The Story of the Stone, volume 4 - It was an eerie, desolate night.

At the two-thirds mark, after 80 chapters of the 120, three big changes hit The Story of the Stone (c. 1760 / 1791).  First, David Hawkes, the original translator of the Penguin edition, dies; John Minford finishes the job.  Second, the author of the novel, Cao Xueqin, dies, leaving a lot for textual scholars of the novel to do.  Are the last 40 chapters an edit of Cao Xueqin’s drafts, or maybe complete inventions by someone else, or something in-between?  The Penguin book, The Story of the Stone, Volume 4: The Debt of Tears, adds “edited by Gao E,” which is as far as I will go.  I have kept reading as if none of this matters.

The third change, though, which began in the last few chapters of the previous volume, is that the world of the novel is collapsing.  The beautiful teenage garden Arcadia can only last so long.  The “real,” adult world is having its problems – money trouble – but the true villain is time.  The characters age.  The teenagers become, tragically, marriageable.  The garden empties out; the idyll ends.

The novel becomes unbearably sad.  That is another way to describe the change.

A key character dies, with plenty of warning, but still.  The mood of the prose fits the event:

The wedding chamber was a long way off, and the guests heard nothing of the weeping, but from the Naiad’s House, in a brief interval of silence between their lamentations, they heard a faint snatch of music in the distance.  They strained their ears to catch it, but it was gone.  Tan-chun and Li Wan went into the garden to listen again, but all they could hear was the rustling of the bamboos in the wind.  The moonlight cast a wavering shadow on the wall.  It was an eerie, desolate night.  (98, 377)

If only more of the novel were written like this.

Cao Xueqin occasionally, not often but once in a while, uses time-shifted scenes, describing events in one location and then jumping back a bit to look at something happening simultaneously elsewhere in the garden.  The device is especially effective in this part of The Story of the Stone, where the author announces the death, an event of the greatest importance, in what is in a sense the wrong place, and then goes back to let us experience it in person.  Like Faulkner or what have you.  We are so used to this device now but it took a while for Western novelists to figure it out, Tristram Shandy’s herky-jerky line notwithstanding.

A number of other curious things are scattered through this chunk of the novel.  Another terrible double-suicide love affair, a compressed parallel to the best story in the previous volume.  A vendor brings the family some wonderful artifacts to sell, including a magnificent Mother Pearl that attracts other pearls to it, like a magnet.  A long digression on music and the playing of the qin, adding to the inventory of this novel about everything:

‘And before you think of playing, be sure to dress in a suitable style – preferably in a swansdown cape or other antique robe.  Assume the dignified manner of the ancients, a manner in keeping with the chosen instrument of the sages.  Wash your hands.’ (86, 154)

Seriously, before you do anything put on your swansdown cape and wash your hands. 

‘Do let’s put an end to this depressing conversation,’ said Jia She, ‘and have another drink.’ (92, 261)

One more volume to go.

The books I read in November 2024 - like a hideous spinster who has learned the grim humor of the disappointments of life

 

Thank goodness I write these down.

FICTION

The Story of the Stone, Vol. 2: The Crab-flower Club (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin – written up long ago.

Cartucho (1931) &

My Mother's Hands (1938), Nellie Campobello – Brutal vignettes of the Mexican revolution by a diehard partisan, a child at the time, later an important figure in Mexican modern dance.  The title tough guy Cartucho (Cartridge) is killed on the first page.  The rate of killing is not one per page, but close.  The later book is more of a tribute to Campobello’s mother but still incredibly violent.  If you wonder why Fernanda Melchor’s novels are the way they are, or why that one section of 2666 is the way it is, well, here is an ancestor.

The Horizontal Man (1946), Helen Eustis

Last Seen Wearing (1952), Hillary Waugh – By pure chance the two mysteries I read this month were both set at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.  Or, you know, “Smith,” made fictional, but not really hiding much.  I did not know this in advance.  The novels are tonally opposites.  The murdered English professor in The Horizontal Man, and everyone who knew him, is neurotic or worse.  Smith is one high-strung, Freudian place.

He liked his tall old house.  It had a bitter friendly ugliness, like a hideous spinster who has learned the grim humor of the disappointments of life.  (205 of the Library of America edition)

While Last Seen Wearing is an early, influential police procedural, literally inspired by the Dragnet radio show, all about legwork and dead-end leads told in plain language.  A little bit of detective novel nonsense slips in, but not too much.

Smith College, was, I presume, a pleasant and safe place at the time, with fewer lunatics and predators than most places.

The Passion (1987), Jeanette Winterson

So Much Blue (2017), Percival Everett – The typical – usual – same every time – Everett narrator is an abstract painter in this one, interweaving three stories in three genres (in one life). 

Suggested in the Stars (2020), Yoko Tawada

Our Evenings (2024), Alan Hollinghurst

 

POETRY

The Dispossessed (1948) &

Homage to Mistress Bradstreet (1953), John Berryman

Some Trees (1956), John Ashbery

95 Poems (1958) &

73 Poems (1963), E. E. Cummings

Expressions of Sea Level (1964) &

Collected Poems 1951-1971 (but I only read 1951-65), A. R. Ammons

I never write anything anymore about the poetry I read.  I do not know why.

 

TRAVEL

My Life as an Explorer (1926), Roald Amundsen – written up over here.

The Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024 (2024), various – I learned a lot.  Some of the prose was quite purple, which surprised me, given the tendencies these days, but why bother writing about grilled cheese sandwiches or gas station food if you’re not going to write.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (1870), Jules Verne – best read with constant reference to your globe and your beautiful illustrated childhood encyclopedia.  Seeing Verne’s many debts to Poe is interesting.

La steppe rouge (1923), Joseph Kessel – The journalist’s first book, sad, violent stories set during or soon after the Bolshevik revolution.  Kessel is highly skeptical.  Given the high interest of the subject matter, I am surprised that this book has never made it to English.  To any young translator from French: it is short, easy, about interesting people and events, and in the public domain.  Please see the Book around the Corner review of The Red Steppe that led me to the book.

L'Étrange Défaite. Témoignage écrit en 1940 (1946), Marc Bloch – Besides being among the greatest modern historians, Bloch had a special place in Lyon because of his service, and death, in the French Resistance.  I finally got to his frustrated memoir of his official military service in World War II, where he managed the French army’s gasoline supplies in the Low Countries and was evacuated with the British troops at Dunkirk.  The essay about the reasons for the French defeat were less interesting because they have been so thoroughly absorbed.

As Duas Águas do Mar (1992), Francisco José Viegas – An early entry in one of the few long-running detective series in Portuguese, written by a bigshot in the Portuguese literary scene.  Editor of their Bookforum-like magazine, for example; a perpetual guest on the literary panel shows.  I wish someone else would write some Portuguese detective novels for me, because this one was thin, sometimes I suspected contemptuous of the genre.  There is a scene where the insomniac police detective goes through a drawer – his own drawer! – listing every object.  The novel literally ends with the same character preparing, step by step by step, a dish of eggs and ham and potatoes.  Now, given that I read the book to improve my Portuguese, these scenes were great.  Tedious fiction; terrific language exercises.  French language-learners owe Georges Simenon a lot.

The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox - counting the pages, he was quite terrified at the number, and could not prevail upon himself to read them

Di at The little white attic is chasing Don Quixote through the 18th century, so she read, obviously, The Female Quixote (1852) by Charlotte Lennox.  I had not read it, so I trailed along.

An archetypal novelistic heroine, young Arabella has had her brain addled by novels:

From her earliest youth she had discovered a fondness for reading, which extremely delighted the marquis; he permitted her therefore the use of his library, in which, unfortunately for her, were great store of romances, and, what was still more unfortunate, not in the original French, but very bad translations.  (I.1, 7)

But, and this is key, the wrong novels, the colossal 17th century French romances (I wrote about them briefly here) and their English imitations that had an audience in England when for whatever reason the English were not producing such vast quantities of novels themselves.  The books were owned by Arabella’s mother, although more realistically they were the reading of her grandmother’s generation.  A nice touch in The Female Quixote, a touch of realism, is the mix of characters familiar with the old romances and the characters who have no idea what Arabella is talking about.

Because Arabella for some reason has concluded that these endless series of preposterous adventures, with kidnapped princesses and heroes slaughtering armies, just the kind of thing many of us still like today however different the precise conventions and rhetoric, are history, are true, and is thus believes that random strangers are going to kidnap her and that her suitors are literally dying of love for her.

That is pretty much the joke for the entire novel.  I thought it was an amusing conceit with a mildly funny development; Di found it “very, very funny”; Steven Moore, reading the book for The Novel: An Alternative History: 1600-1800 (2013), “laughed myself silly over it” and thought that Lennox “like a seasoned comedian milks [the romances] for every possible laugh” (773). I thought she left a lot of laughs on the table, so to speak.  But that’s two to one against me; maybe you would join the other two.

Moore, providing an example of a funny bit, picks the exact moment I found funniest, when Arabella tells the man pursuing her that he just needs to do the reading:

Arabella having ordered one of her women to bring Cleopatra, Cassandra, Clelia, and the Grand Cyrus from her library, Glanville no sooner saw the girl return, sinking under the weight of those voluminous romances, but he began to tremble at the apprehension of his cousin laying her commands upon him to read them; and repented of his complaisance, which exposed him to the cruel necessity of performing what to him appeared an Herculean labour, or else incurring her anger by his refusal. (I.12, 49)

Just a reminder that Cyrus, for example, in its original French edition, was ten volumes and 13,000 (!!!) pages long.  No idea what the bad English translation was like.  “[C]ounting the pages, he was quite terrified at the number, and could not prevail upon himself to read them  (I.12, 50).  Yeah, no kidding.  These books are very close to unread today, even in France, scholars of the literature of the period aside, and 13,000 pages is a lot even for them.

This suitor never reads more than a page of any of these books but he does prevent Arabella’s father from burning them, like the priest in Don Quixote does to the knightly romances.  A heroic feat as far as I am concerned.

The poor editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition spends most of her time tracking down each of the many references Arabella makes to the French romances, summarizing and often correcting them, so the endnotes are mostly tedious summaries of tedious episodes from tedious novels.  Luckily the clichés of the 17th century are not so far from the clichés of today, so it is easy to follow along without the details.

Many passages suggest that Arabella would be happy if she just had someone to talk to about her hobby, if she had a fandom, a forum on the internet and an annual convention where she could cosplay.  The “original fangirl,” Di calls her.  Lennox’s prose is minimally descriptive but does have passages describing the heroine’s fantastic costumes, her own designs.

At one point it seemed like the novel would end with Arabella’s mania infecting everyone around her, which might have been fun, but instead it all jerks to a halt when Samuel Johnson, disguised as a priest, convinces her that the French romances are un-Christian and that she should be reading the morally improving novels of Samuel Richardson instead.  I have read three of Richardson’s four novels; all three feature, prominently, in a contemporary, nominally realistic setting, the kidnapping of the heroine, so honestly I don’t think reading Richardson is going to work here.  One delusion will be replaced with another.  Reading novels is basically poison; we readers of novels all know that.

The Story of the Stone, volume 3 - melodrama, drinking games, and "a convocation of bees and butterflies"

I am two-thirds through Cao Xueqin’s enormous The Story of the Stone (c. 1760), volume 3 of the David Hawkes translation, and the next twenty chapters have arrived at the library so I had better write this chunk up.

In this big middle section a number of minor or even new characters are given stories, making the structure even more episodic than previously.  Both the teenage love triangle and the Daoist fairy tale recede behind these new stories. 

The mysterious, magical Daoist monk makes just one appearance, in the middle of the best story as such so far (meaning in the first 1,800 pages), a hundred page novella about a young woman who becomes the secret second wife of the shallow, impulsive husband of one of the novel’s best characters, Wang Xi-feng, the woman who has managed the enormous household for over a thousand pages.  The secret comes out, and Xi-feng, a great Machiavellian, slowly but relentlessly destroys the new wife.  Along the way, the poor woman’s sister is also destroyed.  The novel known for its realism is interrupted by an outstanding, horrifying piece of melodrama, one part more fairy-tale like (thus the appearance of that monk), the other more of a domestic soap opera.  I was not surprised to learn that the story of these two sisters has often been detached from The Story of the Stone and adapted into operas and plays.

Immediately after this long, intense episode, the teens in their arcadian garden have a meeting of their poetry club which ends with them all flying kites.  Four full pages of pure kite flying.  “The cousins clapped their hands delightedly” (70, 392).  Me, too.  Some of the art of Cao Xueqin, some of the strong emotional effects, come from these big tonal shifts, the suicide of a teenager followed by poetry and kites.

Much of the substance of this volume is, like the previous, parties and planning for parties.  The theme of the decline of the family becomes more visible.  Budgets are tighter.  But the parties go on.  There is a long section full of Chinese drinking games, simultaneously too obscure:

Li Wan was to begin.

‘Gourd,’ said Li Wan.

‘Green,’ said Xiu-yan.

‘Green’ was evidently correct, since Li Wan appeared to be satisfied and the two women simultaneously sipped their wine.  (62, 200)

and too detailed, if there can be such a thing:

When she and Bao-chai had drunk, she threw the dice.  Twenty.  That meant that Aroma was to draw.  Aroma reached out and took a card.  (63, 228-9)

The unsupervised teens can really – realism! – put away the sauce.  Here a fifteen year-old girl has passed out on a bench:

She was covered all over from head to foot with crimson petals from the peony bushes which grew round about; the fan which had slipped from her hand and lay on the ground beside her was half buried in petals;; and heaped-up peony petals wrapped in a white silk handkerchief made an improvised pillow for her head.  Over and around this petalled monstrosity a convocation of bees and butterflies was hovering distractedly.  (62, 204)

I am really quoting this passage because it is so unusual in a novel where the materiality is more often expressed in lists of art objects or descriptions of clothing than in striking original images.  “Petalled monstrosity”!

Here’s another surprising bit from the end of the novel, another inset story about another jealous wife:

She was inordinately fond of gnawing bones, especially the bones of fowls.  To satisfy this craving she had ducks and chickens killed every day.  The meat she gave to other people; it was only the bones, crisp-fried in boiling fat, that she kept for herself, to nibble with her wine.  (80, 606)

Getting close to the fairy tale again.

All right, time to pick up the next volume.

The depiction of the setting of the novel, the mansion and garden, can be found on p. 33 of Approaches to Teaching The Story of the Stone (Dream of the Red Chamber) (2012), ed. Andrew Schonebaum and Tina Lu.

Roald Amundsen’s My Life as an Explorer - an adventure is merely a bit of bad planning

One last book for Norwegian November, Roald Amundsen’s My Life as an Explorer (1927), a memoir covering the polar explorer’s entire career.  It’s a good book, full of adventure.

To the explorer, however, adventure is merely an unwelcome interruption of his serious labours.  He is looking, not for thrills, but for facts about the unknown.  Often his search is a race with time against starvation.  To him, an adventure is merely a bit of bad planning, brought to light by the test of trial. (237)

To the reader, however, adventure, the times Amundsen is almost killed but for some reason is not, is much of what makes the book good.  To this reader.  I know that many readers are searching for characters like themselves.  I read books about exploration to meet people utterly unlike me.  I mean, these folks are nuts.

Amundsen had written an earlier (1912) book about his expedition to the South Pole, so there is less of that in My Life as an Explorer than I had expected.  He had become more interested in polar aviation, so there is a lot of that, including perhaps too much detail and score-settling about his recent dirigible flight over the North Pole in the company of Umberto Nobile, an incompetent blowhard Italian pilot.  Nobile is a hilarious character, as if from an Evelyn Waugh novel, although I understand how Amundsen has trouble seeing him that way.  The scenes where the characters are trapped in Nome, Alaska, arguing by telegram with the Aĕro Club of Norway about the wording of contracts is almost comedy, even in Amundsen’s exasperated account.

Still, the book, beginning with Amundsen’s teenage inspiration to explore the poles, is mostly about expeditions: preparation and skills (skiing, navigation), multiple brushes with death (“adventure”), then survival and celebrity.

Richard Halliburton called his first two books The Royal Road to Romance (1925) and The Glorious Adventure (1927) – I have read the former but not the latter.  Twenty-eight years younger than Amundsen, he had no interest in exploring and went straight for the adventure.  Perhaps he just had no interest in science.  But I think he understood that the celebrity explorers like Amundsen, with clear accomplishments – first expedition to the South Pole, first flight over the North Pole – had prepared the way – created the market – for the celebrity adventurer.  The two men’s books look like evidence in the cultural shift form glory to celebrity.

Amundsen’s memoir is the real Norwegian literature, the place to find something essential about Norwegianness.  I got this sense visiting the extraordinary campus of ship museums in Oslo, one holding a Viking ship, on the Kon-Tiki, and the largest containing the Fram, the ship Fridtjof Nansen built for Arctic exploration that Amundsen later took to the Antarctic.  The ship is itself a celebrity, for a time holding both the “farthest north” and “farthest south” records.  You buy a ticket and they let you walk around on it, with no risk of freezing to death or starving.  There’s an ice cream stand right outside.

Nansen’s book, Farthest North (1897) is, I should say, better than Amundsen’s.  Maybe next year I will read Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki Expedition (1948).  Norwegians love madmen at sea. 

I assume the book was written in Norwegian and translated by someone, but there is no information in the 1927 edition.  Maybe Amundsen wrote in English, what do I know.  The photo of the Fram is borrowed from the Fram Museum website.