Appointment in Samarra

I took a little hiatus from the list after finishing Henry Miller in order to give Ann some time to catch up. She has way more obligations than I do, which means she has way less time to read. But now that she is long done with I, Claudius and well into Tropic of Cancer, we can safely proceed.

It was so lovely to return to "normal" fiction. Graves's novel was more or a historical recounting (however well written), and Miller was experimental and self-cousciously weak narratively. With O'Hara, we have something more classical, with a protagonist; a problem; a beginning, middle, and end. Oh, sweet joy!

This was the first novel since Light in August to have characters and characterizations that I could really sink my teeth into. The plot here is driven by the characters. And while most of the characters are interesting and well-developed, Julian English is of course the centerpiece of our view of Gibbsville. There is a lot not to like about Julian. He has racist impulses, he cheats on his wife, and he turns to alcohol an awful lot. But O'Hara does an impressive job of making Julian very sympathetic and understandable. The things he does, he does for a reason. And his negative actions and thoughts are balanced by his self-criticisms (or is that self-loathing?) and his knowledge that he has to face up to things. I found the scene in which he returns to Caroline after trying to reconcile with Reilly the first time very touching. He takes those steps slowly and heavily to let her know what happened. He does not mislead her for sex. Similarly, after he has his fight at the club and is driving out of town, he comes to his senses and realizes that he cannot run away, that he must return and meet with Lute. He is funny and endearing even as we watch him make mistake after mistake. O'Hara lets our feelings for Julian be an entire experience, where we can sit outside and critique Julian but at the same time nod with each decision, understanding why. When he climbs into the running car to end his life, we see how trapped he is (or at least how trapped he feels) and can't condemn even if we don't condone.

O'Hara's attempt to treat Caroline the same was is impressive, even as it comes up short. I got the feeling that the heart of Caroline had many chambers that O'Hara couldn't access. He knew of the complexities; he knew of the disappointments; he knew that hidden desires existed; But I think that in the end he didn't know the specifics or how they played out. His one train-of-thought passage from inside Caroline's mind, something he does with no other character, not even Julian, shows that he was going to extreme lengths to get in there. In fact, I was so happy to see an author have such lively and human female characters. Caroline, Irma, Frances, Libby, Alice -- they all exhibit the same racist, defensive, combative, and carnal traits that the men of the novel do.

The racism in the novel seems to be something other than gratuitous. The novel is filled with groups with strict borders. There is the Lantenengo Street people and the regular Joes. The Catholics and the Protestants. The club members and the guests and those entirely excluded. The Jews. The Poles. The Irish. The younger kids and the young adults. All those boundaries crossed and mingled at points, but they could harden in a heartbeat and create social pressures and problems. It is all these hardening borders that isolate Julian at the end of the novel. He sees himself ruined with Reilly, cut off by the Catholics, despised by the Irish, Pollocks, and veterans, too old for the young girls, denied by the women of his age, hated by people he thought were friends but who would side with Caroline and/or Reilly, and he has an enemy in Ed Charney as far as he knows. The small town politics leave nowhere for him to go. The novel feels observational in this respect. O'Hara is clearly critical, but he does not prescribe some solution or provide any exit. When the dust settles on Julian's suicide, life will continue in Gibbsville, and everyone else will suffer from the same structure. People will put two and two together and get five, as Reilly's sister points out. In this novel and in the minds of hungry observers, two plus two always equals five.

This post is now officially too long, so I'll merely add a few concluding thoughts and questions. The title and opening narrative suggest and interesting interplay between fate and the decisions we make. Julian's death is determined long before it occurs, and all his decisions, no matter what he intends, lead him straight and inevitably to that point. Or is there more to it than that?

Julian's nickname is Ju. Is this related to the racism of the novel, in which Ju is a homonym for Jew?

Why begin and end with Lute and Irma? How do they set up the world of the novel and the values and concerns at issue? Is it important that this novel happens in the first year after the stock market crash of 1929? Why do we spend so much time with Al Grecco when he plays such a small part in the novel and absolutely no part in the conclusion?

Cue the crickets.

Tropic of Cancer , or how I learned to use the C-word

WARNING!--THERE WILL BE ADULT LANGUAGE AHEAD

The perfect analogy for my experience of reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer is life. That sounds loftier and bigger than I mean it, but it is true. In my youth (starting out the novel), I was wide-eyed with wonder, trying to learn the language being spoken around me, often confused and hitting against the walls of the text and gaining the necessary cuts and bruises. But I soldiered on. I aged quickly, and 50+ pages into the book, I was in my teen years, rebelling against the world around me--what the hell is going on?! You don't know anything! We come from two different worlds, old man! Somewhere in the middle, I entered my adulthood and accepted that I needed to live by the groundrules that Miller set. I went to work, did my job reading, and tried to make the best of it. Two-thirds into the book, I saw that the end would be upon me one day, and I had to reevaluate the experience of my life, to come to terms with what had happened to me. I didn't hate the world around me, and I did more than just coexist with it; I tried to find reasons to embrace it. And then, near the end of it all, in the twilight years of my reading, I came to terms with the journey I was on. My wounds and scars were still present and aching, but a nostalgia has set in, and I am thankful for the journey I was on.

In short, I hated the book, then felt like I understood it, then appreciated it, and was definitely glad when it was over.

Most of the time while I was reading the book, I had no idea why I was reading it, other than to finish it for the sake of this project. There is no narrative drive in the book to compel a reader forward, no plot or movement to pull me from one page to the next. The weight and importance of the novel is directly proportionate to how fond you are of the main character and the world he stumbles through. If you like the details of these insecure, gad-about, ex-patriated "artists" and their sexual escapades, you are going to find the novel very compelling. If hearing the women referred to continually as cunts and valued by the extent to which they crave, perform, and enjoy sex, then your experience of the book will leave much to be desired.

The passages that gave me the most clarity, were the ones in which Miller declaimed his artistic goal. On page 243 of my edition, Miller writes:

"Up to the present, my idea in collaborating with myself has been to get off the gold standard of literature. My idea briefly has been to present a resurrection of the emotions, to depict the conduct of a human being in the stratosphere of ideas, that is, in the grip of delirium. To paint a pre-Socratic being, a creature part goat, part Titan."

So enough with the romantic notion of elevating people to some noble level of representation. The world around us is filled with sex and shit and crabs and syphilis and people are revolting. But they are also part Titan, and that glorious light at their heart is every bit as present as their nastiness, but both need to be there. When I thought of his perspective, I gained an appreciation for that goal. It made sense of his admiration of Whitman and the shocking strength of Whitman's poetry.

But when I stepped back again, and looked at what he DID represent, I remember why I was frustrated. I don't see anything titanic here. He claims to love the world and the people even as it is all rot, but I don't see that love. I see a character and his friends who all feel superior to everyone else. People who hold jobs and make ends meet are represented as sad clods of human beings. No one Miller meets can write worth a damn or have an appropriate reaction to any circumstance. They are all missing the stuff he sees. I had to reread a good portion of "Leaves of Grass," to be sure, but indeed Whitman is in love with the human race, and the very jobs they do are noble. Yes, he wants to get a something outside of the perfumes of society, at something raw and animal, but the mere act of nursing, of marrying, of swimming, of engaging with each other and the world around them, made every soul beautiful in his eyes. The souls in Tropic of Cancer are every bit as yellowed and rotting and lousy as the places the live. How can you love what you don't respect?

As usual, I am very glad to have read this book. It confirms again that in spite of our apotheosizing the generations before us, they were all as shitty and sex-driven and depraved as any other generation. These are the same folks that Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation." Things do not move steadily downhill; it's always just a trick of perspective.

I would love to hear from someone who really connected with this book and with Miller. So if anyone reads this and has had a different reaction, please let me know about it. Cunts.

Me, Myself, & I, Claudius

I have been very excited to read I, Claudius ever since I saw it on the list. It's one of those books I have just always wanted to read. This project may take 5 years to do, but I am having a great time doing it.

Just because you have been wanting to read a book for a long time, it doesn't follow that you will love the book once you read it. There were many things that disappointed me about this book. The first is that it reads more like a history textbook than a novel. I don't know the history of historical fiction, so it could be that this book was a forerunner in the genre and is remarkable for that reason. Related to the first disappointment is the second: for a book filled with dramatic stories, there is very little drama. Things do not unfold in such a way that you are kept in suspense at all. It's all very factual. The anecdotes are amusing and striking (and I was sent to my old textbooks and Wikipedia to see what Graves was making up), but they aren't dramatic. And connected to these first two disappointments is the third: the plot is missing. We follow the Roman Empire through three generations of emperors, and we have something of a main character in Claudius, but the unifying action that brings it all together is missing.

Now all that being said, I enjoyed the book a great deal for what it was. The unifying principle was not a character's desires, goals, or actions; the unifying principle was the moral fall of the Roman Empire. We follow the empire from the first emperor following Caesar to the installation of Claudius as emperor. Even as Augustus rules, Claudius believes that the hope for a rebirth of the republic is simply a fantasy. And what we see is that the absolute power of being emperor corrupts absolutely, even if it does so through generations instead of through one single person.

This focus on the corruption of a government and the corresponding erosion of civil rights makes perfect sense in its historical context. In 1934, when this book was initially published, we are heading into the second World War. Europe is uneasy and Germany's chancellor is Adolf Hitler. Central government powers are being consolidated and strengthened and many heads of states are strong personalities. In many ways the novel seems prescient, as Graves discusses treason trials and informers and a whole people seemingly powerless to stand up to one man. He even discusses the army being consolidated under Tiberius and Sejanus, disconnecting the army from the people and aligning it instead with the ruler. At times I would have told you this novel was written in 1948 when Orwell was publishing 1984.

From my brief research on the subject, Graves seems to have had some views on gender politics . . . with which I would have to disagree. I find it fascinating that Livia becomes the big villain in the first half of the novel. Apparently Tacitus's Annals made some suggestions about Livia's influence over Augustus, but Graves took it all to a whole new level, making her a villain that Shakespeare would love to include in a play. The women who are good in this novel are ridiculously good, and the those who are bad are near evil. The men who do wrong are mean, and Sejanus does give Livia a run for her money, but he is not nearly as accomplished as she is. Castor is a meany, but Livilla is wretched. In some ways, the men in this novel are simple. They've got honor and codes and they fight, but everything is pretty straight forward for them. The women are smarter, and when inclined, devious. I read in an interview that Graves sees women as the moral centers of our world (not a new position); if that is the case, what roles do women and men play in the collapse of this society?

And what a collapse! The moral depravity in this novel is breathtaking. Whoever wants to complain about the youth of today should give this novel a read. The youth look pretty fantastic comparatively.

I am very glad that I read this novel, and I am very excited to rent the 1976 miniseries, which must put all the drama together into something genuinely dramatic, a Sopranos in ancient Rome. John Hurt, Derek Jacobi, and even a young Patrick Stewart as Sejanus . . . seriously? How good does that sound?

I Need More Light, Less August!

I think that without the excellent initial musings of my husband, I would have walked away throwing this book over my shoulder like salt. This is an incredibly dense and complex book, the language twisted and inscrutable in passages, beautiful and painful in passages, poetic and enviable everywhere, though the story befuddled me thoroughly. At times, I felt like Lena, plodding along because I have to, because I need to find something - which in my case is only the last page. It took me well over a month to make my journey, and here are a few thoughts so that I can walk away respecting myself, as well as the book.

One disclaimer I must make before beginning is that I had not read Light in August before I sat down with it this summer. Since I have always believed that one must re-read Faulkner if one hopes to comprehend him, I must immediately admit that I don't. Those who do seem to be onto the same themes that Jason and I just discussed over lunch: race, religion, and a community that polices itself with rabid determination, punishing everyone whose interests or identity transgresses "sacred" racial and moral boundaries.

Light in August does seem almost entirely preoccupied with the stories of those transgressors: with Lena, who gets pregnant out of wedlock; with Joe Christmas, who was born out of wedlock and reportedly the product of miscegny; with Joanna Burden, who lives nearly in exile based upon her family's history with race and carries on an illicit sexual relationship with Joe Christmas; and with Gail Hightower, who is a whole fucking mystery unto himself, as far as I'm concerned. The savage sexism of Joe Christmas bothered me terribly, and I in my arrogance feel like I have better uses for my time than analyzing him in any detail, although I am interested in the relationship between gender and morality in the novel.

Traditionally, in America, the woman's consolation for her social and political inequity was her unchallenged command of the moral domain. She was to know morality, to embody it, and to imbue it in her family, as well as her community; this was God's intention. In this novel, women do function in this way - but only to a degree. Armstid predicts when he gives Lena a ride in his wagon that "womenfolks are likely to be good [to Lena] without being very kind. Men, now, might. But it's only a bad woman herself that is likely to be very kind to another woman that needs the kindess." His wife, Martha, is in fact very good to Lena without being kind, giving Lena her own egg money in a fit of fury - and emphasizing that it is her own, as if to dare Armstid to stop her. Men do treat Lena fairly well, but in that respect, Lena is alone. There are many "bad men" in the novel, and they make savage and terrible moral guardians, committing acts of appalling violence and cruelty in the name of upholding their own codes.

In a sense, Joe Christmas fits in with those men, insofar as he loathes himself and tries to provoke others to loathe and reject him, too. Of course, Joe also asks a central question, which he poses to Joanna Burden: "Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?" He himself isn't sure he even has "different blood," but if he doesn't, he says, he has "wasted a lot of time." Doing what? Exposing that hatred? Showing the absurdity of racism by revealing the violence that comes at the mere suggestion, the mere statement of racial difference?

It's almost as if I don't want to ascribe that to Joe Christmas because he is so deeply unlikeable - and because the novel itself is saturated with descriptions of blackness as a tangible, undesirable state. Gah!

To be sure, this novel is critical of the policing roles that Hines and Grimm and McEachern play, but what is the novel really about, in the end? I disagree vehemently with the idea that Lena is somehow a symbol of life that carries on in spite of all. Lena is delusional. She rejects Byron on some unstated basis, which I suspect is that he lost in his fight with Lucas Burch. He is not masculine enough for Lena, so she will go on searching (without actually searching) for a man she knows won't have her. I don't quite get it, which makes this whole blogging process seem frustratingly pointless.

Sigh.

A Brave New Handful of Dust

I'm getting a little ahead of Ann for the moment, but I'm sure she will catch up in no time. For now, we forge ahead into the unknown, into Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust.

This was another intriguing book, one of those whose final act seems so incongruous with those that preceded it, like A Passage to India. We begin as a comedy of English city society and end in the jungles of Brazil. I felt like I tumbled into the surreal as Tony and Dr. Messinger struck out into the jungle, like Waugh had been reading Heart of Darkness and decided to give that a go for a while. Then I started to wonder, which came first in the creation of the story: the jungle or the city? So I looked it up on Wikipedia and there was a quote by Waugh saying that he had had an experience in which he was far from culture reading to an older gentleman when it occurred to him that the man could keep him hostage if he wanted to. So that is where this book began for him. He worked back from there, he said, to play out further "civilized man's helpless plight among [savages]." Tony is of course our civilized man and Brenda, Beaver, and the lot are the savages. You can probably take it all from there.

The thing that I actually thought of most when I finished this book was how similar it was to Brave New World by Huxley. In both stories we follow a man who shares our sensibilities about the world and how people and society ought to behave while struggling in a world that actively works against him. Brave New World even has that section in it where the protagonist goes to live amongst the savages, which struck me as being similar to the jungle section in Waugh's book. And of course, both protagonists are beaten down in the end. Curiously enough, Brave New World was published in 1932, just before Waugh would have been writing his book. Whether or not there was any influence, it is clear that there is something of a zeitgeist here that both authors are tapping into about the fears of where contemporary society was headed. The Great War was a ways behind them, but more turmoil was brewing and the modern political machinery was churning away.

This is a book that I have enjoyed thinking about after I finished it more than I enjoyed the actual reading of it, although I did find the characterization of John Jr. very funny and greatly enjoyed the fake affair scene with Tony and Milly and her daughter. This is my first exposure to Waugh and I would be delighted to read more.

Some Light (in August) Reading

This blogsite is appropriately titled because I want to begin every post by stating that I am not smart enough to be writing about this book. Light in August is no exception.

Trying to wrap my head around this book is like trying to fit a twin-sized sheet on a queen-sized bed: I can get one corner on, and then a second, but as I stretch to make the third corner fit, one of both of the first two comes flying off. The stories of Lena Grove, Byron Bunch, Joe Christmas, and Gail Hightower could each stand alone in a short story or in a novella, so what is Faulkner doing bringing all these lives under a single cover in a single novel? What unifies all these different tales? What do all these characters have in common?

After much mulling and pondering, I think that Faulkner is saying something about the way we deal with life by withdrawing from it. The thing that got me started in this direction was Reverend Hightower. When he delivers Lena’s baby, his dissatisfaction with Bryon changes, and he wants to thank Byron for pulling him out of his non-existence into the world around him. He has been so busy living in a world of ghosts that he has not interacted with the world around him. From there, I thought about Ms. Burden and her life of isolation on the hill. And then there was Byron himself, who is so afraid of becoming hurt that he avoids human contact, especially with women. When he works late on a Saturday he feels safe, like nothing will come and endanger him there. In this light, Lena’s imperturbability in the face of others opinions begins to look like something other than mere strength. She has checked out, in her own way, living in a fantasy nearly as complete as Hightower’s chasing down Joe Brown/Lucas Burch even after he is untraceable.

So how does Christmas fit into all of this? First, let us look at the way he impacts the world around him. He is a catalyst of sorts that upsets the whole world around him. In the most obvious way, he affects Ms. Burden. Before Christmas, she leads a solitary life, shunned by Jefferson’s white community and shunning them in return. As her relationship with Christmas progresses, she goes through something of a breakdown. At first, she is detached and calm, but then she begins to unravel, going to emotional extremes, and as Christmas observes, she behaves like three different women. Finally, she pushes Christmas in a way she has to know will end badly; she asks him to go to a school for blacks and then learn the law under a black lawyer. As if that weren’t enough, she pulls an ancient revolver on him to force him to act. I wonder if she is practically committing suicide by pushing Christmas as she does. After 40 years of controlling her world tightly, when she lets go and engages, it all falls apart.

Christmas doesn’t have this exact result on everyone else, but he crashes into all of their neatly monitored worlds and breaks them all apart. Byron brings Uncle Doc and his wife to Hightower, and Christmas charges into Hightower’s home where he is murdered. Christmas’s presence forces everyone to interact with each other.

Christmas. In all the novels we have read so far, none of them have dealt with race issues so bluntly. Passage to India dealt with race, but it was all put in the context of nationalism. Here, Christmas believes himself to be of a mixed race simply because other people tell him that he is. This information shapes his whole life. He uses it to start fights and to force others to react to him. He hates himself and those around him, both white and black. When Burden asks him how he is sure, he notes that he has certainly wasted much of his life if he isn’t indeed mixed. What is Faulkner saying about race here? Is Christmas somehow the South, mixed and struggling 70 years after the civil war to come to terms with its mixed heritage? Christmas is the most active of the characters in this novel, even if his actions are destructive and self destructive. What does that mean? Moreover, this novel deals more with the reaction to race than to race itself. This book does not show white and black characters working anything out; instead, it shows how all these people react to the suggestion that there is a black blood somewhere in the gene pool.

So now I have to devolve into a set of questions that I have and would love to hear anyone’s thoughts on. In a novel where we get everyone’s past, even the past of Grimm, who appears in one chapter to shoot Christmas, why is Joe Brown (or should I say Lucas Burch) given no history? We get nothing on him. Peculiar.

What is Faulker saying about authority and America through McEachern and Grimm? Faulkner makes it clear that each sees himself reacting without passion, following immutable laws of behavior. Neither man is set up as a model to emulate, certainly; one acts from religious piety, and one from patriotic vision. Both are cruel and as detached as the other characters in the novel. But acting through passion is just as problematic, as Uncle Doc and the folks who killed the Burden family illustrate. Withdrawing, bad. Following rules blindly, bad. Being blindly passionate, bad. The closest we get to a hero is Christmas and Hightower. That is rough.

How is Christmas’s relationship to his grandfather, Uncle Doc paralleled with Hightower’s relationship to his grandfather? I’ve heard that Christmas, who is 33 in the novel, is likened in some criticism to Christ; how does that idea follow through?

This novel is rich and complex and way beyond my meager intellect, but it sure is a compelling read. What do you have to add?

Bueller? Bueller?

The Sound and the Fury, a Post told by an Idiot

This was my second Faulkner novel. Years ago, I read As I Lay Dying and loved it. The Sound and the Fury did not disappoint, though it was a difficult read. It took me half way through the first section before I realized people were playing golf in the opening passage. I was very proud when I finished that first section, Benjy's section, because I had made it through the time-slipping cloudiness of Benjy's experiences, and I had even made a chart that covered the various events to which he referred. Alright, I said to myself, now I can move on the the easier section.

Ha ha ha! O Quentin, you are a difficult man to read. When the partially insane have something to tell you, they tend to tell it to you in an insane way. I read that Faulkner made Quentin talk without clear references because to a half-mad individual, he thinks he makes perfect sense and he assumes you can follow to. And that at the heart of it is one of the things that I treasure about the Faulkner and Woolf novels that we have read. While the novels require a lot of work, they are trying to represent the way the human mind experiences and processes the world, how it orders sensory input and interprets it. So for Benjy, Caddie smells like trees, and that is an important fact. Benjy's section misses interpretation and emotional valence because Benjy doesn't process the world that way--it's a series of facts and events. Even his crying is unemotional; it's just a sound his throat produces. Not a lot of writers can take you inside the mind like that and still manufacture a compelling narrative and compelling characters too boot.

Jason's section was mercifully clear, but absolutely maddening in his meanness. I can't remember the last time I wanted a character to have his come-uppance so badly. And again, I give Faulkner boundless credit for making such a mean-hearted and ugly-souled man who seems entirely consistent within himself. Faulkner didn't like Jason any more than I did, but he was thorough, and he made Jason make sense to himself. Jason truly believes that he has been wronged and that all his actions are justified, undeniably so. You can especially feel that in the final section, when the narrator follows Dilsey and makes his own observations about the Compson family.

I am sure that there is a big social critique here about Southern Culture and the family in decay, a theme we have been seeing a lot of in these novels from the 20s. But this is another case where I spent more of my energies trying to understand and appreciate the structure and approach of the novel rather than play out its full social implications. However, I did find it interesting that Jason was obsessed with the stock market and the economy as a whole, especially since the book was written and published just before the stock market crash of 1929. All the books that we read in the next 10 year time span will be impacted by the Great Depression and the mounting European political tensions.

I was also surprised at how Faulkner portrayed Caddie and her daughter, Quentin. While neither woman was given her own section, Faulkner seemed as taken with them as any other character in the novel was. The family freaked out and broke down over Caddie's sexual misadventures, but Faulkner passes no judgment. In fact, Quentin's habits are driven by Jason's behavior, as she declares at the dinner table at the end of Jason's section. I can't help but think that Faulkner supported that claim of hers. I expected a good deal of sexism from Faulkner but found very little. Mrs. Compson was hardly a flattering portrait of a southern woman, but she was no more dysfunctional than anyone else in the family, and her failure seems rooted in her efforts to be a "Southern Lady" and hold onto a position and manner of life that is long dead and gone, if it was ever truly here. The family falls apart trying to live in the past, by a moral and social code that is merely a quaint and unworkable notion.

I'm sure Ann will say things much more successfully than I. (No pressure, Ann.) ;)

Excellent novel, and I am very excited for a Light in August.

Red Harvest

This is my second Dashiell Hammett novel, and I think the reason I like them is because they remind me of watching "oldy-moldy" black-and-white movies with my Dad when I was younger. Hammett doesn't take any breaks in this book. The street rulers of the city of Personville are constantly in flux, with the Continental Op trailing not far behind the long thread of ruthless double-crossers and back-stabbers. The language and slang used, typical for the period of the 20s and 30s, had me laughing several times:

"They're saying you turned rat on him."
"They would. What do you think?"
"Ditching him was all right. But throwing in with a dick [cop] and cracking the works to him is kind of sour. Damned sour, if you ask me."

One of my middle school english teachers, in her beautiful southern accent, would always tell us that "for a fantasy, you must suspend disbelief." (I'm not sure where that comes from, but I'm sure someone knows.) With that advice in mind, I won't dwell on my opinion that the Continental Op was maybe a little too wise, with instincts a little too prescient, to be believable. But in a novel such as this, which I do think was enjoyable, I suppose that is the point of fictional heroes.

I enjoyed The Maltese Falcon much more than this book, and I am surprised that Red Harvest beat it out to get on the Time 100 greatest novels list. I would compare my "diminishing returns" appreciation and enjoyment of Hammett novels to the Charles Bukowski novels I've read. I seem to get less and less enjoyment out of the next book, even though they are still entertaining.

Red Harvested

This was my first time reading a Dashiell Hammett novel, and I enjoyed it greatly. I can see why this book began a trend of hard-boiled detective stories, full of wise-cracking smart guys and aggressive femme fatals.

I thought the pacing and structure of the book was very tight, and very well thought out. I loved that he solved the initial murder at the end of the first Act and then set himself up for the motion of the rest of the book. That the original story ties in with the climax of the final story is wonderfully done.

The character of the Continental Op is fascinating. I realize that his character doesn't have much of an arc, and Hammett doesn't care to tell a character-driven story here, but I think the nature of the character is very revealing. He is like a street-saavy Sherlock Holmes, one who notices everything and knows how to put it together. Both he and Holmes know how to process data, but the Op's game is really, in the end, a social one. He knows how to play all sides off each other. He seems remarkably in control until he gets himself full of laudanum. Until that point, he tangles with all the major players, he interacts with them, he exchanges information with them, but he doesn't get dirty with them. But you can't look into the blackness of this social world without the blackness looking back into you. He feels himself going "blood-simple" as he realizes all the deaths that his monkeying around with the social order has caused. He has been poisoned by Poisonville. To escape it and who he is becoming, he takes the laudanum, and with the laudanum, he takes the final decent to becoming a native: it looks like he killed Dinah. And he appears to be pinched pretty good too, becoming dependent on Reno for an alibi. His final struggle is to prove his own innocence to himself (if indeed he can be innocent of this death, even if it was not his hand that plunged the ice pick into Dinah's heart), and extricate himself from this poison.

Again we are dealing with a post War society, one that has the materiality of a thriving society with the missing morality of a dying one. There is no real center of power, no natural order. Elihu lost control to a democracy of workers and he called in help that took control. So Elihu called in more help in the form of our narrator, and that help also took control. No one in this novel is blameless or innocent. Everyone can be bought and sold. And our hero is motivated by anything but righteousness. People have tried to kill him and he takes that personally.

Of course, that motive is to keep the sentimental out of the narrative. We can't have a dudley do-right in this world. But the Continental Op is as close as we come. He claims to follow the rules of the Agency as best he can, but he will step beyond them to get the job done. What a man.

As a final note, I find it interesting that the Op is 40 years old and is not in ideal shape. He is not a ladies man. He is old enough to have served in the war, and while it never states that he is a veteran, I assume he was. His masculinity is defined by the way he interacts with other men, not by the way ladies respond to him. Discuss.

On to book No. 10 . . .

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf's Lighthouse?

Before this project, I had never read any Virginia Woolf, save for the short excerpted passages included in my Norton 5th Edition. I've always liked the idea of Virginia Woolf that formed somewhere along the line, but now I can say I love the real thing. She is a poet who prefers paragraphs to stanzas.

I had the same initial trouble penetrating this novel as I had with Mrs. Dalloway. There were so many characters and so many relationships to keep track of. My difficulty was compounded by Woolf's habit of so thoroughly stepping into the minds of her characters. I did not know who I was supposed to be critical of and who I was supposed to be rooting for. I don't think I ever realized how I look for these signals from an author when I read, but apparently, I do.

The difficulties of course worked themselves out as continual exposure let me trace out who was who and let me understand where everyone was coming from without the need to cheer for one character and boo down another. Everything evened up for me just in time to enjoy the amazing dinner scene in the first section. I wanted that scene to go on forever, jumping from head to head and thought to thought as the characters swim in the social waters. I found it mesmerizing and difficult to put down.

Part two, Time Passes, blew my mind. When has an author set up so many characters, especially what appears to me a main character, in the first part of a novel and then slaughtered them parenthetically in the second part without drama or incident. Mrs. Ramsey is simply not there one night to hold Mr. Ramsey. CRAZY! The second section was the most poetic. Had I a pen in hand (and was not reading from a library's copy of the book), I would have underlined the entire section for its beautiful insights and phrasings.

Politcally, I'm not sure I'm smart enough to suss out this book. It tackles the same difficulties of community and communication between people that Mrs. Dalloway does, but now it tackles gender issues and issues of art very aggressively. Mr. Ramsey the tyrant, the man for whom women are fonts of sympathy to coddle his gentle ego, who seems to take a sadistic glee in shattering dreams . . . what am I to do with him. Regardless of what and who he is, his children crave his approval, and Cam finds herself in love with his very form and dignity. How do we move beyond these social and constructed roles, if at all? So much lies with Lily Briscoe and her comparison with Mrs. Ramsey, but I'm not the guy to tease that out. Much smarter scholars than I have deciphered this text and I shall be happy enough for now to swim in the deep end of Woolf's work, unable to touch bottom, floating, just enjoying the waters.

Come on in; the water's fine!

Crossing The Bridges of San Luis Rey

If what I wanted while reading Cather was for an incident to be mined fully and to be laden with meaning, Wilder here has given me my wish. On the one hand, the book is the polar opposite of Cather's, for every incident is rife with meaning. On the other hand, the books are very similar, attempting to arrive at a truth about life through the tableau's of different life stories laid next to one another.

I enjoyed this book immensely. Wilder writes beautifully and directly, blending details and meanings in straightforward sentences that all work together to build to something grand. Moreover, the topic is epic while the subject is small and local; my favorite kind of story.

This is a novel about our efforts to find meaning in what seems like a random and meaningless world. Set in 1714 Peru, this novel seems worlds away from America and Europe after The Great War. But how many mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers must have been asking themselves "why?" in the wake of the war? Why did their loved ones die? Why did others survive? How could God let this all happen? I imagine the questions raised by the breaking of the bridge are the same as those asked by Wilder's contemporaries.

We are set up brilliantly by Wilder in the introductory section to read the lives of those fallen with great care, looking for some pattern or meaning, as Brother Juniper did. We are told that a great treatise was written on this subject, so we cannot help but think in those terms. Are we looking for irony? A cruel God? A just one? Should it make sense? We follow the narrator's retelling of these lives as a chain of cause and effect. We watch the lives interweave know that someone will be taking the spill down the chasm soon. Who? Why? We are encouraged to make connections and try to make sense as Juniper does. The frame of the novel plays an important role in our reading of the stories, which is just great writing on Wilder's part.

And then we get to the final section and Brother Juniper's method is revealed. Wow. Have waded through the complex emotions and responses of this set of people, to see that Juniper made a chart assigning people numbers to create some calculus to explain God is horrendous, and horrendously funny. The method of course fails him, so he tries to amass all the facts he can from all the sources he can, hoping that some great mind will come along to discover (or "surprise" as Wilder seems to like to say) the method to divine God's meaning. By this point, we know that such things are futile, and we are left with our own attempts to connect things. You must end with the resolution that you do not know and cannot know.

Wilder does not leave us in a state of hopelessness, though. He offers us one nugget, perhaps something we ourselves noticed. This book isn't just about finding meaning; it is about love: "There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning." Love IS meaning and the meaning IS love. All of these tales are about thwarted or lost love: The marquesa for her daughter, Pepita for the Abbess, Esteban for Manuel, Manuel for Camilla, Uncle Pio for Camilla and the theater she was to create, the Captain for his daughter, the Abbess for Pepita and the twins. Long before the bridge of San Luis Ray breaks, these bridges of love between two people break and those who live by that bridge fall long before they make the physical fall that begins the novel. The Marquesa, Esteban, Uncle Pio, they have all fallen from the bridge of love. They have all "discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other." Interestingly, it is as they attempt to mend those bridges or at least to move on that they meet their final fates. The Marquesa will be brave and less selfish; Esteban will join the captain and "do what we can" and "push on . . . as best we can"; Uncle Pio will find a replacement in Don Jaime; but those things are not to be. And what of Don Jaime and Pepita. And what of the survivors who find meaning by carrying on and loving backwards across the absence to make up for the first broken bridges?

The book gives you a lot to chew on, being emotional without becoming cute or trite.

As a final thought, what do you make of Camilla as being the only character who overlaps all the narratives. I think she is central to Wilder's thinking, but she would deserve an essay all to herself.

Jason (Goodness 2, Piety 0, Usefulness 8)

Death Comes for the Archbishop - and His Era

I am told that Willa Cather characterized Death Comes for the Archbishop as a narrative, rather than a novel. Although I do hate to quarrel with an author about her own work, I would argue that Death Comes for the Archbishop is not a narrative either, or at least, not in the sense of being a story about characters. Yes, Death Comes for the Archbishop recounts selected incidents in the life of the fictional Father Jean Marie Latour, who was appointed Bishop of New Mexico at age 35, in or around 1851, and who died 38 years later, in the spring of 1889, but I would argue that Cather is not telling the single story of Latour's life so much as the many stories of the new American southwest. Focusing on Latour gives her a lens through which to view whole towns, whole tribes, and disparate cultures, with which Catholic priests have a unique relationship.

Cather's interest in stories is explicit throughout Death Comes for the Archbishop, not only in the content of the writing, but also in its structure. Cather divides the "narrative" into nine books, many of which are devoted to the story of one excursion, one event, or one person, his rise and fall. Sometimes Father Latour and his vicar, Father Vaillant, participate in the stories, as in Book Two, when they rescue the fair Magdalena from the evil, throat-slitting bandit who is her husband, and sometimes they simply hear the stories, like "The Legend of Fray Baltazar," which is recounted by one of the parish priests.

Father Latour also sees his life in terms of stories. In Book Six, as he looks about, he begins to think "how each of these men not only had a story, but seemed to have become his story." And in the final and most modern(ist) Book, when Father Latour is nearing death, he drifts ever backward and forward in time. The narrator explains: "When the occasion warranted [Father Latour] could return to the present. But there was not much present left; Father Joseph dead, the Olivares both dead, Kit Carson dead, only the minor characters of his life remained in present time." Father Latour keeps returning, then, to the past, some of which he fears will be forgotten. And that, too, is what this book is about: the passing of historical moments.

When the book opens, we are almost immediately made aware of things that have come before and faded away. "The language spoken" among the cardinals in the preface, the narrator relates, "was French - the time had already gone by when Cardinals could conveniently discuss contemporary matters in Latin." The Italian Cardinal later laments, "Beginnings . . . there have been so many." In this story, Bishop Latour must begin the whole Apostolic Vicarate, but he bears witness to many endings as well: the ending of corrupt priests, the ending of marriages, the decline of tribes. An era comes and goes in the pages of this novel, for with the start of the gold rush and the arrival of the train in Santa Fe, death comes not only for the archbishop, but for his moment in history.

There is a strong preoccupation in this book - and perhaps it is Cather's - with capturing oral stories and histories in print while the people still remember them. The narrator says of the subject of Book Five, Padre Martinez, that Martinez "knew his country, a country which had no written histories. He gave the Bishop much the best account [Latour] had heard of the great Indian revolt of 1680, which added such a long chapter to the Martyrology of the New World." Obviously Martinez did not witness this revolt; he was part of the oral tradition of recounting it. Notably, however, Martinez is a dying breed. The narrator says: "Naturally [Martinez] hated the Americans. The American occupation meant the end of men like himself. He was a man of the old order, a son of Abiquiu, and his day was over." The beginning of Latour's Vicarate Apostolic is itself an ending.

As for what is ending, well, when Martinez is first introduced, the narrator says, "Father Latour judged that the day of lawless personal power was almost over, even on the frontier, and this figure [Padre Martinez] was to him already like something picturesque and impressive, but really impotent, left over from the past." As the institution of America begins, lawlessness and individual tyranny end, subjugated by law, order, and the dual institutions of church and country. The frontier is tamed, and Cather recounts how a bishop and his vicar help to tame it.

There is something interesting in the way that European influences work in this novel, but I think that's a topic for another discussion, along with the vaginal cave with its stone lips and strange smells.

The Style of Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather was doing something daring with the novel, or so I am told. According to A.S. Byatt's introduction to my edition of Death Comes for the Archbishop, Cather was striving to do for the novel what modern painters were doing with painting; simplifying and de-romanticizing. This move forward is also a giant move backward, according to Cather, according to Byatt. And the main inspiration for the style of Death Comes for the Archbishop were the frescoes of the life of St. Genevieve done by Puvis de Chavannes. She wanted to create a narrative "without accent, with none of the artificial elements of composition." In these frescoes, scenes of martydom are given equal weight as the scenes of daily living because "all human experiences, measured against one supreme spiritual experience, were of about the same importance."

I lean on this explanation of the narrative style of Death Comes for the Archbishop because I found myself very disappointed in the book. And from my experience, books and films are disappointing to us because they do not tell the same story that we wanted told, they do not focus where we want them to focus. That is not the fault of the story or the teller; it is the fault only of the reader to keep forcing her desires on the story being told.

I wanted adventure. I wanted drama. I wanted to have any one of the many mini-narratives of the novel expanded and played out for us. I would have liked to have seen Padre Martinez resist the new order and seen the confrontation between the priests. I would have liked to spend more time with Fray Baltazar and his motives, fears, concerns. I wanted rich characters with rich motives in dynamic conflict. But Ms. Cather was not interested in my wants; she wanted to tell her own story her own way. To her, the "essence of such writing is not to hold the note - not to use an incident for all there is in it - but to touch and pass on. I felt that such writing would be a kind of discipline in these days when the 'situation' is made to count for so much in writing, when the general tendency is to force things up." Yes, I wanted the incident to stand for much more, for the situation to count for a great deal, for things to get forced up.

Instead of playing out these incidences and situations, Cather touches upon each scene and moves on, for the meaning is not in the individual moments that happen over the 40 years of the novel, but in the collective image created by all the frames of the fresco of her work. Panels cannot be separated and made more important than other panels--all the panels are equal and work in concert. We don't need to see Latour's raising the money for the cathedral or the cathedral itself; in one panel we see the stone to be built; in the next, it is already built and Latour's body is laid out.

I respect and admire Cather's desire to push the novel in a new/old direction to try to get at some truth of life as she understands it. While I was reading it, I kept thinking of what wasn't there; now that I am done, I can appreciate what is there.

I think Ann will touch upon the politics and contents of the novel when she blogs; me, I had to expend all my energy trying to see the book for what it is to also work through the meanings presented throughout the novel.

Fiesta; or, The Sun Also Rises

The back cover of my edition of The Sun Also Rises reads like a torrid romance novel, illustrating (again) how difficult it is to capture a book in summary, but also how important. Here's the back cover:

Paris in the twenties: Pernod, parties and expatriate Americans, loose-living on money from home. Jake is wildly in love with Brett Ashley, aristocratic and irresistibly beautiful, but with an abandoned, sensuous nature that she cannot change.

When the couple drift to Spain to the dazzle of the fiesta and the heady atmosphere of the bullfight, their affair is strained by new passions, new jealousies, and Jake must finally learn that he will never possess the woman he loves.

I'll grant that this is a commercial summary, intended to sell the book, but it is a bunch of wretched nonsense all the same. The Sun Also Rises is not a frustrated, tragic love story, nor does anyone in this novel have a "nature," at least not in the sense in which that sounds. This is a novel firmly rooted in environment, in a time and several places, through which the war has left these characters to wander Europe, lost and half-dead.

For the duration of Book One, I found this a vastly frustrating novel to read. The first person narrator of the story, Jake Barnes, is a journalist living in Paris. His work occupies a very small share of his life; most of the time, he goes purposelessly from bar to restaurant to bar in the company of a great many characters he rarely bothers to introduce or to contextualize. (The writer Robert Cohn is an exception to this pattern, but more about him later.) When Jake first encounters his former love Brett Ashley, he is in a dance club, where he has brought a woman he stared at on the street. When Brett accuses him of turning romantic, he answers, "No, bored" - and that's exactly how he sounds in Paris. Bored. Aimless. Detached. One of the reasons for his bitterness, we soon discover, is that he sustained an injury during the war that left him impotent. That is likewise one of several reasons he and Brett can't be married. According to Brett, they can't even live together because she would cuckold him relentlessly. "You couldn't stand it," she tells him, to which he answers, "I stand it now." Brett leaves at the end of Book One for San Sebastian, where she conducts an affair with Robert Cohn.

The novel picks up serious steam in Book Two when Jake and his friend Bill Gorton go to Pamplona for the fiesta. Brett and her fiance, Mike, meet them there, and Robert Cohn comes along, too, which is of course awkward for everyone. Still, Jake comes alive during fiesta, I would argue because it organizes the experience of life - or rather, disorganizes that experience - in much the same way that war did. Fiesta goes on for seven days without ceasing. There are rockets going off, people thronging the streets. "Everything be[comes] unreal," as Jake says. Bill Gorton calls it a "wonderful nightmare." People share their wine, their food. It is an atmosphere of community and chaos and danger, as illustrated when a man is killed during the running of the bulls.

When it comes time to see the actual bullfight, Robert Cohn reveals his otherness, his difference from the rest of the group when he worries that he might be "bored" during the fighting. This remark incenses Bill Gorton, who says, "That Cohn gets me. . . He's got this Jewish superiority so strong that he thinks the only emotion he'll get out of the fight will be being bored." Brett's fiance picks up on the fury and the joke, and this exchange ensues:

'You weren't bored, were you?' asked Bill.
Cohn laughed.
'No. I wasn't bored. I wished you'd forgive me that.'
'It's all right,' Bill said, 'so long as you weren't bored.'
'He didn't look bored,' Mike said. 'I thought he was going to be sick.'
'I never felt that bad. It was just for a minute.'
'I thought he was going to be sick. You weren't bored, were you Robert?'
'Let up on that, Mike. I said I was sorry I said it.'
'He was, you know. He was positively green.'
'Oh, shove it along. Michael.'
'You mustn't ever get bored at your first bull-fight, Robert,' Mike said. 'It might make such a mess.'


By the end of this passage, the notion of boredom is exchanged for physical sickness in a way that I find significant. The concern before the fight is that the violence will prove too disturbing for Brett. That it also proves too disturbing for Cohn suggests that boredom is the equivalent of physical weakness, of being feminized. The rest of the men come to Spain to feel emotion, to be engaged, to be men again. This is especially true of Jake, who is very proud that he has aficion, or passion, for the bulls, which in this section seems to stand in for his lost and wounded masculinity. Americans aren't supposed to be able to have aficion, but Jake does, and it is real, validated by the Spanish men who touch him on the shoulder and approve. In the terms of fiesta, then, Jake is the strong one, the real man, and Cohn is weak and womanly.

Except that he isn't. As we know from the opening sentence of the novel, "Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton," and when Cohn finds out that Brett has gone off with Pedro Romero, the 19-year-old bullfighter, he demands that Jake tell him where they are. Jake won't, and when Cohn comes at him, Jake tries to throw a punch only to have Cohn knock him out cold. Cohn is such a strong fighter that can't be defeated by the men in his party; he can only be defeated by Romero, whom he "masscres," but whom he can't knock out. Romero says he'll kill Cohn in the morning if Cohn doesn't leave town, and Cohn does finally depart, teary and regretful. Not long after that, Brett leaves with Romero.

Just as the war has damaged and blighted the men in this book, it has also damaged Brett, as we discover in Book Three. Just as Jake is settling into his hotel in San Sebastian to recover from fiesta, he gets a distress call from Brett, summoning him to Madrid, where Jake learns that Brett kicked Romero out because Romero wanted to domesticate her. (During the war, Brett married an English aristocrat, Lord Ashley, only to have him come home deranged and threatening to kill her. He went to bed every night with a gun beneath his pillow, and for her own safety, Brett took out the bullets as soon as he fell asleep. No wonder, then, that she does not take kindly to the idea of domestication.) Romero wanted Brett to grow out her hair and marry him so that "I couldn't go away from him, he said. He wanted to make sure I could never go away from him. After I'd gotten more womanly, of course." Brett is "all right" now that she's gotten rid of him, but she is very fixated on one idea as she talks to Jake:


'I'm thirty-four, you know. I'm not going to be one of those bitches that ruins children.'
'No.'
'I'm not going to be that way. I feel rather good, you know. I feel rather set up.'

Later, she adds: 'You know it makes me feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch. . . .It's sort of what we have instead of God.'

At age 34, Brett's almost but not quite lost her chance to be fertile. That she still has a chance to procreate is clear from the fact that she can still attract a virile 19-year-old partner, the novel's consummate example of masculinity and the only man in the book who is not blighted or broken. (Jake is impotent. Mike is bankrupt. Cohn is Jewish, which the men in this novel regard as his weakness.) Still, Brett rejects this last opportunity to have kids because she doesn't want to be a bitch "that ruins children." After the terrible violent nightmare of the war, it is not procreation, but refusing to create that replaces God - and perhaps defies him.

So what is this a story about? Certainly it's about lost and damaged people clinging to each other after the war, when pre-war ideals and ambitions about career and family no longer make sense. In many ways, it's also about Jake Barnes' friendship with a Jewish writer and former boxer, who reads a book called The Purple Land that awakens the romantic in him, inspiring him to leave his long-time love, Frances, to pursue Brett, a woman of class. In this respect, Cohn is to Barnes as Gatsby is to Nick Carraway: the last example of strong, romantic hope after everyone else has already given up. That Cohn happens to be pursuing the object of Jake's affections is all the more perfect. Cohn's doomed quest to win Brett allows Jake to experience what would happen if Jake truly and sincerely pursued Brett himself, as shown in this conversation:

'Everybody behaves badly,' I said. 'Give them the proper chance.'
'You wouldn't behave badly.' Brett looked at me.
'I'd be as big an ass as Cohn,' I said.
'Darling, don't let's talk a lot of rot.'
'All right. Talk about anything you like.'
'Don't be difficult. You're the only person I've got, and I feel rather awful tonight.'

Brett needs Jake to be her friend, her "person," the one man who can't pursue her. And Jake seems to be liberated by Cohn's experiences so that he can be that "person," no longer trapped by the belief that he and Brett should be together. At the very end of the novel, it is she saying that they would have been good together, while he recognizes this as a "pretty" fantasy.

One final note is that I don't feel like I know enough historically to say how "Jewishness" is coded in this place and at this time in history. In this novel, however, it is treated with the same disdain by Brett's fiance as Gatsby's low origins are treated by Tom Buchanan (ironically, although Cohn has both money and a solid name in the place of his birth, that fortune is overshadowed by his ethnic and religious identity here).

The Great Gatsby

For the sake of continuity, I will start this blog entry by asking what this book is about. At its most basic, The Great Gatsby is the story of the social climber James Gatz, who invents himself as Jay Gatsby, falls in love with a rich girl, and spends the rest of his short, tragic life trying to win her, despite the fact that she has married a wealthy man named Tom Buchanan. After quickly amassing the fortune he needs to care for Daisy, Gatsby almost succeeds in getting her back, at least until Tom investigates the actual sources of Gatsby's money, which Tom reveals on a trip to New York with Daisy, Gatsby, Nick, and another friend. This revelation makes Daisy doubt Gatsby, but it is a tragic accident on the way home from New York that ruins Gatsby's chances forever - and indeed ends his life. On the way home, Daisy drives, inadvertently striking and killing a woman who turns out to be Tom's mistress, Myrtle Wilson. Thinking Gatsby hit Myrtle and drove away, Tom tells Myrtle's husband where to find Gatsby. George Wilson goes to Gatsby's house, shoots him in his pool, and then shoots himself, leaving Nick Carraway alone to arrange Gatsby's funeral, which no one but Gatsby's father attends. It is a sad and wonderful story, but it's also a more complex one than I think I realized.

I think Jason is right on about the parallels between James Gatz and Clyde Griffiths (who seals his fate in part by inventing not one but two new identities for himself). There is a social climber at the heart of this novel, and the narrator says that he "represent[s] everything for which I have an unaffected scorn." At the same time, however, the narrator has genuine affection for Gatsby, who has "an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person. No - Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men."

But what did prey on Gatsby? That's a question I don't feel like I can entirely answer to my satisfaction.

The east-west business that Jason raised also interests me. The Carraways have new money, but they have stayed in the same place long enough that they can successfully mythologize their origins and masquerade as having old money. Near the end of the novel, Nick says, "I am . . . a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family's name." In the middle "west," old money is rooted. There are family homes, family estates, and the people have some decency. In the east, where there is new money, anyone can rent any house. No one "remembers" how to get to your address unless you're throwing a party. People don't come to your funeral. God himself isn't watching anymore; he's been replaced by an advertisement, a giant pair of eyes.

There is some connection, too, between geographical and social mobility, both of which are vaguely distasteful. Old money keeps horses. Old money converts a garage back into a stable, while new money buys a new yellow car, a "circus wagon." Jordan and Daisy are both bad drivers. I don't know what this all means, but I find it interesting!

I suppose Nick admires Gatsby's optimism because he knows Gatsby, like Clyde, can't possibly succeed. We can never have the American dream; it's ever receding before us, so that we can only ever be what we were at the start.

The Great Gatsby - That Ol' SPOILED Sport

What a difference context makes! I read this book two years ago and didn't find it nearly as satisfying as I did this time. On the one hand, I think it was more enjoyable because I already knew the basic plot movement and didn't need to wonder or worry about where the story was going. On the other hand, I had An American Tragedy for comparison.

Like An American Tragedy, The Great Gatsby is about money. In many ways James Gatz/Jay Gatsby is like Clyde Griffiths, a boy of humble origins who falls in love with wealth, wealthy culture, and a beautiful and rich girl. In An American Tragedy, Clyde had no chance of moving up the social ladder, but by marrying the right girl, he hoped he could. Gatsby wants to climb the social ladder so that he can marry the girl of his dreams. And Gatsby can and does move up that social ladder . . . to an extent.

He is wealthy, there is no doubt about it. Everyone wants to take advantage of his parties and his generosity, but his money is new. And because it's new, it's suspect. All the rumors circulating around Gatsby are because old money has an existing history, a family to point to. Buchanan and Daisy are from old money, and they see Gatsby's parties as vulgar. Gatsby's counterpoint is of course Myrtle whose party is more vulgar and distasteful. Compare both parties to the cultured ease of the opening dinner at the Buchanans. Buchanan doesn't have hydroplanes and a "circus wagon"--he has converted his garage to a stable, for goodness sake--how cultured is that? And the true social and cultural inroads made by Gatsby are revealed by his funeral. So he can be rich, but he cannot ever have what Buchanan and Daisy have. The money is Daisy's voice that both Gatsby and Nick admire is something you are born into.

And what does Daisy see in Buchanan that makes her love him? God knows that he is nothing but an ass to us readers. Gatsby's not the bee's knees, but he sure is more likable than Tom. But to Daisy, Gatsby, for all his charms is not of the same social standing as Tom, no matter how much money he has. It is a doomed love affair from the beginning. At 30, Daisy is not the 18 year old romantic girl ready to run off with Gatsby.

I love how Gatsby is not self-made, but that Wolfshiem takes full credit for making him.

Nick is fascinating to me as well, but since all my posts are too long as it is, I shall cut myself short. Where does Nick fall in this scale of wealth and social position? He seems both rich from childhood (as the opening sentence suggests) but also rather poorly positioned in his home on West Egg. I love how Nick gets disgusted with just about everyone.

And speaking of West Egg, what do you make of the Midwest v. East distinction? It seems to move from a comment about America to something about the East Coast. Is this East v. West distinction echoed in East v. West Egg?

I'd write more, but I hate to bore.

Happy readings!

In Praise of Chronological Order

I realize that starting with these older texts can be challenging and will probably scare off a number of people who were scarred by high school and college instructors, but there is a huge benefit to doing it this way.

Namely, we get a picture of a larger culture. When Peter Walsh reflects on his time in Britain, that means something to us because of our experience with A Passage to India. And in these novels concerned with class and class structure (An American Tragedy, Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby) we have a context that is created from these companion texts. Novels and stories all exist within a particular time and place regardless of their being called "timeless." Reading the books together and in order, we can see them existing together.

We are not far enough along the timeline to see books referring to each other, commenting upon each other, building off each other, but I will not be surprised to see that in the future too.

So far I find this to be a very rewarding project. Thank you, Ann, for making this happen!

Mrs. Dalloway - Brought to a SPOIL, then Left to Simmer

This was the most fascinating of the three novels so far to me. I found the first 10 pages to be VERY difficult. I am used to things opening in media res, but this took that to a whole new level. I must have reread each paragraph two or three times before moving to the next one, waiting for something to become clear. From the back of the book, I knew that the story took place in one day and that it followed Mrs. Dalloway as she prepares for an evening party. That knowledge helped very little to anchor me.

When we first jump outside of Clarissa to Scrope Purvis, who drives past her while she waits to cross the street, I was shaken. That paragraph got four or five reads. It wasn't until we left Clarissa and started wandering through all the people on the street that the book came into any real focus for me. Ah! We are going to be sitting in these heads and bouncing off of people as they pass, interact, and comment upon each other. We are in a novel of thoughts more than action. Then it all became delicious.

It felt to me like a poem forced into the suit of prose. I had to read slowly, digest each sentence both for appreciation and for meaning. Once I committed myself to this deliberate pace I loved it. Every sentence feels like its meaning is supposed to echo throughout the novel, just like the "leaden circles" of Big Ben tolling away the hours and tying all the players together. How different from the overwritten prose of Dreiser, to feel like every sentence demands your attention.

As for meaning, I am not smart enough to digest this novel. I will be chewing on it for a long time to come.

I loved being in each person's head, hearing Peter Walsh view the world and himself, struggling with Mrs. Kilman as she says things that she knows she shouldn't say. Every character here is respected, has something internal. I feel like we glimpse through our various viewpoints an entire culture, or at least an entire cultural moment. These characters are both self-aware and self-delusional.

I will point to a passage that I believe Ann will expound upon because it struck us as the center of the novel. This is from the ponderings of Peter Walsh restating Clarissa's youthful theory "to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said . . . not 'here, here, here' . . . but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them, even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to . . . ."

How apt then that the novel should be called Mrs. Dalloway and follow all these people, most of whom she knows and some of whom she does not, namely Rezia and Septimus. To know Mrs. Dalloway (or any other character here) we need to know them all.

No one exists in a vacuum. Just as important is that we all exist alone. At one point I thought the novel was downright existential as no one could communicate with anyone else effectively, Dalloway couldn't even tell his wife he loved her (not in so many words). We were stuck in minds, never getting satisfactory exchanges. We jump from character to character; there is no bridge, no connection. So, no one exists in a vacuum and no one exists together. Ouch. That is a tough bind for the human race, or at least for post-war Britain.

Watching the Movies that Go with the Books: An American Tragedy

For purists, seeing a movie after reading the book can be downright harrowing. The actors have the wrong hair. The script eliminates four of the best scenes - and irreverently changes two more. High on rubber cement, the script writer creates a whole new subplot to replace the three other ones he mutilated like the sick serial killer he is. Frankly, if not for some popcorn and the great reward of fuming after the fact, the whole experience would be too much.

Of course, there is another option - or so I'm told - which is to take the same faith I would give to the book and loan it to the film, assuming that the director has a viable story s/he wants to tell. It may not be the same story that appears in the book, but it was inspired by the book, and it can be interesting (instead of irritating) to compare and contrast the two. You know, theoretically.

Testing this whole notion, last night we watched A Place in the Sun, the 1951 Columbia Pictures adaption of An American Tragedy. The director - who won an Oscar for his efforts - decided that the story he wanted to tell was a tragic tale of a love that could not be. The marketing department definitely got the memo, billing the movie as "The Screen's Most Powerful Love Story," which naturally takes place between Clyde and Sondra, renamed George and Angela for the film and played by Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift.

To tell the screen's most powerful love story, it becomes necessary to make a few changes to Dreiser's novel, and by a few, I mean scores, including changing the setting to post-war America.

- Roberta, renamed Alice, becomes a dowdy, unattractive, whiny, grating shrew who does everything but boil George's pet bunny. Seriously, when he goes to spend the week with Angela and her parents (!) at the lake, Alice sees a picture of him in the paper with Angela and hops a bus, calling George at Angela's house and demanding to be picked up at the bus station NOW and married IMMEDIATELY; otherwise, Alice will go to Angela's house and tell her parents everything.

- Angela's parents, meanwhile, seem more or less prepared to allow George into the family - even after George discloses fully his poor (and embarrassing) background. Marrying Angela is not a dream in this version of the story, and entering the upper crust is not a tantalizing possibility. It's all real, and it's all going to happen, provided George can somehow get rid of the shackle that is Alice.

- Instead of planning Alice's murder, however, George decides to kill her rather spontaneously. Once he's out on the water, he loses his nerve (because he is a really good guy, after all), and Alice falls into the lake because she stands up and overturns the boat.

- Despite all of these changes, George in the end decides that he must be guilty, because while Alice was drowning, he wasn't thinking of her. He was thinking of Angela. In his prison cell, he bids Angela farewell (she will love him forever, though), and he goes to the chair, presumably meant to have our tears as he fades from view.

In an odd way, seeing this romantic version of the story increased my admiration for Dreiser's novel. In the book, Clyde is an ass - in no small part because Roberta is not. The book doesn't simplify Roberta; the book makes her an attractive, intelligent girl whom Clyde woos, pesters, and finally seduces, only to abandon her even before her hour of need. Clyde is an ass. And to put us in his head, to make him sympathetic to us in spite of that, is a serious accomplishment.

The book also encourages us to think in ways that I did not fully credit. By giving us two very clear characters to root for, the film makes us unwittingly complicit in the murder of Alice. We want Alice dead, if only to make Shelley Winters stop whining! In the book, however, we are meant to question much of what we read. Jason realized this just from reading; for me, it took seeing the film to help me see the book.

An American Tragedy - SPOILED but not Rotten

Oh how different are the writing styles of Forster and Dreiser (and Woolf too for that matter, but that will be saved for another blog). Some will prefer Dreiser to Forster, but I belong to the other camp, preferring Forster's direct, poetic, and insightful prose to Dreisers cumbersome and unedited prose.

Both these stories, Passage to India and An American Tragedy, do not end where I expect them do. I expect Passage to end shortly after the trial and Tragedy to end shortly after Clyde is caught. The dramatic impulse does not dictate that we follow Clyde all the way to the moment of his execution, but it is important to Dreiser to take us there. It was Forster's determination to include the entire final section that led Ann to draw her brilliant reading about what is actually at the heart of Forster's novel, the friendship of Aziz and Fielding. Here the American tragedy is not simply Roberta's murder. The novel is about two murders: Roberta's and Clyde's, and for Dreiser, Clyde's murder seems every bit as tragic and pointless as Roberta's.

The thing that strikes me about the third book of the novel is Clyde's inability to feel fully guilty for murdering Roberta. He's not a sociopath insofar as he knows that what he did was not good, I believe. There's much made, as Ann notes, about whether or not Clyde actually killed Roberta or if in the end it was an accident, but again I agree with Ann and that Clyde is clearly responsible for Roberta's death. So why does Clyde want to split hairs here, and to the point that he cannot make any such confession of his guilt even to McMillan and God? Because, I propose, for Clyde, his actions were not wrong. The personal beliefs born in Clyde is that the search of material goods and ease are a reasonable and necessary quest. Roberta was going to ruin that irreparably. What is immoral then? Getting rid of an obstacle to pursue what he must pursue or accepting defeat and living a miserable life. Clyde does not deal with a moral vs. immoral decision, but with two moral decisions.

This books seems to me to be a response to Horatio Alger novels, in which our plucky young hero rises up from obscurity due to hard work and moral righteousness. Clyde never stands a chance to truly rise. He makes a million bad decisions and suffers from them, but if he were born privileged like Gilbert or Belknap, his decisions would have been in no way disastrous. Belknap faced the same problem, but his rich father bailed him out. If Gilbert reached the same point that Clyde did and got someone pregnant, Dad would be there. Hell, even Dr. Glenn performed abortions for the rich and privileged but not for the poor. And let's say Gilbert murdered Roberta for the same reason Clyde did, the entire legal force of the Griffiths would have been there to aid him.

Please forgive the rambling nature of this post.

If Clyde's murder is a parallel with Roberta's, and if Roberta was murdered because she stood in Clyde's way, then why was Clyde murdered? What was Clyde pregnant with and how did his pregnancy (metaphorically speaking, of course) threaten to derail the social world in which he lived? I think that is the central question of the novel.

How do morality and social progress/personal improvement meet and shape each other? Another central question.

This novel is widely considered a piece of Realism in which environment, not nature determine the course of events and character. Here, Clyde's desires and concerns are innate, not created by culture. So much so that he is constantly searching for understanding, understanding that his mother and society at large cannot have for him. He is something like Frankenstein's monster not knowing why he has been made so monstrous. How can others behave so well? How can they avoid the troubles he does? What Clyde never connects, because no one admits, Clyde's desires are not monstrous, but human, or rather "American." Others have the same problems, but they are either comfortably stuck in their caste or they are privileged enough to avoid the ramifications.

To murder Clyde, society addresses nothing, examines itself and its structure not at all. The deathhouse sequence continually refers to the mechanical nature of things here. Everything is ritualized and automatic and meaningless. The only examination expected is to be made by the prisoners trying to come to peace with the end of their life. Our social structure need examine nothing and can move on, leaving Clyde and his trial to be what it always was: entertainment for the masses, a reality TV show before TV, a Jerry Springer circus of pain and outrage.

And though I feel all that intellectually, I can't say I had much sympathy for Clyde, myself. He was a whiny prick. I have no idea what that says about me.