The hardest book I’ve read recently, and the easiest. The hardest not in French, a separate category of difficulty.
Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding (1946) is one of the first novels I really dismantled, studying it piece by piece. This complex novel likely informs the way I understand fiction in ways I do not even know, but it certainly taught me that finding the patterns behind the surface is worthwhile. The better understood work of art becomes more beautiful. At least this kind of art.
The Golden Apples (1949)
is a relative of Delta Wedding, but linked short stories, all set in the
same little Mississippi delta town; how hard can it be, I thought? And then the difficulties of the book
defeated me again and again. Comical,
sometimes – oh no, I was supposed to be keeping track of that! So I’ll write this off this attempt as something
of a failure, except that it is useful preparation for my next reading, when I
will be braced and alert and properly equipped.
It was a bit of a relief to poke
into the Welty scholarship – don’t be afraid to ask for help! – and see The
Golden Apples routinely described as her most difficult book. By difficult I mean: layered patterning;
concealed multi-directional references (the title, is that Hesiod or Yeats?
Both); original symbolism; overlapping time; lots of characters; deferred information. Mostly the latter, really. Every basic who / when / what question
will be answered, but I may have to hold
onto it for ten or a hundred pages.
It’s all the usual Modernist
stuff, employed with a high level of art and craft. Here’s the last sentence:
They heard through falling rain the running of the horse and bear, the stroke of the leopard, the dragon’s crusty slither, and the glimmer and the trumpet of the swan.
Next time, I’ll know what all of
that means. Next time.
I have a box or two of fantasy
paperbacks, mostly well-known books, that are causing me anxiety (keep, sell, give
away?). I just re-read one of them, Poul
Anderson’s The High Crusade (1960), with real pleasure. It is a book written on principles opposite of Welty’s. It is an easy book. I am supposed to get it – all of it – right away. I re-read this kind of book to repeat but not
deepen the pleasure.
Given what it is, though, Anderson’s
book is good fun. Extraterrestrial
invaders make the mistake of landing in a medieval village. Soon enough, three knights and their yeoman archers and sturdy peasants have conquered an interstellar empire. It is all preposterous but also episodically, logically inexorable. The narrative
pleasure is watching Anderson move the stakes up, notch by notch, until he runs
out.
The High Crusade is an example of the genre of human triumphalism, a descendent of Aristophanes’s Birds (414 BCE), where the Athenians conquer Olympus through sheer exuberance. Like the Aristophanes play, Anderson’s novel has elements that critique imperialism, but they are all swept away by the energy of the upstarts. Empires are overthrown and replaced by new empires. The overthrowing is so enjoyable that the replacement is barely noticed.
There are three more Anderson novels in that box, and come to think of it Tau Zero (1970) is also a human triumphalist book. Anderson rigs things so humans conquer the next universe, the one that comes after the heat death of our universe.
If you see me reading old fantasy
novels, you will know I am rummaging in the box. They should go, mostly. Like I need my own copy of The Martian
Chronicles. Like that book is hard
to find if I want it.
