A Villainous Post

I just wrapped up a season of fantasy baseball in a position typical for me: I finished 6th out of 8. I’ve loved playing this game for the last thirty years, but I’m so bad at it! I think the problem breaks down into three parts. (Thanks for reading while I work out my frustration in print!) First, I have a stubborn loyalty to ideas that I think ought to work, even if statistics suggest otherwise. Second, and maybe this is the same thing, I’m a slow learner: if I don’t see some relationship or pattern, memorizing a formula doesn’t work for me until I can finally internalize the reason for the formula. And I usually have to try something over and over and make, in my estimation, a hundred mistakes before the right way really settles into my brain. Third, fantasy baseball essentially boils down to having a drafting strategy in March and then watching for six months to see how that strategy works. It takes way too long for me to make my hundred mistakes in a game in which each turn lasts a year!

Yes, I’m a slow learner. It seems I’m often confessing my weaknesses in these posts, things about literature or the life and people and ideas depicted in that literature that didn’t really make sense to me until I was over 50 . . . or 60 . . . or 65. A few months ago, I wrote about realism in some heroines that many people don’t think are realistic. Today I want to write about realism in a villain that I didn’t really understand as realistic until just two days ago. I just finished C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet for the third time. I probably read it for the first time when I was about 20. The book has two villains: Devine, who wants to exploit Malacandra (we know it as Mars) because its abundant gold will bring him power on Earth, and Weston, who doesn’t care a fig for any single human being but wants Humanity with a capital H to survive forever by taking over the galaxy, even if that means killing sentient extraterrestrials. It’s Weston I want to talk about today. (I think I understood greed even when I was 20.)

To be fair to my younger self, the villains of my childhood and youth were all exaggerations. Snidely Whiplash (from Dudley Do-Right) and Dick Dastardly (from Wacky Races) took what were already exaggerations from melodrama and cartoonified them. The Joker and the Riddler (either the comic-book versions or the TV versions) could be taken either as mere personifications of weird ideas or as caricatures of serial killers. I’m not sure I ever took an outlaw from Cisco Kid or Gunsmoke seriously enough to think of him as a depiction of a character from life. Of course there were mad scientists, swamp creatures, the Blob, Frankenstein’s monster, Wells’s (and Welles’s) Martians, and other imaginative antagonists that didn’t appear anything like realistic to me. Then when I was 18, I met Darth Vader; it never occurred to me then even to wonder whether the man in the spacesuit who spoke while his machinery breathed for him and choked underlings with a hand gesture was realistic. Even the very idea of a villain, a character who constantly goes about trying to do harm to a given person or group, seemed to me more like a plot device than a realistic human being. I didn’t know anyone like that. Even the bullies at school just sat around being bewildered most of the time and only occasionally thought that abusing me might be fun. It wasn’t until I started reading lots of Dickens (I’m sorry I always seem to get around to him!) that I found out that a villain in a story might be something as mundane as a businessman who cares more about continuous profit than the well-being of his neighbor. It probably helped that I started paying attention to the news in the 1980s and learned about blackguards like Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken.

Back to Lewis. Weston is taken by the Malacandrians (who are good, unfallen creatures) to meet Oyarsa, who is, as I understand it, the angel of the planet. He sees people living simply and assumes they are uncivilized and ignorant and superstitious. He hears the unbodied voice of Oyarsa and assumes a witch-doctor must be using ventriloquism. He identifies someone he believes to be the shaman (actually an old creature who has merely fallen asleep) and tries to tempt him with a cheap necklace from Woolworth’s. He dances around shouting “Pretty! Pretty!” to all the other creatures while trying to get them interested in the plastic baubles. All of this display only makes the Malacandrians laugh. I think I thought I was supposed to laugh at the ludicrous character myself. In an angrier mood, he tells them they have no idea who they’re dealing with and that if they don’t do as he says, “Me go Poof! Bang! and you dead!” You don’t understand the primitive mind, he tells his fellow earthlings when they urge him to stop. All of this looked to me like it came straight out of the recipe book for fictional bad guys, not out of observations from life. It was reasonable but inexperienced of me to think this way: I had read about people like Weston in stories and seen characters like him in movies, but I had never met anyone who did or said these things in real life.

But the other day, it occurred to me that I had actually known many people like Weston. Take out the details of the dance and the cheap necklace and the threat with the gun (I thank God I’ve never had to deal with that threat in real life!), and Weston is completely recognizable. He assumes he is the smartest person in any group he finds himself in. He assumes that a simple life, or any life unlike his own, indicates stupidity. He assumes a stupid person is of inferior worth. He thinks of all relationships in terms of strength and weakness, winning and losing. He cares only about his own wishes and believes he can manipulate anyone by means of his superior skills into suiting those wishes; if he ever thinks about the others’ wishes that he is violating, it’s only to think that their wishes don’t matter as much as his on some objective cosmic scale. And yet for all his supposed superiority he depends on tools – guns and trinkets – to get his way. I’ve known many people like Weston. I’ve worked with them. I’ve had Thanksgiving dinners with them. I’m sorry to say I’ve gone to church with them. It was an amazing, awesome, satisfying, revealing, sad, powerful moment when I suddenly found, in the middle of a fantasy about space travel, a stark bit of earthly realism.

Over the River

I’ve achieved a milestone: I’ve finished Galsworthy’s nine-volume Forsyte Saga. In some ways this last entry, Over the River, was the least satisfactory of the nine. Along with the interesting characters and mundane-yet-urgent conflicts, I’ve enjoyed the series most for the way each book critiques the old ways and then, in a surprising twist, critiques modernity. Over the River certainly had the solid characters and the poignant conflicts and the critiques of humanity’s ways, but it didn’t surprise me with a clever philosophical twist. Still, as a final volume, its main business was summarizing, I suppose, and it did that fairly well.

Dinny Cherrell took a prominent position again, which suited me just fine since I really like that character. But the main plot involved her sister, Clare, who has left her husband in India because he has experimented with the sadistic use of a riding whip. The case ends up involving a trial, which I read both literally and metaphorically. Clare has spent a platonic night with a male friend in a broken-down car out in the countryside on a dark night, and the rejected husband uses this event as the basis for a suit of divorce, since adultery remained at the time the only grounds for divorce among non-royals. Sadism isn’t on trial since Clare refuses to testify about the issue. The old rules for divorce are certainly on trial since both parties want to be free from each other and can only achieve their end by convincing a jury of a lie. (As far as this main point goes, I think Waugh did a better job skewering the practice in A Handful of Dust.) If modernity is allegorically on trial in the literal trial, it is only in its acceptance of a casual friendship between a young man and a young woman, and Waugh doesn’t seem to think the new social norm very bad, if only people aren’t so careless about it as Clare and her friend have been. 

Of all people, Dinny’s Uncle Adrian sums up the critique of modernity at the end of the novel and the series. Society changes with time, he says, and this is inevitable. Humans are imperfect, so change is always needed. Modernity sees to have changed too much too fast, though, throwing out everything without pausing to distinguish the baby and the bathwater. People need some of the good things from the nineteenth century (I agree!) and they need continuity. But he doesn’t give details, and then he apologizes for being too philosophical. So it’s not the powerful commentary I so enjoyed in earlier volumes. I’ll share just a couple more quibbles. The characters go to see Cavalcade on the stage a few times, and I think Galsworthy lets this other artwork do a little too much of his work. (I sympathize with what I take to be his dislike for the show, though; I hate the movie.) Then there’s the confusion over the metaphor in the title. At one point the narration says time is a river and we can only go along with the flow, we can’t go over the river. But later Dinny is said to have gone over the river by getting married. Confusing. It seemed to me that Galsworthy would want to have said that she was moving against the flow of time’s river by participating in a traditional institution, not crossing over it. OK, a third quibble: Dinny marries a man she admires but doesn’t love just because she thinks she needs tradition as a shield against modern times. She, the series, and the philosophy deserve a better end.

I’ve achieved another milestone: exlibrismagnis.com now has over 300,000 views. I wish I could say they were all actual human visits, but I can’t. I had a lot of Russian bots back in 2016. The eager blogger, in hopes of being internet-famous, would check the list of referring URL’s and, hoping to find a mention of this site on some other blog or message thread, would click the sites on the list trying to see some actual referring link. Alas, I mostly got sites in Russian that seemed to be inviting me to gamble online. Blogspot’s host learned to block them soon after that, and then for many years I had only a handful of visits every day, which seemed like a legitimate representation of what a world of 7 billion people might do with my rambling thoughts. But in the last month or so, I’ve started having hundreds of views per day again. Yesterday 40 visits supposedly came mayo clinic dot org. (I spell it out in an attempt to protect against a robotic search.) Forty more came from what purports to be another healthcare organization. What’s that about? I understand the bots from nine years ago tricking me into clicking their link in an attempt to catch a fool ready to separate himself from his money. But why would there be a link for my blog on the Mayo Clinic’s site? On the other hand, why would a scammer pretend to be the Mayo Clinic? The link didn’t take me to a donation page or anything. Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. Anyway, if you’re reading this because a healthcare site (or a Singaporean university’s site) had a link to me, write to let me know. Or if it’s a scam and you understand it, explain it to me, please!

Quick Roundup

In between mini-trips, I’ll just drop some short notes on recent reading.

I continue my plan to read Finnegans Wake over the course of fifteen years, the time it took Joyce to write it. After having consumed my annual slice of Finnegan Pie for 2025, I can say that it remains as wacky as ever with its nonstop wordplay and elusive sentence structure. But I think the man (who has several names and stands for several people, I think, or maybe all men) goes to an inn, has a drink and a meal, and then hires a woman. If this is the passage that got the book banned for pornography in some places, then I’m pretty sure neither the boards who did the banning nor their kids – assuming they even read this far – understood it or got any excitement from it. I don’t see anyone ever reading Finnegans Wake and then thinking, “Oh, now that I’ve read that, I can’t wait to commit adultery!”

George MacDonald’s Heather and Snow is the first of the Scottish pastor's novels I’ve really enjoyed in at least three years. There is no wise old man this time, the kind that in other books me wonder if MacDonald saw himself in these lofty characters. There are no polemics in which some leading character decides that anyone who disagrees with him (i.e. with George MacDonald) isn’t doing Christianity right. The protagonist is a young rural woman who understands God the best she can, which is to say that she understands Him better and more biblically than her mother or silly neighbor. But then all of them understand and serve God the best they can, as well. There are no judgments, just discussions and respectful attempts to explain or to persuade. The differences are nothing as compared to the difference between the belief of the faithful and the disbelief of the local baron’s son. There’s also a brother with some kind of mental developmental issues and a big snow that causes some deaths and a neighborly intervention before fornication (which didn’t involve reading James Joyce!), and all these events lead to very interesting thoughts and discussions about life in all its complexities and how best to live it in service of God and neighbor.

Finally, I will merely recommend Anthony Trollope’s short story (with eight chapters it could really be called a novella) “Why Frau Frohmann Raised Her Prices.” 

I’ll have more after the next trip!

Furiously Taking Notes on Orlando

I’ve written before about the importance of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso to my reading project. I wish I remembered what work by C. S. Lewis mentioned Orlando and made me want to read the classics that the good professor knew so well. But I do remember the exact spot I was standing on – on a sidewalk in Norman, Oklahoma – when I read the Lewis passage. And I remember how excited I was when I finally got to Orlando a few years later and found that it was indeed worth reading. My only regret about my first encounter is that I read the epic over six years, one sixth of the long work each year. This time through, I’m reading it in thirds. The next go around, I’ll probably read half of it at a time.

Reading a third of it in the last two or three weeks makes me realize that the plot is more tightly constructed than I previously thought. There are lots of cuts from one strand of the tale to another and many groups of characters that meet or get separated while wandering in the woods, narrative devices that give the book a feeling of being only a wobbly web of randomly arranged episodes. But when the girl captured by pirates in canto XIII finds her lost love in canto XXIII, you know Ariosto sees the connections between all the parts. In canto XXII, when Ruggiero and Bradamante are freed from their magical illusion, see each other clearly, and kiss again for the first time in a long time, only then to be separated when Bradamante runs into the woods after Pinabello, who stole her horse in canto III, you know Ariosto has a plan. 

So I’m taking lots of notes – some in a separate file, some in the margins of the book itself – to help me when I read Orlando a third time: notes like, “This is the letter Ruggiero wrote in XXV, 85-92.” Supposedly contemporary readers or listeners had no trouble keeping track of the multitudinous threads. The poem is written in 46 cantos, and it helped me a lot to realize a few years ago that it must have felt then like a 46-episode television series. Just as any one episode of LOST or Stranger Things or Rings of Power cuts abruptly from one subplot to another, and just as some subplots in any of those series are sometimes set aside for a couple of episodes, and just as a guest character in season 1, episode 4, may return and become a major character in season 2, episode 7, so Ariosto juggles his storylines and hits on two or three in each canto. But I have my own issues with attention, and I live in an age of video, and it’s harder for me to keep track of it all when I’m reading than it is when I’m watching – and it’s pretty hard for me when I’m watching, to begin with! I’ve tried different methods of keeping notes on Renaissance epics before. I made a giant spreadsheet for Faerie Queene, but I decided it didn’t do much good after all that time compiling it. For Orlando Furioso, besides my marginal notes, I’m writing a canto-by-canto summary as well as character-by-character synopses. It helped immensely to keep referring to the ones from last year as I read this year’s third of the work. So I’m hoping it will all help me keep the storylines straight the third time I read Orlando. But I have to say that I love every bit of storytelling that happens in Orlando Furioso, even when I’ve forgotten the context.

As I was writing this post, I started thinking, “Will I ever read Orlando a fourth time?” Then I had a curious thought that, if I get the chance to know someday that I’m in the process of dying, I might want to comfort some of my hours with Ariosto’s great poem. When my dad was dying of cancer, he wanted me to read Dickens’s Little Dorrit to him, just because it was the last Dickens book he had obtained. (I had given it to him the previous Christmas.) I already know that if I find myself in that situation, I’m going to have one of my kids, or maybe my grandson, read Dombey and Son to me. But I may want to give Orlando some time, too. I guess it’s a version of the desert island question: if you knew you had six months to live and felt too weak to hold the book yourself, what book would you want a loved one to read to you? You can let me know if you come up with an answer.

By the way, I reached the part this year where Orlando becomes furioso. He’s been in love with Angelica since the beginning. But I’m giving the plot away and telling you right now: if you ever read this book, don’t waste any time hoping that 1500 pages later Lando and Angie will get together and live happily ever after. Halfway through the epic, just before she leaves the tale forever and Ariosto tells us he’s glad to be rid of her, Angelica runs off with a fellow named Medoro. They carve their names in entwined knots on trees and leave notes in caves telling the world how much they love each other (and how much fun they had in the cave). Orlando sees it all and goes crazy. Whatever will Charlemagne do now that he’s lost his greatest paladin? Will Paris survive? Or will history change? Everything up to this point including enchanted castles and magic shields has been absolutely historical, of course. But maybe Ariosto wants to veer into alternative history now and let the Saracens take the French capital. Or maybe Astolfo will ride a hippogriff to the moon to search for Orlando’s lost wits! 

So Does Obscure Mean Wretched?

I had read that Jude the Obscure was the most shocking and controversial of Hardy’s novels. Then I found in the last couple of weeks that it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. (Dreading?) I guess I forgot all these years that the people shocked by it were Victorians, who were, as we know, somewhat easily shocked. Yes, Jude slowly rejects the Christianity of his youth. Yes, he gets divorced, falls in love with another woman and entices her away from her marriage, has sex once with his ex for old times’ sake, has a little trouble understanding why his fiancé is upset about that, and . . . OK, you get the idea. Yes, clearly Silas and Eulalia were scandalized. And I would have hated it forty years ago, too. But at this point it seems to me that the story is the kind of story that happens in real life and that Jude is just a person that I might know. 

I noted in a post back in May that I’ve learned to be less judgmental even about fictional characters. And I find myself less judgmental about authors. Hardy had an admirable talent for writing compelling fiction, and in Jude it seems to me he finally became completely honest with the public about his doubts – doubts about the Church, doubts about the Bible, doubts about society’s judgment on people who didn’t fit the mold (Jude loses his job as a manual laborer because of his marriage to a divorced woman, and Sue’s first husband loses his teaching position because he lets his adulterous wife have a divorce instead of teaching her a lesson and making her stay). And it’s not like he can’t see anything right about the Church or faith or social norms, either. So since he was so forthright and so able to outline his characters’ positions sympathetically and so willingly to look at both sides of all issues, I was able to go along with him, agreeing sometimes, disagreeing at other times (probably more often), but respecting him always. I will warn you, though, any of you who think you might read Jude the Obscure based on this short review, that it is probably the saddest book I’ve ever read, with one unforgettably, gut-wrenchingly tragic scene.

By the way, I don’t think even Hardy had sympathy for his character Arabella, so is it all right if I’m a little judgmental about her?

A Star is Born – and a Heart, and a Black Misery Drop, and a Green Book

I have an exciting announcement to make to my readers today – so exciting that it calls for the first-ever embedded image on exlibrismagnis! How exciting is that?

Forty years ago I thought of designing a board game based on the novels, novellas, and stories of Dickens. The idea was that each player would play one of the lead characters from a novel – David Copperfield, for instance, or Florence from Dombey and Son – and would slowly acquire acquaintances, employers, friends, love interests, and enemies in the form of cards representing other characters from perhaps other novels or stories. Each card would correspond to a page in a book that told all the possible actions that that character might take, the current action being determined by a die roll.

Twenty-five years later, the card game Dominion appeared, and the deck-building game came into the world. I was ahead of my time in conception but abysmally behind my time in practical application. So the creative thoughts began flitting again: maybe, as in these new deck-builders, all the necessary information and possible actions could be printed on the card itself. But still, what information would I need? What would a card look like? How would this game go? How could I test anything without cards? But how could I make cards without knowing what the game was like? How could I do any of it without beginning to reread the novels while taking careful notes on every character that appeared?

Three years ago, I realized that if I didn’t get started soon, I would get a chance, long before any game actually materialized, to ask Dickens himself face-to-face how he would have designed it. (It’s highly probable that, in that blessed state, neither of us will care enough about board games to hold the conversation.) So two years ago, I worked for a while and came up with a card design, based on measurements and specifications from a custom game printing company. Last year, I took careful notes (all arranged systematically on a spreadsheet) while reading Great Expectations and filled in a few cards. This past winter, I reread some more and added a page in my spreadsheet for almost 100 characters from Our Mutual Friend. Then I laid out card designs for about 30 of those characters and filled out a few more from Great Expectations. A couple of months ago I uploaded the designs to the printer, and a few weeks ago they arrived. And now, my friends, like a very proud papa, I show you a picture of a sample of this first draft!

Almost all the illustration come from nineteenth-century editions of the books. I had to borrow a few from novels by Trollope and Thackeray, but their all Victorian. The mechanics of the printed text aren’t very consistent: remember that I don’t really know how this game is actually played. But essentially, most characters provide either red hearts (love and emotional support), yellow stars (action and practical aid), black drops (misery), or green books (eccentric qualities). Some characters just do what they do, but many will attempt to do useful things only if you have the hearts or stars to pay for the action. Some Dickens characters don’t provide exactly love and don’t make practical contributions but are absolutely essential to the atmosphere of a Dickens story; these provide the green books, which a player can spend to improve the chances of success on any heart or star action.

Speaking of atmosphere, it’s important to me that every card have a description taken from the original text, which should be read aloud whenever the card is first acquired, and, if possible, a quotation of something the character says. Sometimes you’ll play a card and find that all you get out of it is being able to read the quotation aloud. Take John Podsnap, for instance, one of the cards featured in the picture. Podsnap never attempts anything; he simply is what he is. So his actions cost nothing; the player simply rolls two dice whenever the card is played. Should no “successes” be rolled (a success being defined as a 4, 5, or 6), the player reads the quotation: “We know what England is. That’s enough for us.” If one success is rolled, the player should read aloud (and preferably act out, as well) the indicated action – also taken from, if not exactly quoted from, the original text: “He clears the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him with a flourish of his right arm.” Actions like this have nothing to do with winning the game and everything to do with enjoying the game! Should the player be so fortunate as to roll two success, he takes a green book token, a benefit indicated on the card as “+1P.” For right now, I’m calling the green books Plot Points, hence the P, and yet that’s exactly what they aren’t because these eccentric characters do nothing to propel the plot toward either conflict or resolution!If one success is rolled, the player should read aloud (and preferably act out, as well) the indicated action

How does one acquire these cards? Each player will have a personal character board that outlines specific needs of one leading hero or heroine from one of the novels. Are you an orphan who needs to go to school? Go through the draw deck, looking at the backs of the cards, on which is printed some essential generic information about each character, until you find one that says “Teacher,” and then add that card to your private deck. You might be lucky and end up with the kind Mr. Mell from David, or you might be very unlucky and draw Wackford Squeers from Nicholas Nickleby. I say “unlucky,” but what’s life, or a book, or a game without some challenges, right?

And speaking of challenges, what exactly are the goals of this game-in-the-making? Each main character has problem to overcome; Bella Wilfer, for instance, has to get over her mercenary view of life. Each main character has a secret to find: Pip has to find out who is providing him with money. An orphan must end up with a kind protector, while all heroines and adult males must end up married with a steady, reputable source of income, however small. (A penitent Bella will actually score higher if her husband’s income is small!) All grief tokens must have been removed by hearts. (Esther from Bleak House forms an exception to this rule since she, more than others, gets wisdom from sorrow.) All a player’s enemies must be caught or dead. Most of a player’s friends must be alive, happy, and preferably married. It’s essential to me that the game can have 0-to-n winners. If no one meets the goals, no one wins. If two of three players meet their goals, the two of them win, while the third has to be satisfied with a Pip-like ending to his story. 

There’s a lot yet to do. For one thing, I have to play with these cards and figure out how the game goes. How does one play through one’s private deck of characters? How many cards are in play at a time, and how can a player manipulate which cards stay and which go away (so as to get advantageous combinations in play together: a detective and a criminal, for instance, or a couple of young, eligible friends that really do need to fall in love)? Is there a map to move around? My original conception, as innovative as it was, was forged in the era of board games in which choices were limited and fates were determined by the roll of dice; the game that emerges from these last few years of thought and effort must present the player with a lot more choices. All of that means that I have to change some of the cards I already have, because I haven’t put real choices on enough of them. And, of course, I need to read a lot more and make a lot more cards – once I truly know what to put on them. Right now I have 53 cards in my little draft deck, but I envision that the game should end up with something like 800.

But right now, at last, I have a draft copy of some cards to play with!

Selected Literary Essays, part II

I introduced this topic last time. So I’ll just jump in to the review this time, starting with some scattered notes on various essays, moving into a topic that ties together three essays and leads to a point personally very satisfying, and ending with a point quite unsatisfactory.

In “Variation in Shakespeare,” Lewis points to passages in the Bard’s work in which one metaphor tumbles forth after another, all basically saying the same thing. Cleopatra says of Antony, “His legs bestrid the ocean; his rear’d arm / Crested the world; his voice was propertied / As all the tuned spheres, and that to friends.” Each of the three sentences essentially says, “He was more a Titan than a human.” For me, the most interesting point Lewis makes out of this observation is that the variation technique allows Shakespeare to write beautiful poetry and yet create realistic, deep characters. Speaking one great poetic line sounds forced, but speaking several poetic lines saying the same thing sounds like an imaginative mind trying to find the right metaphor off the cuff.

Speaking of Shakespeare’s characters, in “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?” Lewis complains that critics told his college-age self that true enjoyment of the play required appreciation of the characters, while he wanted to continue to enjoy the ghost and the poison that he enjoyed when he was a child. In “The Literary Impact of the Authorized Version,” a topic he was asked to speak on, Lewis disappointed his orginal audience by saying that there is none: the Bible has influened literature to be sure, but any element of a particular translation, even the AV (i.e. King James), that finds its way into non-Biblical literature is a knowing reference, not an indication that the translation’s vocabulary or grammar has worked its way into the English language. In “Sir Walter Scott,” he says that the novels shine because they created, for the first time in literature, the feeling for period, even with all their anachronistic mistakes. 

In two essays near the end, “Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism” and “The Anthropological Approach” Lewis makes essentially the same point. Scholars from nonliterary fields had started explaining  literature (explaining it away, really), claiming that they had discovered what hadn’t been understood before. Freud said all literature is “just” competition with the father and sexual desires too shocking to be admitted; anthropologists said it’s all “just” a reworking of primitive myths. To Freud Lewis argues (1) that people aren’t really all that shocked at sexual desires anymore and (2) that sexual desire is one of the most boring topics in literature. To the anthropologists he says that the stories of the Holy Grail are exciting and mysterious and have captured imaginations for centuries, while the Celtic cauldron myth they trace it to is simplistic and has fallen out of all interest for anyone but anthropologists. To both he says that literature is so much more interesting and so much more varied than any of their supposedly exciting sources. Maybe those things are truly in or behind or under literature, he argues, but literature can’t be “just” that, or we wouldn’t be so devoted to it. I wrestled with some people who tried to take away the legitimacy of my field of scholarship, as well, so I sympathized with Lewis as he battled bravely against the barbarian invaders!

In some post from the last year or two, I said that I enjoyed poetry partly by listening (even when I read it to myself) to the conflict of the underlying meter and the actual rhythm of a line. I may even have admitted that I sometimes read a line with the meter clearly accented – to BE or NOT to BE, that IS the QUES-tion – and try to follow with an inner ear the way the line would be read if it were just a bit of prose. Sometimes I go the other way: I read the line naturally while attempting to keep some internal click marking off the longs in the feet. I know I said that I was unsure that my way of understanding the issue had any true validity, that perhaps I was just trying to impose an idea of musical meter and syncopated rhythm into a place it doesn’t belong. Well, in three essays on meter in poetry, Lewis affirmed my view. In “The Fifteenth-Century Heroic Line,” he says that, while all meter allows for play between the paradigm (i.e. the pattern of metrical feet) and the natural pronunciation, "the decasyllabic" (i.e. iambic pentameter) allows the most. "Hence all poetry in this metre has to be read with what we may call ‘double audition'." Wait! Did he just say what I think he said? I had to wait a few essays to find out!

In “Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century” (I really should read some of Donne’s love poetry!), Lewis says that most modern readers, including every last one of his students, do not know how to scan. I first thought he meant scan with sophistication. But, no: he meant that they didn’t understand meter at all. All their teachers had decided that meter was a pointless distraction, so they didn’t teach it. Then, in the simply titled “Metre,” he picks up that point again and furthers it. Students are missing out on so much by not knowing how to scan the meter in a line! Meter, he says, is only interesting if the actual line goes against the paradigm (five iambic feet, for instance) with some frequency. There are two main schools of performing poetry with these contradictions (what I think of as syncopations): Minstrels sing the paradigm and leave the listener to imagine the rhythms of ordinary speech, while Actors offer the rhythm and tempo of ordinary speech and leave the listener to imagine the meter. "Scansion is the conformity, made audible by Minstrels and concealed by Actors, of the individual line to this paradigm." Amazing! Not only did he say that I was right to hear two different levels of rhythm in a line of poetry, but he even gave names to my two ways of reading: sometimes I’m a Minstrel and sometimes I’m an Actor!

Well, I’ve covered the scattered notes and the satisfying point. Now it’s time for the disappointment. In “High and Low Brows,” Lewis spends some time on what he calls “style,” which, he says, is the ability to use exactly the right word or turn of phrase to make a mountain in the description seem unlike any other mountain, to make a sunset look to the reader like a particular sunset on a particular evening, and so on. Then – brace yourselves – he throws in the gratuitous remark that Dickens has “detestable” problems with style. *uggh* I can hardly type the words. But Lewis can’t have meant it! I don’t believe that he praises G. K. Chesterton’s wisdom in any other book as much as he does in Selected Literary Essays, and Chesterton called Dickens “the last of the Great Men.” Surely Lewis agrees!

Surely!

Selected Literary Essays, part I

In 2002, I had the great privilege of attending and presenting at the two-week C. S. Lewis Summer Institute in Oxford and Cambridge, England. I could talk to you for two weeks about the experiences I had. I could mention meeting Barbara Reynolds – Dorothy L. Sayers’s secretary – for the first time, when she walked up to me without knowing me, put her hand on my chest, and asked, “Have thought about what your legacy should be?” I could tell you about the more-than-disappointing showing at my session, in which all three people present simply sat at a table, and I read to the session chair and the other presenter, after which the other presenter read to the chair and me.

But for today’s purposes, I just want to say a bit about two dramatic presentations by the marvelous David Payne. One evening we enjoyed Mr. Payne performing his one-man C. S. Lewis show in a two-act play written by himself called “An Evening with C. S. Lewis.” The stage was set with two chairs and a little table. Lewis said hello to us and welcomed us all in to his sitting room at The Kilns and apologized that his brother Warnie had just stepped out to the pub to buy some beer to bring home. (Warnie never got back.) For about forty-five minutes, Lewis told us various details of his life, concentrating on his conversion to Christianity. After an intermission, he came back, apologized about Warnie taking so long, and proceeded to tell us the story of Joy Davidman, whom he married while she was in a hospital battling cancer. For some reason, I had trouble seeing Lewis clearly starting about halfway through this second act; his face wouldn’t hold still but seemed to wave as if I were seeing him through water. Must have been the humidity. I’ve said somewhat recently on a post here that there was a time in my life when I considered Lewis my only friend. After the show, I went up to Mr. Payne and thanked him for letting me spend an evening with my friend.

On another occasion, Mr. Payne went to the pulpit in St. Mary’s Church, Oxford, to deliver the inaugural address that Lewis delivered upon starting his second job, as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge. The speech, entitled “De descriptione temporum,” or “On the Description of the Times,” spent a bit exploring the sense in which the Middle Ages and the Renaissance indeed go together without a great dividing point between them and then proceeded to look for actually dividing points in western history. Lewis posited that the greatest historical division lay not between Roman civilization and barbarism, not between a medieval “Age of Faith” and a modern “Age of Science” or “Age of Reason,” but somewhere between Jane Austen and the time of the speech, 1954. The division, he says, lay between a culture of belief and a culture of disbelief. His argument was so startling and yet so clear, there was one moment when several people in the audience (congregation?) audibly gasped, not, as people usually gasp, in reaction to the scandalous, but in shock as the scales fell from our eyes.

When I got home I immediately went to the library and checked out a collection called Selected Literary Essays, which begins with “De descriptione temporum” and includes several other of Lewis’s professional essays, none of which, I believe, are included in the collections of essays put out by Christian publishing houses (God in the Dock, Christian Reflections, etc.). I was excited to dive into this part of my friend’s life, but found that, since I didn’t know enough of the literature he wrote about, I couldn’t understand much. So I read the essays on Austen and Shakespeare and returned the book.

Last month, twenty-three years later, I read the whole volume. I’m pleased to report that I’ve read quite a bit more and as a result understood quite a bit more of the book this time – not everything by all means, but more. As this introduction has taken up enough space, I’ll call it “part I” and go into more details on the book in the next post.

Beacon Lights of Literature

As I was growing up, my parents had a home-made bookshelf made of bricks and planks with two shelves full of books.Considering how much my mom and dad encouraged me to read and bought me any book I wanted, that doesn’t seem like a lot of books for themselves. The collection included, among other things, some of my dad’s books from his engineering degree, John Blackburn’s A Scent of New-mown Hay, and three of my parents’ high-school literature books. I said a few months ago that I should write a post about those textbooks, and here it is!

Sadly, I have to start by saying that I gave all three to a used bookstore a few years ago and then, quickly regretting my decision, tried to replace them with copies I could buy online. I found two of the three but couldn’t remember the name of the third. The two I have are from a series called Beacon Lights of Literature. They are the ninth-grade and eleventh-grade books. I believe the book I haven’t recovered was a tenth-grade book. Either my parents’ high school didn’t teach literature in the twelfth grade, or neither of them bothered to keep the textbook.

The introduction to the ninth-grade offering says that each section is arranged so that students will actually enjoy the experience. “Poems, stories, plays, and novels,” that preface says to the student (and possibly teacher), “are not merely examples for dull analysis. They were written either to thrill, to entertain, or to uplift.” I doubt that that explanation changed things for many people, but my dad experienced all three reactions in his reading and talked to me about books as if that’s just what happens, so it happened with me, too.

The ninth-grade volume starts with short stories. The first is Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum.” What could cause more horror than a Poe story? Finding out that the last page was missing from my parents’ book! Fortunately, the copy I now have has all the pages of that classic. As a kid, I also enjoyed “The Most Dangerous Game,” by Richard Connell. Section two has a good chunk of the Odyssey, which didn’t interest me when I was young. (It does now.) Section three presents Ivanhoe, the book I reread a few months ago that made me think to mention these old lit books. I read it the first time out of this school anthology, but, thinking that it might have been abridged (to keep it thrilling and uplifting!), I bought a separate copy this past February. Section four includes “Ballads,” and the editors have classed under that rubric some “ancient” ballads, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which I think I gave up on when I was young, and “The Highwayman,” which I LOVED! “Tlot-tlot, in the echoing night!” Section five has some American poetry by Bryant and Longfellow and Whittier and their pals. I don’t remember having any reaction to this part from my early years; I can guess why. Now that I understand more how to enjoy poetry, I should actually read this section. I may even have read all of the poems separately before, but reading them as a small anthology would be nice. Section six has A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and since The Patty Duke Show and Flipper taught me that Shakespeare was boring, I missed out on the fun for another couple of decades. *sigh*

The eleventh-grade book has a lot of excerpts. It starts with a portion of Sandberg’s biography of Lincoln. I think I said in a post a few years ago that my dad just talked to me like I would read the whole thing “some day,” so I skipped this part at the time. (When I finally read “the whole thing,” I read Sandberg’s one-volume condensation.) Shakespeare pops up again. This time it’s Julius Caesar, which I would have loved if I hadn’t listened to ‘60s sitcoms. It also includes a one-act play called Sam Average, which I remember liking. But I don’t remember why, so I should reread it. Next comes English poetry, which I know I skipped. Maybe it’s for the best. Would I enjoy Wordsworth and Tennyson today if I had read these when I was 10 and didn’t understand them?  Eleventh-graders are apparently ready for some essays, because they get a lot of those next. I definitely don’t remember anything about any of them, so I think I wasn’t ready to be “thrilled” by non-fiction. The last section, disappointing again, has, instead of one good novel, excerpts from five novels. I never bothered. But much more interesting to me was a list on the final pages of “THE FINEST NOVELS IN THE WORLD.” Here’s the list (it's in chronological order):

1. Robinson Crusoe
2. Gulliver’s Travels
3. Clarissa
4. Tom Jones (They got away with recommending that one to students!)
5. Eugenie Grandet
6. The Three Musketeers
7. David Copperfield
8. The Scarlet Letter
9. Henry Esmond
10. Madame Bovary
11. Fathers and Children
12. Les Miserables
13. Anna Karenina
14. The Brothers Karamazov
15. Huckleberry Finn

I possibly haven’t looked at that list in forty years. I’m pleased to say that I’ve read all fifteen. I think fourteen of them are good; I don’t understand how Clarissa pleased so many readers so much for so long. The editors admit that nothing from the most recent fifty years made the list, but they suggest that Moby-Dick may one day be considered a classic. They also include a list of “interesting novels” that includes some of those more recent books, even some detective fiction: Main Street, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and Of Human Bondage make the cut along with about fifty others.

For some reason, I didn’t grow up thinking that I had to read or understand everything in those engineering books. But I did grow up thinking that I should read the contents of Beacon Lights of Literature. Together with Classics Illustrated (a series of adaptations in comic-book form that I’ve mentioned before in these posts), these books gave me an idea of a canon. Flawed though the idea may be, this literature does tend “to thrill, to entertain, and to uplift” me, and I understand that both writing it and reading it require knowledge, wisdom, creativity, and technical skill, and that applying those accomplishments is satisfying. So I’m OK with the idea of a canon, even if no one comes up with a perfect list. (I’ve heard that physicians know the idea of a perfectly healthy human body even though they’ve never seen one.) Having these books on those makeshift shelves certainly gave me an idea that literature was once taught in American public schools, and their influence surely weighs heavily in the disappointment I felt when my school gutted its English curriculum just as I reached high school. We had to learn what was “relevant” then, and Shakespeare & Co. were deemed irrelevant. In the end it’s OK, because I eventually decided to work hard to give myself the education in literature that the school denied me, and then I started a blog, and then I wrote this post, and then you read it!

Oh! Just remembered. I also read A Scent of New-mown Hay. It’s good!

What Can I Say? It’s Good!

After reading Paradise Lost (this was my third time), what can I say? 

I can say that I don't think Milton was right to say that the evil spirits felt cause to stick together. My criticism is not that I think he makes the demons too good or noble. It is a common observation that Milton makes Satan and the fallen angels too sympathetic. I disagree; the demons are despicable. I think that their acknowledgement that their new situation isn’t as pleasant as Heaven and their struggle to convince themselves that they should have no regrets is interesting and powerful and shows that each demon is dedicated to himself and his own comfort better than any presentation of them as mad monsters would. No, my criticism is based on the philosophy that the evil spirits have no purpose to hold to in unity. Evil is not a thing, so there is no principal to bind them. 

I can say that the footnotes in the Oxford edition drove me nuts. It's so hard not to look, but I don't need the editor to tell me that “discovered” can mean “revealed.” I tried for a while to tell myself to quell my discomfort by remembering that maybe some people really need these notes. But then I thought how much better it was for me, in my several decades of reading English from the 14th through the 19th centuries, just to learn these old words and old meanings by context. I sometimes look up words in glossaries and dictionaries, of course. But I usually choose editions that allow me to decide when to do that instead of one that has constant reminders of explanatory footnotes conveniently placed at the bottom of the page. If I read the note and then try to remember the equation “this old word means that thing,” I usually don’t remember because that information is disconnected and, in my mind, arbitrary. Much better just to learn to read these usages in context. I’ve read so many times that Adam or Lancelot or Mr. Pickwick was loath to do something that I have no trouble remembering what the archaic word means. I wouldn’t probably remember if I just tried to memorize a definition from a glossary.

I could say that I wish, when I was teaching literature to home-school students a few years ago, I had had them read book V instead of book IV. I thought I would entice them to read more of the poem if I left them with the cliffhanger of Satan seeing Adam for the first time and then formulating his plan of attack. But I think these kids at the Christian co-op probably would have liked the idyllic scenes of Eden before the Fall better.

Well, I can say those things. But what good does it do for me to say that Paradise Lost is good? If you’ve read it, you know it’s good. If you haven’t read it, you probably already have a notion that it must be good in some way or else it wouldn’t be a famous classic. So I’ll just let Milton show you how good his epic is. Here’s Adam’s morning prayer (book V, lines 153 ff.):

These are thy glorious works, Parent of good,
Almightie, thine this universal Frame,
Thus wondrous fair; thy self how wondrous then!
Unspeakable, who sitst above these Heavens
To us invisible or dimly seen
In these thy lowest works, yet these declare
Thy goodness beyond thought, and Power Divine:
Speak yee who best can tell, ye Sons of light,
Angels, for yee behold him, and with songs
And choral symphonies, Day without Night,
Circle his Throne rejoycing, yee in Heav’n,
On Earth joyn all yee Creatures to extoll
Him first, him last, him midst, and without end.
Fairest of Starrs, last in the train of Night,
If better thou belong not to the dawn,
Sure pledge of day, that crownst the smiling Morn
With thy bright Circlet, praise him in thy Spheare
While day arises, that sweet hour of Prime.
Thou Sun, of this great World both Eye and Soule,
Acknowledge him thy Greater, sound his praise
In thy eternal course, both when thou climb’st,
And when high Noon hast gaind, & when thou fallst.
Moon, that now meetst the orient Sun, now fli’st
With the fixt Starrs, fixt in thir Orb that flies,
And yee five other wandring Fires that move
In mystic Dance not without Song, resound
His praise, who out of Darkness call’d up Light.
Aire, and ye Elements the eldest birth
Of Natures Womb, that in quaternion run
Perpetual Circle, multiform; and mix
And nourish all things, let your ceasless change
Varie to our great Maker still new praise.
Ye Mists and Exhalations that now rise
From Hill or steaming Lake, duskie or grey,
Till the Sun paint your fleecie skirts with Gold,
In honour to the Worlds great Author rise,
Whether to deck with Clouds the uncolourd skie,
Or wet the thirstie Earth with falling showers,
Rising or falling still advance his praise.
His praise ye Winds, that from four Quarters blow,
Breath soft or loud; and wave your tops, ye Pines,
With every Plant, in sign of Worship wave.
Fountains and yee, that warble, as ye flow,
Melodious murmurs, warbling tune his praise.
Joyn voices all ye living Souls, ye Birds,
That singing up to Heaven Gate ascend,
Bear on your wings and in your notes his praise;
Yee that in Waters glide, and yee that walk
The Earth, and stately tread, or lowly creep;
Witness if I be silent, Morn or Eeven,
To Hill, or Valley, Fountain, or fresh shade
Made vocal by my Song, and taught his praise.
Hail universal Lord, be bounteous still
To give us onely good; and if the night
Have gathered aught of evil or conceald,
Disperse it, as now light dispels the dark.

Keeping Up Appearances

I had just a little bit to say about Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances. But when I sat down to write, I wondered if I could tie in the exquisite British sitcom Keeping Up Appearances in any way. And I’m pleased to say I can! Hyacinth Walton has married a man named Richard Bucket. Now to most Brits, the name Bucket has connotations; its homonymity with a practical piece of farming equipment brings to mind a sense of respectable yeomanry, a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy, a comfortable and reliable goodness. But Hyacinth has a delusional sense that she occupies by natural right a higher position in the traditional British social hierarchy than the place of respectable yeoman. So she pronounces the name “Bouquet,” a name that doesn’t just mean an arrangement of flowers; it’s a French word and carries with it overtones of elegance and nobility and carefully trained charm. It’s a good joke, and it’s funny in every single episode.

Owen Barfield, also, was interested in the connotations and overtones in words. The first Barfield book I read, Poetic Diction, I enjoyed so much I read it twice. Here, basically, Barfield says that older languages reveal that their speakers had a richer view of the world than we do. Ancient and New Testament Greek is sometimes said to be a poetic language because every noun has both a literal and a figurative meaning. Pneuma, for instance (you’ll forgive me for transliterating instead of using Greek script), actually means “breath” and “wind” but figuratively means “spirit” or “life force.” A common view (at least I’ve heard it’s common: I haven’t actually read any linguistic history that says this) says that early people saw a person breathing and saw a tree swaying in the wind and came up with a word for the motion of air and then later imagined an unseen entity and, with poetically minded people leading the way, decided that the word for the concrete thing could be applied to the immaterial or abstract thing as well. On the contrary, Barfield argues that early speakers of Greek didn’t see these as two different meanings: they thought of an immaterial life force being carried by wind and breath, they came up with a word for the conglomerate, and they meant everything all at once when they used the word pneuma. Barfield was a friend of Lewis and Tolkien and a frequent attendee of the Inklings meetings at the Eagle and Child in Oxford. I admire Lewis and Tolkien; I liked Barfield’s argument about language; ergo, I concluded Barfield was a reasonable, respectable guy. A Bucket, if you will.

Saving the Appearances begins by saying the same thing from a different angle. Here, Barfield starts with the planets. Ancient people looked at the lights that moved against the background stars and, believing in gods or angels and crystalline spheres, “saw” all of these things when they looked up. We register the same points of light, but we “see” globes of rock or gas revolving around the sun according to laws discovered by Kepler and Newton and Einstein. Now, Barfield claims that the earlier view is one that views material objects as connected to immaterial things; in his words, he says that the ancients viewed concrete things as “participating” in the abstract. (I suppose he got his term from Plato, who taught that beautiful things “participate” in the ideal of Beauty.) Science, Barfield says, has pulled apart the meanings of the sight and dismissed the immaterial part. I’d like to point out that Kepler’s laws are every bit as immaterial as angels or Plato’s ideals. But I get Barfield’s point: the ancients saw meanings actually existing in words and in things that we think of only as poetic, symbolic references. The same patterns of light waves may strike my retina and Julius Caesar’s, but we see different things. So far so good.

But halfway through Saving the Appearances, Barfield becomes a crank, and he lost me. He says that our view of the planets, our thought that we now actually know what they are, is a form of idolatry, since we don’t actually know the real nature of the unseen particles that make up the planets. The ancients were wrong, but only in that they saw the planets as participating in the wrong things. To escape our idolatry, we have to have a new stage of participation, one that “realizes the directionally creator relation.” He apologizes for the awkward phrase but confesses that he can find no better way to describe what humanity needs. Near the end of the book he says that a new morality, surpassing Christian morality as much as Christian morality surpassed pagan, involves man’s obligation to awaken to “final participation” (our intentional reshaping of the way we see things – I think). Jesus’s explanation of the Parable of the Sower talks about the ears to hear and about eyes that don’t see, and Barfield says that, at last, we can now understand Jesus’s words, that we now know that He meant hearing and seeing in Barfield’s way of looking at things. (Barfield reminded me of Hegel at this point: the goal of the unfolding of the universe across eons is for humans to see things the way Barfield sees them. So humble.) Original participation, he says, was paganism, and the Scientific Revolution should be thanked for leading us to the idolatry of the images so we could break free and fulfill our purpose to “realize the directionally creator relation.”

So I was wrong, I suppose, in thinking that Barfield was a reliable yeoman. No, no! Barfield was a Bouquet among Buckets. Well, if that’s so, I’m happy being a Bucket.

Recent Audiobooks

Over the last year-and-a-half, while I’m out to pick up my grandkids from school, I’ve been listening to audiobooks in the car. In the first few months of this year, I’ve listened to Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (as read by the wonderful Mil Nicholson and available for free on Librivox), Stephen Lawhead’s Pendragon, Patrick O’Brian’s The Yellow Admiral, Edna Ferber’s So Big, and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio.

City driving is not the most conducive to paying careful attention to an audiobook: so many interstate entrance ramps, so many stop lights, so many intersections with no stop lights or stop signs whatsoever (a curious feature of Spokane streets), and, during one recent period, so many girl scouts selling cookies! I found my mind wandering a lot during Pendragon, but then I thought that it was not nearly so good as the first three books in the series (and the internet seems to agree with me). I found my mind wandering a lot during The Yellow Admiral, but then I thought that it was not nearly so good as the first seventeen books in the series (and again the internet seems to agree). Still, with so many hundreds of words just floating past me and not registering, I started wondering if I should just stick with music during the twenty-minute commutes. But then I remembered that I had been very focused on Our Mutual Friend, and it occurred to me that neither of the more recent authors is nearly so good as Dickens. (I haven’t consulted the internet on that question. I know I’m right.)

Over the last three or four weeks I’ve listened to two early twentieth-century books about people in small rust-belt towns, and I haven’t had any trouble following either one. I had heard that Ferber’s So Big, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1925, was about a woman who runs a farm. And I suppose it is that, but it’s so much more. As I listened over the course of about three weeks, I heard about the shift in turn-of-the-century America from rural life to urban life. I heard about philosophical conflicts between money and beauty. I heard about birth and death, about happy marriages and unfortunate marriages. I heard about young people from more than one generation imagining what they wanted to do in life and then changing directions because of (or being changed by) unfolding circumstances. I heard about Americans of several generations acclimating to a culture of ad agencies, automobiles, celebrities, skyscrapers, fashion magazines, and world war. When characters learned to adjust, the book was heart-warming. When they didn’t, it was movingly tragic. I can see why it won the big prize, even though Ferber’s use of informal “you” drove me nuts. She writes at one point, “She smiled then so that you saw the funny little wrinkle across her nose.” Why couldn’t she just say that the smile drew a funny little wrinkle?

Have you (I know who you are, so that wasn’t an informal use of “you”!) ever looked at a list of American classic literature – say, the contents of the Norton Anthology that you bought for a college lit class or a beautiful list that your favorite high-school substitute gave you – and found yourself not sure you could remember which works were written by Upton Sinclair and which by Sinclair Lewis? Do Bret Harte and Hart Crane become confused in your mind? Do Robert Sherwood and Sherwood Anderson get smooshed together into some sort of hyphenated monster? I was thinking about this curious pattern in authors’ names just the other day, and that very evening we watched a Jeopardy! episode that included an “Authors Before and After” category! One contestant earned several hundred dollars for enunciating the very improbable question, “Who is Upton Sinclair Lewis?”

Maybe my confusion will resolve a bit now that I’ve finally been reading (i.e. listening to) Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. This set of linked short stories appeared in section III of Miss Engler’s list: “those works on a difficulty and interest level which require greater maturity on the part of the student.” A lot of sex happens in this book. A teacher is accused of pedophilia. A preacher enjoys peeping at a naked woman in the house next to the church. Several casual trysts occur. One man sends his wife away after he finds that she has committed adultery, and the woman’s mother brings her back to the husband’s house and takes off her (the daughter’s) clothes in front of him. Now I see why Miss Engler told us to wait! But she recommended reading books from section III in college, and I would have hated this book when I was college-age. I wasn’t lonely and desperate and didn’t know anybody who was (or, rather, didn’t know that they were), and I would have wondered why twentieth-century authors couldn’t all write nice stories like So Big about relatable, realistic, sympathetic people. I would have thought that Anderson (See? I remember which is which now! Robert Sherwood wrote that play about Lincoln) was saying that all people were desperate and lonely. I might have thought Anderson was telling me that people should be desperate and lonely because that’s all life can offer or deserves. I might have thought that Anderson himself was desperate and lonely and should have gotten some help instead of writing a book about “unrealistic” characters. Miss Engler just didn’t know how much maturity it would take on my part. I’m way past college age now; I’m even way past the age of teaching college. Finally I know that a lot of people feel isolated and defeated. I know that almost everybody feels this way sometimes. I know that authors don’t always approve of the characters they put front and center in their books; not every book is about a hero. And I have a lot more experience, by grace, showing compassion towards people with these problems instead of shock or disbelief or bewilderment.

I’m having one difficulty, though, in listening to Winesburg, Ohio. More disturbing to me than the characters are the narrators and their bizarre ideas of what an Ohio accent sounds like (one fellow thinks a Maine accent will do) and their weirdly overwrought dramatizations of the characters’ lines. I wish Miss Engler had said, “The works in section III will be suitable for you when you’re retired, but don’t listen to them in the car.”

Rereading Pascal

I have an idea of what I want to write about today, but the topic depends on the story of my life. If we can divide people into those who at least think about writing an autobiography and those who don’t, I would fall in the first group. But today is not the day either for me to write this imaginary book or for you to read it. But here’s the summary as it will no doubt appear in future book reviews.

When I was a kid, I was happy. When I was in high school, I was still happy, but, even more, I was convinced that I was right to be happy and that people who weren’t as ebullient as I were somehow wrong. I started attending a church that taught what would now be called a prosperity gospel, where I heard that God loves us and wants our happiness always. My life concurred.

Then things changed. I can point to three main events in my life around the time I turned 20 that reshaped my thinking. But I also have evidence that my brain chemistry altered. For decades, my favorite Bible verse was Ezekiel 36:32: “It is not for your sake that I will act, says the Lord GOD. . . . Be ashamed and confounded for your ways.” I became convinced that being sad was right and that people who weren’t as melancholy as I was were somehow wrong. I started going to a different kind of church, but still people there would tell me from time to time that I needed more of the joy of the Lord, and I would respond, “King Solomon, inspired by the Spirit of God, said, ‘With much wisdom there is much sorrow.’ ”

I see now that I said much of this more clearly and more efficiently in this post about Chesterton. Today I must say that Pascal’s Pensées helped me as much as Orthodoxy. Here was another intelligent (understatement of the year) Christian telling me that I was correct in being ashamed and confounded in my ways. Pascal’s never-written book (this masterpiece comes to us as notes scribbled on little bits of paper!) moved me profoundly like no other book I’ve ever read. When I reread it some twenty years later, I came face to face again with an overwhelming Power that made me join Job in covering my mouth.

At some point, after thirty years of feeling miserable, it occurred to me to try an antidepressant. The first day I took one, I actually felt (I know people say this, but I really felt it!) a great weight being lifted from my shoulders. Hour by hour, it seemed to me that the folds of an enormously heavy curtain were being raised off of me, one by one. From that day Easter has been more of a celebration for me than ever: I consider myself to have lived a thirty-year season of Lent. Every once in a while, I have days when the pill doesn’t work. The world doesn’t get so dark because I know that I will be better the next day, but I think on those days, “No wonder I was so miserable all those years: I felt like this all the time.”

Last month, I read the Pensées again for a third time, and it seemed different. The sharp insight into human nature, the love of God, the brilliant, powerful writing were still there. I was still aware that I stood in the presence of one of the Greatest of the Great Books. But the experience didn’t move me to drop to my knees in humility and godly sorrow this time. And I started to wonder: have I lost something valuable by taking an antidepressant?

Not on the Lists

When I was in college and first really started learning about Literature (high school gave absolutely no direction on this score, although I did end up with Miss Engler’s treasured Book List), I found out that I did not care for certain works by Hemingway and for certain poems by Wallace Stevens. And I knew that I did like the works of Charles Dickens (I had read, I think, two of the novels by that time). So in my thirst for knowledge, I encoded in my head the summary judgment that I did not like Twentieth-Century Literature and did like Nineteenth-Century Literature. (Please read those names the way a pretentious twenty-year-old would pronounce capitalized phrases.)

Of course, over the next few decades, I found plenty of exceptions, some even by Hemingway and Stevens. And yet my dumb rule still held sway in my head. Now to be fair, if a twentieth-century work has a certain streak of modernism in it, I will probably like it less than a nineteenth-century work with a certain strain of Romanticism or of Realism. (Grr. Why are some artistic movements capitalized and some not?) And so I avoided current literature for most of the last two decades of the previous century and the first two decades of this.

To be brutally candid, I was pretty old before I realized that just because the year of a book had a 9 as the second digit doesn’t mean that it falls under the rubric of modernism. “Twentieth century” means a lot of things. The twentieth century was a long time, and it witnessed a lot of different artistic sensibilities. I was served poorly by the clunky names of college classes and my facile acceptance of them.

Now good British expository style would find this off-center introduction leading right up to a tangent point with the central topic of the essay. But I see that I’ve missed the mark: I want to talk about one twentieth-century novel that irks me and one twenty-first-century novel. But I took some time to write that preamble, so I’ll leave it there. I hope you find it informative or entertaining!

I’m well ahead of schedule this year and recently read two books not on my plan, both of which I thought deserved a mention. I think both could be considered somewhere in the vicinity of Great Books. The first one is by a Pulitzer winner, and the second one has been mentioned twice on Jeopardy! in the last year.

First up is a note about Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist. I loved this book until the last page. Macon Leary’s series of travel books for the “accidental tourist” is an excellent joke: Macon hates to travel and assumes others do, too, so his guides show his readers how to travel in Europe while seeing as little as possible and feeling as much as possible that they have never left home. He tries to make feeding his dog easier by pouring the dog food down the old coal chute, but then finds that his dog is afraid of the basement and has to be carried down to his meals. That’s good stuff. I could read a thousand pages about Macon. He wants everything regular and predictable and comfortable, and then he meets Muriel Pritchett. I could read two thousand pages about Muriel and never get bored. She offers to train the dog and says she charges $10 a session but will only charge Macon $5 since they’re friends, even though they’ve just met. Their relationship is hilarious and weird and sad and heart-warming, and I loved reading about every high and low for n-1 pages. But Muriel says that a man can’t just throw away a girl like a piece of trash, and then that’s just what Macon does. On the last page. And I wondered, why did I read about this man if he can’t learn anything? The dog is more sympathetic. There. I think I explained why the last page of the book ruined the whole thing for me without giving away the ending, because there’s also a wife, and if you read it, you’ll still be left guessing right to the end just as I was.

I had a much better experience with Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow. I couldn’t help thinking of War and Peace when I saw that the protagonist’s name was Count Rostov, but Towles, while no Tolstoy, is good enough to get away with it. (Is “Towles” pronounced like the first half of “Tolstoy”?) In the earliest days of the Russian Revolution, Rostov is sentenced by a committee to lifelong house arrest in the Metropol Hotel. Rostov has stayed there often and even has a dedicated suite there filled with family heirloom furniture. But the bailiffs pass that familiar door and take him to a small attic room. No problem, Rostov thinks. Become master of your circumstances so they don’t master you. Thus Count Rostov is wise and inspirational. He finds ways to treat the attic as a private suite. Thus Count Rostov is resourceful. It seems the Communist Committee is not the only authority that can force one to live in a hotel, and over the course of his life he befriends one nine-year-old girl and later adopts another. Thus Count Rostov is caring and charming. Eventually he becomes the head waiter at one of the hotel’s restaurants. Thus Count Rostov is humble and industrious. Count Rostov also proves to be intelligent and courageous, but to give examples would give too much away. I won’t say this novel is better than Tolstoy’s book, but this Count Rostov is better than Tosltoy’s Count.

At the Norman, OK, Public Library, I once saw a poster that said, over the face of the Statue of Liberty, “BE FREE! READ!” I get what the poster’s maker and the library’s decorator were trying to do. But all-caps commands coming from the stern visage of that lady are hardly consonant with the notion of liberty. Still, I think of that poster when I enjoin you to read this book. (The gentleman in me, as inspired by Towles’s Count, prohibits me from capitalizing those last three words, but perhaps you should read the phrase the way a pretentious twenty-year-old would.)

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 political 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 thought 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 at 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 truly about an American and a Vietnamese woman, is also at some level an allegory 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 special 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 trotting out 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.