Yiddish playwrights are against greed. Me, too, no evil eye.

All of the plays in God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation are American (written in the U.S., performed in New York theaters), but most of them are set in the old country, not so old for most of the audience.

The best play, I think, it the one Nahma Sandrow puts in the title: Jacob Gordin's God, Man, and Devil (1900). Gordin was a giant in the Yiddish theater, it's first serious playwright. He was right in the mainstream of modern theater, and reminded me at times of Ibsen or Ostrovsky. Gordin was a Tolstoyan who wanted to use the theater to educate the masses about high culture; as a result, he wrote a stage version of The Kreutzer Sonata, and The Jewish King Lear, which I must, must read.

God, Man, and Devil has a literary predecessor, too, as one might guess from the title. This is a Faust story. In a simplified version of Goethe's prologue, Satan, not to be mentioned on anyone's blog, convinces a distant, preoccupied God to let him test the virtue of a pious man with riches. Satan, no evil eye, actually tells us that this has be more like the story of Faust than Job, because "Nowadays a Jew is used to sorrows."

The dapper Mephistopheles, not to be thought of, calling himself Uriel Mischief, inveigles the poor, virtuous scribe Hereshele into buying a lottery ticket, a winner. Hershele is a genuinely religoius man, but the money, and Mischief's influence, ruin his and his family's lives, no evil eye, in more or less predictable ways. We get divorce, industrial accidents, attempted murder, all sorts of dramatic things.

The ingenious thing about the play is how Hershele's worst traits turn out to have been present all along, and how they are brought out through his interactions with his wife and father and other characters. The story of a man destroyed by his greed, good stay, evil away, is not exactly subtle, but the dramatic revelation of his character is expertly done. Hershele really is a good man, but not just that, like all of us.

It was asking for trouble to mention the devil, not to be mentioned, or good luck, no evil eye, and Hershele has a superstitious neighbor who has all of the formulas necessary to ward off all the bad effects. I have interlarded my text with some of them. She, of course, mentions luck and the devil more than anyone. A good gag for a play where the devil is an onstage character.

David Pinski's play The Treasure (1906) is also a greed play. An undertaker's son finds some gold coins in the cemetery while burying his dog. The vain teenage daughter, who is, frankly, a scream, gets to be a rich girl for a day, perhaps a bit too publicly. Next thing you know, the whole town is digging up the cemetery. Finally, logically, the disturbed dead take the stage.

This one's not exactly subtle, either, but it's funny, it builds to a meaningful climax, and I'll bet it works well live. Sandrow includes a scene from another from another Pinski play, Yankl the Blacksmith, just to show that Jewish playwrights did actually write about lust and adultery and other typical dramatic subjects (and the scene is well-chosen - it's like Jewish Tennessee Williams). But four out of the five plays in her excellent book are primarily attacks on greed.

I can't be expected to work for the sake of ideals alone - in America, thank God, people know the value of a pious Jew.

More samples from Nahma Sandrow's God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation. I had not planned to write about this for more than a couple of days, but My Life in Book's perspicacious question has inspired me, although to what, who can say.

Two major themes dominate early Yiddish literature: one is ignorance and superstition, and the other is greed. Both are threats to culture. Outside oppression - anti-Semitism and pogroms - is a distant third, although it comes to the forefront as conditions in Russia worsen. For the Yiddish writers who emigrated to America, to New York - and all of the plays in this book are American - superstition has receded, and the pogroms have been left behind. That leaves greed, mostly. I can be this reductive in part because there isn't that much Yiddish literature and these themes really are very common, and in part through pure ignorance (but not superstition).

An example of greed and ignorance, hand in hand, the beginning of Messiah in America (1919) by Isaac Moishe Nadir:

Shabby theatrical office, Broadway area, 1920s. MENAKHEM-YOSEF is a producer; JACK is his assistant.

JACK. I've got it!

MENAKHEM-YOSEF. What?

JACK. A spitter.

MENAKHEM-YOSEF. A spitter. What do you mean, a spitter?

JACK. A novelty. I know this kid who can spit further than anyone in the world. His record is nineteen feet.

MENAKHEM-YOSEF. Nineteen feet is no novelty. It seems to me that somebody has already spit further. He's already been outspat.

JACK. What are you talking about, Mr. Menakhem-Yosef? Nobody has spit nineteen feet yet, except for the Philadelphia spitter, and he's dead.

MENAKHEM-YOSEF. See that? It's the nation's best men that die the youngest. How much will he take?

JACK. The spitter? Four hundred fifty a show. But I think he's good value.

MENAKHEM-YOSEF. Certainly he's good value, who's talking value? But that's too high for me. I can't be expected to work for the sake of ideals alone. I can't bring on the Messiah single-handed.

JACK. What did you just say? Messiah. Messiah? Quiet. Why not bring on the Messiah? How is the Messiah any worse than a spitter?

I don't want to, but I'll stop there. They're going to put on a Broadway show in which the Jewish Messiah comes to earth. They plan to sell shares in the First Messiah Redemption Corporation. "Redeemed from what?" "How the hell should I know? What difference does it make? Jews want to be redeemed." They get Jack's uncomprehending uncle to play the Messiah, and pay h im thirty-five dollars a week, because "In America, thank God, people know the value of a pious Jew."

This is all completely outrageous, an affront to decency and good taste. Sandrow compares the playwright's humor to a sock to the jaw. That's about right.

What happens next? Don't know, exactly. Sandrow only includes this one scene! More than what I wrote, but only about four pages, all just as good. "It culminates in a boxing match between two competing Messiahs: the one who appears in this scene and a young motorcycle tough." Oy, you're killing me, I want the rest!

Tomorrow, more greed.

Who needs a collar? Do I need one? Do you? - Aunt Jemima and the Nestlé baby on the Yiddish stage

Yiddish literature is full of surprises. Whatever I thought I might find, it did not include a play with a cast of characters featuring:

AUNT JEMIMA, black cook in apron, advertising pancake mix
ARROW COLLAR MAN, blond and handsome, advertising collars
NESTLÉ BABY, baby girl, advertising baby food
WRIGLEY TWINS, twin youngsters, advertising chewing gum

And so on. The play is (here's a Yiddish lesson) Bronks Ekspres, or Bronx Express: A Dream in Three Acts (1919 or so), by Osip Dymov.

A button maker, Khatskl Hungerproud, is riding the subway from 14th Street up to the Bronx. He bumps into an old acquaintance, a con man, Flames, who gets him fired up about getting rich:

FLAMES. (Points to the subway ads.) Do you see that Pluto Mineral Water?

HUNGERPROUD. The red devil with the tail?

FLAMES. Yes. Twenty-five million. I know him - he's a buddy of mine. Or Tuxedo Tobacco, "Your nose knows," forty million. Or Arrow Collars - he was a telegraph messenger boy. Who needs a collar? Do I need one? Do you? Bluff. Now he's worth one hundred million. Or Aunt Jemima Pancakes, "Delicious, economical, convenient," ten million.

HUNGERPROUD. No!

FLAMES. No? And people don't go every year to Atlantic City to the beach? And football and bathing suits, moving pictures and chewing gum, and ice cream, and shoeshine every minute. Do you have any idea what's going on with the Americans? Nestlé? That baby? Two hundred million. And Smith Brothers Cough Drops, three hundred fifty million.

HUNGERPROUD. Both brothers together?

FLAMES. Each brother separately. Both together, five hundred.

I like the con man's math there. Khatskl falls asleep on the subway, and, one thing leads to another, he ends up lounging in Atlantic City, married to a cigarette mascot, father of the Nestlé baby, with his own real family somehow tangled up in his dream. When Khatskl wakes up, has he learned his lesson about what's really valuable in life? Whaddaya think?

A good part of the fun here is that several of the mascots are still in use, or at least distantly recognizable, and I suppose this would be even more fun live, seeing them wander around the stage. But I also like the critical thinking about advertising. the satire is still pretty much on target. Gee, people were on to the game back in 1919?

The play deepens the bite, too - Hungerproud acquire his dream-riches by selling his Judaism. I haven't found a Yiddish writer yet who sees America differently. The opportunities for improvement are endless, and there's no going back to the shtetl, but the corruptions are endless as well.

Bronx Express can be found in God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation (1999), translated by Nahma Sandrow. The other plays in the book are not the off-kilter hoot that this one is, but they have their own merits. A little more Yiddish theater tomorrow.

Among the most aesthetically pleasing of all insects - the prose style of naturalists

So if I were to take this idea seriously - when and how did poets and novelists start writing seriously about animals - I would have to look to their models, the naturalists and scientists and travelers, the Gilbert Whites and James Audubons and Charles Darwins and so on. Not that the direction of influence only had to go one way, or that a genius like John Clare needed their help, but that's where I think I'd start.

Herman Melville's Mardi (1849), for example, is full of nature writing. A bit overpacked and encyclopedic, even. Chapter 32 is titled "Xiphius Platypterus," and is entirely about the swordfish. An earlier chapter is about sharks and pilot fish. A later one describes whales playing in a medusa-illuminated sea. Often, this is directly pinched from other books. Much of the novel is built like a collage, upon which Melville founds his rhetorical flights (a bit on the swordfish):

"A right valiant and jaunty Chevalier is our hero; going about with his long Toledo perpetually drawn. Rely upon it, he will fight you to the hilt, for his bony blade has never a scabbard. He himself sprang from it at birth; yea, at the very moment he leaped into the Battle of Life; as we mortals ourselves spring all naked and scabbardless into the world."

Not what I'm looking for - I do not believe this tells us much about the swordfish.

Most of Melville's contemporaries are simply prosaic. I've read enough books about traveling in the American West to be tired of the repetitive descriptions of buffalo, grizzly bears, and prairie dog villages. Even John Kirk Townsend, an expert in birds, writes surprisingly flat descriptions of nature (the fun of his Narrative of a Journey across the Rocky Mountains (1839), I should say, is his irrepressible naivté). Here's Josiah Gregg, a merchant in the Santa Fé trail trade, with an unusually nice description of a buffalo charge:

"The buffalo never attacks, however, except when wounded... I have crouched in the tall grass in the direct route of a frighted gang, when, firing at them on their near approach. they would spread in consternation to either side. Still their advance is somewhat frightful - their thundering rumble over the dry plain - their lion-like fronts and dangling beards - their open mouths and hanging tongues - as they come on, puffing like a locomotive engine at every bound, does at first make the blood settle a little heavy about the heart." (Ch. 27 "Animals of the Prairie", p. 366)

That's from Commerce of the Prairies (1844). Gregg is trying to write a useful book, so most of his descriptions of wolves and mustangs and horned lizards are functional, designed to assist travelers. But there's good writing here, too.

I now realize that, today, we are awash in high quality nature writing. Maybe I take it for granted. The current issue of Smithsonian magazine has an article about geoduck clams and the people who work with them that is so well written that it's easy to ignore how good it really is:

"Its long, leathery neck can stretch to the length of a baseball bat or recoil to a wrinkled nub. The neck resembles an aardvark's snout, an elephant's trunk or a monstrous prehistoric earthworm emerging from a fist-size shell, among other things."

The author is Craig Welch; Smithsonian also published, a couple of months ago, a piece of his on the spotted owl of similar quality. Apropos of nothing, except that someone gave it to me, and it's interesting, I'm reading the memoir of entomologist E. O. Wilson (Naturalist, 1994). He begins by telling us about a memory from when he was seven, when he came upon a jellyfish:

"Its opalescent pink bell is divided by thin red lines that radiate from center to circular edge. A wall of tentacles falls from the rim to surround and partially veil a feeding tube and other organs, which fold in and out like the fabric of a drawn curtain. I can see only a little way into this lower tissue mass." (pp. 5-6)

This is not the child's view, but the adult scientist's, aware that the astonishing beast was a Chrysaora quinquecirrha, or sea nettle. I marvel at all of the metaphorical language Wilson needs to describe accurately the jellyfish, not just the "drawn curtain," but also "wall" and "veil" and "bell." Good metaphors are not simply flourishes - what easier way is there to communicate just how the mass of tentacles are folded?

Wilson's specialty is ants, so how about some ants:

"The dacetines are slender, ornately sculptured little ants with long, thin mandibles. Their body hairs are modified into little clubs, scales, and sinuous whips. In many species a white or yellow spongy collar surrounds their waists. Clean and decorative, they are under the microscope among the most aesthetically pleasing of all insects." (133)

Not a fancy passage. I am always skeptical when someone says that "not a word is wasted," but this comes close. As usual, the amount of fine writing, on whatever subject, turns out to be enormous, once I begin to look for it. I'm not convinced, though, that much of it, regarding animals, I mean, can be found in 19th century fiction!

English poets and their English cats - also, a hare, and a tortoise

Thinking about literary animals, I have wandered into 18th century England, when the poets either had cats, or wrote about them, or both. Here's Thomas Gray, for example, writing about Horace Walpole's cat, Selima:

"Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw; and purred applause."

That's from "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat" (1748), and the cat is peering into a "tub of goldfishes" (hence the reflection), so you can see where this is going. The only phrase that looks to me like an original description of a cat is the "conscious tail"; otherwise, its just a catalogue description.

Christopher Smart does a lot better, in the justly famous "My Cat Jeoffry" section of Jubilate Agno (written 1759-63, published 1939):

"For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.
For he is the servant of the Living God, duly and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For is this done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.
For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.
For he rolls upon prank to work it in.
For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself."

Then follow the ten steps of Jeoffrey's self-grooming, not so different from what a ethologist might write: "For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood. \ For fifthly he washes himself \ For Sixthly he rolls upon wash." Then there's the consummate description of a cat: "For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery." I find Smart's poetry very difficult, in general, but this is real observation.

I always assume that William Blake's "fearful symmetry" and so on in "The Tyger" is based as much on an actual housecat as on an imagined tiger, but I don't really know. Who else is there - oh yes, Samuel Johnson's Hodge, who "shall not be shot," but I don't know of a poem about Hodge.

William Cowper could hardly have kept a cat, since it might have endangered his prescious hares. In the third book of The Task (1785), after denouncing hunting, Cowper writes:

"Well, - at least one is safe. One sheltered hare
Has never heard the sanguinary yell
Of cruel man, exulting in her woes.
Innocent partner of my peaceful home,
Whom ten long years' experience of my care
Has made at last familiar, she has lost
Much of her vigilant instinctive dread,
Not needful here, beneath a roof like mine." (lines 334-341)

But there is not much real account of the hare in The Task, unlike in Cowper's "Epitaph on a Hare" (1783):

"His frisking was at evening hours,
For then he lost his fear;
But most before approaching showers,
Or when a storm drew near."

Well that's odd. There's another 18th century English critter who behaves similarly, Gilbert White's tortoise:

"No part of its behaviour ever struck me more than the extreme timidity it always expresses with regard to rain; for though it has a shell that would secure it against the wheel of a loaded cart, yet does it discover as much solicitude about rain as a lady dressed in all her best attire, shuffling away on the first sprinklings, and running its head up in a corner." (Letter XIII)

Now that's the kind of writing I like, the tortoise who behaves like a fine lady. I actually have not read White's The Natural History of Selborne (1789). I encountered the tortoise in an anthology, although I have no idea which, or of what (here?). White was a pioneering naturalist, a genuine scientist, so he falls into a different category than Gray and Cowper and so on. I think that's where I'll wander tomorrow.

A toad sings amorously, his throat full of pearls - Colette's animals

"A little later comes a hedgehog, a muddle-headed, scatter-brained creature, bold yet easily frightened, who scuttles along in a nearsighted way, goes into the wrong hole, eats greedily, is frightened of the car and makes a noise like a young pig on the loose. The gray cat hates him, but hardly ever goes near him, and her green eyes grow bitter when she looks at him." (23)

That hedgehog and cat live in Colette's Retreat from Love (1907), where we also find a toad, a bat, a dog, a crab, and probably other critters that I have forgotten. I read this novel fifteen years ago, I would guess, and I had to remind myself what it was about - a bunch of crisscrossing love affairs, lovely but diaphanous, hard to remember.

But I remembered that hedgehog, and the bitter cat. And the toad, definitely the toad:

"under the five loose stone steps a toad sings amorously, his throat full of pearls. At dusk he drives away the last midges, the little grubs which live in the cracked stones. From time to time he looks at me deferentially, but with reassurance, then - leaning one hand against the wall in human fashion he stands up to swallow - I hear the nop sound of his wide mouth. When he rests he moves his eyelids in such a pensive and lofty way that I haven't yet dared say a word to him." (22-3)

I found it interesting that Chingiz Aitmatov had been a veterinarian, which certainly informed his writing about animals. Aitmatov reminded me of Colette, oddly. I mean, her world of Parisian courtesans seems pretty far removed from the Kazakhstani steppes. Who knows why she wrote about animals so much, and so well? She, like Aitmatov, observed their world carefully, and made it part of her book. Few novelists do that.

Or am I wrong? Juvenile novels are menageries, right, definitely. I remember reading all sorts of animal stories - raccoons as pets, bears as pets, dogs and more dogs. I don't remember too well if any of them were that well written. I'll think some more. I had not really planned to write about this; maybe it won't go anywhere.

Suggestions, though, are most welcome - who, novelist or otherwise, was good at writing about animals?

Quotations from the Margaret Crosland translation, the only English version, I think.

The unfamiliar light was like a blow on the head - Chingiz Aitmatov's animals

The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years contains one more surprising jab at the Soviet government that I did not mention yesterday. The protagonist grew up as a fisherman on the Aral Sea, and Chingiz Aitmatov vividly, angrily, describes its destruction. It's more of a sub-theme than a primary one, but this is, among other things, an eco-novel.

The first three pages of the novel are told from the point of view of a fox. I first thought this was a way to "make it strange" - "it," in this case, being the railroads that run across the steppes. But later scenes are from the point of view of a camel, and an eagle, and, for part of one paragraph, maybe just a couple of sentences, a sturgeon:

"It was a large fish, a powerful and beautiful fish. It flapped its golden tail feverishly, twisting, jumping and throwing the wet pebbles around; at the same time, with its rosy mouth open, it turned towards the sea, struggling to get back to its own element, back to the surf. For a second or so it was suddenly still and quiet, looking around with its unblinking, reproachful eyes, round and clear, trying to adjust to the new world in which it had found itself. Even in the dusky evening of the wintry day, the unfamiliar light was like a blow on the head. The fish saw the shining eyes of the two people leaning over it, a bit of the shore and the sky; in the distance far away out over the sea, it could make out on the horizon, behind thin clouds, the unbearably bright light of the setting sun." (245)

Oh, this is better than I had remembered. "Powerful" and "beautiful," those are the thoughts of Yedigei, the protagonist. The next sentence is more objective, but by the word "reproachful," perhaps, we have entered into the perceptions of the fish. So Aitmatov leads us into the fish. First we, with the people, see the eyes of the fish, then, with the fish, we see the shining eyes of the people. The gaze into space actually hints at the science fiction subplot and the climax of the novel.

A fragment from the bull camel's persepctive:

"How dare people come into his territory? How dare they approach his harem? What right had they to interrupt his rut? He shrieked in loud protest and shaking his head on his long neck, bared his teeth like a dragon, opening wide his fearsome, yawning maw. His breath poured like smoke from his hot mouth out into the cold air and settled on his black, shaggy locks as a white hoarfrost. In his excitement he began to piss, standing there and sending forth a stream into the wind so that the air stank of it and icy drops fell on Yedigei's face." (268)

Aitmatov was actually a veterinarian before he became a writer. That explains his interest in animals, perhaps, but not the way he writes about them.

Chingiz Aitmatov's The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years is a good novel

I have some bad news. I recently came across the name of Chingiz Aitmatov, Kyrgyzstan's "greatest writer". I read one of his novels, The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years (1980). Here's the bad news: it's good, really quite good. Here's worse news: it is, strictly speaking, socialist realism.

I'm joking, but I'm not. If there were a single literary genre which I thought I could completely skip, that must be entirely without literary value, it was socialist realism. Meine Frau tells me that she once read an East German socialist realist novel about apple-cheeked young factory workers who inspired their colleagues to ever-greater productivity. That is definitely not the novel Aitmatov wrote.

Burannyi Yedigei works at a railroad junction in the southern Kazakhstani steppes. His best friend has died, and Yedigei organizes a journey to bury him in a traditional cemetery. That gives us the "day" of the title; we rummage around in Yedigei's past as he rides his camel across the steppes. We learn about his World War II service, his relationship with a young family who are exiled to the railroad junction, and his perhaps even more complicated relationship with his bull Bactrian camel. There's a lot about camels. Some of the best writing is about the camel.

The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years has, intermixed with Yedigei's story, a genuine science fiction plot, about alien contact. The novel also dives back a lot farther than a hundred years to pull in a couple of "traditional" stories, one from the oral folk epic Manas, one of Aitmatov's own invention. So we sometimes leap from cosmonauts on a space station to a legendary tale of warrior nomads who tortured their captives until they became mindless automatons, and a heroic mother who tried to rescue her enslaved son. Science fiction fans may very well find this more irritating than reg'lar ol' readers of literature. My only criticism is that some of the allegory is a little bald. But the linked layers work - they mean more together than they do spearately.

The tortured and brainwashed slaves, a weak-willed rationalist who argues that soon the state will control people's behavior through radio waves, a science fiction plot that is clearly a criticism of the Iron Curtain and Soviet cultural isolation, and an entire novel that seems to me plainly to advocate individualism within the context of a traditional culture, and whose protagonist is unapologetically Muslim - how was this published in the Soviet Union in 1980?

I don't know, and neither does the author of the foreward, Katerina Clark. She suggests that the Soviets were allowing more expression of nationalism by minorities, and that Aitmatov was a Communist insider, and that the novel is sufficiently ambivalent that the Soviets could let it through. I did notice that most of the really bad activity in the novel occurs under Stalin, and there are just a few pages of dull stuff near the end ("We must, all of us, all as one, hold on to this view of justice," and so on, p. 320) that sound like the real socialist realist deal. Was that really enough to assuage the censors?

Lest I give the wrong idea, I don't want to claim that Aitmatov's novel is One Hundred Years of Solitude or Midnight's Children or The Emigrants or Things Fall Apart, one of those novels of big international reputation that most readers should probably try just to see what the fuss is all about, nor that it's a great injustice that the novel is virtually unknown.

But it's a modest injustice, and I would like to read more of Aitmatov's books.

Young America demands genuine American literature

The magazine writers of New York City in the 1840s, the people Perry Miller chronicles in The Raven and the Whale, were obsessed with the supposed problem of American literature. Where were the great American writers - the American Milton, the American Shakespeare, the American Dickens? The American Walter Scott was James Fenimore Cooper, but that did not seem to help much.

One theme Miller traces is the obsession with this idea of the creation of a truly American literature, one that was simultaneously independent from European models, popular enough for writers to make a living, and as good as anyone else's literature. The way they went about creating this literature was to write editorials advocating it, describing it - Niagara Falls, for example, would be a good subject for an American poem* - and claiming that whatever books were around at the moment were definitely not it, not yet.

I found the whole exercise hilarious, and central to the failure of the New York writers to create any lasting work (the New England Dial writers seem to have been just as bad, and the main cause, don't get me wrong, was a lack of talent). It reminded me of a certain strain of litblog writing, mostly directed at criticism, endless worry about how criticism should be done. When I see these sorts of pieces, I always think, what a waste of time - just go ahead and do it yourself.

Manifesto writers rarely seem to recognize the thing they're looking for. To return to Duyckink and Mathews and the other New York members of "Young America" - Emerson and the other transcendentalists did not count, since they were basically German, and possibly all crazy; Longfellow was a fine poet but too European; Washington Irving even preferred to live in Europe. Hawthorne and Poe were also criticized as too "German" - here we see one of the causes of the low status of 19th century German literature in the English-speaking world, an example of the New Yorkers winning the battle while losing the war.

The 1850s saw the publication of The Scarlet Letter, Moby-Dick and "Bartleby the Scrivener," Walden and Leaves of Grass. Whatever else these books may or may not be, they are unquestionably American. And only the Melville and Whitman books were even tangentially influenced by the manifesto writers. Melville, for example, knew all of the "Young America" writers, and read everything they wrote. When he finally produced Moby-Dick, almost no one understood it, and it was soon virtually forgotten. Worse, in a way, is the fact that Miller has no cause to mention Frederick Douglass and his Autobiography. It would have never have crossed these writers' minds that what they saw as an abolitionist tract was a genuine American masterpiece.

I know that my judgment is retrospective, and I'm ignoring a lot of complications (copyright, politics, the crushing popularity of Dickens), but Miller's account is enjoyably ridiculous. Let the artists do their work. Everything will work out somehow. There will always be good books to read. I look back at the 1840s and see Douglass and Emerson and the stories of Hawthorne and Poe, and think, hey, pretty good, but of course, my 1840s also include Gogol and Balzac, A Christmas Carol and Wuthering Heights and Vanity Fair, and Heine and Stifter. In my reading, I'm not much of a patriot.

* E.g., "Roar, raging torrent! and thou, mighty river, \ Pour thy white foam on the valley below;" - "Niagara", Joseph Rodman Drake. I can't believe anyone wanted more of that.

Eliza, my dear - The Raven!

I mentioned Perry Miller's 1956 The Raven and the Whale (1956) yesterday. It's a marvelous account of the literary luminaries of New York City in the 1830s and 1840s. You might guess from the title that Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville are central figures in the book, but that's actually a trick.

This is really the story of sad sack Evert Augustus Duyckink, and smug blowhard Lewis Gaylord Clark, and nationalist monomaniac Cornelius Mathews, and lovelorn hack William Alfred Jones, all New York editors and authors. In other words, literary history's losers. They were big shots at the time, more or less, but their work is dead now. Readers of The Raven and the Whale will not add many books to their reading lists. These writers crossed paths, briefly, with Poe and Melville, and did have a real effect on the writing of those two geniuses, and perhaps on an obscure young Brooklynite named Walter Whitman, so that's part of the interest of the book.

But most of the fun of Miller's book, which is witty and well written, is that it is almost like an existentialist novel. These hapless third-raters strive and fail and strive some more. They do the best they can. Is it their problem that we don't care? Melville and Poe did the same thing, but now we care a lot about them.

I'll direct the interested reader to Prof. Myer's actual review of the book - that's where I read about it. As good as the book is, it's of specialized interest, so I can't exactly recommend it to anyone who is not already curious about the literature of the period. I'll excerpt a good bit about Poe's, let's say, complicated reception in New York, and then mention one more thing tomorrow:
"About this time the Doctor was giving a dinner when the doorbell rang; his guests, assuming him summoned by a patient, went one eating and drinking. Soon the Doctor returned with 'a pale, thin, and most grave-looking man, whose dark dress and solemn air' brought the hilarity to an abrupt stop; leading the apparition to his wife, Francis waved his hand helplessly and said, 'Eliza, my dear - The Raven!'" (134)

Poe's Hoaxes - this most despicable and cowardly practice

Let's see, how else did Poe spend his time, besides writing his own poems and tomahawking those of others? Coming up with hoaxes, of course.

I suppose "The Ballon-Hoax" is his most famous. Poe moved to New York City in 1844, and in lieu of a calling card he published, in the New York Sun, an account of the first successful transatlantic crossing, from England to America, no less, in a balloon. It was fitted with a propellor, see. In the newspaper, the story was not titled "The Balloon-Hoax" - might have given the game away, I wouldn't doubt. Readers become hysterical; there's a run on the paper; unveiled, Poe becomes (more) famous.*

He spent the next couple of years spreading chaos throughout American literature. The strangest episode (I don't understand it well, at least) was the "Longfellow War," when Poe accused Henry Longfellow of plagiarism while reviewing one of his books, and then stretched the controversy out for a couple of months. One way he kept it going was to write indignant protests, under assumed names, against his own review, which Poe could then demolish over the course of many issues of his own magazine.

Maybe scholarship has advanced on this subject, and we know that the reply was genuine. But see Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale (1956), p. 130 - Prof. Miller agrees with me. Poe's action is pure controversialism. Longfellow was, or was becoming, the most famous poet in America, too inviting a target to resist, regardless of whether, in other reviews, Poe dealt with Longfellow quite judiciously.

How amusing to read, soon before Poe's death in 1849:

"We need reform at this point of our Literary Morality: - very sorely, too, at another - the system of anonymous reviewing. Not one respectable word can be said in defence of this most unfair - this most despicable and cowardly practice." (LOA, 1448)

I wish the Library of America Essays and Reviews specified whether or not each article was anonymous. More than once, Poe's name suddenly appears within the piece, as when he reviewed his own stories ("he has perfectly succeeded in his perfect aim," etc). Poe would have been a master of the internet - the fake websites, the sock puppets, the faux hit-generating controversies. I can't say that I admire this side of Poe, exactly, but he certainly keeps my attention. And in fairness, Poe was also a debunker - see his 1836 article "Maelzel's Chess-Player," in which he reasons out the functioning of a supposed chess-playing robot. This was how Poe's imagination worked - always building and dismantling tricky machinery.

* An earlier hoax is "The Unparalled Adventure of One Hans Pfall" (1835), about a balloon trip to the moon(!). Unfortunately, Poe abandoned it without finishing it, because he was beaten to the punch by another author's moon hoax, involving man-bats seen through a telescope. See the "Richard Adams Locke" entry in "The Literati of New York City" (LOA, 1214-22) for the ridiculous details.

Update: See here for PoeCalendar Rob's illuminating summary of the Longfellow War.

Poe and his Tomahawk - His qualifications are too well known to need comment.

Mr. Poe, sharpen that tomahawk. It's time for a round of Poe's Greatest Hatchet Hits.

From a review of The Coming of the Mammoth - The Funeral of Time, and Other Poems, by Henry B. Hirst:

"We are not extravagant in saying (are we?) that the 'Coming of the Mammoth' which might as well have been called the 'Coming and the Going of the Mammoth' is the most preposterous of all the preposterous poems ever deliberately printed by a gentleman arrived at the years of discretion. Nor has it one individual point of redeeming merit. Had Mr. Hirst written only this we should have thrown his book to the pigs without comment." (596)

This is a good place to start, because there is little doubt that Poe is entirely correct. In this poem, at some distant time in the past, a herd of killer mammoths appears: "We saw them hunt the buffalo, \ And crush them with their tusks of steel." The Native Americans who survive the initial mammoth attack invoke their storm god, who kills the mammoths with lightning, all but one, who is driven across the Missisippi, then up a Rocky Mountain peak, then, with a leap, into the Pacific Ocean. This is what Poe is up against.

All right, more chopping. A whack at the Brook Farm Utopians:

"'The Harbinger - Edited by the Brook-Farm Phalanx' - is, beyond doubt, the most reputable organ of the Crazyites. We sincerely respect it - odd as this assertion may appear. It is conducted by an assemblage of well-read persons who mean no harm - and who, perhaps, can do less." (1100)

Mr. Hudson, deliverer of a "Lecture on Lear", has "an elocution that would disgrace a pig, and an odd species of gesticulation of which a baboon would have excellent reason to be ashamed." There's another pig. This isn't even funny, is it? Just an insult.

This joke, at the expense of William Ellery Channing, may be worse than not funny. This is Edgar Poe, math geek:

"To speak algebraically: - Mr. M. is execrable, but Mr. C. is x plus 1-ecrable." (818)

Poe's always merciless about prosody, but he usually does not say the poet can't count:

"In a word, judging by his rhythm, we might suppose that the poet could neither, see, hear, nor make use of his fingers. We do not know, in America, a versifier so utterly wretched and contemptible." (807)

That's from a review of the Poems of William W. Lord.

On American historian George Jones:

"His qualifications are too well known to need comment. He has a pretty wife, a capital head of hair, and fine teeth." (642)

That's actually the nicest thing Poe says in that review, but the meaner stuff is harder to excerpt. Most of the review is about the illustrations on the title page. "The title-pages are to be cut out, we hope, and deposited in the British Museum." (644)

I'm enjoying myself, but I'm not sure I'm being fair to Poe, so how about a serious piece of criticism, from the "Literati of New York" entry on N. P. Willis:

"The Scriptural pieces are quite 'correct,' as the French have it, and are much admired by a certain set of readers, who judge of a poem, not by its effects on themselves, but by the effect which they imagine it might have upon themselves were they not unhappily soulless, and by the effect which they take it for granted it does have upon others." (1128)

This one hits me a bit, I'll admit. Pretty sharp.

More tomahawk chopping here, here, and here. Where else? A favorite.

Page references to Essays and Reviews, Library of America. A most enjoyable book, in its own scattershot way.

Poe's Eureka - angels should exercise caution in the vicinity of Jupiter

I have been organzing Poe's works by genre, I now see. My default is chronology, but that doesn't work for Poe. He's always doing more than one thing.

For example, Penguin Classics publishes a volume entitled The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, which overlaps his entire career. This book contains, I think, very little of Poe's best writing,* but Poe really was a pioneer in the genre, so I understand the book's use. And it includes the baffling Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848), so it's valuable for that alone.

Eureka is a hundred page essay or pamphlet or meditation about science. Gravitation, electricity, the diffusion of light, astronomy, the distribution of galaxies, the formation of the solar system. Some of it is jokey, especially the first twenty pages or so, with the philosophers Aries Tottle and Hog (Francis Bacon). Some of it is highly technical and, to me, dull; the sections on gravitation and light, in particular, completely lost me. But most of it is readable, more or less, and, conceptually, at least, quite interesting.

Poe uses Eureka to make sense of all the shocking scientific discoveries of his day, particularly in astronomy and physics. Neptune had only been discovered in 1846, for example, and at the time of Eureka's publication, the tenth asteroid had just been discovered. Eureka is an imaginative engagement with these ideas and novelties, a "mental gyration on the heel" (1262). I suspect Poe thought he was also making actual scientific contributions, but the Prose Poem subtitle gave him an escape route. Actual scientists also create and work within imaginative conceptions of their ideas, but that's as close as Poe gets to actual science.

The most accessible section, for me, was Poe's attempt to understand the changes in the scale of the universe, in it's size and age and parameters. Poe imagines, for example, an angel in the path of Jupiter:

“Not unfrequently we task our imagination in picturing the capacities of an angel. Let us fancy such a being at a distance of some hundred miles from Jupiter – a close eye-witness of this planet as it speeds on its annual revolution. Now can we, I demand, fashion for ourselves any conception so distinct of this ideal being’s spiritual exaltation, as that involved in the supposition that, even by this immeasurable mass of matter, whirled immediately before his eyes, with a velocity so unutterable, he – an angel – angelic though he be – is not at once struck into nothingness and overwhelmed?” (p. 1335)

In other words, splat. NASA informs me that the mean orbital veolcity of Jupiter is 13 km/second, which one must admit is pretty fast. An irony of this jab at medieval scholasticists is that Poe's own exercise here is not so different from theirs.

Eureka is one of many contemporary examples of literary writers attempting to comprehend science. Tennyson's In Memoriam was being written around the same time, and a number of passages in Emerson's journal show his interest in actual scientific discoveries. And this is before Darwin unleashes the deluge ten years later.

I don't think Poe's concerns are particularly religious, which does set him apart a bit from Tennyson or Arthur Hugh Clough** or the like. Poe's religious beliefs, whatever they are, do not seem to be threatened. God is simply a writer, a superior version of Edgar Allan Poe:

"The plots of God are perfect. The Universe is a plot of God." (1342)

Eureka is Poe's solution to God's tricky plot.

Page references to the Library of America Poetry and Tales. The Edgar Allan Poe society puts Eureka here. And please see Poe Calendar Rob for a clearer idea of what Poe was up to.

* But don't miss "The Descent into the Maelström," which has some of Poe's best descriptive writing, or "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," in which a dead man is kept alive through hypnotism, with horrible and bizarre results.

** Clough is more worried by historicist Biblical scholarship, but the idea is the same: "Matthew and Mark and Luke and holy John \ Evanished all and gone!", from "Epi-strauss-ism."

By the dismal tarns and pools / Where dwell the Ghouls - Poe the poet

Poe, in his reviews of poets' books, always included an enormous quantity of the verse he was reviewing. A ten page review might contain four full pages of poems. I don't know of anyone who reviews poetry like this today, and for all I know it would violate copyright. Then again, how many books of poems get ten page reviews now?

Poe would print an entire poem, or a selection of stanzas, and italicize the best parts. "Best" = most beautiful, and most original. For example:

By the lakes that thus outspread
Their lone waters, lone and dead,-
Their sad waters, sad and chilly
With the snows of the lolling lily,-
By the mountains - near the river
Murmuring lowly, murmuring ever,-
By the grey woods,- by the swamp
Where the toad and the newt encamp,-
By the dismal tarns and pools
Where dwell the Ghouls,-

That's from Poe's "Dream-Land," magnificent and ludicrous. The italics identify my notion of which bits are best. Yesterday, I emphasized Poe's concern for effect, but he was equally interested in originality, to an excessive degree, as we shall see next week when I brush against Poe's habit of flinging charges of plagiarism at other poets. As a result, Poe's verse is, in fact, highly original, sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility. In his best poems, though - "The City in the Sea," "Dream-Land," "Annabel Lee," "The Raven" - he created something that was truly new. Sometimes, as with "The Bells," one fervently hopes that the poem is and remains one of a kind ("Of the bells, bells, bells!-/ Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, / Bells, bells, bells-" and so on).

Poe never went so far as to pull out his favorite lines from other poems without the surrounding stanza. I don't know why not:

from The City in the Sea

Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathed friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.

from The Conqueror Worm

An angel throng, bewinged, bedight,
In veils, and drowned in tears,

Out - out are the lights - out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm

more from Dream-Land

From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE - out of TIME.

There the traveler meets, aghast,
Sheeted Memories of the Past -

from The Raven

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;

Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted -
On this home by Horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore -

Ah, I could include almost every line. No quibbles here with the fame of "The Raven." Would you believe that Poe first thought of the word "Nevermore," and then decided it should be repeated again and again. Who would be likely to obsessively repeat a single word. Logically, obviously, a parrot. This poem was almost "The Parrot." Or so says Poe. I can never quite tell when he is putting me on.

Since I have nowhere else to do it, I will use this space to recommend the excellent four part essay on Algernon Swinburne, one of Poe's poetic descendants, hosted by A Journey Round My Skull. It's long, but the various portraits of Swinburne are worth a click or four all by themselves.

There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells - "The Cask of Amontillado", Poe's finest story

"The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could; but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge."

Poe, in most of his fiction, in most of his poems, was concerned primarily with effect. Every element of the story was supposed to build to a single emotional state or image, like the collapse of the house of Usher, or the appearance of the Red Death. I suspect this is why Poe was not so interested in writing novels. Even in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, it's the individual episodes that stand out - the horrible death ship, for example. Rather than build continously, the novel surges and recedes.

"The man wore motley. He had on a tight-fitting parti-striped dress, and his head was surmounted by the conical cap and bells. I was so pleased to see him, that I thought I should never have done wringing his hand."

As a result, individual sentences, even entire passages, can be sacrificed to the final effect. They can be clumsy, or involute, or simply bizarre, but they're not necessarily meant to be considered on their own. The effect erases everything that came before.

"Here I knocked off the neck of a bottle which I drew from a long row of its fellows that lay upon the mould.

'Drink,' I said, presenting him the wine.

He raised it to his lips with a leer. He paused and nodded to me familiarly, while his bells jingled."

This striving for effect is not my ideal of the art of the short story. I prefer a succession of small touches and ironic details that, considered as a whole, amount to something more significant than their parts. I want the steps leading up to the coup de theatre to be good, too. Edgar Allan Poe did not care about what I want.

"It was in vain that Fortunato, uplifting his dull torch, endeavored to pry into the depth of the recess. Its termination the feeble light did not enable us to see."

Still, he did just what I wanted, once, at least, in "The Cask of Amontillado." How long had it been since I had last read this story? Decades, I think, and the effect was as I had remembered. But the artistry, that was an enjoyable surprise. It is not typical Poe. Look at the quotations I have included. The sentences are shorter than usual; even the words are shorter. Much of the dialogue is in fragments, just a phrase or an exclamation. The whole story is less than seven pages, one of Poe's shortest.

"No answer still. I thrust a torch through the remaining aperture and let it fall within. There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells."

For what it's worth, I pick "The Cask of Amontillado" as Poe's best story.

The Case of the Missing Mystery - a boring Poe detective story, and a good one

I had known for a long time that Poe had written three stories starring C. Auguste Dupin. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Rogët" (1842-3), and "The Purloined Letter" (1843): the first three detective stories in literary history, not counting a wide range of arguable predecessors.

Two of these stories are among Poe's most famous, and will be found in any Poe collection, as well as any number of short story and mystery anthologies. Not "Marie Rogët," though. Why not?

One reason is that it's a little long, fifty pages in the Library of America, compared to thirty-five pages of "Rue Morgue" and nineteen pages of "The Purloined Letter." Another is that it's boring, among the most boring things Poe ever wrote. It's a boring murder mystery!

Poe, smarter than everyone else, about everything (which more often than not was true), decided he was going to solve an actual unsolved murder, the death of Mary Rogers in New York City. "Marie Rogët" presents his solution to the actual crime, with everything transposed to Paris, allowing his newly minted Detective Dupin to take over. How does this work?:

"Three days elapsed, and nothing was heard of her. On the fourth the corpse was found floating in the Seine,* near the shore which is the opposite the Quartier of the Rue Saint Andreé, and at a point not very far distant from the secluded neighborhood of the Barrière du Roule.†

* The Hudson.
† Weehawken." (p. 509, LOA)

The footnotes were added after initial publication, in something called Snowden's Ladies' Companion, a true crime magazine, I guess. Maybe I should have filed this under the comedies. Weehawken! Dupin solves the case by reading all available newspaper articles and reconciling the discrepancies. That's why the story is dull - much of it is nothing but actual excerpts from actual newspapers.

The other Dupin stories are by no means my favorites, since Poe indulges their narrator in some of his most lugubrious prose. But they are genuinely important stories, cultural touchstones; everyone should know who the Rue Morgue murderer was, and where the purloined letter was hidden. And all three stories develop an idea that I think was original, that the detective can restore order through pure cognitive ability, some perfect mix of intuition, logic, and psychology. "Ratiocination," Poe called it. "Marie Rogët," the mystery solved by reading newspaper articles, is conceptually pure, maybe a little too pure.

Poe wrote one other detective story that is much less famous, rarely reprinted, and at least as good as the others - better than "Marie Rogët," certainly. It's called - note the irritating extra quotation marks - "'Thou Art the Man'" (1844), and is not a Dupin story. In a relatively efficient fifteen pages, we get a brief setup, a murder, clues and more clues, a revelation and confession, and an explanation. Almost classic, except that the revelation scene is completely insane, and Poe does have to resort to one cheap trick to make it work. "'Thou Art the Man'" strikes me as at least as effective a detective story as the Dupin tales, told in a more straightforward style.

We call "The Murder in the Rue Morgue" the first detective story retrospectively. A series of other detective stories followed, not right away, but eventually, that were clearly influenced by Poe, and clearly not influenced so much by some other candidates, so Poe stands at the beginning of the genre. I'd like to say something, though, for E. T. A. Hoffmann's Mademoiselle de Scudery (1819), a story that Poe certainly knew, which perhaps looks more like a detective story to us than it did even to Poe.

The "detective", the title character, is a writer of the 17th century, no longer read much but still well-known in Hoffmann's time. The villain is a serial killer. Mlle de Scudery does not catch the killer, but proves the innocence of the prime suspect. This story is the ancestor of the current boomlet of novels featuring Detective Jane Austen and Inspector Oscar Wilde and Special Agent Walt Whitman and so on, all of which are, I assume, hackwork. Not Hoffmann, though, and not Mademoiselle de Scudery.

Edgar Allan Poe's annual short story productivity - many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore

I'd had no idea, before plowing through the Library of America Poetry and Tales, how many comic stories Poe wrote. Of 68 tales and sketches, I identify 25, more than a third, as comic. "Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling." "The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq." "Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences."

What? I didn't say they were funny. They're supposed to be funny. Tastes may differ - and did they ever. How can I communicate how important these histoires were as une pièce of Poe's oeuvre? First, I should stop randomly using French in a Poe-like manner. Second, I should create a graph (click to enlarge):

The time runs from Poe's first five published stories in 1832 to his last six in 1849. Poems, essays, reviews, and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837-8) are omitted. "Supposed to be funny" versus "not supposed to be funny" is my judgment. Please refer to Poetry and Tales, Library of America, pp. 1375-8, to check my data.

I put some signposts on the graph to help see what Poe was doing. There's "The Fall of the House of Usher" in 1839, which I would call Poe's first great story. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" is from 1841. That's "The Gold-Bug" in 1843. There in 1845 - but not included in the totals - is "The Raven."

Like Hawthorne, Poe's fiction productivity was hugely uneven. But he was always writing, almost. In 1836, for example, he wrote eighty book reviews for the Southern Literary Messenger - this was the beginning of Poe the Hatchet Man. Then came Poe's one novel in early 1838. Poe was seriously ill in 1847, and hardly wrote anything. 1848 saw the publication of the bizarre Eureka: A Prose Poem, which I will write about later, if I can think of anything to say about it.

Back to my original point. Poe's most famous stories are almost all from the period 1839-46. Most great writers needed some time to find their own voice. Once they find it, they cultivate it, or test it out, or become formulaic. Poe found his voice, or what we think of as the Poe voice, with the writing of Arthur Gordon Pym in 1837; the first classic Poe short story, "The Fall of the House of Usher," came two years later. After that, he wrote one or two classics a year. But he also continued to write all sorts of other things, including comic tales, the green bars in the graph, and magazines continued to publish them. He never specialized.

Poe could be very funny - his reviews prove that. And there are funny moments in these stories. But his comic tales seem to me to be too much of his time. The references are obscure, or the satire has gone flat, or the sorts of jokes people like have changed. I don't know. But where his weird tales retain their creepy effect, in the face of thousands of imitators, the comic tales are genuine period pieces, instructive about their time, but without much to say to ours.

I will say, though, that at least two of the "funny" ones end with beheadings. Comic Poe is still Poe.

Merely on account of its retrograde operations - why did I read so much Edgar Allan Poe?

Just recently, I polished off both Library of America volumes of Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales, and Essays and Reviews, about 2,800 pages of Poe. Took me two years. Good Lord, I'd never added up the pages - what was I thinking? I'm going to spend the next two weeks on Poe, to do my part to make sure that no one makes the same mistake.

If I'm kidding, it's only to a degree. I remember reading, somewhere, Harold Bloom calling Poe the "worst major writer in the canon," meaning that even in some of his best stories, there are lines that make a sensitive reader like me wince, and there are a pile of stories that are best reserved for specialists, although not for insomniacs - even boring Poe may cause nightmares.

While reading the short fiction of Poe's exact contemporary, Nathaniel Hawthorne, I discovered again and again that the most famous stories were not necessarily the ones I though best. There were a lot of surprises. This was much less true with Poe, barely true at all. My favorites are the same as everyone else's:

"The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "A Descent into the Maelström," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Gold-Bug," "The Black Cat," "The Purloined Letter," "The Cask of Amontillado," "Hop-Frog."

Same with the poems: "The Raven," "Dream-Land," "The City in the Sea," "Annabel Lee." No surprises here. The Portable Edgar Allan Poe contains all of these and more, and looks like a great one-volume choice for non-neurotics.

Even the best stories are packed with exasperations like this, from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue":

"The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis."

This sentence should be taken with a sense of humor, and is directly connected to the themes of the story, so it's not an excrescence. But thank goodness it's imbedded in a story with a decent plot, a murder mystery. Too much writing in this vein drains one's spirits.

One can guess, just from this sentence, why Poe really does read better in French. The fussiness of the Latinate vocabulary simply disappears, or becomes normal. Poe's actual French phrases, one of his most irritating tics, become subsumed - no italics necessary.

But I'm stuck with Poe in English. Let's see what I can do with him.

Help the jackass of your neighbor and your jackass of a neighbor too - Sholem Aleichem's masterpiece "Hodl"

Tevye's oldest daughter, in "Today's Children," turned down a proposal by a rich man to marry a poor tailor. The next daughter, Hodl, does something even worse: she falls for a university student. She "reads and write both Yiddish and Russian and swallows books like hot cakes." That'll lead to trouble.

Here Tevye first meets the student, Peppercorn:

"Just then I looked ahead and saw a young man trudging along by the side of the path, a bundle under one arm, all sweaty and falling off his feet. 'Hurry up or you'll be late for the wedding!'* I called out to him. 'Come to think of it, hop aboard; I'm going your way and my wagon is empty. You know what the Bible says: help the jackass of your neighbor if you pass him on the road, and your jackass of a neighbor too.'**

He laughed and jumped into the wagon without having to be asked twice." (p. 55)

Tevye likes the student and invites him home. Soon Peppercorn is tutoring Tevye's daughters, and is practically one of the family. Just one problem:

"But I will say this for Peppercorn: when he opened his mouth, it erupted like a volcano. You wouldn't have believed the things that came out of it then, such wild, crazy ideas, everything backwards and upside down with tis feet sticking up in the air. A rich Jew, for instance - that's how warped his mind was - wasn't worth a row of beans to him, but a beggar was a big deal, and a workingman - why, a workingman was king, he was God's gift to the world - the reason being, I gathered, that he worked.

'Still,' I would say, 'when it comes to livelihoods, you can't compare work to making money." (p. 57)

The student is a radical, a revolutionary, in Russia in 1904. He marries Hodl - I'm skipping a funny scene where they announce their engagement to Tevye - but then disappears, into a prison, it turns out. The story only has five pages left. Hodl tells her father that she will join her husband in Siberia; Tevye argues with her is his usual indirect way; they sit on the porch all night and talk; Tevye takes her to the train station.

Those last few pages are funny, sad, warm, psychologically insightful. What more do I want? "Hodl" is one of the best short stories I have ever come across. I had not been expecting that.

I have been enjoying the Hillel Halkin translation, Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, but am delighted to see that Penguin Classics, just a couple of weeks ago, published a new version by Aliza Shevrin, an expert translator of Sholem Aleichem. This one is called Tevye the Dairyman and Motl the Cantor's Son. The latter contains the monologues of a nine-year-old who migrates to America. The Railroad Stories or Motl the Cantor's Son, which should you choose? I haven't read either, but will, soon, God willing. Politely request that your library own both.

* Just to be clear, the "wedding" is merely Tevye's joke, although a joke that backfires.

** Exodus 23:5 "If thou see the ass of him that hateth thee lying under his burden... thou shalt surely help him." Close enough for Tevye.

Let's talk about something more cheerful - Tevye's novel of short stories

Tevye the Dairyman actually is a book of short stories that functions as a novel. A timetable of original publication dates will clear things up:

1894 "Tevye Strikes It Rich"
1899 "Tevye Blows a Small Fortune"
1899 "Today's Children"
1904 "Hodl"
1905 "Chava"
1907 "Shprintze"
1909 "Tevye Leaves for the Land of Israel"
1911 Tevye the Dairyman is published as a book
1914 "Lekh-Lekho"

I'm ignoring some revisions. The first two stories are just what their titles say; the rest are about Tevye and his daughters. One can see that it took Sholem Aleichem a few years to attach the "marry off his daughters" story to Tevye. Also, that Sholem Aleichem was not quite happy with the way he ended the story in 1909, so he gave Tevye one more story. Sholem Aleichem was right, the 1914 ending is better.

The stories take place in real time. Tevye mentions actual events - pogroms, plagues, emigration - and he ages, which reinforces the theme of the breakdown of the old order. But Tevye is always funny, and even cheerful. Tragicomic, I guess that's the word. Here's how "Hodl" ends:

"You know what, Pan Sholem Aleichem? Let's talk about something more cheerful. Have you heard any news of the cholera in Odessa?"

"Hodl" is absolutely amazing, one of the best short stories I have ever read. More on that tomorrow. I've come across readers, good readers, who complain about short stories, for reasons which mostly perplex me. One of the oddest complaints is that they want to spend more time with the characters, to get to know them better. I think there's a basic misunderstanding of the form here that could be cleared up with a little effort, but in any case, Tevye the Dairyman doesn't have that issue. You want more Tevye, you got it, at least until you get to the end, when, come to think if it, I still wanted more.