Alec Forbes Is an Unco Bonnie Buik

On numerous occasions, C. S. Lewis emphatically expressed his debt to George MacDonald. He said Phantastes baptized his imagination. He said, “I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master.” And yet, while it was a novel of MacDonald’s that so changed Lewis’s imagination, he also said of his “master,” “Few of his novels are good and none is very good.” It seems it was not MacDonald’s handling of character, plot, and description that so inspired Lewis. And to be clear, Phantastes is, as its name implies, a fantasy novel, and most of MacDonald’s fictional output consists of realistic (not to say realist), domestic novels.

Somewhere in the last eight years or so, I read that, among those novels he thought weren’t very good, Alec Forbes was Lewis’s favorite; I know I read it somewhere because I put a note to that effect on my current ten-year plan. I don’t remember now where I read that factoid, and the source could have been wrong. I also wrote a note to myself saying that at some point (again, I didn’t bother with the details; *sigh*) someone writing for Christian History magazine said that What’s Mine’s Mine was Lewis’s favorite of MacDonald’s novels. Well, the good professor may have said different things at different times. One thing seems certain to me, though. After reading Alec Forbes, I can’t help thinking that Lewis must have liked it better than some of the other novels I’ve read in recent years. Two pervasive features of the book direct me to this conclusion.

First, Alec finds Christian counsel in multiple sources. MacDonald’s novels often feature one Christian sage mentoring the young people. (I always imagine that MacDonald saw in these characters the kind of pastor and teacher he hoped to be.) Alec Forbes has at least four spiritual guides. There’s the minister at the state church. He has no “enthusiasm” (i.e., he doesn’t go in for revival meetings and prefers staid, liturgical worship services), but he consistently teaches godly love, through his actions even more than by words. Recognizing an awareness of the constant presence of God in the dissenting preachers, Alec prefers to go to their church, although he doesn’t necessarily agree with everything he hears there. (They read only the Old Testament, MacDonald explains, and view covenant as the only thing standing between them and what God really wants to do to them.) Alec finds a model of simple and joyful Christian humility in young Annie Anderson, with whom he goes to school. And then there’s the town stonemason, who constantly talks to Alec frankly about his need to escape Hell by getting right with God. I was reminded of the many doors in the foyer of Lewis’s house of “Mere Christianity,” all leading to rooms where Christian fellowship and worship of God can be found.

Second, MacDonald talks in the narration about God calling people "through a back door." The scent of flowers, the warmth of sunlight, a blanket of snow, a windstorm, a gift of a couple of shillings – one earthly thing after another in the story flashes forth grace and beauty and speaks divine truth to the hearts of Alec and Annie. But, the narrator explains, if they – or we – pursue any gracious thing directly, hoping to make the sacred moment last forever, the freshness goes away. These moments in the novel not only make me think of Lewis saying that MacDonald was the first author he had read who could transform common objects into conduits of light, they also remind me of Lewis’s central idea of joy. I won’t try to explain Lewis’s special definition of joy here. If you don’t know about Warnie’s toy garden, but you’re the kind of person to read this much of this blog post, I guarantee that you will thank me for telling you to read Surprised by Joy sometime in the next . . . OK, sometime in the next ten years.

But should you read Alec Forbes? If you enjoy nineteenth-century coming-of-age novels as much as I do, if you love to hate the draconian schoolteachers of Nicholas Nickleby and Jane Eyre, if you think you would like a story in which the male protagonist (sixteen years old?) builds a snow fort and the female protagonist (twelve?) wanders into it and falls asleep and needs a respectful rescue, if you long for a book in which the ultimate spiritual state of the boy is as important as whether or not he gets the girl, then yes, you should read Alec Forbes. Oh, and there’s one more thing. Gin the unco mickle Scots mak ye frichtit, dinna gang greitin’ and speirin’ me a’ aboot it.

My Continuing Quest Through Poetryland

 My planned reading forms the foundation of my adult project of giving myself the classic education of which my high school and college deprived me. (I also continue to study mathematics and languages just for the sake of learning, but I have no complaints about the way my schools handled those subjects.) Of course, I realize that what I’ve learned in my self-assigned regimen of learning, which has been going on for around twenty-five years now, I could never have assimilated by the time I was twenty years old. So I should quit complaining about school, claim victory, and move on. Right?

But still, why didn’t someone in eleven years of public school and four years of college teach me about the music of poetry? We studied some poetry in high-school English classes but never talked about, for instance, the ways rhythm plays against an underlying meter. I hazily remember a teacher once scanning a line of poetry and just leaving the alternating chalk marks above the syllables sketched out on the board, as if we had learned something by looking at an accent mark above the word of. I took a class in poetry in college in an attempt to remedy the deficiency, but we read almost exclusively modern poetry, and if there’s a rhythmic scheme to that body of literature, my professor never spoke of it, and it has totally escaped me since.

In any case, I plod along in my own awkward way trying to learn poetry, fully knowing that, however much I may enjoy Milton and Shelley and Tennyson, I’ll never really get their idiom into my bones since I didn’t grow up with it. Reading even the most enjoyable poetry, I still feel a lot like the way I felt when, at the age of 53, I studied Rosetta Stone Italian for a year and then went to live in Tuscany for four months. And how much sense does it make to read all or most of one or two poets’ works every year? Not much, maybe, but at least the system gets me reading.

This year I actually have three poets on my plan. My first assignment in poetry for 2021 was Robert Browning, and I have to say that I surprised myself by finding a classic poet that I really don’t like. Some I haven’t understood as much as I wished. Some, like Coleridge, disappointed me, but in his case only because he seemed inferior to Wordsworth, who is, as far as my dim sight can tell, practically perfect. But Browning I actually found repulsive at times.

As I said, it was a surprise. I went in to the year expecting to fall in love with Browning and simply to become acquainted with the second poet on the schedule for 2021, the now little-known William Cullen Bryant. But just the opposite happened. I will now smile and give a polite nod to Browning as I pass him on the street, but Bryant will receive invitations to lunch.

And now I come to the big problem in writing blog posts about poetry. I see from my stats that some of my posts about poetry are among the most visited on exlibrismagnis. Many of the visitors are probably people just like me, finally trying to understand poetry at a time when they fear it’s too late. I’m guessing (and hoping) that many of those views come from homeschooling moms and dads who are trying to give their kids something better than what we received. So I feel the burden of obligation to say something profound, something eye-opening about Bryant for readers who are looking for a cup to dip into the pool at a poetic oasis in the middle of the great desert of Literature as Seen by Americans Raised in Public School. So, here goes. But really. Don’t expect much. Just dip your hand into Bryant’s “November” and take a cool, refreshing sip.

Yet one smile more, departing, distant sun!
One mellow smile through the soft vapory air,
Ere, o'er the frozen earth, the loud winds run,
Or snows are sifted o'er the meadows bare.
One smile on the brown hills and naked trees,
And the dark rocks whose summer wreaths are cast,
And the blue gentian flower, that, in the breeze,
Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.
Yet a few sunny days, in which the bee
Shall murmur by the hedge that skirts the way,
The cricket chirp upon the russet lea,
And man delight to linger in thy ray.
Yet one rich smile, and we will try to bear
The piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air.

OK, let’s start with the main conceit: the sun smiles in the summer, and we live on the memory of those smiles during the winter months, when, as you know, the sun is doing something other than smiling. (Side note: this morning, in reading a novel by George MacDonald, I learned a new, very useful name for unseasonably warm days in November. We in America tend to call this meteorological phenomenon by a phrase invoking a mistaken name for indigenous American people. In Scotland, apparently, the pattern is known as St. Martin’s summer, presumably because the feast day of that good man is in early November.) During a St. Martin’s summer, Bryant asks the sun to extend his beneficence for just one more day, stoking the inner fire that will make the bitterness of the coming December, January, and February more bearable. It’s a pretty picture, and who wouldn’t want to have the cheery sun as a friend with whom to hold such a pleasant conversation?

Now, to do my best at making a technical observation, I want to concentrate on some articles that my old teacher would have contentedly put an accent above. (To avoid alignment problems with accent marks, I’ll show accented syllables in all caps.) Consider the second line. My teacher (bless her heart, at least she was trying to teach us something about poetry) would have marked it this way:

One MELlow SMILE through THE soft VAp’ry AIR

“See?” she would have said, “Five iambs. That’s iambic pentameter.” But surely we ought to read the line in a more normal way:

One MELlow SMILE through the SOFT VAp’ry AIR

Now this I will grant my teacher: the effect I sense only works if you know the straightforward pattern of iambs. Against that meter, which lies in the back of your mind as you read the words – should it lie there? I don’t know; nobody ever really explained it to me; but this is the way it happens in my weird, old head – against that meter, the actual pattern of accents sounds like a change, and that change has a clear effect. To my ear, the two consecutive accented syllables in this case primarily serve to slow the line down. And we should slow down. It’s a mellow sun. The air is soft and vapory. We’re not in a rush here. We want this final solar grin to last a while.

The same rhythmic exchange occurs in the phrases “on the BROWN HILLS” and “the DARK ROCKS” and with “the BLUE GENtian FLOW’R” and in “a FEW SUNny DAYS”: all images we want to linger over on this last warm day of the year. Without the slowing inversions, my old teacher and I would have been accenting the articles the and a quite a bit. A triple accent appears near the end in “ONE RICH SMILE,” as Bryant makes his final plea to the sun to stop for a moment before leaving.

One last note. It’s difficult to write a sentence in English without the letter t. So, of course, it happens here and there throughout the poem. But in lines 2 through 13, the t’s are scattered, like the opposing team’s hits on a pitcher’s good day. In the first and last lines, by contrast, they come in clumps: “deparTing, disTanT sun” and “Piercing winTer frosT.” OK, yeah, I also highlighted a p in that last line. But doesn’t it have the same cold sharpness to its sound? This isn’t science; it’s art. So I can’t say that Bryant meant to distribute his sounds in this way or that anybody else even hears them my way. But for me, the beating voiceless stops in the first line hammer a note of scolding; the sun needs a berating for abandoning us each year. And those hard consonants in the last line make me feel the bitterness of a deep winter freeze.

Wow. Some accents and a few consonants. I’m probably working at a fifth-grade level here. But I didn’t do this work in actual fifth grade. So, better late than never?

Augustine Is Really Smart

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading my yearly allotment of Augustine: books 6-10 in the African bishop’s treatise on the Trinity. He didn’t convince me with his main point, but he did convince me (if, indeed, I needed any convincing on this point) that his intelligence embraced broad fields of knowledge and dealt with them in great power and insight.

OK, Augustine’s main point. Books 1-5 (which I read three years ago) deal mostly with terms regarding relationships between the Persons of the Trinity and with the question of Who made the appearances to Abraham, Moses, and others in certain Old Testament stories. I divided the treatise arbitrarily into thirds for my ten-year reading plan, but my artificial division seems to have worked, since books 6-10 shift focus to our relationship with and understanding of the Trinity. Augustine’s primary question is this: How can we love the Trinity when we can’t understand or form an accurate mental picture of the Trinity?

His basic answer is that we sometimes love a thing without exact knowledge of it because we have loved something else like it and reason by analogy. I, for instance, will sit down eagerly later this year as I begin The Claverings, a book by Anthony Trollope that I have not read. Why do I relish the experience in anticipation when I don’t know the book? Because I have read and enjoyed several other Trollope books, so my love is founded on the likelihood that I will enjoy this one as much.

What then, Augustine asks, do we know that is like the Trinity so that we can love the Trinity as we begin and continue to know the ultimately incomprehensible God in three Persons? There is, Augustine tells us, a trinity in my mind: the mind itself, its knowledge, and its love. This answer works to some extent: the knowledge and the love, like the Word and the Holy Spirit being respectively begotten and breathed by the Father, come from and reflect the mind itself, and the mind is not what it is without its actions of knowing and willing. But do knowledge and love have a separate identity that bears an analogy to Christ saying that He doesn’t know everything the Father knows? And doesn’t the mind perform other functions, as well, like reasoning? Augustine suggests a second trinity of human mentality: memory, understanding, and will. In some ways, this analogy seems better, and in other ways it seems just as arbitrarily limited to three as did the first proposition. But Augustine’s question still seems important to me, and his approach still provides a door to my search for an answer. I am inclined to say that I love the Trinity because God in three Persons is like nothing else in existence (thing A cannot both be with thing B and be thing B except in the case of the Trinity: John tells us that, in the beginning, the Word was with God and the Word was God), and I like other things that are unique. Yeah, there’s the problem of saying that all these things are alike in that they aren’t like anything else.

My dissatisfaction with his answers doesn’t negate the point that Augustine wrestles with a fascinating, important question. And the intelligence and knowledge he uses to put all the parts of the argument together are astonishing. Did anyone else before Augustine ever examine the human mind to the point of questioning why we love things we don’t know? Plato and Aristotle both have lots of helpful things to say about loving what we do know and even loving what we mistakenly think we know. But loving what we don’t know? Augustine also appears to me to have invented, some 1500 years ahead of time, the field of semiotics, with all of his analysis of words and mental thoughts as signs of both external things and of each other. In other books, he talks about music, mathematics, and history. In the Confessions, he takes on the mystery of consciousness of time.

In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine commended study of all these fields and more, thus, I thank God, granting approval for medieval Christians to study literature and grammar and astronomy and geometry and to create cathedral schools and universities. He is the most influential Christian writer between the writing of the New Testament and now. Had I never read a word of his prodigious output, he would still bear responsibility for much of the shape of my intellectual life, as he does for anyone geeky and odd enough to be reading this blog. Graduates wear robes at school commencements because monks delivered medieval education because Augustine sanctioned academic pursuit for Christendom.

So what can we call Augustine? An intellectual powerhouse? The founder of Christian academicism? A beacon atop the mountain of western education? It’s difficult to find the right words to describe him adequately and to capture the importance of his far-reaching achievement. He isn’t like anyone else.

Beauty in Ashes

Happy Charles Dickens’s Birthday! I just finished reading Bleak House for the third time in my life, and before writing this blog post, I looked back to see what I blogged about in 2012, the last time I enjoyed the Great Man’s ninth novel. It appears I wrote six times about the book. How did I find so much time to write these posts while I was working?

I have just one thing to write about after this visit with the deep, mysterious, disturbingly comforting Bleak House. I see that I touched on it in one of my posts from nine years ago when I commented on this passage:

It was grand to see how the wind awoke, and bent the trees, and drove the rain before it like a cloud of smoke; and to hear the solemn thunder and to see the lightning; and while thinking with awe of the tremendous powers by which our little lives are encompassed, to consider how beneficent they are and how upon the smallest flower and leaf there was already a freshness poured from all this seeming rage which seemed to make creation new again.

The dark storm makes creation new. After the deluge comes a new brilliantly colored sign in the heavens.

Throughout Bleak House, characters are immersed in atmospheres of influence. Influence, a common word in the book, originally referred to streams of celestial power in our atmosphere flowing (fluens in Latin) in from the planets. These influences, it was believed, both shaped character and caused temporary changes of temperament or health. Influenza came from the influences. At the beginning of Bleak House, the air is filled with “fog,” which sounds romantic to us now but actually consisted mostly of smoke from factories. As we progress through the pages, we get the pervading rain around Chesney Wold, the dust that blankets everything in Tulkinghorn’s chambers, the soot of the poor neighborhoods, the disease in the noisome air of a cramped urban cemetery, and, most importantly, the poisonous influence of the Court of Chancery, touching and harming everyone who has the misfortune to find his business taken up therein:

How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very wide question. From the master upon whose impaling files reams of dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into many shapes, down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks' Office who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery folio-pages under that eternal heading, no man's nature has been made better by it. In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration, under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can never come to good. The very solicitors' boys who have kept the wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr. Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise was particularly engaged and had appointments until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The receiver in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it but has acquired too a distrust of his own mother and a contempt for his own kind. Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise have lapsed into a habit of vaguely promising themselves that they will look into that outstanding little matter and see what can be done for Drizzle—who was not well used—when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of the office. Shirking and sharking in all their many varieties have been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the world go wrong it was in some off-hand manner never meant to go right.

And yet beauty arises from the wreckage of this whirlwind. This isn’t Great Expectations, so Dickens awards his good characters happy endings in this novel with the sad name. And yet every happy ending summarized in the last chapter of Bleak House has a depth of beauty that comes from some tragic mark. One character ends happily married and has a baby girl – who is deaf and dumb. But doesn’t the mother only love her child the more for that deficiency? The narration tells us explicitly that one pretty widow is more beautiful with the shadow of loss on her face. Two neighbors who have argued over the ownership of a disputed strip of land try reconciling but find that they actually have more fun arguing. John Jarndyce still calls his study the Growlery. And the house, in commemoration of the storm that has made creation new, is still affectionately known as Bleak House. Because of its realism and familiarity, isn’t this the happiest of all Dickens’s happy endings?

Ringing the Changes

Dorothy L. Sayers’s mystery novels were once thought of as “literary” detective stories, as opposed, I suppose, to the – what? flaccid pulp? – of Agatha Christie’s offerings. I happen to like both authors quite a lot, although I can see why Sayers was once thought to be artistically better than Christie. The very qualities that earned her this reputation are probably responsible for her books appealing less (and to fewer) today than her counterpart’s, but if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably up for it. If you haven’t tried these out, start with Murder Must Advertise, and then, if you’re still happy, proceed right to The Nine Tailors.

The Nine Tailors! Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow! If you didn’t know anything about change ringing before, you will by the time you’re finished with the book. But look up some articles while you’re reading the novel, and dig even deeper. (Here’s a good place to start.) Listen to some change ringing on Youtube. The topic is fascinating in itself, provides a pervasive atmosphere of activity and terminology throughout the book, and plays an important role in the solution of the mystery.

What is it, you ask? In short, change ringing is a practice of tolling a given set of bells one at a time over and over but changing the order each time. For instance, in a Plain Bob, a set of six bells would begin by ringing in order: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6. The line is then divided into three pairs, which change places: 2 - 1 - 4 - 3 - 6 - 5. Now the end bells retain their rhythmic placement while the four inner bells swap in pairs: 2 - 4 - 1 - 6 - 3 - 5. And so it goes. A complete peal, which takes several hours (more or less, depending on the number of bells involved), gets around to the performance of every ordered permutation. If you had heard this description before knowing it takes place in a mystery by Dorothy L. Sayers, would you have guessed that such a mathematical practice was English? But if I told you that the methods for changing the order of the bells have such quaint names as Steadman’s Triples and Kent Treble Bob Major, would you have guessed any country other than England?

The performances require stamina, athleticism, and mental focus. Imagine going to a cold, windy bell tower and pulling on a rope that controls a massively heavy bell for nine, fifteen, perhaps twenty hours, all the time paying attention to the pattern and keeping track of when to dodge and when to hunt! The herculean feat is made possible by alternates who are ready to sub in when it’s time for a refreshment break and by a leader who helps by shouting the changes like a caller in a square-dance (another artistic form involving the reordering of the participants). The adjustment of the timing that makes the permutations come about is made possible by the method of swinging the bell all the way to its vertical position, where it hovers like a gymnast doing a handstand on the top of the high bar until called to descend and toll again.

I offer a couple of caveats before you go wading into The Nine Tailors and wonder why you let this weird blog writer lead you into a morass. First, it’s long. Mystery novels work best in about 250 pages: enough to hide the connections of the pertinent details but few enough that the reader doesn’t forget those details by day 6 of reading. The Nine Tailors comes in at around 400. Second, Sayers’s language (especially her slang) is just different enough from ours to make descriptions of some key events obscure. I’ve read the book twice, and both times I got bogged down on page 1 trying to figure out how Lord Peter’s car got bogged down in a ditch. The situation isn’t relevant to the mystery other than as a means of getting Lord Peter delayed long enough to get involved in the local intrigue. But let me help potential readers out by suggesting that “the road cresting the dyke” should be interpreted as “the road that ran along the crest of the dyke.” I’ll also point out that a “lag” is a convict and that it’s best just to assume that someone asking for “Paul who is a tailor” could be remembered as and taken as someone asking for Paul Taylor. (Perhaps the book was so long that even Sayers forgot her own details.)

At one point while reading the book, I was looking up what some other people thought about it and found that Upton Sinclair considered it one of four “essential” detective stories. Also on his list was Dickens’s Bleak House, which, it just so happens, was on my plan as the book to start on the day after I finished The Nine Tailors! So I’m reading half of all essential detective novels in one month. That’s an accomplishment almost as impressive as ringing a full peal of Bristol Surprise Major.

Journey to the Center of Two Questions

Given that one of my goals in this third decade of planned reading is to bring back some of the boyhood wonder and excitement of reading classic adventure stories, after rereading Journey to the Center of the Earth for the first time since about 1972, I have to say, “Mission Accomplished!” Of course, the experience isn’t the same this time; I approach this book this second time with almost fifty extra years of experience and understanding. But, wow! Did I have fun! The obsessed professor! The runes! The thrilling sensation of hearing and reading at desperate moments the adventurous name of Arne Saknussemm! Glorious!

Now let me bog down my notes with two annoying grown-up observations my sexagenarian mind can’t help making. First, I couldn’t help laughing at the supposedly seminal science-fiction author alternately praising and flouting science. Axel, in his narration, keeps the reader abreast of the latest scientific information about the structure of the earth, geological eons, and evolutionary strata. But then the plot he unfolds contradicts all of it. For instance, the most prominent indications of prehistoric life the group discovers are actual, living prehistoric beings, whose ancestors at some time long, long ago slid with their habitat down a hundred miles of a gaping chasm, only to survive and breed underground for millions of years without any evolutionary change whatsoever: the adventurers note that they match exactly the skeletons of supposedly extinct species they have seen in museums.

Geology? Oh, sure, the explorers pass through various types of rock that “prove” the latest theories of the formation of the earth. But this all happens in the first fifty miles or so of descent; the next few hundred miles take them through more and more identical tunnels of extinct volcanic action, all of which is assigned to a small molten core that occupies only the very center of the center of the earth. They mention the scientific belief that temperature will increase as they descend and then find that it really doesn’t – until, that is, they find themselves at last in an active volcanic zone. It seems actual science stands in the way of a journey to the center of the earth, so Verne, in order to make good on the promise of his title, has to reject it. The good professor who leads the expedition tries to preserve some kind of scientific authority by saying that Sir Humphrey Davy has an opinion about the inner parts of the earth different from that of all other scientists. But a lone opinion can’t make the premise of the book scientific. An unsupported opinion can’t make science scientific. Some might point to the contradiction as a flaw, as a cheat. I just enjoyed watching the precarious balancing act as Verne showed off both his passion for science and his utterly unscientific yet captivating imagination.

My second annoying observation is related to the first. The editor of the version I read offered occasional notes indicating passages in which she saw Verne’s scientific observations indicating a break with Christian doctrine and sometimes outright disdain for it. I don’t know anything about Verne’s religious views. I can only say that people – Jules Verne belonging to that distinguished society – fall into many more subtle positions regarding the relationship of faith and science than the two the editor seems to recognize. Verne sometimes speaks of the “antediluvian era.” Was he joking in referring to the biblical flood? Was he throwing a comforting blanket to his theologically more conservative readers? Or was the author (or his first-person narrator, Axel, actually) trying to reconcile the accounts of the first few chapters of Genesis with the expanded timeframe of recent geological science? These and twenty more variants were all views held by actual people at the time, and they all represent possible understandings of Axel’s (and possibly Verne’s) view, especially since Axel never says, “And so our journey to the center of the earth has disproved the book of Genesis.”

In any case, since Verne gleefully used his plot to throw out all the science he so carefully alludes to, how could his science possibly throw out any given theology?

The Play’s the Thing

Like a holiday whose meaning metamorphoses over the centuries, my tradition of starting each year of reading with some plays has origins from a bygone era – a previous millennium, in fact. My first ten-year reading plan, which came with the set of Britannica Great Books, started many years with Greek plays and then proceeded somewhat chronologically throughout any given year. Tom Stoppard is not an ancient playwright. He is, in fact, one of the most recent authors on my schedule for 2021. But playwright he is, so January he comes!

My reaction to the plays that I read isn’t fair, I know. Dramatic works should be seen, not read. But I don’t have the luxury of watching performances, and I’m interested in Stoppard’s wordplay and philosophical meanderings. Given that caveat, I’ll say that, while I enjoyed Jumpers and Travesties much more than I enjoyed the Stoppard plays I read three years ago, I still wish I liked them better. I want to love these plays; I really do. Let’s list the possible explanations for my disappointment:

(1) The plays aren’t very good, and their accolades come through an emperor’s-new-clothes dynamic.

(2) The plays are good, but I don’t know enough to see everything that’s good about them.

(3) I want something in a play that Stoppard, writing perfectly good plays, just doesn’t provide.

I think the truth includes elements of options 2 and 3, although I wouldn’t be surprised to find fans who secretly see the emperor as naked. But option 3 surged to the fore when I read one particular exchange in Travesties. This play consists entirely of recollections by the main character of meeting Lenin, James Joyce, and dadaist Tristan Tzara in Zurich in 1917. All are seeking ways to negotiate a world newly unmoored from traditional views of its coherence. Some character (I don’t remember which one) says something a little crazy (they all do), and after someone calls the utterance nonsense replies, “Yes, but at least it’s clever.” A page or two later, Tzara speaks the line, “Dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada dada.” Again someone says he’s speaking nonsense, but Tzara gives an extra turn to his reply: “Yes, but at least it’s not clever.”

Is my problem that I’m trying to find something clever in Stoppard’s word salad when he just wants me to enjoy the mixed greens? Maybe. But then, somebody in the play (yes, somebody – it would all be easier to keep track of if I could see performances) says words to the effect of “We can no longer believe in causation because of the war.” See, I think that’s pretty clever, and I want more of that. So I still have some money on option 2; I’m concerned that maybe Stoppard is clever all the time while I just don’t catch it all. On the other hand, I do like the tastes and textures of a random assortment of romaine, spinach, cherry tomatoes, red onions, croutons, and italian dressing, so I’ll be keeping this play in mind when, later this year, I tackle the greatest tossed salad of them all: Finnegan’s Wake.

I can’t sign off without a word about the third play I read in these last few days: Molière’s Tartuffe. This play didn’t make me question my habits of reading and thinking as Travesties did. It just invited me to read and think and enjoy and laugh. The religious hypocrite Tartuffe gets many people to parrot his nonsense while using a cover of piety to acquire donations and sexual favors, and it’s hilarious. What a relief it is to laugh at heretical chicanery! I don’t get any sense that Molière meant to label all of Christianity as Tartuffian; the character who restores order at the end is a good, reasonable, caring, sympathetic Christian man. I suppose it’s possible that the playwright simply put him in for the sake of appearances, as a screen behind which to hide his contempt for Christianity. But if so, the Church still saw the play as an attack on religion and banned it; so the supposed ploy didn’t work. In any case, I prefer to take Molière and his play at their surface-level word, and their patent message is that we cannot let true Christianity be defined by any person who self-announces his special favor with God, expects all good Christians to stay loyal to him, and then uses their support to gain power, money, and sex. Tartuffe, you deserve your downfall!

A post-scriptum: Blogspot's editor doesn't approve of the noncapitalization of "italian dressing." I guess it would want me also to capitalize "french fries" and "roman numerals." Well, now that I've typed those phrases into the editor, I can report that it has absolutely no problems with my formatting. By analogy, I stand by my lower-case "i." And may I also note that Blogspot's editor flags the word "Blogspot's"?