Earl Derr Biggers' The House Without A Key (#1925Club)

"Amos!" cried Miss Minerva, "That man--why he--"

"Charlie Chan," Amos explained. "I'm glad they brought him. He's the best detective on the force."

 

1925 saw the first of the six Charlie Chan mystery novels. (And I don't know how many movies, etc...)

John Quincy Winterslip has left Boston to come to Honolulu to see what his Aunt Minerva is still doing there. Proper Bostonians don't go gallivanting off to the tropics and even though she's there to see her  cousins Dan and Amos Winterslip, it's time she come home.

But when John Quincy gets off the ship he learns Dan was murdered the night before. He also discovers that while Dan has been living an upright life for a while, he was a black sheep back in the 1880s, and there's still more than one person who would be happy to see him dead.

John Quincy's initial instinct is to pack up his Aunt Minerva and head back to Boston at once, but the Winterslip honour is at stake.

And anyway there's a girl, actually two girls, his distant cousin and Dan's daughter Barbara Winterslip, but more importantly Carlota Maria Egan, beautiful and also the daughter of a suspect.

It's a fun one in the Golden Age mystery tradition, more American than British, not an amateur detective, a few more chase scenes and a bit more violence. (A fist fight! An abduction with an escape!) John Quincy hangs out with Charlie Chan and comes to the correct solution, just a bit later than Chan and Chan has to rescue him. The romance is completely satisfactory.

In fact, really the only downside is that, though I last read it twenty-five years ago, I remembered the murderer and the solution. But I'm quite sure I didn't guess it the first time.

Biggers, already a professional writer, created Charlie Chan because he was impressed by an actual detective of Chinese ancestry on the Honolulu police force Chang Apana and disliked the whole idea of the Yellow Peril.

It's the 1925 Club week! Thanks to Kaggsy and Simon for hosting.

 

I see Fanda also read the novel and enjoyed it this week. 

 

J. G. Farrell's Troubles (#1970Club)

"In those days the Majestic was still standing in Kilnalough at the very end of a slim peninsula covered with dead pines leaning here and there at odd angles." [5]

The opening of J. G. Farrell's Troubles. Those days are 1919, and the Majestic is a grand old hotel in Ireland, by then fairly dilapidated. The hotel was bought by the Protestant widower Edward Spencer some years before; the vendor told him the hotel attracted a regular clientele, but what he didn't tell Edward was that very few of that clientele had money to pay their bills.

Edward has four children, the oldest Angela, a son Ripon, and teenage twin terrors, Faith and Charity. Angela has her Major, who arrives in Kilnalough at the start of the novel.

"In the summer of 1919, not long before the great Victory Parade marched up Whitehall, the Major left hostpital and went to Ireland to claim his bride, Angela Spencer. At least he fancied that the claiming of a bride might come into it. But nothing definite had been settled." [7]

Major Brendan Archer had met Angela in Brighton when on health leave in 1916. They'd kissed once, he'd returned to the trenches, and ever after he was receiving letters from "your loving fiancée, Angela."

Brendan is particularly hapless at the business of romance:

"Until now, incredible though it may seem, the Major had never considered that love, like war, is best conducted with experience of tactics." [253]

When the Major gets to Kilnalough, Angela avoids him. She was tubercular the whole time. ("I thought you knew.") 

There was another prospect, but the Major hadn't even realized: she writes that he hoped he didn't mind, but after waiting, she eventually married someone else. "She oppressed him, though, by the intensity of her feeling for him, and that was the principal thing he now remembered about her. She had had a tendency to hug him violently, squeezing the air out of his lungs--it's distressing to be squeezed very hard if you are not trying to squeeze the other person back. One feels trapped." [255]

And there's a third girl he's attracted to: Sarah, but she's Catholic. After Angela dies he allows himself to fall completely in love, but just like with Angela, the Major barely talks to Sarah. After a year of aimless loitering, he bumbles out a proposal: 

    "Look here, I want you to be my wife."  He could say no more. He could not move. He stood there waiting like a pillar of salt. He could see, though, that it was no go...

    She said crossly, "Oh, I know you do, Brendan." [349]

Hapless!

All the while Brendan Archer is loitering in Ireland, and not getting married, the Majestic continues to fall down or is pulled down by desperate or angry Catholics; its owner, Edward Spencer is going mad in his attempt to hold up some sort of Protestant Irish standard. Major Archer, Edward Spencer, the Majestic hotel--almost a character in itself--are all of a piece: decaying, under attack, committed to vanishing and misguided standards, Anglo-Irish, ineffectual. If you're a symbol-spotting kind of person, the Majestic hotel is definitely a stand-in for the last years of the Protestant Irish Ascendancy.

The book ends with the arrival of the Irish Free State in 1922; the Protestants flee and the Majestic burns to the ground.

The book has a blurb on the back from The Guardian: "Sad, tragic, also very funny." Sad and very funny both are abundantly true; the tragic, though, is a bit more of question: it depends on whether you think they're so hapless, they deserve what's coming to them. And they might! 😉

J. G. Farrell wrote three novels in the 70s--this was the first--called the Empire trilogy, The remaining two are The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and The Singapore Grip (1978). Troubles won the Lost Booker for those novels that came out in 1970 and due to a rules change weren't eligible for any Booker Prize. The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker for its year as well. All three are great. All three focus entirely on representative members of the Empire; the subject populations--Irish, Indian, Malay or Chinese, respectively--are anonymous, nearly invisible. Did Farrell not want to appropriate the stories of the oppressed? Did he simply not know those people as well? (Farrell was born in Liverpool, but came from a Protestant Irish family of colonial administrators.) Or did the stories of hapless English in colonial settings just seem funnier? I suspect the last myself.

John Banville in a well-done introduction calls this Farrell's masterpiece. Could be, though I'd plump for The Siege of Krishnapur myself. Funny as this is, Siege is even funnier. It's also shorter and would make a better introduction if you haven't read any of them. But they're all three great and I suspect I'm going on to reread the other two as well.

It's the week of the 1970 Club, hosted by Simon & Kaggsy! Isn't that a cool logo?

My organizing post for this fall's club is here, with links to a few books from 1970 already on the blog. (Tony Hillerman, Brian Moore, Shirley Hazzard.)

Also:

"...how incrediby Irish it all is..." [24]

This is my trip to Ireland for this year's European Reading Challenge.

 

Page numbers are from the New York Review of Books edition shown above.

I'm hoping to get a couple more in this week. Are you reading something for the 1970 Club? Any favorites from that year?

The Jena Set

"Listen, this good old Jena really is a den of murderers after all. You have no idea how everyone gossips about everything behind your back, even the people you wouldn't expect."

-Letter from Caroline Schlegel to her husband August Wilhelm Schlegel, 5 May 1801

That's a little strong but there is a lot of gossip in Andrea Wulf's new book Magnificent Rebels about the figures of what she labels the Jena set. At the time (1795-1806) Jena was an important German university town near Weimar. The gossip includes: Who's sleeping with whom. Who's feuding with whom. Who's pro-Napoleon and who's not. Who's dying and who pulls through.

But they're people worth gossiping about, with Goethe the best known. He's the old man of the group, 46 at the start, respectable, though not entirely, since he's living with, and not yet married to, Christiane Vulpius. There's a boatload of Friedrichs, and Wulf conveniently provides a Dramatis Personae, because among those Friedrichs are Schiller, Schlegel, and Schelling, plus one (Friedrich von Hardenberg) whose name fortunately doesn't start with 'Sch', and better known as Novalis anyway. Poets, translators, philosophers. Kant is an early booster, and Hegel a late addition to the group. 

At first there's harmony. They start magazines, philosophize together, read each other's poetry. Goethe and Schiller edit each other's work. Goethe arranges for Johann Fichte a job as professor at Jena; his lectures become enormously popular. Later Goethe is equally instrumental in getting Friedrich Schelling an appointment as a professor of philosophy. It's Friedrich Schlegel who popularizes the word Romantic in its modern sense, from the French word 'roman', meaning a novel.

Wulf is most interested in Caroline Schlegel. (Her name through most of the book. At the start she's the widow Böhmer; near the end, after a long affair with him, she marries Schelling.) August Wilhelm Schlegel is her second husband, and the two of them are responsible for what Wulf says are still the standard translations of Shakespeare in German. But the affairs, the literary feuds, the short tempers, begin to tell. Fichte is fired from his professorship for atheism. The Schlegels and Schiller end up in a bitter feud over editing and won't talk to each other, though Goethe attempts to mediate. By 1806, the year of the Battle of Jena, where Napoleon decimates the army of Prussia and its allies, most of the principals have already left town. The town itself is battered. But their legacy lives on, propagated by figures who write books about them, such as Madame de Staël and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

A pretty fascinating crowd in its own right, but especially fascinating if you're a fan of Penelope Fitzgerald's delightful The Blue Flower.

And of course I then had to reread it. It centers around the poet and novelist Novalis, but ends in 1797, when Novalis' fiancée dies of tuberculosis. Most of the same figures appear, though. 

"Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history."

  "...What did they talk about?"

"Nature-magnetism, galvanism, animal magnetism and freemasonry."

"I see the fault in Fichte's system. There is no place in it for love."

"If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching."

"But I have, I can't deny it, a certain inexpressible sense of immortality."

All sayings of Novalis in the novel and I suspect based on his writings, though only the first (which serves as the epigraph) is given a citation. It's funny and touching. A great novel.

Novalis himself dies in 1801, at the age of 28, also of tuberculosis.

Pynchon's V.

"Stencil has stayed off Malta."

Ever since I've been signing up for the European Reading Challenge, there's been these two big historical/encyclopedic novels that turn around Malta I've been thinking about rereading. It turns out this is the year for one, V., Pynchon's debut novel. (The other is Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers.)

Part of the resistance was I'm not sure I'm capable of saying anything about either one.

But let's see. First, the story: the novel has two interlocking plot lines. One in 1956, (the present, roughly; the novel comes out in 1963) and the other in a series of discrete moments from 1898 to 1943. The protagonist of the present is Benny Profane, in his early 20s, child of a religiously mixed marriage (Jewish/Italian Catholic), born in New York City, recently having served a hitch in the US Navy, but now at odds and ends. (Which things, I think, are basically Pynchon himself, except Pynchon's mix is Episcopal/Catholic, and he grew up further out on Long Island, not in the city itself.) The other timeline is the result of an investigation by Herbert Stencil into a woman V., possibly Veronica Wren, who was, as a teenager, caught up in the assassination of a British spy in Cairo in 1898. Herbert's father is Sydney Stencil, a British Foreign Service agent/spy. V. may (or may not) be Herbert's mother. 

Benny is a schlemiel, and is constantly at war with objects: alarm clocks don't wake him; flashlight batteries fail; at one point he tries to rappel down the side of a building and is left hanging upside down. Benny has (imaginary?) late night conversations with a crash-test dummy: they're soul-brothers of a sort, individuals whom the powerful mechanisms of the modern world are out to damage, possibly destroy.

But une guerre contre les objets is the honourable position; the alternative is V., gradually turning herself into an object, glass eye, false teeth, artificial leg. This conflict is Pynchon's theme.

"'I detect allegory in all this,' she said.

'No,' said Slab. 'That is on the same intellectual level as doing the Times crossword puzzle on Sunday. Phony. Unworthy of you.'"

There are moments when it feels like a schematic message novel--Pynchon's message would definitely be humanist, anti-machine, admirable--but the novel escapes allegorical reductionism by a deliberate fudging. V. is not just symbol of the dehumanization of people into objects in the 20th century. (Appropriate as that might be, with the ultimate dehumanization being nuclear annihilation. 1956 is the year of the Suez crisis, important to the novel, and of Hungary. War seemed closer.) But V. is also the woman Veronica Wren, maybe somebody's mother, who's capable of falling in love. (Though not with Sydney Stencil.)

The novel's also funny, or at least I think so:

"Mountebank is a dying profession; all the good ones have moved into politics."

Pynchon is also famous for his zany song lyrics, which can be found in V., although I think he gets better at this as he goes along.

Pynchon also gets better at female characters--though never great--and the women are thinly realized in this, with Benny Profane's sometime girlfriend Rachel Owlglass being the best-drawn of the lot. From Pynchon's (wonderful) introduction to his collection of short stories Slow Learner (1984):

"Modern readers will be, at least, put off by an unacceptable level of racist, sexist, and proto-Fascist talk throughout this story. I wish I could say that this is only Pig Bodine's voice, but, sad to say, it was also my own at the time. The best I can say for it now is that, for its time, it is probably authentic enough."

Pynchon is writing of one of his stories in Slow Learner, but Pig Bodine is a character that also shows up in V., and it's also kind of true of the novel.

Still, I find it a pretty great novel. And it reaches its climax on Malta. Stencil had stayed off Malta; I had, too; but no longer.

You could even call it a classic...

which I've read a few times:

I guess I can treat myself to a new copy. 😉

Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark

"She would live for it, work for it, die for it; but she was going to have it; time after time, height after height. She could hear the crash of the orchestra again, and she rose on the brasses. She would have it, what the trumpets were singing! She would have it, have it--it!"

Jules Breton's Song of the Lark

Thea Kronborg, the heroine of Willa Cather's novel The Song of the Lark, is in Chicago and has just heard an orchestral program beginning with Dvorak's New World Symphony and concluding with music from Wagner's Ring Cycle.

And well, what then? She gets it.

Thea grows up in a small town in rural Colorado in the late 1800s. The big city is Denver--not that big at the time--and the bigger is Chicago. The family background is Swedish. Her father is a minister, rival to the Baptists across town, and she's in the middle of a mess of children. Her parents are good people and are good with her, but she needs to get out, to get to the big city, and even they recognize it. She takes piano lessons from the washed-up Wunsch, a drunkard, but once a solid German musician, who knows she has a gift; the town doctor, Howard Archie, saves her from pneumonia; Ray Kennedy, a brakeman on the railroad, plans to marry her when she gets older; the Mexican community in town--Spanish Johnny, Mrs. Tellamantez--loves to hear her sing.

Still the challenges are hard: she's a girl, in the 1800s, lower middle class at best, born in the back of beyond, 'hating a world that let her grow up so ignorant.' If she didn't have her gift--of a voice--even her intelligence, her solid grounding in music, wouldn't have been enough. And if she didn't have people looking out for her--Dr. Archie, Ray Kennedy, Wunsch, her parents--she wouldn't have made it either, she would have died on the way, either literally or figuratively. But she does, and she does.

So: it's the story of a girl becoming an artist, a Künstlerroman. (Or should it be Künstlerinroman?) What's the formula to success? (In case you wanted to know.) Early training--though her Hungarian piano teacher in Chicago tells her she didn't start the piano early enough to become a great concert pianist; support from those around her; luck; talent, naturally. Hard work, of course.  Thea's considered a bit of a grind by most everyone around her:

"A growing girl needs lots of sleep, Ray providently remarked.

Thea moved restlessly on the buggy cushions. "They need other things more," she muttered.

But she also has to be strong. Thea gets various things from the men in her childhood: her father is learned, the town doctor looks after her, her music-teacher, but from her mother she gets her 'constitution,' and that's a crucial ingredient. In Mrs. Kronborg's case, her strong constitution means that she can bear seven children, raise them, and never be sick; it plays out differently in Thea's case, but she, too, has incredible stamina.

It seems Willa Cather regretted the title. Lark-song ended up suggesting twittering small birds to most, but Cather didn't mean that: she was thinking of the painting by Breton. There's a solidity to the farm-girl in the painting and that was what Cather wanted to convey.

The last element to come to Thea was a certain self-knowledge. She goes to Panther Canyon in Arizona and lives in an Anasazi cliff-dwelling until she achieves the necessary confidence and self-awareness. Panther Canyon is Walnut Canyon (near Flagstaff) in disguise:

And so she becomes not Thea, but Kronborg, a major opera singer.

I went through a bit of a Willa Cather phase twenty years ago or so, and I read the novel then. It's a great novel, and I was glad to reread it. At the time, though, I figured it was basically autobiographical, with a change of art from writing to opera for dramatic purposes. (Also the love object changed from a Frederica to a Fred because Cather would have felt she had to.) And that's not entirely wrong--there is a lot of autobiography in the book. But what I didn't know, until I read Alex Ross' Wagnerism earlier this year, is that's not all there is. Quite a lot of Thea Kronborg is drawn from the actual Swedish-American opera star Olive Fremstad. Cather wrote a fair amount of journalism, especially early in her career, reviewed several of Fremstad's performances, and later wrote an extended profile of Fremstad. The two became friends. Also Alex Ross, who would know--he's the music writer for the New Yorker--thinks that Willa Cather actually knows quite a bit about opera. I'm sure that all went past me the first time--and kind of did again this time, though I tried to think about it more--because I don't really know anything about opera. 

Anyway, a great novel, and I'm glad I put it on my Classics Club spin list! 

Men of Iron (Children's Classic)

 "...that special providence which guards reckless lads befriended them, as it has thousands of their kind before and since..."

It's the year 1400 in England and King Henry IV has just taken over from Richard II. It was not a peaceful transition and the blind Baron Falworth lost his estates as an outcome early in Henry's reign. The Falworths are living quietly in poverty.

Our hero is Myles Falworth, the only child of the blind baron, and he's eight that year. He's our reckless lad. 

Myles is sent to squire for the powerful Earl of Mackworth, an old friend of his father, but one who has managed to stay on the right side of Henry IV. The novel has three main adventures for Myles: the castle has a fagging system where the older apprentice knights demand service of the younger ones; Myles resents this and resists it. Later, chasing a ball into a forbidden garden, he meets the Earl's daughter and niece.

The third adventure is the especially suspenseful one, and you'll just have to read it! But it does involve the future Henry V.

Howard Pyle was an American illustrator and author of children's 
books who died youngish in 1911. Men of Iron came out in 1891. He also did a version of Robin Hood and various volumes of Arthuriana. He drew the illustrations for the volume I have.

The copy I have was my Dad's when he was a child and it was one of his favorites. He got it as a Christmas gift in 1939. And I read it more than once myself as a kid... It still holds up pretty well, I think.

My Dad (around the age he got this book) with my Grandfather and Tam.

David Copperfield

 "I will never desert Mr. Micawber!"

I decided to reread David Copperfield because--well, does one really need a reason to reread David Copperfield? But I've been thinking about rereading it recently because of the new movie version directed by Armando Ianucci, The Personal History of David Copperfield:

It's possible to have seen the movie by now, but it is challenging these days and I haven't. Dev Patel should be a good Copperfield; Ben Whishaw as Uriah Heep seems pretty inspired; Peter Capaldi looks promising as Micawber in the clip, though maybe a little Whovian to me. Anyway not Malcolm-Tucker-ish. Capaldi does have to compete with W. C. Fields to be the definitive Micawber. Nevertheless what I'm really looking forward to is Tilda Swinton as Betsey Trotwood, David's aunt. Some day, hopefully soon, I'll manage to see it.

We'll keep the plot summary simple: young David Copperfield is orphaned, he's sent off to be a child laborer, he runs away from that to his Aunt, he makes good, he marries the wrong girl, and finally he gets married to the right girl. You probably knew all that. It's a pretty good read...

A couple of things occurred to me. Maybe it's just because I have Vindication of The Rights of Women in my head, but just as I wondered if Austen knew that book, now I'm wondering if Dickens did, too. Not unlikely, though in googling I didn't find any particular indication. But Dora is educated to pre-Wollstonecraft specifications, with the expected results; Agnes, according to post-Wollstonecraft ideas. It's not that Dora is a bad person, just that she acts as she's been brought up to do.

Marriage, and marrying the right person, is the theme in this. Well, Dickens always has a bit of a message in his novels. Mrs. Strong says she nearly gave way to the 'first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart.' The words register with David who, at the time he hears them, is married to Dora. Dickens wants it to become a bit an ear-worm for us, but it doesn't, not entirely. Instead we remember, "I will never desert Mr. Micawber." Which fits the theme, of course. Emma Micawber's heart's first impulse was equally undisciplined, I guess, certainly her family thought so, but she disciplined her heart to follow Mr. Micawber. She gets rewarded for it in the end. And she's not the only undisciplined heart in the novel. (David, of course, Emily Peggotty, even Betsey Trotwood.) David, through the magic of the omnipotent Victorian novelist, gets to fix that initial error. Dora may be more lamented, but she goes the way of Bertha Rochester and Edward Casaubon. 

My edition includes the introduction G. K. Chesterton wrote for the Everyman's Library. Like all of the Chesterton introductions, it's contrary, but written with verve. He writes:

"The reader does still feel that David's marriage to Dora was a real marriage; and that his marriage to Agnes was nothing, a middle-aged compromise, a taking of the second-best, a sort of spiritualized and sublimated marriage of convenience."

I suspect no actual reader of Copperfield other than Chesterton ever thought anything like this. And Dickens doesn't want you to think this. If David's marriage to Dora feels more real than his marriage to Agnes that's because Dora comes across as a real person, and Agnes is the usual, too-good-to-be-true, Dickensian heroine. But David and Agnes are the ideal Dickensian couple, and we're meant to feel warm and fuzzy when they do get married. (And I did...)

I had some other thoughts but I'll stop for now.

David Copperfield was a late sub onto the field for a couple of other books (Decameron, Razor's Edge) but definitely qualifies for a couple of my challenges.

Did somebody just say it was supposed to be Novellas in November? Oy! Now you tell me!

Have you seen the movie? If you've read it, what did you think?

And...I will never desert Mr. Micawber!

A Suitable Boy

"'You too will marry a boy that I choose,' said Mrs. Rupa Mehra firmly to her younger daughter." 

A Suitable Boy is Vikram Seth's massive novel (1474 pages in my edition) about life in India in the early 1950s. It first came out in 1993. 

With that many pages there are, of course, a couple of interlocking plots. They're spread out across four interrelated families. 

The one that gives the novel its title is Lata Mehra's search--or maybe more her mother's search on Lata's behalf--for a husband. Lata's family is Hindu, of the Khatri (a merchant) caste, middle-class, but after the death of her father, a bit impoverished. Lata herself is a college student majoring in English. There are three main candidates. In order of appearance: Kabir Durrani, a fellow student of Lata's who's a Muslim; Lata's brother-in-law, Amit Chatterji, a well-known poet in English, and a Brahmin of a well-to-do family; and Haresh Khanna, an up-and-coming manager in the shoe industry, of the right caste. This has the fun of a rom-com plot, with various parties scheming for and against, while Lata tries to decide. It ends in a marriage, and probably even the right one. (Though, if you've read it, did you think so?)

Another plot is political: Lata's older sister married Pran Kapoor. Pran's father Mahesh is a member of the Congress party and at the start, the Minister of Revenue for the (imaginary) state of Purva Pradesh. Mahesh Kapoor is the author of an important land reform bill that has only just been passed, but is still under legal challenge when the first national election since Partition and the independence of India is taking place. There are machinations between wings of the Congress party that catch up Minister Kapoor.

The third (the last major, but not entirely the last) subplot involves Maan Kapoor, Minister Kapoor's other son, who is living a dissipated life and has fallen in love with an older (Muslim) singer of ghazals, Saeed Bai. Maan's best friends are the twins Firoz and Imtiaz Khan; Saeed Bai has other connections to the Khans, a Muslim family.

The Mehras, the Kapoors, the Chatterjis, and the Khans. Whew. Got all that?

At fifteen hundred pages with a marriage plot, it's a clear nod to Victorian triple-deckers; and, of the various attempts to recreate a Victorian novel in modern times, I think it's a pretty good one, better than, say, The Bonfire of the Vanities or Palliser's The Quincunx. By setting it in the 50s, in India, Seth has got more opportunities for drama in his marriage plot than a contemporary North American story. (Which might run--"Should we get married?"/"Yes, let's."--and our story is done.)

The space allows Seth to go full Dickens on us, looking at classes from the well-to-do urban sophisticates, like the Chatterjis, to poor, rural peasants, though I did think he was more convincing with the former. Politics are important. For the most part he gives all the good lines to the partisans he likes: secular, liberal. Hindu nationalists, in particular, come across as villains. Well, we knew what Dickens' party line was, too. 

It's pretty enjoyable. Is it a masterpiece? Mmm, possibly not. 

Seth is pretty good about not telling us what to think most of the way through. That breaks down a bit at the end, though. There are more authorial intrusions like:

'The events involved Maan; and as a result of them the family was never the same again.' [1262]

'...the poor ignorant grieving fool...' [1332]

I don't think this added. 

Also Seth's pretty easy on his characters, probably too much so. Some bad things happen: Muslim-Hindu riots, people crushed by crowding at a religious ceremony. But the main characters are snatched from danger by the authorial hand. Now Tolstoy likes his characters; Dickens likes his characters. Still Prince Andrei dies, Anna dies, Little Nell dies, Sydney Carton is actually guillotined. If you're writing a vast social novel larger than a romantic comedy, something bad probably needs to happen to at least one character. In A Suitable Boy, the fairly minor character Rasheed, Maan's Urdu teacher dies, but 1.) he is minor, 2.) the moment of his death is avoided, and 3.) the madness that leads to his suicide didn't really convince. 

Still, I don't want to leave you with bad thoughts about the book. It entertains. It's funny, informative, engaging, serious where it needs to be. This is the second time I've read it. The first time was twenty-five years ago when it was fairly new. It's interesting the things I remembered: I had pretty good recall of the rom-com plot, and I remembered the hilarious banter of the Chatterjis, who are always spouting off in couplets. Though the best (😉 ) bit of poetry is this triolet from Mr. Nowrojee, the founder of the Brahmpur Literary Society:

Fate snatched away sweet Toru Dutt
   At the soft age of twenty-two.
The casuarina tree was cut.
Fate snatched away sweet Toru Dutt
No bulbuls haunt its branches but
   Her poems still haunt me and you.
Fate snatched away sweet Toru Dutt
   At the soft age of twenty-two.

This gives Twain's 'Ode To Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec'd' a run for its money.

Also I wondered, how did we read things like this back in the day? It was 1995 when I first read this, and when I looked back, I see it I read it on an airplane or in a hotel room in Dubai (where I was working.) So I was particularly unable to look anything up. But Seth has really done his homework, though he wears his learning lightly. But it's only now I can plunder Wikipedia and learn about the Khatri caste, co-respondent shoes, A. L. A Schechter Poultry Corp vs United States, or, indeed, that Toru Dutt was an actual poet who died at, well, twenty-one, in fact. (The latter in particular was a surprise. With a name like that, I assumed she was made up.) Did I need to know these things to enjoy the novel the first time? Clearly not. Do you read books with a tablet in reach to look things up? I'm not 100% sure that's actually an advantage but I do now. And it's interesting to discover things.

I reread it because there's a new mini-series version, directed by Mira Nair. It's already been shown on the BBC, and it was the closing night film at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Well, the film festival was challenging this year. We had thoughts about seeing it, but I hadn't finished rereading the novel and we would have had to stream six hours of video in a twelve-hour window, which is a little too much binging for us. But I do hope to see it soon. It looks like fun:

This is now a ridiculously long post, but well, it's a long book, too...

Peer Gynt

"But just what is the Gyntish self?"

I reread this to prepare for reading something else in the future. We'll see how that pans out...

Peer Gynt (1867) is a long dramatic poem, a play if you will, by Henrik Ibsen, but so long as to be almost unperformable. At any rate, Ibsen didn't imagine it being performed, until later when he did, and got his acquaintance Edvard Grieg to write some now-famous incidental music for a production.

Peer Gynt is the (anti-?) hero of his namesake play. His father is dead, having died drunk and nearly broke; his mother is still alive, exasperated by her wayward son, but not to the point where she will let anybody else say the bad things about him she allows herself to say.

There was an actual Peer Gynt fifty or a hundred years before the play, but he had already moved into folklore by the time Ibsen took him up as a subject.

The problem with Peer is that he's an irresponsible liar. I'm not sure I should be reading any more things (more than I already do) at this time about irresponsible liars, but be that as it may. When the play starts, Peer, returning home after a month supposedly hunting--his clothes are shredded--tells his mother he was abducted by a flying reindeer. She doesn't believe him, but his lies are so vivid, she starts to retroactively fear for his life anyway.

The play/poem, 200 pages in my edition, is Peer's entire life; the irresponsibility overwhelms the early lying, but then sheer immorality overwhelms the irresponsibility. Peer and his mother need money; there's a neighbor heiress who is attracted to Peer and is about to be married against her wishes. At that wedding Peer sees Solveig; maybe she's the one he wants? Instead Peer abducts the bride, but in the end refuses to marry her; and so now he's now wanted by the law.

What does Peer really want? What is that Gyntish self? He meets the daughter of the king of the trolls (or is that just a fantasy?) and could marry her, but then he'd have to live the trollish life, adopt the trollish motto: "to thy own self, be...enough." (There's also the little matter of a required eye surgery that makes anything ugly look beautiful.)

You see the beginnings of the existentialist crisis here. He flees Norway to try on various roles, all of which temporarily seem the proper Gyntish self: rich man, prophet, lover, even archeologist. None of them last. He behaves pretty badly in doing these things: it's the slave trade makes him rich, etc.

In the end he returns to Norway an old man. He meets the devil, (presumably, not so named) but worse he meets the Button-Moulder: if you go to heaven, then great, you've gone to heaven; if you go the other way, well, then, at least you were a great sinner, and you have preserved your identity. But the Button-Moulder! He recycles the soul-stuff from wishy-washy types by melting it all down to start anew. If you've never found yourself, your true Gyntish self, it's the Button-Moulder for you! And the Button-Moulder tells Peer that Peer is his kind of material.

This makes it all a bit Faust with a twist.

Does Peer save himself from the Button-Moulder? The ending is deliberately ambiguous. Should he have been saved? Enh, I don't know. Poking around, I found this quote from Robert Bly, "He does horrible things throughout the play and yet you end up loving him very much." I'm not sure I entirely felt that love, but clearly some do, and your mileage may vary...

In any case, I suppose even basically horrible people need to find themselves, too.

The edition I read was an older Penguin translated by Peter Watts. It was a verse translation and it was OK, but I wasn't amazed. I found the Robert Bly quote looking for alternative translations. Watts:

"...with a huge concern like mine,
that gave employment to some thousands,
to close the firm down altogether
becomes particularly hard."

Bly:

"Thousands worked for me--to an enjoyment.
But I became concerned about unemployment!"

I'm not entirely sure between those two. I assume the Watts is much closer to the text, but Ibsen rhymes in Norwegian, and the Bly has more brio. The Bly doesn't seem to have ever been printed, though it was the text for a production at the Guthrie Theater in Minnesota, with Mark Rylance (!) as Peer Gynt in 2007. That would have been fun. Penguin has replaced the older Peer Gynt I have with a new translation by Geoffrey Hill; Oxford has one translated by Christopher Fry. If you have ideas, let me know! Because my copy has basically dissolved after this reading, and Peer Gynt is after all a classic...

Some other quotes I copied out from the Watts translation:

The King of the Trolls: "My son, we trolls aren't as black as we're painted--
that's another difference between us and you!"

-Act II

(Meaning, we humans *are* as black as we're painted?)

The Great Boyg: "He was too strong. There were women behind him."

-Act II

Peer Gynt: "'Exalted?' Yes, that's what will happen to me;
Anything else is unthinkable."

-Act IV

Peer Gynt: ...I've just one question first:
what, after all, is this 'being one's self'? 

The Button-Moulder: A curious question indeed, on the lips
of a man who has just-- 

Peer Gynt: A direct answer, please. 

The Button-Moulder: Being one's self means slaying one's Self
But that answer's presumably wasted on you,
and therefore let's say: 'Above everything else
it's observing the Master's intentions in all things.' 

Peer Gynt: But what can one do if one's never found out
what the Master intended? 

The Button-Moulder: One just has to guess. 

Peer Gynt: But a man's intuitions so often prove wrong,
and then one is sunk, as it were, in mid-ocean! 

The Button-Moulder: Exactly, Peer Gynt, it's when insight is lacking
that the lad with the hoof makes the best of his captures.

-Act V

So: to thine own self be true?

Call Me Ishmael

"I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.

It is geography at bottom, a hell of a wide land from the beginning. That made the first American story (Parkman's): exploration." 

Charles Olson was born in Massachusetts in 1910 and grew up there. He attended Wesleyan, Yale, and finally worked on a Ph.D. at Harvard in American Studies. In 1939 he won a Guggenheim grant to study Melville. Call Me Ishmael was the result. After various war-related jobs, and a stint working for the Democratic party and FDR's re-election in 1944, the book came out in 1947. Though he had academic qualifications, as the quote above might show, it's not exactly an academic book.

Olson might have seen SPACE as the crucial American quality because he occupied a lot of it: he was 6'8" tall.

The book has a certain oracular quality to it:

"I am interested in a Melville who decided sometime in 1850 to write a book about the whaling industry and what happened to a man in command of one of the most successful machines Americans had perfected up to that time--the whaleship. 

This captain, Ahab by name, knew space. He rode it across the seven seas. He was an able skipper, what the fishing people I was raised with call a highliner. Big catches: he brought back holds barrel full of oil of the sperm, the light of American and European communities up until the 19th century. 

This Ahab had gone wild. The object of his attention was something unconscionably big and white. He had become a specialist: he had all space concentrated into the form of a whale called Moby-Dick. And he assailed it as Columbus an ocean, La Salle a continent, the Donner Party their winter Pass."

"Some men ride on such space, others have to fasten themselves like a tent stake to survive. As I see it Poe dug in and Melville mounted. They are the alternatives."

After the publication of Call Me Ishmael, Olson first taught and then later became the rector of Black Mountain College, in the 50s the gathering place of a substantial strand of modern American art: poetry, dance, music, sculpture and other visual arts; Robert Duncan, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly. Olson himself was also a noted poet.

I read the book umpteen years ago and I remembered it more for its oracular quality about the nature of American art--about which I think he's interesting and astute--and I suspect that's what it's read for now. After all my edition is City Lights Books, and not some university press. I was twigged to it by friends interested in the American avant-garde, not by Melville scholars. He's definitely influenced by his era: the Great Depression has led him to think about American art in terms of economics and industry.

But in reading it again, and right after reading Moby-Dick, I have also discovered that he did real work on Melville. The Melville revival--the Moby-Dick revival--is, in 1947, not to mention 1939 when he gets the grant, still quite new. It's not so long since Melville died. Olson has gotten hold, from Melville's granddaughter, of Meville's personal copy of Shakespeare, in six volumes, the one Melville read just before composing Moby-Dick, and there are scribblings in it and Olson builds arguments around them. He's seen Melville's copy of Don Quixote, which Melville read in 1856 and has other scribblings, and Olson has things to say about that.

Olson has also read around in the history of the whaling industry and is full of fascinating facts: whaling was the third largest source of export goods for the US in the 1840s; of 900 whaling ships world wide in 1846, 735 were American; the Essex, the ship destroyed by a whale and model for the Pequod, set sail on its fatal voyage in 1819, the year of Melville's birth; of the eight survivors from the voyage of the Essex, at least five went on to become captains of their own ship.

It's fascinating, short, (120 pages) and very highly recommended.

Actual facts about Olson come from Robert Creeley's introduction to Olson's Selected Writings, which I also pulled off the shelf to look at.

One more book for Brona's Moby-Dick readalong!

Two by Brian Dillon (#FitzcarraldoFortnight)

I first read Brian Dillon's Essayism (2017) just under two years ago. I didn't blog about it, but I did feel it was one of the best things I read that year. So when I saw In The Dark Room late last year, I picked it up. I read it this week and then reread Essayism.

In The Dark Room (2005) is Dillon's first book, and the Fitzcarraldo Edition is a reprint with an introduction by Frances Wilson.

"...a reflection on memory might also be a reflection on my memory..."

-p. 235

That quote is a bit of an aside in context, but gives a strong sense of the way the book (I suspect) came into being for Dillon. He had a sad and (what has fortunately, in the West at least, become) a rare childhood: he was orphaned at twenty. His mother died when he was fifteen after a long bout with a painful disease, scleroderma; she was also afflicted by depression. Then his father died of a heart attack five years later. So when he started thinking about memory as a topic, it's understandable he might not want to include an examination of his own. But what memories do any of us have more readily available to examine?

So he centers his study of memory around his memories of his own childhood, and of his parents. There are five organizing areas in the book, hooks that memory often gets hung on: the house he grew up in, the things that survived his parents, photographs of his parents, their actual bodies, and revisiting the places associated with his childhood. What does it mean to look at a photograph of one's parents together before one was conceived? What can you say about them, though knowing them well, but not in that moment?

Dillon is forthright about his own battles with depression, and 'The Dark Room' alludes more to that than to the process of making photographs. He writes with deep reference to other literary investigations of memory, with Augustine's Confessions and Proust being particularly important, but also Joe Brainard's I Remember, Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, Virginia Woolf, Sebald. A fascinating investigation.

Then I went back to Essayism. Dillon takes the word from Musil's The Man Without Qualities. The title of chapter 62, in the Sophie Wilkins translation, reads:

I remembered Essayism as a wonderfully insightful book about the glories of reading essays, sometimes (and especially for Dillon) a melancholic pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. And it is very good on a number of essayists. When I first read it, I was so overwhelmed by his (judicious, but real) praise for Palinurus' (Cyril Connolly's) impossible masterpiece The Unquiet Grave I immediately went and reread that. He was equally good, I thought, on Sontag, on Sir Thomas Browne, on Elizabeth Hardwick, on Montaigne. Less time was spent--but still it was quality time-- with Didion, Benjamin, Barthes, Cioran, Gass. For instance he says of first volume of Sontag's diary, (from when she was a teenager and in her early twenties) that it is 'quite endearing in its pretension.' Which is exactly what I thought when I read it, though without the wit to phrase it so well. He was so good I wished he'd told me about essayists I already loved, Hazlitt in particular.

I remembered from that first reading there was an autobiographical component as well, but it was only in reading it immediately after In The Dark Room that I realized how important that was to its conception. That old black dog had been hanging around again and Dillon needed to work. For Dillon, essayism, to essay, to look closely at things and write about them, is a crucial part of maintaining who we are. Good thoughts for a blogger.

I think both of these are very good. Essayism is a little more outward-looking, and I prefer it, probably for that reason, but In The Dark Room is also very good, and especially if your tastes run more to autobiography or memoir.

I also have a copy of This Little Art by Kate Briggs and I'm hoping to read it this week. I earlier read Flights and actually as a Fitzcarraldo book; it was later released by Riverhead (Penguin) and the Fitzcarraldo isn't distributed here anymore. I liked it, but it did occasionally make me squeamish, I admit. I very much liked Drive Your Plow Over The Bones Of Dead, but read that in the Riverhead hardback and didn't blog about it.

Thanks to Kaggsy for the great idea of hosting this!

Side note: I'm forever fascinated by the vagaries of my spellchecker. Didion and Barthes are famous enough that my spellchecker approves. Cioran and Gass, enh, not so much. I think of Palinurus as a pretty important character in the Aeneid, as well as being Cyril Connolly's pseudonym, but that's not good enough. Aeneas himself checks out OK, unsurprisingly. Anchises yes, but Achates, however faithful he might have been, no.

Outline for a long post on Moby-Dick

"And so here, O Reader, has the time come for us two to part. Toilsome was our journeying together; not without offence; but it is done...Yet our relation was a kind of sacred one; doubt not that!...Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely; thine also it was to hear truly. Farewell."

Humpty and Herman sitting around with some poetry in the background.
Shakespeare is above and to the right. Milton further above and to the left.

Quoting Carlyle (from the very end of The French Revolution) may seem a little odd in thinking about Moby-Dick, but that peroratio comes to mind for me pretty much every time I finish a long and difficult book.

So what are the things that occurred to me on this, my second complete reading of Moby-Dick?

Funny: It really is funny in the beginning. First, Ishmael's voice is comic. He's going to knock the hats off people if he doesn't cut loose in some other way. Then he gets cozened into sleeping with a cannibal. Bildad and Peleg are the Mutt and Jeff of ship-owners.

Three Parts: The novel comes in three parts. There is a little intermingling of the parts here and there, but basically they are separate. The first is everything up till they lose sight of shore and Ahab appears. This is the funny part. We learn about Ishmael, we like him. We learn about some of the other crew members as well, Queequeg in particular. Queequeg, of course, is simply a funny name.

The second part is reportorial/scientific. It's the longest. We learn about whales and the process of whaling. This is the part that bores people now, and I believe where I punted on my first attempt (in high school) to read Moby-Dick. But it is interesting, if less so than the rest. Reading Delbanco's biography earlier informed me to some degree the reportorial was the reason people read Melville's earlier, more successful books. Curiosity about a subject is definitely a reason to read novels, as well as non-fiction.

The third part is the symbolically-loaded tragic ending. I'm not going to do a plot summary. You know how it ends. It is both exciting and affecting, in a tragic flaw kind of way.

Epic Similes: I could have been reading the Iliad. I mean, really, I could have.

"As in the hurricane that sweeps the plain, men fly the neighborhood of some lone, gigantic elm, whose very height and strength but render it so much the more unsafe, because so much the more a mark for thunderbolts; so at those last words of Ahab's many of the mariners did run from him in a terror of dismay."  -Chapter 119

"The ship tore on; leaving such a furrow in the sea as when a cannon-ball, missent, becomes a plough-share and turns up the level field." -Chapter 134

Homer's got nothing on this dude.

Language: Which brings me to language. Nearing the end of my reading I made a list of roughly contemporary novels. (Moby-Dick comes out in 1851.)

David Copperfield, 1849-50
Wuthering Heights, 1847
Jane Eyre, 1847
Villette, 1853
Vanity Fair, 1848
Scarlet Letter, 1850

The language in Moby-Dick doesn't sound like any of those to me, though I didn't go back and look. Not even Wuthering Heights or Scarlet Letter. It's weirdly out of its time. The Delbanco biography said that Melville had ordered up Shakespeare, Milton, and Sir Thomas Browne from his bookseller before he started writing Moby-Dick in earnest, and Melville is clearly channelling a language already around two hundred years old for him. Quite successfully, I'd say. But also: Carlyle. Sartor-Resartus comes out in book form in 1836, and Melville could have read that as well as The French Revolution (quoted above) and On Heroes and Hero-Worship. I have no idea if Melville did read Carlyle, but Carlyle is famous (so it's likely enough) and he's the one roughly contemporary author whose language sounds to me something like Melville's. It may just be that both of them were absorbing Burton and Browne, though.

Macbeth: As long as we're thinking about those Shakespearean precursors, I've seen mention of King Lear. Well, of course. But not Macbeth. But just as Macbeth had two pledges he would not die, so does Ahab. But Birnam Wood did come to Dunsinane, and a man not of woman born showed at the just the wrong moment for Macbeth. So, too, does the Parsee go before Ahab, but appear again; and so, too, does Ahab die by hemp, though in the middle of the ocean.

Quotes: I haven't been issuing quotes from my reading as I went along (though thanks! to Brona and Rick and Denise and Laurie for some great ones.) But I couldn't resist a few myself, even though they're likely enough to be duplicates now...

"It is not down in any map; true places never are." - Chapter 12

"Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth--" -Chapter 29 (Oh, that Stubb. Another comic.)

"God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught--nay but the draught of a draught." - Chapter 32 (What, was he reading Pessoa, too?)

"For what he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal within him." - Chapter 33 (Flask sounds a bit like myself as a teenager.)

"I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing." - Chapter 39 (Another fine Stubb-ism.)

"To accomplish his object Ahab must use tools; and of all the tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order." - Chapter 46

"Thou should'st go mad, blacksmith; say, why dost thou not go mad? How can thou endure without being mad? Do the heavens hate ye, that thou can'st not go mad?" - Chapter 113

"There is no steady unretracing progress in this life;" - Chapter 114 

Some Critics: A couple of years ago I read Lawrence Buell's The Dream of The Great American Novel. I got it back from the library recently, and though I didn't reread the whole book, I looked at the Moby-Dick part; he lumps Moby-Dick with Dos Passos' U.S.A. Trilogy and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow as one of four approaches to the Great American Novel; these three are under the heading 'Imagined Communities.' (The other approaches are: up-from narratives, examinations of race, and The Scarlet Letter, which he puts in its own category.) I recommend the Buell if you're interested in the subject.

I'm also likely to try to read Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael by the end of the month, and maybe (maybe!) D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature. Here are the other posts of mine mostly relating to critical work on Moby-Dick and Melville.

One Amusing Fact: Starbucks, the coffee chain, was named for Moby-Dick's Starbuck, but only after Howard Schultz convinced Gordon Bowker, "No one's going to drink a cup of Pequod!" True that, Howie. (At least according to Schultz' own book , co-written with Dori Jones Yang, about Starbucks and titled Pour Your Heart Into It, quoted in Buell.)

And: you know, Moby-Dick really is something great.

Thanks to Brona for organizing the readalong!

Mann's Doctor Faustus and its Story

"...this strategy was a bitter necessity in order to achieve a certain humorous leavening of the somber material..."

from Thomas Mann's The Story of a Novel 

Mann wrote The Story of a Novel shortly after completing his novel Doctor Faustus, in 1949. It was translated into English in 1961 by the Winstons. I thought I'd read them as a pair.

That bit about humor? I think Mann succeeded:  the novel is funny, except, of course, when it isn't. Tom at Wuthering Expectations reminded recently that Mann's Magic Mountain is funny, and this is, too. Magic Mountain is funnier than Doctor Faustus, but then World War I was a barrel of laughs compared to World War II. Still, there's some laughs in this one. The narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, spends the first chapters comically complaining that he doesn't know how to write. In very elaborate prose. When our hero, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is worried about the symptoms of early-stage syphilis, his doctors are comically unavailable: suddenly dead, hauled off to jail, etc. (The devil may have done it.) The names of characters are simply silly. Someone whose German is better than mine should feel free to comment, but I make out the names of the conservative circle of intellectuals around Sextus Kridwiss as Mister Chaos, Mister WoodenShoes, Mister Birdy, and Mister PorridgeMess.

So you probably know this as that crazed, howling cheese of a novel about the musician who slips into syphilitic dementia, full of dry theory about twelve-tone music, a novel unintelligible to mere mortals, and yes, it is all those things. It's an allegory about the collapse of German culture into Hitler-led barbarity.

But, hey, it's funny, too, so that makes it all OK...right?

Anyway, a quick summary: Adrian Leverkühn is born on a German farm around 1890; his friend (and future biographer) Serenus Zeitblom is born in the nearby town, two years earlier. Everyone pretty quickly realizes young Adrian is a musical genius and takes the time to nurture his talent. Adrian first studies theology, but finally comes around to the study of composition. He writes some apprentice works, but then deliberately gives himself syphilis by sleeping with a prostitute known to be infected. This deepens his aloofness and separates him from normal family life; it also liberates his creativity.

Or something does. Adrian writes a confession that Zeitblom reproduces in which Adrian makes a deal with the devil for twenty-four years of musical productivity. Was it just a midnight dream, like Ivan and the Grand Inquisitor? Adrian is discreet and ironic, but he always treats subsequent wonderful events as if some power was assisting him. If there is a devil, one of the concessions the devil extracts is Adrian can have no normal human contacts; well, syphilis makes one type of contact awkward; and Adrian's shy and aloof, given to migraines, so all he can do is work anyway. He produces a number of masterpieces, though they're experimental and not universally loved.

The novel in the last third or so becomes, as Mann notes in The Story of a Novel, more novelistic: there is romance, murder, suicide, the death of Adrian's father. Finally in 1930, the twenty-four years are up, and Adrian submerges into syphilitic dementia. His last two compositions are based on the Apocalypse of John and the death of Faust. Götterdämmerung indeed.

Is this Faust saved? We don't know. Marlowe's Faust isn't, but Goethe's is. Mann suggests, but I haven't read, that the original Faust book is ambiguous, and certainly this is. The novel runs in two time tracks: the events of Adrian's life from 1890 to 1930 or so, with Adrian's death coming in 1940. But there is also the time that Zeitblom is supposedly writing it in: from 1943 to the fall of Berlin in 1945. The Russian advance from the East, the invasion of Sicily and then the fall of Italy, D-Day, the Ardennes offensive leading to the Battle of the Bulge. But Adrian's dead, and salvation for Adrian would mean his music would be performed and understood; that the German culture he is the stand-in for would once again have a place on the world stage. In 1945? Well, a German could only hope. Or then again, maybe hope against is more appropriate? Is German culture irredeemably compromised? Zeitblom articulates both possibilities.

In The Story of the Novel, Mann tells us that when he read the final chapters to Adorno, (who was serving as his adviser on musical theory) Adorno told him that the ending was too optimistic, and Mann decided that was right, and rewrote it to be darker. Certainly Mann did not think Germany redeemed enough to return to live there, though there were calls for him to do so, even to become president of a newly freed Germany, something like Vaclav Havel.

I was thinking about rereading it after I read Broch's The Death of Virgil earlier this year. (Still thinking about The Death of Virgil!) Both novels were written in the US in the closing years of World War II. Mann was living in Los Angeles; Broch in D.C., but according to The Story of a Novel, they met a couple of times during those years. Mann was also deeply involved in war work and traveled to D.C. a few times. When I read The Death of Virgil I thought it was surprising how little political a novel it was, given the time it was written and the nature of the (Austrian exile) author. Doctor Faustus is a very political novel. Though I've now read them relatively closely together, two big Modernist stories about major artists, I'm not sure I have much else to say about that comparison in retrospect...

But I'd already been thinking about rereading Faustus after I read Rolland's Jean-Christophe a bit over a year ago. Here I think the connection is quite clear: both characters are musicians; both represent German musical culture of their era, its relation to the rest of Europe; both protagonists die young. Both authors are closeted homosexuals. (At least likely so. The evidence on Rolland is thin.) Mann was engaged with Rolland, even dreaming about him according to his diary. Rolland, writing just before World War I, is more hopeful. That reflects the times, but as well the temperaments, of the two authors.

One notable difference is that the music theory in Mann is quite difficult and authentic-feeling; Adrian's compositions feel like they really do exist. Rolland is quite general about the works that Jean-Christophe Krafft has written. Most of Adrian's compositions are vocal music and set a text; Jean-Christophe's are purely instrumental. (I think Mann's choice is wiser from a writing point of  view.) This makes for very different novels: the Rolland is a much easier read, with considerably more emphasis on the personal relationships; Mann is more difficult, and much of the first half of the novel feels frankly didactic. (Though the fact that Mann can write about Brentano, Keats, Shakespeare, or the Bible help ground it.) All that makes Mann's more believable. I wondered if Mann was thinking specifically about Rolland in The Story of the Novel when he wrote this:

"There is nothing sillier, in a novel about an artist, than merely to assert the existence of art, to talk about genius, about works, to hail these and rave about their effects upon the souls of the audiences. No, concrete reality, exactitude, were needed--this was utterly clear to me."

But short of including a score or a CD, the reader can only estimate musical works from the description of their effects on others. Doctor Zhivago includes Zhivago's poems and we can judge of them, though less so in my case, since I have no Russian. But a novel about a musician? Music is inherently harder. Is Mann's the right approach? I think a lot of people don't read Mann because of his difficulty, because of all that music theory, but then I think hardly anybody reads Rolland at all. (Which is a shame.)

Also reading The Story of a Novel was interesting from the perspective of a working writer. Of course, in 1943 (when he starts the novel) Mann is famous and celebrated as a novelist in ways that seem almost impossible anymore today. From the outside one might assume he has an almost Goethean level of self-assurance. Turns out it wasn't entirely so. Some here's some quotes, mostly about the writing process, I copied out of the book:

How much Faustus contains of the atmosphere of my life! A radical confession, at bottom. From the very beginning that has been the shattering thing about the book.

Has any man who ever bore the incubus of creation on his back, always concerned, obsessed, preoccupied with the the work of days and years--has any such man ever been an enjoyable companion? Dubito. 

Protracted psychological low, intensified by horror at the misguidedness of the novel I began with so zestful a sense of experiment.

Why, yes. Certainly! On with it! We'll cut a page and a half; we'll cut three pages. That will make it more readable, somewhat more readable. 

The fact remains, never before has any work so agitated and moved me! 

But also these, more general:

Switzerland is where the most gloriously un-German things are said in German.

People who feel held back and not given their due, and who at the same time present a distinguished appearance, often seek redress in racist self-assertion.

Life is pain, and we only live as long as we suffer. [Ouch! Tell me it ain't so, Tom!]

There is no doubt in my mind to whom we are indebted for this victory. It is Roosevelt.

Mann was an enthusiastic American citizen at the time and a great partisan of FDR. Still the House Un-American Activities Committee hounded him out of the country a couple of years later.

Anyway, a great--and affecting--and sometimes funny--novel, even if the music theory pretty much still goes over my head. It's impact falls at the conflux of the intellectual-political-emotional, with emotional perhaps being the least, but certainly not null, term.

Humpty's eyes may look a little dazed.

Anyway, this post (and the process of writing this post) has gone on **way** too long. I was also reading the books with the idea of #GermanLitMonth, and in fact finished them a while ago. But I've been a particularly slow blogger of late.