that “a real, unchangeable difference [exists] between what might be called storytelling truths and statement-making truths – between what makes credible, if sweeping, sense in a story and what’s required for a close-knit metaphysical argument” (75). If you review my rephrasing of Paul, you’ll see that he opposes two metaphysical statements with a summary of the Christian story. Much of Gopnik’s essay is an exegesis of the Gospel of Mark. He closes by asking “whether the uncertainty at the center [of the Christian story] mimics the plurality of possibilities essential to liberal debate, as the more open-minded theologians like to believe, or is an antique mystery in a story open only as the tomb is open, with a mystery left inside, never to be entirely explored or explained” (77). Another way of saying what O’Connor says in her Author’s Note.

The second article is “Rabbi vs. Atheist: Debating God with Christopher Hitchens,” by David Wolpe in the July 4 issue of The Washington Post. Here Wolpe, the rabbi, gives a humorous report on his ongoing public debates with Hitchens, in which he opposes the views Hitchens expresses in God Is Not Great with those of his own in Why Faith Matters. He writes that when Hitchens “maintained that religion is stupid because it presumes that humans possessed no morality until God told them what to do” – this gave me a way of understanding the liberal humanist view – “I answered that the Bible condemns Cain’s murder of Abel long before any laws were handed down at Sinai. The Bible knows that we know murder is wrong” (B4).

Likewise, we readers of Wise Blood know Hazel’s act of murder is wrong (we probably disagree on the morality of his other actions). But in the end sin is also a mystery and one which Wise Blood “can only be asked to deepen.” O’Connor trusts us in this and simply tells her story.
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Fontamara, by Ignazio Silone

2010-07-01T14:00:00.003-04:00

Fontamara, a novel by Ignazio Silone (1934)

I like to think that the first time I read a novel I do so without preconceptions. In general, I postpone Introductions and other critical materials until later, in order to have a fresh outlook. This ploy succeeds for the first several pages or perhaps the first chapter. Then a number of expectations shift into gear. The first ones are guided by the author, who from the opening sentence has attempted to show me how to read the novel. Next come my life experience and the habits of thinking I’ve gained from reading. These expectations inevitably work against my desire to see the work as if for the first time.

In the case of the novels I’m reading this summer, there is a further narrowing influence, which is the question, In what way is this a Catholic novel? Since January, which began with The Second Happiest Day and A Tale of Two Cities and continued through the Woolf-in-Winter Readalong, I’ve felt a growing impatience to identify my Catholic perspective, not in order to preach, but to understand it for myself and let it come to expression. This month I’ve searched out novels by Catholic authors or with Catholic themes, to fill up my summer reading plan.

Fontamara is about the cafoni, the peasants who till the land in a village in southern Italy in the 1920s, and their worldview is thoroughly Catholic. The cafoni of Fontamara are too poor to support a priest; this is one of their many deprivations. At intervals Don Abbacchio comes from a nearby town to say Mass. There is no mention of the sacraments, as in The Heart of the Matter, where going to confession and communion are regular events for Major Scobie. We don’t know what the Fontamaresi do for baptisms and marriages, confirmation, or extreme unction. It’s as if the ritual part of Catholicism doesn’t exist for the desperately poor. They are always aware, however, of the Church calendar with its procession of saints’ days. They pray to the saints and especially to the Virgin Mary.

With respect to the cafoni’s religion, the novel contains an interesting if ironic anthropological insight. The story begins with a threat to the “wretched stream” that has irrigated their fields and vegetable plots “since time immemorial … if men started interfering with the elements created by God, and diverted the course of the sun, the course of the winds, and the course of the waters established by God,” worries the narrator, “it would be like hearing that donkeys were learning to fly, or that Prince Torlonia was no longer a prince, or that cafoni were no longer to suffer from hunger – in other words, that the eternal laws of God were no longer to be the laws of God” (29). There is a critique of the Church in the form of the dream of Michele Zompa, in which Jesus tells the Pope that “it would be well to distribute the land of the Fucino among the cafoni who cultivate it, as well as the landless cafoni of Fontamara on the mountain.” To these and other offered graces the Pope objects that they would inconvenience Prince Torlonia, the merchants, the rich, and the government (21-22).

This having been said, let me point out that Fontamara is a political, not a religious, novel. It is a dramatization of the relentlessly increasing oppression of the cafoni during the Fascist era. It performs a function that few novels attempt, which is to give a voice to those who have no voice. The three narrators – a man, his wife, and their son – along with a charismatic figure named Berardo Viola, unify the narrative and carry the story; but the cafoni are the main characters, and the cafoni progress from one injustice to another, each worse than the last. It is the saddest book I’ve ever read.

Now if you think you may read Fontamara but you don’t like spoilers, you’d better set these musings aside. Because a spoiler is where I’m going next.

Berardo Viola is one of the landless of Fontamara who go to Rome to find work. He has fallen in love with Elvira and feels he can’t ask her to marry him if he does not, as an honorable cafone, own land. However, one governmental obstacle after another prevents him from obtaining work. With the boy narrator, who has accompanied him, and “a man from Avezzano,” he is arrested on suspicion of fomenting rebellion. The man from Avezzano tells him the authorities are looking for a Mystery Man, who they believe is the underground leader. Of course there is no leader; there are sporadic eruptions of resistance but no organized rebellion. In prison Berardo receives word that Elvira has died. With every interrogation he is beaten. The authorities are convinced he knows something, but all he knows is that the man from Avezzano is somehow connected to a movement of resistance. He confesses that he is the Mystery Man; the man from Avezzano is released. He is beaten again, and the boy relates: “Eventually they dragged him back to the cell by his legs and shoulders like Christ when He was taken down from the cross.” Berardo is tempted: “Now he’s out there and I’m in here … letting myself be killed for his sake. Why shouldn’t I tell everything?” (162).

But he doesn’t tell. After another interrogation he says, “What is the point of living now that Elvira is dead? If I turn traitor, everything will be lost. If I betray … Fontamara will be damned forever. If I betray, centuries will pass before another such opportunity arises. And if I die? It will be the first time that a cafone dies, not for himself, but for others” (163).

With this, I felt I was truly reading a Catholic novel; Berardo Viola’s decision to sacrifice himself is the Christ story all over again, reenacted on the local level. Thus, in that moment my Catholic fiction expectation was met. Writing this, I’ve realized I had another expectation, which was that the author would draw his story to a close in a satisfying way. He does this, beginning with Berardo’s speech and continuing through two more chapters. In his Foreword, Ignazio Silone assured me that the novel was “the truth about what happened at Fontamara” (13). I put it down knowing he had told the truth.
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Who is that reading the story by Tolstoy?

2010-06-24T11:51:00.004-04:00

What are you reading?
I just finished the Norton Critical Edition of Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, ed. Michael R. Katz (2008).

Is that a collection of some kind?
Yes. It’s divided into three sections. The first contains the texts of twelve Tolstoy stories, arranged chronologically. First comes “Sevastopol in December,” a military tale published in 1855 when Tolstoy was in his late twenties. Last is “Alyosha Gorshok” (“Alyosha the Pot”), a fable published in 1905. The next section, called Backgrounds and Sources, contains two short pieces – “A History of Yesterday” and “The Memoirs of a Madman” – which lie on the border between fiction and non-fiction; Tolstoy’s diary for 1855; and a few letters. The third section and last half of the book contains twenty-two critical essays. It closes with an impressionistic little story by Donald Barthelme called “At the Tolstoy Museum.” There are also a chronology of Tolstoy’s life and work, and a selected bibliography. Unfortunately, there is no complete bibliography of Tolstoy’s works.

How would you sum up the Norton book?I guess first of all I’d like to sum up my prior experience of reading Tolstoy. I’m glad I read War and Peace last year, reread Resurrection a few weeks ago, already knew a couple of the short stories, and had at least a vague memory of Anna Karenina from a reading long ago. These gave me the feeling of a broad, unifying canvas or tapestry behind the Norton book. I felt I already knew Tolstoy pretty well. I think it was “A History of Yesterday” which caught my eye and led me to buy the Norton book; I’ve always thought it would be fun to describe the thoughts, feelings, and events of one day. Then I set it aside for a year. I picked it up again after my granddaughter Frida read one of the stories, “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” for a college course on death and dying.

As for summing up the collection, the writings and critical essays taken together provide a broad overview of Tolstoy’s aesthetics and the thinking and experiences that gave structure to his writing, as they should. It would be a good supplemental text in a course on Tolstoy. Based on my reading, there seem to have been three major influences on his writing: his social position – he was an aristocrat and wealthy landowner, and served as a military officer; in 1869 he had an intense emotional experience, which he elaborated in “Memoirs of a Madman” as a confrontation with death; and, finally, in 1880 he underwent a religious conversion. Some of my impressions are these: Tolstoy was a relentless experimenter with genre, which was consistent with the Russian literary tradition. He seems to have striven for paradox in everything he wrote. He continually explored his feelings, motivations and thoughts in his diaries, an activity which bore fruit in the fine interior monologues of many of his characters. He dissected the meaning of death and imagined as deeply as he could the experience of dying. He saw art and moral perfection as closely related. He spent effort to improve the feelings communicated by art.

Which of your impressions of Tolstoy is the strongest?His stern desire in the second half of life to teach others the necessity for moral perfection. I don’t see this in War and Peace, which he wrote before his conversion; but it’s quite obvious in Resurrection, which appeared late in his life. As evidenced by his diaries, he first began a moral self-examination when he was nineteen, after reading the diaries of Benjamin Franklin. His first published work was a collection of sermons. He shows the direction he was taking in as early a story as “Sevastopol in December.”

What is “Sevastopol in December” about?On the surface it appears to be about someone, obviously an aristocrat, walking through the battle zone of Sevastopol during the Crimean War. He views the harbor; the town of Sevastopol and its Assembly Hall, which has been converted to a hospital; and the fortifications. The battle is underway during the entire period of the tour. I am embarrassed to confess that the first time I read it I thought it was somewhat naïve, the work of a beginning writer. The critical essays greatly broadened my view, especially the one by Gary Saul Morson, titled, “The Reader as Voyeur: Tolstoi and the Poetics of Didactic Fiction” (1978).

Wow, that’s a mouthful. And time’s running out. Can you talk about Morson’s viewpoint in a few words?Well, “Sevastopol in December” is really the story of its reader. It’s written in the second person, a device I totally ignored on my first reading. In reading Morson’s essay later, I discovered that, in my carelessness, I had already proven the point that, according to Morson, Tolstoy makes in the story. I had committed the crime of “disinterested” observation. Refusing, however unconsciously, to allow myself to be drawn in by the device of the second person, I had exercised aesthetic distance. In other words, Tolstoy implicates me in the crime of aesthetic distance, which he shows is related to ethical distance. How can you turn away from what I am showing you? he says.

He operates like a tour guide: “Now, if your nerves are strong, go in at the door to the left; there they bandage and operate. You will see doctors with pale, gloomy faces, and arms red with blood up to the elbows, busy at a bed on which a wounded man lies under chloroform. His eyes are open and he utters, as if in delirium, incoherent but sometimes simple and pathetic words. The doctors are engaged on the horrible but beneficent work of amputation. You will see the sharp curved knife enter healthy white flesh; you will see the wounded man come back to life with terrible, heartrending screams and curses” (7-8). Then he takes it upon himself to name your reactions: “On coming out of this house of pain you will be sure to experience a sense of relief; you will draw deeper breaths of the fresh air and rejoice in the consciousness of your own health. Yet the contemplation of those sufferings will have made you realize your own insignificance” (8).

The clincher in his agenda arises in the final scene, where “you” come upon a naval officer in the Fourth Bastion, who proudly shows you his “household.” It’s typical of soldiers to settle into their fortifications as if making a home. The naval officer, because you show curiosity and interest in his activities, decides to show you some battle action, “from vanity or merely for a little recreation” (12). A cannon is manned, loaded and fired; the enemy retaliates; the next thing you know, a man has fallen beside you. “Covered with blood and dirt he presents a strange, scarcely human appearance. Part of his breast has been torn away…. ‘That’s the way it is with seven or eight men every day,’ the naval officer remarks to you, answering the look of horror on your face; then he yawns as he rolls another yellow cigarette” (13). Looking has consequences, Tolstoy is saying. There is no such thing as “disinterested” observation.

The key point Morson wishes to make is that, as we read the story, “we gradually come to learn that what applies to ‘you’ also applies to us, that we are simply tourists through the written word” (388). It’s a difficult concept which I haven’t absorbed completely myself, so I hope to come back to it again in the future.
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The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy

2010-06-17T20:29:00.005-04:00

The Moviegoer, a novel by Walker Percy (1960).

Reading this little joy of a novel was an event. I don’t know whether I will have time to tell you what it’s about; there is so much to say about what was happening while I read it. Nor am I sure I want to tell you, believing you ought to have all the surprises for yourself. There’s also the task of fitting in an explanation of why The Moviegoer is “Catholic” fiction. Let’s just head on out and see what we will see.

First of all, distractions multiplied as I read; these were ten days in which I had no time to go to a movie! On the first day of reading, which was the Monday before last, my thirty-something son Ward had emergency abdominal surgery. While he was in the hospital, Paco and I refitted the TV room with a bed so that during his recovery period in our home he could get around without having to climb stairs. Between us, we drove to Baltimore almost every day to visit him, and this Monday I brought him home. Tank was coming, which meant more cleaning and some cooking. On Friday we went to hear the Baltimore Symphony with Abe and Petunia; on Saturday, a wedding; on Sunday after Mass, a reception for our departing pastor; then Tank arrived; on Monday, Paco and Tank left for their annual five-day golf excursion with other brothers, a cousin, and friends; and, in my own little literary world, absorption through all these days in the tales and critical essays in the Norton Critical Edition of Tolstoy’s Short Fiction.

With the actual reading came life coincidences. The story takes place in and around New Orleans, where Paco and I spent the first year of our marriage, which came to a happy close with the birth of our first baby, dark-eyed Athanasius, who began immediately to look around to see what was going on. On the first day of reading, after I’d come home from the hospital, I came across the word anastomosis, which I had heard for the first time that day; it appears in a description of one of Jack Bolling’s uncles: “Dr. Wills, the lion-headed one, the rumpled country genius who developed a gut anastomosis still in use” (25); this is the very procedure that Ward had undergone. Of the many familiar place names in the novel was Prytania Street in the Garden District, where Jack’s formidable Aunt Emily and placid Uncle Jules own a home; Jack’s aunt and uncle are very kind to him; but, he says – just to give you a picture of who Jack is – “whenever I try to live there, I find myself first in a rage during which I develop strong opinions on a variety of subjects and write letters to editors, then in a depression during which I lie rigid as a stick for hours staring straight up at the plaster medallion in the ceiling of my bedroom” (6). Just two years ago, a dozen family members, including Paco and I, gathered in Mavis and Leslie’s elegant Prytania Street home for a week-long Choral Festival. One more coincidence: On my last day of reading, yesterday, a rush of memory came forth when I turned to the page where Jack tries to explain why he was not present at his friend Harold’s baby’s baptism: “He was baptized yesterday,” says Harold absently . . . You were godfather-by-proxy” (210). Fifty-one years ago I had been godmother-by-proxy to a girlfriend’s baby boy, unable to attend the baptism because I was in college in Spokane, Washington, three thousand miles away. Only hours later my friend, whom I hadn’t seen since her baby was two, called me, having searched out my location on the Internet.

It won’t spoil the story to say that Jack Bolling, twenty-nine years old, has settled for the life of a model citizen. He lives in the suburb of Gentilly, manages a branch office in Uncle Jules’ brokerage firm, and dates his secretaries, a succession of Marcias, Lindas, and Sharons. His family barely notices his girlfriends; his mother in particular knows exactly the girl he ought to marry. He goes to the movies, pulling out a city map to plot bus rides to theaters all over New Orleans.

One morning as Jack is getting dressed for work he remembers the search he had first thought to undertake as he lay wounded in a ditch in Korea. He is too embarrassed to say what the object of the search is, but we know it has to do with combating the malaise that everywhere threatens to descend upon him. You will like the meandering progress of the story, but you will marvel at Percy’s deft and quietly funny descriptions:

“Directly next to me, on the first cross seat, is a very fine-looking girl. She is a strapping girl but by no means too big, done up head to toe in cellophane, the hood pushed back to show a helmet of glossy black hair. She is magnificent with her split tooth and her Prince Val bangs split on her forehead. Gray eyes and wide black brows, a good arm and a fine swell of calf above her cellophane boot. One of those solitary Amazons one sees on Fifty-seventh Street in New York or in Nieman Marcus in Dallas. Our eyes meet. Am I mistaken or does the corner of her mouth tuck in ever so slightly and the petal of her lower lip curl out ever so richly? She is smiling – at me! … What a tragedy it is that I do not know her, will probably never see her again. What good times we could have! This very afternoon we could go spinning along the Gulf Coast. What consideration and tenderness I could show her! If it were a movie, I would have only to wait. The bus would get lost or the city would be bombed and she and I would tend the wounded” (12-13).

As for the Catholic connection, I doubt that it would be obvious to readers not looking for it. Jack, as a matter of fact, is irreligious, although it bothers him that between the 98% of Americans who believe in God and the 2% who are atheists and agnostics there is “not a single percentage point for a seeker” (14). Nevertheless, his search, before he is wrenched free of it by Aunt Emily, carries him toward what has made him Catholic. In the last scene there is no evidence that he has any more interest in religion than before, but anyone looking on would say he was a good Catholic.

The photo: The Briggs-Staub house on Prytania Street, New Orleans Garden District’s only example of Gothic Revival architecture, at iNeTours.com.
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Tolstoy, Writing Home

2010-06-10T10:55:00.006-04:00

At the moment I’m reading Tolstoy’s Short Fiction, ed. Michael R. Katz, in a Norton Critical Edition (2008). I picked it up on a whim last summer after being blown away by War and Peace but read only a couple of short selections – “Memoirs of a Madman,” "A History of Yesterday" – until recently, when my granddaughter Frida said she had read “The Death of Ivan Ilych” for a college course on death and dying. The Norton collection includes this famous long story of Tolstoy’s.

Among the offerings in Norton is a letter Tolstoy wrote to his wife, Sofya Andreyevna Tolstaya, in September, 1869. The footnote reveals that they were married in 1862, and “were very much in love, shared lofty ideals of family life, and wanted to have many children. She idealized him as a writer and assisted him in numerous ways.” At the time, Tolstoy “was traveling to a small place in the province of Penza in the hope of buying an estate he had seen advertised in the papers.”

“I’m writing to you from Saransk, my dear. I’ve almost reached the place. It’s 46 versts from here. I’m hiring private horses, and going straight on to the place.

“How are you and the children? Has anything happened? For two days now I’ve been tormented with anxiety. The day before yesterday I spent the night at Arzamas, and something extraordinary happened to me. It was 2 o’clock in the morning, I was terribly tired, I wanted to go to sleep and I felt perfectly well. But suddenly I was overcome by despair, fear and terror, the like of which I have never experienced before. I’ll tell you the details of this feeling later: but I’ve never experienced such an agonizing feeling before and may God preserve anyone else from experiencing it. I jumped up and ordered the horses to be harnessed. While they were being harnessed, I fell asleep, and woke up perfectly well. Yesterday the feeling returned to a far lesser extent during the drive, but I was prepared for it and didn’t succumb, more particularly as it was weaker. Today I feel well and happy, in so far as I can be, away from the family.

“During this journey I felt for the first time how much I have grown together with you and the children. I can remain alone doing a regular job, as I do in Moscow, but when I have nothing to do, as now, I definitely feel I can’t be alone.”
During the 1880s Tolstoy began shaping his agonizing feeling in Arzamas into “Memoirs of a Madman.” Perhaps he was never satisfied that he had captured the experience completely; the story was not published until 1912, two years after he died.

The picture is of a samovar, crafted in silver. Wikipedia tells us that a samovar is “a heated metal container traditionally used to heat and boil water in and around Russia, as well as in other Central, South-Eastern, Eastern European countries, and in the Middle East. Since the heated water is usually used for making tea, many samovars have an attachment on the tops of their lids to hold and heat a teapot filled with tea concentrate.

“Though traditionally heated with coal or charcoal, many newer samovars use electricity and heat water in a similar manner as an electric water boiler.”
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The Heart of the Matter

2010-06-03T12:03:00.007-04:00

The Heart of the Matter, a novel by Graham Greene (1948).

The Heart of the Matter is the third Graham Greene I’ve read for my One Hundred Novels project, after Brighton Rock (1938) and The Power and the Glory (1940). The first two were on my shelves, probably read by Athanasius when she was a teenager and we were in England; this one I found on the Internet for a penny, plus shipping. It’s worth much more than a penny. Some critics designate these books, along with The End of the Affair, as Greene’s Catholic novels.

The main character in The Heart of the Matter is Scobie, a major in the police force of an British-occupied West African country during the Second World War. The drama begins when Scobie is passed over for Police Commissioner in favor of a younger man. Because of his age (he is fifty), it’s unlikely he will come up for promotion again. Never mind. He likes his job and he likes Africa. Louise Scobie is another story. To be the wife of the Commissioner would have elevated her social position, might finally have given people reason to like her. Scobie borrows £200 to pay for her passage to South Africa (sailing to England in wartime is impossible). Then he meets Mrs. Rolt, one of the survivors of a sunken ship, brought in after several weeks in a lifeboat on the open sea. She is barely twenty, if that; was married only six months when her husband drowned.

An essay in last fall’s The Harvard Advocate describes Catholicism as an ideology, which seems odd; I’d always read the word in a pejorative sense. Communism is an ideology; fascism is an ideology. Those “isms” fit the last meaning of ideology in my dictionary, which is “the integrated assertions, theories, and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program.” Maybe to an onlooker Catholicism is “a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual, group, or culture,” but to a Catholic “a manner of thinking” doesn’t say enough. The essay is “Faith Noir: On Graham Greene and the Catholic Novel.” Near the end, the author, Jessica Sequeira, writes, “At the heart of every great work lies a great, unknowable mystery: what Eliot calls ‘the heart of light, the silence.’ Like every writer with an ideology, the Catholic novelist is given the mystery ready-made.”

Sequeira is helpful when she explains how Graham Greene’s fiction works. For example, his novels are thrillers: “the realist genre taken to its extreme, a gun once described now fired.” I had been alerted to danger on page 5 of The Heart of the Matter by the mention of Scobie and a vulture in the same paragraph – The Power and the Glory starts off with the same “gun once fired” – though, caught up in the story, I forgot the scene. Sequeira goes on: “The thriller also aligns surprisingly well with the novel of conscience; the ticking bomb now applies to nothing less than one’s spiritual life.” This last clause describes perfectly the conflict that tears at Major Scobie’s soul. I must disagree, however, with Sequeira’s thesis regarding the mystery at the heart of Greene’s work.

Halfway through the story, Scobie stops outside a rest-house where the lifeboat survivors are receiving medical treatment. “The lights inside would have given an extraordinary impression of peace,” he thinks, “if one hadn’t known, just as the stars on this clear night gave also an impression of remoteness, security, freedom. If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? if one reached what they called the heart of the matter?” (107).

We know Scobie’s respect for facts. He keeps a diary in which, at bedtime, he records the details of his day, bare of opinion or emotion: “Louise left. Y. called in the evening. First typhoon 2 a.m.” (99). What begins to unfold now is his capacity for pity. Pity has forced him to borrow money from Y., a known crook, to send Louise away. Pity brings him to adultery with the waiflike Mrs. Rolt. After a time she is as disappointed as Louise and cries, “I don’t want your pity.” But, for him, “It was not a question of whether she wanted it – she had it. Pity smoldered like decay at his heart. He would never rid himself of it. He knew from experience how passion died away and how love went, but pity always stayed. Nothing ever diminished pity. The conditions of life nurtured it. There was only a single person in the world who was unpitiable, oneself” (156).

Sequeira points to Greene’s central mystery as a melancholic, despairing morality which condemns his characters to a world of “inescapable unhappiness and sin.” “He wrote bleak dramas set against a landscape of sin.” Borrowing a painterly term, she says he redefined literary space as a “heavy, unshakeable mantle of sin.” Oh yes, Scobie, Pinkie and Rose in Brighton Rock, the priest in The Power and the Glory; they are haunted by death and decay; they are deeply and constantly aware of their sin. In Catholic thinking, sin is separation from God; it is spiritual death. Instead of a ticking bomb, Sequeira could as well have evoked the vulture waiting on a corrugated iron roof in steaming West Africa. In the end, Scobie, having pity even for God but believing himself unpitiable, condemns himself to eternal separation from God. But this is not the end of the story.

In my last post, I suggested that Graham Greene celebrates religion in The Power and the Glory. I meant that he brings the mystery of the relationship of God and man up front, where any reader may catch a glimpse. The mystery at the heart of The Heart of the Matter comes to the surface twice, once when Scobie looks at the night sky outside the rest-house, and again, after he has died, when Father Rank says furiously to Louise on the last page, “For goodness’ sake, Mrs. Scobie, don’t imagine you – or I – know a thing about God’s mercy” (242). All there is to know about being Catholic; it’s here on this last page. It’s worth much more than a penny.

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Writing this post in the first week of June, I think about summer reading and remember that I made a list of Catholic authors about a year ago. I usually don’t submit my reading time to the constraints of a queue, but A Summer of Catholic Fiction might be fun. If you’d like to join me, read The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy, first. I’ll post my reflections on June 17th and would enjoy your comments. On the sidebar you can see plans for other books.

Photo shows members of the newly formed West African Air Corps who have been presented with flashes having passed the RAF Trade Test, seen here being inspected by Lord Swinton, 1945. Courtesy: Imperial War Museum. At the WE WERE THERE exhibition.
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The Theme of Resurrection in Three Nineteenth-Century Novels

2010-05-28T16:03:00.014-04:00

A theme in The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, inspired me, after a two-year hiatus, to reread Leo Tolstoy’s Resurrection. There was, in Dostoevsky’s novel, a repeating refrain having to do with the renewal or rebirth of the human spirit. It ends with a religious view of the theme – Alyosha Karamazov has just attended the funeral of the boy Ilyusha, along with some of Ilyusha’s schoolmates:

“ ‘Karamazov!’ cried Kolya, ‘can it really be true as religion says, that we shall all rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Ilyushechka?’ ‘Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been,’ Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy” (776).

Then I remembered that Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, which I read in January, dramatizes the same theme in four different characters – the last one, Sidney Carton, experiences the revivification of his soul by submitting to the guillotine in place of his friend, Charles Darnay – and on its penultimate page quotes from the Gospel of John, “I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (370).

Resurrection also ends with a reference to the theme, but not in the traditional religious sense of bodily resurrection. In the last chapter, the main character, Prince Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhludov, reads verses from the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. To him, these contain “clear, simple, and practical commandments, which if obeyed would establish a completely new order of things in the social life of mankind” (428). He meditates on the commandments and concludes that following them will be his life’s work. “That night,” the narrator tells us, “a new life began for Nekhludov” (430).

Three novels, published in 1854, 1880, and 1899, the first by an Englishman, the second two by Russian authors, all ending with bows to the New Testament. Going out on a limb, which is to say, not having the requisite historical or literary background, I suggest that the novels mirror an evolution in European attitudes toward religion in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Dickens describes events that, fictionally, take place decades before he wrote but presumably reflect attitudes in the England of his time, in which a religious worldview is taken for granted. Twenty-six years later, Dostoevsky addresses religion outright, proposing, through the Karamazov brothers, a three-faceted perspective. Alyosha, the youngest, known formally as Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, “chose the opposite path from all others…. As soon as he reflected seriously and was struck by the conviction that immortality and God exist, he naturally said at once to himself: ‘I want to live for immortality, and I reject any halfway compromise’” (26). He enters the monastery as a novice; after a time, which seems not to have been more than a year or two, his elder advises him to return to the world, where he can more effectively apply his gifts as a lover of mankind.

The middle brother, Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov, is the instrument of an intense critique of religion and religious faith. Alyosha can’t help but respond to him in the language of hope given by his Russian Orthodox faith: “Half your work is done and acquired, Ivan: you love life. Now you need only apply yourself to the second half, and you are saved.” Ivan asks what this second half consists of. “Resurrecting your dead,” says Alyosha, “who may never have died” (231). But Ivan, instead of resurrecting his dead, persists in his critique, and this eventually brings him to hallucinations of visits from the devil and “brain fever.”

A dramatization of Alyosha’s mysterious statement about resurrection arrives with the story of the oldest brother, Dmitri Fyodorovich, who, after investigations and a trial described at length, is convicted of murdering their father, although he is innocent. When Alyosha visits him in prison the night before the trial, Dmitri says, “Brother, in these past two months I’ve sensed a new man in me, a new man has arisen in me! He was shut up inside me, but if it weren’t for this thunderbolt, he never would have appeared” (591). The defense attorney calls Dmitri’s a “wild but noble heart,” which, if the jury acquits him, “will bow down before your deed, it thirsts for a great act of love, it will catch fire and resurrect forever” (747).

Thus, the idea of a new man arising in a principal character appears in all three novels. (Other characters also undergo moral transformations: the grave robber Jerry Cruncher in A Tale of Two Cities; the prostitute Katerina Maslova in Resurrection.) In the New Testament, St. Paul distinguishes between putting on “the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth” (Eph 4:24) and bodily resurrection at the end of the age; but the novels, except for the passages noted above, collapse the two themes into one. In addition, the resurrection theme in Tolstoy has a much more down-to-earth dimension. In the earlier two novels, inner renewal is not only described somewhat mystically but is climactic, while in Resurrection the emphasis is on Nekhludov’s self-regeneration, self-redemption, in the here and now, and is a project which occupies the bulk of the novel. Tolstoy had hoped, when he was a younger man, to become the founder of “a new religion corresponding with the present state of mankind; the religion of Christ, but purged of dogmas and mysticism – a practical religion, not promising future bliss, but bliss on earth” (p. vi, in the Introduction to the Signet Classics edition).

What is Resurrection about? Tolstoy’s practical religion plays out through three interwoven plotlines. In the first, Nekhludov serves on a jury which wrongly convicts Maslova; when she was a young servant girl, Nekhludov had seduced and unwittingly turned her to a life of prostitution. He is conscience-stricken when he learns this. The second plotline emerges as Katusha, the name by which Maslova is known familiarly, is sentenced to four years of hard labor in Siberia. Not only does Nekhludov vow to redeem himself by following her to Siberia and marrying her, he becomes deeply agitated by the criminal justice system in Russia and, through aiding prisoners, resists the system’s manifold evils as well as he can. The third plotline concerns Nekhludov’s efforts, as part of his self-redemption, to turn his two large estates over to the peasants who farm them.

In the course of the story, the land issue is resolved and Maslova becomes a virtuous woman. Nekhludov accompanies her and hundreds of other prisoners on their two-month trek to Siberia but sees little of her. In the end, for his sake, she refuses to marry him; she believes his liaison with her would ruin him as a member of the aristocracy. The prison issue continues to plague him; he asks himself “a very simple question: Why and by what right do some men imprison, torture, exile, flog, and kill other men, while they themselves are just like those they torture, flog, and kill?” (304).

Unfortunately, Tolstoy the author’s apparent distress over the prison issue, and the entire matter of social, political, and ecclesiastical authority, mars Resurrection as a literary work. In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner detects a “moral heavy-handedness” (157) in it. Tolstoy, with his genius for characterization and description, overcomes the problem in the second half of the book, but the effect at the end is of a story abandoned and left stranded somewhere in Siberia. As Alan Hodge writes in the Introduction, Tolstoy “was never able to work out a satisfactory way of life for the Resurrected and Regenerate man” (vii), and indeed the last sentence says of Nekhludov, “Only the future will show how this new chapter of his life will end” (430).

My general impression after reading the novels is that Tolstoy was the last to dramatize an unselfconscious belief in God. After this, if writers of fiction address religion, they either attack it or are self-conscious in their depictions of it. They do not treat it as something taken for granted, as Charles Dickens does in A Tale of Two Cities. In four examples from my novel-reading project, they celebrate it, as Graham Greene does in The Power and the Glory (1940); laugh gently at it, as Don DeLillo does in one scene in White Noise (1984); or critique it, as Alice McDermott does with a light hand in Charming Billy (1998), or Thomas Fleming boldly, in a novel I haven’t yet reviewed, The Good Shepherd (1974).
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"Patience means self-suffering"

2010-05-25T14:45:00.004-04:00

“The term Satyagraha was coined by me … in order to distinguish it from the movement then going on … under the name of Passive Resistance.

“Its root meaning is ‘holding on to truth,’ hence ‘force of righteousness.’ I have also called it love force or soul force. In the application of Satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not permit violence being inflicted on one’s opponent, but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For what appears truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by the infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on one’s self.”

--Mohandas Karamchand [Mahatma] Gandhi, Defense against charge of sedition, March 23, 1922.

The photo, by J. A. Mills/AP, pictures Gandhi after his release from prison in 1924.
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The Dictionary Gamester's Tale

2010-04-30T13:15:00.009-04:00

My reaction to Life: A User’s Manual was visceral rather than analytical: I wanted to make stories too! Here’s a particularly silly one.

In Chapter Sixty of Life: A User’s Manual, my friend Michaela Muellerin came upon the tale of Cinoc. (Later the novel’s irrepressible narrator would address the problem of saying Cinoc’s name aloud, listing twenty possible pronunciations, but would fail to offer a solution.) Cinoc, the story went, had “pursued a curious profession. As he said himself, he was a ‘word-killer’: he worked at keeping Larousse dictionaries up to date. But whilst other compilers sought out new words and meanings, his job was to make room for them by eliminating all the words and meanings that had fallen into disuse…. When he retired … he decided to compile a great dictionary of forgotten words … so as to rescue simple words which still appealed to him. In ten years he gathered more than eight thousand of them, which contain, obscurely, the trace of a story it has now become almost impossible to hand on” (287-290).

“The trace of a story … almost impossible to hand on.” Reading the brief excerpt from Cinoc’s great dictionary, about a page and half long in Life, Michaela thought she detected a hint of the trace – but she couldn’t be sure. The possibility of discovering it tantalized her for nearly two hundred more pages. It might be hidden in the remainder of Life; after all, by this time it was clear that the irrepressible narrator was up to tricks. But no, not a little piece of the trace surfaced; not a bit; not a single muddy footprint; not a soupçon. Finally, she could bear it no longer. What was the story? Suddenly it occurred to her – perhaps her own dictionary of not-yet-forgotten words, whom she referred to familiarly as Webster (pronounced WEB, as in spider’s, and STIR, as in cookie dough) contained a clue. The more obscure, the better. Perhaps she, with effort, might rescue the trace of a different story, equally almost impossible to hand on. She plunged zealously into the dictionary game, closing her eyes, opening Webster at random, pointing blindly to the middle of a page, opening her eyes to look at the word closest to her finger – the word had to be one Michaela couldn’t define on her own – yes, her method varied from that of Cinoc, but it reaped rewards –

The word was crystallography, which (Webster said with an air of pride) designated the science dealing with the system of forms among crystals, their structure, and their forms of aggregation. Well, but where did the plot go from there? Michaela wondered. She must go on and look for the definition of system, Webster suggested.

A system, it turned out, was a regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole, for example, a number system. A system might be a group of interacting bodies under the influence of related forces, such as a gravitational system; or it might be an assemblage of substances that is in or tends to equilibrium, as in a thermodynamic system. Ah, Michaela thought, now she was getting somewhere. Life: A User’s Manual was certainly an “interdependent group of items forming a unified whole.” She must not, however, proceed with undue haste …

First, it was important to be precise about the word form; Webster stepped in to say that form signified the shape and structure of something as distinguished from its material …

And to give attention to the several descriptions of crystal. Crystal had to do with quartz that is transparent, or nearly so, and that is either colorless or only slightly tinged; but it could also mean a body that is formed by the solidification of a chemical element, a compound, or a mixture, and that has a regularly repeating internal arrangement of its atoms and often external plane faces; or it might refer to the crystalline material which is used in electronics as a frequency-determining element or for rectification … What? exclaimed Michaela. A frequency-determining element or for rectification! Here she began to lose her grip, feeling that soon no trace of a story would be left …

Hold on! Webster cried, seizing the initiative. A crystal detector (breathlessly); a crystal detector is a detector that depends for its operation on the rectifying action of the surface of contact between various crystals (as of galena) and a metallic electrode! Don’t you see this?

Michaela sighed and sat back in her chair, knowing, like readers of Life: A User’s Manual, that her only choice was to go along for the ride. Webster persisted, growing feverish and excited. Galena, listen to this, was a bluish gray mineral (classified PbS) with metallic luster consisting of lead sulfide, showing highly perfect cubic cleavage, and constituting the principal ore of lead …

And rectify, rectify was easy. It meant to set right or to remedy – Well, or it could mean to purify (as with alcohol), especially by repeated or fractional distillation – Or, this had to be taken into account: rectify might mean to correct by removing errors – Or, how would Michaela like this one, rectify might mean to make (an alternating current) unidirectional! – An alternating current; an alternating current. Michaela sat up again, alert … perhaps the trace of a story had resurfaced …

And a crystal set – Michaela should know that a crystal set was a radio receiver having a crystal detector and no vacuum tubes, and, furthermore, that in 1922 the U. S. Bureau of Standards had published “Construction and Operation of a Very Simple Radio Receiving Equipment,” enabling anyone handy with basic tools to make a radio and receive broadcasts – All right! All right! said Michaela …

And that an aggregation was a group, body, or mass composed of many distinct parts or individuals (as animals or chapters or inanimate objects) … the word aggregation could also describe the collecting of units or parts (or words or lists or tales) into a mass or whole …

With this, Webster dropped to the floor, spent, and Michaela, relieved beyond measure, returned to Life: A User’s Manual. With the nearly two hundred more pages she had read, she had reached Chapter Ninety-Six, which recounted the tale of Dr. Bernard Dinteville. Here, she was astonished to find that the irrepressible narrator, delighted with her interest in his collecting of words and tales, as well as his making of lists and inventories, desired to engage in conversation. Beckoning eagerly, he led her to a half-open door in one of the flats at 11 Rue Simon Crubellier, through which could be seen Dr. Dinteville’s bedroom. He pointed to a black, varnished wooden chest of drawers, and said – he could hardly contain himself, he was so happy, “You can see … in a glass bowl, crystallography models, minutely sculpted pieces of wood representing some of the holohedral and hemihedral shapes of crystalline systems: the straight prism on a hexagonal base; the oblique prism on a rhombus base; the pointed cube; the cubo-octahedron; the cubo-dodecahedron; the rhomboid dodecahedron; the pyramidal hexagonal prism” (473-474).

“Ah,” said Michaela appreciatively; “a stunning aggregation. Now tell me; is that black, varnished wooden chest of drawers a parallelepiped, to which, in varying dimensions, isometric, tetragonal and orthorhombic crystalline systems are analogous? You were once, several chapters ago, I seem to recall, quite fond of the parallelepipedic structure of certain chests and low tables, not to mention dolls’ houses, cigarette lighters, lamp bases, pill boxes, etc.”

The usually irrepressible narrator smiled broadly, wordless, blushing with confusion, more delighted than before.
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Perec and His Lists

2010-04-23T09:50:00.006-04:00

If you haven’t finished reading Life A User’s Manual, rest easy. This post contains no spoilers beyond page 233.

One of the things I enjoyed about Life A User’s Manual was its numerous lists and inventories. The numbered list of short descriptive phrases that covers pages 228 to 233 particularly intrigued me. It is introduced by the narrator as a sort of reverie by the painter Serge Valène, as he plans the layout of a painting he will make. Valène imagines himself among the tenants of the flats at 11 Rue Simon Crubellier: “He would paint himself painting, and already you would be able to see … all around the long procession of his characters with their stories, their pasts, their legends” (228).

This frame for the list wasn’t its only interesting feature. As I read, I realized that some of the 179 items on the list referred back to stories told, and I wondered if others pointed ahead to stories yet to come. It was like standing on the Eiffel Tower (do people go up there?) and scanning the world. When I had returned from this dizzying height, I received a third impression, which was that, making this list, Perec sketched out his ideas for Life before beginning to write its stories. Finally, there was the playful setting of the list in an old-fashioned typewriter font, with each line (not counting the numerals) made up of exactly sixty characters.

I couldn’t resist giving this typographical exercise a try. It would be easy and fun with the Courier New font on Word. Each of the dozen items in the following list uses sixty characters – which unfortunately is not obvious in the Blogger typeface, but there you are. They are one-line summaries of novels I’ve reviewed on this blog:

A man for whom adventure is letting his horse choose the way
The boy who saddles his horse, rides to Mexico with a friend
The girl who meets her husband-to-be as she holidays in Bath
The official whose main enjoyment is snarling at petitioners
The slave girl writing she will not hurt with her confession
The boy gang leader who marries to thwart a girl’s squealing
The prisoner tortured by keeping him standing till he faints
The once loyal student who avers her teacher must be stopped
The soldier whose battle-terror casts him down a rabbit hole
The man who loves 2 women and his mother then loses them all
An artist who sees neighbors all around in a long procession
The priest at the end who knows to be a saint is what counts

The twelve novels and their authors are: Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes; All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy; Northanger Abbey, by Jane Austen; Notes From Underground, by Fyodor Doestoevsky; A Mercy, by Toni Morrison; Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene; The Town Beyond the Wall, by Elie Wiesel; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark; Going After Cacciato, by Tim O’Brien; Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Lawrence; Life A User’s Manual, by Georges Perec; and The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene.
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The Hungry Woman

2010-04-10T09:47:00.010-04:00

In the morning, as the sky began to lighten, Helen dreamed. She was at the mall where she saw a thin, awkward woman of about forty walking on the concourse. The woman was there to shop, but she hadn’t bought anything. She wanted to be invisible. On her wan face she wore a sulky, resentful expression.

It occurred to the woman that she was hungry. Obediently the dream took her around a corner, between the kiosk for movie tickets and the broad, glassy front of a clothing store, to a table where people ate lunches they had bought at food concessions on the other side of the kiosk. They ate together but were strangers to one another and ate silently, alone. One had finished, a young woman in a white jacket, and was getting up to leave. Suddenly, the woman with the wan face spied a small pile of things she had left three days earlier: a scone with raisins in it, a stenographer’s pad, a pair of glasses, a small round mirror with a yellow frame. She leaned in quickly to retrieve them – as if she feared the young woman would steal them – or out of a chronic state of embarrassment. How could she have left behind a trace of herself?

The scone was old and dry. When the woman touched it, it fell instantly to a mound of crumbs. She mistook a portion of it for a brown paper napkin and tried to wipe up the crumbs. When this failed, she reverted to the edge of one hand and began sweeping the crumbs off the table into her other hand. She seemed to plan to buy something to eat. Her plan broadened into cleaning crumbs and other debris off an entire quadrant of the table. In the center there was a thick smear of cooked apple which had fallen out of an apple tart. The apple was golden brown, shiny with sugary syrup, fragrant with cinnamon. As the woman brought the edge of her hand across the apple, a faint sound of wailing rose from it. Yes, a sound of wailing, very faint. Helen, in her bed and briefly near waking, felt a breeze from the open window waft across her cheek. She mumbled into the pillow, “What’s the matter?” The voice in the dream came stronger and said, “You’re sweeping me into the bag like I don’t exist!” It was true; in her left hand the woman had been holding a brown paper sandwich bag and brushing every bit of trash into it.

In the next moment the woman was no longer forty but young, and quite plump. She had high color in her face and curly, light red hair. She wore a black, short-sleeved pullover sweater. She sat at the end of the table opposite the one she had been cleaning, holding a baby more plump than herself, if this can be imagined, and a large thick book. The black, undecorated hard cover of the book contrasted sharply with the white of its page edges. The baby, rescued from oblivion, vindicated, looked out on the world of the mall with an air of chubby triumph and satisfaction. The woman held him with both arms, which made her bosom bulge outward inside the black sweater in two round and distinct mounds. She clasped the book tightly against the baby’s legs so that it concealed them; he looked as though he had risen from the book. As for herself, she was both proud and tremulous; she dared to be visible; she owned the book and the baby, which no one could take from her; she feared the world’s cruelty but she was young, not jaded, not tired. She was at the mall, she took her place at the table, she held firmly onto her baby and the book. Plump, like a flower. That’s what she was.
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Tea First!

2010-04-03T11:32:00.005-04:00

This piece requires context. It’s a review of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906) and Peter and Wendy (1911), which I wrote for a moral theology course nine years ago. The syllabus of the course, which was called “Virtue in Children’s Literature,” explained: “The content and structure of the course reflects important concerns of systematic and moral theologians. There are kinds of theological questioning happening in some of these books and stories that take us into the realm of Christian doctrine (e.g., faith, grace, sin, forgiveness and redemption). There are characters and plots that raise enduring moral questions and instruct us in the virtues honored by Western classical and biblical traditions.”

The name Tesoro is the surname I adopted when I began this blog. (Back then, in 2006, my first name was Anna; when I got literary last year I resumed my given name, Julia.)

Finally, I do not despise my mother! We had a close and healthy relationship, and in the sixteen years since she went to her eternal reward I have never stopped missing her.

Tea First! *

I say, I do wish I had read the Peter Pan stories before the Introduction and the Notes. I would have penned lovely wonderful words about them, and only afterwards discovered the perfectly horrid autobiography behind them. Never mind. I’ve gone and read them the other way round and there is nothing to be done about it. There is no second chance, not for most of us.

Not that I deserve one – dear me, it must be said, I was already prejudiced against Peter Pan. It comes of the long years when Mary Martin strutted and crowed and, hung by a wire, flew the cocky little creature on stage. I could not stop thinking about her binding her breasts with a rag, and being too tall, and having a face much too old for that of a boy who never grew up.** I fear I have no sense of humor; what is worse, not in all my adult years has a flight of imagination so much as brushed across my bedroom windowsill. It is all rather sad.

I must collect myself. Certainly it is not good form to pretend I have serious thoughts. Wouldn’t my mother be amused, were she still on this earth, when she came to tidy up my mind after I fell asleep. Indeed, she did have a habit of telling me, “You take yourself too seriously.” In such a manner did she fold and pack my pretentiousness away in the bottom of my mind, and air out my smile for when I should be ready to wear it. I despise her. I did mean to say extraordinarily nice things about her, but her insistence on being everlastingly kind to me, and buying me pretty articles of clothing, and cooking special meals when I flew home from far way, when it was clear I did not deserve these things because I was gay and innocent and heartless, are not to be borne. When it comes to pass that I pen my autobiographical satire on the terror of my childhood, I shall give her but a one-sentence obituary, “Mrs. Dearie is now dead and forgotten,” while granting our dog Lucky a paragraph of sweet farewell.

To be sure, I do not mind satire, but, now I have read the Peter Pan stories, I simply will not have authors hating people, and then excusing themselves by saying that David died too young, or Mother would not make the best of it, or Father became a cipher. This is according to my fixed rule: Authors are not to publish their personal rubbishy agony. They must instead refer matters to their notebooks and pen them out zillions of times until a truth of lovely pale colors emerges; then they must pen ever more intensely until the truth takes shape and the colors become vivid and with another drop of ink they must go on fire.

What happened to J. M. Barrie is that he forgot my fixed rule, and the very good reason he forgot it is that he is like Peter. He chortles that he is youth, he is joy, he is a little bird that rummages in the minds of children. Everyone knows this is nonsense, not because it is not possible, but because J. M. Barrie does not know in the least who or what he is. Not knowing, he believes man in general is a vain tabernacle, an empty thing. No good comes of such a belief. No man grows up and tells the truth and remembers his adventures and is kind to others who believes such a thing.

* An example of Tesoro’s authorial comedy and love of stylistic games. She is thinking, “Do I want to fly with Peter Pan now, or shall have my tea first?”

** As often in Tesoro, the modest complaint in this sentence veils her desire to shout, “The Emperor has no clothes!” She means to say that J. M. Barrie’s tale is based on a lie, the lie of a sad and distorted childhood, in which he and his mother made unfortunate choices. His scars stripe every page.
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Life: A User's Manual, by Georges Perec

2010-03-31T13:32:00.010-04:00

Impressions. After reading the Preamble and Part I of Life: A User’s Manual, a novel written by Georges Perec (originally published in French in 1978) about residents in a block of flats in Paris in the late 1970s.

These pages comprise 13.5 per cent of the book. The Table of Contents lists six Parts, an Epilogue, and six Appendices. Each of the Parts contains several chapters, which are numbered, for a total of Ninety-Nine. The chapters are unevenly distributed among the Parts. Chapter titles designate parts of the building (One On the Stairs, 1) or, in most cases, names of residents (Two Beaumont, 1). Numerals in chapter headings indicate the sequence in repeated descriptions of chapter contents (Seventeen On the Stairs, 2; Thirty-One Beaumont, 3). Following the Table of Contents the author has inserted a disclaimer: “Friendship, history and literature have supplied me with some of the characters of this book. All other resemblances to living persons or to people having lived in reality or fiction can only be coincidental. /Signed/ G. P.”

One The Family Room, 1. A room in a house on Silver Maple road. The walls are paneled with the type of thin wood veneer popular in rec rooms of the 1950s and 1960s. The veneer is scored vertically in an uneven pattern and painted mushroom white with a matte finish. There are sash windows on two walls, decorated with lace curtains. A Karastan carpet with an Oriental motif, mainly in crimson with accents of dark and light blue, pale and dark salmon pink, sage green, burnished gold and cream, conceals most of a new, cushioned-vinyl floor with a wood look called Meadow Oak. Long sofas line the other two walls, one in a traditional floral pattern in dark blue and blood red on a beige field, the other an old Pine Factory model with faded ash-blue cushions in a rough, canvas-like weave. The room also contains a La-Z-Boy upholstered in dark brown, a flat-screen television set, a Louis Quinze bookcase (under one of the windows) housing books on golf; the history of Maryland; hymnals with red covers; white and black looseleaf binders holding octavos for choral singing as well as photocopied sheet music; and movie DVDs and videos, and a low square table at one end of the flowered sofa, draped with a circular cloth in dark blue velveteen which drops to the floor and on top of which lies a large round crocheted doily in ecru. On the doily sits a tall lamp with a barrel shade and an ornate metal post with a look of dull bronze; next to the Pine Factory sofa, a floor lamp with a shirred cloth shade and a thin, shiny brass post. On either side of the window above the bookcase hang enlargements of photographs of, respectively, the seventeenth and ninth holes at Pine Point Golf Course; beside the other window hangs an oil painting by the Spanish painter Emilio Delgado of the face of a clown with a pensive expression, mostly in shades of red with touches of orange, light gray and dark blue, executed on tissue paper affixed to canvas, a method invented by the painter in 1966; as he worked the tissue paper took on small, usually horizontal wrinkles which caught the paint and which, in the finished work, create an illusion of shadows. The clown gazes slightly to his right.

On the flowered sofa sit three people who have all at once looked up from novels they are reading. The portly man of fifty-three who has his arm on the armrest near the table is wearing a dark gray business suit with a pale blue shirt and a tie in a red-and-blue paisley design; the open book on his lap is The Jungle, by Sinclair Lewis. The thin woman of forty-three sitting in the middle wears a plain, periwinkle blue linen shift over a long-sleeved, light green cotton sweater; her book is The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk. The tall, large-boned woman of thirty-eight, sitting on the other end of the sofa, wears a russet orange jacket made of soft, supple leather over a cream-colored silk shirt, and jeans; her novel is Silas Marner, by George Eliot. The three are wearing black shoes. They are gazing with startled expressions at a woman of eighty-three curled up in the middle of the other sofa with her legs underneath her body. She has white hair and wears a blousy, glazed cotton caftan which conceals her legs and feet; the cloth of the caftan is painted in deep hues of scarlet and indigo in a Balinese design, with features of the design outlined in black. She has just announced that she is reading Life: A User’s Manual, by Georges Perec, starting several days before the period agreed upon by all four for a simultaneous reading.

Painting of Crail Harbour Jigsaw Puzzle by Gibsons at Bin Bin.
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All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy

2010-03-27T12:30:00.009-04:00

What to remember about Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992)? I’ll go on to read other novels, each one enriching my inner life in its own way, or disappointing it. But before I do, what can I set down in my notebook of memories as an emblem, if that is the proper word, of this novel, which I liked very much?

The title. First of all, the title. Several years ago I had a dream about a number of people crowding close to me and loving me, and I called it “All the Pretty People.” Undoubtedly I had heard about McCarthy’s novel, but I didn’t associate the dream with it. It was as though the title had moved into public consciousness and become available for adaptation as needed. I think it’s because it reflects and represents a universal human experience: there are times when our hearts are full, when we are most aware of what is closest to us; our hearts overflow with the tenderest of affections. All the Pretty Horses is not entirely about horses, but it is about love:

“What he loved in horses,” our narrator tells us about John Grady Cole, “was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.”

Then there was the astonishing physical strength and emotional maturity of John Grady Cole, the hero of the story. He is only sixteen years old when he and his friend Lacey Rawlins mount their horses in San Angelo, Texas, and ride deep into Mexico. (The year is 1949.) Looking for work, the boys stop at the Hacienda de Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, a ranch in the state of Coahuila (97), where, proving himself, John Grady breaks twenty wild horses in two days. It was like the labors of Hercules. He falls in love with the hacendado’s beautiful and spirited daughter Alejandra: “She passed and the horse changed gaits again and she sat the horse more than well, riding erect with her broad shoulders and trotting the horse up the road…. He’d half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat.” On a false charge he lands in prison, where he kills a man in self-defense. Riding back to Texas with a bullet wound in his thigh, he disassembles his pistol, heats the barrel in his campfire, and cauterizes both the entry and exit wounds. I was reading “Oedipus the King” at the same time and realized John Grady Cole was a type of hero rare in modern serious fiction. He is larger than life.

There was the laconic tone of the language, reminiscent of (perhaps even a tribute to) Ernest Hemingway but conveying a blissful awe in the face of nature which I didn’t remember from Hemingway (although I admit it has been decades since I read him):

“They rode out along the fenceline and across the open pastureland…. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing”

Finally, there was the settled religious and ethical stance in the worldview of the novel, which first becomes explicit when Rawlins gets to thinking at the campfire one evening:

“You ever think about dyin?
“Yeah. Some. You?
“Yeah. Some. You think there’s a heaven?
“Yeah. Dont you?”

Three or four times as the novel winds down and John Grady is heading back to Texas (Rawlins has already gone back and John Grady has been with Alejandra for the last time), circumstances require him to narrate everything that has happened in the past year. First this is to a group of children who assure him they have time to listen. Finally it is to a judge in a courtroom in Texas, where he must prove he hasn’t stolen the horse he has driven out of Mexico, which had belonged to Jimmy Blevins, an American boy who was killed there. He hopes to find the boy’s next of kin. The judge clears John Grady in admiring tones and later that night his conscience impels him to go to the judge’s house and confess that he killed one man and was close to killing another, the one who shot Jimmy Blevins:

“I wasnt even mad at him. Or I didnt feel like I was. That boy he shot, I didnt hardly even know him. I felt bad about it. But he wasnt nothin to me.
“Why do you think you wanted to kill him?
“I dont know.
“Well, said the judge. I guess that’s somethin between you and the good Lord. Wouldnt you say?
“Yessir. I didnt mean that I expected an answer. Maybe there aint no answer. It just bothered me that you might think I was somethin special. I aint.
“Well that aint a bad way to be bothered.”

May you enjoy reading All the Pretty Horses as much as I did.
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The Road to Hell

2010-03-20T13:18:00.006-04:00

Now and then I attempt to write fiction. Some pieces “work” and some don’t. After picking up Aristotle’s Poetics yesterday, I think it may be that in only some of them do I supply the requirements of a plot. And I probably do so because I’ve absorbed the patterns of stories I’ve read. So, how to go about making plotting intentional?

Going back to Brighton Rock, what is the plot in that novel? Before Aristotle, I would have said that the plot consists of the interactions of three characters, Pinkie, Rose and Ida Arnold. Each character is a force, a movement in a certain direction: Pinkie will always behave like Pinkie; Rose like Rose; Ida like Ida. The characters are like the words inside a stick of Brighton rock: they remain true to their natures, no matter where they are broken. I thought the plot had to do with the intersection of these forces. What happens when the three characters encounter one another?

Most of the Poetics is about the literary form Tragedy, which Aristotle defines as “an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude” (VI, §2). To be complete, or whole, the plot of a tragedy must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. “A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be. An end, on the contrary, is that which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it. A middle is that which follows something as some other thing follows it” (VII, §3). Before Aristotle, I thought the end of Brighton Rock was Rose’s going to confession after Pinkie is dead. But nothing in the plot causes Rose to go to confession; this is simply an aspect of her character that returns after Pinkie dies.

The end is Pinkie’s suicide, which “naturally follows” the complications set in motion by the murder at the beginning (which I mentioned in yesterday’s post). The crossings of the characters’ paths are among the complications. Another key complication is Pinkie’s recurring feeling that he’s not going to succeed as a mob boss. And there are his character traits, principally his Catholicism. In his seventeen years he has known only poverty and rejection, which he translates as Hell. To him, Heaven is only a word but Hell is real. Since he is a complex character the need for repentance pulls at him; but he is immured in a habit of hatred.

Brighton Rock, with The Power and the Glory, is one of Graham Greene’s Catholic novels. It has theological implications. Is Pinkie already damned, as he so often seems to believe? Why does he persist in squelching glimmers of hope? When he jumps off the cliff at the end, why don’t Rose, Ida and the others hear the splash? Is this Greene’s way of suggesting the strangeness of the mercy of God?
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Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene

2010-03-18T15:08:00.011-04:00

Where do writers get their ideas? Here’s an imagined reconstruction of Graham Greene’s thoughts as he comes upon the people, objects, memories, etc. that will lead to his novel, Brighton Rock (1938). It’s a Bank Holiday, Whitsun Monday, and he’s in Brighton for the day:

“This place’ll do … Snow’s. I’m hungry. Plenty of tables free. They’ve got the standard… I’ll have the kippers and eggs. Earnest little waitress, bony face, protuberant eyes; can’t be more than sixteen years old. Innocent; good … green. What could happen to her? Some geezer could trick her into marrying him. Love, she’d fancy. I remember a newspaper story about a man who did a crime and then married an underage girl to keep her quiet… she couldn’t be forced to give evidence against him.

“Where did she say the sweet shop… here it is. Strange, to have shops under the pier. Looks like a pink barred cell. Outside, the tide pounds into the breakwater like a fist. Brighton rock, Brighton rock … this must be it. I’ll get two sticks, one for Auntie Rose … what am I saying; she – Bloody hell! Now I’ve done it. Clumsy fool! Every stick broken. Wait: look: it’s what Spicer says, No matter where you break it, it still reads Brighton Rock. Like people: the same all the way through. What if … something happens here. A scuffle breaks out. In this little pink barred cell. Brighton rock knocked onto the floor and smashed. A murder. No sound except the sea. Over in an instant. Medical examiner says heart attack, but the murderer is uneasy. Think I’ll have a walk.

“That kid, he pushed a blind man into the roadway rather than go around him. Look at him, the pressure of pride… Hard face; no beard yet but his eyes are ancient, ancient and grey. Cheap suit, recently brushed as if he has an appointment; narrow shoulders, thin frame, fingernails bitten except for one long thumbnail. For carving? I smell mobs, the racket. Shoes with long pointed toes … polished, but leather cracked. He’s on his uppers, that’s certain, hole in the sole, hole in the spirit. Reminds me of Pinkie (there’s a coincidence, the pink shop), a kid at school who said he’d kill somebody some day, he didn’t care who. Habit of hatred. Disgust, resentment, fears he’s finished before he’s begun.

“Hell. Damnation. Murder is a mortal sin. So is fornication, which includes Catholics marrying before a clerk of the court instead of a priest. Some people think they’re damned already … if you’re Catholic you are, if you do a mortal sin and don’t confess it and receive absolution. Might as well do another one. You think, I’m young, there’s time to repent. Still, there’s the saying … what is it? “Between the stirrup and the ground, he something sought and something found.” Mercy. No one can conceive the … appalling strangeness of the mercy of God (246). He’s going into the Cosmopolitan, not that he has a room! Meeting someone undoubtedly, someone with a big cigar and gold cigarette lighter. I’ll have a look.

“Hello, there’s a fine woman. Singing, not hired to sing, having a good time with the men in the bar. Full-blown charms, big, beautiful breasts like Aunt Ida’s…. I used to crawl into them when I was a little chap and fall asleep. The enormous comfort. Ida had a strong sense of justice, knew the difference between Right and Wrong. I did too, before I was Catholic. Things much simpler. Now it’s wrestle with sin and virtue – but hope stretches a long way. You can win to the evil side suddenly, but it’s the long life that counts … the guardian good tempts you to virtue like a sin, drives you remorselessly towards the ‘happy death’ (241). The woman; magnificent legs. If Ida were here, she’d do anything to keep that little waitress safe, wouldn’t care who she rolled over. This woman, she likes men, says, There’s nothing wrong with it, it’s natural. Says, It’s a good life. No one a stranger to her; there’s nothing with which she doesn’t claim kinship. She sets out to save people and sticks to it until she’s done. Like Ida, but a big part of her purpose is fun."
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Rain Pools

2010-03-15T12:06:00.010-04:00

Why read fiction? Because when you uncurl yourself from the corner of the couch, stand up, and begin to move around, you see things you never saw before.

In my back yard this morning there are standing pools of water. They are visible from the upstairs windows. They aren’t big pools but there are lots of them, about ten, depending on how you calculate their boundaries. The biggest, which is on this side of the silver maple nearest the road, is eight feet across. The pools’ surfaces are broken by tufts of short grass and weeds, which are suddenly, in this almost-spring weather, bright green. At the edges of the pools near another maple, which is directly behind the house – this is a thick-trunked behemoth of a maple, as maples go, and the mother of the one near the road – there is a band of mud. Water from the big tree drips into the pools beneath its branches so that it seems to be raining again. By the way, trees are not yet in leaf in our area, but the maples are happily sprouting tiny red leaf-buds.

Oddly, the rain pools look different from each of the three upstairs windows. It has to do with the quality of the light. The view from the middle window, in the bathroom, is the best. There you enjoy an optical illusion. You direct your attention to the grass and you find your eye ranging over the whole yard, trying to take in everything. Grackles cluster on the bird feeder and below it; two squirrels scare them away. The giant leaves of the hostas which flourished last year near the big maple lie on the ground flat and thin, a washed-out grayish-brown. Chores must be tackled when the ground dries out: finally, spread the compost shoveled into the wheelbarrow last October and forgotten; with determination, pull down an ugly vine climbing high into the big maple, along with English ivy creeping upward once again from the roots.

The movement caused by dripping water compels you to return to the pools. Strangely, they grow in size. They glimmer invitingly. The two near the big maple reflect the sky and other trees, neighbors’ trees behind and to the side of the gnarly maple, which have tall, straight trunks. One of them is an eighty-foot tulip poplar. The whitish-gray, cloud-tumbled sky appears light brown in the water; the contrasting trunks, dark brown. A squirrel bounds across the top, now the bottom, of the next-door neighbor’s stockade fence, which hangs upside-down in the water. You have the sense of looking deeply into things. Your eye no longer wanders. You recall a descriptive passage in G. K. Chesterton’s Manalive:

“The country around these colleges is flat; but it does not seem flat when one is thus in the midst of the colleges. For in these flat fens there are always wandering lakes and lingering rivers of water. And these always change what might have been a scheme of horizontal lines into a scheme of vertical lines. Wherever there is water, the height of high buildings is doubled, and a British brick house becomes a Babylonian tower. In that shining unshaken surface the houses hang head downwards exactly to their highest or lowest chimney. The coral-coloured cloud seen in that abyss is as far below the world as its original appears above it. Every scrap of water is not only a window but a skylight. Earth breaks under men’s feet into precipitous aerial perspectives, into which a bird could as easily wind its way as—” (65).

This passage took me several readings before I understood it; once I did, it became the book for me. Now reminded, I plan, whenever I walk in the neighborhood, to stop at the edge of a puddle; or whenever I ride in a car to look out at a quiet stream we are traversing, and expect a reflection. Who knows what will be there?

Back in the yard, the rain begins again. My eye is forced to the surface of the pools. Raindrops make little circles which quickly spread, overlap and disappear, to be replaced by other circles, exactly the same. Here on the surface life is restless, wouldn’t you say?
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Deaf Sentence, by David Lodge

2010-03-02T17:33:00.005-05:00

Deaf Sentence, a novel by the British novelist, David Lodge (2008)

I had a personal reason for reading this novel. It's about Desmond Bates, a retired linguistics professor living in an unnamed former industrial city about a four-mile drive north of London. Unfortunately, he is growing progressively more deaf; this affliction has hastened his retirement and threatens to narrow his life considerably. He finds it difficult to talk with his wife; he doesn’t like parties any more – hearing aids are almost useless in the din; and a future without playing with his grandchildren looks grim. Most of the time, he confronts his challenges with good humor. He joins a lip-reading class; frets about his daughter, who is expecting her first baby; and once a week visits his eighty-nine-year-old father in London.

The plot centers around the perplexing entrance into Desmond’s life of a good looking blond Ph.D. student from America named Alex Loom. Alex has a dissertation supervisor, but she is dissatisfied and wants to switch over to Desmond, whose work she says she has read. Professionally, this is not possible, since he has left the university, but she is persistent. Her topic is suicide notes. Out of boredom and with communication complicated by his deafness, Desmond agrees to meet with her. She turns out to be an indifferent student, but from the first meeting it is obvious that she is open to sexual adventure. He resists her overtures.

The turning point arrives with an e-mailed invitation from Alex to “punish” her for marking up a university library book – with a sadomasochistic rendezvous. This both arouses and appalls Desmond. Strangely the novel loses its tension at just this point, wandering off to describe the decline of his father and a last-minute lecture tour in Cracow, into which Desmond fits visits to Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. His father dies soon after he returns, having suffered a stroke. Although he does his best to ignore Alex’s e-mail, she continues to turn up like a bad penny, eventually worming her way into a meeting with his family. In the end, she simply disappears, pursued by bad debts. Desmond returns to his lip-reading class. He enjoys the sessions, where there is much laughter over miscommunications.

Analyzing my impatience with the novel, and my opinion that after the e-mail it fizzled, I found that I had lost sight of its comic tone. The action rises toward the e-mail and falls afterwards; there is no other climactic event. I envisioned a welter of problems stemming from its presence on Desmond’s computer. But David Lodge seems to have had another question in mind: How would a decent man, who is retired after a long professional career and doesn’t have enough to do, deal with a temptation like Alex Loom? (Not everyone in the novel resists her charms.) Lodge answers that, first, the man remains decent, both morally and professionally; and, second, life gets in the way. Other more importunate matters simply push themselves to the fore.

For my personal reason, see the label Deafness.
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The Waves

2010-02-26T12:10:00.009-05:00

The Waves, a novel by Virginia Woolf (1931).

Just briefly, The Waves is about six friends as they move through stages or, more accurately, dimensions of their lives between late childhood and middle age. Their names are Bernard, Susan, Neville, Louis, Jinny and Rhoda. The friends live in England in an upper middle class milieu, during the period when it is common for young men to go out to India for their careers. The manner of the narrative is unique. The Waves is told almost entirely in dialogue form, through the alternating viewpoints of the characters. The exception is the prose poems opening each of the nine parts, which describe the effects of the sun on sea and earth as it progresses across the sky in one day. The poems float narratorless above the rest of the story until near the end, when they appear to have sprung from Bernard’s point of view. “But for a moment,” he reminisces, “I had sat on the turf somewhere high above the flow of the sea and the sounds of the woods, had seen the house, the garden, and the waves breaking” (213).

I hate to say this, but all of the above is a lie. Oh, the characters’ names are as given, and the sun does do that shining kind of thing; but the idea that I or anyone can put together a coherent picture of something experienced, whether it’s a book or another person, is a sham. There is much to admire in The Waves. All the Virginia Woolf novels I’ve read are remarkable for the beauty of their language; this one is near perfection. Its deft interweaving of form, structure and theme is an unbelievable accomplishment. Here I’m speaking of the motif of the waves. The relentless succession of soliloquies by the characters – they don’t converse so much as take turns thinking their way through the story – is like the uninterrupted surging of waves. The prose poems are like big waves that occasionally rear up and rush toward the shore. The characters often liken their experiences to waves. For example, Bernard says of Neville when he has suddenly left the room, “Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waters, he went over me” (63). Louis, observing the rhythm of an eating-house, says, “I, who would wish to feel close over me the protective waves of the ordinary, catch with the tail of my eye some far horizon” (67). Life itself is like the waves. Now they tumble and destroy you. Now they rise beneath you like a proud horse carrying you to a confrontation with death. I had to read the novel as an assignment, so and so many pages a day, because it was difficult; at the same time it entranced me. Yet I felt a sense of disquiet; there was something missing, something fundamental. In the language of the novel, this feeling points out the lie that most of us live with, that there is coherency in life; that we can tell stories about it.

Thus it is ironic to call The Waves a story. Bernard is the character who addresses the problem. He is the one who has amused the others by telling stories, making phrases, putting events into sequences. But from the beginning his friends haven’t trusted this tendency. He can be stopped in the middle of a sentence by someone who detects insincerity. Late in life he sheds the habit. The point of view in the ninth part belongs to him, as he attempts to “sum up” the meaning of his life for a dining partner, an “almost unknown person” he may once have met on a ship to Africa. Oddly, he begins by stating that his life as something with “roundness, weight, depth” (176) is an illusion. After dinner, when the other diner has gone, he drops his notebook of phrases on the floor of the restaurant to be swept up by a charwoman at dawn. What is real is the eternal movement of the waves, the forces of life; to believe that there is anything solid or permanent in an individual human life – this is to live in a dream world. Be assured, I don't hold with these ideas myself. They are what I understand of the novel.

The Waves is the fourth and final novel in the Woolf-in-Winter Reading Challenge. The host this time is Claire, whose blog is “kiss a cloud: notes from a reading life.” Many thanks to all the hosts, Sarah, Emily, Frances and Claire. Reading Virginia Woolf has taught me much about literature and aroused thoughts I’ll probably be processing for months.

Photo from Treknature.
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Orlando, by Virginia Woolf

2010-02-12T10:40:00.008-05:00

The Woolf-in-Winter Reading Challenge presses on! This time Frances of Nonsuch Book: Musings of a Print Junkie is the host. During the day, on her blog, she will list those who are participating, with links so that you can read and comment on their reviews. The book is Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, which is really a novel and which Woolf wrote in the landmark year of 1928, when universal suffrage was granted in Great Britain. My post focuses on one narrative event, the moment in Chapter 3 (pages 65-67) when the title character is transformed from a man into a woman.

The scene opens as Orlando, for the second time in his life (he lives for hundreds of years but ages slowly), is sunk in “a profound slumber.” Like the first time, this sleep lasts for seven days. The biographer appears, opening the scene with the words, “And now again obscurity descends,” not only reviving a persistent theme in the novel, that of obscurity, which refers to a state in which things are hidden or only partially seen; but also obtruding himself into the narrative as a character. We might take the biographer as a woman, for two or three times in the novel she utters complaints about male novelists; but her attention to the craft of biography so often mimics Orlando’s life-spanning labor on a long poem called “The Oak Tree” that it is difficult to separate her from the scenes where he is shown as a boy or man – as he is for nearly the entire first half of the book – sitting at his desk. The reader who attends at least a little to the labor of reading Orlando appropriates its essential uncertainty. But, since language demands decisions, I’ll stay with my internalized image of the biographer as a man.

The biographer, who uses the authorial “we,” is a whimsical figure, is quite self-conscious, and has a dramatic flair. When he announces, “Now again obscurity descends,” it’s as though he steps onto a stage in front of the curtain descending upon a previous act. Fumbling with the hat in his hands, his shoulders bent humbly forward, he shows himself deeply averse to continuing his account of Orlando’s life. The audience has delicate sensibilities and ought to be spared. It is all part of an act; the next minute the biographer’s speech is interrupted by the silver trumpets of the austere Gods of Candor, Honesty and Truth, who stand ever by the biographer’s inkpot.

As in a dream, the scene shifts to Orlando’s room, where the doors gently open and three female figures enter, our Ladies of Purity, Chastity and Modesty. The reluctance of the biographer to inscribe what has to come next is taken up and allegorized by the three sisters, who represent varying degrees of virginity, coldness and concealment. Each approaches the sleeping form of Orlando and, singing in highly figurative language, waving her veil in the air, begs him to keep himself and the thing that must come next hidden. We the audience, who have been evoked by the biographer as sensitive souls, but who at the same time are implicated by the authorial “we” in the project of revealing what must surely come next, are being treated to a masque. Now for a definition: A masque, according to J. A. Cuddon, was “a fairly elaborate form of courtly entertainment which was particularly popular in the reigns of Elizabeth I, James I and Charles I…. The masque combined poetic drama, song, dance and music. The costumes were often sumptuous. The structure was usually simple. A Prologue” – in this scene, the biographer’s initial appearance is a kind of Prologue – “introduced a group of actors known to the audience. They entered in disguise or perhaps in some kind of decorated vehicle. Plot and action were slight. Usually the plot consisted of mythological and allegorical elements…. At the end there was a dance of masked figures in which the audience joined. In short, it was a kind of elegant, private pageant.”

Our masque continues: After the speeches and songs of the Ladies, the trumpeters peal forth, “Avaunt! Begone!” The sisters wail and wave their veils through the air (“What a racket!” I thought as I was reading) but they have no might before Truth and retire from the room. Again, one last time, the trumpets peal forth, “Truth!” Orlando awakes, stretches himself and rises from the bed. The biographer steps forward, emboldened at last to close the scene, and says: “He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and … we have no choice left but confess – he was a woman.”

This segment of Orlando caught my interest because of its negative connotations for the virtues of purity, chastity (which means neither coldness nor celibacy) and modesty, and its puzzling conception of truth. Studying a bit further, I came to see that truth in Orlando, even if it is spelled in the masque with a capital T, allegorizing it along with the virtues, refers not to metaphysical truth but to the truth of the biographer – telling what is known, and to the truth of a life lived with candor. These truths exists in tension with all those forces that oppose them, including lost records; purity, chastity and modesty (as defined in the novel); and “the spirit of the age” (a theme arising in Chapter 5).

I was also intrigued by the employment of the masque form, which made the segment almost completely self-contained. Reading George MacDonald’s fairy tales at the same time, it occurred to me that the novel was a type of fantasy, which led me to wonder whether masques were a very early antecedent of fantasy. In addition, the presence of a distinct form gave me the opportunity to read up a little on the New Critics and work on my close reading skills. In the kind of analysis I’ve attempted, a literary work is explored for form, as well as for the work’s internal vitality and logic, rather than, to give one example, for the ways in which Orlando actually is a biography.

Finally, encouraged by Erich Auerbach’s method in Mimesis, where the last chapter is about To the Lighthouse, I tried out the idea that one segment could fairly represent the whole novel. It doesn’t quite, since the scene takes place apart from Orlando’s estate in England, which is so vital a part of his character; but it does at least suggest the theme of writing – the craft of writing – that pervades the novel; it examines the tension between truth and obscurity; and it looks squarely at the theme of gender.

Sources: Erich Auerbach, “The Brown Stocking,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature; J. A. Cuddon, “masque,” in The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory; Wilfred L. Guerin et al, A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature; and Merry M. Pawlowski, “Introduction,” Orlando: A Biography (Wordsworth Classics).

Painting by Sir Peter Lely, c. 1675, of King Charles II of England in the robes of the Order of the Garter, as shown on Wikipedia. Charles is king during the period when Orlando becomes a woman.
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My Car!

2010-02-07T16:27:00.003-05:00

A Tale of Two Cities

2010-02-05T11:18:00.010-05:00

Jerry Cruncher is a crunching kind of man. His voice is hoarse and he has stiff, spiky hair. In A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens, 1859), he throws a boot at his wife if he catches her “flopping”: falling on her knees to pray for him. During the day he is an odd-job man for Mr. Jarvis Lorry of Tellson’s Bank, which goes well enough; it is his night job that brings Aggerawayter, as he calls her (aggravator?), to her knees. Her husband is a grave-robber and their son young Jerry wants to grow up and be just like him: a Resurrection-Man. When old Jerry has an unprosperous night of it, he grabs Mrs. Cruncher by the ears and knocks the back of her head against the headboard of the bed. “Is it being a good wife to oppose your husband’s business?” he hollers.

Another character with a descriptive name in A Tale of Two Cities is Dr. Alexandre Manette. Early in the story, Mr. Lorry travels from London to Dover, where he meets Lucie Manette, and from there to Paris to fetch the doctor, who has just been released after eighteen years in the Bastille prison. It is the first meeting of father and daughter. Her presence means little to him, despite a flash of memory that brings back a vision of her mother, now long dead. The years of solitude and deprivation have ruined his mind. Monsieur Defarge, a servant from the years before, keeps him locked in the attic of the Defarge wine shop, “Because he has lived so long, locked up, that he would be frightened – rave – tear himself to pieces – die – come to I know not what harm – if his door was left open.” Mr. Lorry, who conceives his task as digging someone out of a grave, worries that Dr. Manette will not have the moral strength to grasp the opportunity of living again. But he and Lucie, carrying him back to London, are determined to restore him to health. Very soon they discern that he harbors a grave secret. Encouraged by the ever sensitive Mr. Lorry, after a relapse a few years later, to speak of himself in the third person, the doctor says, “You have no idea … how difficult – how almost impossible – it is, for him to force himself to utter a word upon the topic that oppresses him.” Yet the secret is a kind of lever which, if he could confess it, would lift him to a full state of health. Unfortunately, it is also a lever that, if discovered by the wrong parties, can be manipulated to destroy those whom he has come to love. The French word for lever is manette.

A theme of resurrection runs all through A Tale of Two Cities, from Mr. Lorry’s coded message in the beginning – “RECALLED TO LIFE” – to the climactic episode of Charles Darnay’s sentencing by a revolutionary tribunal in Paris to death by guillotine. Darnay’s crime is membership in the French noble family Evrémonde. In the tumultuous 1780s in France, merely to be an aristocrat or a member of the royal family is to be punishable by death. It doesn’t matter that years before Charles has rejected his heritage and made a new life in England, which includes marrying Lucie Manette. He has returned to Paris to rescue a faithful servant who, guarding the family holdings, is tormented by the mob. Arrested; imprisoned; freed through the efforts of Dr. Manette – whose history of imprisonment for offending the nobility gives him powerful influence among the revolutionaries; he is suddenly imprisoned again. The damning evidence is the history of Dr. Manette, the secret that, first in his confusion and then out of love for his family, he has withheld. While he was in the Bastille but still of sound mind, he wrote a letter in which he accused the Evrémonde family of dire cruelties to a peasant family, which as a physician he witnessed, and of causing him to be imprisoned for revealing the Evrémonde depredations to the authorities; and hid it in the wall of his cell. At the eleventh hour a spy finds it.

At this moment Sydney Carton quietly steps forward. For most of the novel, he has been a figure of dissolution – “Sadly, sadly, the sun rose,” our narrator has told us earlier, after one of Sydney’s lost nights; “it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.” Now, in the crucial moment, Sydney Carton executes a plan to drug Charles Darnay; have him spirited to his family – who are waiting in a carriage to flee to safety in England; and go to the guillotine in his place. Two instances of resurrection are in motion. Charles, who upon the adjournment of the tribunal has folded Lucie in his arms and said, “Farewell, dear darling of my soul. My parting blessing on my love. We shall meet again, where the weary are at rest!” and who, after a night of agony in his cell, has resigned himself to death, is recalled to life. Sydney, in the act of self-sacrifice he performs for Lucie, whom he has always loved but never believed he deserves, finally calls to life his “good abilities and good emotions.” Climbing the stairs to the guillotine, he is convinced that Lucie will name a son after him, and that this man will in the future bring his own son to a more peaceful Paris and tell him his story. Lest the theme and its foundation be missed, the narrator inserts the verse from John 11:25: “I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”

Even Jerry Cruncher is recalled to life. When the crisis arrives, he goes to Paris to attend Mr. Lorry, who is there to attend the family. Pulled into the danger that now threatens all the relations of Charles Darnay, Cruncher vows to Miss Pross, a family servant, “them poor things well out of this, never more” will he rob graves. What is more, “never no more will I interfere with Mrs. Cruncher’s flopping, never no more!” The “youthful occasion of his renouncing by proxy the works of darkness” has finally yielded its grace.
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So Far in 2010

2010-02-01T14:28:00.007-05:00

One of my favorite books is Tales of Wisdom, edited by Howard Schwartz and first published in 1976 as Imperial Messages: One Hundred Modern Parables. The original title comes from the first story printed in the book, “An Imperial Message” by Franz Kafka (1883-1924). One thing I like about the collection is that it includes a great many Jewish stories, for example, “The Angel and the World’s Dominion,” by Martin Buber. “Parable” is only a loose designation; some of the tales are more like legends; others, dreams; some are clearly in the genre of fantasy (an example is Borges). The one I’m thinking of is “Dulcinea del Toboso,” by the Argentinian Marco Denevi. Like many of the stories, it’s only half a page long:

“She read so many novels that she ended up losing her mind. She had people call her Dulcinea del Toboso (her name was really Aldonza Lorenza), she thought she was a princess (she was a peasant’s daughter), she imagined herself as young and beautiful (she was forty years old and her face was scarred by smallpox). Finally, she invented a lover for herself to whom she gave the name don Quixote de la Mancha. She said that don Quixote had departed for far away kingdoms in search of adventures and danger, both to perform worthy deeds and to be able, on his return, to marry a damsel of her noble character. She spent all her time peering out of the window waiting for the return of the nonexistent knight. Alonso Quijano, a poor devil who loved her, struck on the idea of passing himself off as don Quixote. He put on an old suit of armor, mounted his nag, and set forth to repeat the deeds which Dulcinea attributed to her lover. When sure of the success of his strategy, he returned to Toboso; Dulcinea had died.”
A little dry; but still, I’m thinking it might be fun now and then to reimagine a novel I’ve just read rather than write a review.

Here are the works, most of them novels, that I've read so far in 2010:

January
The Second Happiest Day, by John Phillips (1953).
Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf (1925).
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens (1859).
To The Lighthouse, by Virginia Woolf (1927). A second reading.
"The Fisherman's Wife," one of the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm.

February
Orlando, by Virginia Woolf (1928).
"The Brown Stocking," in Mimesis: Representations of Reality in Western Literature, by Erich Auerbach (1953).
The Complete Fairy Tales of George MacDonald (originally published 1862-1879).
"Of Repentance," in The Complete Essays of Montaigne (originally published 1580-1585).
The Waves, by Virginia Woolf (1931).
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Favorites in 2009

2010-01-30T16:50:00.010-05:00

Here are some of the novels I plunged into in 2009 as part of my project to read 100 unfamiliar ones, one right after the other. A few are highlighted, with brief descriptions. They were novels that came alive so emphatically that they stay with me still, becoming part of my blood and bone.

4. White Noise, by Don DeLillo (1984)
5. My Ántonia, by Willa Cather (1918). Jim Burden and Bohemian immigrant Ántonia Shimerda grow up together in early twentieth-century Nebraska. What I remember best is the landscape: Ántonia’s dug-out-of-the-earth home, the grasslands, the skies, the effects of snowy and rainy weather on the earth.
6. Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott (1819)
7. Charming Billy, by Alice McDermott (1998)
8. The March, by E. L. Doctorow (2005)
9. A Woman’s Life, by Guy de Maupassant (1883)
10. Good Faith, by Jane Smiley (2003)
11. Going After Cacciato, by Tim O’Brien (1978). The setting is the Vietnam War. The entire novel is Paul Berlin’s thinking through of what has happened to him during a frightening battle. I may have to reread this one again soon, just to come up with a decent review.
12. The Violent Bear It Away, by Flannery O’Connor (1955)
13. The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, by Miguel de Cervantes (1615). The brave self-knighted don Quixote rides out on Rocinante to seek adventure and right wrongs. Couldn’t be a better yarn to be honored with the title, “first modern novel.”
14. The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene (1940). An unnamed priest, despite the weakness and flaws of his human nature, and the guilt of a sin of which he has not been absolved, carries out the duties of his vocation. I loved the irony that finally comes clear at the end.
15. The Town Beyond the Wall, by Elie Wiesel (1964)
16. The Princess of Clèves, thought to be by Madame de Lafayette (1678)
17. I Sailed With Magellan, by Stuart Dybek (2003)
18. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne (1759-67). A great deal of fuss in the Shandy family, mostly clustering around the event of Tristram’s birth and welling up again when he is five years old and has an unfortunate accident with his best part of being a little boy. By the end I felt as though “my uncle Toby” was my Uncle Toby. (I saw the movie in 2004 and it was wonderful.)19. Black Dogs, by Ian McEwan (1992)
20. Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Lawrence (1913)
21. Hard Times in These Times, by Charles Dickens (1854)
22. Manalive, by G. K. Chesterton (1912). Carried by a great wind, Innocent Smith literally drops in on the bored inhabitants of Beacon House and changes their direction. The joy of life that is the theme of this short novel is infectious.23. The Sea, The Sea, by Iris Murdoch (1978)
24. The Green Man, by Kingsley Amis (1969)
25. War and Peace, by Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1867-69). Prince Andrey, Pierre Bezuhov, Natasha and the Rostov family are among the many characters whose lives play out in the foreground of the War of 1812. The novel was a long, emotionally involving journey for me, immensely rewarding.26. The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty (1969)
27. Snow, by Orhan Pamuk (2002). The Turkish poet Ka finds himself snowbound in the city of Kars. He falls in love and there is a military coup. The novel is deeply textured – lyrical descriptions of snow; tender love scenes; melodrama; accounts of violence. I became familiar with the streets and buildings of Kars and felt I had known Ka, İpek and Blue for a long time.28. Hebdomeros, by Giorgio de Chirico (1929)
29. The Blithedale Romance, by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1852)
30. The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker (1988). Back from lunch with a new pair of shoelaces, Howie steps onto an escalator and rides up to the mezzanine, where his office is. Amusing and delightful, his memories and cogitations as he goes to the top.31. A Mercy, by Toni Morrison (2008)
32. Notes from Underground, by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864)
33. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961). Miss Jean Brodie has a hypnotic effect on people, especially the six pupils who are her “set.” When Sandy Stranger grows up she decides Miss Brodie must be stopped. One of the pleasures of this comic novel is its structure. With the insertion all the way through of flash-forwards, it almost seems to fold back on itself.34. Elizabeth Costello, by J. M. Coetzee (2003)
35. Hunger, by Knut Hamsun (1890)
36. The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver (1998)
37. Sentimental Education, by Gustave Flaubert (1869)