The Wuthering Expectations Best of 2010, I guess

The best book I read all year was, easily, incontestably, Moby-Dick.  The closest competitors, in audacity, scope, intensity, were the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson and the first edition of Leaves of Grass. A different kind of reader would include The Brothers Karamazov.  I don’t want to write about any of these – I wrote plenty about Melville and Whitman, did justice to Dostoevsky, and have just barely begun to pretend to comprehend that enormous bolus of Dickinson.

Makes her sound pretty appealing, yes?  One of things I had to say about Whitman was that he had dropped a Brooklyn city directory on his foot.  I forgot I wrote that.  Not bad, huh?  If you can’t make yourself laugh – where was I?

So I don’t really want to write about the Best Books of the Year.  How about the Biggest Surprises?

1.  There’s this Argentine surrealist, César Aira, who writes weird little novel-like thingaroos.  I read three of them this year.  An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter (2000) has a scene where a painter, and his horse, are struck by lightning, and then struck by lightning again, that is an unbelievable piece of writing.  Just crazy, stunning.  Nuts.

2.  I could single out every other episode of Gottfried Keller’s enormous Green Henry (1854).  In Part 3, Chapter 1, young Henry encounters the collected works of Goethe.  “From that hour I did not leave the couch, and I read for forty days on end, during which time the winter returned, and the Spring came back, but the white snow, whose shining I saw but heeded not, passed me by like a dream” (tr. A. M. Holt).  Green Henry is absolutely suffused with Goethe, dripping with Goethe.

3.  The City of Dreadful Night (1874), Bysshe Vanolis!  An amazing piece of poetic crankery, a brilliant pastiche of English and European poetry, a serious attempt to bring Baudelaire and Nerval into English.  The universe as a clock with no hands, the sinners who have so little hope that they cannot even go to hell, the Childe Roland-like wasteland of despair.  Fantastic, in all senses.

4.  Speaking of wastelands of despair, my weirdest experience of the year was reading one of my own recurring dreams in George MacDonald’s Lilith (1895).  Please read that dream-stuffed book; maybe you’ll find one of your own.  That reminds me one of the year’s true highlights, a guest post on MacDonald by my mother.  Thanks, Mom!

5.  All those French poets – Verlaine, Rimbaud, Hugo, Corbière, Laforgue, Mallarmé.  But I guess they were not surprises.  Like I didn’t know they were going to be good.  Please.

6.  Still, they were full of lots of individual little surprises.  As there were in, to switch to a novel I knew I would love, Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford.  The Armistice scene at the end of the third book, A Man Could Stand Up- (1926), it just builds and builds, and then, a joyous pow!  I looked for a quotation, but out of context, none will make sense.

That’s plenty, I guess.  No room for Moishe Leib Halpern, or Clarel, or The Ebb-Tide, or Skylark. No James Hogg or Tolstoy or Kalidasa.  Peter Pan floats away on a bird's nest.  The mayor of Casterbridge witnesses his own drowned body.  The time traveler witnesses the senescence of the earth.  This is now.

Next year, I guess: more books.  Or maybe I should just read these again.  They sound pretty good.

But he was a horse no more - the beasts of George MacDonald

The hero of Lilith has just returned to dream-land, where he is given a moon-horse. (What?):

Nineteen hands he seemed, huge of bone, tight of skin, hard of muscle - a steed the holy Death himself might choose on which to ride abroad and slay.  The moon seemed to regard him with awe; in her scary light he looked a very skeleton, loosely roped together.  Terrifically large, he moved with the lightness of a winged insect. (Ch. 31, "The Old Sexton's Horse")

So the story of Lilith is that a bookish fellow sees a ghost in his library, which leads him to Fairy-land, which is partly ruled by Lilith, Adam's first wife, who turns into a leopardess and steal babies, while the forest children fight the giants, and, let's see.  Anyway, the hero loves his moon-horse, and rides off to hunt the leopardess.  Lilith is a novel of repeated journeys over the same terrain, with variations on each trip.  The horse rushes past every obstacle the hero had previously encountered on foot.  Then the wolves howl and the moon sinks below the horizon:

The mighty steed was in the act of clearing a wide shallow channel when we were caught in the net of darkness.  His head dropped; its impetus carried his helpless bulk across, but he fell in a heap on the margin, and where he fell he lay.  I got up, kneeled beside him, and felt him all over.  Not a bone could I find broken, but he was a horse no more.  I sat down on the body, and buried my face in my hands. (end of Ch. 31)

MacDonald's novels are packed with beasts.  At the Back of the North Wind costars a horse.  In The Princess and the Goblin, the miner boy Curdie battles strange hybrid cave creatures, while in The Princess and Curdie, he gathers his own army, and then uses the special powers of each beast - one, for example, is a giant sphere with a face - to defeat his enemies, much in the manner of Pokémon.  The beasts return in Lilith as monsters - as "a solitary, bodiless head" which springs away with "a rapid rotatory twist," or "a dreadful head with fleshy tubes for hair" and a "great oval mouth" or "a long neck, on the top of which, like the blossom of some Stygian lily, sat what seemed the head of a corpse, its mouth half open, and full of canine teeth" (all from Ch. 40).

For some reason, though, it's the horses that interest me the most.  At the Back of the North Wind is in part a real London novel, set in the world of cabbies and their horses.  The treatment of horses is part of the plot.  MacDonald's novel began to be published nine years before Anna Sewell's Black Beauty (1877), which I last read at least thirty years ago.  Where else can we find this theme?  Perhaps - nay, in all likelihood - you have been leafing through John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy (1848, with many subsequent editions), where in Book 5, Chapter 11 you will find:

The reasons for legal intervention in favour of children, apply not less strongly to the case of those unfortunate slaves and victims of the most brutal part of mankind, the lower animals. It is by the grossest misunderstanding of the principles of liberty, that the infliction of exemplary punishment on ruffianism practised towards these defenceless creatures, has been treated as a meddling by government with things beyond its province; an interference with domestic life. The domestic life of domestic tyrants is one of the things which it is the most imperative on the law to interfere with...

This immediately follows an argument against restricting the labor force participation of women, who are not helpess creatures like children or horses.

I've come a bit far from George MacDonald, but I doubt he would mind.  His fantasies are the sorts of books that are meant to lie in the lap while the reader's imagination wanders through its own dream-land.

Thanks again to my mother for assisting with George MacDonald Week.

It would have been odd here - dreamy George MacDonald

Little Diamond is dreaming:

It was such a nice stair, so cool and soft - all the sides as well as the steps grown with moss and grass and ferns!  Down and down Diamond went - a long way, until at last he heard the gurgling and splashing of a little stream; nor had he gone much farther before he met it - yes, met it coming up the stairs to meet him, running up just as naturally as if it had been doing the other thing.  Neither was Diamond in the least surprised to see it pitching itself from one step to another as it climbed towards him: he never thought it was odd - and no more it was, there.  It would have been odd here.  (At the Back of the North Wind, Ch. 25, "Diamond's Dream")

George MacDonald's novels are made of dreams.  Every time the North Wind comes to see Diamond, she has to get him out of bed, and somehow he always ends up back in bed, or nearby (he perhaps sleepwalks) when the adventure is over.  It was all just a dream.  Or not.  MacDonald won't say.  The passage with which I began is unusual in that it is explicitly a dream, about a bunch of naked angel boys who dig up the stars every night.  What?  Who knows, it's a dream. 

The hero of Phantastes wanders through a magic world that is a mix of German novellas, King Arthur stories, and actual fairies ("From the cups or bells of tall flowers, as from balconies, some [fairies] looked down on the masses below, now bursting with laughter, now grave as owls", Ch. III, which is full of fairy lore).

I found Phantastes too strange, too random, and in some sense, then, not so like a dream.  The later Lilith, however, perfectly mimicked dream-logic.  I cannot explain the difference.  The weird hodgepodge of Biblical apocrypha and dancing skeletons and tiny elephants and a librarian who is actually a raven (or vice versa) somehow all seemed to fit together.  The illogic of Lilith is more logical than the illogic of Phantastes.  Or less logical.  Who knows.  One scene near the end of Lilith is exactly like a recurring dream I have had for years, which is just too weird, or else completely understandable.

Since I'm on the topic, readers of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series really must take a look at Lilith, obviously a touchstone book for him.  Certain passages were uncannily like bits of Sandman.  And I haven't written a word, and might not, about MacDonald's less dream-like fairy tale mode, as in The Princess and the Goblin (please see raych's enthusiastic enthusiasm), which I could imagine many readers preferring to the Ludwig Tieck-like dream-space of Lilith. 

Update: Look, here's Things Mean a Lot on the joys of The Princess and the Goblin, hot off the presses.

Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one.

George MacDonald was a Christian writer. He was the author of realistic novels, often with Scottish settings, always with explicit Christian messages.  When I was putting together the Scottish Reading Challenge, I had concluded, mistakenly, that these books had retreated to the archives, and that only the fantasies were still read, but I was quite wrong.  Editions of the Christian novels were recently in print.  See left for The Baronet's Song, which has been "edited for today's reader."  One of those "edits" is the title, originally Sir Gibbie (1879), which, admittedly, sounds ridiculous.

I have leafed through a strange book assembled by C. S.Lewis, George MacDonald: An Anthology (1947), which is not a collection of stories or poems, but rather of aphorisms, of sentences of wisdom broken lose from MacDonald's many books.  What a way to treat a fiction writer.  MacDonald was enormously important for Lewis, who attributes some sort of conversion experience to his reading of the strange fairy novel Phantastes (1858).  If I understand Lewis correctly, he had not a religious conversion, but an imaginative conversion, a preparation for a later religious awakening.  "I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him," writes Lewis.  But also "Few of his novels are good and none is very good."  MacDonald was a sage to Lewis, but not quite an artist.  Quotations from the valuable George MacDonald website The Golden Key.

MacDonald's Christianity was his own.  He apparently believed that animals could achieve salvation, for example, which explains the talking horses in At the Back of the North Wind, among other oddities.  He had a very strong sense of a feminine aspect of God.  The powers in his fantasies are almost always women - the North Wind, the great-great-grandmother of The Princess and the Goblin, a host of fairy tale figures in Phatastes.  MacDonald's God is, among other things, a protective mother.  It's a gentle, sweet Christianity.

It's also a German Christianity.  MacDonald, like Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot, was a keen student of German literature, particularly the great German Romantics.  "Were I asked, what is a fairytale? I should reply, Read Undine," the 1811 novella by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, MacDonald writes in the essay "The Fantastic Imagination."  MacDonald is right, by the way, about Undine.  Most important to MacDonald was Novalis, a connection that is both obvious and a complete mystery to me.  Novalis is a poet I read with keen incomprehension.  He advocated, or sought, or found, for all I know, some sort of idealized Kantian transcendental Christianity, available to us all if we would only I don't know what.

The very end of Lilith (1895) - or non-end, since the chapter is titled "The Endless Ending":

Strange dim memories, which will not abide identification, often, through misty windows of the past, look out upon me in the bright daylight, but I never dream now.  It may be, notwithstanding, that, when most awake, I am only dreaming the more.  But when I wake at last into that life which, as a mother her child, carries this life in its bosom, I shall know that I wake, and shall doubt no more,

I wait; asleep or awake, I wait.

Novalis says, "Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one."

George MacDonald, by a means I do not quite understand, turned that idea into fiction.

His rhymes were not very good - more of At the Back of the North Wind

Over the last three months, I read five George MacDonald novels, all fantasies, all good.  Phantastes (1858) and Lilith (1895) are fantasies for adults - and note the range of dates, what a career.  At the Back of the North Wind (1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and The Princess and Curdie (1883) were written for children.  I've also tried a couple of shorter fairy tales, "The Light Princess" (1864) and "The Golden Key" (1867).  So that's what I'm working with.

My favorite, easily, was At the Back of the North Wind, which is why I suggested it to my mother.  It's such a richly weird book, full of peculiar dissociations and jagged edges that are beyond rational understanding but somehow make sense within the novel.  MacDonald was a real visionary writer, although a gentle one.  I'm comparing MacDonald to Arthur Rimbaud, who pursued a "disordering of the senses" by means of absinthe and sex and impulsive behavior.  MacDonald has his own way of disordering the senses, using more ordinary means.

Nursery rhymes, for example.  Diamond, the boy at the center of the novel, travels to the back of the north wind (meaning, he nearly dies), as first mentioned by "an old Greek writer" (although "I do not think Herodotus had got the right account of the place").  When he returns, he appears to have received the gift of visionary poetry.  My mother included a bit of a reworked "Little Boy Blue" from the extraordinary Chapter 20, "Diamond Learns to Read," which is retold so that Little Boy Blue leads a group of forest animals in a battle against a snake. Every MacDonald novel I tried has a variation on that idea.

Here's a bit of Diamond's vers libre:

for old Diamond's a duck
they say he can swim
but the duck of diamonds
is baby that's him
and of all the swallows
the merriest fellows
that bake their cake
with the water they shake...
baby's the funniest
baby's the bonniest
and he never wails
and he's always sweet
and Diamond's his nurse
and Diamond's his nurse
and Diamond's his nurse  (Ch. 16)

I've skipped some of it - it's about a page long.  He's singing to a baby, the only person likely to understand his poem:

When Diamond's rhymes grew scarce, he always began dancing with the baby.  Some people wondered that such a child could rhyme as he did, but his rhymes were not very good, for he was only trying to remember what he had heard the river sing at the back of the north wind. (Ch. 16)

A good passage to test the book.  The reader who does not feel a bit of the chill of the north wind at the end of that sentence might be better off somewhere else.

Guest Post: The apples they dapple; the cherriest cherries - George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind

This is so exciting. As part of the Scottish Literature Reading Challenge, Wuthering Expectations is delighted to feature it's first ever guest post.  Please welcome The Mother of the Amateur Reader.

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I am not a literary scholar, just a retired elementary school librarian who reads books for the enjoyment I receive from them, not looking for hidden meanings and symbols.

My book for Amateur Reader’s Scottish challenge is At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald.  This was MacDonald’s first novel for children.  It appeared in monthly installments in Good Words for the Young, a children’s magazine published in London, beginning in November 1868, and was published as a book in 1871.

This fantasy takes place in Victorian Britain and is about little Diamond who was named after his father’s favorite horse.  Little Diamond sleeps in a bed in the hay loft above old Diamond’s stall.  One night little Diamond is visited by the North Wind.  He travels with her and they become friends.  Eventually little Diamond gets to the back of the north wind, returns home, and life as he knew it is changed.

As I was reading the story, I wondered why the north wind?  The north wind is very harsh.  MacDonald shows us two sides of the north wind.  One side is very destructive and the other side is very gentle.  In an afterword, Peter Glassman writes that At the Back of the North Wind is based on MacDonald’s religious beliefs.  The North Wind represents the will of God and faith in Him.  Even though the North Wind causes many to drown when she sinks ships, it will eventually result in good.  The story shows many examples of the moral and social values of the period.  Just like North Wind, the inequalities between the well-to-do and the very poor show two very distinct sides.

It is interesting to note that even as MacDonald was influenced by the writers who came before him, he also influenced writers who came after him such as J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.  I have also learned that Madeline L’Engle, one of my favorite authors for young readers, gives him credit for influencing her writings.

Now I leave you with a sampling of the many nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and songs found throughout the story.  This is from “Little Boy Blue” which takes up almost six pages of the book. It’s not the “Little Boy Blue” that I learned.

Little Boy Blue lost his way in a wood.
Sing apples and cherries, roses and honey;
He said, “I would not go back if I could,
It’s all so jolly and funny.”

He came where the apples grew red and sweet;
“Tree, drop me an apple down at my feet.”

He came where the cherries hung plump and red:
“Come to my mouth, sweet kisses,” he said.

And the boughs bow down, and the apples they dapple
The grass, too many for him to grapple.

And the cherriest cherries, with never a miss,
Fall to his mouth, each a full-frown kiss.

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Me again:  Thanks, mom!  All week, the fantasies of George MacDonald.