Like Children

Today I have just a couple of last notes on The Brothers Karamazov. The internet helped me out on the first one, and I’m sorry to say I didn’t see this one sooner. Dostoevsky’s novel about the dysfunctional family and all their very grown-up vices includes long sections about neighborhood boys. These boys talk about pets and get in trouble at school and do a lot of things that don’t seem to have much to do with the question of who killed Fyodor Pavlovich or which lover Grushenka will settle on. But, as the wisdom of the web points out to me, they are children, and Ivan’s great question has to do with the suffering of children. Clearly Dostoevsky intended for the reader to make some connections.

Although I’ll have to continue to ponder this issue, two points of contact have come to mind. First, the children may be innocent, but they are not sinless. The Bible supports the distinction in its twin teachings that children are born in sin (see for example Ps. 51:5) and that nevertheless they do not have the ability to distinguish good and evil (see for instance Deut. 1:39). The neighborhood boys display both notions pretty clearly, so we may be expected (or invited?) to learn that Ivan’s question may assume a purity that children simply do not have.

Second, the ending section in which little Ilyusha dies (if you haven’t read the lengthy book, you’ll forget I said that before you reach the end!) shows that the suffering of children, like any human suffering, can bring about great good. I understand that suffering itself is bad; otherwise God would not promise to do away with it in the future kingdom. But if I willingly submit myself to the pain of exercise, dieting, waiting for the purchase of a toy, or visiting the dentist, all for the sake of a greater good, I can begin to see that God might view the death of Ilyusha – who is happy to be going to Heaven, after all – as an acceptable cost for the salvation of several other boys. Could I have made a world in which this were so? Well, that’s Ivan’s great question, and I have to say that I, as currently constituted, definitely could not. But then God has baked it in to me that I shouldn’t kill a child. Still, if I accept that the government has a right to incarcerate, say, an armed robber for ten years while I have no right to lock someone in a shed for even a day, I must admit the possibility that while I have no right to kill a person as the result of a philosophical calculation, God does have not just the power but the right to take human life.

I promised a couple of last notes about Karamazov, and my first one became so involved it turned itself into three paragraphs with two enumerated subsections. My second final note is much shorter. Dostoevsky knew and loved the works of Dickens. He especially liked David Copperfield and often called himself and his wife Mr. and Mrs. Micawber. I haven’t read about any special affinity of Dostoevsky for A Christmas Carol, but Alexei’s plea to the boys never to forget the kindness and courage of the departed Ilyusha is so extremely reminiscent of Bob Cratchit’s tearful family enjoinder during Christmas Future, I can’t believe Dostoevsky didn’t intend his scene as a case of flattering plagiarism.

(Really, Blogspot Editor? You don't know the word "enjoinder"?)

Poetic Feete

I had what was for me an unusual experience last year: I read a few hundred pages of Shelby Foote’s history of the American Civil War and didn’t enjoy what I read. The work is massive, and I had read it one-and-two-thirds times, a few hundred pages a year for at least fifteen years, and I had never had a disappointing experience before, even in my previous encounter with the passage that I reread last year. But I loved my reading in Foote this year, so I'm glad to see that last year was just a temporary aberration. The problem may have lain in my circumstances: rushing to pack and move, concerned about selling the house, etc. It may have had to do with Foote’s attempt to downplay Nathan Bedford Forrest’s massacre at Fort Pillow. I didn’t know as much about Forrest the first time I read Foote’s account, but at this time in my life, I really don’t need to hear any defense of the murder of captured black soldiers by the Ku Klux Klan’s first Grand Wizard. Sure, it was an atrocity, Foote says, but no worse than other atrocities committed during the four-year bloodbath of war. I don’t buy it. That war is too full of stories of strangely humane behavior by the combatants between and after battles. Capturing enemy soldiers, disarming them, and then shooting them was not standard practice (except when the captured were black and the capturers were Confederate), and Forrest's act deserves not the slightest amount of extenuation.

I enjoy reading about the Civil War mostly, I think, because of the surprising events that happen when a supposedly civil, supposedly educated, supposedly noble, supposedly pious country descends into violent conflict. I found a lot of amazing characters and stories in the passage I read this year. Here were Admiral Farragut damning the torpedoes in Mobile Bay, Jubal Early attacking Washington, Lincoln standing above the fortifications to watch the action, and the anonymous soldier telling him to “get down, you fool!” Here were the incredible and tragic stupidity of the botched action at the Petersburg crater, Sherman’s march to the sea, Hood’s decision not to defend Georgia against Sherman’s advance and instead to go on the offensive to his destruction in Tennessee, and the inspiring example of a completed, accepted presidential election held during a civil war.

A note on the Petersburg Crater: I had read that thousands of Union troops marched, ran, or fell into the crater caused by an underground explosion and then that Confederate survivors began to fire at the packed, disoriented “attackers” as if, they said, at a turkey shoot. Thousands! I had imagined a stadium-sized crater! So I was surprised and – should I say? – disappointed when I visited Petersburg and saw a hole just a few feet deep that seemed like it could have held no more than five hundred men. I read in the park’s brochure that erosion and plant growth over the years had made the crater shallower and less ominous, so I supposed that I was seeing only a fraction of the original. But Foote says the crater covered about a quarter of an acre. When I read that a couple of weeks ago, I looked across the street at two houses and, remembering that a typical neighborhood plot contained an eighth of an acre, thought, “Those two yards make up about a quarter of an acre, and that was about the size of the crater I saw.” Online just now, I read that the depression measured about 170' by 60'. Yeah, about the size of two house lots. So maybe what I saw was the whole thing after all. But thousands of men? Could thousands of men stand in two neighborhood yards? Maybe I have grossly underestimated the meaning of the word “crowded” in the accounts of the crater.

I also want to read about the Civil War because it tells me like no other story just how stupid and stubborn and cruel humans can be. I remember decades ago reading Bruce Catton say that he thought about these stories every time he heard some “fathead” talk about the glories of war. In my Foote assignment this year, I read of Gen. Sherman saying, “War is cruelty. You cannot refine it.” And I read of a Union soldier in Georgia, seeing the boys and old men they had just shot down, who said, “There is no God in war. It is merciless, cruel, vindictive, un-Christian, savage, relentless. It is all that devils could wish for.”

After the election, Lincoln delivered an inspiring speech to some well-wishers serenading him on the lawn of the White House. In the middle of his remarks, he said, “Human-nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak, and as strong; as silly and as wise; as bad and good. Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this, as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged.” Is he wrong? Do we not have today weak and strong, silly and wise, bad and good Americans trying to direct our future? In our endeavor, we must, as Lincoln said, learn wisdom from the past, and we must all try to make things right without seeking revenge. With malice toward none, with charity for all, folks. Every American should say these words ten times every morning and before every political utterance on social media.

By the way, Lincoln said his speech was “not very graceful.” You should read the whole thing and see what this wise, eloquent leader considered ungraceful. It will take you less time than it took to read this post. Just look up “Lincoln response to a serenade November 10, 1864.”

Why Did I Think Pickwick Wasn’t a Favorite?

Ten years ago, when I drew up my current ten-year Reading Plan, I decided that since I had read and reread all of Dickens’s novels, I could just stick with my favorites this time around. So I picked ten for the new schedule, one for each year: A Tale of Two Cities was there, of course, along with other obvious choices (obvious for me, anyway) like David Copperfield and Dombey and Son. The Pickwick Papers didn’t make that initial cut, but at some point I had a space on one ten-item list of miscellany and decided to throw Pickwick in. So I’m reading it now and wondering, How did I not think this was a favorite?

First of all, it's making me laugh out loud over and over. Its humor is silly, but I’m no snob. Mr. Winkle, for instance, brags about being a sportsman but scares all of his friends on their first hunt when he doesn’t know how to carry his gun without pointing it at parts of his friends or himself. That’s no highbrow joke; it’s the kind of humorous story one would tell about a family member again and again over the years. But I laugh at tried-and-true family jokes, and I laugh at this one. The humor in this first novel often reminds me that Dickens is firmly in the English comic tradition that spawned Monty Python; Mr. Jingle’s habit of stringing short phrases together without forming sentences, for instance, may have had a direct influence on Eric Idle’s “Say no more” character (Mr. Jingle lacks the bawdy inuendoes). I laugh at the Ministry of Silly Walks, and I laugh at Mr. Pickwick getting pushed in a wheelbarrow.

Then it’s so memorable. Before I started, I thought, “OK, this is the one where the hero is considered a great social scientist when he actually can’t tell a road sign from an ancient carving, where there’s a nice Christmas dinner, and where Pickwick goes to debtor’s prison.” That was about all I remembered at the moment. But after just a few pages, twenty more details and characters from the rest of the book came rushing to mind: the fat boy who says, “I wants to make your flesh creep”; Mr. Pickwick getting thrown over a wall and standing in the rain; Tony Weller spelling his name in court (trust me, it’s funny); and more. If I remember that much from it, I must have enjoyed it before.

In an old post on these pages called “Dombey Redux,” I list my favorite comic characters from the Dickens canon. At the end I say, “I know I’m forgetting someone obvious and important.” At last I can say that that obvious and important omission is Sam Weller. G. K. Chesterton says somewhere that Dickens became Dickens when he first put Sam Weller on a page. Sam’s most famous humorous trait is a form of speech known in the dictionary as a Wellerism, in which he says what he would naturally say and then claims his utterance as a quotation from someone in a different situation altogether. “Out vith it, as the father said to his child, when he swallowed a farden.” “That’s what I call a self-evident proposition, as the dog’s-meat man said, when the housemaid told him he warn’t a gentleman.” It doesn’t seem that the respectable Mr. Pickwick would hire such a volubly volatile servant, but to his credit and to our delight, he does. Like Holmes’s Dr. Watson, Sam is unexceptionally loyal and ready to lend a little muscle when a dangerous situation calls for it, and his sometimes embarrassing banter can usually be repressed with a quick, “Not now, Sam.”

Dickens hasn’t quite mastered his distinct art of naming characters yet. Mr. Winkle, Mr. Wardle, Mr. Jingle, and Mr. Trundle, all introduced in the first few chapters, offer a potentially confusing sameness barely broken by the arrival of Mrs. Bardell. But Pickwick is a great name, as are the names of Mrs. Bardell’s lawyers: Dodson and Fogg. Either of those names on its own would have far less than half the impact of the pair; together, the names of Dodson and Fogg give us a quintessentially Dickensian moniker for a law office.

But much of the mature Dickens is here, if in slightly less than polished form: the humor, the sentiment, the love for Christmas, and the pathos (more of that in a future post). One element that pervades Pickwick that doesn’t make much of a showing in later books is all the playful kissing between couples not married or even engaged. The frequency of kissing in Pickwick might be explained by the concurrence of Dickens’s marriage to Catherine Hogarth and the serial publication of the novel. Its relative absence in later books might be explained by the author’s grave nuptial disappointment.

Profoundly Short

I only have a few minutes today, and I’ve been reading The Brothers Karamazov, so I’m about to do a silly thing. I’m going to attempt to give my answer to Ivan Karamazov’s profound question in just a few words.

Ivan seems to waver on whether he believes in God. At one point he says that he believes in God but rejects his world. His greatest concern is the torture of children. Why would God make a world in which children can be tortured? I couldn’t make such a world, he tells his pious brother Alyosha; I couldn’t make a world with all its beauties and goodness and gratification at the cost of a single little girl being tortured. And then he asks, could you?

Hypothetical questions like this always include one big problem. Someone asks me, if you had just hit 63 home runs in a season and the Yankees offered you a contract, would you take it? I don’t know! I would have to be such a different person with such a different physical constitution and such a different history, I don’t know if my St. Louisian aversion to the Yankees would still hold. Ivan seems to be asking me, If you were God, could you create such a world? My first answer is, how could I possibly know? If I were God, I’d have a radically different mind, and I can’t imagine how that mind works.

But Ivan might actually be asking, Could you as a human being bring about a wonderful situation with happiness for millions if it meant the torture of one child? I don’t know if Alyosha in particular could, but I do know that, sadly, in millions of instances, a human being has tried to buy the happiness of just one person (that human’s self) at the cost of torturing a child. We do this, not God. We commit all the horrible atrocities Ivan mentions and much worse. We beat children senseless because they interrupt our drunken stupor. We drop napalm on Vietnamese children. We starve coal miners’ children to make CEO’s richer. We shoot children in schools. We drop fire bombs and atomic bombs on children in cities.

Ivan Karamazov asks, Could you do this, humanity? Humanity, if it’s honest, can only reply, Yes, Ivan, we do this all the time. The only sensible next step is not to blame God for what we with willing hearts do routinely, but to ask for his forgiveness and restoration and life.

Alyosha’s answer is shorter and simpler. He gets up and kisses his brother and walks away.