The Lists

When I was teaching beginning Latin and we got to the words copia and copiae, students always balked at the idea that a word could mean something different in singular and in plural. (Copia is plenty or an abundance, as in “cornucopia.” Copiae refers to troops.) But English has a few examples of its own. A premise, for instance, is a given statement in a train of thought or formal proof, while “premises” can mean the property of some institution or unit; an unwelcome customer might be escorted off the premises, for instance. Another example is “list.” Of course, the plural can mean more than one series of items (a grocery list and a laundry list, e.g.), but it can also mean the pitch or field in which a joust takes place. When a knight “enters the lists,” he is decked out in full panoply of armor and regalia (complete with some cloth token from a lady) and ready to test his mettle (and his metal) by riding full tilt at another brave warrior with couched lance.

I may have first encountered this courtly meaning of “lists” in Sidney Lanier’s The Boy’s King Arthur (surely if I ever do make a list of my top 100 books, Lanier’s treasure will have to appear on it), but it may also have been in Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, in one form or another. I still remember that when my dad recommended Ivanhoe to me, it thought it would be an adventure story about Indians. The word still sounds to me like it comes from a language much more exotic than Saxon. But when Dad bought me the Classics Illustrated version, I found that Scott’s great work was something quite different: a story of knights in shining armor fighting for honor and the safety of beautiful damsels. I was hooked on the setting from the first. And between the artwork in that comic and the inner-cover illustration in my copy of Lanier, I fell in love with a clear visual picture of the anachronistic setting of colorful pennants, striped pavilions, Cinderalla-like castles in the shape of actual specimens from 400 years after Ivanhoe’s time (and a thousand after Arthur’s), high-stepping steeds, and crystalline blue skies dotted with perfectly fluffed clouds.

When I was about 20, I read the prose work by Scott, although it may have been abridged since I read it from my dad’s high-school literature book. (I should write a post about my parents’ high-school literature books!) I wish I remembered more about my experience reading the book then. I wish I could have said to myself, “You’re going to read this again 45 years from now, and you’ll want to know how the book has changed for you.” It seemed harder to read than I remember. That could be because of my general problem of reading with ever-increasing years of memories and ideas jostling around looking for associations with every word I come into contact with. But was it also because at 20 I still just let unfamiliar words roll past? Scott uses a beautiful and influential diction of chronologically jumbled archaisms to give his historical fiction flavors both of days-gone-by and of nobility. When I was that young, did I just enjoy savoring those flavors without worrying about the meaning of every word? Did I just let eremites and recreants and oubliettes pass by with the assumption that if I had been educated better, I would have understood? (That’s a very real possibility). These days I want to know what every word and sentence actually means, and that can slow me down.

In any case, everything I remember loving was still there: the lists and the pavilions with their pennons, the mysterious Black Knight, the castle besieged, the definitions of chivalry that helped at least one romantic young man determine to do the right thing in difficult circumstances, the beautiful ladies who prefer death to dishonor, the trial and the call for a champion to decide guilt or innocence, Robin Hood and his merry men, and the return of good King Richard Lionheart. What I didn’t remember was the complex and nuanced judgment of the narrator on all that happens. I’ve read that this was the most popular Scott book at the time, and I can see why. It’s the best I’ve read recently, and not just because of the chivalric action, but because of its challenging wisdom. The Jewish characters are sympathetic, and they argue against the prejudice hurled against them by “Christian” society. Scott has horrible villains perpetrate all manner of hideous cruelties against them, but the heroes of the story, in defiance of both the time of Richard I and Scott’s time, defend the dignity of the Jews and even offer to fight for their honor. Scott’s knights define chivalry in a way that makes it sound like the loftiest way to live ever conceived, and I’m sure that as a kid reading the Classics Illustrated version, I felt that had I been alive at the time I would gladly have died for noble King Richard. And yet the women of the story, who depend on the chivalry at crucial moments, critique the code as a way for hot-headed young men to pretend they’re serving God while really they’re just indulging their sinful passion for violence. Scott portrays the Catholic Church as both the ultimate source of truth and as rife with corruption. He describes the Normans as conquerors, usurpers, and oppressors of the Saxons, and yet the most noble person in the story, Richard, is a Norman. The great Norman king receives the loyalty of the great Saxon agitator, Robin Hood, and he oversees a marriage at the end of the book that brings about amity between the nations.

As I read, I thought about the nineteenth-century English teenage girls who made up a substantial portion of Scott’s audience and of what a sane, wholesome influence this book must have had on them. I don’t think they knew when Ivanhoe first appeared that the author was Walter Scott. But I think they knew him as the author of the Waverly novels and knew that he was Scottish, and so they read a book by a Scotsman praising everything noble in the history of Scotland’s English oppressors. They read a book by a member of the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk praising the Christianity of the truest Catholics. They read an argument that if nobility of blood depends on length of pedigree, the Jews must be the most noble people on earth. All these issues were matter of politic importance in a society that barred Catholics, Jews, and sometimes Scots from political office and university education, and Scott taught these young readers politically subversive views in an acceptable and even wildly popular way, and yet they come across not as political positions but as moral truths. Yes, this book was way, way better than I remembered!

Top 100 – Part VIII

This is the 800th post on exlibrismagnis! Every hundred posts, I’ve departed from reporting on current reading and shared some of my favorite moments from books, sections and ideas and lines that I think about often. I just went through all the previous entries in this subseries and did two things. First, I added the label “Top 100” to each of them; now you can find all the others easily in the “Labels” section at the right side of the page. (If you’re reading on a phone, you have to click “View web version” at the bottom of the page to see the “Labels” section, as well as other “gadgets.”) Second, I realized that, sure enough, I do think about all these favorite passages often.

Two or three years ago, I selected the items for today’s post. Curiously, I’ve read a couple of these books within the last twelve months and even wrote on this blog about these very moments, proving, I suppose, that I do really think about these things often.

I’ll begin with a Russian theme.

• Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov: Dmitri, railing against God, asks his brother whether he (he, Alyosha, not God) could have created a world in which one little girl would be tortured for the good of the whole. For me and others, it’s the most piercing, devastating presentation of the “problem of evil”: if God is all-powerful and all-benevolent . . . . And yet human beings do torture little girls, so the question creates its dilemma partly by pushing this responsibility off on God.

• Edward Rutherfurd, Russka: One afternoon a visitor from the west visits a humble restaurant in Russia, almost nothing more than a domestic kitchen opened to the public. He asks for bread, and the woman of the house offers him the last stale heel of yesterday’s loaf. After asking if she has any fresh bread, the woman says that she doesn’t start the new loaf until the last loaf has been completely eaten. How often do you make a loaf? Every day, she says. So every day you serve a couple of slices of fresh bread in the evening and then stale bread during most of the day the next day? Yes. Why don’t you, one morning, throw out the old loaf and make a new loaf each morning? That would waste the bread. But only once, and then you could serve fresh bread all day every day from now on! Well, she finally replies, suffering is a part of life. I think of that woman every time I drink the bitter cup of coffee left in the pot overnight instead of just throwing it out, every time I hang on to a cheap, plastic mechanical pencil after the eraser end has broken. Oh, the examples are embarrassingly numerous.

• Tolstoy, Anna Karenina: Levin struggles with belief in God until he sees his baby’s face for the first time, and his doubts “blow away like dust.”

• Cervantes, Don Quixote: I mentioned this point just last month without realizing it was in my notes to talk about in no. 800. Cervantes treats two prostitutes as if they were great ladies worthy of respect. At one level, we’re supposed to believe that he’s crazy and can’t see how they’re dressed. But what does dress have to do with the dignity of the human person? I think Quixote is the sanest man in the book.

• Ariosto, Orlando Furioso: Orlando has lost his mind (over a girl not worth losing one’s mind over), so Astolfo goes to look for it. Does that sound like a joke straight out of The Phantom Tollbooth? Maybe. But it turns out that in the world of Orlando Furioso, a lost mind does indeed go somewhere. In fact, everything that is lost goes to the same place, and that place is the moon. Naturally, Astolfo searches for the legendary Prester John (who is strangely easier to find than Orlando’s lost wits), and together they ride a hippogriff to the moon to look through the landscape of discarded treasures. To me that sequence stands right at the pinnacle of fantastic creations along with the Yellow Brick Road, a snowy wood in a wardrobe, a pilotless boat covered in white samite waiting to take Galahad to the Holy Grail, and Sauron’s Eye, and perhaps surpasses them.

• Dickens, The Pickwick Papers: Just a few months ago, I mentioned Toby Weller’s contribution to the trial scene in Pickwick and said, “Trust me: it’s hilarious.” Well, in jotting down the outline of this list a few years ago, I though then that I could actually convey the humor so that you didn’t have to trust me. Now that we’ve come to it, though, I don’t think I can, but I’ll try. The Wellers have a Cockney habit of switching around V’s and W’s when they speak. “ ’e’s wery aggrawating,” one of them might say of an annoying personage. In the dock (i.e. on the stand), Sam Weller gives out his name as “Veller.” The judge asks him if he spells it with a V or a W. “Mark it down a wee, milord!” shouts his father, Toby, from the gallery. “Mark it down a wee!” Out of context, the line probably doesn’t make you crack a smile. You might not even get the joke, since it depends on my poor retelling. But I have laughed out loud many times a Toby’s eccentric understanding of the alphabet and think of that line every time a spelling issue with a V comes up.

• Dickens, Dombey and Son: Okay, I know I’ve already used up all the credit I have for retelling great jokes without the necessary context of hundreds of pages of setup. But here I go overborrowing: Captain Cuttle has a habit of quoting hodgepodges of Scripture and common aphorisms. When he realizes that the result doesn’t sound right and that he has no way of looking up the correct version easily, he turns to any handy young person in the vicinity and says, with all the airs of a great, wise professor of sacred literature, “Search the Good Book, and when found, make note of.” This is my favorite of all the Dickens books that most people haven’t heard of, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. When you read it, that joke will make you laugh. For right now, though, know that I laugh at it, and imagine how often I think of it with glee when a garbled Bible verse comes to mind and I make a resolution to look it up later.

I don’t have a plan yet for the books to talk about in my 900th post. But at the rate I’m going, I’ll have several years to work it out.

Allegorically Speaking

Last year I wrote here that Owen Wister’s The Virginian grabbed me in a very positive way at first and then turned awful. This year, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American did just the opposite. I started reading about Thomas Fowler, a married British journalist in Vietnam in the ’50s, living with a local girl who fixes him multiple opium pipes every evening and then lies dutifully on the bed while he enjoys himself adulterously, and I thought, “What have I got myself into?” But then the American showed up, and the book got really good.

In reading other works by Greene before, I’ve almost always found something like allegory. I’ll pretend to be an actual literary critic for a moment and try to explain why I say “something like allegory” instead of just calling it allegory. Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory. Bunyan gives characters names like Piety and Hopeful and Heedless to show that they represent characteristics. If he thinks some fault, like despair, is an especially tough problem, he makes that character a giant. In the world of Pilgrim’s Progress, any fantastic thing can happen because the story isn’t really about a man named Christian traveling to a new place called Celestial City; it’s really about any Christian’s advancement toward sanctification and heavenly reward. For this allegory to work, the details don’t have to have in-world consistency or coherence; they only have to be consistent with what they represent in our world.

By contrast, Greene’s story really is about Englishman Thomas Fowler, American Alden Pyle, and Vietnamese woman Phuong. Pyle doesn’t represent the United States in the sense that the United States is the actual character in the actual story and that Pyle is merely the country’s avatar. He does represent the U. S. in that he comes from the U. S. But if a story began with a traveling salesman who says to the first housewife who opens the door, “Hello, madame. I represent the Whirlwind Vacuum Cleaner Company” (my hypothetical story clearly takes place in a bygone era), no one would think that the story is actually about the vacuum company and that the salesman is merely an allegorical manifestation of it.

And yet Greene’s character, the actual point of the actual story, does do a little bit of allegorical work because he quite naturally acts like someone who comes from the U. S. One can’t read the book without thinking that the U. S. national policy toward the nation of Vietnam in the ’60s is an awful lot like Fowler’s attitude toward Phuong, but that’s because U. S. national policy was developed by people like Fowler, not because Fowler arbitrarily represents the country. In an actual allegory, like Animal Farm, Fowler might have in fact been a fowl (a rooster probably), and the other characters, representing various countries, would have been other farmyard animals, all from the same in-story country (in fact all from the same hundred acres in the same country), because allegorical representation can be in many ways arbitrary as long as the necessary attitudes or actions are clear enough that the reader knows what each character represents and what the story is really about. But Fowler doesn’t represent the U. S. in an arbitrary way. His representation is totally natural and normal. Arggh! Does that make any sense?

The novel is short, and I don’t want to give too much away, but I’ll say this much about the plot. Pyle comes to Vietnam as part of an American economic mission, and he sees Fowler with Phuong. He decides he likes Phuong, and he believes it to be objectively clear that Phuong would be better off with him than with Fowler. “Sorry it had to be you, Fowler,” he says (I’m quoting from faulty memory and paraphrasing slightly), “since we’re such good friends. But you can see that she would be better off with me and that she’ll see it, too.” Pyle sees that a brothel is a likely future for someone like Phuong if not suitably protected and believes he has something like a duty to preserve her from that fate, and in fact makes his pitch to her in very objective terms. Of course, this looks like an allegory of the United States taking over the war in Vietnam from the French with the attitude that only our country can save Vietnam and her neighbors, all lined up like dominos, from Communism. But don’t Americans tend to believe in simple solutions and to believe that Americans have the ingenuity and perseverance to implement those solutions better than anyone else in the world? Fowler doesn’t allegorically represent the U. S. He’s a citizen of the U. S. acting like it.

And yet The Quiet American, as a story about an American and a Vietnamese woman, is also at some level a story about Americans and Vietnamese people. Will you be surprised if I tell you that things don’t end well for everyone? Some readers say that Greene, writing in 1955, predicted the American phase of the war and its outcome. But, really, it didn’t take powers of prediction. You read twenty pages of this book and tell me you see any way for it to end happily ever after!

Our Mutual Complexity

Wikipedia says (and it seems to be properly sourced) that critics didn’t think much at first about Our Mutual Friend because of its complexity. Admittedly, the plot is complex. Lizzie Hexam is on a boat on the Thames rowing her father, Gaffer Hexam, who pulls a dead body out, which is identified as that of John Harmon by a shaken man called Julius Handford. Then a nouveau riche couple named the Veneerings holds a dinner attended by  various people, all of whom seem to be their oldest and dearest friends (although the Veneerings haven’t known any of them for more than a month), and one of the diners, Mortimer Lightwood, tells the story of John Harmon, who, having inherited his father’s dust (i.e. trash) company, sailed home to England only to be murdered, the business and home instead going to the faithful servants, the Boffins. Lightwood further says that Harmon was instructed by the will to marry Bella Wilfer, a pretty girl who says she will only marry for money. Mr. Boffins hires Silas Wegg, a literary man with a wooden leg, to read Gibbon to him at night, and he hires as a secretary a man named John Rokesmith, who looks a lot like Julius Handford. Rokesmith also ends up renting a room at the Wilfers. The Boffins want to adopt a small child and also to take in Bella so that she can enjoy some of the wealth she would have had had Harmon lived. Lizzie’s brother goes to study with Bradley Headstone, who falls in “love” with Lizzie but is loved by his assistant, Miss Peecher. Mortimer’s friend, Eugene Wrayburn, also falls for Lizzie and pays to have her educated, but not by Headstone, who becomes jealous about Wrayburn’s attentions. Then the Lammles, two of the Veneerings’ friends, try to get their friend Georgiana Podsnap married to Mr. Fledgeby, who visits Lizzie one day on the terrace where she and a dolls’ dressmaker named Jenny Wren rent rooms from Mr. Riah. It seems several of the characters owe Mr. Riah money. Meanwhile Wegg meets a taxidermist named Venus and partners with him to begin to search through the old Harmon house for, what? money? a second will? Now we’re about a fourth of the way through the book, and I haven’t even mentioned Mr. Twemlow, Lady Tippins, Betty Higden, Sloppy, and the Milveys. Yes, it’s complex.

Can we even say that there’s a central plot? Lizzie is the first character we meet, and she forms one vertex in a nice love quadrangle. So maybe the book is primarily about her. But Lizzie’s overshadowed pretty quickly in chapter 1 by the appearance of a dead body. So maybe the main plot has to do with John Harmon. Who killed him? What will Wegg and Venus find in the dust heaps? But then there’s the title. Surely an author points to the central story in his title! (Not so surely: Trollope doesn’t in The American Senator.) Rokesmith is called a mutual friend of the Boffins and Wilfers, so maybe he forms the center of the central story. Where does this mysterious stranger come from? But then the book is called *Our* Mutual Friend; maybe “we” are the key. In other words, maybe the story of the Boffins and the Wilfers (especially the Boffins and Bella) takes center stage. Or maybe Dickens will tie all the stories together. Or maybe they will all stay parallel, only intersecting randomly like knights and damsels in The Faerie Queene, held together by the common theme of money and the sudden acquisition thereof.

All I can tell you now is that all this complexity and lack of center, far from bothering my dad and my future wife and me when we read the book together (see the previous post), seemed very exciting. Each of the first five or six chapters introduced a new set of characters, tangentially related at best, and each was as intriguing and entertaining as the last. We didn’t care where it was going because the going was so much fun, and we were glad that we had many hundreds of pages to find out what it all meant.

May I go back to the issue of characters? I’m annoyed every time I read some critic complain about a “shallow” Dickens character. You create fifty of the best, most memorable characters in the history of literature, and then we’ll talk about the characters you didn’t draw out so well! As I said last time, I think the only real dissatisfaction we can have is with a handful of the pretty girls scattered across the novels, novellas, and stories, and we love them in spite of themselves if we truly love Dickens. But let me add a couple more arguments on behalf of the author of the best-selling novel in all of history (I just found that out a few days ago: look it up!), as if such an author needs arguing on his behalf.

First, Dickens was writing at a time when the notion of a character in a novel was changing. Characters had been types before. We watched them act according to their respective sets of virtues and vices, and we enjoyed the plot that came out of it. Only in the nineteenth century did we really start to have an idea that a good character should have a somewhat unusual make-up that would lead him or her to respond to circumstances and change and grow in interesting ways. And only after detectives and psychoanalysts (who are also detectives) became a thing did we really want to find out all the inmost secrets of a character. Dickens didn’t live that late, so don’t expect Joycean character from him. But we can expect some characters full of surprising complexity (e.g. David), heroes with dark flaws (e.g. Pip), and characters who change dramatically (e.g. Sydney Carton). Ugh! I had several other examples in mind, but this post is already getting too long.

Second and last, Dickens’s plan for a novel involved putting on a long parade of characters, of opening up every district of London and the surrounding countryside all at once. Maybe the primary human complexity he intended to portray was social and not individual. And yet in his secondary and tertiary and even incidental characters, Dickens is the master of presenting the tip of what is clearly an iceberg. David Copperfield meets an old carter (i.e. a nineteenth-century Uber driver) named Barkis who has an eye for David’s old nurse, Peggotty. One day he tells David, “Tell her, Barkis is willin’.” A couple more times in later chapters, he gives a knowing wink to David and says, “Barkis is willin’.” I don’t think Barkis says anything else in the book, yet he is a favorite with Dickens fans. We know the diligent old country laborer who doesn’t talk much, so we recognize Barkis’s authenticity. It means something that he has chosen as his beloved an eminently good woman. It means something that he is so shy, he passes along his intentions through a young, involuntary mediator. With a single line, Dickens assures us that Barkis is a man we would respect, a man we could rely on, a man whose faults we could overlook if we met him in real life. That is the work of an ingenious master artist, and I don’t know why we should want any more from him.

Our Mutual Female Friends

A Tale of Two Cities was the first book by Charles Dickens that I read. I was about twelve years old, and it changed the way I looked at literature. The second Dickens book I read wasn’t Oliver Twist or Great Expectations or David Copperfield, the ones you might imagine (because you could find cheap editions of those at the B. Dalton bookstore in the mall, or because you considered the catalog of Classics Illustrated comic books to represent the sum total of the literary canon!). It was, for some reason now lost to even the outermost reaches of historiographical power, Our Mutual Friend. My dad and my fiancé (now wife) all got copies and read it during the same period and talked about it when we got together. Life has perhaps never been better than during those weeks of discussing Dickens with two people I loved.

I’m now enjoying my third reading of Our Mutual Friend. Many years have come between my second reading and now; it is for instance, one of the few Dickens books I haven’t blogged about before because I haven’t read it since I started this public project. I’m a little amazed at how much I remember from the book, and especially that everything I remember brings up memories of conversations with Nancy and Dad; I don’t remember anything about reading it the second time.

But, of course, I don’t remember everything in the eight-hundred page tome. The biggest surprise has been Bella Wilfer. I remembered her story well enough, but I had some details of her character wrong. I think that in my memory I had confused Bella with Caddy Jellyby from Bleak House. And I know the reason: both girls have trouble with their mothers and find solace in private dinners (i.e. lunches) with their fathers, a story line that seizes my heart and mind because it is one in which I can sympathize with both father and daughter. (Notice that my mom did not join in our Little Women-like Dickensian book club.)

But there must be other reasons that caused me to misremember details about one of the main characters of this book I cherish. Perhaps because Bella’s character isn’t as strong or deep, literarily speaking, as the characters of Mr. Bumble, Wackford Squeers, Captain Cuttle, Ebenezer Scrooge, Aunt Betsey Trotwood, Wilkins Micawber, Sydney Carton, or Miss Haversham? Yes, of course, that’s the reason. Critics have said (don’t ask me their names; I refuse to remember them!) that Dickens was never good at the characters of heroines. Let me clarify right here that by “heroine,” I think they mean “main love interest”: the person the supposedly typical young woman among readers was expected to have identified with. Betsey Trotwood is heroic in the greatest sense and stands as one of Dickens’s greatest creations, but she is not, I believe, who these critics have in mind when they deprecate Dickens’s depiction of heroines. And if I’m right about who they’re thinking about, I have to agree to a point. If the girl isn’t married at the beginning of a novel and Dickens destines her to marry before the end, he makes her pretty and earnest and good. What do I think of when I think of Kate Nickleby? That she’s pretty and earnest and good. What do I think about when I think of Lucie Manette? That she’s pretty and earnest and good. There’s more to Bella than that, but the end of her story arc finds her pretty and earnest and good.

So I partially and reluctantly agree if these nameless critics mean that Dickens wasn’t especially good at providing his eligible young women with deep characters. But if they mean that Dickens wasn’t good at drawing women, I disagree and have to defend my hero. I have two main lines of argument, and I’ll get the politically parlous one (parlous: a good Dickens word) out of the way first. I believe it’s possible that some women are indeed pretty and earnest and good, and I believe that many young women in the Victorian era, no matter how admittedly unfair or cruel or thoughtless the men of the age were at restraining women within their “sphere,” actually aimed at domestic bliss as the goal of their lives. Please tell me I’m not a monster to think it’s OK to believe that some Victorian women would have found it a great compliment to be called pretty and earnest and good. There may even be a few women today who would take joy in a slightly differently worded encomium. The problem is not, says this dude with the limited perspective of testosterone and a Y chromosome, that some women are satisfied with being pretty and good and seeing family duty as the pinnacle of fulfillment; the problem is in assuming that all women want it or ought to want it or ought to be it without wanting it. In any case, Kate Nickleby is admittedly nowhere near as interesting a literary character as, say, Anna Karenina or Scarlett O’Hara. But might she not be nevertheless true to life?

I confess, that first argument only goes so far. Elizabeth Bennet is pretty and earnest and good and also a deeply interesting character, so it was clearly possible for Dickens to do better. Perhaps we can pity the man here. In Catherine Hogarth, he found a wife who was pretty enough but who didn’t turn out to have the other two-thirds of the winning recipe. So maybe he only wanted to give his male leads happier love lives than he himself had had.

But before we leave argument no. 1, let’s acknowledge that Dickens, while not reaching Austenesque heights, does sometimes do better with his eligible females. Bella is more than the stereotype, with her mercenary edge. Esther Summerson is more, with her serious doubts about whether she can in fact live up to the stereotype expected of Victorian women, especially after smallpox erases her beauty, and with her understanding that struggle and defect and loss can actually elevate the worth of everything else in life. Susan Nipper is more, with her acid tongue. And Caddy Jellyby is more, with her melancholia and her resentment of her mother.

With Susan and Caddy, we have strayed from the group of lead love interests, and this departure leads us to argument no. 2: Dickens does just fine with women whom we don’t expect to see getting married. After all, this is Charles Dickens, wildly popular and influential author, subject of scores of scholarly books and two scholarly journals of long standing, and probably still in our tragically unbookish and functionally illiterate society the most familiar English author of the nineteenth century (although he may be second to Austen). He doesn’t enjoy this glorious reputation and eminent standing because he had serious flaws in his skills with character development. He produced a grand parade of unforgettable female characters, interesting and complex, ranging from wholesome to silly to morally ambiguous to infuriating and all the way to downright villainous.

Let’s begin with Betsey Trotwood, who hates men (and donkeys) and will not let David Copperfield forget her disappointment that he wasn’t born a girl. But she has a sad history that explains some things at least, she protects a man with mental illness, and boy! does she come through in the end! Then how about Miss Havisham, who sits in a darkened house in her wedding dress decades after she was jilted at the altar? She auditions boys to find one who will come play with her beautiful young ward just so she can watch Estella break the boy’s heart. Miserable Estella, herself, is an amazing character, a girl who cannot have the life Dickens’s ideal readers and typical female protagonists enjoyed because she has been raised as a tool by a mad recluse. (I suppose she is the lead love interest since Pip is in love with her all the way to the end of the book, but do we really want her to marry Pip? I don’t!) Then there’s Biddy, the girl Pip doesn’t notice, who has to negotiate the conflict between her feelings for Pip and, on the one hand, Victorian standards of expression (or repression) of those feelings and, on the other hand, Pip’s very consistent treatment of her in a way that makes him wholly unworthy of her affection. Biddy thinks she has to be realistic and settle for someone else, but she ends up much happier for her choice.

Give a Dickensian woman a few married years, and she can be loving like Mrs. Boffin or narcisistically shrewish like Mrs. Wilfer. Give her a job, and she might blossom into a Sarah Gamp, the drunken nurse with the conveniently fictitious friend. Give her money, and she may become a delicious villain like Lady Dedlock, who, like the Sphinx, has a secret, speaks in riddles, and never shows animation or expression on her stony face. Then there’s Mrs. Defarge, who coldly encodes the deadly fate of her enemies into her knitting while talking with them. And there’s Nancy, the prostitute with the heart of gold – and not my wife! (A side note. If you were, by the slimmest of chances, to ask me for examples of men who treated prostitutes with utmost dignity, four names would come to mind: Jesus, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, and Dickens.)

I have to stop without doing any more than mentioning Sally Brass, Mrs. Clennam, Rosa Dartle, Jenny Wren, and Miss Mowcher, all well developed and none stereotypical. And there’s Mrs. Gummidge, with one unforgettable line, and Mrs. Plornish, with one unforgettable goofy habit, and Mrs. Bagnet, who is the subject of one unforgettable joke (definitely not at her expense). None of these three women can be said to be developed as deep literary characters, yet they all live in my memory as three-dimensional human beings.

How are you supposed to take this post, dear reader of the twenty-first century? The odds are that you have lived a tragically deprived life and haven’t read these books, that you don’t know these names. In that case, my flipping through a picture book can’t possibly demonstrate to you that Dickens actually could create good female characters. But if nothing else, the fairly long litany of names in this post may at least suggest to you that the girls who are pretty and earnest and good are in the minority.

Play with Fire

I remember twelve years ago, when I couldn’t wait to publish a post on everything I read. I really do. But this year, we’re almost to the end of January now, and I haven’t had any pressing urge to share my profound thoughts. Well, that’s the problem, actually: twelve years ago I felt I had more profound things to say. And by “profound” I don’t mean world-changing or even erudite; I just mean more than surfacy. But I feel now as if I’ve said on these pages all the profound things I have to say. I’ve reported my favorite thoughts on all the books I love and all the books I hate already. I’ve spewed forth all the contents of my brain on literary style and what makes for meaningful content. I’ve even shared what little I know about good poetry.

But I’ve had a good time reading this month, and there are at least three of you out there who read faithfully (which I know because you write to me from time to time). So I have a few slightly-more-than-surfacy things to say today about my recent adventures. Many of those adventures have braved the unknown perils of the Land of Drama, so here are a handful of comments about the plays I’ve read in the last four weeks.

A few years ago I read, mostly understood, and heartily enjoyed two plays by Ben Jonson: Volpone and Every Man His Humour. This year I decided to tackle the same author’s Sejanus and Batholomew Fayre. Sejanus is a tragedy about the rise and fall of a power-hungry advisor to Tiberius Caesar, just the kind of thing I would expect to enjoy. But I didn’t much. It didn’t have any of the rich poetry of Shakespeare, and yet despite its more straightforward language, I didn’t always understand the mere meaning of the sentences. I don’t usually have much trouble with seventeenth-century English, so I don’t know what was wrong; I was probably distracted or something. But I will say that if I get a hankerin’ to read an Elizabethan-Jacobean drama about Romans, I’ll go back for another helpin’ of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Batholomew Fayre worked much better for me. Four-hundred-year-old humor can be tough: it can depend on obscure topical references and on puns using slang no longer in use. There was a bit of that at the Fayre, but what I missed in understanding was made up for by the goofy but well recognized characters and the obligatory disguises and mistaken identities.

Better than either offering from Jonson was Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Here the creator of Figaro has some fun with a newly rich blockhead, M. Jourdain, who wants to surround himself with all the luxuries that gentlemen enjoy but doesn’t have the taste or understanding to know what it is he’s getting. On the other hand, his ignorance leaves him very easy to please; one of his teachers explains that all language is either poetry or prose, and M. Jourdain thinks an education a very fine thing indeed if it can teach a person that he’s been speaking prose his whole life without knowing it. Of course, there are more disguises and misunderstandings. Aristotle said that tragedy shows humans as better than they really are and comedy as worse than they really are. But comedy has always seemed much more realistic to me than tragedy: the ludicrous M. Jourdain is barely exaggerated. I grew up in the St. Louis suburbs, the land of 100,000 real-life Beverly Hillbillies families. So I know. (Sometimes the hillbilly still comes out in me: hence me hankerin’ for a helpin’ in the previous paragraph.)

Best of all were two plays by Aeschylus: Prometheus and The Eumenides. I don’t remember now why of all the Greek plays I could have reread, I chose these two, but I’m glad I did. (Or maybe they’re all just so good that any random pair would have scratched my itch.) Students of ancient Greece have to wonder often how intelligent people could have believed in such a petty, jealous, vengeful, unstable set of gods, let alone worship them. Well, Prometheus dares to pull back the curtain and show Zeus for what he is: an immoral, untrustworthy parricide. He also hints that Zeus will himself fall in the (near?) future. I wish we had more of this story!

The Eumenides provides an interesting and moving origin story for one part of the human psyche. Clytemnestra has killed Agamemnon because he dared to come home from war when she didn’t stay faithful to him as Penelope did to Odysseus. Orestes kills his mother in revenge. The Furies are ready to wreak havoc on the land; they don’t like to see killing in return for killing, so they want to kill some more in order to stop the killing. Make war to make peace; that always works, right? Fortunately Athena convinces the divine avengers to leave the physical realm as it is and work on the heartstrings instead, creating senses of conscience and guilt as gifts to mankind. I’ve heard so many people talk about guilt being a bad thing, I’m always happy when I hear a wise one pointing out that guilt is a gift. 

By the way, one of the three of you who contact me from time to time recently reported to me that he can no longer post comments. I have discovered that you have to have a Google account (and presumably be signed into said account) in order to comment. So fire up your account, and make a comment. But don’t say anything too surfacy!

Book Awards – 2024

One year ago, I said that I was especially looking forward to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, a biography of Gen. Longstreet, Charles Williams's Many Dimensions (an old favorite), the rest of Shirer's Third Reich, and, of course, Dickens (Great Expectations and Pickwick Papers this year). Most of these books campaigned hard in the last three or four weeks for Academy votes, and some of them will find that their efforts have been rewarded. The red carpet is out. The electricity is in the air. Welcome to the exlibrismagnis Book Awards for 2024!

Author of the Reread Book that Most Contradicted My Memory: Charles Dickens
The Inimitable always gets his own category in these awards so as to give other fictional writers a fighting chance at winning. The melancholy Great Expectations is always a beautiful chiaroscuro painting, a hearty feast with bitter herbs, and a best friend with special needs all rolled up into one. I know I’ll enjoy greatness every time I pick it up to reread it, and it never disappoints. Pickwick Papers, on the other hand, I had remembered as a good but relatively shallow book with a string of forgettably silly episodes. But once Sam Weller, heir to Sancho Panza and harbinger of Samwise Gamgee, comes on the scene, the book gains direction and develops a good pour of stout underneath the head of foam.

Best Reread in History: Herodotus, The Histories
I was worried back in January that I would forget about Herodotus by the time the Book Awards came around and that he would lose to a historian whose book was both written and read more recently, and who probably won a Pulitzer prize. But then I remembered that I can grant one award for the best new read and one for the best reread. Congrats, Herodotus!

Best New Read in History: James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations
It just now occurred to me that I read both a book called Great Expectations and book called Grand Expectations in the same year. It seems crazy that I could have been so unobservant, but it’s true. And so now my head is swimming with the idea that the two books tell the same story. Dickens tells the story of Pip, who wants to live out the British Dream of becoming a gentleman, and then gets disappointed. Patterson tells the story of the people who survived the Depression and beat two aggressive totalitarian empires, people who wanted to live the American Dream of making a better, healthier, safer, more prosperous, more entertaining, more exciting world for their children through free choice, ingenuity, and hard work, only to be disappointed by Vietnam, lying leaders, a Generation Gap, and stagflation. Patterson’s book did indeed win a Pulitzer Prize and is, I think, the second best volume of the very good Oxford History of the United States.

Best New Read in Fiction: Jules Verne, Mysterious Island
The pre-Watergate American child in me read Mysterious Island and marveled at this motley group of shipwreck survivors learning to get along and striving to build a better, healthier, safer, more prosperous, more entertaining world for themselves through ingenuity and hard work. I had no idea when I scheduled this book that it would be the sequel to last year’s Children of Captain Grant, and I had no idea when I had read half the book that it would prove to be also a sequel to another one of Verne’s greatest books. The experience took me right back to the time when reading was the most joyful: summer days when I had nothing to do but sit alone in a cool basement (maybe with a 1970s-formula, real-sugar Pepsi in a chilled glass bottle!) reading a great book for hours on end.

Most Disappointing Read: E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros
Lewis liked Eddison, and Tolkien said this book influenced him. But Eddison was a man who thought three men named Juss, Spitfire, and Goldry Bluzco could be brothers. What kind of language, what kind of culture, what kind of father could conceivably give siblings such incongruent names? They live in a world where everyone constantly clashes and wars as much as those names, and they like it that way. Thoroughly unpleasant.

Best Poetry: Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, first third
Granted, I read very little poetry this year. But, although I liked Auden’s poetry, it was very hard for me to understand, so I have to go with book that could also win an award for best epic. At some point I need to give Shakespeare this award.

Best New Read in Drama: August Wilson, The Piano Lesson
Family, ghosts, and a woman whose painful memories keep her from playing the piano she loves. All three strike chords (pun very much intended) with me. I just found out last week that Denzel Washington’s son has made a movie of this play!

Best Biography: Elizabeth Varon, Longstreet
Varon revealed a man almost entirely different from what I assumed he was and explained a lot about the way we commemorate and teach about the Civil War.

Best New Read in Religion: A Four-Way Tie
It was way too hard to decide between Augustine’s On the Trinity, Abelard’s Yes and No, Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, and William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, so I’m just going to put in the extra expense and get statuettes made for each of them.

Best Offroading: Jing Tsu, Kingdom of Characters
The road to China’s inclusion in the modern world was paved with questions about its language. How can the Chinese language be typed? In what order should the Chinese characters be arranged so Chinese titles can be found in card catalog? What numbers will represent the Chinese characters in digital communication, and which version of the characters will be represented? Every chapter presents a new conundrum that made me say, “Oh, yeah! How do they do that?” Honorable mention goes to Truman Capote’s “A Christmas Memory.” It’s a short story; maybe I’ll give it a micro statuette.

Best Reread: Charles Williams, Many Dimensions
I already gave Orlando Furioso an award, so I’m going with Many Dimensions here, a good supernatural thriller with a good message. God’s power is not a commodity to be distributed, sold, patented, used, and consumed. We are not the consumers in this relationship, God is, for He is the Consuming Fire. Now that I think of it, I’m going to give this book an award for Religion as well. So many extra statuettes!

Janus, for whom January is named, had two faces, one looking forward and one looking backward. At least that’s what I’ve been told, and it’s been my understanding that the respectable fellow’s unusual anatomy lies behind our habit of both contemplating the old and anticipating the new at the turn of the year. (I highly suspect that the cause and effect are reversed – that our friend took on the extra visage after he learned of our quite natural custom.) What 2025 reading am I most anticipating? Graham Greene’s Quiet American, Aelred’s Spiritual Friendship, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and Pascal’s Pensées stand out upon a quick glance at my list for the next twelve months. Will any of these win awards? It all depends on how the Academy that lives in my head votes!

I hope that your New Year’s Day is filled with happy memories of books read this year and fond hopes for books you plan to read in 45 squared. See you then!