Talking is far better, because you never know what may come of it - what make a railroad story a Railroad Story?

I thought I was going to pin down a couple of my favorites among Sholem Aleichem's Railroad Stories, but I'm having trouble doing that, and not because they're all my favorites. I mean, there's some of this, and there's some of that. But I can't stop looking at the frames of the stories.*

Sholem Aleichem could have published all but a few of these stories as pure monologues, like the examples collected in the superb Nineteen to the Dozen: Monologues and Bits and Bobs of Other Things. The monologues in that books are pure - they are uninterrupted, and the reader has to infer the identity of the auditor. In The Railroad Stories, the narrator, the commercial traveler, is always present, but so, potentially, are a train car full of other people.

So in "Baranovich Station," it's important that the teller of the fascinating but unfinished story is in a full car with dozens of listeners. The pain of never hearing the end is that much greater than if there were an audience of just one, and the reader can share his own pain with the fictional crowd. Although, presumably, the reader also has some distance and can appreciate the joke in a way that the audience cannot.

"A Game of Sixty-Six," by contrast, has to be one on one (with the reader looking over the traveler's shoulder). A man relates to the narrator, confidentially, and at length, being cleaned out by card sharks, before suggesting a little game of their own. Our traveler may not be the sharpest card in the deck himself, but:

"I watched him cut the deck; he did it a little too skillfully, a little too fast. And his hands were a little too white. Too white and too soft. Suddenly I had a most unpleasant thought..."

The con man's story wouldn't work in public. The creepy gangster's story in "The Man from Buenos Aires" works the same way. It requires intimacy.

But sometimes, as in two stories told about an unimportant branch line called the Slowpoke Express, the railroad car provides a stage, even for an audience of one:

"And since we were on the Slowpoke Express, which I described in the last chapter - where, being the only passengers in our car, we had all the time and space in the world - he sprawled out as comfortably as if he were in his own living room and gave his narrative talents free rein, turning each polished phrase carefully and grinning with pleasure at his own story while stroking his ample belly with one hand." ("The Miracle of Hoshana Rabbah")

The plots of the two Slowpoke Express stories depend on the actual characteristics of locomotives (an engine running out of coal, for instance), which is not generally the case. What makes a story a Railroad Story? It's the train car as a public space, where strangers can impart their stories to each other. From the narrator's farewell, "Third Class":

"When you travel third class, on the other hand, you feel right at home. In fact, if you happen to be in a car whose passengers are exclusively Jews, you may feel a bit too much at home... At night you can save yourself the bother of having to fall asleep, because there's always someone to talk to - and if you're not in the mood to talk, someone else will be glad to do it for you. Who expects to sleep on a train ride anyway? Talking is far better, because you never know what may come of it."

Translation by Hillel Halkin.

* Prompted by D.G. Myers, a bit, perhaps.

The up-to-date technogeek Nathaniel Hawthorne

I currently credit Nathaniel Hawthorne with two literary first uses. His 1843 sketch "The Old Apple-Dealer" is, to my knowledge, the first literary mention of the railroad, while the 1851 The House of the Seven Gables introduces photography to literature via a daguerreotypist.

Come to think of it, there's another - "The Old Apple-Dealer" is merely set in a railroad station. The first literary train ride is from just slightly later in 1843, in "The Celestial Railroad," Hawthorne's clever update of The Pilgrim's Progress. Turns out you can't just ride the train to Heaven.

Maybe I should mention that I don't actually quite exactly think these works are really the first mentions of these subjects in all of fiction, not to mention poetry, not to mention other belletristic essays and whatnot. The world, it is big. But if you know of an earlier candidate, please put it in the comments. If it's a daguerreotypist or other photographer, earlier or later, please add it to Terry Vertigo's bibliography of fictional photographers, as well. He's got a 100 year gap between Hawthorne and Anthony Powell that needs filling.

And I have a larger point, which is that I never think of Nathaniel Hawthorne as Mr. Up-to-the-minute, keen observer of what's new and now. Dickens and Balzac, for example, those are the eagle-eyed journalists of the big picture. But Dickens doesn't put a character on a train until Chapter 20 of Dombey and Son, published in 1846 or 1847, (oops, untrue - see correction below)* and his first mention of the subject is earlier in the same novel. Oddly, Dickens has to have someone build the railroad, in Chapter 6, before any of his characters can ride on it, an unusually literal way of constructing a fictional world. See nicole's post here for a really fine passage from that chapter.

I don't remember Balzac using the word "railroad" until Cousin Bette, 1846, and then it always has the word "bond" after it. The context is always investing. No one actually sets foot on a train. Maybe somewhere in the sixty plus installments of The Human Comedy I have not read there is a daguerreotypist or a train ride or two, maybe even one earlier than Hawthorne's. Although railroad construction started late in France for various reasons, not until 1842 on any significant scale, so Hawthorne probably trumps Balzac there.

The House of the Seven Gables actually devotes a paragraph to the issue of technological novelties. Clifford has been in prison for decades, so everything is new to him:

"As regarded novelties (among which cabs and omnibuses were to be reckoned), his mind appeared to have lost its proper gripe and retentiveness. Twice or thrice, for example, during the sunny hours of the day, a water-cart went along by the Pyncheon House, leaving a broad wake of moistened earth, instead of the white dust that had risen at a lady's lightest footfall; it was like a summer shower, which the city authorities had caught and tamed, and compelled it into the commonest routine of their convenience. With the water-cart Clifford could never grow familiar; it always affected him with just the same surprise as at first." (Ch. XI)

This is followed by a bit about, yes, railroads, "the obstreperous howl of the steam-devil." Much of Hawthorne's work, much of his imaginative life, takes place in the colonial history of New England. But there's this other side of Hawthorne that didn't fit my image of him.

* UPDATE: I forgot about the short American train ride in Martin Chuzzlewit, Chapter 21, another fine scene for the reader with a taste for Dickens' America fantasia. This chapter came out in serial form in September 1843, so it's quite close to Hawthorne. But "The Old Apple-Dealer" was published in January 1843, and "The Celestial Railroad" in May 1843. Check my work here. Thank goodness my error didn't spoil my Dombey and Son joke. The Americans can build their own railroads; Dickens has to build the English ones himself.