Christopher Newman, lately possessed of a sizeable fortune amassed through years of conscious endeavor in trade in America, decides to throw it all off and go abroad. He has only a vague idea of what he seeks, but what he finds is an enchanting woman who answers his feminine ideal. Madame de Cintre returns his affections, but their engagement is broken by her aristocratic family, who scorn the idea of a common businessman attaining her hand. Newman strives valiantly to win her, but is eventually forced to abandon the matter forever.
Newman is just that - arisen out of obscurity to a self-generated place of prosperity. Easy-going, forthright, warm, congenial, and open, he is a credit to his country. "You take things too coolly," says a European acquaintance. "It exasperates me. And then you are too happy. You have what must be the most agreeable thing in the world, the consciousness of having bought your pleasure beforehand and paid for it." Indeed, he feels, as Americans are wont to do, that most anything can be bought, and in America this is at least true of position. One's origins have little bearing on one's place in society; hard work is virtuous, something to be commended.
But Newman's would-be in-laws take quite the opposite view, living on little else but the glory of their ancient lineage. They shun Newman for his industry while inhabiting a moldering house emblematic of their waning finances. They find Newman's proposal audaciously incomprehensible; Newman is just as incapable of understanding their indignation. "[H]is sense of human equality was not an aggressive taste or an aesthetic theory, but something as natural and organic as a physical appetite which had never been put on a scanty allowance." That his antecedents have any importance to them baffles him.
As Newman later finds, high birth is certainly no indication of high morals. He behaves honorably throughout the degrading ordeal to which his fiancée’s relatives subject him, and he emerges blameless and unscathed. Unfortunately, he also comes out without a wife. Madame de Cintre commits herself to a nunnery to escape the contrivances of her family.
It is too bad that Newman is treated so terribly, for he is a decent protagonist, pleasantly sociable, confident and uninhibited. "He himself was almost never bored, and there was no man with whom it would have been a greater mistake to suppose that silence meant displeasure." He views the Continent with "a placid, fathomless sense of diversion." That world, however, does not look as kindly on him.
Monday, March 05, 2007
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
If Little Women were a comestible, it would be like milk and honey: wholesome, mild, and nourishing, to be sure; but sweet, so sweet, almost unbearably so; and moreover, replete with biblical connotations. Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy are the March girls, and Alcott, drawing on her childhood, chronicles a turbulent year in their lives. Their father is a Union soldier in the Civil War, and the family's finances are precarious, so the girls and their mother manage as best they can while maintaining their moral fortitude and love and commitment to each other.
The book is soaked with the flavor of the 1800s, evoking an era in which a girl could reach the age of sixteen without ever having looked at a boy as more than a friend, and then at seventeen become engaged. But though Marmee and Papa take the traditionally staid views of propriety in relationships, their position on women's rights is strikingly progressive. They accept the necessity of sending the older girls to work, and encourage useful endeavor. When Papa returns home, he commends Meg: "I remember a time when this hand was white and smooth...this hardened palm has earned something better than blisters."
Altogether the girls are excellent examples of solid Protestant work ethic. They assume their duties as cheerfully as they can, and though they err from time to time, they are quick to amend their follies. They entertain themselves well and get along most of the time, performing plays, hosting clubs, and assembling newspapers. Even their leisure is admirable. When asked about her plans for summer vacation, Jo replies, "'I've laid in a heap of books, and I'm going to improve my shining hours reading on my perch in the old apple-tree.'"
Alcott based Jo on herself, reflecting her penchant for literature. The novel is full of educated allusions, from Shakespeare to Dickens to Thackeray. But it is apparent that the author was rather young when she wrote the book. Many passages suffer from facile sentence constructions and a wordiness awkward even for the time in which they were written. Alcott seems to be afraid of "said;" one finds, in the first chapter alone, to wit: "grumbled," "sighed," "added," "cried," "began," "advised," "returned," "observed," "sang," "continued," "answered," "announced," and "exclaimed."
Much of Little Women reads like a primer. The tone tends toward didactic and the moral lessons are quite overt. The girls face adversity, but they are steadfast, and everything comes right in the end. Characters are developed admirably. The story is exceedingly instructive, suitably nutritious for the children it was obviously written for, but perhaps too treacly for the likes of me.
The book is soaked with the flavor of the 1800s, evoking an era in which a girl could reach the age of sixteen without ever having looked at a boy as more than a friend, and then at seventeen become engaged. But though Marmee and Papa take the traditionally staid views of propriety in relationships, their position on women's rights is strikingly progressive. They accept the necessity of sending the older girls to work, and encourage useful endeavor. When Papa returns home, he commends Meg: "I remember a time when this hand was white and smooth...this hardened palm has earned something better than blisters."
Altogether the girls are excellent examples of solid Protestant work ethic. They assume their duties as cheerfully as they can, and though they err from time to time, they are quick to amend their follies. They entertain themselves well and get along most of the time, performing plays, hosting clubs, and assembling newspapers. Even their leisure is admirable. When asked about her plans for summer vacation, Jo replies, "'I've laid in a heap of books, and I'm going to improve my shining hours reading on my perch in the old apple-tree.'"
Alcott based Jo on herself, reflecting her penchant for literature. The novel is full of educated allusions, from Shakespeare to Dickens to Thackeray. But it is apparent that the author was rather young when she wrote the book. Many passages suffer from facile sentence constructions and a wordiness awkward even for the time in which they were written. Alcott seems to be afraid of "said;" one finds, in the first chapter alone, to wit: "grumbled," "sighed," "added," "cried," "began," "advised," "returned," "observed," "sang," "continued," "answered," "announced," and "exclaimed."
Much of Little Women reads like a primer. The tone tends toward didactic and the moral lessons are quite overt. The girls face adversity, but they are steadfast, and everything comes right in the end. Characters are developed admirably. The story is exceedingly instructive, suitably nutritious for the children it was obviously written for, but perhaps too treacly for the likes of me.
Monday, February 26, 2007
Silence by Shusaku Endo
Another recommendation by Will, the father of the boy I watch, this book was just as incongruous with what I'd think he'd like, though it was utterly removed from the former, The Bone People. A Portuguese priest travels to Japan in the 1600s to minister to the persecuted believers there. He is captured and forced to renounce his faith by stepping on a portrait of Christ. Throughout his Japanese sojourn he struggles with the seeming silence of God, but after he apostatizes he realizes that God had been with him all the time.
"It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful," says Rodrigues, the priest, "the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt." When Rodrigues meets the Japanese Christians, he is struck by the squalor of their lives and their desperate existence. But despite their poverty they manage to feed and harbor him until he is betrayed to the persecuting authorities, who are ardently striving to eradicate any traces of what they view as the religion of the West. The Japanese officials refuse to believe their people can comprehend Christianity in its Western context, insisting that any professing Christians there adhere only to their own corrupted understanding of their native Buddhism.
Rodrigues does not see them this way. Upon observing a Japanese believer's poignant rendition of a hymn as he is martyred, Rodrigues reflects, "Life in this world is too painful for these Japanese peasants. Only by relying on 'the temple of Paradise' have they been able to go on living." There are no noble savages here, no blissful ignorants. Christianity achieved something for these people that their indigenous teaching lacked.
Rodrigues publicly renounces his faith in a complex inner struggle that leads paradoxically to a rejuvenation of his devotion to his God. "He loved him now in a different way from before. Everything that had taken place until now had been necessary to bring him to this love." It is as if when stripped of his trappings of Catholicism - the priesthood, the sacred veneration of icons - Rodrigues discovers the heart of Christianity and depth of God's love and mercy for him.
"It is easy enough to die for the good and beautiful," says Rodrigues, the priest, "the hard thing is to die for the miserable and corrupt." When Rodrigues meets the Japanese Christians, he is struck by the squalor of their lives and their desperate existence. But despite their poverty they manage to feed and harbor him until he is betrayed to the persecuting authorities, who are ardently striving to eradicate any traces of what they view as the religion of the West. The Japanese officials refuse to believe their people can comprehend Christianity in its Western context, insisting that any professing Christians there adhere only to their own corrupted understanding of their native Buddhism.
Rodrigues does not see them this way. Upon observing a Japanese believer's poignant rendition of a hymn as he is martyred, Rodrigues reflects, "Life in this world is too painful for these Japanese peasants. Only by relying on 'the temple of Paradise' have they been able to go on living." There are no noble savages here, no blissful ignorants. Christianity achieved something for these people that their indigenous teaching lacked.
Rodrigues publicly renounces his faith in a complex inner struggle that leads paradoxically to a rejuvenation of his devotion to his God. "He loved him now in a different way from before. Everything that had taken place until now had been necessary to bring him to this love." It is as if when stripped of his trappings of Catholicism - the priesthood, the sacred veneration of icons - Rodrigues discovers the heart of Christianity and depth of God's love and mercy for him.
The novel was translated from the Japanese, and the writing was as pure and unadorned as haiku. I don't know that I've ever read a work of Japanese literature, and I'm pleased my initial foray was a book so sympathetic toward my own beliefs. Endo was a Christian, after all, and he believed that if Christianity wasn't true in Japan, then it wasn't true anywhere.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
The Bone People by Keri Hulme
So one day Will, the father of the little boy I babysit, picked me up as per usual, and, upon his noticing the books that accompanied me, we began talking about what he had read in college. He told me he had loved his World Lit class, and when we got to his house he pulled this book off a shelf, saying, "I've read this three times. It's really great; it's about these people in New Zealand who go to this tower where this woman lives and they're all kind of troubled and they sort of help each other...well, you'll just have to read it." So I did.
Kerewin Holmes is a part-Maori self-sufficient financially independent painter-reader-writer living in a custom-built tower on the New Zealand coast. One day she comes home and discovers a thin, blond, mute boy in her living room. She finds that his name is Simon, and she contacts his father Joe and returns him to his home. Joe invites her over for dinner the next night, she reciprocates, and soon all their lives are intertwined. Kerewin learns that Joe adopted Simon after he washed up on shore one night, the lone survivor of a shipwreck, and that Joe's wife and son died shortly after, leaving the two alone. She also finds that, when drunk, Joe punishes Simon severely, though Simon feels he deserves it and so it just makes him love his father more. But one night Joe's blows send him to the hospital. Months of soul-searching, healing, and repentance find them all reconciled in the end.
The book is altogether strikingly individual. Literate allusions abound in the mind of Kerewin, who is well-read and familiar with French and Latin, as well as fluent in English and Maori. She has a keen ear for language and sound that becomes apparent as the sometimes stream-of-consciousness narrative follows her mental rabbit-paths of rhyme and word-play. She is clever, though at times a little too precious, like when she refers to herself as "Sherlock" - her last name is Holmes - and marvels that she never came up with that before. The distinct culture of New Zealand plays a major part in the individuality of the novel. Maori words are interspersed between the audibly accented English: "Berloody cheeky, mate."
An outré spirituality harbored by the characters pervades the book. They combine Maori spritualism with a brand of missionary Christianity and puerile superstitious mysticism in a confusing conglomeration of beliefs. Kerewin keeps a book of religious writings that includes Buddhist and Hindu texts among her own musings, as well as select books of the Bible. Simon sees auras around people, and Joe is visited by an ostensibly prophetic old Maori chief.
Though things eventually come right, Simon and Joe's relationship forms a terribly sick situation, and it makes the book an uncomfortable one. Kerewin's cold seclusion, too, is unnatural and undesirable, though also rectified by the denouement. The book is engrossing, but not necessarily something I'd want to read more than once. So why did Will - Cubs fan, mathematics major, Mac enthusiast, Guitar Hero champ - read it thrice?
Kerewin Holmes is a part-Maori self-sufficient financially independent painter-reader-writer living in a custom-built tower on the New Zealand coast. One day she comes home and discovers a thin, blond, mute boy in her living room. She finds that his name is Simon, and she contacts his father Joe and returns him to his home. Joe invites her over for dinner the next night, she reciprocates, and soon all their lives are intertwined. Kerewin learns that Joe adopted Simon after he washed up on shore one night, the lone survivor of a shipwreck, and that Joe's wife and son died shortly after, leaving the two alone. She also finds that, when drunk, Joe punishes Simon severely, though Simon feels he deserves it and so it just makes him love his father more. But one night Joe's blows send him to the hospital. Months of soul-searching, healing, and repentance find them all reconciled in the end.
The book is altogether strikingly individual. Literate allusions abound in the mind of Kerewin, who is well-read and familiar with French and Latin, as well as fluent in English and Maori. She has a keen ear for language and sound that becomes apparent as the sometimes stream-of-consciousness narrative follows her mental rabbit-paths of rhyme and word-play. She is clever, though at times a little too precious, like when she refers to herself as "Sherlock" - her last name is Holmes - and marvels that she never came up with that before. The distinct culture of New Zealand plays a major part in the individuality of the novel. Maori words are interspersed between the audibly accented English: "Berloody cheeky, mate."
An outré spirituality harbored by the characters pervades the book. They combine Maori spritualism with a brand of missionary Christianity and puerile superstitious mysticism in a confusing conglomeration of beliefs. Kerewin keeps a book of religious writings that includes Buddhist and Hindu texts among her own musings, as well as select books of the Bible. Simon sees auras around people, and Joe is visited by an ostensibly prophetic old Maori chief.
Though things eventually come right, Simon and Joe's relationship forms a terribly sick situation, and it makes the book an uncomfortable one. Kerewin's cold seclusion, too, is unnatural and undesirable, though also rectified by the denouement. The book is engrossing, but not necessarily something I'd want to read more than once. So why did Will - Cubs fan, mathematics major, Mac enthusiast, Guitar Hero champ - read it thrice?
Monday, February 19, 2007
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The Return of the Native and The Mayor of Casterbridge may both have been as gloomy as the English moors, but Hardy contrived happy endings for at least some of the characters. In Tess, however, Hardy declines any pretense of nicety, submitting his hapless protagonists to increasingly tragic circumstances, culminating in a bitter denouement.
Tess, ill-advised ingenue of the English countryside, is raped by a licentious aristocrat, Alec D'Urberville, and the resulting infant dies shortly after its birth. Tess seeks employment as a dairymaid miles from her home, to escape the scorn of her neighbors and earn money for her impoverished family. A young well-to-do man, Angel Clare, falls in love with her and convinces her, despite her misgivings, to marry him. On their wedding night, Clare confesses to her a night of debauchery in the city, and so, assured, Tess reveals to him her similar past. But Clare is distraught by her revelation, and leaves her.
D'Urberville returns to pursue her in this vulnerable state, and she passively relinquishes herself to him in her hopelessness when he offers to provide for her impoverished family. Clare, repentant, finds them together. Tess kills her lover, rejoins her husband for a few weeks of pleasure, and is subsequently discovered and hanged.
Hardy's prescient pessimism anticipates, or perhaps ushers in, the effects of Darwinism on Western beliefs in the 20th century. Clare, son of an evangelical minister, professes an appreciation of Christianity but denies the verity of its supernatural elements. Tess readily assumes his "rational" views, having always harbored a faith tenuous at best. D'Urberville undergoes a radical conversion halfway through the novel, becoming a traveling preacher. But a brush with Tess, and her iteration of her husband's philosophies is enough to kill his emotional Christianity. Upon renouncing his beliefs, he renews his assault of Tess. "'O why didn't you keep your faith, if the loss of it has brought you to speak to me like this!'" she cries to him.
What Tess doesn't understand is that it just cannot be that way. One cannot have a standard without authority behind it; there is no moral code without God. Clare, full of ideals and clearly endowed with a sense of right and wrong, expects Tess to forgive him his pre-marital dalliance without any qualms, but finds himself unable to to the same for her. He later accepts her companionship, though she has added to her offenses murder. His self-fashioned ethics are startlingly inconsistent.
Hardy purports to write an indictment of ineffable Fate, but all he truly demonstrates is the futility of relativism.
Tess, ill-advised ingenue of the English countryside, is raped by a licentious aristocrat, Alec D'Urberville, and the resulting infant dies shortly after its birth. Tess seeks employment as a dairymaid miles from her home, to escape the scorn of her neighbors and earn money for her impoverished family. A young well-to-do man, Angel Clare, falls in love with her and convinces her, despite her misgivings, to marry him. On their wedding night, Clare confesses to her a night of debauchery in the city, and so, assured, Tess reveals to him her similar past. But Clare is distraught by her revelation, and leaves her.
D'Urberville returns to pursue her in this vulnerable state, and she passively relinquishes herself to him in her hopelessness when he offers to provide for her impoverished family. Clare, repentant, finds them together. Tess kills her lover, rejoins her husband for a few weeks of pleasure, and is subsequently discovered and hanged.
Hardy's prescient pessimism anticipates, or perhaps ushers in, the effects of Darwinism on Western beliefs in the 20th century. Clare, son of an evangelical minister, professes an appreciation of Christianity but denies the verity of its supernatural elements. Tess readily assumes his "rational" views, having always harbored a faith tenuous at best. D'Urberville undergoes a radical conversion halfway through the novel, becoming a traveling preacher. But a brush with Tess, and her iteration of her husband's philosophies is enough to kill his emotional Christianity. Upon renouncing his beliefs, he renews his assault of Tess. "'O why didn't you keep your faith, if the loss of it has brought you to speak to me like this!'" she cries to him.
What Tess doesn't understand is that it just cannot be that way. One cannot have a standard without authority behind it; there is no moral code without God. Clare, full of ideals and clearly endowed with a sense of right and wrong, expects Tess to forgive him his pre-marital dalliance without any qualms, but finds himself unable to to the same for her. He later accepts her companionship, though she has added to her offenses murder. His self-fashioned ethics are startlingly inconsistent.
Hardy purports to write an indictment of ineffable Fate, but all he truly demonstrates is the futility of relativism.
Monday, February 12, 2007
Crime and Punishment by Feodor Dostoevsky
I avoided this book for a long time because I have mixed feelings about Russian literature, and didn't want to commit myself to a long book I might not enjoy. Chekhov's profundity was entirely lost on me, and I only got two-thirds of the way through War and Peace before the people at the Jeopardy! tryouts told me to just stop and watch the movie instead. But I liked Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, and Tolstoy redeemed himself for me with The Death of Ivan Ilych. I'd heard Crime and Punishment had a redemptive ending, and so, after chastising myself for balking at a novel because of its length - "Since when am I one to pass on a book because it's too long?" - I checked it out.
It turns out I didn't want it to end. I felt nothing lost in translation here; the writing was forceful and immediate. Dostoevsky is a superb storyteller: he infuses the plot with action right from the beginning, honing in on the key players of his drama and sticking with them. Rodion Romanov Raskolnikov is an impoverished young man who, amidst the turmoil of mid-19th century Russia, puts his pet theory of moral relativism into practice by murdering and robbing an old moneylender and her sister. The novel follows Raskolnikov as he tries to make sense of what he has done, detailing his subsequent states of mind - hallucination, recklessness, rationalization, indifference, and finally remorse and repentance.
It is primarily a novel of the mind, and Raskolnikov's inner dialogue is fascinating. He, even at his most irrational, is eminently believable as he discovers just what a "miserable wretch" he truly is. The personalities of his friends, enemies, and family are just as engaging. Russia seems so remote, but the story is so universal. Raskolnikov realizes his depravity, and like Ivan Ilych, asks himself the essential questions: "What should he strive for? To live in order to exist?"
Raskolnikov's salvation is borne by Sofya Marmeladov, whose steadfast devotion to him brings about his final restoration. "There was a New Testament under his pillow...It was hers, the very one from which she had read to him the raising of Lazarus." Like Lazarus, Raskolnikov returns to light and life after being submerged in death and darkness.
Dostoevsky effectively denounces the atheism of 19th-century Russian intellectuals with his masterful, deft pen. His novel is a spellbinding account of a criminal's psychological plight, the striking image of a destitute man ensnared by his own misguided ideals. Raskolnikov mocks religion and the devout, ensconcing himself in jaded, indifferent disbelief. It is not until the very last page that Dostoevsky gives him his answer to the eternal question; the answer to the eternal question.
It turns out I didn't want it to end. I felt nothing lost in translation here; the writing was forceful and immediate. Dostoevsky is a superb storyteller: he infuses the plot with action right from the beginning, honing in on the key players of his drama and sticking with them. Rodion Romanov Raskolnikov is an impoverished young man who, amidst the turmoil of mid-19th century Russia, puts his pet theory of moral relativism into practice by murdering and robbing an old moneylender and her sister. The novel follows Raskolnikov as he tries to make sense of what he has done, detailing his subsequent states of mind - hallucination, recklessness, rationalization, indifference, and finally remorse and repentance.
It is primarily a novel of the mind, and Raskolnikov's inner dialogue is fascinating. He, even at his most irrational, is eminently believable as he discovers just what a "miserable wretch" he truly is. The personalities of his friends, enemies, and family are just as engaging. Russia seems so remote, but the story is so universal. Raskolnikov realizes his depravity, and like Ivan Ilych, asks himself the essential questions: "What should he strive for? To live in order to exist?"
Raskolnikov's salvation is borne by Sofya Marmeladov, whose steadfast devotion to him brings about his final restoration. "There was a New Testament under his pillow...It was hers, the very one from which she had read to him the raising of Lazarus." Like Lazarus, Raskolnikov returns to light and life after being submerged in death and darkness.
Dostoevsky effectively denounces the atheism of 19th-century Russian intellectuals with his masterful, deft pen. His novel is a spellbinding account of a criminal's psychological plight, the striking image of a destitute man ensnared by his own misguided ideals. Raskolnikov mocks religion and the devout, ensconcing himself in jaded, indifferent disbelief. It is not until the very last page that Dostoevsky gives him his answer to the eternal question; the answer to the eternal question.
Monday, February 05, 2007
The Best Short Stories of O. Henry
I was making my way methodically through the fiction section of our little local library recently, and when I got to the "O" section, I paused. In between the O'Haras and the O'Neills, I found an O. Henry. I sincerely hope a librarian did not put it there. I returned the book to its proper place, where, coincidentally, I had just minutes before selected a volume by the same author.
I've run into Henry's stories periodically throughout school, in various anthologies, and I've yet to read a piece of his that isn't thoroughly enjoyable. He manages his medium deftly, suffusing his abbreviated narratives with easily grasped characters and adorning his denouements with perpetually unpredicatable irony. Irony is of course Henry's hallmark; he is the father of the unexpected twist. His stories are essentially all about the experience of reading them - the bulk of each serves mainly as the setting for the jewel of the concluding line.
Suspense propels most of the plots. But it is not solely the suspense over what is to happen next; often it involves discovering why the story is worth reading at all. Many of Henry's tales appear quite mundane at the outset; they proceed pleasantly but not extraordinarily, and so the payoff for the reader does not occur until that very last line. Much like a Hitchcock movie, the plot in its entirety comes full circle only at the end.
But that's not to say the beginnings and the middles of the stories don't offer up their own merits. Henry writes with a garish verbosity whose audacity would disgrace a lesser writer, but which in Henry's hands becomes exciting and ultimately endearing, as he expertly wields words like "eleemosynary" and "peripatetic." He assumes the dialects of Americans as varied as his surprise endings, from New Yorkers to Texans to Mississippians. He procures excellent metaphors: "They had the appearance of men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat - seamy on both sides."
Henry treats his characters tenderly, sympathizing with the plights of his hoboes and shopgirls, not too stingy to refuse them a few happy endings. Irony is invariably cruel to the ficitional pawn of fate, but Henry often strives to lessen the sting. In his classic "The Gift of the Magi," he lauds his innocent protagonists: "Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest."
Henry manages to be both sardonic and sweet in a delightful blend of irony and sentimentality. It's a pity that misguided library shelf stacker had apparently never heard of him.
I've run into Henry's stories periodically throughout school, in various anthologies, and I've yet to read a piece of his that isn't thoroughly enjoyable. He manages his medium deftly, suffusing his abbreviated narratives with easily grasped characters and adorning his denouements with perpetually unpredicatable irony. Irony is of course Henry's hallmark; he is the father of the unexpected twist. His stories are essentially all about the experience of reading them - the bulk of each serves mainly as the setting for the jewel of the concluding line.
Suspense propels most of the plots. But it is not solely the suspense over what is to happen next; often it involves discovering why the story is worth reading at all. Many of Henry's tales appear quite mundane at the outset; they proceed pleasantly but not extraordinarily, and so the payoff for the reader does not occur until that very last line. Much like a Hitchcock movie, the plot in its entirety comes full circle only at the end.
But that's not to say the beginnings and the middles of the stories don't offer up their own merits. Henry writes with a garish verbosity whose audacity would disgrace a lesser writer, but which in Henry's hands becomes exciting and ultimately endearing, as he expertly wields words like "eleemosynary" and "peripatetic." He assumes the dialects of Americans as varied as his surprise endings, from New Yorkers to Texans to Mississippians. He procures excellent metaphors: "They had the appearance of men to whom life had appeared as a reversible coat - seamy on both sides."
Henry treats his characters tenderly, sympathizing with the plights of his hoboes and shopgirls, not too stingy to refuse them a few happy endings. Irony is invariably cruel to the ficitional pawn of fate, but Henry often strives to lessen the sting. In his classic "The Gift of the Magi," he lauds his innocent protagonists: "Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest."
Henry manages to be both sardonic and sweet in a delightful blend of irony and sentimentality. It's a pity that misguided library shelf stacker had apparently never heard of him.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
A Death in the Family by James Agee
It sounds depressing, and it is, but it is also quite beautiful. Agee illustrates a young family’s noble struggle to comprehend the loss of their husband and father and move on. Jay crashes his automobile on his way home late one night, and he is killed instantly. His death devastates all his relations - that a young father, who worked out of his native rural poverty to attain a respected place in the middle class, who had recently conquered his alcoholism and reconciled himself to his wife, who had two tiny children to raise - that he should be alive one moment and gone forever the next, overwhelms them.
Agee's voice, as in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is subdued but arresting. He writes in a mesmerizing cadence of prose, an unparalleled lilting song; his works are a melancholy ode to humanity. He describes his characters and their world in furious detail, invoking all the senses and imbuing the novel with a shocking degree of authenticity. His portrayals of sounds ring in the ears with unsurpassed verisimilitude. His is a severe but thoroughly accurate realism.
The intensely realistic nature of the book is due, no doubt, to its autobiographical origins. Agee's own father died in the same manner as Jay when Agee was six; Jay's six-year-old son Rufus bears Agee's middle name. Rufus' bewilderment and anguish in the wake of the events form some of the most poignant elements in the book; Agee's careful delineation of a young boy's thoughts surely bespeaks his own recollections.
The book must have functioned, therefore, as a tribute to his father. For Agee's work transcends reality, assuming a sort of symbolically charged air. Under his pen real life becomes loftier, more poetic, more important, drenched in deep emotion; fervently grounded in practical matters but simultaneously reaching for ethereal heights. He permits some of his characters a belief in the supernatural, and is on the whole sympathetic towards them, allowing them to cry out to God with the utmost sincerity. Spirituality pervades his work.
The novel inevitably leads one to ponder mortality, as all deaths do. In a society in which accidental deaths are increasingly rarer, and life spans are continually lengthening, these times of reflection are not as prevalent. Agee's book, then, in its ferocious veracity and breathless immediacy, functions as that reminder, urging self-evaluation on the reader: What would I do if someone close to me died? Am I ready to die?
Agee himself died rather young, at 45, of a heart attack. He never saw his book published and so did not enjoy the acclaim of the entirely deserved Pulitzer Prize that it would bring him.
Agee's voice, as in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is subdued but arresting. He writes in a mesmerizing cadence of prose, an unparalleled lilting song; his works are a melancholy ode to humanity. He describes his characters and their world in furious detail, invoking all the senses and imbuing the novel with a shocking degree of authenticity. His portrayals of sounds ring in the ears with unsurpassed verisimilitude. His is a severe but thoroughly accurate realism.
The intensely realistic nature of the book is due, no doubt, to its autobiographical origins. Agee's own father died in the same manner as Jay when Agee was six; Jay's six-year-old son Rufus bears Agee's middle name. Rufus' bewilderment and anguish in the wake of the events form some of the most poignant elements in the book; Agee's careful delineation of a young boy's thoughts surely bespeaks his own recollections.
The book must have functioned, therefore, as a tribute to his father. For Agee's work transcends reality, assuming a sort of symbolically charged air. Under his pen real life becomes loftier, more poetic, more important, drenched in deep emotion; fervently grounded in practical matters but simultaneously reaching for ethereal heights. He permits some of his characters a belief in the supernatural, and is on the whole sympathetic towards them, allowing them to cry out to God with the utmost sincerity. Spirituality pervades his work.
The novel inevitably leads one to ponder mortality, as all deaths do. In a society in which accidental deaths are increasingly rarer, and life spans are continually lengthening, these times of reflection are not as prevalent. Agee's book, then, in its ferocious veracity and breathless immediacy, functions as that reminder, urging self-evaluation on the reader: What would I do if someone close to me died? Am I ready to die?
Agee himself died rather young, at 45, of a heart attack. He never saw his book published and so did not enjoy the acclaim of the entirely deserved Pulitzer Prize that it would bring him.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Henry James, in sketching his Portrait, takes a young, idealistic woman and explores the detour her fortunes take when she inherits a fortune from her uncle. Isabel Archer's aunt proposes to escort her across Europe after her father dies. Isabel charms her relations and so finds herself financially independent upon her uncle's decease. Isabel is largely self-educated, having spent much of her adolescence steeped in books; from literature she extracted a varied brew of self-aware knowledge and untempered opinions. "She had a theory that it was only on this condition that life was worth living; that one should be one of the best, should be conscious of a fine organization (she could not help knowing her organization was fine), should move in a realm of light, of natural wisdom, of happy impulse, of inspiration gracefully chronic."
Isabel has lots of theories, in fact, and her newfound riches allow her to execute them. "She always returned to her theory that a young woman whom after all everyone thought clever should begin by getting a general impression of life." Isabel embarks upon her European tour. While she considers marriage important, she strives to achieve a destiny and identification without having to marry advantageously. She refuses the hands of several worthy suitors, but she is eventually captivated by a destitute widower whose good taste, veneer of decorum, ostensibly humble existence, and good favor by Madame Merle, a friend of Isabel's, do much to recommend him to her. Defying the misgivings of her relatives, she weds him.
Though she is years in discovering it, Isabel's marriage is solely mercenary on her husband's part. When a wedding occurs in the very middle of a book, depend upon it to be unfortunate. Isabel learns that Madame Merle is the illegitimate mother of her husband's daughter, and the motive behind Merle's encouragement of the courtship becomes apparent to her. Distraught over this discovery, Isabel flees to the bedside of her dying cousin, whose deteriorating health adds to her agony. After his funeral, an old suitor beseeches Isabel to run away with him and salvage some sort of happiness out of life, but she steadfastly refuses and returns home to a husband who despises her.
Isabel makes the right decision. The climactic scene is deeply reminiscent of Jane Eyre's refusal of Mr. Rochester; both women decline the fervent pleas of men to forsake their scruples and disregard the eyes of the world. Isabel's ideals may not have prevented her from being deceived when the correct path was obscure, but they allowed her to choose wisely when the decision was clear.
The story elicits many moral lessons, though from what I understand James was averse to viewing fiction in such a didactic manner. Money often causes more problems than it solves. Consult one's family in matters of romance; their sensibilities are not clouded by the illusions of infatuation. Accept responsibility for the byproducts of mistakes. Have an open mind, but not one too open. Take care as to whom one invites into confidence; even the least likely can harbor ulterior motives.
James retains vestiges of the traditional view of women as inferior. When Isabe speaks in illogical tautology, it is considered characteristic of gender. "'Because it's not,' Isabel said femininely. "I know it's not.'" And later, James remarks, "She knew how to think- an accomplishment rare in women." At the risk of disparaging my gender just to make myself look better, I'm sometimes half inclined to agree.
James' writing involves a delightful dearth of symbolism, making the book eminently accessible. He desires solely to analyze a young woman's fate when her free will is enhanced by pecuniary freedom, and the result is blatantly apparent. Stocked with a surfeit of self-assurance, she is easily ensnared, and, along with her bookish ideals, is beset by the terrible actuality of reality. But she is not vanquished entirely.
Isabel has lots of theories, in fact, and her newfound riches allow her to execute them. "She always returned to her theory that a young woman whom after all everyone thought clever should begin by getting a general impression of life." Isabel embarks upon her European tour. While she considers marriage important, she strives to achieve a destiny and identification without having to marry advantageously. She refuses the hands of several worthy suitors, but she is eventually captivated by a destitute widower whose good taste, veneer of decorum, ostensibly humble existence, and good favor by Madame Merle, a friend of Isabel's, do much to recommend him to her. Defying the misgivings of her relatives, she weds him.
Though she is years in discovering it, Isabel's marriage is solely mercenary on her husband's part. When a wedding occurs in the very middle of a book, depend upon it to be unfortunate. Isabel learns that Madame Merle is the illegitimate mother of her husband's daughter, and the motive behind Merle's encouragement of the courtship becomes apparent to her. Distraught over this discovery, Isabel flees to the bedside of her dying cousin, whose deteriorating health adds to her agony. After his funeral, an old suitor beseeches Isabel to run away with him and salvage some sort of happiness out of life, but she steadfastly refuses and returns home to a husband who despises her.
Isabel makes the right decision. The climactic scene is deeply reminiscent of Jane Eyre's refusal of Mr. Rochester; both women decline the fervent pleas of men to forsake their scruples and disregard the eyes of the world. Isabel's ideals may not have prevented her from being deceived when the correct path was obscure, but they allowed her to choose wisely when the decision was clear.
The story elicits many moral lessons, though from what I understand James was averse to viewing fiction in such a didactic manner. Money often causes more problems than it solves. Consult one's family in matters of romance; their sensibilities are not clouded by the illusions of infatuation. Accept responsibility for the byproducts of mistakes. Have an open mind, but not one too open. Take care as to whom one invites into confidence; even the least likely can harbor ulterior motives.
James retains vestiges of the traditional view of women as inferior. When Isabe speaks in illogical tautology, it is considered characteristic of gender. "'Because it's not,' Isabel said femininely. "I know it's not.'" And later, James remarks, "She knew how to think- an accomplishment rare in women." At the risk of disparaging my gender just to make myself look better, I'm sometimes half inclined to agree.
James' writing involves a delightful dearth of symbolism, making the book eminently accessible. He desires solely to analyze a young woman's fate when her free will is enhanced by pecuniary freedom, and the result is blatantly apparent. Stocked with a surfeit of self-assurance, she is easily ensnared, and, along with her bookish ideals, is beset by the terrible actuality of reality. But she is not vanquished entirely.
Friday, January 12, 2007
The Professor by Charlotte Bronte
The 19th-century British authoress is a paradox- Austen and the Brontes, save Charlotte, never married, and even Charlotte not until she was 39, and then only a year before she died. But all their respective works deal almost exclusively with romance. It lends their books a poignant irony.
The Professor is so plainly autobiography combined with wistful daydreaming that I could only read it detachedly. A young, intelligent, uncommitted British man, William Crimsworth, seeks employment abroad in Brussels. He becomes a schoolteacher, falls in love with an impoverished student of his, marries her, runs a school with her for some years, and eventually settles comfortably in England. As a student and teacher herself in Brussels, Charlotte undoubtedly must have developed an attachment, or dreamed of one, at least, and decided to transform her unfulfilled hopes into a novel.
William has setbacks and obstacles, but they are systematically taken care of. Crimsworth is essentially faultless- studious, scrupulous, religious, fastidious, not too good-looking. He is more or less destined to succeed in life. His love, Frances, is much the same, but being a woman at that period of time, attempting to maintain a level of self-sufficient decency, her chances at happiness before Crimsworth entered the picture were not as certain. Some of the most telling passages occur when Crimsworth discusses with his now-wife what she would have become if he had not married her. "Had I been an old maid," she avers, "I should have spent existence in efforts to fill the void...and died weary and disappointed, despised and of no account, like other single women."
The book lacks the breadth and scope of Charlotte's masterpiece, Jane Eyre, and it contains many little oddities besides. Crimsworth has an inordinate confidence in physiognomy, often describing his acquaintances solely in terms of the relation of their features to their personalities. Many conversations in the novel are carried on entirely in French, obviously intended for an audience better educated than myself. Both Crimsworth and Frances denounce Catholicism with a vigor rarely seen in novels of romance.
Male first-person protagonists drawn by female writers are overwhelmingly idealized and hardly believable. Bronte's hero complies with this, exhibiting a markedly effeminate sensibility towards life. The timid but steadfast young woman and the dashing lover come to rescue her found in Jane Eyre are prefigured here, but Frances and Crimsworth are not nearly as compelling or as vivid as Jane and Rochester.
The Professor is so plainly autobiography combined with wistful daydreaming that I could only read it detachedly. A young, intelligent, uncommitted British man, William Crimsworth, seeks employment abroad in Brussels. He becomes a schoolteacher, falls in love with an impoverished student of his, marries her, runs a school with her for some years, and eventually settles comfortably in England. As a student and teacher herself in Brussels, Charlotte undoubtedly must have developed an attachment, or dreamed of one, at least, and decided to transform her unfulfilled hopes into a novel.
William has setbacks and obstacles, but they are systematically taken care of. Crimsworth is essentially faultless- studious, scrupulous, religious, fastidious, not too good-looking. He is more or less destined to succeed in life. His love, Frances, is much the same, but being a woman at that period of time, attempting to maintain a level of self-sufficient decency, her chances at happiness before Crimsworth entered the picture were not as certain. Some of the most telling passages occur when Crimsworth discusses with his now-wife what she would have become if he had not married her. "Had I been an old maid," she avers, "I should have spent existence in efforts to fill the void...and died weary and disappointed, despised and of no account, like other single women."
The book lacks the breadth and scope of Charlotte's masterpiece, Jane Eyre, and it contains many little oddities besides. Crimsworth has an inordinate confidence in physiognomy, often describing his acquaintances solely in terms of the relation of their features to their personalities. Many conversations in the novel are carried on entirely in French, obviously intended for an audience better educated than myself. Both Crimsworth and Frances denounce Catholicism with a vigor rarely seen in novels of romance.
Male first-person protagonists drawn by female writers are overwhelmingly idealized and hardly believable. Bronte's hero complies with this, exhibiting a markedly effeminate sensibility towards life. The timid but steadfast young woman and the dashing lover come to rescue her found in Jane Eyre are prefigured here, but Frances and Crimsworth are not nearly as compelling or as vivid as Jane and Rochester.
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
Robert Pirsig chronicles his intellectual journey into the essence of belief and existence within the scope of a cross-country motorcycle trip. Most of the story is related by his present self, who refers to the person he was before being treated in an insane asylum, as "Phaedrus." Phaedrus, Pirsig tells us, made a discovery tantamount to Copernicus' reconfiguration of the universe, and he, the present narrator, is here to explain it all.
Phaedrus found that by looking at the world not as a duality of subject and object only, but as a triune format in which subject and object are striving towards what he terms "Quality," or ultimate reality, he could reconcile himself to the idea of existence and achieve peace of mind. From this principle Pirsig reasons that the revered Ancients, Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, were mistaken, and the Sophists, whom the great philosophers derided, were in fact closer to the truth, that their Virtue was synonymous with his Quality, their pre-Socratic striving for "arete," excellence, more in line with the way things should be. He descends into an equation of Eastern mysticism, ultimately ending with an inconclusive attempt at transubstantiation. He partially bases his theories on the "mythos," the collective awareness of mankind that we are all privy to, almost echoing Chesterton when he said, "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors."
When Pirsig equates Dharma and the Buddha with his Quality, he loses credibility. The ancient Eastern texts have no authority; they have themselves only to offer. It is as if he fixates on them merely because they are not Western, because they are not heir to the legacy of those mistaken Greek philosophers.
Pirsig reasons for pages and pages, and though his overarching philosophy is faulty, he does have some good minor points. He takes up with the scientific method, insisting that there are an infinite number of hypotheses for any given experiment, and so the selection of the hypotheses that may be correct cannot be done scientifically, that is, in some objective textbook format; rather, the selection invariably involves a sort of subconscious art that comes from the perpetual reach for Quality.
"It is the quest of this special classic beauty, the sense of the harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony. It is no the facts but the relation of things that results in the universal harmony that is the sole objective reality." That harmony speaks to the central drive of humanity. In literature, one continually seeks cohesion, threads of continuity, recurring symbolism- harmony. In life, one looks for meaning, purpose, reason, to make sense of it all- to bring the universe into harmony. His is a valid observation.
When extending his concept of Quality into real life, Pirsig infuses his esoterism with a more pragmatic air. "It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality that kill. The plaster false fireplace in the apartment, shaped and waiting to contain a flame that can never exist." He identifies a feeling I have harbored for quite a while but only on vague, indefinite terms.
Phaedrus found that by looking at the world not as a duality of subject and object only, but as a triune format in which subject and object are striving towards what he terms "Quality," or ultimate reality, he could reconcile himself to the idea of existence and achieve peace of mind. From this principle Pirsig reasons that the revered Ancients, Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, were mistaken, and the Sophists, whom the great philosophers derided, were in fact closer to the truth, that their Virtue was synonymous with his Quality, their pre-Socratic striving for "arete," excellence, more in line with the way things should be. He descends into an equation of Eastern mysticism, ultimately ending with an inconclusive attempt at transubstantiation. He partially bases his theories on the "mythos," the collective awareness of mankind that we are all privy to, almost echoing Chesterton when he said, "Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors."
When Pirsig equates Dharma and the Buddha with his Quality, he loses credibility. The ancient Eastern texts have no authority; they have themselves only to offer. It is as if he fixates on them merely because they are not Western, because they are not heir to the legacy of those mistaken Greek philosophers.
Pirsig reasons for pages and pages, and though his overarching philosophy is faulty, he does have some good minor points. He takes up with the scientific method, insisting that there are an infinite number of hypotheses for any given experiment, and so the selection of the hypotheses that may be correct cannot be done scientifically, that is, in some objective textbook format; rather, the selection invariably involves a sort of subconscious art that comes from the perpetual reach for Quality.
"It is the quest of this special classic beauty, the sense of the harmony of the cosmos, which makes us choose the facts most fitting to contribute to this harmony. It is no the facts but the relation of things that results in the universal harmony that is the sole objective reality." That harmony speaks to the central drive of humanity. In literature, one continually seeks cohesion, threads of continuity, recurring symbolism- harmony. In life, one looks for meaning, purpose, reason, to make sense of it all- to bring the universe into harmony. His is a valid observation.
When extending his concept of Quality into real life, Pirsig infuses his esoterism with a more pragmatic air. "It is the little, pathetic attempts at Quality that kill. The plaster false fireplace in the apartment, shaped and waiting to contain a flame that can never exist." He identifies a feeling I have harbored for quite a while but only on vague, indefinite terms.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy
So I was rummaging through our hall closet at home and I came across my dad's old literature anthology from college. This presented me with a fascinating moment for self-reflection. I have always taken an instinctively pragmatic approach to evaluating works of fiction- is the work instructive? redemptive? satisfying? and ultimately, is it entertaining?- rarely able to muster up sufficient appreciation for the darkly profound or avant-garde.
I believe this tack stems, at least in part, from a conviction I've intrinsically harbored that a work is not worth reading if I could not in good conscience recommend it to my dad, whose own tastes, indeed, I have often seen mirrored in mine. When I was in the sixth grade I discovered Jules Verne, and I gleefully passed on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island to him after I devoured them. We marveled at Verne's clairvoyant depictions of scuba diving and delighted in the re-emergence of Captain Nemo together. Excellent books to be sure, but, as I learned later, essentially only science fiction, turn-of-the-century boys' adventure novels, and not necessarily the revered classics that for many years I'd held them to be, on par with Faulkner and Hemingway and Joyce, who figure heavily in the aforementioned textbook, and for whom I retain respective distastes.
But it was within this textbook that I found Tolstoy's delineation of death. Ivan Ilych contracts a fatal illness and declines rapidly. He is, until this point, a self-satisfied middle-aged judge well-situated in life with a wife and children. The realization that he is dying devastates him. The heretofore self-sufficient man cries out to God: "'Why hast Thou done all this?'" He recalls the major events of his life and marvels that it should end in such a manner. "'Maybe I did not life as I ought to have done,'" he muses. "'But how could that be, when I did everything properly?'" In the agony of his final days he is unable to continue to justify a life spent striving for power and reputation and position. "He tried to add, 'Forgive me'...knowing that He whose understanding mattered would understand."
The story ends with an allusion to a verse of Scripture my dad is fond of quoting: "He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. 'Where is it? What death?'" mirroring, of course, Paul's defiant "Death, where is thy sting?" And so, amidst the scathing social commentary, the sardonic irony, and the esoteric symbolism of the untenably profound, I encountered a story of which I could say to my dad, "Here, read this. It's really good."
I believe this tack stems, at least in part, from a conviction I've intrinsically harbored that a work is not worth reading if I could not in good conscience recommend it to my dad, whose own tastes, indeed, I have often seen mirrored in mine. When I was in the sixth grade I discovered Jules Verne, and I gleefully passed on Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and The Mysterious Island to him after I devoured them. We marveled at Verne's clairvoyant depictions of scuba diving and delighted in the re-emergence of Captain Nemo together. Excellent books to be sure, but, as I learned later, essentially only science fiction, turn-of-the-century boys' adventure novels, and not necessarily the revered classics that for many years I'd held them to be, on par with Faulkner and Hemingway and Joyce, who figure heavily in the aforementioned textbook, and for whom I retain respective distastes.
But it was within this textbook that I found Tolstoy's delineation of death. Ivan Ilych contracts a fatal illness and declines rapidly. He is, until this point, a self-satisfied middle-aged judge well-situated in life with a wife and children. The realization that he is dying devastates him. The heretofore self-sufficient man cries out to God: "'Why hast Thou done all this?'" He recalls the major events of his life and marvels that it should end in such a manner. "'Maybe I did not life as I ought to have done,'" he muses. "'But how could that be, when I did everything properly?'" In the agony of his final days he is unable to continue to justify a life spent striving for power and reputation and position. "He tried to add, 'Forgive me'...knowing that He whose understanding mattered would understand."
The story ends with an allusion to a verse of Scripture my dad is fond of quoting: "He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. 'Where is it? What death?'" mirroring, of course, Paul's defiant "Death, where is thy sting?" And so, amidst the scathing social commentary, the sardonic irony, and the esoteric symbolism of the untenably profound, I encountered a story of which I could say to my dad, "Here, read this. It's really good."
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy's work, while fixated on the countryside, is rarely pastoral and idyllic. Rather, his is a world of determined, pervasive melancholy. Still, he provides instances of redemption, and his dramas are never tedious. The Mayor of Casterbridge satisfied me, so when I saw The Return of the Native at a library book sale, I capitalized on the opportunity to repeat the feeling.
Hardy opens with the heath. "Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity." Egdon Heath proves to be almost a character here in Hardy's novel. The heath does as much to alter the fates of the principal players as they themselves do. Its atmosphere, to some familiar and comforting, to others stifling and oppressive, permeates every scene and action. The plot is one of diametrically opposed lovers whose rash and desperate attempts to orchestrate events to suit their own whims end in tragedy. The heath bears witness to their futile drama, reflecting upon its face a "black fraternization" with its ill-destined inhabitants.
The story is winding and captivating; suffice it to say several intertwined individuals of the mid-19th-century English countryside become yet more closely and convolutedly related when the eponymous native, Clym Yeobright, interrupts the natural course of things and drastically alters life in Egdon Heath. Clym falls in love with Eustacia Vye, an idle, beautiful woman secluded in her grandfather's home, desperate for the imagined pleasures of the city. "The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine."
She bewitches Clym, and they are soon wed. But her capricious dissatisfaction and blind selfishness have tragic consequences, ending ultimately in death, for her and two others. She rekindles a relationship with Wildeve, who is lately married to Clym's dear cousin. While harboring him in her house she neglects to answer the door when Clym's heretofore estranged mother comes to reconcile. Distraught, and believing Clym condoned Eustacia's refusal to admit her into their home, his mother wanders on the heath in the rain, and after being bitten by a snake, dies. Eustacia later determines to flee abroad, aided by her lover, but in a wonted fit of passion drowns herself. Wildeve perishes in an attempt to save her, and Clym just escapes with his life.
Eustacia destroys all that she touches with her self-absorbed ambitions. "Yeobright," however, "loved his kind. He had a conviction that the want of most men was knowledge of a sort which brings wisdom rather that affluence." Why this astute, intelligent man fresh off the streets of 1840s Paris should be so deceived as to make such an unworthy alliance is hard to determine.
Clym dreams of opening a school to educate the villagers of Egdon, much to the chagrin of Eustacia. When his eyesight is temporarily strained, restricting him to "furze-cutting" on the heath to earn money, Clym is not daunted. He throws himself wholeheartedly into the endeavor. "He is set upon by adversities," says Hardy, "but he sings a song." While he is merrily serenading the heath in the glow of his exertion, Eustacia happens upon him. Furious that he could enjoy engaging in the work of a commoner while she too is living like one, she unleashes her wrath upon him, the touching portrait of a man afflicted and nonetheless happily laboring in what capacity he can slashed to shreds by Eustacia's vindictive ranting.
Eustacia, retaliating against Clym as the source of her unhappiness, decimates his chances of achieving anything but, though Hardy does grant Clym an epilogic career as a travelling preacher/moralist. Is beauty truly such an inescapable snare, that a circumspect scholar would fall victim to a conniving, vindictive woman whose chief, and perhaps only virtue, is her face?
Hardy opens with the heath. "Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity." Egdon Heath proves to be almost a character here in Hardy's novel. The heath does as much to alter the fates of the principal players as they themselves do. Its atmosphere, to some familiar and comforting, to others stifling and oppressive, permeates every scene and action. The plot is one of diametrically opposed lovers whose rash and desperate attempts to orchestrate events to suit their own whims end in tragedy. The heath bears witness to their futile drama, reflecting upon its face a "black fraternization" with its ill-destined inhabitants.
The story is winding and captivating; suffice it to say several intertwined individuals of the mid-19th-century English countryside become yet more closely and convolutedly related when the eponymous native, Clym Yeobright, interrupts the natural course of things and drastically alters life in Egdon Heath. Clym falls in love with Eustacia Vye, an idle, beautiful woman secluded in her grandfather's home, desperate for the imagined pleasures of the city. "The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine."
She bewitches Clym, and they are soon wed. But her capricious dissatisfaction and blind selfishness have tragic consequences, ending ultimately in death, for her and two others. She rekindles a relationship with Wildeve, who is lately married to Clym's dear cousin. While harboring him in her house she neglects to answer the door when Clym's heretofore estranged mother comes to reconcile. Distraught, and believing Clym condoned Eustacia's refusal to admit her into their home, his mother wanders on the heath in the rain, and after being bitten by a snake, dies. Eustacia later determines to flee abroad, aided by her lover, but in a wonted fit of passion drowns herself. Wildeve perishes in an attempt to save her, and Clym just escapes with his life.
Eustacia destroys all that she touches with her self-absorbed ambitions. "Yeobright," however, "loved his kind. He had a conviction that the want of most men was knowledge of a sort which brings wisdom rather that affluence." Why this astute, intelligent man fresh off the streets of 1840s Paris should be so deceived as to make such an unworthy alliance is hard to determine.
Clym dreams of opening a school to educate the villagers of Egdon, much to the chagrin of Eustacia. When his eyesight is temporarily strained, restricting him to "furze-cutting" on the heath to earn money, Clym is not daunted. He throws himself wholeheartedly into the endeavor. "He is set upon by adversities," says Hardy, "but he sings a song." While he is merrily serenading the heath in the glow of his exertion, Eustacia happens upon him. Furious that he could enjoy engaging in the work of a commoner while she too is living like one, she unleashes her wrath upon him, the touching portrait of a man afflicted and nonetheless happily laboring in what capacity he can slashed to shreds by Eustacia's vindictive ranting.
Eustacia, retaliating against Clym as the source of her unhappiness, decimates his chances of achieving anything but, though Hardy does grant Clym an epilogic career as a travelling preacher/moralist. Is beauty truly such an inescapable snare, that a circumspect scholar would fall victim to a conniving, vindictive woman whose chief, and perhaps only virtue, is her face?
Monday, December 04, 2006
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
"I wanted him to give me wisdom," Augie says of a venerable businessman, and says, essentially, throughout his reminiscences. Augie March recalls his impoverished childhood in a Jewish neighborhood in the in the 1920s, continuing the narrative into his adolescence and through to his adulthood in post-WWII Europe. He describes his jobs, his friends, his romantic forays, and his travels- from Chicago, to Mexico, to New York, and finally abroad. His exploits are, as they have often been described, picaresque. Augie is not always above the law, but when he strays, we go right along with him.
Augie is continually caught up in the whirling eddies of strong personalities. One of his first jobs involves assisting a paralyzed business eccentric whom he reveres as a genuine genius, and later he steals textbooks with a Mexican math whiz on scholarship at the University of Chicago. Augie is perpetually seeking knowledge and, as he said above, wisdom. He begins to read the textbooks before delivering them, and he becomes enraptured with the ideas he finds. “I lay in my room and read, feeding on print and pages like a famished man.”
The book is dauntingly long, for Augie’s life is made of innumerable adventures, no detail of which he considers too small to include. Bellow composed complex sentences of description- clause piled on clause, with illustrative concrete nouns and reclassified verbs stacked precariously atop the subjects and predicates. Augie employs esoteric allusions abundantly, almost obnoxiously, as if Bellow wanted to underscore Augie’s self-education, evidence of his having read widely and deeply without perhaps a tempering authority to guide him in the proper deployment of such potent arsenal.
Augie uses very little foreshadowing, restraining himself to telling the story as it happens, avoiding bracing suspense in favor of a more natural revelation of events. Augie traces the development of his perception of himself as the events are unfolding, coming to a refreshing self-awareness towards the end. “I said when I started to make the record that I would be plain and heed the knocks as they came, and also that a man’s character is his fate. Well, then it is obvious that this fate, or what he settles for, is also his character.” Though his character-as-fate theory is nebulous and indefinite at best, the underlying current of personal responsibility that he espouses is a worthy conclusion.
Augie is continually caught up in the whirling eddies of strong personalities. One of his first jobs involves assisting a paralyzed business eccentric whom he reveres as a genuine genius, and later he steals textbooks with a Mexican math whiz on scholarship at the University of Chicago. Augie is perpetually seeking knowledge and, as he said above, wisdom. He begins to read the textbooks before delivering them, and he becomes enraptured with the ideas he finds. “I lay in my room and read, feeding on print and pages like a famished man.”
The book is dauntingly long, for Augie’s life is made of innumerable adventures, no detail of which he considers too small to include. Bellow composed complex sentences of description- clause piled on clause, with illustrative concrete nouns and reclassified verbs stacked precariously atop the subjects and predicates. Augie employs esoteric allusions abundantly, almost obnoxiously, as if Bellow wanted to underscore Augie’s self-education, evidence of his having read widely and deeply without perhaps a tempering authority to guide him in the proper deployment of such potent arsenal.
Augie uses very little foreshadowing, restraining himself to telling the story as it happens, avoiding bracing suspense in favor of a more natural revelation of events. Augie traces the development of his perception of himself as the events are unfolding, coming to a refreshing self-awareness towards the end. “I said when I started to make the record that I would be plain and heed the knocks as they came, and also that a man’s character is his fate. Well, then it is obvious that this fate, or what he settles for, is also his character.” Though his character-as-fate theory is nebulous and indefinite at best, the underlying current of personal responsibility that he espouses is a worthy conclusion.
Monday, November 27, 2006
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Tolkien, Chesterton, T.S. Eliot, and now Evelyn Waugh- strangely enough, early 20th-century British Catholic converts all. What a peculiar convergence of literary figures. Someone should write a thesis paper on that. Waugh himself converted to Catholicism mid-career, with the latter half of his works becoming increasingly serious and religiously centered. Brideshead Revisited comes of this era.
It seems Waugh composed the book with a mind to present his new beliefs in a manner palatable to the generally secular reading public. His protagonist, Charles Ryder, falls in with pampered young Sebastian at Oxford, and becomes intertwined with his Catholic family. Years later, Charles chances upon Sebastian's sister Julia, and begins an affair with her that lasts until her father's death. But just when all hurdles have been cleared for them to marry, Julia breaks off their relations, unable to continue in sin.
Through this family Waugh exhibits varying stages of Catholicism, from the mother's lifelong devotion, to the father's insincere conversion, to the children's agnosticism. By the end, Charles, agnostic himself, sees every member return to a more or less genuine faith, each finding their own degrees of peace and happiness. Charles, however, is disillusioned and alone. While he and Julia had both effectually disowned their respective spouses when they took up with each other, Julia turns to missions after their affair ends, replacing that void in her life, but Charles is left unfulfilled.
Waugh's linguistic craftsmanship here is superb. Far surpassing Scoop in complexity and texture, his prose yet retains a lucidity and forceful elegance that can only be admired. His characters are arresting. The only disheartening element of the book is its overtones of homosexuality. Charles' relationship with Sebastian is mostly established to be platonic, but it is startlingly intimate, and there is enough ambiguity involved to make things uncomfortable. Less uncertain is the orientation of flamboyant world-traveler Anthony Blanche, Charles' classmate, whose purpose as a character is just as unclear as Waugh's attitude regarding such things. Waugh himself carried on untoward relationships during college, but this predates his conversion. He later married happily, so surely he viewed the effeminacy of Charles and Sebastian an unsavory but inevitable aspect of adolescence to be repented of later, and the unequivocal perversion of Anthony just another vice of an uninhibited man. That's how I'd have it, anyway.
Brideshead Revisited drew me in. The plot was essentially mundane, but the people continually interested me. I hadn't the slightest idea where Waugh was going until the end, and I was relieved to discover a conclusion compatible with my own convictions, for I was with him regardless.
It seems Waugh composed the book with a mind to present his new beliefs in a manner palatable to the generally secular reading public. His protagonist, Charles Ryder, falls in with pampered young Sebastian at Oxford, and becomes intertwined with his Catholic family. Years later, Charles chances upon Sebastian's sister Julia, and begins an affair with her that lasts until her father's death. But just when all hurdles have been cleared for them to marry, Julia breaks off their relations, unable to continue in sin.
Through this family Waugh exhibits varying stages of Catholicism, from the mother's lifelong devotion, to the father's insincere conversion, to the children's agnosticism. By the end, Charles, agnostic himself, sees every member return to a more or less genuine faith, each finding their own degrees of peace and happiness. Charles, however, is disillusioned and alone. While he and Julia had both effectually disowned their respective spouses when they took up with each other, Julia turns to missions after their affair ends, replacing that void in her life, but Charles is left unfulfilled.
Waugh's linguistic craftsmanship here is superb. Far surpassing Scoop in complexity and texture, his prose yet retains a lucidity and forceful elegance that can only be admired. His characters are arresting. The only disheartening element of the book is its overtones of homosexuality. Charles' relationship with Sebastian is mostly established to be platonic, but it is startlingly intimate, and there is enough ambiguity involved to make things uncomfortable. Less uncertain is the orientation of flamboyant world-traveler Anthony Blanche, Charles' classmate, whose purpose as a character is just as unclear as Waugh's attitude regarding such things. Waugh himself carried on untoward relationships during college, but this predates his conversion. He later married happily, so surely he viewed the effeminacy of Charles and Sebastian an unsavory but inevitable aspect of adolescence to be repented of later, and the unequivocal perversion of Anthony just another vice of an uninhibited man. That's how I'd have it, anyway.
Brideshead Revisited drew me in. The plot was essentially mundane, but the people continually interested me. I hadn't the slightest idea where Waugh was going until the end, and I was relieved to discover a conclusion compatible with my own convictions, for I was with him regardless.
Monday, November 20, 2006
Erewhon by Samuel Butler
I guess this is what I get for reading a book solely because someone, somewhere, made an oblique reference to it. I can't even recall where I heard of it. Somehow, nevertheless, I got the idea the book was worth my time, which prejudiced it in my favor. I dearly wanted to like it. But a sense of the foreboding fell over me when, in the preface to the revised edition, the author admitted, "I have found it an irksome task to take up work which I thought I had got rid of thirty years ago, and much of which I am ashamed of..."
Erewhon, in its entirety, feels derivative, in part because it is, but also because so many others have gleaned inspiration from it. In the best style of Gulliver's Travels, Butler strands his protagonist in a strange society through whose unconventional manners and mores we are ostensibly to see the foibles of our own. Drawing also on Thomas More's Utopia and predating Huxley and Orwell, Butler attempts what others have done, or will go on to do, much more successfully.
The beginning is bogged down in exposition and the adventures and aspirations of a poorly drawn protagonist. This man stumbles upon the Erewhonians and becomes their, albeit well-treated, captive. He details the oddities of Erewhon, from their aversion to machines and progress, to their severe punishment of physical ailment, to their nominal forms of religion. Butler employs thick, ambiguous metaphor and his voice is often indiscernible. At points it is hard to determine whether he is mocking society through his protagonist, or mocking the protagonist himself as society. I wouldn't doubt it to be both. Butler attacks from so many sides that he seems to prevail on none.
Altogether I think I missed the boat on the satire. In fact, I think that boat set sail when Butler died. Much of his wit now seems inapplicable, having faded along with the Victorian times it set to skewer. The book's inability to transcend time is, in all probability, its chiefest shortcoming.
Butler himself, from what I can gather, was a tortured, confused man swept up in the prevailing winds of turn-of-the-century intellectualism, unable to find a tenable basis in either religion or materialism, and so, being neither hot nor cold, as it were, was incapable of forming definite beliefs, resulting in a literary work as muddled as his mind.
Erewhon, in its entirety, feels derivative, in part because it is, but also because so many others have gleaned inspiration from it. In the best style of Gulliver's Travels, Butler strands his protagonist in a strange society through whose unconventional manners and mores we are ostensibly to see the foibles of our own. Drawing also on Thomas More's Utopia and predating Huxley and Orwell, Butler attempts what others have done, or will go on to do, much more successfully.
The beginning is bogged down in exposition and the adventures and aspirations of a poorly drawn protagonist. This man stumbles upon the Erewhonians and becomes their, albeit well-treated, captive. He details the oddities of Erewhon, from their aversion to machines and progress, to their severe punishment of physical ailment, to their nominal forms of religion. Butler employs thick, ambiguous metaphor and his voice is often indiscernible. At points it is hard to determine whether he is mocking society through his protagonist, or mocking the protagonist himself as society. I wouldn't doubt it to be both. Butler attacks from so many sides that he seems to prevail on none.
Altogether I think I missed the boat on the satire. In fact, I think that boat set sail when Butler died. Much of his wit now seems inapplicable, having faded along with the Victorian times it set to skewer. The book's inability to transcend time is, in all probability, its chiefest shortcoming.
Butler himself, from what I can gather, was a tortured, confused man swept up in the prevailing winds of turn-of-the-century intellectualism, unable to find a tenable basis in either religion or materialism, and so, being neither hot nor cold, as it were, was incapable of forming definite beliefs, resulting in a literary work as muddled as his mind.
Friday, November 17, 2006
The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston
I checked out this book solely because it was included in the College Board's list of 101 great books, at which list, for lack of a better, I have been chipping away dutifully for nigh on two years now. I thought, perhaps snobbishly, that this book would be merely a requisite representation of the Chinese woman that fulfilled some sort of multicultural quota, and maybe there are elements of that involved in the book's place in the College Board's heart, but Kingston's work is a decent piece of literature in its own right.
Kingston retells the tales her mother mesmerized her with in her childhood in sparse, bare English that evokes the fine, linear simplicity of the art of feudal China. She gives the eponymous woman warrior her own voice, allowing her to narrate the story of her training by a mystical old couple who give her the abilities to avenge the mistreatment of her people. Kingston slowly introduces facets of her own life and eventually moves entirely to talking of her family and their transition to life in America.
Kingston is at her finest when she is recreating the world of her ancestors. Her story-telling is just as riveting as her mother's must have been for her. The legends and fables, moreover, are fresh and unusual to unaccustomed Western ears. If the book were composed only of these, it would make for excellent bedtime reading.
When she draws parallels to her own life and compares her own experiences, there Kingston approaches profundity. I've come to wonder lately if that isn't what all literary fiction is- elegant attempts to make connections. Across ages, across cultures, across categories; within a book, within a concept, within a single sentence. For what is an allusion, but a connection between antiquity and modernity; a metaphor, but an abstract connection between two concrete entities?
The book's impact wanes when Kingston enters the narrow, crowded streets of San Francisco's Chinatown and her early years. She laments the disparagement of the female in her parents' culture, and she depicts the generational conflict between the elders born in China, and their offspring, who are beginning to assimilate into the new country in which they were born. It all lacks the poetic force the ancient stories contained.
But maybe that is where Kingston was going. Her contemporary life seems somehow insufficient when viewed through the lens of the past. The old meets the new, the East meets the West, and yet here we are, by time relentlessly pushed forward.
Kingston retells the tales her mother mesmerized her with in her childhood in sparse, bare English that evokes the fine, linear simplicity of the art of feudal China. She gives the eponymous woman warrior her own voice, allowing her to narrate the story of her training by a mystical old couple who give her the abilities to avenge the mistreatment of her people. Kingston slowly introduces facets of her own life and eventually moves entirely to talking of her family and their transition to life in America.
Kingston is at her finest when she is recreating the world of her ancestors. Her story-telling is just as riveting as her mother's must have been for her. The legends and fables, moreover, are fresh and unusual to unaccustomed Western ears. If the book were composed only of these, it would make for excellent bedtime reading.
When she draws parallels to her own life and compares her own experiences, there Kingston approaches profundity. I've come to wonder lately if that isn't what all literary fiction is- elegant attempts to make connections. Across ages, across cultures, across categories; within a book, within a concept, within a single sentence. For what is an allusion, but a connection between antiquity and modernity; a metaphor, but an abstract connection between two concrete entities?
The book's impact wanes when Kingston enters the narrow, crowded streets of San Francisco's Chinatown and her early years. She laments the disparagement of the female in her parents' culture, and she depicts the generational conflict between the elders born in China, and their offspring, who are beginning to assimilate into the new country in which they were born. It all lacks the poetic force the ancient stories contained.
But maybe that is where Kingston was going. Her contemporary life seems somehow insufficient when viewed through the lens of the past. The old meets the new, the East meets the West, and yet here we are, by time relentlessly pushed forward.
Sunday, November 12, 2006
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
So I was listening to NPR (my philosophy is that if my media is biased in the opposite direction, when I hear something I like, I can trust it to be true) and I caught an interview with the author of this book. I couldn't resist; I find contemporary nutrition research absolutely arresting. Pollan, a journalist by trade, investigates the actual origins of the foods we eat, beyond the grocery store.
He begins in an ostensibly random place- a cornfield in Iowa. Much of the supermarket can be traced to this state, not only in overtly corn-based products, but also in anything containing citric acid, glucose, fructose, maltodextrin, sorbitol, xanthan gum, modified cornstarch, and MSG, among other things that habitual ingredient-list readers like myself would readily recognize. High fructose corn syrup, of course, is everywhere. Almost all animals raised for consumption are now corn-fed. Break down the molecular composition of the average American, and you will find corn.
That is just a small portion of what Pollan serves up. There is a lot to this book, but the essential message is that we as a nation are producing and consuming plants and animals in ways they were not designed to be used. According to Pollan, we could save untold amounts of money in all sorts of areas- from health care, to fossil fuel use, to fertilizers and pesticides, to government subsidies- if we would allow a system based on the natural growth cycles of our food.
Pollan's worldview is decidedly evolutionary, but even he admits the fallibility of science. "The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables...the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters," he says in a statement that has implications outside the field of nutrition, and that speaks volumes about the shortcomings of materialism.
Moreover, Pollan profiles Joel Salatin, a "Christian libertarian environmentalist" who maintains an entirely self-sustaining farm on a few hundred acres in Virginia. Salatin's cows eat grass, their natural diet; his chickens eat the insects and larvae that come with cows and in doing so fertilize the pasture. His pigs turn the farm's waste into rich soil that feeds the garden. "'All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse,'" Salatin insists, likening his cause to the homeschool movement. Pollan is enthralled with the concept, and I'd have to agree.
Pollan's tone is sometimes overreaching but mostly elegant and accessible. He is methodical and scrupulously detailed. He is areligious, but he is compassionate to Christians and even presents one as his ideal food producer. It's a terribly informative book and I am quite glad I read it.
He begins in an ostensibly random place- a cornfield in Iowa. Much of the supermarket can be traced to this state, not only in overtly corn-based products, but also in anything containing citric acid, glucose, fructose, maltodextrin, sorbitol, xanthan gum, modified cornstarch, and MSG, among other things that habitual ingredient-list readers like myself would readily recognize. High fructose corn syrup, of course, is everywhere. Almost all animals raised for consumption are now corn-fed. Break down the molecular composition of the average American, and you will find corn.
That is just a small portion of what Pollan serves up. There is a lot to this book, but the essential message is that we as a nation are producing and consuming plants and animals in ways they were not designed to be used. According to Pollan, we could save untold amounts of money in all sorts of areas- from health care, to fossil fuel use, to fertilizers and pesticides, to government subsidies- if we would allow a system based on the natural growth cycles of our food.
Pollan's worldview is decidedly evolutionary, but even he admits the fallibility of science. "The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables...the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters," he says in a statement that has implications outside the field of nutrition, and that speaks volumes about the shortcomings of materialism.
Moreover, Pollan profiles Joel Salatin, a "Christian libertarian environmentalist" who maintains an entirely self-sustaining farm on a few hundred acres in Virginia. Salatin's cows eat grass, their natural diet; his chickens eat the insects and larvae that come with cows and in doing so fertilize the pasture. His pigs turn the farm's waste into rich soil that feeds the garden. "'All we need to do is empower individuals with the right philosophy and the right information to opt out en masse,'" Salatin insists, likening his cause to the homeschool movement. Pollan is enthralled with the concept, and I'd have to agree.
Pollan's tone is sometimes overreaching but mostly elegant and accessible. He is methodical and scrupulously detailed. He is areligious, but he is compassionate to Christians and even presents one as his ideal food producer. It's a terribly informative book and I am quite glad I read it.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
Act One by Moss Hart
Maybe it's the lofty editorial pretensions I harbor, but Moss Hart's autobiography, hailed by its back cover as "the dramatic story that captured a generation," seems not so much a refined, time-honored classic as much as the early draft of a rough, albeit worthy, manuscript. Hart's story in itself is captivating, and the immediacy and authenticity of his telling quality stuff, but a firm, guiding hand such as George Kaufman's could have made this book that much better. For Kaufman was the catalyst to Hart's career, and there is no little irony to be found in the fact that this excellent but improvable narrative climaxes with the drastic revision of the author's first literary success.
Hart begins this book in his childhood, tracing the thread of theatre that has wefted throughout his life. He travels through his impoverished adolescence and chronicles the development of his embryonic attempts at plays, climaxing with veteran playwright Kaufman's collaboration on his first quality play and concluding with its acclaimed debut on Broadway. It's a decent ghetto-to-glamour account, and Hart deftly fashions himself into a protagonist to be sympathized with and cheered on.
"It was astonishing to find how much of what we had written was unnecessary," Hart says of Kaufman's subsequent revisions to his play. If only Kaufman had applied his red pencil to this autobiography. Hart's prose is mired in unneeded words, rough cliches, stilted dialogue, repetition, inconsistencies, and contradiction. In one place he writes, "a historic," and later, "an historic." He asserts that he has "never really heard" the laughter of the audience for he is always "listening ahead for the next line," but then goes on to describe his elation at the sound of that very laughter.
Hart also spouts universal truisms left and right, as an old, rich, successful, self-satisfied man ruminating over his life can only be expected to, I suppose. "It is always a little dismaying to discover that the truth, as one explores it, consists largely of a collection of platitudes," he avers. Whether or not this "truth" is itself true I cannot say, but Hart certainly believes it.
So sometimes I had to restrain myself from marking up the library copy I read with notes in the margin. But like I said, it was a good story, and my interest rarely flagged. Moreover, I learned much about playwrighting and the creative process. The other morning I read an article in which a tv show producer commented,"If this were a play, we'd still be in previews," a reference which would have been entirely lost on me had I not read this book.
Hart begins this book in his childhood, tracing the thread of theatre that has wefted throughout his life. He travels through his impoverished adolescence and chronicles the development of his embryonic attempts at plays, climaxing with veteran playwright Kaufman's collaboration on his first quality play and concluding with its acclaimed debut on Broadway. It's a decent ghetto-to-glamour account, and Hart deftly fashions himself into a protagonist to be sympathized with and cheered on.
"It was astonishing to find how much of what we had written was unnecessary," Hart says of Kaufman's subsequent revisions to his play. If only Kaufman had applied his red pencil to this autobiography. Hart's prose is mired in unneeded words, rough cliches, stilted dialogue, repetition, inconsistencies, and contradiction. In one place he writes, "a historic," and later, "an historic." He asserts that he has "never really heard" the laughter of the audience for he is always "listening ahead for the next line," but then goes on to describe his elation at the sound of that very laughter.
Hart also spouts universal truisms left and right, as an old, rich, successful, self-satisfied man ruminating over his life can only be expected to, I suppose. "It is always a little dismaying to discover that the truth, as one explores it, consists largely of a collection of platitudes," he avers. Whether or not this "truth" is itself true I cannot say, but Hart certainly believes it.
So sometimes I had to restrain myself from marking up the library copy I read with notes in the margin. But like I said, it was a good story, and my interest rarely flagged. Moreover, I learned much about playwrighting and the creative process. The other morning I read an article in which a tv show producer commented,"If this were a play, we'd still be in previews," a reference which would have been entirely lost on me had I not read this book.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton
So one day I was watching, of all things, a Catholic channel on TV, because some learned men were discussing G.K. Chesterton and his major works, and my curiosity was piqued. One man, a professor at a Catholic college, expressed his admiration for Orthodoxy and recommended it as an introduction to Chesterton's religious writing. So here I am.
Chesterton makes it clear his is not an argument of apologetics; rather, he is concerned solely with the moral and philosophical implications of belief in Christianity, for, he says, "having found the moral atmosphere of the Incarnation to be common sense, I then looked at the established intellectual arguments against the Incarnation and found them to be common nonsense." From what I can surmise, Chesterton's basic foundation for his beliefs stems from this: he has observed life is a certain way, and Christianity, of all possible belief systems, fits most perfectly this perception of his, so therefore Christianity is true.
It's a legitimate position, if not entirely fact-based. When Chesterton attempts to access factual information, he strays into archaism. Trying to establish a basis for supernatural occurences, he makes a case for contemporary appearances of ghosts, and he says "science will even admit the Ascension if you call it Levitation." Unfortunately, I don't think "science" will readily admit even levitation anymore.
Chesterton was a Catholic, and his writing retains elements of some of the extra-biblical features of such a faith, from constant reference to "the Church" as means of salvation, to saint-worship, to excessive reverence for priests and nuns, to all but condoning the atrocities of the Crusades. Nevertheless, he does accept Quakers, whose beliefs must have been vastly removed from his own, as true believers. He did not seem to consider salvation achievable through Catholicism only.
Chesterton emphasizes his conviction that of all worldviews, Christianity is the only one with any claim to humor and joy. I appreciated his reasoning. I've always entertained privately the belief that existence is inherently funny. Satan, Chesterton maintains, fell from taking himself too seriously, while "[t]here was some one thing too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth."
The writing is quite pretty, undoubtedly, and the philosophical points no less so. Chesterton's poetic approach to finding the meaning of life is refreshingly novel. Some of his arguments are outdated, and parts of his book are trivial and extraneous, but the essentials remain pertinent, poignant positions on what it truly means to exist.
Chesterton makes it clear his is not an argument of apologetics; rather, he is concerned solely with the moral and philosophical implications of belief in Christianity, for, he says, "having found the moral atmosphere of the Incarnation to be common sense, I then looked at the established intellectual arguments against the Incarnation and found them to be common nonsense." From what I can surmise, Chesterton's basic foundation for his beliefs stems from this: he has observed life is a certain way, and Christianity, of all possible belief systems, fits most perfectly this perception of his, so therefore Christianity is true.
It's a legitimate position, if not entirely fact-based. When Chesterton attempts to access factual information, he strays into archaism. Trying to establish a basis for supernatural occurences, he makes a case for contemporary appearances of ghosts, and he says "science will even admit the Ascension if you call it Levitation." Unfortunately, I don't think "science" will readily admit even levitation anymore.
Chesterton was a Catholic, and his writing retains elements of some of the extra-biblical features of such a faith, from constant reference to "the Church" as means of salvation, to saint-worship, to excessive reverence for priests and nuns, to all but condoning the atrocities of the Crusades. Nevertheless, he does accept Quakers, whose beliefs must have been vastly removed from his own, as true believers. He did not seem to consider salvation achievable through Catholicism only.
Chesterton emphasizes his conviction that of all worldviews, Christianity is the only one with any claim to humor and joy. I appreciated his reasoning. I've always entertained privately the belief that existence is inherently funny. Satan, Chesterton maintains, fell from taking himself too seriously, while "[t]here was some one thing too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth."
The writing is quite pretty, undoubtedly, and the philosophical points no less so. Chesterton's poetic approach to finding the meaning of life is refreshingly novel. Some of his arguments are outdated, and parts of his book are trivial and extraneous, but the essentials remain pertinent, poignant positions on what it truly means to exist.
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