That's the general panoramic view.

I suppose in the end it makes sense to have some idea of a book as a whole, good or bad, worth reading or not, morally edifying or blighting, but in fact I do not read books as wholes, but rather passages, and sentences, and sometimes even individual words.  As I have improved as a reader I have retreated further from the whole;  as I continue to improve, I will move past the passage, and then the sentence, and perhaps even the word, reading nothing but a series of letters, each deeply meaningful, until I am adept enough to read nothing but the nirvana of the blank space between and among the letters.  Every day, then, after an hour or so of clear thought, careful writing, and judicious editing, I will produce the perfect blog post about what I read, one that is completely blank.

I have not yet achieved that level of sophistication.  What I am trying to say is that I have read 14 ½ Charles Dickens novels because of, as an example, this:

From these, in a narrow and a dirty street devoted to such callings, Mr Wegg selects one dark shop-window with a tallow candle dimly burning in it, surrounded by a muddle of objects vaguely resembling pieces of leather and dry stick, but among which nothing is resolvable into anything distinct, save the candle itself in its old tin candlestick, and two preserved frogs fighting a small-sword duel.  (I.7)

Allow me to savor the image: “two preserved frogs fighting a small-sword duel.”  Readers familiar with Our Mutual Friend will know that I have just accompanied the one-legged Simon Wegg into the anatomy shop of Mr. Venus.  The latter is presumably the creator of the frog tableau; he is a taxidermist and assembler of skeletons by trade:  “’You may go and buy a skeleton at the West End if you like, and pay the West End price, but it’ll be my putting together.’”  Again, I will pause – “and pay the West End price.”  I have been led to believe that there are people in the world who criticize Dickens for wordiness, who wonder why he does not just get on with it.  But he is!  This, the dueling frogs and proud craftsman, are it, or much of it.

Mr. Venus gives a tour of the shop:

‘My working bench.  My young man's bench.  A Wice.  Tools.  Bones, warious.  Skulls, warious.  Preserved Indian baby.  African ditto.  Bottled preparations, warious.  Everything within reach of your hand, in good preservation.  The mouldy ones a-top.  What's in those hampers over them again, I don't quite remember.  Say, human warious.  Cats.  Articulated English baby.  Dogs.  Ducks.  Glass eyes, warious.  Mummied bird.  Dried cuticle, warious.  Oh, dear me!  That's the general panoramic view.’

I have to suppress the kerfuffle over teeth (“There was two in the coffee-pot at breakfast time.  Molars.”)  in order to marvel at the delights of this passage alone, “Say, human warious,” for example, or “Ducks.”  The penultimate exclamation is the result of something, the bird mummy or cuticles, reminding Mr. Venus of his romantic troubles, which will work out fine; do not lose any sleep over the love life of Mr. Venus the skeleton articulator.

The frogs, by the way – this is a tip for aspiring fiction writers – could be found on Dickens’s own writing desk, not as taxidermy but in the form of a French bronze sculpture (and they were toads, not frogs).  So the tip is to surround yourself with useless knickknacks which you will someday insert into your story as a telling detail.

All of this is just one little slice of one little chapter of Our Mutual Friend.  Dickens is so generous.

Mikhail Lermontov and A Hero of Our Time

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41) lived and worked in the shadow of Pushkin. His verse forms, his subject matter, and his death in a pointless duel (age 27), suggest his older contemporary at every turn. For the last four years of his life, he was widely acknowledged as Pushkin's heir, Russia's greatest living poet. But Lermontov is very much worth reading for his own sake.

Lermontov's single short novel, A Hero of Our Time (1840), is a series of four adventures of Pechorin, the supposed hero of the title. The adventures are all set on the war-torn Caucasian frontier, and involve smugglers and Chechnyan bandits, kidnapping, Russian roulette, and dueling - exciting stuff. Why, then, is Pechorin always so bored?

That's the central irony of the novel - the adventures are all a result of Pechorin's boredom, his struggle against the meaningless of his life. The result is always some sort of disaster. Pechorin sows chaos, just to have something to do, and leaves a trail of casualties. Here's a sample of how he operates. Pechorin is trying to steal the Princess Mary from his friend Grushnitski, for sport:

"During all these days, I never once departed from my system. The young princess begins to like my conversation. I told her some of the strange occurrences in my life, and she begins to see in me an extraordinary person. I laugh at everything in the world, especially at feelings: this is beginning to frighten her. In my presence she does not dare to launch upon sentimental debates with Grushnitski, and has several times already replied to his sallies with a mocking smile; but every time that Grushnitski comes up to her, I assume a humble air and leave them alone together. The first time she was glad of it or tried to make it seem so; the second time she became cross with me; the third time she became cross with Grushnitski." (p. 121, Ardis edition)

The result, in this case, is one of the greatest, craziest, dueling scenes in Russian literature.

A Hero of Our Time has an indirect, modern structure. A Lermontov-like narrator first hears a long story about Pechorin, then, by chance, actually meets him. Then the last three stories are in Pechorin's own voice, from his journals. So the reader starts at a distance, but draws closer and closer to Pechorin.

Lermontov's hero is a relative of Goethe's Werther and any number of Byronic heroes, and his own descendants will be seen again in certain protagonists of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, and any other character who asks "What's the point of it all?"

This is cross-posted at the Russian Reading Challenge. I'm not sure it's any more useful or well written than Lermontov's wikipedia entry, but such is life.

The long "Princess Mary" chapter is the earliest non-English story I know set in a spa town. In England, I'm thinking of Jane Austen and Tobias Smollett. Who am I forgetting?

Don't blink - the duel in Tom Jones

A kindly anonymous reader reminds me of the duel in Tom Jones. Here it is, in its entirety:

"Jones was a little staggered by the blow which came somewhat unexpectedly; but presently recovering himself he also drew, and though he understood nothing of Fencing, prest on so boldly upon Fitzpatrick, that he beat down his Guard, and sheathed one half of his Sword in the Body of the said Gentleman, who had no sooner recevied it, than he stept backwards, dropt the Point of his Sword, and leaning upon it, cried, 'I have Satisfaction enough: I am a dead Man.'"

A single complex-compound sentence. If everything moved along at this rate, Tom Jones would not be a 700 page book.

Mr. Pickwick on the way to prison

Yesterday’s post on the duel in Nicholas Nickleby reminds me of two things.

First, that there is a sort of dueling scene in Chapter 2 of The Pickwick Papers, which is derailed just before the shooting begins. Just an adventure for Mr. Winkle, nothing serious.

Second, a scene of transportation to prison is much like the journey to a duel or execution. Here is Mr. Pickwick, in Chapter 50, being taken to debtors’ prison for failing to pay a dishonorable bill:

“The hackney coach jolted along Fleet Street, as hackney coaches usually do. The horses ‘went better,’ the driver said, when they had anything before them, (they must have gone at a most extraordinary pace when there was nothing,) and so the vehicle kept behind a cart; when the cart stopped, it stopped; and when the cart went on again, it did the same. Mr. Pickwick sat opposite the tipstaff; and the tipstaff sat with his hat between his knees, whistling a tune, and looking out of the coach window.”

Pickwick might be at his lowest point in the entire novel. What is he thinking? Dickens doesn’t tell us, but instead creates a new character who we will never see again after this page.

The duel in Nicholas Nickleby

I was surprised to find a duel, between two minor characters, in Chapter 50 of Nicholas Nickleby. It's a first-rate scene. It seems to me that duels are not commonly represented in English literature. Is that true? There's an important one in Clarissa. What else?

Dueling scenes bring out the best in many writers, for understandable reasons. The stark contrast between perfect health and imminent (voluntary, generally pointless) death leads most writers to heighten the perceptiveness of the chracters and the precision of the prose. Execution scenes often work the same way.

Pierre's duel in War and Peace is probably the peak of the genre, but the Russian tradition is rich. Eugene Onegin, A Hero for Our Time (and both Pushkin and Lermontov were themselves killed in really stupid duels), Chekhov's A Duel. Probaby many more.

A certain form of dueling persisted in Germany longer than almost anywhere. Fontane's Effi Briest includes a brilliant dueling scene, the tragedy in that case being that the duelist fully understands that the duel is a horrible mistake, a failure of character.

French writers travesty duels. The hero of Balzac's The Wild Ass's Skin has, or thinks he has, a magic talisman, so he fires not only without aiming but without even looking in the direction of his opponent. The duels in Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin are simply ridiculous, perfectly in keeping with the character of that novel.

The most famous duelists in America are politicians - Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson. I feel like I must be forgetting some crucial literary example. Please remind me.

Anyway, here's Dickens. The duelist is on his way to the duel:

"Now the noise of the wheels resolved itself into some wild tune in which he could recognize scraps of airs he knew, and now there was nothing in his ears but a stunning and bewildering sound like rushing water. But his companion rallied him on being so silent, and they talked and laughed boisterously. When they stopped he was a little surprised to find himself in the act of smoking, but on reflection he remembered when and where he had taken the cigar."

This is all good, but imagine that Dickens had left out the final phrase, had just stopped at the last comma. The story would carry on in the exact same way, and nothing important would be lost, except the most poignant detail in the passage.

Brushes on thirty different scales - Alexander Pushkin

Something a little different here. Pushkin (1799-1837) is Russia’s greatest poet, almost the founder of Russian literature. In his short life, he wrote in a number of styles, absorbing a range of Russian and international influences. Byron, most obviously, but really everyone he came across. Pushkin wrote a lot of satires, some smutty poems, some character sketches, not so much beeyootiful nature poetry, but some. His eye for detail was superb – here’s the equipment of a dandy (the hero, Eugene Onegin) preparing to go out on the town:

Eugene Onegin, Canto I, Stanza XXIV

Porcelain and bronzes on the table,
with amber pipes from Tsaregrad;
such crystalled scents as best are able
to drive the swooning senses mad;
with combs, and steel utensils serving
as files, and scissors straight and curving,
brushes on thirty different scales;
brushes for teeth, brushes for nails.
Rousseau (forgive a short distraction)
could not conceive how solemn Grimm
dared clean his nails in front of him,
the brilliant crackpot: this reaction
shows freedom’s advocate, that strong
champion of rights, as in the wrong.

Some of this is just a list, but a list that reveals the dandy’s vanity (the crack at Rousseau digs at a different sort of vanity). No surprise that Pushkin also proved to be a great fiction writer. Here’s another list, about Onegin’s country house, which he has just inherited. Here’s what he faces:

Canto II, Stanza III

The rustic sage, in that apartment,
forty years long would criticize
his housekeeper and her department,
look through the pane, and squash the flies.
Oak-floored, and simple as a stable:
two cupboards, one divan, a table,
no trace of ink, no spots, no stains.
And of the cupboards, one contains
a book of household calculations,
the other, jugs of applejack,
fruit liqueurs and an Almanack
for 1808: his obligations
had left the squire no time to look
at any other sort of book.

The boredom will obviously be crushing. Note the writer’s indictment, slipped in – “no trace of ink.” Onegin flirts with a local girl, who falls in love with him. He rejects her, and one of the consequences in an idiotic duel. Here’s the aftermath, a different kind of Pushkin:

Canto VI, Stanza XXXV

Giving his pistol-butt a squeezing,
Evgeny looks at Lensky, chilled
at heart by grim remorse’s freezing.
‘Well, what?’ the neighbor says, ‘he’s killed.’
Killed!... At this frightful word a-quiver,
Onegin turns, and with a shiver
summons his people. On the sleigh
with care Zaretsky stows away
the frozen corpse, drives off, and homing
vanishes with his load of dread.
The horses, as they sense the dead,
have snorted, reared, and whitely foaming
have drenched the steel bit as they go
and flown like arrows from a bow.

A nice mix of reporting and metaphorical language. Just the right mood. It’s hard to read this without wondering about Pushkin’s own death in an idiotic duel not too many years later.

Maybe I will write more about Pushkin later. He’s such a varied writer. I’ve read most of what he wrote, or at least most of what’s in English. All of his prose, his tragedy “Boris Godunov”, a substantial share of his poetry. But he’s like Hugo in this way - hard to grasp whole.

All of the stanzas I mentioned here are from the Charles Johnston translation. Who knows how this compares to the original. It’s lively, light, poetic. One hopes it’s also accurate, and sounds more or less like Pushkin.