The Lists

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

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

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

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

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

Top 100 – Part VIII

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

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

I’ll begin with a Russian theme.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allegorically Speaking

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

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

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

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

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

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