What’s needed, it seems, is the right verisimilitude - Alcott, Baudelaire, Austen, and Knausgaard - highlights from The Hudson Review

Now I am going to look at the highlights of the Winter 2015 issue of The Hudson Review, my favorite literary journal.

For a long time, The Hudson Review had nothing online, and then a few things, and now quite a bit.  But not everything, so I can only insist that poet David Slavitt’s peculiar idea to write fake choruses to lost Sophocles plays, based only on the titles of the plays, is promising; or that classics professor Bruce Heiden’s translation of Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Chats” is perfect.  I can give a hint of the latter, I guess:

Their haunches emanate unnatural fires;
And golden speckles, fine as desert sand,
Constellate the marble of their eyes.

And I bought the Slavitt book, so more of that later.  The poetry in this magazine is usually strong.

Even with more articles given away online, I never see anyone promote it.  The piece that should be circulating widely is Bruce Bawer’s review of the Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle novels, the best thing I have read on them.  Bawer has the advantage that he has 1) read all six books, 2) read them in Norwegian, and 3) read them in Norway.  The latter point especially:

Sometimes it can seem as if every second or third novel you pick up in an Oslo bookstore is about a man (a literary type, naturally) in late middle age who’s lived alone in some remote place since his divorce and who, one day in dark midwinter, is given a grim diagnosis by his doctor, after which he goes home to reflect on his life – his failed marriage, disappointing career, estranged children – and to contemplate stoically his impending death.   (588)

While jolly Knausgaard is seen by Norwegian readers to offer “a naïve, credulous, American-style enthusiasm about life.”  How can an American reader know that Knausgaard was writing a complex parody?  By the way, anyone who has commented on the oddity of the English translation – Bawer says you are right: “innumerable errors that are minor but whose cumulative effect is distracting” (594).

I have not read Knausgaard, so I only care because the review is so good.  Of more direct interest was a long piece on “Mind and Mindlessness in Jane Austen” by Wellesley English professor Timothy Peltason, a careful ethical argument that pushes well past Austen’s romantic plots towards the inner lives of her characters, including those with no inner lives, or “inner lives that are astonishingly unvaried and unimaginative, so much so that the narrator pauses frequently to wonder, and obliges us to wonder with her, what it can possibly be like to inhabit such a consciousness, or such a lack of consciousness” (611).  Lady Bertram from Mansfield Park or the awful Elliots from Persuasion are examples.  “[T]he comic horrors of inward vacancy,” Peltason calls the theme.

The larger point is to contrast the mindless characters with the mindful, the heroines and their successful suitors.  The marriage plot is not just about the search for love, but the search for morally intelligent life in the universe.  Austen fans should seek out the magazine for this one.

Alexandra Mullen’s review of the latest Library of America collection of Louisa May Alcott novels is also excellent, and luckily it is online.  If Work or Rose in Bloom are not first-rate works of art, they are still of high interest, moralistic, improving fiction with artistic ambition and real humor.

One of her sons makes the argument [for Horatio Alger novels!] from verisimilitude: “A bootblack mustn’t use good grammar, and a newsboy must swear a little, or he wouldn’t be natural.”  His mother replies: “But my sons are neither bootblacks nor newsboys, and I object to hearing them use such words as ‘screamer,’ ‘bully,’ and ‘buster.’”  Genteel fictions meet with her disapproval when both the virtue and rewards lack verisimilitude – when boys run away to sea and behave so nobly that Admiral Farragut invites them to dinner.  What’s needed, it seems, is the right verisimilitude…  (680)

And even I agree with the aunt on that.  Mullen’s and Peltason’s  essays are model for something I never do but maybe should, working through the ethical argument in good fiction with clarity and force.

For The Hudson Review, routine stuff.

The Best Books of 1863 - how very few of these / Poor little busy poet bees / Can we expect again to hum

Ow, my eyes.  You can see the 1863 “Birth of Venus” by Alexandre Cabanel in the flesh – or in the marzipan (see the Zola quotation at the following link) –  at the Musée d’Orsay, although I do not know why you would, since that museum has so many good paintings.

The Best Books of 1863 were better than this painting.  But it was the year of the second-rate.

I would pick The Cossacks, Leo Tolstoy’s clear-eyed look at the desire to romanticize other cultures, as the best book of the year, but it is not quite first-rate Tolstoy.  Now that is an absurd standard, but the fact is that The Cossacks is dragged along behind Tolstoy’s great masterpieces.  It is read as much as it is, and will continue to be read, because of other books.

My list of surviving English novels for 1863 looks like this:

Romola, George Eliot
The Water-Babies, Charles Kingsley
Salem Chapel, Margaret Oliphant
Rachel Ray, Anthony Trollope
The Small House at Allington, Trollope, in the middle of its serialization.

Boy, there is always plenty of Trollope in the 1860s.  I have only read two of the five.  We see  some of the same phenomenon here, I think, certainly with Romola, possibly with the Trollope novels.  The exercise is to imagine that Romola were the only George Eliot novel.  Would anyone still read it?  The exercise is preposterous, so I will move on.  The English class of 1863 seems a little weak, is all I am saying.  Go to those links, though, the ones not to Wuthering Expectations.  A good case is made for every one of those books.

No idea what was going on in French literature this year (or Spanish, or Italian, or German).  American literature was almost put on hold by the Civil War.  Without a doubt, the great American work of the year is a speech, the Gettysburg Address, elegant, forceful, rhetorically brilliant, and now, in its way, one of the key  texts  of the United States.

Louisa May Alcott’s charming Hospital Sketches and Henry Longfellow’s Tales from a Wayside Inn can hardly stand that kind of competition, although both are enjoyable books.  The Longfellow book contains “The Birds of Killingworth,” a bizarre and superb poem of ecological apocalypse.

One more novel was not even second-rate artistically, but was all too significant, Nikolai Chernyshevksy’s What Is to Be Done?, a radical Utopia, written in prison, smuggled out, published illegally, eventually becoming a founding text of the Russian Revolution.  So if not such a great year for novels, 1863 was unusually well equipped with important political literature.

I wrote a bit about the Chernyshevsky novel while discussing Fathers and Sons, where I was startled to see a number of people declare that they wanted to read What Is to Be Done?  Are you all nuts?  But I will suffer along with the rest of you.  I should organize a readalong – it would be the least popular book blog event since the readalong of Herman Melville’s Clarel a few years ago.  And if it turned out a fifth  as well, that would be something.

I wonder what I am missing?  I never mean these posts to be completely comprehensive, and how could they be, but I do hope that any additional suggestions sound a bit desperate and little-read  – Walter Savage Landor’s last book of poems, how about that one?

Come to think of it, I have read that book.  Landor, eighty-eight years old in 1863, was a fine poet; it is a fine book.  But that is hardly my point here, as Landor knows:

The Poet Bees
There are a hundred now alive
Who buz about the summer hive,
Alas! how very few of these
Poor little busy poet bees
Can we expect again to hum
When the next summer shall have come.

One hundred and fifty years is a long lifespan for a book.  Seven novels, the Alcott book, the Longfellow poems, one of the greatest funeral orations, not bad, really.

Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony - Charles Ives and Beth play the piano

So, sitting at the dear little piano, Beth softly touched the keys, and in the sweet voice they had never thought to hear again, sang to her own accompaniment the quaint hymn, which was a singularly fitting song for her: -

And then follows the lyrics, which are from Pilgrim’s Progress:  “I am content with what I have \ Little be it or much” (Ch. 22).  Beth is singing about herself:  “Since I had my little piano, I am perfectly satisfied.”

No other character in Little Women, not even Jo the writer, is so intimately associated with art.  Her music and piano serve a functional purpose for Alcott, plumping up a character at risk of flatness, but Beth’s piano, like Beth’s story more generally, also suggests an alternative source of transcendence unavailable to most people.  Beth is remembered by readers for her almost saintly virtues, or for her passivity and timidity, but she is also an artist, even if at times her art is intensely personal, an escape from earthly cares.

If you want, you can hear Beth play, sort of, or at least hear an expression of the idea of Beth playing.  The third movement of the Piano Sonata No. 2: Concord, Mass., 1840-1860 by Charles Ives is titled “The Alcotts.”  Surrounded by the spiky “Emerson,” mysterious “Thoreau,” and chaotic “Hawthorne” (at certain points the piano is played with a wooden rod of a specified length, creating massive dissonant clusters of notes), “The Alcotts” is the quiet, peaceful, domestic piece.  Mostly quiet.

I will imagine Beth is playing.  Listen along – here is Jeremy Denk; here is Ives himself.  The first four notes could hardly be more familiar, since they are those of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.  But Beth has just settled in, she is playing quietly, picking at the notes of the Beethoven transcription in front of her.  Or perhaps she is looking at Piano Sonata No. 29, the “Hammerklavier,” or a hymn book, since the sonata and a hymn titled “Missionary Chant” quickly blend together.    Ives is always borrowing, and in fact the Beethoven motifs occur in every movement of the sonata.  But Beth is playing this time; back to her.

She plays at whim, gains confidence, and returns to try the beginning of the Fifth again.  She repeats the figure she has improvised, creating variations, gaining speed and volume.  Some wrong notes here and there – who cares, now she’s having fun.  Back to those four notes, as can be seen above, fortissimo this time – we are at the two minute mark of the performances.  But this is Beth, so she does not stay loud for more than a few seconds.  She switches to a Scottish folk song, beginning at the bar line (see below, "Slower and quietly"), for about thirty seconds (3:00-3:30 or so).  The folk song collapses and is somehow rebuilt as sweet, meditative Beethoven.  Jeremy Denk cannot believe - look at 4:36 – how pretty the end is.

To Ives the Beth playing is the real one, Elizabeth Alcott, or perhaps a blend of the real and imagined sister.  “Here is the home of the ‘Marches’,” Ives writes in Essays Before a Sonata:

all pervaded with the trials and happiness of the family, and telling, in a simple way, the story of “the richness of not having”…  And there sits the little old spinet piano Sophia Thoreau gave to the Alcott children, on which Beth played the old Scotch airs, and played at the Fifth Symphony.  (p. 47,  W. W. Norton & Company, 1970)

It is a beautiful piece of music, especially meaningful to readers of Little Women.

The names of the hymns and so on can be found in the comprehensive Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives.  I would not have figured out much of that on my own.  The score has a long, complex history, but was first published in 1920.  My copied bits are from the revised 1947 version.

Jeremy Denk wrote a fine piece for the New Yorker about the difficulties of playing and recording the Concord Sonata, but it seems to be unavailable for non-subscribers.

Alcott the scold - a lunatic, a corpse, a villain, and a viper

There are other ways to read Little Women.  As a temperance tract, for example.  Take a look at Chapter 25, “The First Wedding,” which is really  Chapter 2 of Two.  One of the sisters is getting married, so Alcott can give us every last detail of what a wedding should be.  No breakfast, just “a plentiful lunch of cake and fruit, dressed in flowers” and “water, lemonade, and coffee.”  Guests sent wine, but the teetotaling Marches sent it to the Soldier’s Home – Papa March “thinks that wine should only be used in illness.”

This leads to a page-long discussion of the evils of wine, which climaxes with the bride bullying poor innocent dim-witted college student Laurie into taking a temperance pledge:

She did not speak, but she looked up at him with a face made very eloquent by happiness, and a smile which said, "No one can refuse me anything today."  Laurie certainly could not, and with an answering smile, he gave her his hand, saying heartily, "I promise, Mrs. Brooke!"

What a dirty trick!  But Alcott lacks confidence and concludes the scene with:

So the toast was drunk, the pledge made and loyally kept in spite of many temptations, for with instinctive wisdom, the girls seized a happy moment to do their friend a service, for which he thanked them all his life.

If I had suspicions before, I was certain now – the narrator in Two is different than in One.  Alcott had never resorted to this clumsy look into the future before.  She senses that some readers might be skeptical of Laurie’s moral fortitude so she cuts them off.

My favorite moment with the new narrator comes later in Two, in Chapter 34, the one that introduces The Fantastic Professor Bhaer.  Back in One, it was a matter of celebration when sixteen year-old Jo published her first story in a newspaper even if it was, as Alcott says in her journal, “Great rubbish!”  In Two “[s]he took to writing sensation stories – for in those dark age even all-perfect America read rubbish.”  Now that last remark is obviously sarcasm, isn’t it?  But later in the chapter Prof. Bhaer condemns sensation fiction as immoral causing Jo to repent and burn her manuscripts, although with regret:

"If I didn't care about doing right, and didn't feel uncomfortable when doing wrong, I should get on capitally.  I can't help wishing sometimes, that Mother and Father hadn't been so particular about such things."

Ah, Jo, instead of wishing that, thank God that “Father and Mother were particular,” and pity from your heart those who have no such guardians to hedge them round with principles which may seem like prison walls to impatient youth, but which will prove sure foundations to build character upon in womanhood.

I have resisted the idea that Little Women is easily autobiographical, but this scene is much funnier if we imagine that Alcott is scolding her younger, fictional self.  Like the temperance pledge, this was also a two-against-one bullying scene.  It was not so coercive until the narrator stepped in.

Scenes like these led me to want to reform my ways, to drink more wine and to write a story like the one she describes earlier in the chapter about “a lunatic, a corpse, a villain, and a viper.”

Pin it round your neck, and then it will be useful - Meg's shockingly revealing dress

Chapter 9 of Little Women, “Meg Goes to Vanity Fair,” that is where I want to spend my time today.  Bunyan describes Vanity Fair as the place where “all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honours, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures, and delights of all sorts, as whores, bawds, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.”

I can see why Pilgrim’s Progress has fallen out of favor as a children’s book.  Still that is just what Alcott’s chapter is about: Meg, the oldest sister, visits a marriage market, a fair where husbands are captured and wives are bought.  A party with the wealthy Moffats in Boston, I mean.

Meg’s sisters join her for the first few pages, as they pack her trunk and prepare her clothes.  The chapter is nothing but folds, silk, pins, ribbons.  Meg, sixteen, unworldly, and poor, only has one dress that is presentable at a fancy party; that is the crux of the action.  “My silk stockings and two pairs of [spick-and-]spandy gloves are my comfort,” she says, but that does not last.

That one functional dress is enough to escape Vanity Fair for one party, but a second does her in.  Her friends supply her with an appropriate dress, a blue silk “so tight she could hardly breathe” that is so revealing that only a frill and rose-bud bouquet “reconciled Meg to the display of her pretty white shoulders.”  She feels “’so queer and stiff, and half-dressed.’”  She wrestles with her dress’s train:

Meg smiled and relented, and whispered as they stood waiting to catch the time, "Take care my skirt doesn't trip you up.  It's the plague of my life and I was a goose to wear it."

"Pin it round your neck, and then it will be useful," said Laurie, looking down at the little blue boots, which he evidently approved of.

It was not until this point that I realized that Alcott was serious – that the shoulder-revealing dress was not unwise but immoral, not necessarily in its display of flesh but in its encouragement of the sin of vanity.  The dress is so dangerous that despite Laurie’s sarcasm, Meg finally throws herself into the party, dancing wildly and drinking champagne to the point of illness (“She was sick all the next day”).

A surprisingly jolly chapter, but all in the service of setting an example about how girls should and should not find husbands (not at balls, not in questionable dresses).

Speaking of jolliness, the rich Moffats, the mother and father – this is a curious little detail – are a “fat, jolly old gentleman” and a “fat, jolly old lady.”  The latter at one point “lumber[s] in, like an elephant, in silk and lace.”  Only one other character in the novel is fat, the wealthy Aunt March.  Or two characters, if you count her poodle, “a fat, cross beast” (Ch. 19).  Not every rich person in the book is fat, just most of them.

I keep forgetting to mention it, but Amanda at Simpler Pastimes is hosting a Classic Kiddie Lit Challenge this month, with a George MacDonald Princess and the Goblin readalong at the end of the month.  I have vaguely considered running a project.  Some fun!  Once I hit publish I will register Little Women over at her place.

The little books were full of help and comfort - Bunyan as structure in Little Women

Structure.  I thought the most interesting thing in Little Women – I mean in One – was the layer of structures Louisa May Alcott used to construct the book.  There are at least three.

1.  The year and seasons, roughly Christmas 1861 to Christmas 1862, with time passing at what feels like a natural rate.  “One July day she came in with her hands full…” I read at the beginning of Chapter 12, while Chapter 13 begins on “one warm September afternoon,” and “the October days began to grow chilly” at the head of Chapter 14.  Time moves differently in the sad, stressful November and December, so those months need more chapters.

2.  Episodes.  Many chapters belong to a single sister.  All four get their share.  All four have virtues to emulate and vices to expunge.  Sometimes we work as a group, sometimes we work on our own, so to speak.  The girls are always working, even while playing.

3.  Pilgrim’s Progress.  Alcott employs John Bunyan’s 1678 allegorical novel, and also its 1684 sequel, as a structural device throughout her own novel, both within the novel – meaning the characters read the book and refer to it – and outside of the novel, so to speak, in chapter titles and in the novel’s epigram, so that the first words of the book are actually Alcott’s adaptation of a poem from Pilgrim’s Progress: “Go then, my little Book” and encourage the “little tripping maids” to “choose to be \ Pilgrims better, by far, than thee or me.”  Alcott immediately blends her own novel with her model.

On that first Christmas, in Chapter 2, the girls all receive new copies of Pilgrim’s Progress, hidden under their pillows during the night, with each sister getting a different colored cover.  Which is great, right?  Those were the days.  These are the “little books” that the sisters are always reading for comfort and instruction.  The fictional characters are again modeling behavior for the actual reader engrossed in his own little book, as seen as Chapter 16 opens:

In the cold gray dawn the sisters lit their lamp and read their chapter with an earnestness never felt before.  For now the shadow of a real trouble had come, the little books were full of help and comfort, and as they dressed, they agreed to say goodbye cheerfully and hopefully, and send their mother on her anxious journey unsaddened by tears or complaints from them.

The Pilgrim’s Progress takes the place of the Bible for the March sisters.  I may well have missed a reference, but I believe the Bible is directly mentioned only once, in Chapter 33 – now we are in Two – where it is found in the possession of the 1848 revolutionary Professor Bhaer who keeps his edition of Shakespeare “with his German Bible, Plato, Homer, and Milton.”  In other words, the Bible is kept in the company of literature, not religious texts.  The fact that almost no one in the novel can even read this Bible is an additional irony.

Two unfortunately loses much of this overlaid structure.  The sequel becomes, as the passage about the books suggests, a kind of Bildungsroman for Jo, with the other sisters sidelined in one way or another, a functional but less complex way to organize the story.

Jane GS was inspired, when she read Little Women, to read The Pilgrim’s Progress as well, which more Alcott readers should do.  Bunyan’s book is sectarian and narrow, but also one of the great pieces of English prose, and I find that reading it in the context of Little Women softens its Calvinist harshness, which by itself is a debt I owe Alcott.

Buy Little Women or else - Alcott's discomfort read

Some groundwork for Louisa May Alcott’s  Little Women.  It is actually or at least once was two books, Little Women, or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy published in October 1868 and a sequel with the same title plus Part Second, published in 1869.  The second book is a genuine sequel in that its existence was determined by the success of the initial book, as Alcott threatens in the last lines of One:

So grouped the curtain falls upon Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy.  Whether it ever rises again, depends upon the reception given to the first act of the domestic drama, called “LITTLE WOMEN.” (Ch. 23)

That sounds almost extortionate, which reminds me that I should mention that I now refer to the two parts of Little Women as One and Two, exactly like the mobsters in The Sopranos refer to the different parts of The Godfather.  An English publisher, unknown to Alcott, solved the problem by calling the second book Good Wives.  Two is its own book, a worse book, unfortunately, an aggravating book in places, but I will save that topic.  They’re different.

Little Women is a didactic novel for children, explicitly improving.  I do not think that current readers have lost their taste for didactic novels, but the kind of didacticism we tolerate or even like has certainly changed a lot, and it does not look much like that of Little Women.  It is amazing, given its open agenda and homiletic passages, how well the book has survived, how beloved it is.

But we love the characters, the sisters, not Alcott’s wisdom.  Perhaps we even love their weaknesses more than their virtues.   I assume most young readers simply ignore the improving sermonettes, just racing past them.  I would guess that I did thirty years ago – no, it must be longer – when I last read the novels.

Most readers seem to pick a single sister with whom to identify, although since the people most likely to write about their favorite character are bookish sorts, the bookish Jo is over-represented in the written record.  Readers can divvy the sisters up, too – another ingenuity – identifying, for example, with Jo’s ambition but Beth’s quietness and Meg’s unquenchable thirst for champagne (that is in the text, Ch. 9 – she even has a hangover!).

Alcott’s didactic strategy is to trick the reader into transforming sympathy into self-examination.  If I share Jo’s best qualities it is likely that I also have some of her worst, that I sin in the way she sins.  So even without direct intervention by the narrator or the girls’ mother, I may find myself learning from Jo’s struggle against anger or Meg’s against vanity.  Or I may enjoy a virtue from Sister A but need to work on a problem from Sister B.

It can be amusing to see readers call Little Women a “comfort read.”  The novel is supposed to be a discomfort read, a quiet undermining of my complacency, a gentle call to reform my wicked ways.  Adult readers, though, are mostly perfect, so I suppose we are comforted by the memory of our old childhood struggles against Apollyon and the Slough of Despond, now that we reside in the Celestial City.

Alcott and pathos - the presence of human sympathy, perhaps, had lightened that hard hour

Although Louisa May Alcott was only an army nurse for a month, she had the good luck to arrive just in time to treat the mass of casualties of the Battle of Fredericksburg, a bloody disaster for the Union.  Alcott wanted to see service, so for her this was good luck.  Her first chapter of actual hospital work is about the first day the wounded poured in to be cleaned, re-bandaged – their bandages had not been changed for days – and stitched up.

Alcott first published Hospital Sketches, or most of it, in a New England anti-slavery newspaper.  She was writing for an audience desperate for news, and likely with family in the army.  A patriot and abolitionist, Alcott might well have avoided criticism and protected her readers from unpleasant subjects.  That book would not be worth reading.

She steers a middle course, openly critical of the bad food (coffee “like mud soup, scalding hot, guiltless of cream, rich in an all-pervading flavor of molasses, scorch and tin pot,” III, 43), the unhygienic conditions, and the indifferent or thieving staff, and writing in an open-eyed but careful manner about the blood and wounds.  Anesthetic-free amputations are routine – “whipping off legs like an animated guillotine” (VI, 88) is her description of a particular doctor – and much of a nurse’s job involved treating horrible wounds, and Alcott does not conceal any of this, yet I believe the book is readable by almost anyone.  A “six foot New Hampshire man” has “a leg broken and perforated by a piece of shell, so large that, had I not seen the wound, I should have regarded the story as Munchausenism” (III, 35), and a “rough Michigander” has “an arm blown off at the shoulder, and two or three bullets still in him – as he afterwards mentioned, as carelessly as if gentlemen were in the habit of carrying such trifles about with them” (III, 33).  She uses words to describe but also to conceal.

Hospital Sketches is at its core about death.  Ten pages of the short book, the longest single episode, are given to a single death and life.  John the Virginia blacksmith is the character who stands in for all of the others.

I thought him nearly gone, and had just laid down the fan, believing its help to be no longer needed, when suddenly he rose up in his bed, and cried out with a bitter cry that broke the silence, sharply  startling every one with its agonized appeal:

"For God's sake, give me air!"

It was the only cry pain or death had wrung from him, the only boon he had asked; and none of us could grant it, for all the airs that blew were useless now.  (IV, 56-7)

Alcott divides her wards into “’my duty room,’ my ‘pleasure room,’ and my ‘pathetic room.’"  John is in the pathetic room.  Alcott means the word in its older sense, not inferior but evoking pity or sympathy, and she uses her book to create pathos as well.  I believe we again see the influence of Dickens, the master of elevated sentimentality – not that he never succumbs to the cheap stuff!

He never spoke again, but to the end held my hand close, so close that when he was asleep at last, I could not draw it away.  Dan helped me, warning me as he did so that it was unsafe for dead and living flesh to lie so long together; but though my hand was strangely cold and stiff, and four white marks remained across its back, even when warmth and color had returned elsewhere, I could not but be glad that, through its touch, the presence of human sympathy, perhaps, had lightened that hard hour.  (IV, 57)

Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches: Pigs also possessed attractions for me

Little Women and its sequel Good Wives are on the horizon.  I am in theory reading along with Dolce Bellezza, as are, I hope, many people, although I will be on vacation the week following Christmas, just when DB plans to write about the novels.  I will catch up, I promise, at least if whoever is hogging the library copy, probably some ten year old who can hardly appreciate the book the way I will and should surrender it for the greater good of book blogging, ever returns the dang thing.  So it will likely not be until January that I write about who I think Jo should marry and which of the characters I most want to slap, which I understand are the key interpretive difficulties of the novels.

In preparation, I read Louisa May Alcott’s earlier little memoir Hospital Sketches (1863), a surprisingly humorous account of her one month as an army nurse (she contracted typhoid and had to abandon her service).  Rob Velella, proprietor of The American Literary Blog, twittered that Hospital Sketches is a better book than Little Women.  I don’t remember Little Women well enough to say, but Hospital Sketches is a good book.

A sample of Alcott’s humor, from a Chapter V, “Off Duty,” where we get to see a little bit of wartime Washington, D. C., including the new Capitol building, the statuary (“rather wearying to examine”), the army mules, and the free-range pigs:

Pigs also possessed attractions for me, never having had an opportunity of observing their graces of mind and manner, till I came to Washington, whose porcine citizens appeared to enjoy a larger liberty than many of its human ones. Stout, sedate looking pigs, hurried by each morning to their places of business, with a preoccupied air, and sonorous greeting to their friends. Genteel pigs, with an extra curl to their tails, promenaded in pairs, lunching here and there, like gentlemen of leisure…  Maternal pigs, with their interesting families, strolled by in the sun; and often the pink, baby-like squealers lay down for a nap, with a trust in Providence worthy of human imitation. (V, 71-2)

Although Alcott often reminded me of Mark Twain (this is before Twain had published anything of significance), her model is Charles Dickens.  Hospital Sketches is packed with references to Dickens.  I in fact concealed one of them in the ellipses above, where young pigs are not only compared to Mrs. Peerybingle from The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) but Alcott actually includes a close paraphrase of a Dickens passage about neat stockings.  Not only is the tone that of Dickens, but so is some of the language.

Hospital Sketches, in the edition I read (Belknap, 1960), is only 84 pages long.  The editor, Bessie Z. Jones, fills it out with a fascinating essay on military nursing before and during the Civil War.  That is the heart of the novel, of course, Alcott’s work as a nurse.  I should write something about that.  Dickens is again relevant.