There is a dark shape whispering in her ear - Henry Longfellow's fine Salem witch trial verse play

In 1868 Henry Longfellow published a pair of blank verse plays on Puritan subjects, “John Endicott” and “Giles Corey of the Salem Farms,” together The New England Tragedies, that may not be the best works of Longfellow I have encountered but come close.  Scholar Lawrence Buell has championed the plays, presenting them intact in the Penguin Classics Selected Poems, where they take up 40 percent of the pages.  Buell had to sacrifice a lot of other poems to keep them, but they are worth it.

“John Endicott” is about Puritan persecution of Quakers, while “Giles Corey” is of course about the Salem witch trials.  I think I will just write about the latter, since the story is more familiar and more shocking.  For example (Martha Corey is on trial for witchcraft, Hathorne is the prosecutor, Mary the crazed accuser):

Mary:  There is a dark shape whispering in her ear.
Hathorne:  What does it say to you?
Martha:                                                      I see no shape.
Hathorne:  Did you not hear it whisper?
Martha:                                                        I heard nothing.
Mary:  What torture!  Ah, what agony I suffer.  (Falls into swoon)  (IV.1)

The blanks are there to help see the blank verse lines.  You can see that this is not exactly Shakespeare, but the monosyllables and broken lines are certainly tense and dramatic enough.  “Giles Corey” is easily the most exciting Longfellow I have read, although the witch trial material is so sure-fire that it may be cheating.

Maybe I should mention that I have not read Arthur Miller’s Crucible, although I have seen the 1996 film adaptation which I assume was quite different.  Many of the elements of the film could have been lifted directly from Longfellow, although I doubt they were.  As drama, Longfellow’s conflicts were similarly interesting to those in the film; as language Longfellow takes the prize.

Because, after all, sometimes he does sidle up to Shakespeare:

Tituba:  Here's monk's-hood, that breeds fever in the blood;
And deadly nightshade, that makes men see ghosts;
And henbane, that will shake them with convulsions;
And meadow-saffron and black hellebore,
That rack the nerves, and puff the skin with dropsy;
And bitter-sweet, and briony, and eye-bright,
That cause eruptions, nosebleed, rheumatisms;
I know them, and the places where they hide
In field and meadow; and I know their secrets,
And gather them because they give me power
Over all men and women.  (I.1)

As much as I like this, though, re-reading it I can see the limits.  The rhythm is deft, the syllables juicy and fun to read aloud, but where is the surprise – where is the word that is out of place yet exactly right?  Something like “Witch's mummy, maw and gulf / Of the ravin'd salt-sea shark.”  Now I am whining that this expertly assembled and surprisingly entertaining Longfellow play is not Macbeth.  No, it is altogether plainer and saner, in both language and conception, and is merely Longfellow at his best, or close to it.

Longfellow and the poetics of bird defense in America - the ceaseless fusillade of terror

It’s always the same story when I return to boring, stuffy, old-fashioned, simple-minded Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:  “This is a lot better than I expected.”  You think I would learn sometime, although some of the fault might lie with Longfellow.

In the plus column, Longfellow is among the deftest versifiers to ever write in English; the biggest minus is that he had no ideas of any originality so expended much of his talent on well-made versions of banalities.  But in the end it is the exceptions that survive.  So I will celebrate Book Blogger Appreciation Week by writing about some of Longfellow’s exceptions.  Since no one wants to read about Longfellow, the posts will be eminently skippable and skimmable, thus allowing my valued readers to get off the dang internet earlier than usual.  No, no, thank you!

In “The Birds of Killingworth,” a New England town decides it has had enough with their thievery and racket and votes to kill all the birds in town.  I see that two of the poems eight pages are devoted to a defense of the birds, not all that interesting.  No, it is the massacre that is interesting:

And so the dreadful massacre began;
    O’er fields and orchards, and o’er woodland crests,
The ceaseless fusillade of terror ran.
    Dead fell the birds, with blood-stains on their breasts,
Or wounded crept away from sight of man,
    While the young died of famine in their nests;
A slaughter to be told in groans, not words,
The very Saint Bartholomew of Birds!

As much as I enjoy singing along with Longfellow, he also spurs me to argue with him, and what is the point of that, so I will just say that the best lines are more in the middle of the stanza than at the beginning or end, the Fs and Ds and Ss (“ceaseless fusillade”), and the horrible image of the crawling wounded birds.

Anyway, the best part is what happens without the birds, a Dantean hell on earth, some of it ecologically plausible, some more fanciful:

The Summer came, and all the birds were dead;
    The days were like hot coals; the very ground
Was burned to ashes; in the orchards fed
    Myriads of caterpillars, and around
The cultivated fields and garden-beds
    Hosts of devouring insects crawled, and found
No foe to check their march, till they had made
The land a desert without leaf or shade.

Actually, this is the best part of the best part:

From the trees spun down
    The canker-worms upon the passers-by,
Upon each woman’s bonnet, shawl and gown,
    Who shook them off with just a little cry;

Longfellow does not have a satisfactory ending to the tale, so I will just spend a minute enjoying the Song of the Canker-worms.  As the narrator said in that Jacques Poulin novel, “we must embrace the author’s style.”  I assume that the current cohort of eco-critics have made great use of this surprising environmental parable in verse.

Actually, I could look that up in the MLA International Bibliography.  Hmm, one article, “The Poetics of Bird Defense in America, 1860-1918” (in Poetry After Cultural Studies, 2011), Angela Sorby.  One article since 1947.  Listen, eco-critics, you’re missing a sure thing here.  Sheesh.

We must embrace the author’s style - the infinite resources of language - Translation Is a Love Affair

We translators have a strange job.  Don’t think that all we have to do is find the words and phrases that best correspond with the source text.  We have to go further, pour ourselves into the other person’s writing  the way a cat curls up in a basket.  We must embrace the author’s style.  (40)

Who was recently asking for novels about translators?  Here is one from Quebec, Translation Is a Love Affair (2006) by Jacques Poulin, nimbly translated by Sheila Fischman.  A young translator, Marine, finds a stray cat which leads her and the crotchety author she is translating into a warm-hearted adventure.  Translation offers some metaphors for human connection.  I am just going to ignore all of that, the story and so on, although I appreciate the effort to correct the strange neglect of cats in fiction, to look at the short novel’s style.

The fictional author, in a fictional interview:

On what then should the contemporary novel be based? asked the interviewer [“the human soul” and “society” have been rejected as outmoded].  On the infinite resources of language! replied Monsieur Waterman in an impassioned voice…  he constructed a theory of the novel that I wasn’t sure I fully grasped.  He saw the novel as a house built with materials from the past (the dead ash) and from the future (fertile pollen).  To construct it, the most important tool was, of course, style.  (92-3)

How odd, then, or so it seemed at times, that Translation Is a Love Affair is an exemplar of the plain style:

The telephone was in the kitchen.  As soon as I set him down, the cat headed for Chaloupe’s bowls.  I gave him a big handful of dry food and a bowl of cold water, then I dialed the number on the collar.  (8)

Declarative sentences, little adornment, ordinary metaphors.  If the cat is “black as a stove” the narrator means it literally (“I am a translator, I love words”, 3).  Alternatively – this just came to me – Poulin deliberately throws the cliché right after that declaration of metaphorical principle in order to show that his narrator has trouble living up to her own standards.  Regardless, the novel is full of maddeningly plain-spoken passages.  “The grocer put our groceries in a plastic bag” (96)

Although her narration is mostly thin and compressed, Marine also plays with words in her ordinary life, testing out near synonyms, comparing French and English for shades of sound and meaning, looking up even common words in her Petit Robert. Marine is somehow matching her prose style to her life (see especially Chapter XIV, in which Marine temporarily abandons the plain style - the chapter's title is "A Night of Horror").  It is the fictional novelist’s style, too:

In the chapter I was translating, which was the last one, Monsieur Waterman had taken out every useless word, he’d punctuated carefully, and I was trying to be faithful to him.  Like Milena [Kafka’s Milena!], I wanted my words to hug the curves of his writing.”  (143, in the last chapter of Poulin’s novel, of course)

Marine also wants her words to hug the curves of her life.

Other readers may well enjoy the story of the stray cat and its consequences, one of those stories about how a family-substitute assembles, and wonder what all of this nonsense about style is doing in Poulin’s novel.

The phantoms had passed away - Giovanni Verga's metafictional love affair

It occurs to me that I can make up for my illness-evaporated post with a final Giovanni Verga piece written write now.  That it took me this long to come up with this idea suggests that I have not entirely recovered.   I can write about Verga’s metafiction.

Little Novels of Sicily does not tell a story, I would not say that.  I assume that the stories were, for the most part, originally published in magazines or newspapers, but I do not know that.  Whatever the reason, design or variety, the world Verga is reporting on or creating quickly fills out.  One story is about a priest, another about gentlemen; one about daily life, another about a festival.  In “So Much for the King,” a peasant cab-driver – except the cab is a litter carried between two mules – is hired to carry the Queen of the Two Sicilies.  In a number of places, Verga reminds me that the stories are all set before the unification of Italy, before the massive changes of revolution and emigration, although a coda sometimes carries the story past 1860.  That priest, for example, “had to hide in a hole like a rat, because the peasants… wanted to do him in.”

The revolution comes in the next to last story, “Liberty,” when the peasants turn on their oppressors, real and theoretical, and one kind of injustice is violently replaced with another.

Day broke: a Sunday with nobody in the square, and no mass ringing.  The sexton had burrowed into his hiding hole; there were no more priests.  The first-comers that began to gather on the sacred threshold looked one another in the face suspiciously; each one thinking of what his neighbor must have on his conscience.

If you get the comedy of Verga at all, that last line, “his neighbor,” is hilarious.  Maybe there is a sort of narrative, and this is how it ends, or begins again.

But there is one story left in the book, “Across the Sea.”  A man and a woman (“wrapped up in her furs”) are on a steamer approaching Sicily.  He is clearly in the middle of an attempt at seduction.  Although a “sad Sicilian folksong” can be heard nearby, we have clearly moved into a different kind of story.

As they near Sicily, the woman asks the man to point out the famous features, and he does, the mountains, the olive groves, and something more:

It was as if all those places were peopled with people out of a legend, as he pointed them out to her one by one.  Thereabouts the malaria; on that slope of Etna the village where Liberty burst out like a vendetta; below, beyond, the humble dramas of the Mystery Play, and the ironic injustice of Don Licciu Papa.

Earlier stories are titled “Malaria,” “Liberty,” “The Mystery Play,” and “Don Licciu Papa” – why, this fellow is our author!  Once in Sicily, he revisits the scenes of his tales, although almost everyone is gone – “[t]he phantoms had passed away.”  The love affair sputters along.  The story ends with a farewell to Verga’s lover and to his Sicilian characters, and with a metaphor that makes this out-of-place story clear:  the writing of the brutal, miserable Little Novels of Sicily was itself a kind of love affair.

They know how to read and write – that’s the trouble - comic Giovanni Verga

I do not remember if it is where I first heard of Giovanni Verga, but a 2003 James Wood article from The New Republic is what caught my attention.  This was back before Wood sold his freedom to The New Yorker, when he could write about Verga just because he wanted to, with no of-the-moment publishing hook, no new biographies or translations.  My favorite Wood piece, maybe.  He works through a couple of stories not in Little Novels of Sicily which I have not read, “Jeli the Shepherd” and “Rosso Malpelo.”

Wood argues that the comic effect of Verga comes directly from the pitilessness of the narrator, from the very fact that the narrator seems to be embedded within the world of the stories.  The less he questions this values of the world, the more the reader wants to question them.  “Thus Verga’s fiction is peculiar because his characters are not free – they are all i vinti [the defeated], and the narrator knows it – but his readers are free to resist such determinism, and are indeed slyly encouraged to do so by Verga’s very narration.”  The narrator is just tellin’ it like it is – I mean, just look at these people! – but I can say no.

I suppose I can resist resisting and just take Verga as a chronicler of injustice.  The priests are as bad as the peasants, who are as bad as the gentry, who are not that far from becoming peasants themselves:

They know how to read and write – that’s the trouble.  The white frost  of dark winter dawns and the burning dog days of harvesttime fall upon them as upon every other poor devil, since they’re made of flesh and blood like their fellow men, and since they’ve got to go out and watch to see that their fellow man doesn’t rob them of his time and of his day’s pay.  But if you have anything to do with them, they hook you by your name and surname, and the names of those that begot you and bore you, with the beak of that pen of theirs, and then you’ll never get yourself out of their ugly books anymore, nailed down by debt.

“The Gentry” begins with this paragraph.  The rich landowners, the people who are called Don So-and-so, they are the “they,” not the narrator, and not “you,” meaning me.  I guess I am one of the peasants, or should imagine that I am.  But the story is in this case about one of the Dons, Don Piddu, whose misfortunes (“failure of crops, mortality among his cattle, his wife sick, his daughters all marriageable, handsome, and ready”) are as bad as those of the peasants.  Maybe he can get rid of one of the daughters by “den[ying] himself the bread of his mouth to take his daughter to the party in a silk dress open in front as low as her heart,” but it is too late and he goes bust, “and when the peasants disputed with him, they left out the Don and called him plainly thou.”

Like “Malaria,” this nine-page story still has the tales of two more characters to cover.  It ends with a grim punchline on an advantage of knowing how to read and write.

The Wood article is now in The Irresponsible Self (2004); the quotation is from p. 128.  That “sold his freedom” thing was just a bitter joke!

The malaria doesn't finish everybody - a peculiar Verga masterpiece

And you feel you could touch it with your hand – as if it smoked up from the fat earth, there, everywhere, round about the mountains that shut it in, from Agnone to Mount Etna capped with snow – stagnating in the plain like the sultry heat of June.

"It" is the malaria.  I want to go back to “Malaria” – that’s the story’s first sentence – because it is unusual.  It shows off one of Verga’s tricks.  Plus, “smoked up from the fat earth,” that’s good stuff right there.  Verga is obviously working with a miasma theory of disease.

The story starts without a character, unless I (“you”) count.  I guess I do.  Verga wants to fill me in on this condition if Sicilian life.  A sick shepherd soon appears, and some sick villagers who “tremble with  fever under their brown cloaks, with all the bed blankets over their shoulders.”  Any writer could have come up with the cloaks, but the blankets suggest a good eye.  They are out of place in the heat of these first few pages, “roads wasted by the sun…  two heaps of smoking dung…  coruscations of sparks” – the latter from a train.  We’ve gone a couple of pages, and now a “donkey lets his head hang…  the dog rises suspiciously.”  A human should appear soon, since the story is only eight pages long.

Six to go.  Ah, I see, the people were waiting for the heat to dissipate.  At sundown “sunburned men appear in the doorways… and half-naked women, with blackened shoulders, suckling babes that are already pale and limp, so that you can’t imagine that they’ll ever get big and swarthy and romp on the grass when winter comes again, and the yard floor will be green once more, and the sky blue, and the country all around laughing in the sun.”  Perhaps this is more of a sketch about the oppressive effects of this disease than a narrative.

No, here is a name, Farmer Croce, who got caught by the malaria after thirty years of “swallowing sulfate and eucalyptus decoction.”  His story just takes a couple of paragraphs, then it is on to Neighbor Carmine who lost all five of his children.  The parents lived on, after a page or so of narrative – the loss of the last boy is especially sad, but “[t]he malaria doesn’t finish everybody.”

Which brings us to Cirino the simpleton, who is frequently stricken by a malarial attack, knocked right off his feet, but always recovers, even though – now I am interpreting the narrator’s tone – it hardly seems fair, since Cirino has nothing and nobody.  Why does he get to live?

A little transition now to an innkeeper who has lost four wives to malaria and is looking for a fifth.  The stories within the story lengthen as we near the end, so poor Killwife gets more than two pages, ending with a vision of “[a]ll the other people on the plain,” the ones who come from somewhere else on the train that has ruined his inn, the people who are healthy:

Then the train lost itself in the vast mist of the evening, and the poor fellow, taking off his shoes for a moment, and sitting on the bench, muttered, “Ah! For that lot there isn’t any malaria!”

I do not believe I have read another story quite like it, excepting some of the others in Little Novels of Sicily.

This was an injustice on God’s part - introducing Giovanni Verga's Little Novels of Sicily

In an irritating but inevitable Wuthering Expectations first, I missed a post because, staggered by illness, I was too weak to write or even read.  Evidence suggests I am again capable of writing, although I suspect I am still too weak to think.

I have no complaints, though, since I was not afflicted with typhoid, or worse, the malaria, as are so many of the Sicilians Giovanni Verga writes about in his comic 1883 masterpiece Little Novels of Sicily:

And truly the malaria gets into you with the bread you eat, or if you open your mouth to speak as you walk, suffocating in the dust and sun of the roads, and you feel your knees give way beneath you, or you sink discouraged on the saddle as your mule ambles along, with its head down.  (“Malaria”)

They had it rough, those Sicilians back then, before the big wave of American emigration.  “During the ‘fifties and ‘sixties,” writes translator D. H. Lawrence in his introduction to the book, “Sicily is said to have been the poorest place in Europe: absolutely penniless.”  I might want a qualifier or two to remove that “is said,” but they would be reasonable qualifiers.

Verga, in a long career, wrote other books about other walks of life, sentimental romances and so on, but it is his cluster of books about Sicilian peasants that have lasted, both in Italy and abroad:  The House by the Medlar Tree (1881), Mastro Don Gesualdo (1889), and more short stories, including “Cavalleria Rusticana” (1880), the source of the opera (I have not read any of these, not yet).  The advocacy and skillful translations of Lawrence have surely helped keep Verga alive, up to a point, in English.  Stylistically, I do not see all that much in common with Lawrence, but all of the misery and brutality and hopelessness likely reminded him of home.  Zola is another connection that seems more theoretical than stylistic.

Now, Chekhov, that one I can hear, even though the two authors worked without knowledge of each other.  Facing similar problems, they developed similar tools: distant narrators, a sense of ironic comedy in the face of the most horrifying tragedy, and a sparse use of fancy language.  Verga has a touch of Sholem Aleichem in him too, when he gets close to his characters:

Only one thing grieved him, and that was that he was beginning to get old, and he had to leave the earth there behind him.  This was an injustice on God’s part, that after having slaved one’s life away getting property together, when you’ve got it, and you’d like some more, you have to leave it behind you.  And he remained for hours sitting on a small basket, with his chin in his hands, looking at his vineyards growing green beneath his eyes, and his fields of ripe wheat waving like a sea, and the olive groves veiling the mountains like a mist, and if a half-naked boy passed in front of him, bent under his load like a tired ass, he threw his stick at his legs, out of envy, and muttered: “Look at him with his length of days in front of him ; him who’s got nothing to bless himself with!”  (“Property”)

Verga has his own tricks, though, some good, good tricks, which if I am lucky I will write about later.  I used the word “comic” up above and will perhaps return to it if I ever get my thinking cap on straight again.

The Relic's vision - to see this page of the Gospel living before my eyes

Teodorico finds his relic about halfway through The Relic, and then something strange happens.  He has a dream which takes him to the Jerusalem of the distant past, to a particular Easter Day, “to see this page of the Gospel living and sounding before my eyes” (97).  Teodorico is going to witness the trial and death of Jesus Christ.

A dream with this length and specificity is not really a dream, but a vision.  I have been emphasizing the comedy of the novel, but this long episode is not, a few little touches aside, at all funny.  It aims at something like genuine religious awe.  It is also heretical, but that is a point separate from the aesthetic decision to crack the novel apart.  The vision of Jerusalem fills over a third of the novel.  It is not a digression.

The dream world is thickly described:

A slave, his hair bound by a metal diadem, entered carrying a jar filled with warm water smelling of roses, in which I cleansed my hands; another offered me cakes of honey on large vine leaves; another poured out a strong black wine of Emmaus.  And that his guest might not eat alone, Gamaliel cut a slice of pomegranate and with closed eyes raised to his lips a bowl in which pieces of ice floated among orange-flowers…  I lit a cigar and went to stand at the window. (113)

I picked that passage for the cigar as much as anything, one of the anachronisms that slip into the scene to remind us that something ain’t quite right.

All of this description, of food and architecture and perfumes and sunshades made of peacock feathers, remind me that Eça de Queirós is as usual deliberately imitating Gustave Flaubert.  The Relic, or this one part of it, is Eça’s Salammbô, his Hérodias – he even tells his own version of the history of Herod and Salomé and John the Baptist.  That one is the obvious nod, I guess, but compare Eça’s description of the sacrifice of the Passover lambs to Flaubert’s nightmarish human sacrifices to Moloch:

With the constant austere mutter of the sacred ceremonial mingled the bleating of lambs, the tinkling of silver plates, the crackling of wood, the dull thud of wooden hammers, the slow trickling of water into marble vessels and the blare of trumpets.  Despite the aromatic gums kept burning and the long fans of palm leaves which the attendants were waving in the air, I put my handkerchief to my face, overcome by the enervating smell of raw flesh, blood, frying fat and saffron which the Lord required of Moses as the best gift of earth.  (152)

Eça hardly dwells on the cruelty of the sacrifice as much as Flaubert.  His description of Christ’s suffering, for example, is strong but not sadistic.  The great point of the vision is to historicize the life of Christ, to explain and abolish the miracles of the Church.  Teodorico moves from religious awe to human sympathy.  Fortunately, back in the real world it takes him a while for what he learned to sink in, which allows the comedy to return in the last quarter of the book.  The mix of tones, the social comedy and parody combined with the humane spiritual message of the vision, is pretty strange, an is the great mystery of The Relic.

Dwight covers the same chapter.  It is unusual.

Monday is a holiday for me, so no post.

The soothing presentiment that Auntie would soon die and molder in her grave - The Relic takes its hypocrisy on the road

A couple of major jolts to the plot occur about one-seventh of the way into The Relic – the one-seventh mark is not where good novel-writing principle says to put a major turn, but The Relic is a strangely structured novel – and Teodorico learns that in all likelihood his rich Auntie will leave her wealth to the Church, not to him.  He amps up his pious act (“in Auntie’s presence I ascetically drank a glass of water and ate a crust of bread”) between visits to his kept woman (33).  His piety impresses his aunt who offers him – or demands – a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and the acquisition of a holy relic.

“What a tremendous bore!  Jerusalem!” (47)  He wanted to go to Paris.  But Teodorico quickly realizes the opportunity at hand as he begins to imagine, what else, the exotic prostitutes.  Teodorico is not just a character in a Portuguese Flaubert novel – he is almost a Portuguese Flaubert.  I occasionally wondered if Eça de Queirós had somehow seen some of Flaubert’s letters from Egypt, the ones about his uninhibited sexual adventures, but that seems impossible, and Teodorico is completely unlike Flaubert in that he is a sentimental sensualist who falls in love with his fling.

The novel now turns into a kind of travel book, although Teodorico, more interested in women than culture or history, is a bad guide.  He barely sees Egypt – barely leaves his new companion’s bedroom.  Jerusalem is mostly the source of complaints:  dirt, boredom, tourist traps.  He does find his relic: a branch of a thorn tree, surely the same kind of tree that supplied Christ’s crown of thorns, possibly even the exact tree, prove that it ain’t.  In a peculiarly Proustian passage a suspicious Teodorico interrogates the tree:

The monster remained dumb, but suddenly I felt within my soul, like the consoling freshness of a summer breeze, the soothing  presentiment that Auntie would soon die and molder in her grave.  The Tree of Thorns, through the general communication of Nature, sent from its sap into my blood the sweet announcement of Dona Patrocinio’s death, as a sufficient promise that none of its branches, when transferred to the oratory, would prevent the horrible old lady’s liver from being the death of her.  (93)

What Teodorico does not realize – as the narrator, writing in retrospect, he must, but he plays dumb – is that 1) the thorn branch is not the first but actually the second relic he has acquired, the first something rather more secular he picked up in Egypt, and 2) the branch, and the other relic, too, are genuinely capable of miracles.  I count three between them (the relics have to cooperate on one of the miracles). 

Miracle # 2 is the final big plot twist, one that is visible many pages earlier and almost painful to see approach, although when I consider that the victim of the twist is the one writing the book the pain of the false tension becomes psychologically interesting.  #3 comes when Teodorico hits bottom, allowing him to Learn His Lesson, not a lesson that I was expecting.  The Relic is essentially pro-hypocrisy:  the right hypocrisy for the right reason.

Then there is Miracle #1.  That’s the wild one.  So that’s tomorrow.

Heavens, what a good smell of church - the hypocrisies of The Relic by Eça de Queirós

I have never read a novel like The Relic, the peculiar 1887 masterpiece by José Maria Eça de Queirós.  It is both one thing and another.  Both things are good.  The meshing of the things is unique.  I would like to think that with some effort I could come up with a more precise word than “things.”

Teodorico is an orphan, now an adult, dependent for everything on his horrible Auntie who is not merely pious but a religious fanatic, while Teodorico is a sensualist.  A sample of awful Auntie:

In her presence the prudent friends of the house had learnt not to mention interesting stories read in the newspapers revealing a love motive, since they scandalized her like a naked offence.  “Padre Pinheiro,” she called out one day furiously with blazing eyes to the luckless priest, on hearing him tell of  a servant girl in France who had thrown her child into a drain.  “Padre Pinheiro, be good enough to respect me.  It is not the drain, it is the child that disgusts me.”  (27)

With Auntie, Teodorico is a hypocrite and liar, waiting for her to die, spending his allowance on operas and a favorite prostitute.  He always goes to Mass before visiting her in the hope that one of Auntie’s friends will observe his devotion.  He carries incense in his pocket and, after an amorous evening:

I would go furtively into the deserted stables at the further end of the courtyard and on the lid of a barrel burn a piece of the holy resin, and remain there bathing in its purifying odor the lapels of my coat and my manly beard.  Then I went up and had the satisfaction of hearing Auntie sniff delightedly and say: “Heavens, what a good smell of church”; and with a modest shrug I would murmur: “It is I, Auntie.” (27)

Much of the comedy of the novel comes from the baldness, the purity of Teodorico’s hypocrisy.  I was on to him, I thought.  Soon he will slip up and reveal that he is The Unreliable Narrator.  But no, he is in fact completely reliable.  Whoever he thinks he is telling his story to – himself, a future reader, who knows – is getting the truth.  The fun, then, is the contrast between the secret truth, which I am in on, and the lie that is the rest of his life.  I’m sure rigging the novel the other way would be fun, too, but this is fine.

This puts me about one-seventh of the way into  the novel.  Maybe I will have to write about it for six more days.

The Relic was reissued a few months ago by Tagus Press; the translation, by Aubrey Bell, is from 1925.  I have no doubt that the more recent Margaret Jull Costa translation is as good or better, but this one is fine.  I had meant to read The Relic back during the Great Portuguese Event, but I had run myself ragged.  My energy has returned, so I’ll spend another day or two, not six, with Eça.

She was, by now, in the throes of a particularly revolting literary seizure - Gary fights for the honor of the French uniform

I hadn’t really planned on spending more time with Romain Gary’s Promise at Dawn, but I got caught just leafing through it.  The structure is episodic both in the childhood and wartime sections, so it is easy to fall upon particularly enjoyable adventures.

Gary is in England, flying with the Free French.  It is 1940, during the Battle of Britain.  He has discovered that he has made a mistake at a London dance hall:

On the second day, while a more than usually violent raid was in progress, I found myself in the company of a young poetess from Chelsea…  My lady friend was a great disappointment for she never stopped talking and talking about T. S. Eliot, and about Ezra Pound and Auden, into the bargain, gazing at me with blue eyes literally sparkling with imbecility.  (Ch. 36)

Kissing provides only a temporary respite because “I was obliged, after a while, to abandon her mouth in order to breathe – and off she went again about E. E. Cummings and Walt Whitman.”  Gary thinks about faking an epileptic seizure (“it had worked before in similar circumstances”) and tries to fob her off on a series of Polish officers hoping that “with a little luck my Ezra Pound might find other points of contact besides literature, and I would be rid of her.”  But she always returns, “embark[ing] upon a dissertation on the symbolism in Finnegans Wake.”

Meanwhile, the rest of the officers in the nightclub are interpreting events a little differently – those Poles are stealing a French officer’s girl!  The “prestige” of the French uniform must be defended:

“Well what next?” I asked them.

“Duel!” barked one of the three lieutenants.

“Nothing doing,” I told them.  “No more audience, blackout everywhere, no more spectators, so no more need for heroics.  Get that, you stupid asses?”

“All Frenchmen are cowards,” stated the second lieutenant, with a polite Polish bow.

“All right: duel,” I said.

I mentioned yesterday that Promise at Dawn is in part about the Lithuanian Jewish Gary becoming French.  Here we witness a step in the process.  Heck if they don’t fight a duel, in a hotel corridor, in the middle of a massive air raid that could pulverize them at any time, all in the company of Ezra Pound:

She was, by now, in the throes of a particularly revolting literary seizure, and, raising her moist eyes to mine, kept murmuring, in erotic undertones:

“You are going to kill a man!  I can feel it!  You are going to kill a man!”

But of course he will do no such thing, “because Mickiewicz was a great poet but also because I did not want to get into trouble.”  The whole episode, which with some minor adjustments, might as well come from a Dumas novel.  It is funny, has several little twists I have omitted, and is extremely French.

I am not convinced I gave a good sense of the Gary’s voice yesterday.  This should do it – “eyes literally sparkling with imbecility” is representative.  I could do this several more times and cover Gary’s idealism, his fatalism, and of course the center of the book, his deep love for his titanic mother.  But the comedy and derring-do should be enough.  If this scene sounds good, the rest of the book ought to work out all right for you.

You are going to be an Ambassador of France; your mother knows what she is saying - Romain Gary's Promise at Dawn

Promise at Dawn, Romain Gary, 1960.  A novel disguised as an autobiography, or a memoir packed with amusing lies.  Emma of Book Around the Corner loves Gary and suggested I read this one, given that it is funny, revealing, dramatic, and features one superb character, Gary’s irrepressible, smothering, preposterous mother – the book is worth reading just for her, honestly.  Emma has written a number of pieces about Gary; the one about a stage adaptation of Promise at Dawn contains lots of good information that I can now skip.

Yet as good as the book is, I am having trouble approaching it.  One reason is the subject matter.  The novel is roughly split two-thirds childhood and school years, one-third World War II.  The latter is exceptionally interesting, but do you see a lot about WWII at Wuthering Expectations?  The other problem is that nobody ever talks about Gary.  By “nobody” I of course mean writers in the literary magazines I have been reading for twenty-five years.  Well-read Francophiles like litlove know his work.  The strange thing is that Gary was once a best-selling author in the United States, a reasonably big deal.  What happened to his reputation here (he is still a big deal in France)?  Have I been reading the wrong magazines?  I should have picked up a received opinion by now, one that I can test when I actually bother to read Gary’s books.  That’s the way literature is supposed to work, right?  Why did no one tell me what to think?

The central line of the book is Gary’s mother's work to make her son a man, and French, and also a great artist of some sort.  They settle on writer after some misfires:

The singing lessons were discreetly abandoned.  I heard one of my coaches refer to me as “the child prodigy”: he claimed that he had never in his life seen a youngster so completely devoid of ear, voice or talent.  (Ch. 13)

Since Gary began life as a Lithuanian Jew, even the journey to Frenchness is complicated enough:

From the age of eight, whenever we hit on difficult times – and we seldom hit on anything else – my mother would come and sit opposite me, her face weary and a haunted expression in her eyes.  She would smoke a cigarette, look at me for a long time with a knowing and satisfied eye, and state with calm assurance:  “You are going to be an Ambassador of France; your mother knows what she is saying.”

All the same, one thing puzzles me.  Why didn’t she ever make me President of the Republic while she was at it?  (Ch. 13)

And heck if Gary – the real Gary, not just the one in the novel – does not become a French ambassador, win France’s highest honors during the war, and win the Prix Goncourt not once but twice, the second award the result of a hard-to-believe hoax, all of it – all but that second prize which comes later, after Promise at Dawn – urged on him by his amazing mother.

Thanks, Emma, for the recommendation and the advocacy!  Lots more people should read Promise at Dawn.  The title’s kind of fuzzy, so there is a criticism.

Realists are people who think reality isn’t how you think it is. - Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos

Another kind of fantasy novel, a new one: Down the Rabbit Hole (2010, tr. Rosalind harvey), the tiny first novel by Mexican author Juan Pablo Villalobos.  It is narrated by a boy named Tochtli (“rabbit” in Nahuatl) who is – here is the big fantasy conceit – the only son of a Mexican druglord.  He lives in a bizarre world where every ordinary value is inverted and every material comfort is instantly available.  Or almost every comfort, since Tochtli’s demand for a Liberian pygmy hippopotamus is complicated even for a narcotics kingpin.  Not impossible – the characters spend the middle of the book in Liberia – but challenging.

Some voice – the whole novel is voice:

Yolcaut is my daddy, but he doesn’t like it when I call him Daddy.  He says we’re the best and most macho gang for at least eight kilometres.  Yolcaut is a realist and that’s why he doesn’t say we’re the best gang in the universe or the best gang for 8,000 kilometres. Realists are people who think reality isn’t how you think it is.  Yolcaut told me that.  Reality is like this and that’s it.  Tough luck.  The realist’s favourite saying is you have to be realistic.  (4-5)

Yolcaut = rattlesnake, a footnote informs me.  Does the voice sound like that of a seven year-old?  How about a seven year-old who is obsessed with vocabulary words?

What happens is I have a trick, like magicians who pull rabbits out of hats, except that I pull words out of the dictionary.  Every night before I go to sleep I read the dictionary.  My memory, which is really good, practically devastating, does the rest.  (3)

Alice merely visits the world down the rabbit hole; the rabbit lives there.  Tochtli’s off-kilter facility with language is one of many nods to Lewis Carroll, although the novel hardly has the linguistic dazzle of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Through the Looking-Glass.  Of course if Alice had narrated those books they would sound quite different.

That line above has the rabbit paired with the hat, so that’s a nod to Carroll.  Tochtli’s second obsession is hats (“I don’t think I’m odd for wearing a hat”).  Amusingly, the hippopotamus is also a reference, an obscure one.  Each of the Alice books contains exactly one mention of a hippopotamus, both pretty arbitrary, used, I assume, because the word is fun to say and the beast is fun to imagine, but incongruous enough for me to notice them when I revisited Carroll recently.

Another Carroll reference gets right at the power of Villalobos’s little book.  Tochtli is young enough to be genuinely innocent, but the world he lives in is a violent nightmare.  His father is a psychopath and anyone he meets is likely to suffer a bloody death.  No surprise that Tochtli is fascinated by beheadings, but through the safe distance of history, by means of the samurai sword in Japan or the guillotine in Revolutionary France.

The Queen turned crimson with fury, and, after glaring at her for a moment like a wild beast, screamed 'Off with her head! Off –'

'Nonsense!' said Alice, very loudly and decidedly, and the Queen was silent.

But that's not how things work down Tochtli's rabbit hole.

Idly checking Amazon, I see that Down the Rabbit Hole is due for an American release in October.  The copy I read was purchased in England (see spelling of “kilometres” above) and smuggled into the United States.  If I were a professional critic I would embargo this review, but I ain’t and it’s done been wrote so off it goes.

In which I enjoy the Victorian Hugo Awards

A little tribute to amateurism today.  Jess Nevins is a librarian and the author of a 1,200 page Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana along with a huge amount of comic book annotations.  A great reader of old-timey clever conceits, Nevins came up with one of his own:  the Victorian Hugo Awards, which I would like to call the Victor Hugos.

The actual Hugos are the premier English-language science fiction and fantasy fan award but “[u]nfortunately,” Nevins says in his first column, “they've only been awarded since 1953,” so, a genuine expert, he hands out his own.  So far he has novel and short story Hugos awarded for 1885 through 1891. Nevins has to consider not just the quality of the works, but their reception, their popularity and prestige.  Along the way, he tells the shadow story of how the genres and audiences coalesce.  It is all enormously informative.

I mean, as far as the nominees and winners go, Nevins is making it all up.  He has read all of these books and accumulated all of this information.  The Victor Hugos are a way to play with what he knows.

The winners so far (novel; short story):

1885:  Jules Verne, Mathias Sandorf, Jules Verne; Margaret Oliphant, “The Open Door”
1886:  H. Rider Haggard, She; Ambrose Bierce, “Can Such Things Be?”
1887:  Haggard, Allan Quatermain; Vernon Lee, “Amour Dure”
1888:  Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward; Mrs. Riddell, “The Last of Squire Ennismore”
1889:  Marie Corelli, Ardath; Mrs. Riddell, “A Terrible Vengeance”
1890:  Ignatius Donelly, Caesar’s Column; Guy de Maupassant ,“La Horla”
1891:  Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; Henry James, “Sir Edmund Orme”

The mix of obscurities and canonical titans is the first thing that I notice, and more still-famous names appear if I move to the other nominees – Robert Louis Stevenson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Rudyard Kipling, After London (which “would have been the deserving winner”), Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, E. T. A. Hoffmann (works are eligible the year they are published in English), William Morris.  And of course dozens of semi-forgotten writers.

Nevins does not hesitate to identify duds – he calls Marie Corelli’s Ardath, about a poet who travels back in time to ancient Babylon to restore his poetic genius, “a bad book with nary a redeeming quality to it; it is self-indulgent to the point of mania, laughable in its attempts at profundity, and an unwitting self-parody.”  Corelli was likely the best-selling fiction writer of her time.

He notes injustices, too (ignore that Nevins also creates them).  What else came out in 1886, when the laughable She won the Victorian Hugo?

She would have won the 1886 Hugo, but Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was the more deserving of the two.  She is a great read, vivid, memorable, and packed with a surprising amount of Haggard's fin-de-siecle pessimism, but there's a reason that Jekyll and Hyde is in the literary canon and She is not.  Jekyll and Hyde is better written and more complex symbolically and psychologically.  She is good fun; Jekyll and Hyde is good literature.

I have read She and found it close to idiotic.  That Nevins is able to mount a reasonable defense of Haggard shows why he is the expert, not I.  I would not have the patience.  But I still love to learn about some new possibilities to read and the literary oddballs who I will leave to the specialists.  The anti-Bellamy dystopia Caesar’s Column sounds unreadable, but I am happy to know that its author Ignatius Donnelly, in an earlier book, “established the modern cult of Atlantis.”  Just think, without Donnelly we would have no Aquaman, no Namor the Sub-mariner.

The main lesson, though, is a reminder that many of the very best late Victorian writers turned their attention to ghost stories, weird tales, and stories of the future.

The Victorian Hugos appear irregularly.  They look like a lot of work.  I always learn a lot from them.

But this was not a method, it was an idea - science and The Invisible Man

Here comes science fiction book #3.  Ideally it would round out and definitively prove my arguments about science fiction, but I fear it does not.  The Invisible Man (1897 – I have returned safely to the 19th century) is barely a science fiction novel at all.  I have been calling science fiction a branch of fantasy; the Wells novel at least supports that argument.

Oh sure, there is plenty of science.  Whatta ya call this if not science?

I found a general principle of pigments and refraction – a formula, a geometrical expression involving four dimensions.  Fools, common men, even common mathematicians, do not know anything of what some general expression may mean to the student of molecular physics…  But this was not a method, it was an idea, that might lead to a method by which it would be possible, without changing any other property of matter – except, in some instances colours – to lower the refractive index of a substance, solid or liquid, to that of air – so far as all practical purposes are concerned.  (Ch. 19)

Just ask this scientician! (Warning, the link talks).  The invisible man might as well be a practitioner of alchemy for all it would matter in the novel.  And if Wells had any actual interest in science he would not make the invisible man a sociopath.  That decision kinda narrows the possibilities of the story.

Yet The Invisible Man is an entirely different creature than the kind of dream-fantasy George MacDonald or Lewis Carroll wrote.  The invisibility is magic but once that is granted the rest of the novel proceeds logically.  The section describing Mr. Invisible’s frustration with his superpower is especially amusing:

"I was fasting; for to eat, to fill myself with unassimilated matter, would be to become grotesquely visible again."

"I never thought of that," said Kemp.

"Nor had I.  And the snow had warned me of other dangers.  I could not go abroad in snow – it would settle on me and expose me.  Rain, too, would make me a watery outline, a glistening surface of a man – a bubble.  And fog – I should be like a fainter bubble in a fog, a surface, a greasy glimmer of humanity. Moreover, as I went abroad – in the London air – I gathered dirt about my ankles, floating smuts and dust upon my skin.  (Ch. 23)

This, to me, was among the finest inventions in the novel, the image of the ambulatory man-shaped bubble of air pollution (quaintly called “fog” in olden times).  The business about eating refers back to an earlier memorable scene, in which an observer notes  that Mr. Invisible has been eating cheese and bread.  Ick!  Fortunately the superpower conceals his excretory tract.  Our standards of permissibility have made one of the novel’s shocks invisible.  I do not know another Victorian novel that spends so much time emphasizing – concealing but by concealing revealing – digestion and male nudity.

The face of Mr. Cuss was angry and resolute, but his costume was defective, a sort of limp white kilt that could only have passed muster in Greece. "Hold him!" he bawled. "He's got my trousers! And every stitch of the Vicar's clothes!"  (Ch. 12)

The invisible man flees the dangerous city for an English village, which is where the real fun lies.  He is, at his worst, just one naked maniac, but he acts as a chaos seed in the quiet, orderly villages.  Coordination against him is impossible, plans collapse, and no one seems to realize that blankets would make decent weapons.

I suppose The War of the Worlds (1898) repeats the idea.  In both novels, the peaceful English countryside is disrupted; in one case the threat is small, in the other enormous.  Comic rather than sublime.  Blissfully free of ideas, except perhaps that the English villager will, after several clumsy missteps, come through in the end.

Damn your pseudo-science! Somehow this isn’t at all how I envisioned it. - Roadside Picnic by Strugatsky & Strugatsky

Science fiction actually has a “cool stuff” sub-genre (also a branch of exploration literature) typically involving the discovery and exploration of an alien artifact.  Larry Niven’s Ringworld (1970) and Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (1972), for example.  An enormous structure is invented and then filled with the most interesting creatures, machines, and puzzles the author can think of.  The characters and I wander around and admire the result.  These particular novels are especially pure examples since the origin of the structure is never really explained, perhaps because the author has not come up with one, or because he has and it is lame.

Both novels have several sequels which might well contain ingenious and satisfying solutions to their puzzles.  For now I will stick with my sense of wonder.

Roadside Picnic (1972) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky is an example I recently read.  The Strugatskys bring the alien space to Earth.  The Zone is a small American town which unknown aliens turned into a nightmarish magical landscape full of physics-bending gadgets and traps.  And zombies, it turns the dead into zombies, but surprisingly friendly ones.  The traps are deadly, the gadgets useful or decorative or also deadly.  The small town location sacrifices the awe created by the giant alien structure device but nicely drapes everything with an uncanny feeling.

I have a problem now.  If I want to demonstrate the inventive qualities of Roadside Picnic, I should provide a description of a good invention.  But the method of the novel is to normalize  the weirdness.  To the alien gizmo smuggler (the “stalker”*) with whom we spend most of our time, The Zone is not cool or intriguing like it is to me but a constant threat.  Here is what he sounds like when something strange happens:

Over the pile of ancient trash, over the colorful rags an broken glass, drifts a tremor, a vibration, just like the hot air above a tin roof at noon; it floats over the mound and continues, cuts across our path right beside a marker, lingers over the road, waits for half a second – or am I just imagining that? – and slithers into the field, over the bushes, over the rotten fences, toward the old car graveyard.  (24)

The narrator has been creeping into The Zone, pausing, evaluating the weeds and sidewalks, for several pages, and this is the first “event” of the trip.  What happened?  “God knows!  It came and went,” he says, and that is all we ever find out from him.

Similarly, here is how he describes the artifacts he pinches:

Two empties.  A box of pins.  Nine batteries.  Three bracelets.  And another hoop – resembling a bracelet but made from a white metal, lighter and about an inch larger in diameter.  Sixteen black sparks in a plastic bag.  Two perfectly preserved sponges close to a fist in size.  Three shriekers.  A jar of carbonated clay.  There was still a heavy porcelain container, packed carefully in fiberglass, remaining in the bag, but Redrick left it alone.  (76)

He does not know what these things are.  Those are just the names ("empties," "sparks") that have become attached to them.  Some are described in more detail elsewhere, some not.  That last container is explained – it figures in the plot.  Otherwise, a mystery.  A good science fiction joke that runs through the novel is that scientists figure out how to use some of the artifacts, like the batteries, without ever understanding the science.**

So to recapture the "cool stuff" thrill I have to translate the stalker’s normal to my weird.  Where he is jaded I am freshly curious.  A late chapter – the post’s title is from it, p. 132 – includes a scientist seeming to explain this and that, but mostly just reinforcing the mysteries.  The authors do not want to explain their crazy creations which are more fun – cooler, weirder – as mysteries.

It was Scott at Seraillon who recently recommended this novel to me – thanks!

*  The stalkers are named, amusingly, after the title character of Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co.  See p. 197 of Boris Strugatsky’s afterward to the new translation of the novel (Chicago Review Press, tr. Olena Bormashenko).

**  Roadside Picnic is a demonstration of Clarke’s Third Law, although the novel precedes Clarke’s aphorism by a year.

This is her nest - The Space Merchants and Chicken Little, imagination at play

Science fiction is about ideas, I sometimes read.  I resist the usage.  Kant and Nietzsche work with ideas.  Fiction writers, fantasy writers most prominently, work with conceits.  They imagine something new and interesting which I then admire using words like cool and neato and awesome.  The new cool thing is like a new toy.  I do not develop a toy, or take it to its logical conclusion.  I play with it.*  Or, in literature, I follow along while the writer shows me the cool, neato, etc. ways he thought to play with his new toy.

I take this as the greatest pleasure of fantasy literature and its branches, including science fiction: imagination in isolation.  Thus enthusiastic readers overlook or forgive or indulge lapses in story, characters, writing, and taste.  Just keep the cool stuff coming, please!

The Space Merchants (1952) by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth is one of the earliest American science fiction classics.  I revisited the novel after twenty years in part because it has just been reissued as part of a Library of America collection (the accompanying website is itself pretty neato), and in part because I wanted to play with its best toy again.  The Space Merchants was originally published under the title Gravy Planet – that’s one of those lapses of taste, although I am not sure that I do not prefer it, given the part of the book I like best.

The novel is a satire of consumerism and advertising.  Michael Dirda runs through that side of the book, the parts that have dated and those that have not.  Many of the jokes would work well today in a situation comedy set in an ad agency.  Timeless or shallow?  A little of both.  One solid idea, or running joke, is that although this future society is completely captured by consumerism and advertising  the standard of living, despite all sorts of magical technological advances, is lower than in 1952.  Wealthy people in New York City can afford cabs, but the cabs are bicycle-powered.  Meat is plentiful, but meat comes from Chicken Little.

That’s the one great invention, I think: Chicken Little,  the giant pulsing living blobs of meat that feed the planet.  Pohl and Kornbluth understand the value of their own idea well enough to know that just talking about Chicken Little is not enough.  They have to rig the plot so we meet it.  Sensitive eaters, avert your gaze:

He swung open her door.  “This is her nest,” he said proudly.  I looked and gulped.

It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored.  Chicken Little filled most of it.  She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter.  Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh.  You could see that she was alive.

Herrera said to me: “All day I walk around her.  I see a part growing fast, it looks good and tender, I slice.”  His two-handed blade screamed again.  This time it shaved off an inch-thick Chicken Little steak.  (Ch. 9)

Almost the exact midpoint of the novel, right at Syd Field’s Plot Point 2.  Maybe this does not look like much.  No, as prose, as a description, it is not.  I wonder why “fifteen yards” is not “fifty” – reach for the sublime!   The authors build to the moment well, dropping the name without quite saying what it is, and they cleverly use Chicken Little in the plot, so that is part of the scene’s effectiveness.  Even better, though, is the carver and his blade.  I have to imagine him bouncing around on this enormous blob of gum, slicing away with his oversized sword, all of which is completely ridiculous but vivid, a fun use of the new toy.  Perhaps I have to play with the imaginary toy myself, too.  Perhaps that is what it is for.

*  I play with ideas, too, but with toys I only play.

The appalling and calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations - some Lord Jim puzzles

What’s going on with the narrator in Lord Jim?  It puzzles me.  Not Marlow-the-narrator, but the other one, the semi-invisible, semi-omniscient one.  He has the first four chapters and twenty pages to himself before Marlow appears, his performance already in motion, to circle around the story of what happened to Jim out on that ship, what he did that was so bad, why he acts like it is worse than it was.  I think I basically get what Marlow is up to, at least.

My misreading of Lord Jim is that Marlow stretches a simple martyr complex to unnecessary lengths for his own dramatic reasons – another presentation of the Great Marlow Show.  “You thrilled to the spear attack, you shivered at ‘The horror, the horror’!  Marlow is back with another existential shocker” etc. etc.  I would have to reread the novel to build this up, though.

In the meantime, Omniscient Conrad.  Here’s how he writes (Jim is on the deck of a cargo ship which for some reason is full of passengers to Mecca):

The thin gold shaving of the moon floating slowly downwards had lost itself on the darkened surface of the waters, and the eternity beyond the sky seemed to come down nearer to the earth, with the augmented glitter of the stars, with the more profound sombreness in the lustre of the half-transparent dome covering the flat disc of an opaque sea.  The ship moved so smoothly that her onward motion was imperceptible to the senses of men, as though she had been a crowded planet speeding through the dark spaces of ether behind the swarm of suns, in the appalling and calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations.  'Hot is no name for it down below,' said a voice.  (Ch. 3)

This narrator mostly simulates a Flaubert-like objectivity, but he bursts into these adjective-packed passages, the kind of thing lazy reviewers now call “luminous.”  Jim is on deck, and the first sentence may attach itself to his point of view – perhaps he was looking at the moon, or is feeling the pressure of the stars.  The second sentence, though, is explicitly not Jim’s or anyone’s.  The motion is imperceptible, available only to the disembodied author and his lucky reader.

The more I look at the line, the less it seems to mean.  The ship is crowded, so the planet it resembles is likewise.  But it the planet is in a strange place – behind the stars – and not just in any old empty space but one where Yahweh moves over the waters.  For a line, Conrad creates a mythological space, but the voice that dispels it is not a demon from the underworld but just the ship’s second engineer.

I wonder what imagery or reference I am missing later in the book that should bring me back to this point and others like it, these little glimpses into the Cosmic.  Perhaps they are just flourishes, Conrad flexing his poetic impulse, giving me some enjoyably flavorful and chewy sentences.  But more likely they mean something.

I’ll do an entire week of this with some book.  Day 1: What does this mean?  Day 2:  How about this?  And so on.  Not all that different from what I usually do.

Three dirty owls - Conrad and Kipling, compared and contrasted

I read Lord Jim (1899-1900) a couple of weeks ago – when was I in France – a month ago.  Conrad’s novel  has a lot of surface similarities to Captains Courageous which I thought would make for a facile post.  I am sure I meant to type “fascinating.”  For example, they were published around the same time, and they are both seafaring novels.  Probably a lot of other similarities.

Or differences.  The core of the Conrad book is an episode in which Jim, older than fifteen but still untested, behaves shamefully during an emergency at sea.  His great desire is to be a hero, and instead he finds himself to be a coward.  That covers about half of the novel; the rest tells of Jim’s attempt, perhaps successful, perhaps not, to efface his humiliation.  I likely had Lord Jim in mind while reading Captains Courageous.  Because Kipling is writing a boys’ book, he will form his hero’s character until the boy demonstrates his heroism in the climax, saving the cod fishers from pirates, for example – the notorious Newfoundland Pirates, led by the bloodthirsty Captain Cod – while the adult novel begins with the emergency and explores its consequences.

I can see how that could make up a little post.

I won’t write it, though, because, leafing through Lord Jim, I find myself distracted by other things.  Like this:

“’They sat in the stern shoulder to shoulder, with the skipper in the middle, like three dirty owls, and stared at me,’ I heard him say with an intention of hate that distilled a corrosive virtue into the commonplace words like a drop of powerful poison falling into a glass of water; but my thoughts dwelt upon that sunrise.  I could imagine under the pellucid emptiness of the sky these four men imprisoned in the solitude of the sea, the lonely sun, regardless of the speck of life, ascending the clear curve of the heaven as if to gaze ardently from a greater height at his own splendour reflected in the still ocean.” (Ch. 10)

I tell you, that passage if nothing else is written.  Conrad wrote the heck out of it.  I find it hard to tear myself from the “three dirty owls” – that really took me by surprise.  Conrad’s prose is full of surprises.  I am not sure that particular simile is a likely one coming from this character (Jim in disgrace) in this situation (telling how he was adrift on the Indian Ocean), but I do not care much about that.  I can see them there, as if in an Edward Lear poem.  “Jim and three owls went to sea. \ Jim was clean, the owls dir-tee.”

I direct attention to the extra quotation marks.  The owls belong to Jim, but the poison and “pellucid” and ardent gaze and splendor are all Marlow, Conrad’s favorite distancing mechanism, who is supposedly saying all of this and hundreds more pages much like it in a single nighttime story-telling session, which is also not exactly likely, although I buy it, completely.  If you hear that Marlow is telling a story, do not hit the hammock early.  Stay for the whole story, even if you have to get up early the next day.

Bibliographing nicole wrote about Lord Jim a long time ago.  She covers Marlow more sensibly.  Here’s the great similarity between the Conrad and Kipling novels:  the telling in both is more interesting than the substance, but Conrad’s telling is far more complex, and is in fact part of the subject of the novel.

I see, in nicole’s comments, a pretty decent parody of Javier Marías which has my name on it, although I do not remember writing it.

Death in Kipling's boys' book - one hundred and seventeen of them

What does Harvey need to do to become a man, great or otherwise, according to Captains Courageous?  He needs to learn the value of work.  He needs to learn the various codes of masculinity – I have not written about this theme since it seems like standard boys’ book stuff.  And he must learn to face death.  Perhaps this is the usual stuff as well, courage on the battlefield or in an emergency.  I do not think so.  Kipling is up to something a little more interesting.

Death recurs in the novel.  Death is mysterious.  Perhaps the uncanniest scene is when the fishing crew sees a ship sink; it is manned by drunks and has been neglected for who knows how long.  It looks like this:

She sailed into a patch of watery sunshine three or four miles distant.  The patch dulled and faded out, and even as the light passed so did the schooner.  She dropped into a hollow and – was not.

The fishermen hurry to the spot to help survivors, but the ship is gone, as if into fairy land.  As for Harvey, he “could not realise that he had seen death on the open waters, but he felt very sick.”

Death returns in the back story of the fishermen (one lost his family in the Johnstown Flood and is addled), in stories, and in storms and accidents (“When a man has lost his only son, his summer's work, and his means of livelihood, in thirty counted seconds, it is hard to give consolation”).  In one unlikely but effective scene, Harvey faces death in as literal a fashion as possible.

Once Harvey is in Gloucester, reunited with his parents, and on the path to Great Manhood, death recedes.  I was puzzled.  What was the point of the theme?  A final, expansive scene explains.

Harvey and his parents stay in town long enough to attend Gloucester Memorial Day, which includes speeches, recitals, and a reading of:

the names of their lost dead – one hundred and seventeen of them.  (The widows started a little, and looked at one another here).

Kipling begins to list off the names, one by one.

“September 27th. – Orvin Dollard, 30 married, drowned in dory off Eastern Point.”

The shot went home, for one of the widows flinched where she sat, clasping and unclasping her hands.

Harvey is affected physically.  “Great lumps were rising in Harvey’s throat, and his stomach reminded him of the day when he fell from the liner.”  Another name is announced, “Otto Svendsen, 20, single… lost overboard,” and Harvey actually faints.

Otto is the ghost that has haunted Harvey throughout the book.  He was on the crew of Harvey’s ship, and died not long before Harvey was rescued.   Harvey took Otto’s place, slept in his bunk, ate his food, earned his wages.  Did his work.  Harvey’s life is somehow owed to this other man’s death, a man he never met, who the reader never sees.

It is time for a lesson: “he understood things from the inside – more things than he could begin to think about.”  Vague but more satisfying than the earlier thumping stuff about the value of hard work.

Then Kipling gives me one of those “a few years later” codas that is aesthetically pointless but is fortunately just a page long.  Oh well.  I did not write about Captains Courageous for three days because it is a perfect book.  Or even a second-rate book.