Tender Is the Night has some good writing - Fitzgerald's Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!

Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel about the decline and fall of a talented psychiatrist, is full of fine writing, beginning with the bit of “Ode to a Nightingale” that supplies the title.  Maybe Keats should not count.  “O for a beaker full of the warm South…,” Keats demands, a wine “[t]asting of Flora and the country green, / Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!”  Fitzgerald gives me plenty of that.  This is, I hope it is obvious, not the bit of “Ode” that supplies the title, but a different, relevant bit.

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel.  Deferential palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach.

I take “deferential” and “flushed” as the nice touches here, adjectives I would not expect.  The beach is new, not fashionable, so some old villas “rotted like water lilies.”

“The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one.”  That is nice, right, a postcard view but who would see that rug?  The narrator lingers.  A man appears, “floundered a minute in the sea,” and disappears.  “When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour.”  Iambs in front of the comma, trochaic pentameter after.  The effect of watching the empty beach for two hours, while “bus boys shouted in the hotel court; the dew dried upon the pines,” while actually spending a couple of minutes reading the paragraph, is sharp.  This is 1923 or so, and the rich Americans have only barely started to descend on France.

Here are two, a young actress, fresh with her first taste of celebrity , and her duenna mother, “[the actress’s] cheeks lit to a lovely flame, like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening…  she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, but the dew was still on her.”  I have made it to the second page of my copy of the novel.

The two uses of “dew,” are they too close together?  In writing like this, made up of hundreds of arresting little effects, and by “arresting” I mean that I stop and enjoy them, I often ask if Fitzgerald went too far.  What is overwritten?  What is beautiful and what is kitsch?  It is a dance.  His first novel and bestseller, This Side of Paradise (1920), I remember as a mishmash of undergraduate jokiness and overwritten kitsch.  The first-person narrator of The Great Gatsby puts a brake on the purple prose.  Now, the more mature Fitzgerald can show off:

… the hot light clipped close her shadow… a faded Buick cooked on the hotel drive… Three British nannies sat knitting the slow pattern of Victorian England, the pattern of the forties, the sixties, and the eighties, into sweaters and socks, to the tune of gossip as formalized as incantation. (still on the second page)

Maybe something in one of every three sentences where I think “Oh, that’s good.”  When the story gets moving, maybe more like one in ten.  I think this is the third time I have read Tender Is the Night, so I am in no hurry to see what happens.

This is a remnant of the old fraternity style – the actress has been on an all-night spree in Paris:

Later Rosemary and the Norths and a manufacturer of dolls’ voices from Newark and ubiquitous Collis and a big splendidly dressed oil Indian named George T. Horseprotection were riding along on top of thousands of carrots in a market wagon.  The earth in the carrot beards was fragrant and sweet in the darkness…  (I.xviii)

I like those carrots but that first sentence is packed with what I mean by overwriting.  Maybe it is directly drawn from life, manufactured dolls’ voices and Mr. Horseprotection and all, but it is, as the expression goes, too cute by half.  Case by case, adjective by adjective: too cute by 30%? 10%?  Just cute enough?

The ride on the carrot wagon is stolen directly from the opening of Zola’s The Belly of Paris (1873); a slightly earlier paragraph about the ludicrous “car of the Shah of Persia, “a new facet of the fabulous,” is likely pinched from Radiguet’s The Ball of the Count of Orgel (1924), although maybe it is an authentic contemporary detail used by coincidence by both writers.  I had not known any of this whenever I last read the novel.  What will I see next time?

Maybe I will have made it to the French Riviera by then.  The Riviera is the part of France that I am least interested in visiting, but in fairness it is now a lot more crowded than it was in Tender Is the Night.  It is a lot more crowded by the end of the novel than it is on the still, quiet first page.

Voice

Of the five historical mysteries I read over my summer vacation, I liked three of them enough to consider reading more in the series.* The little Banville novel is something of an exception, since I've already read all but a few of Banville's books. I'll really lay into Banville tomorrow, so let's set that one aside.

Maybe I'll set Carlo Lucarelli aside, too. The greatest interest there is thematic. Plus, it was so short, you read all three books in the series, and you're not even close to 300 pages. Easy reading.

In two other novels, the great appeal of the writing is the voice of the narrator. Steve Hockensmith is playing with the Sherlock Holmes type of mystery, so the narrator has to be Dr. Watson. But in this case, Watson is a burly cowboy named Big Red. Holmes is his older, smaller, smarter brother, Old Red. Old Red is illiterate, so Big Red has to read him the latest Sherlock Holmes stories. Also, the signs on the bathroom doors. The comedy can be a bit broad. Funny, though.

Watson \ Big Red is folksy and sees the homorous side of things, so the tone is almost always comic. I don't think I ever actually laughed while reading this book, but that's a matter of habit:**

"Someone cleared his throat, and I glance across the aisle to find a fortyish sport in a checked suit giving me the eye in a friendly, amused sort of way. He had a face as flat and pink as a slice of ham, and atop his head was a pompadour of such impressive proportions I wouldn't have been surprised had I spotted the great explore Sigerson attempting to climb it with a team of native guides." (p. 33)

That's pretty good. If its not quite characteristic, that's because of all the dialogue and plot fuss, most of which was all right. The book has many short chapters, which unfortunately often end with irritating false climaxes - this is my main stylistic complaint. They do work, though - I always wanted to keep going.

Hockensmith's narrator has a typical comic voice. Owen Parry created something more original for his Civil War mysteries. Abel Jones, our hero, is Welsh, a veteran of wars in India, a wounded veteran of Bull Run, and a Methodist teetotaler. He is earnest and self-righteous, full of prejudices (against the Irish, the rich, cavalrymen). And he's scared of horses, "great stupid things," "four-legged demons."

The comedy of the book, which in many ways is a quite serious piece of work, comes from the narrator's inability to suppress his judgmental scolding, even while telling the story of a murder investigation, or a battle. Mostly, he's a driven man on a mission, but he continually pauses to zing his superiors, scold his inferiors, and praise his own virtue. An example of the latter: he does not drink, of course, but he'll buy whiskey for other people, in order to get them to spill secrets. But then he tells us that he feels bad about it.

Maybe this isn't meant to be funny, but I think it is, because it works so well. It deepens the character - in some ways he's a very narrow man, while in other ways he's an abyss. It keeps me guessing, at least - just what will he be capable of, this strange fellow.

My only real disappointment with the book is that the answer is: whatever is necessary to fulfill certain plot and genre expectations. But let that bide, as Captain Abel Jones always says when he suspects he's gone a bit too far.

By the way, neither of these narrators, both of whom are supposedly writing their stories, sound remotely like they actually would have, telling their own stories at the time. But, fortunately, I don't care about accuracy.

* In the right situation - trans-Atlantic flight, for example - I'd read more of any of them. I just wouldn't go out of my way for more Victoria Thompson or Michael Pearce.

** The Parry and Hockensmith books are both quite funny, but my only audible laugh came from the Michael Pearce novel, the one set in Trieste. The angry, drunken Irishman, suspected of murder, turns out to be James Joyce, which is funny enough. Wait, I thought, Italo Svevo lived in Trieste, too - I wonder if Pearce can work him in. About two pages later, there he was, under his real name, smoking one of his last cigarettes (see The Confessions of Zeno, Ch. 1). That's where I laughed.

A type of the triumphant monster, Death - too much starch in Dombey's pudding

Dickens was a master of the rhetoric of fiction. His range of modes and methods rivaled that of any writer who ever lived. I would guess that this was related to his gift for speech - that he was a great mimic, and could imitate anything. Speeches, sermons, advertising, journalism, the novels of everyone else. His range and control improved with experience.

Dombey and Son is full of magnificent passages that demonstrate his mastery. But something has gone wrong. The writing can be too thick, too worked up. Dickens has added too much starch to his pudding. He has whipped his cream to butter. He has whipped his egg whites to - what happens when one overwhips egg whites? Meine Frau tells me that they become lumpy. Yes, parts of Dombey and Son are lumpy. Dickens's Christmas story from the same year, The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848), has the exact same problem. I found a few passages in that story almost incomprehensible. They were so very thick.

Should I quote extended rhetorically heated, dullish paragraphs to make my point? That'd be fun. Instead, I'll point to one odd feature of Dombey and Son that I don't remember seeing anywhere else in Dickens: his use of a refrain.

He does this three times, I think. I'll just stick with the first example, Chapter XX, "Mr. Dombey goes upon a Journey." Great chapter. It's full of excellent railroad detail. Once Mr. Dombey is actually on the train, we enter into his troubled thoughts (he has just suffered a great loss). The speed of the train somehow reminds him of his loss. The paragraph ends:

"The power that forced itself upon its iron way--its own--defiant of all paths and roads, piercing through the heart of every obstacle, and dragging living creatures of all classes, ages, and degrees behind it, was a type of the triumphant monster, Death."

There's some social criticism here (the railroad as an agent of destruction) aside from gloomy Dombey's thoughts. Comes back at the end of the novel, too. The personification of the railroad as Death is rhetorically extreme, but so far so good, although that's clearly not Mr. Dombey any more.

The next paragraph ends "like as in the track of the remorseless monster, Death!" The one after that ends with the exact same phrase. The next, with "and what else is there but such glimpses, in the track of the indomitable monster, Death!"

So four paragraphs in a row end almost identically, a poetic effect, as if the passage is a ballad. Or perhaps the proper comparison is with a sermon, the preacher hitting his point again and again.

I'm not so sure that this section, or the other two places in the novel that use the same device, all moments of keen mental stress for someone, are novelistically effective. They seem to end up a great distance away from the characters. They draw attention to their rhetorical effect, their artificiality. Did Dickens ever repeat this experiment?

I wonder if the move to the first person in David Copperfield was also a way to push back against the thickening of his style, a way to limit or control some of the rhetorical flights. We'll see. By Bleak House, if I remember correctly, he had the problem completely under control. That foggy opening passage, for example. Just the right amount of starch.

Melville's evolving style - an experiment - I studied it every morning, like the multiplication table

Typee (1846), first sentence of Chapter 25:

"Although I had been unable during the late festival to obtain information on many interesting subjects which had much excited my curiosity, still that important event had not passed by without adding materially to my general knowledge of the islanders."

Omoo (1847), first sentence of Chapter 25:

"During the morning of the day which dawned upon the events just recounted, we remained a little to leeward of the harbour, waiting the appearance of the consul, who had promised the mate to come off in a shore boat for the purpose of seeing him."

Mardi (1849), ditto:

"A few days passed: the brigantine drifting hither and thither, and nothing in sight but the sea, when forth again on its stillness rung Annatoo's domestic alarum."

Redburn (1849), you get the idea:

"Though, for reasons hinted at above, they would not let me steer, I contented myself with learning the compass, a graphic facsimile of which I drew on a blank leaf of the "Wealth of Nations," and studied it every morning, like the multiplication table."

White Jacket, or the World on a Man-of-War (1850), first two sentences this time:

"Colder and colder; we are drawing nigh to the Cape. Now gregoes, pea jackets, monkey jackets reefing jackets, storm jackets, oiljackets, paint jackets, round jackets, short jackets, long jackets, and all manner of jackets, are the order of the day, not excepting the immortal white jacket, which begins to be sturdily buttoned up to the throat, and pulled down vigorously at the skirts, to bring them well over the loins."

Moby-Dick (1851), two sentences again, Chapter 25:

"In behalf of the dignity of whaling, I would fain advance naught but substantiated facts. But after embattling his facts, an advocate who should wholly suppress a not unreasonable surmise, which might tell eloquently upon his cause--such an advocate, would he not be blame-worthy?"

That's enough, and possibly too much. Note the publication dates - can't say Melville wasn't working hard, and there would be four more books in the next six years.

I have no doubt that picking a different chapter would give different results, but I think this choice (not quite random, but I didn't check them all ahead of time, and have never read Redburn or White Jacket) shows what I'm talking about.

The Typee and Omoo passages are relatively plain and dry (the Typee one too much so, much duller than most of the book). In Mardi, something has changed, even in a straightforward sentence like this one, free of Hecatic Spherula - "forth again on its stillness rung," the rhythm of the line has changed.

The line from Redburn is simply fantastic, and has me newly excited to read that book.

White Jacket features a list, a key tool for Melville and his descendents, the Pynchons and their kin. The lines from Moby-Dick don't seem that special, but they aren't plain, and they sound like Melville to me. The style, the voice, of Typee and Omoo sound much more generic.

Becca suggested in a comment that Virginia Woolf's voice followed a similar path, from not-Woolf to Woolf in a short period of time, and she has already convincingly explored the idea. Other nominees are welcome. Since one has to know a fair chunk of an author's work to play this game, it's a little tricky. I've come up with a few candidates only to think "How do you know?"

I feel that I have justified Mardi to myself more than I had expected. Whatever its problems, reading Mardi is a way to spend some time with an enormously creative and original artist while he thinks through some problems and plays with some ideas, even if his solutions are unworkable and his ideas are preposterous.

By coincidence, Anecdotal Kurp put up a post on Sir Thomas Browne this morning. If you want a taste of what Melville was reaching for, I recommend it. I recommend it, regardless.

Herman Melville's Mardi was written by Herman Melville

Herman Melville's Mardi (1849) is sort of a catastrophe. I'm glad I read it, more or less; I doubt I'll ever return to it. But it has one interesting feature: although it's the third book by Melville, it's the first appearance of Melville, the author of Moby-Dick and "Bartleby the Scrivener" and whatever else we think of when we think of Melville. For the first time, I mean, Melville's book sounds like Melville. He had found his voice.

Typee, Melville's first book, is an excellent South Seas travel narrative, romanticized (a lot, I assume), well worth reading, easily recommended. The sequel, Omoo, is also pretty good, but does not have such a strong central story. This is a disadvantage of writing non-fiction - the one really strange thing that happened to Melville is covered in Typee. The style of these books is charming, humorous, and straightforward, and sounds only barely, in stray moments, like Herman Melville.

I recognized Melville from the first page of Mardi. One thing he had been doing while writing his first two books and perambulating about Manhattan was reading, just reading an enormous quantity of books, including all of those great 17th century prose stylists like Sir Thomas Browne who so strongly influenced his style. Ruined it, perhaps, in Mardi, a book stuffed with undigested fantasies and experiments and ravings. He's still charming, in small doses, and definitely humorous, but he is no longer straightforward. Sentences and thoughts are extended, and then extended again. The second half of the book, a journey from one nominally satirical setpiece to another, was a trial.

All of this reminded me of William Faulkner. Faulkner's first two novels, Soldiers' Pay (1926) and Mosquitoes (1927), sound nothing like him. They're not bad, not at all, they just don't have the distinctive Faulkner voice. Then in his third novel, Sartoris aka Flags in the Dust (1929), there it is, fully developed, just like that. Sartoris is not any better than the earlier novels - it might be worse - but it's instantly recognizable as Faulkner.

Faulkner did not wait for the publication of Sartoris to start his next novel, The Sound and the Fury. Poor Melville took the other path, and waited, so he felt the full brunt of the uncomprehending response to Mardi. He seems to have retreated to more conventional seafaring novels for his next two books. I don't know what they sound like, how Melvillean they are.

After the exhausting Mardi, I'm not exactly excited to find out. Mardi has made me less eager to pursue middlin' Melville, but, oddly, more eager to reread Moby-Dick, where the biblical voice, the seventeenth century cadences, the arcane facts, and the technical realism of the earlier books are finally pulled together into a great work of art.

If you're planning to plagiarize some of this post for an assignment in your Novels of Melville and Faulkner course, you need to work in a lot of specific examples from the various books or you won't do very well. But for my purpose, I think this'll do.

Among the most aesthetically pleasing of all insects - the prose style of naturalists

So if I were to take this idea seriously - when and how did poets and novelists start writing seriously about animals - I would have to look to their models, the naturalists and scientists and travelers, the Gilbert Whites and James Audubons and Charles Darwins and so on. Not that the direction of influence only had to go one way, or that a genius like John Clare needed their help, but that's where I think I'd start.

Herman Melville's Mardi (1849), for example, is full of nature writing. A bit overpacked and encyclopedic, even. Chapter 32 is titled "Xiphius Platypterus," and is entirely about the swordfish. An earlier chapter is about sharks and pilot fish. A later one describes whales playing in a medusa-illuminated sea. Often, this is directly pinched from other books. Much of the novel is built like a collage, upon which Melville founds his rhetorical flights (a bit on the swordfish):

"A right valiant and jaunty Chevalier is our hero; going about with his long Toledo perpetually drawn. Rely upon it, he will fight you to the hilt, for his bony blade has never a scabbard. He himself sprang from it at birth; yea, at the very moment he leaped into the Battle of Life; as we mortals ourselves spring all naked and scabbardless into the world."

Not what I'm looking for - I do not believe this tells us much about the swordfish.

Most of Melville's contemporaries are simply prosaic. I've read enough books about traveling in the American West to be tired of the repetitive descriptions of buffalo, grizzly bears, and prairie dog villages. Even John Kirk Townsend, an expert in birds, writes surprisingly flat descriptions of nature (the fun of his Narrative of a Journey across the Rocky Mountains (1839), I should say, is his irrepressible naivté). Here's Josiah Gregg, a merchant in the Santa Fé trail trade, with an unusually nice description of a buffalo charge:

"The buffalo never attacks, however, except when wounded... I have crouched in the tall grass in the direct route of a frighted gang, when, firing at them on their near approach. they would spread in consternation to either side. Still their advance is somewhat frightful - their thundering rumble over the dry plain - their lion-like fronts and dangling beards - their open mouths and hanging tongues - as they come on, puffing like a locomotive engine at every bound, does at first make the blood settle a little heavy about the heart." (Ch. 27 "Animals of the Prairie", p. 366)

That's from Commerce of the Prairies (1844). Gregg is trying to write a useful book, so most of his descriptions of wolves and mustangs and horned lizards are functional, designed to assist travelers. But there's good writing here, too.

I now realize that, today, we are awash in high quality nature writing. Maybe I take it for granted. The current issue of Smithsonian magazine has an article about geoduck clams and the people who work with them that is so well written that it's easy to ignore how good it really is:

"Its long, leathery neck can stretch to the length of a baseball bat or recoil to a wrinkled nub. The neck resembles an aardvark's snout, an elephant's trunk or a monstrous prehistoric earthworm emerging from a fist-size shell, among other things."

The author is Craig Welch; Smithsonian also published, a couple of months ago, a piece of his on the spotted owl of similar quality. Apropos of nothing, except that someone gave it to me, and it's interesting, I'm reading the memoir of entomologist E. O. Wilson (Naturalist, 1994). He begins by telling us about a memory from when he was seven, when he came upon a jellyfish:

"Its opalescent pink bell is divided by thin red lines that radiate from center to circular edge. A wall of tentacles falls from the rim to surround and partially veil a feeding tube and other organs, which fold in and out like the fabric of a drawn curtain. I can see only a little way into this lower tissue mass." (pp. 5-6)

This is not the child's view, but the adult scientist's, aware that the astonishing beast was a Chrysaora quinquecirrha, or sea nettle. I marvel at all of the metaphorical language Wilson needs to describe accurately the jellyfish, not just the "drawn curtain," but also "wall" and "veil" and "bell." Good metaphors are not simply flourishes - what easier way is there to communicate just how the mass of tentacles are folded?

Wilson's specialty is ants, so how about some ants:

"The dacetines are slender, ornately sculptured little ants with long, thin mandibles. Their body hairs are modified into little clubs, scales, and sinuous whips. In many species a white or yellow spongy collar surrounds their waists. Clean and decorative, they are under the microscope among the most aesthetically pleasing of all insects." (133)

Not a fancy passage. I am always skeptical when someone says that "not a word is wasted," but this comes close. As usual, the amount of fine writing, on whatever subject, turns out to be enormous, once I begin to look for it. I'm not convinced, though, that much of it, regarding animals, I mean, can be found in 19th century fiction!

Dickens in The Old Curiosity Shop - all working up together in one delicious gravy

Note to skimmers, i.e., rational blog readers: Every quotation I’ve extricated from The Old Curiosity Shop here is meant to be enjoyable.

Dickens the creator of first-rate metaphors:

“Kit, who in despatching his bread and meat had been swallowing two thirds of his knife at every mouthful with the coolness of a juggler...” Ch. 1

Action as insight into character:

“'Owe indeed, ma'am!' replied Mrs Jiniwin. 'When my poor husband, her dear father, was alive, if he had ever ventured a cross word to me, I'd have--' The good old lady did not finish the sentence, but she twisted off the head of a shrimp with a vindictiveness which seemed to imply that the action was in some degree a substitute for words.” Ch. 4

Place as insight into character:

“It was a dirty little box, this counting-house, with nothing in it but an old ricketty desk and two stools, a hat-peg, an ancient almanack, an inkstand with no ink, and the stump of one pen, and an eight-day clock which hadn't gone for eighteen years at least, and of which the minute-hand had been twisted off for a tooth-pick.” Ch. 5

A long one, with no insights at all:

“The glow of the fire was upon the landlord's bald head, and upon his twinkling eye, and upon his watering mouth, and upon his pimpled face, and upon his round fat figure. Mr Codlin drew his sleeve across his lips, and said in a murmuring voice, 'What is it?'

'It's a stew of tripe,' said the landlord smacking his lips, 'and cow-heel,' smacking them again, 'and bacon,' smacking them once more, 'and steak,' smacking them for the fourth time, 'and peas, cauliflowers, new potatoes, and sparrow-grass, all working up together in one delicious gravy.' Having come to the climax, he smacked his lips a great many times, and taking a long hearty sniff of the fragrance that was hovering about, put on the cover again with the air of one whose toils on earth were over.

'At what time will it be ready?' asked Mr Codlin faintly.

'It'll be done to a turn,' said the landlord looking up to the clock--and the very clock had a colour in its fat white face, and looked a clock for jolly Sandboys to consult--'it'll be done to a turn at twenty-two minutes before eleven.'

'Then,' said Mr Codlin, 'fetch me a pint of warm ale, and don't let nobody bring into the room even so much as a biscuit till the time arrives.'” Ch. 18

Mr. Codlin has an extremely minor function in the plot of The Old Curiosity Shop. The landlord has none whatsoever. Nor does the stew. As far as the story is concerned, the whole passage could be cut, by, say, an editor with no taste or sense.

May I insert another note to skimmers, this time skimmers of Dickens? Slow down! Every Dickens novel is a storehouse of treasures like this. Don't leave them behind.

Cervantes and the notarized ending

Last year many readers gnashed their teeth when they got to the epilogue of the last HP book, which the author used as a way to constrain post-copyright abuse and writers of fan fiction. Why she cared, I don't understand, since she could so easily distract herself by buying an island or something. Maybe it was an act of self-discipline, to remove the temptation of writing more of the same thing.

Anyway, there is a canonical precedent. Part 2 of Don Quixote (1615) was published 10 years after Part 1 (1605). At first, Cervantes has great fun with the idea that everyone Quixote and Sancho Panza meets already knows them, having, of course, read Part 1, a smash bestseller. But then, while in the middle of writing the novel, Cervantes (the actual Cervantes) come across a continuation of Don Quixote, published in 1614, and the fun turns sour. Cervantes is furious.

In Chapter 59, Don Quixote (the character) comes across the faux Don Quixote (the book) in an inn. Don Quixote (the "real" character) is on his way to the tournament in Saragossa, but it turns out that the "fictional" Don Quixote goes to Saragossa. So:

"Don Juan informed him that this new history told how Don Quixote, whoever he might be, in that same tournament had participated in a tilting at the ring but that the description given had shown a sorry lack of inventiveness, especially with regard to the mottoes of the knights and their liveries, in which regard it was impoverished in the extreme though rich in foolishness.

'For that very reason,' said Don Quixote, 'I will not set foot in Saragossa but will let the world see how this new historian lies, by showing people that I am not the Don Quixote of whom he is speaking.'"

So they go to Barcelona instead. The false Don Quixote keeps turning up.* The "real" Don Quixote visits a notary, to get a sworn statement that he is the real Don Quixote. And then there's more notarizing at the end:

"Perceiving that their friend was no more, the curate asked the notary to be a witness to the fact that Alonso Quijano the Good, commonly known as Don Quixote, was truly dead, this being necessary in order that some author other than Cid Hamete Bengali might not have the opportunity of falsely resurrecting him and writing endless histories of his exploits." (Ch. 74)

This is why people talk about Don Quixote as the first postmodern novel, this and the "Cid Hamete Bengali" business.

Dickens fought a similar problem most of his life. His serialized novels took 18 months or so to publish. Theatrical versions, with their own endings, would appear before he was done. Nicholas Nickleby has an ill-judged chapter where Nicholas rants about this evil, targeting a specific hack writer. Dickens would write his own "official" theatrical versions which would be rushed into production a few days after the last installment of the serial appeared. Notarization did not help; enforcement of copyright law did.

* The false Don Quixote, but never, per Nabokov's suggestion, the false Don Quixote. Nabokov wanted the "real" and "false" Don Quixotes to joust.

A horrible misunderstanding of Ford Madox Ford

So the Campaign for the American Reader has a website called The Page 99 Test, which is headed by this quotation:

"Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." --Ford Madox Ford

No source is given, so I don't know the specific context. Elsewhere, somewhere in his eccentric literary history The March of Literature, I think, Ford describes his "page 90 test", which I paraphrase as follows:

Pick up a new book. Turn to page 90. Read the first full non-dialogue paragraph. Judge accordingly.

The point of the test is to get a sense of the writer's prose, just the prose. The reader doesn't know who any of the characters are, or what's going on, and page 90 (or 99) is far enough in that mediocre writers have let their guard down. "Non-dialogue", because decent dialogue comes cheap. Ford was a literary editor, and was swamped with books. This was his method, an aesthete's method, a writer's method, of culling.

Not every reader cares about the quality of prose. There's no shortage of evidence for this proposition. But good prose is what Ford means by "the quality of the whole". Is the book well written?

I was surprised, then, to discover that at each post on the Page 99 site, a single page of a book is discussed by its own author. They tell us how page 99 is "representative" of their wonderful book. Many of the authors don't include a single sentence of their own work. Many others should not have. Strangely, not a single writer says that their prose is so poor that their book isn't really worth reading.

So the whole thing is just puffery. Trivia, marketing, probably best ignored. Is the Campaign for the American Reader a publisher front organization? Ford's long dead, I know, but please, leave him out of it.

The Campaign's home website tells me that it wants "to encourage more readers to read more books." I want to encourage more readers to read better books.

Last Lines of the 19th Century

"Really, madam," said I, "you must be aware that every volume of a narrative turns less and less interesting as the author draws to a conclusion,--just like your tea, which, though excellent hyson, is necessarily weaker and more insipid in the last cup. Now, as I think the one is by no means improved by the luscious lump of half-dissolved sugar usually found at the bottom of it, so I am of opinion that a history, growing already vapid, is but dully crutched up by a detail of circumstances which every reader must have anticipated, even though the author exhaust on them every flowery epithet in the language."

This is from the last page, although not quite the last lines, of Sir Walter Scott's The Tale of Old Mortality (1816), his best novel that I've read, where Scott has tea with a woman who insists on asking what happens not only to the hero and heroine of the novel (do they marry?) but about everyone, down to the comic relief. The Incurable Logophile recently bemoaned the epilogue of Ann Patchett's opera fantasy Bel Canto, and wondered why authors still bother wrapping everything up at the risk of the energy and emotional impact of their actual ending.

The Scott quote shows that it's an old problem. This is only Scott's fourth novel, and he's already sick of it. Richardson set this terrible precedent, ending Clarissa with an epilogue worthy of the novel's bulk, punishing and rewarding almost every character mentioned in the entire 1500 pages.

In a fair fight, there aren't going to be as many great last lines in older novels as in more recent ones (just as the last lines of short stories are in general punchier than those of novels). The compressed attention to style isn't there, the attention to every detail. Instead, we get an account of a marriage, or a flowery farewell to the reader. The exceptions are too rare. This is the world of, as James said, "loose baggy monsters".

The list I discussed yesterday includes some first rate exceptions, whether poetic like Frankenstein ("He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.") or rhetorically magnificent like A Tale of Two Cities ("‘It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.’"). But is even the end of Emma that special ("But, in spite of these deficiencies, the wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions of the small band of true friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect happiness of the union.")? Or the end of Middlemarch, too dreary to duplicate here, and certainly not the evidence to present to someone convinced that Eliot is an essayist disguised as a novelist.

Some first-rate 18th and 19th century last lines, missed by the list:

“I dwell the longer upon this subject from the desire I have to make the Society of an English Yahoo by any Means not insupportable; and therefore I here intreat those who have any Tincture of this absurd Vice, that they will not presume to appear in my Sight.” Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

“The old man and his sons followed the body to the grave; Albert was unable to. Lotte’s life was in danger. Workmen carried the coffin. No clergyman attended.” The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

“When they tried to detach this skeleton from the one it embraced, it crumbled to dust.” Notre Dame of Paris, Victor Hugo. Really, what an ending!

“He has just received the Legion of Honor”. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert

“While she was saying this, Rollo woke up and slowly wagged his head to and fro, while Briest said calmly: ‘Ah, Luise, don’t go on... that is too big a subject’.” Effi Briest, Theodor Fontane

Famous Last Lines

Nigel Bene has directed my attention to a list of the 100 Best Last Lines from Novels (pdf file) compiled by the American Book Review. It's a treat - I can only approve of any list with a sufficiently well-developed sense of the ridiculous to not only include Richard Brautigan, but to give him two slots (e.g., "P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise", concluding Trout Fishing in America).

There's a richness here that surprised me. That Brautigan line tells you exactly what goes on in his books. Similarly, look at the ends of The Adventures of Augie March ("Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn’t prove there was no America") or White Noise, which concisely summarize the entire novel. Or how about the endless end of On the Road, or the finale of Cat's Cradle, which give us the core of not just those novels, but of Kerouac and Vonnegut.

I have mixed feelings abou Catch-22, but look at this last line:

"The knife came down, missing him by inches, and he took off."

As a first line, it's pretty good - starts things off with a bang. Somewhere in the middle of the book, it's nothing special. But at the end of the book! Pretty great, a spur to the imagination.

Some of the last lines are punch lines. As I Lay Dying, J R and The Recognitions, Tristram Shandy - great last lines if you know the setup, but not that special if you don't. The end of The Awakening ("There was the hum of bees, and the musky odor of pinks filled the air.") looks like empty poeticizing on its own, but it's not, not at all.

Some are perfect on their own: Huckleberry Finn ("I been there before"), The Stranger, To the Lighthouse. Tastes will differ, but there has to be something here for any good reader. The tastes or purpose of the source make the list heavy on Americans, especially experimental sorts. But I'm not sure there would be a lot more older entries even in a fairer competition. Tomorrow I'll suggest why.

This idea seems original to me. Meine Frau remembers a German newspaper that uses to have a regular last line feature. Here are some favorites of mine that did not make the list:

“There will be a tremendous explosion, but no one will hear it and the earth will return to its nebulous state and go wandering through the sky, free at last from parasites and disease.” The Confessions of Zeno, Italo Svevo (1923)

“Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust.” The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa (1956)

“I take no notice. I go on revising, in the quiet of the days in the hotel at Androgué, a tentative translation into Spanish, in the style of Quevedo, which I do not intend to see published, of Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial.” “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, Jorge Luis Borges (1941)

“And Sir Thomas Browne, who was the son of a silk merchant and may well have had an eye for these things, remarks in a passage of the Pseudodoxia Epidemica that I can no longer find that in the Holland of his time it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvasses depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost for ever.” The Rings of Saturn, W. G. Sebald (1995)

“As the train drew out of the station she sat with her head bowed in shame, because the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years had not wanted a bookshop.” The Bookshop, Penelope Fitzgerald (1978)

“Outside the owls hunted maternal rodents and their furry broods.” Scoop, Evelyn Waugh (1938)

Feel free to leave your own favorites in the comments here, or at Nota Beale, or wherever you like.

Balzac's prose - the vegetable fate throws us today

Balzac, the prose writer. The Good, a description of Sanson, the executioner, a real person:

"Aged, at the time of our story, about sixty, this awful functionary was noted for his excellent attire, his quiet and composed manners, and for the contempt he displayed towards Bibi-Lupin and his acolytes, the machine's provision merchants. The only indication, in this man, which betrayed the fact that in his veins flowed the blood of medieval torturers, was a certain breadth and formidable thickness in his hands. Sufficiently well educated, much concerned with his duties as a citizen and a voter, very fond, it was said, of gardening, this tall, broad-built man, who spoke in a low voice, always calm and of few words, his forehead broad, rather bald, far more closely resembled a member of the British aristocracy than a public executioner." (p. 473)

Balzac the Bad:

No quotation for this one. It's too easy; there's too much. His longer novels are full of pedestrian passages. This is a symptom of the Comédie Humaine, Balzac's grand project to somehow write about all of life in his novels, to stuff everything in. In the last quarter of A Harlot High and Low, in particular, much concerned with prisons, police, and legal procedures, Balzac continually interrupts himself to fill us in on some essential piece of information about thieves' cant or the role of the magistrate or the architecture of the Conciergerie.*

It's not all bad - the passage about the executioner, a character never mentioned after the above description, is part of this stuffing process. But most of this sort of writing is far from deathless. If Balzac had not been a great novelist, he would have been a mediocre social scientist.

Balzac the Baffling:

"well! it will take more than talent to clean the vegetable fate throws us today". (p. 90)


* On the other hand, I had never been much interested in the tour of the Conciergerie (you can see Marie Antoinette's cell and I don't know what else). Balzac has made me reconsider.

Stendahl at Waterloo - Ah, now we're being attacked!

Beginning any sort of discussion of Stendhal, as I did yesterday, with a question of style is probably a good way to confuse people. For this, I blame Stendhal. He's a really strange writer. A strange person.

The Charterhouse of Parma is probably most famous for its scenes set at Waterloo. They served as an important example for later battlefield novelists, especially Tolstoy.

What a surprise then, that Waterloo takes place in Chapters 3 and 4, at the very beginning of the novel, and that Fabrizio, the protagonist, is not even a soldier, but a 17-year old Italian with a purchased hussar uniform. This was a brilliant move by Stendhal. Because Fabrizio knows nothing, and barely speaks French, the battle can be depicted in a fresh and unusual way. We never leave Fabrizio's point of view, confused as it is. He's even drunk part of the time, after buying a bottle of brandy because he wants the other soldiers to like him.

We're back to style. Scott gets close to this sort of "objective" style in some of his battle scenes, but he is never this pure. He also wants us to know the terrain, the positions of the armies, all of the usual stuff. Stendhal throws all of that away. We just get drunk Fabrizio, who doesn't know how to load a rifle, hoping for a glimpse of Napoleon.

Any readers of War and Peace will find these two chapters interesting.

Any current readers of W&P who are reading this are thinking: Oh sure. I'll get right on that. Anything else I should read? Buddenbrooks? The Oxford English Dictionary? Thanks for the helpful suggestion.

Apricots and broken egg-shells - the beauties of Mansfield Park

Fanny Price, the protagonist of Mansfield Park, is not much of a heroine. She is almost always in an environment where she has no direct or indirect influence on events. She suffers, she endures, she is pathetic. Her greatest moment of weakness is allowing herself to be drafted into the Bertrams' play. Her greatest triumph is declining Henry Crawford's marriage proposal, on the grounds that he is immoral.

All of this happens before the last third of the novel, when Fanny returns home to her poor, vulgar Portsmouth family. The change of setting allows us to see how deeply Fanny has changed. She may still be passive, but is no longer pathetic. There has been enormous inner growth of character.

If you feel too sorry for Fanny, you can be her friend. Here is her Myspace page. Be warned, it plays music.

Anyway, I like Fanny well enough, despite her drinking problem ("Never had Fanny more wanted a cordial.” Vol. III Ch. 15). But I don't read Mansfield Park for Fanny.

The horrible Mrs. Norris, so generous with other people's money, is bragging about her late husband to the man who now has his living:

"It was only the spring twelvemonth before Mr. Norris's death, that we put in the apricot against the stable wall, which is now grown such a noble tree, and getting to such perfection, sir," addressing herself then to Dr. Grant.

"The tree thrives well beyond a doubt, madam," replied Dr. Grant. "The soil is good: and I never pass it without regretting, that the fruit should be so little worth the trouble of gathering."

"Sir it is a moor park, we bought it as a moor park, and it cost us - that is, it was a present from Sir Thomas, but I saw the bill, and I know it cost seven shillings, and was charged as a moor park."

"You were imposed on, ma'am," replied Dr. Grant; "these potatoes have as much the flavor of a moor park apricot, as the fruit from that tree. It is an insipid fruit at the best; but a good apricot is eatable, which none from my garden are." Vol I Ch. 6.

There is nothing much like this in Austen's earlier novels. Descriptive details or physical objects of any sort are extremely rare. When they do occur, they are often of a conventional nature. See Elizabeth's visit to Darcy's estate - it could be cribbed from a guidebook.

Fanny's beloved brother has just left, as has Mr. Crawford, who her fool of an uncle thinks Fanny loves:

After seeing William to the last moment, Fanny walked back to the breakfast-room with a very saddened heart to grieve over the melancholy change; and there her uncle kindly left her to cry in peace, conceiving perhaps that the deserted chair of each young man might exercise her tender enthusiasm, and that the remaining cold pork bones and mustard in William's plate, might but divide her feelings with the broken egg-shells in Mr. Crawford's. She sat and cried con amore as her uncle intended, but it was con amore fraternal and no other. William was gone, and she now felt as if she had wasted half his visit in idle cares and selfish solicitudes unconnected with him. Vol. II, Ch. 11.

These cold pork bones and flavorless apricots are to me very high instances of Austen's art - they supply artful detail to the scene, but also fill out characters in ways that make simple description seem very clumsy. Mansfield Park is full of this sort of thing - the entire episode by the ha-ha is another example, where the exact locations of the characters are crucial to really understanding the scene. In Sense and Sensibility, people are mostly just in rooms together.

There is more literature in Mansfield Park than in Austen's other novels. The play is an actual play, by Elizabeth Inchbald. Fanny quotes Scott and Sterne and mentions William Cowper. Just more of Austen filling in the scene. When do the Bennets or Dashwoods ever mention what they read? Maybe the parody novels - Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey - have more of this stuff than I recognize.

I think Austen's artistry makes a huge leap in the decade gap between the writing of the first three novels and the last three. Maybe not her art of creating characters - she never recreates Elizabeth Bennet - but her prose is richer and she's becomes more observant.

The next time I read Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility, I'll see if I can prove myself wrong.

The most likable character in all of literature

Elizabeth Bennet, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, is something along the lines of the most likable fictional person in history.* This is the source of Austen's unusual popularity, this is what all of her chick lit followers want to recreate.

Elizabeth's older sister Jane is prettier.** Her bookish younger sister Mary is smarter, though a fool ("Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how"). Elizabeth is witty, generous, kind, observant - all the sorts of things we wish we were. And if we don't identify ourselves with her, we know she'd be a great friend.

I hope this does not sound like some sortof mockery. It's not. Lots of writers - most great writers - create characters just as full and alive. Austen's own characters are among them. But how many of her readers love Austen for pathetic Fanny in Mansfield Park, or prickly Emma, or even sensible, self-sacrificing Anne Elliot? I like Elizabeth more, myself. "Most likable fictional person" - that's my own opinion, not an attempt to describe the opinion of others.

My problem here is that I either do not understand or do not respect her achievement, as large as it is. Compare Elizabeth to her predecessors, to Burney's Evelina or Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe, or Austens own Dashwoods. Something new is going on here, a real advance in fictional characterization. Or compare Austen to Scott or (early) Dickens, who can toss off brilliant minor characters by the fistful, but have enormous trouble creating interesting central characters.

Anyway, I don't fiction read to meet new friends. Tomorrow I will try to describe what I do look for, using Mansfield Park, which I think is a much greater artistic work than Pride and Prejudice. But it's much less loved, and doesn't have the likes of Elizabeth Bennet. I'm not sure any other novel does.

* Other candidates are welcome, since my ignorance is vast. And anyone who finds Jo from Little Women more likable, or Effi Briest, or David Copperfield, or Oskar Matzerath, should firmly stick with that position.

** Jane is very likable, too. So is Darcy, once he overcomes his pride (or is it prejudice?). The difference is, we love Elizabeth as soon as we meet her.

Poe - actually pretty good - "The Fall of the House of Usher"

Poe was first able to match his voice and subject in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by parodying real accounts of survival and adventure. His next insight, or accidental discovery, was that it was the nature of the subject that really mattered – it was the horrifying, unbelievable story that was well matched to his style.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) is where this discovery takes place, the earliest of his 8 or 9 most famous stories. Our nervous, stiff narrator visits his nervous, hysterical childhood friend, Roderick Usher, at his isolated Scottish mansion. Terrible things are suggested, terrible things occur. The narrator escapes to tell us about them. That’s the story, really. Poe’s stories have been so thoroughly ransacked by movies and horror stories that a modern reader may not find the results so shocking. I think it’s still effective, despite that, and sometimes despite Poe.

Here’s another example of Poe at his worst:

“I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment – that of looking down within the tarn – had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition – for why should I not so term it? – served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis.”

This is a long way from what I consider good writing, but there is some psychological effectiveness. Who would talk about being frightened in this way? What horrible trauma must this man have suffered to tell the story like this? What is he repressing?

In the end, the narrator turns to watch the mansion collapse into the lake. Here the action blends with the psychological state of the narrator:

“While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened – there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind – the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight – my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder – there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters – and the deep and dark tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher.’”

Some of this is ridiculous, too ("orb of the satellite"="moon"). But a lot of it is quite good, tense and effective (“deep and dark”, “sullenly and silently”). Whatever has destroyed the House of Usher has also damaged the mind of the narrator.

Why was it so difficult for Poe to find the right subject for his style? Why was his voice so fixed? Most – all? – great writers face the same problem, although many of them seem to work out the voice/subject synthesis simultaneously. The subject shapes the style, and vice versa, and by the time the reader sees the book the fit already seems natural, even obvious. With Poe’s history of publication, we can see the style develop in the service of nonsense and trivia, and then, surprisingly, find a home.

Edgar Allan Poe, not so bad after all

By 1838, Poe had been writing for 10 years without much success. He had developed a style that was convoluted, fussy, pedantic, and sometimes irritating. It turned out to work well in book reviews.

Not in the short stories he had been writing, though. Poe had tried all sorts of stories, including a surprising number of comic stories. Period pieces, almost all of them. The style Poe had developed was not suited to the material he was using. But with the story “MS Found in a Bottle”, and then The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe figured out or stumbled upon a type of story that suited his voice.

“MS Found in a Bottle” is the story of a shipwreck victim who finds himself on a ghost ship heading towards the Antarctic. Arthur Gordon Pym reworks the same material, with a mutiny, a plague ship, cannibalism, an undiscovered Antarctic island filled with savages and ancient secrets. Both are first person accounts, the narrator reporting on the strange things he encountered. Both break off at the same point, just as something really bizarre and mysterious happens.

In retrospect, this is the beginning of horror fiction. But Poe found his way into this sort of story by parodying another genre, the “true story” of survival and exploration. Pym owes a lot, for example, to the account of the 1,000 mile boat journey, with almost no food or water, of Captain Bligh and his crew after the Bounty mutiny, and to the similar boat trip of Owen Chase after an enraged whale sank his ship. Probably also to plenty of other accounts I don’t know. Add to this the accounts of exploration. Since Pym ends up in the Antarctic region, Captain Cook’s journey is specifically mentioned.

Poe borrows some subject matter and details from these books. But his real innovation was to borrow the voice. Horrible things happen to Chase and Bligh, but the accounts they wrote are very cool-headed. They can be emotional – sentimental or discouraged, for example - at certain points, but mostly they are professional. Captain Cook writes in the same way. So does Mungo Park, wandering around West Africa.

There are two things gong on here. First, the authors tell us so many things that are hard to believe that they have to adopt a tone that reinforces their trustworthiness. Second, these are the stories of the survivors. They made it home, so they can afford to just give us their version of the facts. If the people who did not make it home told us their story, they might not be so calm.

So Pym, who experiences all sorts of really horrible things, relates them to us in this detached, prolix manner - that’s how we get the scientific description of penguins nests, a chapter or two after he eats one of his fellow shipwreck survivors. But in this case, the events are so incredible that the cool manner of describing them actually increases the sense of horror. You wonder if the narrator is traumatized, or insane. How can he be so calm?

This destabilization is made worse by parts of the story that otherwise make no sense. Pym is hiding in the stowage of the ship, at risk of dying of thirst and the fumes, when he has a dream that he is in the Sahara, where he is attacked by a lion. He awakens to find his Newfoundland dog licking him. There is no reason his dog should be on the ship, and the explanation given later is preposterous. Read a certain way, this is incompetent storytelling. If we are allowed to doubt the narrator, it’s something else.

Poe had a bad ear for prose and a fussy voice that he did not know how to change. With Arthur Gordon Pym, he for the first time was able to adapt the material to the voice. It's his first great success, badly written in some ways, a strange triumph in others.

Edgar Allan Poe, worst writer in the canon

I remember Harold Bloom writing something like this, although I am probably paraphrasing. "In the canon" means he is still worth reading, and rereading. "Worst writer" means style. It means this:

"There can be no doubt, either, that the same result would ensue in the case of tobacco, while undergoing its usual course of fermentation, were it not for the interstices consequent upon the rotundity of the hogsheads."

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Chapter 6.

This is from a short novel that involves a stowaway, a mutiny, cannibalism, a ghostly plague ship, attacks by savages on uncharted islands, and so on. But also pedantic digressions on the stowage of tobacco and the arrangement of penguin nests:

"At each intersection of these paths the nest of an albatross is constructed, and a penguin's nest in the centre of each square - thus every penguin is surrounded by four albatrosses, and each albatross by a like number of penguins." Ch. 14.

There's about three pages describing birds. This is part of an interlude in the book where nothing happens.

I could put up dozens more awkward or silly sentences, but I'll stop. This is actually a good novel, but easy to ridicule.

Before Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe had been writing for about 10 years - poems, short stories, and book reviews. I don't think he had much to show for it. One decent story out of dozens ("MS Found in a Bottle", recycled in Pym), a few good poems (one great one, "The City in the Sea"), and a budding career as the most notorious book reviewer in America, the Tomahawk Man.

Rereading Arthur Gordon Pym, I now think this is where Poe really comes into his own as a writer. Tomorrow I'll see if I can show how he does it.

600 pages of aphorisms

As I read more Custine, it becomes easier to see why he's difficult to read than the typical travel writer. He is always striving for the pithy saying.

"To make a great nation is infallibly to create an architecture."

That's buried in the middle of a paragraph, when it should either begin or end one. Plus, I'm not sure it's true. His point is that the architecture of St. Petersburg is all borrowed from other countries, is not an authentic expression of the Russian culture. He's probably right about that.

Maxim de la Rochefoucauld and Nicolas de Chamfort are two of the greatest aphorists in history. Pascal and Voltaire weren't bad either. They make it look so easy. But they didn't bury their gems in 600 page tomes.

His rejected screech-owl Oration

Why read an antique, long, semi-accurate history of the French Revolution? Because Carlyle was a great writer.

A great stylist, really. He wrote at a very high rhetorical pitch, full of epic similes and exclamation points. Some passages sound like they should be declaimed. Except the weight is undercut by his irony and humor, to the extent that it’s often hard to tell if he means to be taken entirely seriously. (Or, as I suspect is the case with Sartor Resartus, it’s all meant seriously, and the irony is meant not to undercut the ideas but to conceal their outrageousness). Carlyle’s essay on Mirabeau, written around the same time as The French Revolution, is an extreme example of his style – one does not so much read as decode it.

An example of Carlyle at his best. It is the evening of the 8th of Thermidor. Robespierre and most of his allies will be dead within 48 hours. Here’s Carlyle:

“Robespierre, for his part, glides over at evening to his Jacobin House of Lords; unfolds there, instead of some adequate resolution, his woes, his uncommon virtues, incorruptibilities; then secondly, his rejected screech-owl Oration; - reads this latter over again; and declares that he is ready to die at a moment’s warning. Thou shalt not die! shouts Jacobinism from its thousand throats. ‘Robespierre, I will drink the hemlock with thee’, cries Painter David, ‘Je boirai la cigue avec toi’; - a thing not essential to do, but which, in the fire of the moment, can be said.”

Why look, there’s everything I mentioned. E.g., the epic similes: the “Jacobin House of Lords” in place of the Hall of the Jacobin Society, and “Jacobinism”, not an –ism at all but some group of assembled Jacobinists, certainly with fewer than 1,000 throats. The novelistic characterization is good, with Robespierre’s pettiness, ego, and self-pity deftly sketched. The last line is unusually zingy, almost an aphorism. Or a punchline.

I can read this sort of stuff at length with great gusto.

Modern Library edition, p. 692.