Dr. Metablog

One Heck of a Big Miller

The miller in The Miller of Angibault is, according to George Sand, really, really huge.  "The big miller descended, stretching, from his corn-loft, cracking the joints of his long arms and legs. He was well-proportioned, robust, easy in his movements, and strikingly featured.  This speciment of the countryside was remarkable for a region whose inhabitants are generally on the short side."  How tall was this "tall miller?"

Nineteenth-century novelists rarely give us hard data, but George Sand provides the exact measurement for this "specimen." "Grand-Louis" is exactly five feet eight inches tall! 

Le Meunier d'Angibault was written in 1844.  It's in Thackeray's Pendennis (1850), I think,  that one of the female characters is described as a "maypole" of five feet four inches.

I wonder how tall Shakespeare imagined Helena -- the famous "painted maypole" of A Midsummer Night's Dream to be.  Probably just as tall as the boy who played the part, but how much would that be in inches? 

Height is believed to have increased a centimeter a decade in western Europe from 1850 to 1950.  Is it possible that the great heroes of antiquity -- Hector, Samson etc. -- were all under five feet tall?  My grandfather was just a hair above five feet tall. 

The average height of American males was 5' 8" in 1960 and is 5' 9 1/2" today.  How tall would a Louis have to be today to be called Grand-Louis? 

The "Motor" vs. the Horse

Edith Wharton loved the "motor" but never lost her nostalgia for the horse drawn vehicles of her youth.

A passage in A Backward Glance (1932) conveys the novelty and thrill of her virgin voyage.   

"There were no motors in 1903; but as a toy for the rich they were beginning to appear.  My old friend George Meyer was the owner of a magnificent specimen.  I had never been in a motor before, and could hardly believe that were to do the run from Rome to Caprarola and back (fifty miles each way) in an afternoon.  The car was probably the most luxurious, and certainly one of the fastest, then procurable;  but that meant only a sort of high-perched phaeton without hood or screen, or any protection from the wind.  I had the high seat like a coachman's box . Off we tore across the Campagna, over humps and bumps, through ditches and across gutters, windswept, dust-enveloped, I clinging to my sailor hat.  I spent the next days in bed, fighting an acute laryngitis.  In spite of this I swore then and there that as soon as I could make money enough, I would buy a motor, and having a delicate throat, scoured the country in the hottest weather swaddled in a stifling hood with a mica window, till some benefactor of the race invented the wind-screen and made motoring an unmixed joy."

The twentieth-century "motor" was hectic, prone to breakdowns, and erratic.  In contrast, the vehicles of Newport, Rhode Island of Wharton's aristocratic youth were dignified and stately, as much for display as for utility.  "Young ladies, married or single, expected to be taken for an afternoon drive by the master of the house.  The vehicles of the fashionable young men were either dog-carts (drawn by a pair driven tandem) or a high four-wheeled conveyance called a T-cart, which was drawn by one big stepper, while the older men drove handsome phaetons with a showy pair, and an impressive groom with folded arms in the rumble.  Carriages, horses, harness and grooms were all of the latest and most irreproachable cut, and Bellevue Avenue was a pretty scene when the double line of glittering vehicles and showy horse-flesh paraded between green lawns and scarlet geranium borders."

"Dog-cart?"  "Phaeton?"  "T-cart?"  What do these words signify?  And moreover, what the heck was a daumont, "preceded by outriders, which swayed gracefully on its big C-springs to the rhythm of four high-stepping and highly-groomed horses, a postilion on one of the leaders, and two tremendous footmen perched high at the back."

For more philosophizing on these nineteenth-century horse drawn conveyances, click here.

The Golden Age of Sex Ed

I've been reading the novels of Edith Wharton.  It's been one heck of a thrilling experience. The Age of Innocence is a world-class masterpiece, as subtle a novel as any that I've read in years, and The Buccaneers, which Wharton left uncompleted at her death, is almost as good (fortunately, she left behind a plot summary so we know how it was to conclude. (Edith, couldn't you have hung on for just a few more weeks?! In addition, I was dazzled by The Reef and The Children. Also a couple of volumes of short stories.  I'm now reading the very intriguing Glimpses of the Moon.  And all the while, I'm wondering how I could have passed over all this great stuff in my first seventy years and still considered myself a serious reader.  Wharton wrote forty books and I think that until this month I had only read The House of Mirth, which, it turns out, is her most notorious but not her finest work.  But I'll give H of M another chance -- when I come to with new perspective.  

Edith Wharton and her great contemporary Henry James are often bracketed  -- both of them upper-class New Yorkers and writers of "psychological" fiction.  I suppose there's some justice to the comparison, but I prefer to think of Wharton's works as a culmination and also a critique of the great Victorian novelistic tradition.  One (of many reasons) is that nineteenth-century fictions often revolve around the keeping of secrets.  In the archetype, Mr. A loves Miss B, and Miss B loves Mr. A, but some sort of social constraint forbids them to acknowledge or to speak their love until 450 pages have elapsed.  Wharton repeatedly brings these conventions out into the open in order to rip them to shreds.  She scrutinizes and satirizes the imprisoning systems of manners (as well as conventions of fiction) that the earlier era left unchallenged.  She punctures taboos.     

The secret that underlay all of those punishing proprieties was, in one form or another, sex: sexual needs, sexual passions, sexual gratification.  The godawful messiness of it all. 

When the twenty-three year old Edith Wharton was about to be married, she was ignorant and terrified of sex (and this despite the fact that she was then known, and I don't [and couldn't] make this up, as "Pussy" Jones ["Jones" as in 'keeping up with the Joneses', "Pussy" an affectionate diminutive certainly not employed in its modern street-corner signification]).  Like many another young lady, she turned to her mother ( in her case, Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, the 'best-dressed woman in New York') for advice.  The outcome was catastrophic.  So here it comes, sex ed in Victorian America, recollected in anything but tranquility: 

A few days before my marriage, I was seized with such a dread of the whole dark mystery, that I summoned up courage to appeal to my mother, & begged her, with a heart beating to suffocation, to tell me "what being married was like."  Her handsome face at once took on the look of icy disapproval which I most dreaded.  "I never heard such a ridiculous question!" she said impatiently; & I felt at once how vulgar she thought me.

But in my extremity of need I persisted.  "I'm afraid, Mamma---  I want to know what will happen to me!"

The coldness of her expression deepened to disgust.  She was silent for a dreadful moment, then she said with an effort:  "You've seen enough pictures and statues in your life.  Haven't you noticed that men are -- made differently from women?"

"Yes," I faltered blankly.

"Well, then  ---?"

I was silent, from sheer inability to follow, & she brought out sharply: "Then for heaven's sake don't ask me any more silly questions.  You can't be as stupid as you pretend."

The dreadful moment was over, & the only result was that I had been convicted of stupidity for not knowing what I had been expressly forbidden to ask about, or even to think of."

Poor dear Edith, our hearts go out to you and to all the maidens of the last era.  Her "heart beating to suffocation," her pathetic ignorant (not stupid, but ignorant) inquiry, and the imperious mother hiding her embarrassment behind an affectation of anger.  O my!  Along with the ridiculous idea that furtive (I'm sure) glances at "pictures and statues" could convey any bird-and-bee information of value.  Edith's derelict mom punted when she should have pulled her goalie. She missed the "teachable moment."  But then again, how do we know what mamma Lucretia knew about sex.  Perhaps she had nothing to offer.  Perhaps she was one of those Victorian ladies who was taught to lie back and think of England (or, in her case, to think of Washington Square).

Pussy Jones's marriage to Teddy Wharton was a miserable failure.  Some of Edith's friends suspected that it was what used to be called a "mariage blanc" -- a marriage without sex.  After twenty-eight years and, I'm glad to report, a couple of fervent affairs, Edith divorced Teddy, by that time alcoholic, manic-depressive, and institutionalized.  Among her manuscripts Edith left an unfinished pornographic fragment, Beatrice Palmato (which I have not yet read but which is supposed to involve, double-eek!!!, father-daughter incest).

Edith Wharton's passage from unnaturally prolonged innocence to sexual sophistication or perhaps even to sexual derangement summarizes, in little, a big hunk of American social history.  In the course of her lifetime, she had to cope with revolutionary changes, and those changes provide the background for some extraordinary and sometimes painful works of fiction.

So I will read on. 

[Biographical details are from Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (New York: Knopf, 2007). 

A Further Note on Nineteenth-Century Horsedrawn Vehicles

Modern readers of the great classic novels of the previous era generally have no clue about the significance of horses and horse-drawn vehicles.  As I wrote, right here on this blague a couple of months ago, "no, I'm not obsessed, it's just that I have this little bee in my bonnet about the fact that we gasoline-era moderns understand the exact social significance of jeep, Jaguar, Jetta, and jalopy, but we are, except for specialists, utterly clueless as to the valence of barouche, basket carriage, berlin, britchka, brougham, buckboard, buggy, cabriolet, caleche, cariole, carryall, chaise, chariot, clarence, coupe, croydon, curricle, cutter, daumont, dearborn, diligence, dog-cart, fiacre, fly, four-wheeler, gig, go-cart, governess cart, hansom, jaunty car, jersey-wagon, kibitka, landau, phaeton, post-chaise, rockaway, shandrydan, shay, spider-phaeton, spring-van, stanhope, sulky, surrey, T-cart, telyezhka, tilbury, tarantass, trap, troika, victoria, vis-a-vis, wagonette, and wurt."

What does it tell us when our hero arrives on the scene in a wurt?  Does it mean that he is rich and stylish, or vulgar and pretentious, or tasteless, or downtrodden.  We don't know, and so we read our own traditional literature with one hand tied behind our backs.

Well, I though that I had made my point, and I thought also that I had exhausted the list of nineteenth-century horse-drawn vehicles.  But then I came upon this passage in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (a truly splendid novel published in 1920, though the action is set in the 1870s). 

They [Archer and Countess Olenska] walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught sight of the plush-lined "herdic" which had carried his note to the Parker House, and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing his brow at the corner hydrant.
    "I told you everything was predestined!  Here's a cab for us.  You see!"  They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where cabstands were still a "foreign" novelty.

The novelty, the herdic, was "a kind of carriage invented by Peter Herdic of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in 1881" (so Wharton is guilty of a tiny anachronism).  "A predecessor of the taxicab, the herdic was a small two-wheeled carriage that had side seats and an entrance at the back.  Their low entry made it easy for passengers to enter and exit the cars.  The first herdics carried up to eight passengers.  The earliest herdics were painted bright yellow."

Cheers to Peter Herdic, forgotten father of the Yellow Cab. 

Sons of Ham, Sons of Japheth

In Caroline Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1859), Eulalia, the daughter of an New England abolitionist, has married a slave owner and traveled with him to his home in Georgia.  Here's what she sees.  Warning: be prepared to be shocked and revolted.

"All around, far as the eye could reach, the rich rolling fields of cotton, bearing the downy wealth of the South, stretched out a boundless ocean of green, spotted with white, like the foam of the wave.  Soon returning in grand march from the fields, came the negroes, poising on their heads immense baskets, brimming with the light and flaky cotton.  Little children looking very much like walking semicolons, toddled along, balancing their baskets also, with an air of self-importance and pride.  Eulalia recollected all the horrible stories she had heard of negro insurrections, and thought what an awful thing it was to be at the mercy of so many slaves, on that lonely plantation.  When she saw her husband going out among them, and they closed round, shutting him in as with a thick cloud, she asked herself if her were really safe.  They gathered around him, eager to get within reach of his hand, the sound of his voice, the glance of his kind, protecting, yet commanding eye.  More like a father welcomed by his children than a king greeted by his subjects, he stood, the centre of that sable ring.  She had never seen him look so handsome, so noble, so good.  As she looked at her husband, standing in their midst, the representative of the fair sons of Japheth, wearing on his brow the signet of a loftier, nobler destiny, every lineament and feature expressive of intellect and power, and then at each of that dark, lowly throng, she felt a conviction that freedom, in its proudest latitude, education with its most exalted privileges, could never make them equal to him. She never dreamed that slavery could present an aspect so tender and affectionate.  Do the hundreds and thousands buried in the black coal-pits and wretched dens of Great Britain, who have never heard, in their living graves, of the God who created, the Saviour who redeemed them, pass their sunless lives in greater comfort or fuller enjoyment."

Hey, it's good to be a slave. Apparently. "Tender and affectionate????

I was aware that there were anti-Uncle Tom's Cabin novels, designed to showcase the glories of slavery, but I had never read one. The Planter's Northern Bride is supposedly one of the best of the genre.  It has the power to make you despair for the intelligence of the entire human race. Some samples:

"Merry voices singing in the fields of labour or filling up the pauses of toil...."

"The joyful songs and exhilarating laughter of our slaves...."

"The negro has an intense appreciation of beauty and grace, and feels the influence of mental superiority."

"You will see the negro, not as he is at the North, an isolated, degraded being, without caste or respectability, a single black line running through a web of whiteness, but surrounded with the socialities of life, and though doomed to labour, yet free from the cares and anxieties that rest so heavily on us."

Here are the words that Caroline Hentz puts in the mouth of one of Eulalia's slaves. 

"I tell you what, Crissy, when de nigger have good massa and good miss, dey well off.  When dey have bad massa and missis, dey bad off. Talk 'bout us being on a 'quality with white folks, no such ting.  De Lord never made us look like dem.  We mustn't be angry wid de Lord, for all dat:  He knows best, I 'spise.  Look a'me, black as de chimney back, -- dey, white as snow;  what great, big, thick, ugly lips I got, -- dere's look jist like roses.  Den dis black sheep head, what de Lord make dat for?  Dey got putey, soft, long hair, just like de silk ribbons.  Now look at dat big long heel, will you?" added Judy, putting out her bare foot in the moonshine, giggling and shaking;  "who ever saw de white lady with sich a heel as dat?  I do wonder what the Lord made us nigger for?  I spect de white dust gin out, and he had to take de black."

Slavery deformed society.  Arguments in support of slavery deformed the intellect.  The attempt to find supernatural sanction for slavery perverted religion. Slavery incapacitated the slaveholding states.  One hundred and fifty years after slavery, they have still not caught up and they are still pulling the country down.

Does Caroline Hentz believe the words that she puts on paper?  I believe she does.  I believe that she makes these observations and arguments with total sincerity.  I also believe that the kind of utterances to which she gives vent, though no longer respectable, no longer made in public, are not dead but continue to appear in VFW halls, in bowling alleys, in union halls, and in truck stops all over the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Updike's Gamble

John Updike's novels are loaded to the ever-loving gills with invocations of the most evanescent and ephemeral manifestations of "popular culture."  I can't think of another writer who is so relentlessly fascinated by the most trivial of things.  If his novels are to be read in a hundred years, they will not be fully understood unless encrusted with extensive and elaborate footnotes.

"Roy has been carefully shaping can his Total mush into a kind of a pyramid with the back of a spoon."  Who will understand the meaning of this sentence.  "Total mush?"  I imagine a footnote:  "'Total' was the brand name of a fibrous dry packaged breakfast food which, when liquids such as milk were added, could be formed into a paste."  

Here's another example.  Rabbit is musing.  "Biblical names.  Rachel, Esther.  Not always.  Barbra, Bette."  And here's the putative footnote. "In this passage, Harry muses about the names of Jewish women.  "Barbra" (sic) refers to Barbra Streisand, a popular Jewish-American singer and actress of the period.  Professor Harvey Wrongbody's assertion that "Bette" refers to Bette Davis is clearly uninformed, as Miss Davis was not Jewish. "Bette" as Professor Wrongbody should have known, references Bette Midler, a performer famous in her day for impersonating Janis Joplin (see Index) in The Rose." 

In the first few pages of Rabbit at Rest --  which is perhaps the most consistently fine of Updike's novels, there are dozens or scores of allusions that will test a future annotator's learning.  It's highly unlikely that with the passing of generations anyone but specialists in late twentieth-century Americana will be able either to identify or grasp the significance of  "this guy Bundy who murdered dozens of women in dozens of states."  (Bundy?  Is that King Kong Bundy?  McGeorge Bundy?  Al Bundy?)  Or have the least idea what is meant by a "Cabbage Patch doll with its bunchy beige face" or the possible thematic significance of "Cara Lott Gets Hot" or "Winn Dixie" or "Ekerd Drugs" or the National Enquirer or "Planter's Peanut Bar" or "Melanie Griffith" or "Deion Sander's recent arrest."  It's only twenty years since Rabbit at Rest was published, and I was there, paying reasonable attention, but frankly, I'm already becoming a bit vague about some of  the details.

If I were a novelist of Updike's talent, I would think twice about loading up on trivia that cannot help but  barricade the novels from future readers.  But perhaps Updike doesn't care.  Perhaps he's only interested in the moment and in readers of his own generation.  To me, it seems as though he doesn't give a royal fig for the future. 

Shakespeare, a writer not for his age alone but for all time, occasionally included references to fleeting phenomena.  I rather like it that he did so.  I'd be intrigued to learn, once and for all, who was that "red-nosed innkeeper at Daventry" to whom Falstaff refers.   But neither Shakespeare nor any other writer with whom I'm familiar so saturated his work with multitudinous and forgettable popcultch trivia.

But perhaps Updike has made the right choice.  Perhaps the density of reference makes the novels so credible, so real, that scholars will be happy to annotate and readers will revel and glory in the footnotes.

It's a gamble.  My guess is that it's a losing one, but time will tell.  

Yellow Face

"Yellowface" is the Asian equivalent of theatrical "blackface," as in the case of Warner Oland (a Swede) or Sidney Toler (an Scottish-American) impersonating Charlie Chan. "Yellow Face" is also the name of an uncharacteristic Sherlock Holmes short story -- one that is unusual among Conan Doyle's compositions in that no crime is solved nor none committed, and also because Sherlock Holmes' overconfident deductions prove to be entirely erroneous.

Grant Munro has married a young widow, Effie Hebron, who returned to her native England after her Atlanta husband died of yellow fever.  After some years of blissful marriage, Effie begins to act most strangely;  she sneaks out to a neighboring house in the middle of the night -- a house at the upper window of which her puzzled husband catches sight of a strange and unnaturally immobile yellow face.  

After listening to Munro's narration, Sherlock Holmes confidently theorizes that Effie's first husband did not die, but has secretly returned to England to blackmail his erstwhile wife.  But when Munro, Watson, and Holmes break into the house, they discover at the window not a husband come back to life but a young girl, Effie's daughter, wearing a mask to conceal the fact that she is a "little coal-black negress."  The mystery is solved:  Effie has been behaving peculiarly not because she is seeing another man (as Munro seems to fear) or because she is being blackmailed, but because she was afraid to confess to her second husband that her former mate was black --  even though, she proclaims,  "a nobler man never walked the earth."

And so the story proceeds to its climax.  How will Munro respond to the revelation? Will he reject his wife, or embrace her?  "It was a long two minutes [ten minutes in the first American edition!!] before Grant Munro broke the silence....  He lifted the little child, kissed her, and then, still carrying her, he held out his other hand to his wife, and turned towards the door. 'We can talk it over more comfortably at home,' said he.  'I am not a good man, Effie, but I think I am a better one that you have given me credit for being.'" 

"Yellow Face" is designed to be an uplifting story of tolerance and trust and in truth it is extraordinarily progressive, even radical, by the standards of 1894.  But it's also a naive story.  It elides and dodges the complications that it raises, especially about matters of race.  Is it credible, or is it not more fear than fact, that a mixed-race husband and an English woman would produce a "coal-black" offspring. Doyle's belief that such an engendering is possible is a mark of the simplicity of his thinking about race.  Moreover, there were strict "anti-miscegenation" laws in Georgia in the last part of the nineteenth century. How did Effie and John Hebron manage to evade them?  In what way did they live?  Hebron managed to leave a considerable estate to his wife?  How did he achieve his wealth?

Doyle is interested in making a case for tolerance and he is interested in Holmes.  But he does not much concern himself with the other characters that he creates.  He does not explore the psychological costs for Effie when, as she says, "she cut herself off from her race."  What prompted her to violate so strong a taboo?  And why would a strong and independent woman suddenly become so fearful when she re-married?  What did it cost her, emotionally, to leave her child behind in Georgia where a dark mixed-race girl would be so awkwardly situated?  How could she conceal so much of her history from Grant Munro without overwhelming guilt?  How did she manage to achieve so blissful a union with him while carrying many important secrets?  And what about the poor child?  Born to an illegal union that is soon fractured by death, then abandoned, then reclaimed and brought to a strange land -- and asked to wear a yellow mask for fear the someone would be shocked by her pigmentation. Doyle does not even broach the question of the damage to the child?   And what kind of future can be in store for her in England?

Doyle seems to consider that "Yellow Face" concludes happily -- but does it? While it is certainly to the author's credit that he is unfazed by the taboo against "intermarriage," it is also true that he rests satisfied with easy, superficial, and naive answers to hard questions. Or rather, he does not even seem to realize that he has started a whole pack of hares in motion.   

It's curiously negligent that Doyle does not even give a name to the "coal-black negress."  She remains a plot-device, not a person. 

It is equally odd that Doyle does not find fault with Sherlock Holmes' inability to think past the convention of the genre, where blackmail is a commonplace.  Intermarriage, Doyle seems to suggest, is so exotic, so unusual, that it would not occur even to so brilliant a detective as Sherlock Holmes that a yellow mask might hide a black face.

Updike -- Part IV

The Updike-athon continues  Since my last report, I've read Museums and Women, Bech is Back, In the Beauty of the Lilies, Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. 

The good news:  Updike is fluent, a masterful stylist, a remarkable story-teller, a distinguished craftsman.  He's original, entertaining, bold, inventive.  The section of Beauty of the Lilies that describe Alma DeMott's childhood in Basingstoke, Delaware is as good as anything I've read in years -- a truly classic piece of writing  

The bad news:  Updike's characters have no heart  They're almost uniformly small-minded, bigoted, hateful, unloving and, in fact, incapable of love.  The novels are distressing and depressing.  And inconsistent.  The Rabbit quartet is reputed to be Updike's masterpiece, but the long section about Skeeter in Redux is a ludicrous mess, a total bomb, a failure that disfigures the entire series  

A reader who knew America only through the Rabbit series would be convinced that Americans in the second half of the twentieth century were selfish, money-grubbing, racist, entirely without culture, sex-obsessed, alcoholic, uneducated, insecure, obnoxious, undisciplined and knowledgeable only of TV trivia.  I suppose that there are such people -- but there are also substantial citizens, artists and artisans, and good, functioning families.  I must say that four large novels in the company of Updike's folk can wear a reader down.  I think it's time to re-read Trollope's Palliser novels, where there is villainy but also redemption.  I crave an antidote.

Updike-III

Two more Updike novels down the hatch.  The first, Seek My Face, published in 2002, is an extended short story rooted in the author's prodigious knowledge of the contemporary art scene.  It's casually written -- as if Updike didn't try very hard.  Am I excessively sensitive to be insulted that Updike didn't extend himself to invent a plot?  The second novel is iRabbit at Rest, composed back in 1990 when Updike was trying harder.  Harrry "Rabbit" Angstrom, "hero" of four novels, is a force in modern fiction.  He's nasty, amoral, and crude, but hardly more so that the panoply of suburbanite creatures who surround him  Updike mercilessly draws attention to everything odious in America culture -- he's the poet laureate of tacky. Rabbit is fascinating but repellent. Whatever happened to "to teach and to delight?"  

Every once in a while Rabbit, always, alas, comprehensible, becomes momentarily sympathetic. But then Updike allows him to speak -- and Rabbit's words are invariably aggressive and offensive.  I think that the gap between what Rabbit thinks and what Rabbit says is a major structural flaw in the novel -- and one that will eventually push the novels from center to periphery.  But time will tell. For now, the Rabbit books are a guide to our own American kind of shallowness -- and so here I am, off to the library or to the second-hand bookstore to hunt down the earlier novels in this series.  What does Dickens say about Uriah Heep -- something about "fascinating in his own repulsion."  Yes, I think that phrase will serve nicely for Updike's Rabbit.   

Updike- II

In Terrorist, Updike takes us inside the head of a young,malleable, soft-spoken Islamist fanatic.  The protrayal is persuasive, in part because the horror bigotry is understated and casual.  It's quite a feat of imagination on the author's part.  It's a good novel -- a page-turner, as they say.  It's most remarkable feature is that the hero of the novel is a tired and bedraggled high school guidance counsellor;  What a breakthrough -- the guidance counsellor, figure of o-so-much contempt and satire, as savio!.  Of course, the contrived/dramatic ending in which the terrorist and the counsellor square off is totally unbelievable, but at least it doesn't involve fistfights or animatrons.  On the whole, Terrorist is a very readable, imaginative and largely satisfying novel.  It's a bit spare, laconic  -- but perhaps it only seems so because I'm also reading Doestoevsky.  It's not a novel for the ages -- it's too obviously occasional.  And I must say, I'm suspicious of a piece of fiction about the interaction of various ethnicities in which the only two Afro-Americans are a whore and a pimp named Tylenol.  

Off to the Bradford Public to see what else is in their Updike holdings.

Updike

I've shamefully neglected the writings of John Updike.  I read the first Rabbit novel when it appeared in 1960 and was struck by its vigor and authenticity.  A talent to watch, I said to myself -- but then I lost track.  I loved one of the Bech books, devoured on an airline ride from somewhere to somewhere else twenty years ago.  I've been dazzled by short stories in various anthologies and by art criticism in the NYRB.   But for a writer considered an American master, nominated for a Nobel  -- well, I've been inattentive.  And now Updike is gone.  I'm late (as usual).  To remedy the personal deficiency, I hastened to the Bradford Public Library, where, sad to say, the only Updike on the shelf was one I'd never heard of,Villages, published in 2004. 

Villages is billed as an autobiographical novel and appears to be so.  It's eminently readable, slickly written (sometimes so facilely that it crosses into self-parody).  But, my-oh-my, what an embarrassingly bad performance.  It's no more than a sexual history of "Owen Mackenzie" in which the succession of women Owen encounters are diffentiated only by the size and shapes and degrees of mucosity and erectility of their reproductive organs.  It's an adolescent novel written by a seventy-year-old eminence.  What the heck was Updike thinking?. Why would he waste precious time on such unambitious, indulgent stuff -- unless he took a long-ago manuscript out of a drawer and fooled around with it a bit?

Disappointing indeed. A few years ago, I read through the novels of Philip Roth, who is an exact contemporary of Updike.  My conclusion:  that Roth (see Books over there on the side of the page) was a writer of arrested development.  Oh no, not again!

Let's see if the BPL has anything else by Updike today.  Let's hope for the best.  Villages has got to be an aberration. 

What We Should Have Read in the Fifties: Two Years Before the Mast

It's been a long time since I enjoyed a book as much as Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, which describes events of 1834-36 and was first published in 1840. It's a great piece of writing. I've heard about it since I was a child, but just got around to reading it this week. It's a book that alters my understanding of the early nineteenth century. 

Why did I like it so much.  Let me count the ways.

1.  It's a sensitive work. Dana's a Boston patrician but instead of going to sea as a junior officer, which he could easily have done, he enlists as a common seaman. He describes life on board the ship from the seaman's point of view. I don't know another book that's so honest, so real, and so uncomplaining. Dana later put what he learned to work, becoming an advocate for sailors' rights. His is not a modern sensibility, but on the whole there's far less of the deplorable racist and sexist assumptions that disfigure the earlier literature and make us cringe for our ancestors.

2. I've always loved sea stories. Wasn't I transfixed, as a child, by the Bounty and Hornblower stories?  But Dana is leagues ahead. Two Years  is non-fiction that is more compelling reading than most fiction. I couldn't put it down. Besides, I had just read Moby-Dick, a thoroughly romanticized version of life on sea. Melville is poetic; Dana is gritty and detailed. I'm sorry, but I'm almost always happier in the world of the enlightenment than the world of nineteenth-century romanticism.  Something in the mitochondria, perhaps. 

3.  A large hunk of the book takes place in California, when it was still part of Mexico and there was a shack or two where there's now Santa Barbara or San Diego or Monterey.  It's an invaluable record of California before the gold rush, both picturesque and enlightening 

4.  It has great characters:  ship captains both competent and cruel, sailors brave and cowardly, as well as the occasional onboard eccentric.  A good account of naval camaraderie.

5.  Language. Some of us enjoy specialized vocabulary of any sort.  This book is a treasure trove of words unfamiliar to a landlubber like me.  "It was clew up and haul down, reef and furl, until we had got her down to close-reefed topsails, double-reefed trysail, and reefed forepenser."  "I threw the downhaul over the windlass, and jumped between the knight-heads out upon the bowsprit.  The crew stood abaft the windlass and hauled the jib down, while we got out upon the weather-side of the jib-boom... the great jib boom flying out to leeward and slatting." "The cook made us a mess of scouse." "Dessert was duff." Sometimes Dana lays it on a bit thick, but it's worth it.  What is a martingale anyway?   Well, "it comprises the parts of the standing rigging which strengthen the bowsprit and jib boom against the force of the head stays"  Clears that up.  Who's up for a great big helping of scouse?

Another Crack at Moby Dick

I read this great so-called classic of American literature once in the '50s and twice in the '60s and I just didn't get it.  I've now re-read it and, after forty-something years of seasoning and experience, I'm still a dissenter. Moby Dick is like opera or ballet -- it's so highly stylized that either you buy into it or you don't, and I don't. To me, Melville is a quite ordinary GrubStreet quill-driver whose every sentence screams at the very top of its lungs, "Look at me, I'm Shakespearean."  I resent Melville's attempt to draft using WS as puller.

Ultimately, there's a deep  incompatibility of sensibility between me and HM.  I'm not a big Romantic guy. Baring the soul isn't enough to keep me happy, certainly not  for the length of so elongated and dense a novel. Perhaps for a brief lyric. 

I like stories.  Moby Dick must have the thinnest plot in the history of 800-page novels. Man hunts whale, man finds whale, and (last ten pages) whale wins. 

Charles Reade's formula for the long nineteenth-century novel was "Make them laugh, make them cry, make them wait."  Melville neglects the first two of these maxims.  There's nothing either amusing or pathetic about Moby Dick but I'm here to tell you that Melville totally mastered the "make them wait" part.  Totally.

Oscar Wilde's Siblings

According to Richard Ellman, whose 680-page extremely- detailed Oscar Wilde (1988) I've now read and enjoyed, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde came out of more colorful family situation than is generally known.  Oscar's father, the famous eye surgeon Sir William Wilde, brought three children to his marriage with Jane Elgee -- apparently by three different mothers, none of whom he bothered to marry.  The first child, a boy named Henry Wilson, was supported by his father and eventually became a partner in his medical practice.  The girls, Emily and Mary, born two years apart, were adopted by Sir William's older brother "as his wards" and were also acknowledged to be part of Oscar's family.  Emily and Mary were not so fortunate as their older half-brother. "In the course of showing off their ball dresses before a party, one went too close to an open fire, caught her crinoline in the flames, and was terribly burned.  So was her sister, who tried frantically to rescue her.  Their gravestone records that they both died on the same day, 10 November, 1871. Sir Williams's grief was intense, and his groans could be heard outside the house."  The girls were twenty-four and twenty-two years old.  Oscar, born in 1854. was just seventeen at their deaths.  Although he wrote voluminously about his own life, Oscar nowhere records this horrific event. But was he affected? Certainly the knowledge that his father lived a second, darker life seems to have made a contribution to the plot of Dorian Gray -- a novel in which Dorian is in love with a woman of questionable birth.  Matters of legitimacy are raised in two of Wilde's best known plays.  Nevertheless, it seems extraordinary that the tragic deaths of two half-sisters should have left no mark either on Wilde's public or private personality. It might be argued that Wilde's lifelong aim was self-destruction and that his sister's deaths served as a template for his own tragedy -- but such an argument would be weak in evidentiary support.  The sisters and the fire is a terrible tale that may signifiy nothing beyond its own horror.    

Extrapolation

When you consider an adult whom you've known from infancy, you're tempted to think that their traits at maturity were evident from birth. You saw it in them.  Shyness or assertiveness or enterprise or doggedness or volubility or curiosity -- all there right at the starting gate.  "It stands to reason that she would have entered the field of medicine -- she was always so compassionate."  I'm never convinced when people say such thiings.  I think that it's easy to make retrospective claims.  If a child is interested in fifty things, we look back and only remember the ones that "foretold" -- so to speak -- her mature interests.  We forget about the traits that didn't develop or which metamorphosized. 

As simple as it is to claim that the mature being is a predictabe exfoliation of childhood traits, just so difficult is it to make actual predictions.  In my experience it's almost impossible to look at a two-year-old or a five-year-old or even a sixteen-year-old and extrapolate to the adult.  In fact, it's far easier to misjudge a child than to get him or her right. No matter how well you might think you know them, children are hard to read.  

These thoughts are prompted by reading Nicholas Murray's skillful new Life of Matthew Arnold.  The poet's father, the famous education reformer 'Arnold of Rugby,' a man who should have known better, was absolutely wrong about his son. According to Thomas Arnold, Matt was 'not likely to form intimate friendships," "He flitters about from flower to flower but is not apt to fix."  "I do not see how the sources of deep thought are to be reached in him." " He  does not know what it is to work because he knows so little what to think."  The best he can say: "I think he is not so idle as he was." 

Idle! and shallow!  Has there ever a been a more colossal misjudgment of a son by a father?  Or did Matthew Arnold live the most of his life with a giant "I'll show him" chip on his shoulder?

Come to think of it, I'm rather glad that I don't know what judgments or predictions my father might have made about me.   

Can You Believe It?

And now a brief quiz for Metablogian readers who are familiar with nineteenth-century fiction. I will describe the situation and quote a short excerpt, and you will be required to identify the novelist. Ready?  Let's go. Here's the story: a clergyman considers whether to commit a murder.  Although he takes no concrete action, he's overcome with guilt about what might have been. Here's a sample of his extensive, tortured musings.

        He struggled to drive from his mind and from his eyes the phantom of the terrible deed but that he did not succeed was made evident to himself by the hot clammy drops of sweat which came out upon his brow, by his wakefulness through the livelong night, by the care with which his ears watched for the sound of the young man's coming as though it were necessary that he should be assured that the murder had in truth not been done.  Before that hour had come he found himself to be shaking even in his bed; to be drawing the clothes around him to dispel the icy cold, though the sweat did still stand upon his brow;  to be hiding his eyes under the bedclothes in order that he might not see something which seemed to be visible to him through the utmost darkness of the chamber.  Why then, could he not sleep?  Why should he be hot and shiver with cold by turns? Why should horrid phantoms perplex him in the dark?

And the correct answer is?  Obviously, it's Russian anguish, the novelist is Fyodor Doestoevsky and the passage is from Crime and Punishment. 

Except that it's not.  Surprise.  It's Anthony Trollope, master of manners, anthropologist of English civilization.  The character is not Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, but Thomas Greenwood, D. D.; the novel is Marion Fay and the year is 1882. (Crime and Punishment appeared in Russian in 1866, in English in 1914).  

In Dostoevsky's novel, Raskolnikov does the deed right at the outset.  There's no murder at all in Marion Fay.  As is common in Trollope's last novels, there's a flirtation with boundary-breaking (bigamy in Dr. Wortle's School, pre-marital sex in An Eye for an Eye, interclass marriage in this particular novel), but there's also a withdrawl or hesitation.  Marion Fay would have been quite something if Trollope hadn't lost his nerve and had let Greenwood pull the trigger.  And an even stronger piece of fiction if Lord Hampstead had actually married the low-born tubercular Quaker lass and if Hampstead's sister Frances had married the Post Office clerk George Roden before it was discovered that he was an Italian Duke by birth. But Trollope drew back from the dilemmas he created, alas and alack, and and as a result there is no  English parallel to Dostoevsky's radicalism -- more's the pity.  

My Henry James Problem

I'm reading, or re-reading (what does it matter when it's been fifty years since the last go-around) Henry James' The Wings of the Dove. Once again, I'm variously stimulated, frustrated and infuriated.  Has there ever been a writer who cries out to be parodied more than does Hank the J?  Try to resist the impulse to make fun house mirrors of this representative, convoluted sentence.

      "Her welcome, her frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as he made shift at moments to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of her whole setting and by the perception at the same time, on the observer's part, that this element gained from her, in a manner, for effect and harmony, as much as it gave -- her whole attitude had, to his imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music."

Let me guess that most of Dr. M.'s loyal readers did not finish reading the quoted bit.  They made a good faith attempt at the first few words, then whistled, threw up their metaphorical hands, and surrendered.  Or if they did get all the way to the end of the sentence, they were certainly puzzled as to whether they had fully deciphered the Jamesian code.  It's not that the sentence has no meaning, but is it worth a reader's time to parse and disentangle its many syntactic knots?  Now, dear friends, just Imagine 539 small-print pages of prose, every paragraph on every page loaded with similar abstractions, assertions, modifications, withdrawals, subordinations, and equivocations.  It's taxing.  James takes it out of you, wears you down.

And therefore let me confess that a big chunk of my Henry James problem is that it's so damn hard to keep the ol' eye on the ball when every sentence is so laborious to construe. In most novels, readers are pulled along by the plot.  You might have trouble "getting into it," but once you do, your attention is galvanized and you start to sail.  In the case of HJ, there's very little plot, very little in the way of story.  It's all hypersubtle character analysis and teasing conversation. I can't speak for every reader, but I must admit that, while reading Wings, my mind frequently took flight.  I regularly had to forcibly snap myself back to attention.  It's anything but effortless to stay with the Jamester. 

But let me return to the exemplary sentence that I quoted above. The two key words are "poetry' (line 1) and "meanings" (line 5).  To paraphrase:  she (i.e. James's character Millie Theale) has "poetry" and the situation has "meanings."  Underneath all the wobbly circumlocutions, that's kind of it.

But neither of these two crucial nouns gives much away.  What sort of poetry does Millie 'have,' you might ask?'  What particular 'meanings' inhere in the situation?  I myself want --crave, in fact -- further definition and explication.  That's the novelist's job.  If he wants to keep me happy and focused, he has to provide considerably more specificity that HJames deigns to supply.  Words such as "poetry" and "meanings" don't constrain a reader;  rather, they are empty vessels into which I, or any other reader, can pour a variety of significations.  The reader, i.e. me, is simply asked to do far too much of the work.  I resent it, some of the time. 

Which takes me back to where I came in, in the 50s and 60s, when James was the king of the American canon -- or at least he was very much the boss in the Large Eastern University where I was a graduate student in literature.  I don't know how my ever-so-civilized teachers managed it, but to appreciate and understand Henry James was framed not as a test of the author's creative skill, but as a test of the reader's sensitivity.  James, it was confidently and regularly asserted, was subtle, delicate, loaded to the gills with the most exquisite sensibility. Did I, a kid from Coney Island Avenue, possess the sophistication, the tact, the sensitivity to grasp James superfine insights and his characters' inclinations and velleities?

You know what?  I didn't. I failed the test.

James portrays a world to which I could not easily relate.  No one in Wings of a Dove works for living. The characters all live off their incomes, derived who knows how? When HJ has to bring two characters together, he has two choices and two choices only -- a dinner party or a chance encounter at a museum. Action?  Yes, the characters travel from one resort city to another.  I'm exaggerating just the tiniest bit.  There is one character in Wings who has an occupation.  Although we never see him at work, Merton Densher is a journalist.  Which is precisely his problem. How can he be a suitable mate for Kate Croy if he has a job?  How shockingly vulgar! 

It was a chore to take James seriously, especially in 1960 and especially for someone of my background.  But then, not to take James seriously, not to understand him, was presumed to disqualify a guy from the serious study of literature.  Which turned out not to be the case.   

But I'm glad to say that I persevered with Wings. If I hadn't, I never would have re-read the infinitely splendid, magnificently tawdry piece of dialogue between Densher and Croy that brings Book 8 to a conclusion -- a conversation that's as well done as anything in English since WS lay down his quill in 1613.   

Coming soon to these pages:  my Marcel Proust problem. Hint:  way worse than my James problem.

Reading Trollope

I would have thought that there wasn't a novel by Anthony Trollope that I hadn't read, but browsing the library shelves, I found one that was unfamilar to me.  It's a short, late novel called An Eye for an Eye.  It dates from 1878 (Trollope, born in 1815, died in 1882. 

Trollope wrote forty-seven fluent novels and thoroughly mastered his craft.  An Eye for an Eye reprises familar motifs, most notably Trollope's favorite situation of the weak hero torn between private and public needs.  Shall it be love, this time, or shall it be duty?  In this particular case, the hero is young, uncommonly simple Fred Neville, who promises himself to the Irish beauty Kate O'Hara but also agrees that he will never dishonor the Scroope name (he's the heir to the Earl of Scroope) by marrying beneath his station.  It's a typical Trollope situation but daring for its time, because Fred impregnates Kate (when?  between chapters?  Although I thought I was reading attentively, I missed the moment).  Trollope creates an awkward situation, but I'm sorry to say, gets himself and Fred off the hook by throwing one of the major characters under the metaphorical bus, so to speak.  I don't like it when novelists sidestep the dilemmas that they create.  Trollope clearly admires the aristocratic Scroopes, but either volitionally or unconsciously (it's hard to say which) manages to persuade his readers that they're better off giving the upper classes a wide berth.   

Trollope was not a learned or innovative thinker, like his greater contemporary George Eliot, but in his later novels he pushed, a little, against Victorian prudery.  His last novel, Dr. Wortle's School, which I've recently re-read, deals with the potentially shocking question of bigamy. 

I often wonder why I'm such a Trollope fan.  There's so much about him to dislike:  his crude anti-feminism, his condescension to people of other colors and to non-English nations, his obsessions with class and cash, his disgust with Jews, his ridiculous worship of horses and hunting, etc.  And yet, he tells a great story, he loves his characters, and his dialogue is often bright and witty.   Although not the kind of writer who transcends time and place, a novel by Trollope is still the best place to go to learn about nineteenth-century England. 

What is a Drag?

What, exactly, is a drag?  Here's a sentence from Kate Chopin's edgy (in a Victorian way) 1899 novel, The Awakening.  "Alcee Arobin and Mrs. Highcamp called for Mrs. Pontellier one bright afternoon in Arobin's drag."  A drag?  Could it be "a large four-horse coach with seats inside and on top."  O my gosh!  It's still another nineteenth-century horse-drawn vehicle!  Along with a cutter and a kibitka.   Memo to self: add to list.

I didn't know of the existence of The Awakening, a novel which had dropped completely off the map, until sometime in the 1980s, when it re-established itself in courses in AmLit.  It was a banned book for a while, not, I would guess, because of the adultery itself, but because Edna Pontellier acknowledges and acts on sexual desire.  Alcee Arobin, drag-owner, senses her vulnerability, but I don't think that in this case the vehicle figures in the seduction.  It's a fine, liberating book, the prose a little on the hothouse-gardenia side, but well worth the re-reading.   

Crime, Punishment, Oblivion

If someone had asked me, a month, ago, whether I'd read Crime and Punishment, I'd have sworn up, down, sideways, and seven ways from Sunday that I had done so.  And I would confidently have specified the date: during the early 1950s, when anyone who read anything at all knew that "existence preceded essence" and that the grandfather of existentialism was Fyodor Dostoevsky.  Who, in those days, would have confessed to ignorance about Raskolnikov, his heady jumbled philosophy, the murder, the remorse?  We were all striving to be Alienated Youth, and Raskolnikov was the king of alienation -- a hundred times more alienated than the runner-up, James Dean.

I've just finished reading Crime and Punishment, and I have a confession to make.  I didn't remember the plot, the characters, or the outcome.  Not the picture of louche, impoverished, oppressive St. Petersburg.  Nothing except the mellifluous name:  Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. Come to think of it, I didn't remember the Rodion or the Romanovich either.  Just the Raskolnikov part.

Did I read the novel back there in the fifties?  If I did, is my memory now so flimsy and porous that I've lost everything?   Did I pretend to have read the novel?  Or was it so much spoken of that I absorbed it without effort.  Whatever the facts, I certainly managed to fool myself.

Crime and Punishment is an exceedingly vivid piece of writing.  I think that the trampling of Marmeladov and the suicide of Svidraigalov are such brilliantly written scenes that they could not possibly slip my mind. How could I lose track of the pathetic waif Sonya, her dreadful occuption, or her lunatic stepmother?  The grand generous gestures, the poverty, the overwrought emotions, the flaunting of propriety.

It's a thrilling, iconoclastic novel -- painful, and not fun for the morally squeamish.  It's absolutely unforgettable. 

An American "Victorian" Novel

It's not just sexual prudery that makes a novel "Victorian."  The more of these novels I read (and trust me, I've read my share), the more clear it is that the heart of the matter is that hero and heroine are kept apart not by Mrs. Grundy but by paralyzing social constraints.

To demonstrate my point, I will now invent the plot of a generic "Victorian" novel.

Lydia Armstrong, who is charming and rich and has been greatly improved by her singing and drawing lessons, loves handsome, intelligent Reginald Cockerell, but she can't hint that she does so for fear of appearing forward. Besides, her parson father looks down on the upstart Cockerells, who made their small fortune in trade.  Meanwhile, young Cockerell feels that his first enthusiastic courting of Lydia was awkward and unwelcome;  moreover, he's been informed that she loves Bentley Rayburn, an empty-headed aristocrat who drives a mean barouche.  As a result, Cockerell emigrates to Australia, and although presumed to have been shipwrecked, returns after nine years and 650 pages to discover, quite inadvertently, that Lydia has been pining for him all the while she has sat patiently sewing and providing French lessons for her numerous adoring nieces and nephews.  After a few more chapters and much agonizing, he at last, awkwardly, affirms his longstanding affection.  Much glee; as W. S. says, "the more delayed, delighted."

Why the heck didn't Lyddie and Reg sit down and talk things out before he left for the Antipodes?

Because frankness is impermissible;  it's insufficiently "Victorian."  The rules don't allow it.

Although there must be a quarter of a zillion variations on the theme, the essence remains constant.  All those Lydias and all those Reginalds are kept apart by the social artifices that exalt and fetichize propriety and inhibit self-realization and pleasure.

I've been indulging these sour thoughts because I've just finished reading William Dean Howells' high-Victorian (1882) domestic novel, A Modern Instance. Howells is often described as a "realist" novelist.  I suppose he is, if by realist is meant that in A Modern Instance the central figure, Bartley Hubbard, is a rotter, a gambler, and an opportunist, the hero Ben Halleck limps, and the heroine, Marcia Gaylord has a foul, jealous temper.  But take away these flaws and the so-called realist novel looks typically Victorian.  The crux (here come spoilers) is that the scamp Bartley marries Marcia and then deserts her.  A divorce follows.  Our upstanding friend Ben Halleck has loved Marcia unselfishly for many years, but he can't propose to her because he has violated the rules by loving her even in the years when she was married.  Will the sanctity of wedding vows and all of western civilization come crashing down if he marries a previously-loved divorcee?  Howells even goes so far as to kill off Bartley, but he still can't see his way clear to allowing any happiness to Ben and Marcia.  How does the novel end?  Well, it doesn't end;  it just stops, with Marcia rusting in Equity, Maine, and Ben puzzling and paralyzed down in Boston. 

Howells, though an American, a "realist" and an excellent craftsman, cannot resolve the dilemma he has created.  He is incapable of bringing his novel to satisfying close because he is as deeply Victorian as the characters to whom he has given life.   

Victorians are often called Puritans, but it was the most radical of the Puritans, John Milton, who, in the 1640s, two hundred and fifty years before Howells, first advanced the thesis that divorce should be legal and that marriages should be based not on sacrament or law but on mutual love.  And although he doesn't say so, I'm sure that Milton would have been perfectly at ease if Ben Halleck and Marcia Gaylord had talked about the divorce, found their way to bed, and lit out for the territories.  

What is a Cutter?

Regular readers of this blague should be able to anticipate Dr. Metablog's best and favorite answer to the important question, "What is a cutter?"

Familiar with Dr. M's lifelong passion for baseball, the king of all sports, an informed reader might be tempted to say that a "cutter" is short for a "cut fastball" -- a variation, baseballophiles know, of the two-seamer -- perfected by the likes of Mariano Rivera.  Or one might think to guess that a "cutter" is a skilled craftsman in the garment trades. Good answers both, but not the echt metablogian answer.

How about a utility knife or box cutter, prominent in the new world of terrorism?  Or a small fore-and-aft rigged sailing vessel, junior to the sloop?  Or one of those self-destructive teens who inflicts injury upon himself?  A shaper of gems?  An unlicensed, underworld surgeon?  A film editor?  A queue-jumper? A quarry worker from Bloomington, Indiana?  A mohel? 

Good answers all. But Dr. M, in a moment of ultra-metablogism, is proud to announce that the properest answer can be found in William Dean Howells' 1882 novel, A Modern Instance: 

"On a Saturday evening in February, a cutter, gay with red-lined robes, dashed away and came musically clashing down the street under the naked elms.  The young man slackened the pace of his horse,as if to still the bells.  The girl took the hand he offered her when he dismounted at the gate, and as she jumped from the cutter, 'Wont you come in?', she asked.  'I guess I can blanket my horse and stand him under the wood-shed,' answered the young man, going round to the animal's head, and leading him away."

The answer: a cutter is a nineteenth-century horse drawn vehicle.

Howells doesn't bother to mention whether it runs on wheels or on runners. He assumes that his readers will know.

Another Novel by John Hassler

Last month, I reported that I had read The Dean's List and that I was not sufficiently impressed to enroll myself in the John Hassler fan club.  But inasmuch as Hassler had been so celebrated upon his death, and I felt so negligent, I thought it only fair to give him a second try.  Now I've done so: I've read The Staggerford Flood (2002).  It's a congenial satire that concerns itself with an aging group of small-town Minnesota Catholics.  It's intermittently witty, but either too subtle or too fey for me. Hassler has been praised as a great regionalist, but in my view can't hold a candle to the upper New York state chronicles of Richard Russo and isn't even in the same league with the inventive and often very beautiful Baltimore novels of Anne Tyler. 

What We Read in the Fifties: The Ox-bow Incident

Walter van Tilburg Clark's 1940 western, The Ox-bow Incident, was required reading in English classes at Erasmus Hall High School during the Eisenhower years.  I assume that I studied and possibly even answered some assigned questions about the novel, but judging by the minute shards of information that my porous head has retained, I’d be hard put to swear yea or nay.

The Ox-bow Incident is still in print and apparently still part of many curricula, which is a surprise, considering its racist caricaturing and taboo language.  For those who can overlook its offenses, it raises some peculiarly American questions about violence and personal responsibility.  It's not a beautifully-crafted novel: it takes a long time to get going, leaves gaps in the continuity, and although just a couple of hundred pages long, is peopled by more characters than I could easily track.  The principal defect is that the narrator, a young cowpoke named Art Croft, is never forced to choose between the good guys and the bad.

Despite these defects, The Ox-bow Incident proved to be well worth the re-reading, largely because of the story, which is inventive and which takes a number of surprising, unexpected turns. It's an anti-western, I now realize, in which readers wait in vain for a white-hatted hero ride to the rescue and to wing the black-hat and bring the gang of bad guys to justice. Instead, thugs and bullies drag the weaklings down to their own level.  Although I had already read my share of Zane Greys, I’m sure that I did not understand that Clark was toying with the conventions of the western genre. Nowadays, The Ox-bow Incident seems less kin to Riders of the Purple Sage than it is to Lonesome Dove.

Clark wrote when Hitler was menacing the world and he clearly aimed his shafts at temporizers and appeasers.  I suspect that at Erasmus, my teachers understood The Ox-bow Incident in the context of the anti-communism that was the religion of the 1950s.  I would not be at all surprised if the novel is now taught as anti-Jihadist, but it needn't be, because it's not so much anti-this or anti-that as it is about decency and the need to stand firm for law and justice. "Because most men are more afraid of being thought cowards than anything else," says the author, and because "real" men, so-called, believe that it's manly to take the law into their own hands, the cowboys and shopkeepers and drifters who cohere into a necktie party are defenseless against masculinist demagoguery.

While Clark never uses the word "honor," he implies that the cowardly-fearful would think it dishonorable to back off from their commitment to violence.

I think it was Spinoza who said that "honor" was a "slavish dependence on the opinion of others."  His definition could serve as a an epigraph to this novel.  Honor, as well as law, justice both domestic and international, masculinity, and violence, are all matters of contemporary debate, and as a consequence, The Ox-bow Incident hangs in there quite nicely.

I've now see the 1943 William Wellman-Henry Fonda-Dana Andrews-Anthony Quinn film of The Ox-bow Incident. It's faithful, much too faithful to the book.  I found it plodding and prosaic, inoffensive, but far too moralistic.  It was just the merest tad more optimistic than the bleak novel.  The political semi-allegory was barely there.      

The Springless Kibitka

No, despite appearances, I'm not obsessed with nineteenth-century horsedrawn vehicles, although I do love those classic novels in which our hero dashes to the rescue in one kind of coach or another.

It's just that I have this little bee in my bonnet about the fact that we gasoline-era moderns understand the exact social significance of jeep, Jaguar, Jetta, and jalopy, but we are, except for specialists, utterly clueless as to the valence of barouche, basket carriage, berlin, britchka, brougham, buckboard, buggy, cabriolet, caleche, cariole, carryall, chaise, chariot, clarence, coupe, croydon, curricle, cutter, dearborn, diligence, dog-cart, fiacre, fly, four-wheeler, gig, go-cart, governess cart, hansom, jaunty car, jersey-wagon, landau, phaeton, post-chaise, rockaway, shandrydan, shay, spider-phaeton, spring-van, stanhope, sulky, surrey, tandem, telyezhka, tilbury, tarantass, trap, troika, victoria, vis-a-vis, wagonette, or wurt. Which of these words tells us that the driver is rich or stylish, and which of them implies that he is vulgar and tasteless?  Or downtrodden?  We don't know, and so we read our traditional literature with a handicap.   

It is good fortune that when in Don Juan (a comic epic well worth the revisiting), Byron trots out a kibitka (a vehicle new to me), he tells us all we need to know:  "And there in a kibitka he rolled on,/  (A cursed sort of carriage without springs,/ Which on rough roads leaves scarcely a whole bone...."  [IX, 234-6]).  Byron testifies that the kibitka is down there in the horsedrawn slums. An online dictionary is less poetic but more detailed than Lord B: "a kibitka is a rude kind of Russian vehicle, on wheels or on runners, sometimes covered with cloth or leather, and often used as a movable habitation."

Definitely not the kind of vehicle out of which Sir Plantagenet should step when he opens Parliament or accompanies Lady Glencora to the ball.

May 10.  My friend W. S. wants to know if history provides an instance in which a "a cabal of kibbutzniks kibitzed in a kibitka?"  A good question to which I am at present unable to provide an answer.  May 19.  Professor Marion Morrison wants to know why I prefer Russian vehicles to "les voitures hippomobiles."  Whoa, Professor M.  Time to get off your high horse!   

The Helene Mullins Mystery

We're still cleaning out and throwing away (as I reported a couple of days ago). Today I discovered, in amongst a small cache of books that I inherited from my father, a volume of poems called Earthbound. I'd never heard of the poet, Helene Mullins, but I traced her via a 2001 The New York Times obituary.  "Helene Mullins Johnson, a poet, died on Oct. 26 at her home in Manhattan. She was 92 years old.  She died of congestive heart failure.  Mrs. Johnson first had her poems published in The Pagan, a Greenwich Village magazine, in the 1920s. After Thornton Wilder introduced her to his publisher, Harper's published her first novel, Convent Girl, and her first volume of poems, Earthbound, in 1929. Her final collection of poems, Mirrored Walls, was published in 1970. There are no survivors." Google provided me with another couple of facts. Helene Mullins was born in 1899 in New Rochelle, New York, and educated in "convent boarding schools." In 1935, she was so severely injured in an automobile accident that she lay unconscious for three weeks. 

And also: the library nearest to me that owns a copy of Earthbound is the Dakota State University, in Madison, South Dakota, which is precisely 502 miles from where I sit. 

The poems are, in my view, brimming with pre-Raphaelite fervor. The precursoress whom Mullins most resembles is Christina Rossetti, though there's an occasional dash of Ernest Dowson, and every once in a while, a gesture borrowed from the early Yeats. The poems are as intense and agonized and spiritual as Rosetti's, and were, even in their own time, composed in an extremely old-fashioned style. 

What does the world offer a hard-working but not brilliant poet who was clearly ambitious and tense, and who poured all her strength and feeling into her writing. There she was, a young woman fleeing the convent and shocking her family by taking up residence in Greenwich Village, where she lived near  Thornton Wilder and other 1920s gentlemen of literature and where she frequented the irreligious offices of The Pagan. I mourn for the struggle and yearning and effort that went into those long-forgotten poems.  And which, all said and done, earned her little behond a most perfunctory obituary in the Times.

But what in the ever-living universe was this volume doing in my staid father's library?   It's implausible that he could have found anything empathetic in such poems as "St. Theresa" and "The Boy Christ."  Especially since Earthbound was the only volume of "contemporary" poetry that he seems to have possessed.  In 1929, when Earthbound hit the streets, my father would have been a buoyant, studious young fellow of twenty-five -- a diligent bachelor law clerk with still a year or so to go before he would find Lilly. Helen Mullins herself was just thirty years old. Is there a story here? Am I missing something?

There are no clues;  not even a single pencil mark.  Not from one end of the book to the other. Something doesn't compute.

Book Report: The Dean's List by Jon Hassler

I had never heard of the novelist Jon Hassler, who died last month.  The obituaries took me by surprise:  Minnesota's best artist, more significant than the Coen brothers, or Bob Dylan, or Garrison Keillor.  Or Sinclair Lewis.  How could I be so ignorant?

Off I trotted to the library, where there was a nearly pristine shelf of Hassler novels.  They were clearly virgin and untouched  -- so I'm not the only diligent reader who is ignorant of Hassler.  From the shelf I plucked The Dean's List (1997) and attacked it with great expectations.

I'm very sorry to report that this particular novel is a lot less exciting than the ecstatic obituaries would have led me to believe.  The Dean's List is an academic story with a familiar cast: a  harried dean, a celebrity poet, an overbearing mom, an elusive girlfriend -- nothing that David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury hasn't done with more wit and verve.  Or Robertson Davies, for that matter.  Too many quirky characters; too many satirical targets.  Perhaps I made a mistake and chose the wrong Hassler novel.  I'll borrow another one and report back.    

Tamim Ansary's West of Kabul, East of New York

Some months ago, I reported on Hosseini's very popular novel of Afghanistan, The Kite Runner.  I thought it was a must-read-bad-book, that is, a book that is so informative and interesting that we should overlook its inferior construction and prose.  I've now read another Afghan-American story and I have come to much the same opinion.  Tamin Ansary's West of Kabul, East of New York (FSG, 2002) is swift and likable and necessary, but oh so very disappointing.  Ansary is an author of children's books, and, perhaps out of habit his prose is so guileless that it seems aimed not at adults but at a junior high school audience.

Ansary's is the familiar story of an immigrant (this time half Afghani, half Finnish-American) stranded between two cultures.  His transformation may be a little harder than most because Islam can be an inflexible integument.  It's sad to read that Ansary's brother has become a fanatical fundamentalist who has embraced some contrary-to-reason, contrary-to-the facts-of-history dogmas.  It's even more discouraging to read of Ansary's encounter with an Egyptian cab-driver in New York City, who says, "Thank God for the Taliban.  I hate America. The sluts. The booze. The filth. In Egypt, I am a lawyer. I can't earn enough to support my family, so I come here for six months a year.  But I never bring my wife. I don't want her to get polluted.  One of my friends brought his wife here, and you know what she said to him.  'Don't touch me anymore.'  You know what I would do to my wife if she ever said that to me.  I would take her to the country, I would dig a hole, I would put her in that hole...."   Ansary's a responsible and rational being and of course he's appalled and I think embarrassed by the hatred and misogyny that he encounters in that cab.  Let us hope that it's not the angry cabbies but the Ansarys who will prevail  -- in Islam as well as in closer-to-home relgions.      

What We Read in the Fifties: Mutiny on the Bounty

Aficionados of this blague will remember that Dr. M. occasionally revisits books that were notorious in the days of his unnaturally elongated adolescence. Here’s a small sample of the novels that Dr. M has reported upon: I the Jury, King Solomon's Mines, The Caine Mutiny, Blackboard Jungle, The Amboy Dukes, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, Scaramouche. It’s quite the roster, isn't it, of time-sensitive material.

Some of these novels have worn astonishingly well. Others are merely astonishing: what in the world could I (or the drab Eisenhower-era sensibility, for that matter) have possibly found worthwhile in most of these colossally dated and inartistic fictions?

To extend my anti-nostalgia, I’ve now tackled, for the first time in more than fifty years, a novel that enthralled the heck out of me. It’s Nordhoff and Hall’s Mutiny on the Bounty, first published in 1932 but widely read at least through the 1950s. Why was I so infatuated? Certainly not because of the novelists’ skill. The story of the tyrannical Captain Bligh, the Byronic rebel Fletcher Christian, the mutiny, the open boat, and the settlement of Pitcairn offered the opportunity to engage all the important themes: family, power, sex and love, religion, sanity, rebellion, technology, colonialism and cultural conflict. But N and H fell far miles short of the mark – not only did they write gawky sentences, but they also left gaping holes in the plot, created disappointingly shallow characters, and failed to explore the opportunities for thoughtful commentary. The novel is swift and superficial and clumsy.  It’s not for all time; it’s for the supermarket checkout stand.

Nevertheless, there’s little mystery why the novel captured this Brooklynites's youthful fancy. What adolescent would demand artistry from a novel that is awash with exoticism, romance, and sex?

Let us consider the following piece of reheated anthropological observation.  Midshipman Byam (the story is cunningly told through the eyes of a juvenile narrator) attends a Tahitian entertainment at which young women perform a dance “believed by the Indians (i.e. Tahitians) to ensure the fertility of the crops.”

The dress of the dancers consisted of no more than a wreath of flowers and green leaves about their waists, and the dance itself, in which they stood in two lines of three, face to face, was of a nature so unbelievably wanton that no words could convey the least idea of it.

“No more than a wreath of flowers about their waists?”  Does that mean…?  Holy smoke.  “Unbelievably wanton?"  Exactly how wanton is that?  What in the censorious world did these young ladies actually do?  They didn’t…?   No, they couldn't. “No words could convey….” 

What openings did N and H leave to be filled by an inexperienced but lascivious imagination!

And how does Midshipman Byam deal with such provocations?  Good luck for him as well as for all the randy young readers who identified with his circumstances.  Byam takes as his eager concubine a young Tahitian woman.  “Slenderly and strongly made, in the first bloom of young womanhood, and with her magnificent dark hair unbound, Maimiti made a picture worth traveling far to behold.”

OK, so I fell for it.  Sure it was contrived and manipulative.  But I was thirteen or so years old, living in concrete, subwayed, bepigeoned Flatbush where young ladies danced not in wreaths of flowers but in stiff and forbidding crinolines.  Exactly how many fertility ceremonies had I attended?  I was exoticism-deprived.

I’m just slightly embarrassed to admit that I did not just read Mutiny on the Bounty and call it a day.  Not at all.  Instead, I read everything that I could find about Bligh and Christian and Pitcairn Island and even about Norfolk Island, where the mutineers relocated after Pitcairn became overpopulated.  I became something of an expert on the geography of these islands. I also took to reading about nineteenth-century sailing vessels, and though an arrant land-lubber, I could accurately, in those days, define taffrail, yardarm, orlop, lanyard, hawse-hole, gimbal, lanyard, poop, mizzen.

Nor was it all erotic displacement.  Although I began with Nordhoff and Hall, I later read Cook and Bouganville and eventually moved on to the writings of Mead and Malinowski and others in that pioneering generation of anthropologists.  Of course I didn't understand or have long forgotten much of what I read  -- but neither Maimiti "with magnificent dark hair unbound" nor that unbelievably wanton ceremony ever entirely evaporated from my susceptible, impressionable young brain. 

Irene Nemirovsky's Fire in the Blood

Irene Nemirovsky's spare but luminous novella, Fire in the Blood, is set in an out-of-the-way French village a few years before the start of World War II.  Just as the plot is beginning to come to a boil, the author interjects an easy-to-overlook but very telling incident.  "A car full of Parisians arrived and stopped in front of the Hotel des Voyaguers. 'It's so quiet,' one woman said."  The automobile and its condescending passengers soon drive on and Nemirovsky, speaking through her narrator, offers her readership a few words of guidance:  "How many peaceful sleepy places they'll drive through tonight, how many sleepy villages.... They'll pass silent sombre country estates and will not begin to imagine the dark secret life within -- a life they will never come to know." 

In Fire in the Blood, Nemirovky's subject is Issy-l'Eveque and its "dark secret life."  As it turns out, there is as much mystery and passion in this corner of rural Burgundy as in Paris or any other modern metropolis.  In fact, the yearnings and loves and jealousies and inhibitions of these patronized village folk soon achieve nothing less than tragic proportion.

Fire in the Blood resists easy classification. It's a satire, a novel of manners, a mystery, and also a romance. Nemirovsky manages to depict an entire society in little -- not only its ingrained customs, but the resistance to those customs.

Not to spoil the story, but here's the situation: unmarried old Uncle Sylvio, after many years abroad, has returned home to the village of his birth.  His upstanding young niece Colette marries a local miller named Jean Dorin.  A couple of years later, Jean Dorin falls into the river and drowns.  Uncle Silvio happens to know that his niece has been carrying on an affair and he also knows that her young lover has been visiting not just Colette but also Brigitte Declos, an attractive woman married to an elderly farmer.  From this beginning, the story takes a series of winding and unanticipated turns.  But Nemirovsky is not content merely to complicate the plot. Her quarry is larger:  it's the moral and psychological ramifications of Issy-l'Eveque's mysteries.  Indeed, the story, the plot ends thirty pages before the novel comes to a close, and revelations that at first seem like a coda became a climax. It's a little miracle that Nemirovsky has created a story that manages to be both a wicked satire of rural complacency and an exhortation to a more full life.      

I've now read Fire in the Blood twice, the second time with great care.  The novella was more intricate, more carefully plotted the second time than I had noticed or appreciated.  Unless I'm deceiving myself, this is one heck of a piece of writing.  I'm dazzled.

Irene Nemirovsky was thirty-nine years old when she was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942.  She wrote Fire in the Blood in 1940.  Thought to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in an old valise and the novella published for the first time in 2007.

How many more stories might Nemirovksy have told?  How much more life might she have lived?