From the Earth to the Moon, with sandwiches - "Hurray for Edgar Poe!"

A culture, a literary tradition, emphasizes its own writers more than anyone else does.  It’s normal and natural.  Exceptions are of the highest interest, yes.  And I am thinking of French readers, who like more of everything.

So Jules Verne is read more in France than in the United States, is where I am going today.  Looking at Amazon, judging the number of editions and the numbers of reviews, it looks like four Verne novels are still widely read in the United States.  In France it is at least eight novels, maybe as many as a dozen, and recently there was a beeyootiful reissue of everything, in cheap paperbacks with attractive embossed red covers and vintage illustrations, so that bookstores had plenty of random “now what is this” titles.  The School of the Robinsons?  The Sphinx of the Ice?  Maybe someday I will find out what they are.

This is not to say that the French take Verne particularly seriously.  A junior high-level collection of travel writing that I read called him a “popularizer of genius,” which gets the attitude.  He really is popular, still popular, with Verne-derived images all over, most charmingly on carousels.  And he is taken more seriously – more critically – than he was when he was alive.

I just finished De la Terre à la Lune, trajet direct en 97 heures 20 minutes (From the Earth to the Moon, on a Direct Path in 97 Hours, 20 Minutes, 1865), which I tried for a couple of reasons: it is fairly short, fairly easy, and inspired much of the imagery of a much greater work of art, George Méliès’s 1902 film A Trip to the Moon.  I occasionally had to force myself to really read the French text, since it was easier to just substitute an image from the film.  Close enough!  Sometimes quite close.

The title pretty well summarizes the novel.  The means of transportation is a big bullet shot out of a giant cannon.  To the extent that the book has characters, they are a couple of American artillery-makers who, lacking purpose with the end of the Civil War, come up with this crazy scheme.

To the extent that the novel has a plot – eh, it barely has a plot.  Based on this book alone, I would doubt the ability of Verne to plot.  From the Earth to the Moon is mostly engineering – a great moment of tension is the pouring of molten metal into a Florida pit to found the huge cannon (which is entirely underground) – but the parts that are not are satire.  This novel is packed with jokes.

The bomb-makers who belong to the Gun-Club have all been blown to bits, and now have wooden legs and rubber jaws and so on.  “[T]here was not quite one arm per four persons, and only two legs per six” (Ch. I).

I took this as a bit of a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe and his story “The Man That Was Used Up” (1839).  The Gun-Club is in Baltimore, maybe another nod.  The President of the Club gives an inspirational speech in which he covers a pretty thorough history of fictional journeys to the moon, so Poe is there again:

“Hurray for Edgar Poe!” cried the assembly, electrified by the words of its president. (Ch. II)

That’s the spirit.

Several chapters are nothing but meetings.  The meetings feature sandwiches.  Easily my favorite sentence in the novel:

“We are ready,” replied the members of the Committee while each absorbing a half-dozen sandwiches.

– Nous sommes prêts, répondirent les membres du Comité en absorbant chacun une demi-douzaine de sandwiches.  (Ch. VII, “The Hymn of the Bullet”)

Three chapters straight of meetings.  Not satire, really, but gritty realism.

Gags, statistics, nonsense, engineering, and at the end, kaboom!  A strange novel.

All translations mine, so don’t trust them.

“It’s this accursed science,” I cried. - The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells - but he was not a reader of fiction

What I should be doing is continuing on with Ibsen, writing about his ungainly ten act masterpiece Emperor and Galilean.  But at some point I took a break from Ibsen to read The First Men in the Moon (1901) by H. G. Wells, so now I will take a break to write about it.  Easier to read, easier, to summarize, easier to bat around.

Summary:  An absent-minded scientist, Cavor, invents an anti-gravity metal, Cavorite.  For some reason the first thing he does with it is fly to the moon.  For some other reason he takes a venal bankrupt with a fancy prose style with him.  The men are captured by the moon-men, the Selenites, and taken to their phosphorescent moon-caves.  Thus the puzzling preposition in the novel’s title.  Wells wrote “in” and meant it.  The bankrupt escapes and writes a shocking and, frankly, almost unbelievable memoir about his experiences.

The literary tradition of trips to the moon goes back at least to Lucian’s True History (2nd century), where the method of transport is a whirlwind.  A knight in Orlando Furioso (1532) gets to the moon by hippogriff.  Jules Verne shot his astronauts to the moon with a giant cannon, much like Georges Méliès did in A Trip to the Moon (1902).

“That's perfectly easy. An air-tight manhole is all that is needed.  That, of course, will have to be a little complicated; there will have to be a valve, so that things may be thrown out, if necessary, without much loss of air.”

“Like Jules Verne's thing in A Trip to the Moon.”

But Cavor was not a reader of fiction.  (Ch.  3)

The 1993 Everyman paperback I read has a lot of baffling stuff about the reaction to this particular Wells novel, a lot of nonsense about science and Wells as a “prophet,” even though a trip to the moon is less of an original prophecy than anything Wells had written before.  The passage above is a winking acknowledgment.

Yet Jules Verne insists the science is on his side, as he says in a 1903 interview:

I make use of physics.  He invents.  I go to the moon in a cannonball, discharged from a cannon.  Here there is no invention.  He goes to Mars [?] in an airship, which he constructs of a metal which does away with the law of gravitation.  That’s all very well but show me this metal.  Let him produce it.  (p. 189)

Yes, H., why do you not produce the magical metal?  Verne, after all, produced the giant cannon.  He must have.  Otherwise his challenge makes no sense.  Charitably, I take all of this an amusing hoax on gullible readers.  Less charitably, I fear Verne believed himself – “Here there is no invention.”

The Wells novel is almost nothing but invention, some of it absolutely marvelous, some of it satirical and even political, some of it just for laughs.  The First Men in the Moon is a fifth book of Gulliver’s Travels, or Alice in Lunarland, or the teleplay for Laurel and Hardy in Space.  I am not sure who should play the scientist, Laurel or Hardy.  The movie would work either way.

There is even some science, although not where it seems it should be.  Ignore Verne’s misdirection.  Remember The Time Machine (1895) and so on.

I might be able to avoid Ibsen for several days with this piece of fluff.

The quotation in the title is from Chapter 13.

Ballooning with the dummy in the top hat, or Around the World in Eighty Days

Because of movies, mostly, there are a few books that should now come with warnings, prominently displayed:  Not Like the Movie.  The back covers should feature specific “anti-spoilers.”  Frankenstein is the most obvious example, I think.  The perplexed reader waits, in a fidget, for the appearance of hunchbacked Igor and “Fire bad!” and “Puttin’ on the Ritz” but instead reads about the monster reading The Sorrows of Young Werther.  That’s my favorite part of the book, at least.  Regardless, the innovations and improvements of James Whale are nowhere to be found.

Anyone read Carlos Collodi’s 1883 The Adventures of Pinocchio?  It’s a fascinating book, not merely frightening like parts of the Walt Disney version but quite grim.  The big shocker, though, is the – no, I don’t want to say.  Leave it at this: the use of the cricket is very different.  Very, very different.

Reading Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) recently, I came across another one.  Phileas Fogg, a wealthy sufferer from autism, “that dummy in a top hat,” (Nabokov, The Defense, p. 34), is tangled up in an expensive bet:  can he travel around the world, point to point, in eighty days?  A number of forms of transportation will be required – certainly, different boats and steamships, and trains, and because there will inevitably be complications along the way, other more clever and surprising vehicles.  I have never seen a  film version of the novel, but I had somehow picked up the idea that there would be a balloon.  Where did I get that idea? (Poster from Wikipedia).

Here’s the balloon:

Still, some means must be found to cross the Atlantic on a boat, unless by balloon, - which would have been venturesome, besides not being capable of being put in practice. (Ch. 32)

I’m reading the 1873 George Towle translation; perhaps the infelicities of that sentence are his fault.  Separate issue.  It was amusing to carry along, while reading, a niggling feeling that a balloon was supposed  to appear.  It could have, at any moment, even at the very end.  The train to London breaks down, but, look, there’s a balloonist!  But no.

I know that Verne had written an earlier novel about ballooning (Five Weeks in a Balloon, 1863), so perhaps he was sick of the subject.  The variety would have been nice, though.  I was startled by how dull most of the obstacles and solutions were in Around the World, which is nominally an adventure novel.  Fogg mostly solves his problems by spending money.  The ship he needed already sailed?  Hire another!  The novel is not much of a demonstration of the ingenuity of Jules Verne.   He is generally more interested in steamship schedules than in exciting incidents. Even the ending is stolen directly from Edgar Allan Poe.

As if I cared whether or not there was a balloon, or a rocket ship, or a tricycle!  Just get me around the world, Jules – and that, he did.  Still, a warning to adventure seekers:  Around the World in Eighty Days is more a classic of trainspotting than of adventure, and there ain’t no balloon.