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?