Please do not bother me with practicalities - The Wuthering Expectations Best Books of 2016 - falling in love with war again

The best books of 2016, meaning that I read.

1.  Among recent books, Christopher Logue’s War Music, the English poet’s from-the-foundation anachronistic reconstruction of The Iliad.  The renovation has been ongoing since the 1950s, but is now complete, by the sad reason of Logue’s death in 2011.  A sample, which begins with Zeus talking to his daughter Athena, and suddenly shifts:

    And giving her a kiss, He said:

    ‘Child, I am God,
Please do not bother me with practicalities.’

    Hector and Agamemnon.  Slope sees slope.
    Drivers conducting underbody maintenance.  (p. 123)

Funny, brutal, tough, with armies that “Moved out, moved on, and fell in love with war again” (82).  Quite likely gibberish without a pretty decent knowledge of Homer.  That the book is a fragment only roots it more firmly in its epic tradition.

2.  I completed a re-read – mostly “re-” – of Anton Chekov’s short stories in the thirteen-volume Constance Garnett translation.  Paying some non-neurotic, I hope, attention to chronology, I was mostly past the earlier, shorter, simpler stories; however good that stuff can be, this year it was “The Steppe” (1888) and “Ward No. 6” (1892) and so on, ending last week with “Peasants” (1897), “The Lady with the Dog” (1899), and “In the Ravine” (1900), examples of the greatest fiction ever written.

I guess the plays will have to wait for next year’s list.

3.  This was the year I took Oscar Wilde seriously, reading his short fiction, novel, plays, a volume of criticism, and a 1,200 page book of letters – not everything he wrote, but a lot, and with the exception of The Importance of Being Earnest, which even Wilde saw as a freak, none of these books were as interesting on their own as they were together.  The meta-story of Wilde as artist, prisoner, and exile was a great story.

I had a similar experience with Mark Twain, where even some pretty trivial pieces became more interesting as part of the Mark Twain story.  And then once in a while he writes a masterpiece, just to keep my attention.

4.  The most famous books I read for the first time were The Return of the Native and Tess of the d’Urbervilles, The Bostonians and What Maisie Knew, Pudd’nhead Wilson and Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles, and to get away from English, Nana and La Regenta (famous in Spain, anyways – many thanks to everyone who gave a shot at the readalong).

None of these are among my favorites, exactly, but finally, finally.

5.  Similarly, I finally read The Education of Henry Adams – “greedily devoured it, without understanding a single consecutive page” (Ch. 31), as Adams says about his own reading.  This would have been the perfect book with which to close out a 19th century book blog, but I did not know enough to plan that well.  Maybe I’ll write about this book next year.

6.  As for poetry, I spent the year cramming poems of the 1910s (and earlier, and sometimes later) down my gullet like I was a goose fattening my own liver.  Stefan George, Stephen Crane, Walter de la Mare, Ezra Pound, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, H. D., Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, and many more.  Four books by Edwin Arlington Robinson.  Four books by Vachel Lindsay.  So much great, good, bad, crazy poetry.  Welcome to Modernism.  The movement from poet to poet and from year to year was as exciting as almost anything an individual poet was doing.  Finishing one book, however good, I moved to another.  I wanted to see what happened next.  I still do.

There is no way my poetry-liver is absorbing these poems well.  I feel like an undergraduate again, tearing through the poetry section of my Norton Anthology of American Literature – what is this – what is this?  Absolutely terrific fun.

Wuthering Expectations will be on a holiday break for a couple of weeks, and back in early January for more good books.

She was not an existence, an experience - the narrator versus Tess - plus bonus layer of live rats

Writing yesterday about Tess of the d’Urbervilles at its wildest, I stopped before using the scene with this line: “But there was another hour’s work before the layer of live rats at the base of the stack would be reached; and [nice description of the moon]” (Ch. 48).  I have not yet found a book blogger quoting this line.  What novel were they reading?

I am hopping back to the Criticism in my outstanding Norton Critical Edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles.  What drives Dorothy Van Ghent crazy (from her book The English Novel: Form and Function (1953)), the “elements resistant to aesthetic cohesion” – she is so polite – that most bothers her, are the narrator’s invocations of poems.  Quotes from Wordsworth or Browning or Swinburne or whomever.  Tess, though she is reduced to swede-grubbing, is not uneducated. She could handle the quotations.  It is the surrounding lecture that “belongs to an intellectual battlefield alien from the novel’s imaginative concretions” (p. 428).

Tess and her family are moving – the subsequent scene, the description of the country-wide moving day, is outstanding – and they are singing a hymn that is sad but offers the hope of heaven.  Tess has spent the length of the novel suffering, so she does not share their hope:

for to Tess, as to not a few millions of others, there was a ghastly satire in the poet’s lines–
                Not in utter nakedness
                But trailing clouds of glory do we come.  [“Ode. Intimations of Immortality,” ll. 63-4]
To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result seemed to justify, and at best could only palliate.  (Ch. 51)

A classic statement of Hardyan pessimism.  What needles Van Ghent is not just the intrusion of the philosophical statement, but the anti-novelistic introduction of the “millions” and “her like.”  “[I]n what way do these statistical generalizations add to the already sufficient meaning of Tess’s situation?” (p. 429).  The novel is about Tess, Tess, Tess.  Any philosophical work needs to be done through her.  If Wordsworth is helpful, show us Tess reading Wordsworth.

Not that the narrator needs Wordsworth.  Nor does Tess.  Much earlier in the novel, after Tess has suffered her second, I think, great trauma, she is recovering.  She has resolved “to be useful again”; she has made some peace with an indifferent world.

The past was past; whatever it had been it was no more at hand.  Whatever its consequences, time would close over them; they would all in a few years be as if they had never been, and she herself grassed down and forgotten.  (Ch. 14)

A little jolt there at the end.  It is all pretty clearly Tess.  Yet the narrator is not satisfied.  She has not gone far enough for him.

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly – the thought of the world’s concern at her situation [unmarried mother] – was founded on an illusion.  She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a structure of sensations, to anybody but herself.  To all humankind besides Tess was only a passing thought…  Most of her misery had been generated by her conventional aspect, and not by her innate sensations.

I suppose it would be hard to find readers now who think badly of Tess because she had a child out of wedlock.  The “conventional aspect” has changed a lot.  But the narrator is after something else.  This is the side that Van Ghent finds bullying.  I do, too.  I found myself fighting with the narrator a lot, and not with his artlessness, whatever that might mean.  This structure, the narrator who tells the story but becomes frustrated that it does not say exactly what he wants it to say, is pretty interesting.

The narrator is fundamentally wrong.  He mistakes the illusion.  Tess was an existence, rather more than a passing thought, to me, while reading the novel.

Introducing Algernon Charles Swinburne

Introducing him to myself, I mean.  I believe that he was, until a couple of months ago, the only major Victorian poet I did not read in college, even in scraps, just a few famous poems, which was all I read of John Clare and Matthew Arnold and Christina Rossetti and many others, and is still all I have read of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who I think is now the last big name I have not worked on.  Unless Robert Bridges and Ernest Dowson count as major poets and big names.

Perhaps Swinburne is no longer a major poet.  Regardless, he does not offer easy entry.  Many of his best-known poems are long, allusive, a real challenge to concentration.  The editors of the 2004 Algernon Charles Swinburne: Major Poems and Selected Prose (Yale UP) say:

Negotiating a poem by Swinburne requires a state of attention that can scarcely be maintained and that is, in any case, never sufficient.  (xxiv)

Which is hilarious, and, at least as far as maintaining my attention goes, less true for me know than it was twenty-five years ago.  If I do not understand Swinburne, I can at least read him.

The funny thing is that  without reading him I picked up a lot of facts and fun about Swinburne, whether through literary history or magazine book reviews or W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn:

He was small of stature, and at every point in his development he had remained far behind a normal size; he was quite startlingly fine-limbed; yet even as a boy he had an extraordinarily large, indeed outsize, head on his shoulders, which sloped weakly away from his neck.  (162)

This is directly below the a tiny black and white reproduction of the portrait of Swinburne by his friend William Bell Scott.  Perhaps I thought I knew Swinburne just because of this amazing image.  His head really was that big; he really did love the seashore more than any poet I know aside from Whitman.

The portrait is easily that of the man Henry Adams describes meeting in The Education of Henry Adams, the effervescent, endlessly learned talker.  “The idea that one has actually met a real genius dawns slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry at last.”

My trusty, worn Fifth Edition Norton Anthology of English Literature  gives Swinburne nineteen pages of poems.  Seventeen pages come from 1865 to 1868, age 28 to 31, mostly from the 1866 Poems and Ballads, the book that made Swinburne’s name for the usual mix of good and bad reasons – high-quality writing, charges of obscenity.

This is also the period in which Swinburne was developing his alcoholism, along with his poetry, to a point of perfection.  Friends eventually dried him out and tamed him.

I have been reading Swinburne’s letters along with the early poems, the first of the six volume edition Cecil Lang put together in the 1960s.  The publication of the letters inspired an outstanding “life and works” piece by Edmund Wilson for the New Yorker (also available in The Novels of A. C. Swinburne (1962), where I read it).  Swinburne, as compressed by Wilson:

Here is a life lived entirely for literature, in which nothing else is really important – and since literature is inexhaustible, a life that is immensely enjoyed.

Reason enough to read Swinburne to the extent my attention can handle him, and even to spend a few days writing about his poems.

A "too tired to write a post" post

I was going to write up something last night about how I was too tired to write anything, but I was too tired.  By Monday I will be rested and relaxed, or so I hope.

Travelers of a certain energetic type would be shocked and perhaps embarrassed by how little I did and saw in France.  Day trips shrunk to half days, rest days were spontaneously added to the schedule, the length of meals expanded to civilized lengths.  No Barcelona, no Carcassonne, no Montpellier, even though these marvels were only a few hours away.  Still, I managed to fill the time while barely leaving Roussillon.

The two themes, so to speak, of the trip were food and – well, food is always a theme.  I was particularly successful with cheese, chocolates and produce, moderately so with wine and restaurants.  If in Perpignan, do not miss the narrow but superb Don Jamon – do not click if bothered by lovingly photographed Spanish ham.

The second theme was an attempt to make some sense of medieval France, inspired by a brief stop on the way south in Chartres and an attempt or two to look at Chartres Cathedral, all under the misleading guidance of Henry Adams and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904).  Adams’s book, like its ancestor,  John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, moves far beyond the title edifices, discussing medieval French poetry, philosophy, and religion.  The book provides a strong misreading of the Middle Ages with Chartres as the primary text.

“Reading,” in the context of a cathedral, is just a metaphor, but in the case of Chartres a near literal one.  A couple thousand sculptural figures surround the entrances, and hundreds more are in the stained glass, all characters in stories, some of which I knew well and some that were utterly baffling.  The construction and history of the cathedral is yet another story.  Chartres is useful not just because it is a masterpiece, or an agglomeration of masterpieces, but because its story is, for a Gothic cathedral, unusually coherent.  The window that tells the story of The Song of Roland was hidden by renovation, so I will have to go back just for that.

Traveling, tourism, is like reading in this way – I read a complex book as preparation for the next reading, I visit a complex place to prepare for the next visit.  I was just getting somewhere, I think, when I have to leave, but next time I will be ready.  Or perhaps I will never return, never re-read, and the preparation is really for the next trip, the next book, or some trip or book in the distant future, one I have not yet imagined.